Before sideways record deals, biker shootouts and band implosions, Loosely Tight took the L.A. Coliseum stage before 45,000 people. It was the 1979 California World Music Festival. The Phoenix band shared the bill with Ted Nugent, Cheap Trick, REO Speedwagon and Toto. Cheech and Chong hosted.
To get there, the quartet first nailed an Arizona Battle of the Bands in Tempe. Next, they won the international final at the Santa Monica Civic. Out of 2,100 entries, they won it all. First prize? The Coliseum slot. “We played against all these bands from around the country, and from L.A.,” says drummer Pat Dixon, the only living member of the original band. “I thought Dino was gonna blow it somehow, but he was great. We came across as an accomplished tight unit.”
Pat is talking about Loosely Tight frontman, songwriter and guitarist Dino Livingston. What happens next says everything about him.
“The night before the festival,” remembers Danny Zelisko, the prolific concert promoter who was then Loosely Tight’s de facto manager. “Dino met some girl, did a handful of acid, and he broke his ankle. He showed up 15 minutes before the band came out. He’d been up all night. He’s on crutches, and we had to carry him up to the stage.”
Now Dino was a consummate frontman—absurdly magnetic, a force to the point of lunacy. His potent, unaffected voice could hold its own in a standoff with Sammy Hagar and Ian Gillan. Here he was, his one gift in life, crippled.
“When I saw him before we went on, I looked in his eyes and he was just crazy,” Dixon says. “Like one eye spinning in a circle.”
Zelisko and the band figured Dino did exactly what could’ve been predicted—he blew the band’s big chance.
So the quartet faces tens of thousands clueless to Loosely Tight and restless for the headliners. Here’s Dino, spun out and sleepless, in great physical pain. The band kicks in. He begins singing, barely able to play guitar.
“He was playing with one crutch,” Dixon says, “because he couldn’t play otherwise. But that insanity he brought that day was who he was, and that’s what the audience responded to.” Halfway through the set, Dino heaved the crutch and, on a busted ankle, tore up the stage like he had in so many Arizona clubs. Pure Dino. The stadium erupted.
“It was deafening,” the drummer remembers.
The management team Leber-Krebs (Aerosmith, AC/DC) said Loosely Tight killed it and wanted them. The band had an instant California fanbase. An Infinity/MCA deal followed, and the band began demos with producer Richie Wise (Kiss, Dust), but MCA folded the Infinity subsidiary in late ’79 and the band’s contract was done.
A Phoenix band called Ched (Dino, bassist brother Danny, and guitarist J.R. Lomeli) got Pennsylvania native Dixon on drums and, in ’77, renamed themselves after a Jagger quote calling the Stones loosely tight. Dino’s songwriting gift, coupled with the band’s reputation as a disruptive live force, drew a huge Phoenix following. None of the guys had to day-job it. Dixon and his wife even bought a house.
The traits that made Dino a great, tension-fueled frontman and songwriter also made everyday life impossible.
“I was in the band three and a half years,” Dixon says, “and I never had a sane conversation with Dino. He came from Enid, Oklahoma. … But he had this strange charisma, people were really drawn to him, it was like a Manson thing. He just didn’t direct anyone to murder people! But he was prolific. There were so many songs I wish we had recorded.” The two brothers fought hard and often. In 1980 they split up on stage, and Dino recruited bassist Mark Lehman.
“Every night with that band was life’s drama unfolding,” Dixon continues. One night, a contingent of Dirty Dozen bikers who worshipped Dino packed a gig in Mesa. After a guy in a pickup fired on them outside, “all these guns come out, and bam bam bam. The bikers tossed all their guns into Dino’s guitar case. The police showed up but nobody got arrested. That guy in the pickup died! I never interacted with those guys but I wondered ‘how did we get here.’ It didn’t seem like the route to American Bandstand to me.”
“They should have been huge,” Zelisko says. “The wheels came off. They got so big and nothing happened. Dino just couldn’t get out of his own way.”
In ’81 Loosely Tight released the album Fightin’ Society, with Lehman on bass. The raw “Ruff & Tuff” hit regular rotation at KDKB-FM and led off the station’s Arizona Sounds Volume 3 in 1979. “Bomb’s Away” should’ve catapulted the band into the stratosphere. Its poppy main riff later reappeared—suspiciously enough—in Autograph’s huge pop-metal hit “Turn Up the Radio.” Other tunes like “Loud and Restless,” “Renegade” and “From Another Place” hit sweet spots between Deep Purple’s Machine Head and the late-’70s New Wave of British Heavy Metal—power hooks, honed musicianship and a working-class ethos.
Chemistry makes a band. Timing too. Loosely Tight had both, and their window for commercial success was closing fast. Dixon was gone for good, later joining Phoenix band Icon, which signed with Capitol—a label once interested in Loosely Tight.
The band fizzled, and Dino formed another version years later in Houston. Cancer killed him in 2011. Lomeli had taken his own life. Danny died of cancer. Lehman is gone as well.
The songs remain. They thunder on in prominent films and television shows.
– Liner notes by Brian Jabas Smith
