In an exclusive interview with Rock Scene, Tracii Guns looks back on his early experiences with music. He remembers being a young boy and sitting in the back of his mother’s boyfriend’s car in 1971 and hearing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” for the first time. “It was overwhelming audio fear,” he recalls. “I remember thinking, I have to recreate that noise right now!”

On the way to the airport, they stopped by a newsstand. Tracii saw Jimmy Page, decked out in his dragon suit, on the cover of Creem magazine. His mom told him, “That’s the guy making that noise on the record.” "I saw that picture, and I’d never seen anything like it in my life,” Tracii says. “The imagery, the sound, it completely captivated me when I was five-and-a-half years old. From that point on it was all about, ‘Mom, play me something like that!’ Led Zeppelin II  was all I ever listened to until I was seven years old. The theremin coming in on the ‘Whole Lotta Love’ solo, that riff, the way Jimmy used reverb…everything had plate reverb on it. Everything sounded scary and dark and damp. I kinda pictured these dark figures in a really cloudy overcast environment being very moist and depressing. And I was so drawn to that.” Shortly after, Tracii heard a Black Sabbath greatest hits album. “The imagery on the cover was just, like, all these skeletons in a community, and the first song was ‘Iron Man.’ I was like, ‘Oh! There’s more of this.’ It was like a horror movie for your ears.”

Read more at Rock Scene, and watch the video below. Also check out Rock Scenes gallery of photos from L.A. Guns' show at Debonair Music Hall in Teaneck, New Jersey on April 9, here.