This is tonight, by the way. Quiet Riot walks onstage at SEVEN Bar inside the Cherokee Casino in Oklahoma and the guy grabbing the mic is John Torra, a 23-year-old from Long Island. When Quiet Riot hits the Metal Health era material, the youngest person in the whole building will be the singer. Wild.
Here's how he got it. Quiet Riot put out an open call to replace Jizzy Pearl and more than 700 people threw their name in. Torra was just posting videos of himself singing Quiet Riot songs on social media, including Cum On Feel the Noize, and fans started rallying behind him. Manager Regina Banali said the first time she saw the clips she honestly thought, is this AI? Nope. They flew him to LA, and by the third song of the audition the whole band was nodding. "Frankie would've chosen him," she said. That's Regina's call, and Frankie Banali is her late husband, so that carries weight.
The timing is perfect, because this whole catalog turns 43 this November. Metal Health was the first heavy metal album to ever top the Billboard 200, back in 1983, nearly twenty years before Torra was born. Six million copies. Now some kid born after The Phantom Menace is up there singing it every night. The tour runs through September 2027 and hits the Whisky A Go Go on October 16. If you are anywhere near one of these dates, go yell along with him.
Photo: Photo by Sebastiaan Stam via Pexels
Source: Men's Journal
