With “Have a Good Time But Get Out Alive,” the Iron City Houserockers created what Rolling Stone called “a new American classic.”

That should have been the meal ticket but, a year later, in 1981, the quintessential Pittsburgh band was still playing the same local clubs it did before all the hype.

Still signed to MCA Records and Cleveland International management, the Houserockers forged ahead with preparations for a third album. Having worked on “Have a Good Time” in New York with the famed trinity of Ian Hunter, Mick Ronson and Steve Van Zandt, for the follow-up they looked to one guy: Stax legend Steve Cropper, of Booker T. & the M.G.'s and The Blues Brothers.

The result was “Blood on the Bricks,” a 1981 album recorded in LA — with the lineup of Joe Grushecky, Marc Reisman, Eddie Britt, Art Nardini, Gil Snyder and Ned Rankin — that followed in the vein of the previous records while smoothing some of the Houserockers’ rough edges. “Blood” came with more hard-driving working-class anthems — “Saints and Sinners,” “This Time the Night Won’t Save Us,” the title track — along with a catchy single, “Friday Night” that put them on national TV for the first time on “Solid Gold,” the hit show with the dancers.

It turned out to be a rinse and repeat for the Houserockers when the good press for “Blood on the Bricks” exceeded the sales. Reisman and Rankin departed soon after, and the band, depleted and deflated, put a bow on it with 1983’s fittingly titled “Cracking Under Pressure.”

Five years after the reissue of “Have a Good Time,” “Blood on the Bricks” is getting the same treatment, with a CD package from Grushecky’s new label, Omnivore Recordings, that features the original nine tracks joined by 11 bonus tracks, including outtakes, demos and four live tracks from Cambridge, Mass.

Of particular interest are “Jukebox Nights” and “Angels,” a pair of solid outtakes that Grushecky thought would be central to the album. Here’s what he had to say about the project.

You had just made “Have a Good Time,” which got great reviews. What was the situation going into this record?

The first three Iron City Houserockers records were like three different complete animals. The first record we had no guidance at all about what we were doing. We went from playing at the Decade on a Thursday night to driving up [to Cleveland] and recording on a Friday and sometimes driving home and playing Friday night. We never spent more than one day at a time in the studio. The second record we had all these heavyweight producers come in with us. By the third record, we felt pretty confident, pretty comfortable with the process.

How did you end up with Steve Cropper producing?

There was a gentleman at MCA Records, Denny Rosenkrantz, in charge of our project at that time. Cleveland International had evolved into some pretty serious infighting over the Meat Loaf stuff. Meat Loaf was a cash cow and they were trying to do the followup to ‘Bat Out of Hell’ and there was a lot of stuff not going right on that. For one reason or other, even though ‘Have a Good Time’ was one of the most critically acclaimed records of the year, they didn't have much interest in what we were doing.

So we started dealing with MCA directly and Danny Rosenkrantz thought we would be a good fit for Steve Cropper. I really idolized Steve Cropper, as most of the guitarists of my generation did. We flew out to Los Angeles and met with him. We hit it off and he came into Pittsburgh and stayed at the Howard Johnson's in Oakland for about 8 to 10 days and rehearsed with us at the Asterik Studios in Wilkinsburg. And it was very hot. We were in a sweat box. He was such a good guy, but the first couple of days he was there, I was almost embarrassed to pick up a guitar in front of him.

Then, things lightened up and we became really good friends. He really enjoyed his time here in Pittsburgh. He enjoyed the Pittsburgh food. He went to a gig with us at what used to be old White Elephant [in White Oak], and it was a classic Houserockers gig. It was packed to the rafters and there were ambulances taking people out before the show even started because the kids were so wild. So we got along famously with him. He was a really good guy. I think everybody either subconsciously or myself, consciously, didn't want to let him down. We wanted to rise to the occasion because Steve was one of the kings of the Los Angeles studios, so he knew everybody and any of us could have been easily replaced.

So, what did you have in terms of songs? Were they all written and ready to go?

[We had] about half of them going in. And then as the studio rehearsals progressed, the rest of them. For some reason, I had been writing all these songs about lakes. I was thinking about Geneva on the Lake. When I was a kid, I went up there and I just couldn't believe all the music that was everywhere, and I went back as an adult and it was sort of like this rundown beach town. I wrote a bunch of songs about that, and about the feeling that Pittsburgh was slipping away.

The steel mills were collapsing, the whole way of life that we had when I was growing up was slipping into history. I started writing a lot about that for whatever reason. I wrote “Saints and Sinners.” I had a version of “This Time the Night Won't Save Us,” “No Easy Way Out,” “Fool's Advice,” “Blood on the Bricks.” I had this song called “Jukebox Nights” that I thought was going to be the big song of the record, the song to build around, and we rehearsed it and we rehearsed it and we could never get it right.

The last night I left Steve off in Oakland, I drove home through the South Side and I saw this graffiti that said “JJ + Little Girl”’ and it was in red on the side of an old railroad trestle, and I thought, “Man, that looks like blood on the bricks.” So I took some of the themes that I had used in “Jukebox Nights” and turned it into “Blood on the Bricks.” I was thinking of the Animals: “How would the Animals do this?” I brought it into the rehearsal on the last day and it just clicked right off the bat.

With “Friday Night,” I remember people being like, “Oh, the Houserockers are trying to write a hit.”

Yeah, well, we were trying to get on the radio because that was the defining thing in those days. There was a difference between having a very successful money-making career and being a band like us who were always on the verge of being dropped by the record company or scraping pennies together to go out on the road.

A classic thing for us was that we're playing a lot of the same bars as Huey Lewis and the News and Willy DeVille. Willy DeVille never made it out. We never made it out, and all of a sudden Huey Lewis had a great big hit and a couple of years later he's playing arenas. So yeah, we were trying to write a hit. We worked out “Friday Night” before we went to Los Angeles, so I must have written it after I heard Steve was coming in. The same with “No More Loneliness,” which was sort of like a soul song, like a Stax type.

Did he try to move you at all into an R&B direction? I would think that maybe you guys would be a little bit of a mismatch because you weren't an R&B band.

No, but we loved R&B, though. He wasn't trying to push us in any direction. If you listen to “Saints and Sinners,” the demo of it, the recording of it's not that much different. He wasn't doing anything the other guys hadn't done, and if he did something we didn't like, we would tell him. We weren't shy about not doing something we didn't like.

My tastes were all over the place. I liked everything from soul music to rhythm ’n’ blues to straight-ahead blues to rock ’n’ roll to rockabilly to jazz. I was just like a sponge. We didn't consciously go in that direction, but one of the criticisms of that record from our fans, not so much the music press, cause it was greatly received again, was that we had taken some of the rough edges off our songs. And we did. We played them better. We were better musicians and we wanted to come up to Steve Cropper’s level of expectations of us, and they were pretty high.

What was it like going on “Solid Gold”?

Well, we were worried about lip-synching because that wasn't our strong suit. Everybody was on my case about lip-synching because I had done it once, twice before, and not a very good job, and I can remember practicing and practicing to get the song right. We were worried because Ned was playing full blast and we're in this huge sound stage, and they turned the music up really, really loud. But it was easy to do, much easier than the other places we played where you had a strain to hear what was going on through everybody banging around on their stuff. I think we did a one or two takes, and boom, we were done.

I can remember we were playing this place called Banjo Louis in Greensburg that night. We didn't even get to see it.

How'd your fanbase feel about it? They tease you?

I have no idea how they felt about it. They didn't give a [expletive] the night we played. I'll tell you that. I know we were sort of disappointed because that was the height of the first wave of the tribute bands. It was the early ’80s and tribute bands were everywhere: a ZZ Top one, a Doors one, a Bob Seger one, and we're playing out in the suburbs and we could feel our fanbase starting to slip away because Pittsburgh was going down the tubes and everybody wanted to hear [expletive] tribute bands, sort of like it is now.

Plus the population cleared out, right?

Oh my God, yeah. We lost most of our fanbase. I mean, we were working class heroes. We certainly weren't the hip. ... You were talking to me about that band The Puke and all those guys. We weren't like those guys that ended up being accountants and lawyers after dabbling in rock ’n’ roll for a couple months. We were lifers.

Well, some of you did, right? Marc became a lawyer.

We were 50-50. Me, Art and Gilbert pretty much remained musicians, one way or another. Ned, Marc and Eddie sort of turned their back on it, which to this day sort of mystifies me because we should have stuck together. I have no idea why those guys gave up so easily.

Yeah, sometimes it takes a while. You just have to hang around a little bit, like Seger and Mellencamp did.

I think one of the things I got frustrated with was we couldn't find good management and we had no record company support. That was the two big factors. I was always disappointed that we didn't stick together because I think we could have come out on the other side stronger than ever. You listen to the Iron City Houserockers, there weren’t too many bands better than us.

You also had MTV coming in at the time ...

Yeah, it changed everything, and we never made a video. The record company wasn’t into us making a video and we couldn't get out of our old deal with MCA. And for a while, this guy Freddy DeMann, he wanted to manage us. He was Michael Jackson's manager at the time. He came to see us playing in Los Angeles and said, “You're the best rock ’n’ roll band I've ever seen. I want to manage you.” And he tried to get us off our old contract for a while. Nothing worked. We couldn't move forward. He ended up signing Madonna. So it was a combination of factors and then the people that we had worked with at MCA all got [fired]. A new regime came in. One of my great regrets is doing that “Cracking Under Pressure” record. We should have just not done that because we got dropped anyways. Irving Azoff came in and dropped us, B.E. Taylor and Donnie Iris on the same day. He cleaned the whole roster out.

I was reading some of the old press on the band and they really pushed the whole Pittsburgh working-class thing on you guys, because of the name and everything.

Yeah, probably. Plus our music was pretty down and dirty. We were singing about real-life stuff. I thought that early on for myself that I wrote better songs when I wrote about something I knew about. I forget what author said, “Write what you know.” [Editor’s note: Mark Twain] So that's what I was doing. I was writing about what I knew, which was way easier for me than trying to make up stuff — probably a lack of imagination. I wasn't writing these [BS] epics, like Meat Loaf stuff. I was down on the street level.

Do you think there was a little bit of an anti-Pittsburgh bias? I remember back in the day, Pittsburgh was used as a punch line, by people like Johnny Carson.

Oh yeah, Pittsburgh was like the smoky city and full of dumb hunkies. Musically, I don't think anybody gets too much respect out of Pittsburgh. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only guy carrying a Pittsburgh flag, musically, from my age group, you know. Regionally, The Clarks and Donnie Iris are much more popular and much more well-known, but nationally, it might have been the Iron City Houserockers. We're sort of like the face of Pittsburgh rock ’n’ roll.

First Published: March 18, 2025, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: March 18, 2025, 7:48 p.m.