DIRTY HONEY
They may be firm believers in the ‘fake it until you make it’ motto, but Dirty Honey are out there holding their own in the company of Guns N’ Roses, Kiss and more. No fakers here…
Marc LaBelle is a natural wanderer. ACalifornia resident with a generously stamped passport, the singer has seen a lot of the world, much of it from a motorcycle. The Dolomites in Northern Italy. France and Spain. Rome through Bari and into Croatia and Slovenia. New Zealand. Australia.
“A ton of Canada.” Alaska. During time off he and a friend go hiking in Wyoming and Montana, where they photograph grizzly bears.
All that comes before you factor in his travels with Dirty Honey. Extensive support tours with their heroes Guns N’ Roses, as well as Kiss and Rival Sons, plus their own headline runs, have hurtled LaBelle and his bandmates across the globe with barely a moment to draw breath. The rush of this experience pours into their second album Can’t Find The Brakes, a treasure chest of energised classic rock’n’roll, imbued with diverse moods not seen on 2021’s shitkicking self-titled debut. It’s the product of a high-octane period, stirring pensive Zeppelin-y textures into the meaty Sunset Strip boogies that first turned heads in their direction. All that, and they’re still unsigned.
But it was the grizzly bear photography – and the close shaves it’s entailed – that Axl Rose wanted to hear about when LaBelle joined him backstage in San Diego last year for a three-hour, tequila-fuelled hang that left the Dirty Honey frontman wondering how it all got this far.
“That’s what Axl was most interested in, me getting eaten by a bear…” he chuckles, a few hours before the band headline a gig in Kansas. “It’s interesting because up in Alaska you can get really close to these bears that are salmon fishing, and they don’t really care about humans, they just want to eat salmon. In Montana and Wyoming there’s a different threat there, especially if they’re near food and they think you’re going for their food… But it’s all good.”
Completed by guitarist John Notto, bassist Justin Smolian and drummer Jaydon Bean, Dirty Honey bottle much of that risk and exhilaration on Can’t Find The Brakes. Bears aside, they’re not short on inspiration: the fast pace of road life; the highs and lows of the past few years; the thrills that rock stars crave, and the cost at which it often comes.
“So many musicians have problems with addiction, because they’re always chasing the high of being on stage,” LaBelle muses. “I think on some level I’m probably doing that as well. I’m just choosing a slightly healthier ‘drug’, maybe, of choice.”
Can’t Find The Brakes came together
