Don’t Take It So Hard

The Zoo Crew has got “Don’t Take It So Hard” spinning off The Last Vegas record Bad Decisions, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks long enough you already know this one has that porch-in-the-summer feel, the kind of tune that sounds like somebody cracked a bottle, picked up an acoustic, and decided the night was going to write itself. Track five on the 2012 album, clocking in around four minutes and seventeen seconds, it sits right in the middle of a record the Chicago boys cut back home after a stretch in Los Angeles. Chad Cherry told folks the album came out a little more raw, a little rough around the edges, and a little catchier than the one before it. That is the whole point of this song. It does not beg you to overthink anything. It just swings.

Nate Arling, the drummer, laid the origin out plain in a 2012 sit-down. “Don’t Take It So Hard” is one Chad and bassist Danny Smash had been kicking around for a while, written during a hot, sunny Chicago summer on the porch with a couple of acoustic guitars, then grown into a big Midwestern classic rock song once the rest of the band got hold of it. Chad filled in the color in another interview around the same time. Danny had landed in Chicago in 2008, right next door to Chad’s place, and the two old friends started writing the way they used to when they were kids. This was one of the first tunes they knocked out after the reunion, composed around a bottle of Jameson and two acoustics. At first it carried a kind of Guns N’ Roses “One in a Million” atmosphere. After the band heard it, the thing got louder and more electric, and Chad heard it turn into something like “Sweet Child o’ Mine” bumping into a Lynyrd Skynyrd number. They even cut an acoustic version for a radio session nearly a year before the album dropped, and the bones of the song barely moved. That is how you know it was finished before it ever saw a studio clock.

The whole Bad Decisions record was built on that same idea of not being too hard on yourself. Nate said the title came up in the studio with producer Johnny K, a guy the band had known a long time, while they were sitting around talking about how people make bad decisions and how the band had made plenty of their own. Chad put the mantra even simpler: everybody likes to have a good time, sometimes you have too much fun, and the best times seem to end in a bad decision. Buying the record, he joked, would definitely be one of those. Adam Arling, Nate’s brother on guitar, said the title track was less about mistakes and more about the rock and roll beast in general, and that if you know Chad, the bad decisions pretty much write themselves. They recorded the album in Chicago instead of L.A., with more time to let the songs breathe, no samples, no loops, just five guys plugging in the wrong jack, blowing up an amp, flipping a chorus with a verse, and seeing what came out the other end. Adam told Guitar World they did that stuff like it was 1978. Johnny K handed them the keys and told them they already had the songs. The band wanted this one dirtier and more their own after earlier records that had included co-writes with Nikki Sixx. Variety, Chad said, is the spice. They wear the arena rock and the punk right on their sleeves.

The Last Vegas did not fall out of a limousine. The Arling brothers, Adam and Nate, came up in Rockford, Illinois, the kind of kids who would stand in a grocery-store line drooling over Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen. A friend tossed them the name Last Vegas before their first show because it sounded like something you might hear on MTV, and they kept it. They got a start down in Normal, then made the move to Chicago around 2001, recorded, toured hard, and lost a bass player who had also been singing. Adam and the other guitarist split the vocals for a stretch. After the next batch of tracks was done they put the recording on ice and auditioned singers, because the music was there and the voice was not. Chad Cherry walked in during the summer of 2005. He had just moved to Chicago, a friend from the Crank County Daredevils told him the only real rock and roll dudes in town were the Last Vegas, and he checked a show, liked that it was real, and noticed they did not have a lead singer. At the after-party he told them so. He had been fronting The Nastys out of Michigan. They stole him, and he went in and put the vocals on Seal the Deal, which the band had already tracked. From there it was Get Hip Records, endless club miles, and a 2008 win in Guitar Center’s On-Stage contest that put them on Mötley Crüe’s Saints of Los Angeles tour, handed them a deal with Eleven Seven, management, cash, and a pile of Gibson gear. Nikki Sixx produced Whatever Gets You Off. Bad Decisions, out August 28, 2012 on FrostByte, was the record where they came back to Chicago and did it their way. They have shared stages with AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses, and Buckcherry, and they still talk like a band that remembers the basement and the loft.

If the song is hitting you the way it hits the Zoo Crew, go dig the rest of the story on the band’s own patch of ground. The official site is thelastvegas.com, and the discography page still lists Bad Decisions right there with the FrostByte and E-One release from 2012. You can also find the boys on Facebook, Instagram, and X. No separate fan club site has stayed lit long enough for us to send you there with a straight face, so the band’s own pages are the place the Zoo Freaks ought to park. And if you want the rest of the freeform ride, deep cuts and all, the station spinning this one is THE ZOO. Don’t take it so hard. Just turn it up.