If it were up to Sebastian Bach, he would bang his head and scream his lungs out onstage every night until the wee small hours of the morning. Alas, there comes a time when the fans have to leave the venue and Bach has to retire to his tour bus to unwind with a glass of wine.
Thankfully, the singer has unearthed the perfect set-closing song for his ongoing Slave to the Grind 30th-anniversary tour: “Get the Fuck Out.”
The rude, crude rocker has quickly become one of Bach’s favorite songs to perform as he revisits Skid Row‘s seminal sophomore album in its entirety, though he’s taken some liberties with his current live rendition. “I don’t sing all the lyrics, because some of them are atrocious,” Bach tells UCR. (He specifically omits the second verse, which includes zingers like “I ain’t buying you breakfast, so keep your mouth busy and wrap your lips all around my attitude.”) “I can’t sing some of those words, especially now — and even then, I didn’t like them either. But that chorus is fun and very funny. It’s very humorous, and the crowd loves to sing, ‘Get the fuck out.'”
Listen to Skid Row’s ‘Get the Fuck Out’
Bach has also enjoyed dusting off “Beggar’s Day,” a Japanese B-side that replaced “Get the Fuck Out” on a “clean” version of Slave to the Grind to appease the Parents Music Resource Center (and which the singer always thought was “a far better song anyways”). Despite being more than 30 years old, the track has taken on an eerie prescience in light of recent events.
“The song ‘Beggars Day’ is kind of mind-blowing,” Bach admits, “because the lyrics say: ‘Suzi got an Uzi / What a beautiful bride / That’s where the trouble began / Will there be a resurrection or a bloody insurrection? / It’s only up to Suzanne / With a load of ammunition in her hand.‘ That’s the first verse. This was written in 1991, and I married a girl named Suzanne [Le Bach in 2015] — that’s my wife, that’s my bride — and there just was an insurrection. And I’m singing and I’m going, ‘These are weird lyrics.'”
Bach appears to be taking a bit of artistic liberty here as well: The actual lyric is, “Will there be any objection or a bloody resurrection? / It’s only up to Suzanne.” Still, he maintains that it’s “pretty trippy” to shout out his wife every night while performing the tune.
Listen to Skid Row’s ‘Beggar’s Day’
From a technical standpoint, the Slave to the Grind 30th-anniversary tour has proven a fun, albeit daunting, challenge for Bach. “The first album [Skid Row’s eponymous 1989 debut] is more singing. Slave is more screaming,” he explains. “A song like ‘Livin’ on a Chain Gang,’ that’s like an endurance test. That’s just fucking [screaming] as hard as I can go for three or four minutes.”
Bach has risen to the occasion so far, thanks to a rigorous practice regimen and a few reinterpretations of Slave‘s most demanding songs. He urges fans who have longed to hear the album’s beloved deep cuts to buy a ticket to his current trek, which wraps on Dec. 17 in San Diego — because these songs won’t stay in his set forever. “This tour ends in late December. Jan. 1, we will not be doing the Slave to the Grind album [in full],” Bach says.
“If you like that record, and you want to hear stuff like ‘Creepshow’ and ‘Mudkicker,’ if that shit turns you on, now is the time for you. Because come Dec. 31, there’s a whole new plan coming in.”
Watch UCR’s Complete Interview With Sebastian Bach
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There’s nothing guilty about these pleasures.
