Vain

Vain came together in 1986 as an American glam-metal outfit based in the San Francisco Bay Area and fronted by vocalist Davy Vain, with James Scott handling lead guitar, Danny West on rhythm guitar, Ashley Mitchell on bass, and Tom Rickard behind the drums. The group delivered a propulsive, hook-heavy brand of metal and hard rock that echoed the sound of fellow West Coast acts such as Guns N' Roses, Faster Pussycat, and Mötley Crüe. Their early demo recordings reached Island Records, which issued the band’s first album, No Respect, in 1988. Amid the rising Seattle grunge wave that overshadowed many similar pop-metal acts, Vain foundered in the early 1990s and lost their Island deal before the label could put out a finished second album. Following the 1991 exits of West and Rickard, the remaining members brought in Shawn Rorie and former Guns N' Roses drummer Steven Adler; the band briefly operated under the name Road Crew before returning to Vain in 1993. Successive personnel shifts accompanied the next two studio releases, 1994’s Move on It and 1995’s Fade, both issued on Polystar, while Davy Vain stepped out on his own in 2000 with the solo album In from Out of Nowhere. The group reassembled in 2005 to deliver its fourth full-length record, On the Line, and in 2009 secured the rights to the long-shelved 1991 follow-up to No Respect, All Those Strangers, which it released independently. Enough Rope arrived in 2011, and in 2017—with Davy Vain, Scott on guitar, West on guitar, Mitchell on bass, and Louie Senor on drums—the band put out its seventh studio album, Rolling with the Punches. Disintegrate Together surfaced in 2024.