Y&T - In Earthshaking Rock We Trust!
by Martin Popoff

San Francisco's legendary Y&T are remaining busy, their latest spot of news being a nice pair of reissues. Following up on '05's Black Tiger and Mean Streak campaign, we now get the band's first album for A&M Earthshaker (1981) and In Rock We Trust (1984), which can be obtained through the band's erstwhile site, www.meniketti.com.

Earthshaker was indeed, just that, Y&T finding a raucous, no nonsense sound after three years in a bit of biz limbo, quickly finding themselves the darlings of the NWOBHM set and cementing their reputation as the Van Halen that shoulda been and might be if things fall into line jes' right. In Rock We Trust built on the success of Black Tiger and Mean Streak (likely forever the top-polling fan faves), hitting #33 in the UK charts and #46 in the states, big anthem from that one being 'Don't Stop Runnin'.'

Which might be an apt descriptive of Y&T's philosophy. Sure, Dave Meniketti isn't running as hard as he used to be, but there is in fact, lots in the works.

"We are actually playing a show in about two and a half weeks from now, in San Francisco, where we're going to play the entire Earthshaker and In Rock We Trust albums, from front to back," says Dave. "It's a hell of a lot of work for us, because when you look at those records, and what we've been playing live over the many, many years, I would say a good four, five, six songs on each record, we have to basically play for the very first time; or, some of those we haven't played in ten or 20 years. A lot of work. But I really thought that that was a great idea. It was spurned on from something I saw on our forum on our website. One of the fans was talking about it and how cool it would be. Or maybe even it was something about other bands doing it. But I do remember thinking, wow, that is a cool idea. And we have so many good records that we could do that with that the fans would love. My original idea was just to do one night, the one entire record, with some favourite songs from other records, because one record wouldn't be long enough for a set. But because we ended up putting both records out at the same time, we thought we would do that. And we did this exactly a year ago at the same venue in San Francisco for the Black Tiger and Mean Streak records; we did one set of the entire Black Tiger record, and then the next set we came out and did all of Mean Streak, plus some extra songs from all of the records. And that's what we're going to do this time."

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