Some bands get one great story. The Hollywood Stars have collected about six of them across fifty years, each more improbable than the last, and the newest one might be the most moving yet. This is a group that helped write a KISS anthem, watched their own debut album get buried for four decades, reactivated after a nearly half-century silence, and have now turned a personal catastrophe into one of the most defiantly joyful rock songs you will hear this year.
A Song Born From a Burned-Down House
The band has released a video for “Hey! LA!,” the title track of their new album, out now on the garage-rock label Rum Bar Records on vinyl, CD, and download. The song has a genuinely heartbreaking origin, though you would never guess it from the sound. Lead singer Scott Phares lost his Malibu home in the Los Angeles wildfires that tore through the region in January 2025, and he wrote the track in the aftermath, while he was still processing what had happened.
What he refused to write was a dirge. Watching the star-studded FireAid benefit concert on television, Phares decided the response he wanted to make was not a lament but a celebration, a high-energy shout-along built to remind people that even after losing a house, you have not lost everything, and that rebuilding is possible. He kept it to four chords and cranked the energy, aiming for something you did not need to sing so much as yell. He asked drummer Terry Rae for an intro in the mold of the Sweet’s glam-stomp classics, and Rae delivered. The result is uplifting on purpose, a song engineered for letting off steam. Even the album art turns grief into defiance: the cover is an actual photograph of the charred remains of the staircase in Phares’s destroyed house, digitally set ablaze. It is a genuinely bracing piece of resilience, and it fits a band that has never once accepted that it was finished.
The Hollywood Stars are touring behind it, too, having just sold out an East Coast debut in Boston, with a headlining hometown-area show set for August 28 at the Maui Sugar Mill in Tarzana.
The Great Lost Band of the Sunset Strip
To understand why all of this lands so hard, you need the backstory, and it is a doozy. The Hollywood Stars were assembled in late 1973 by Kim Fowley, the legendary and notorious Los Angeles rock impresario, as a deliberate West Coast answer to the New York Dolls at the height of glam. This was, in fact, the very first of Fowley’s manufactured “concept” bands, predating the far more famous outfit he would later build around a teenage Joan Jett. For a few years the Stars were kings of the Sunset Strip, packing the Whisky a Go Go and the Starwood for crowds that on any given night might include John Lennon or Angela Bowie, with Iggy Pop known to leap onstage as a guest. Journey and Van Halen opened for them. That is not a typo.
Then came the curse that has defined them ever since. The band recorded a debut album for Columbia, and a front-office shakeup got the whole thing scrapped and the group dropped, through no fault of their own. That album sat on a shelf, unheard, for nearly forty years before finally seeing release in 2013 under the perfect title Shine Like a Radio: The Great Lost 1974 Album. In the cruelest twist, the songs did not stay buried, they just made other people famous. Guitarist Mark Anthony co-wrote two tracks with Fowley that became hits for bigger acts while the Stars’ own versions gathered dust: “Escape” landed on Alice Cooper’s platinum Welcome to My Nightmare, and “King of the Night Time World” was picked up by KISS, who made it a staple of their double-platinum landmark Destroyer. Imagine writing a song that helps define a KISS album and having almost nobody know your band recorded it first. That is the Hollywood Stars in a nutshell: enormously talented, endlessly unlucky, and impossible to keep down. They managed one contemporary LP in 1977 before punk and new wave swept the board and they scattered.
Forty-Seven Years Later, They Came Back
The story could have ended there, a footnote for record-collector obsessives. Instead the band reformed in 2018, and in 2024 they released Starstruck, their first album of new material in a genuinely staggering forty-seven years. Hey! LA! is the follow-up, and it doubles as a kind of reckoning with their own history. Mark Anthony, the group’s main 1970s songwriter, who has since died, is honored with two posthumous writing credits on the record. And the album closes, fittingly, with the band’s own fresh recording of “King of the Night Time World,” finally reclaiming for themselves the song they gave the world half a century ago.
There is something perfect about that arc. A band that spent fifty years being overlooked, scrapped, and covered by more famous acts, that simply refused to disappear no matter how many times the industry counted it out, is exactly the band you want writing an anthem about a city picking itself up out of the ashes. Phares has lived the song’s message on every possible scale, from a shelved album to a burned-down home, and each time the answer has been the same: rebuild, plug back in, and make some noise. If you ever needed proof that stubborn optimism is its own kind of rock and roll, the Hollywood Stars have spent half a century providing it. The KISS connection alone makes them worth a look, and our appreciation for that whole glam-and-greasepaint era is a decent rabbit hole to fall down while you stream the record.
Hey! LA! is available now on Bandcamp, Amazon, and wherever you buy music, and supporting it directly is a small, satisfying way to back a band that has earned every ounce of its second, third, and fourth act. Turn it up. Shout along. That is the whole point.
