Bang Tango is a hard rock band formed in 1987 by Mark Knight and Kyle Kyle after they’d both left City Slick, recruiting Kyle Stevens and Tigg Ketler for the new band. After the LA band Rough Cutt auditioned hundreds of singers and had chosen Terry McCardy, Knight inquired about the singers they didn’t choose, and they recommended Joe Lesté.

Their first release was the song “I’m No Stranger” which appeared on the soundtrack for the 1988 horror movie Black Roses. The following year, Bang Tango released the EP Live Injection followed by their debut album Psycho Cafe. Their music video for its single “Someone Like You” began airing on MTV, after which Lesté described their success as “all of a sudden it just blew up”. Knight also recalled:

(When we) played The Whiskey (a Go Go in West Hollywood), there was a two-mile line down the street. When we played there maybe three months before the record came out, there was maybe twenty people there.

Psycho Cafe, produced by Howard Benson, reached #58 in the US and stayed on the Billboard 200 for 39 weeks as the band toured with LA Guns and Ratt. Decades later, Rolling Stone would name it one of the 50 Greatest Hair Metal Albums of All time.

When the band approached Benson with songs for their sophomore album Dancin' On Coals, he told them they “didn’t have (good enough) songs”, so they fired him. Later, the band admitted it was their own egos that fueled that decision, and their follow-up Dancin' On Coals had what the band later called an “overproduced” sound where “production-wise it was just flat”. The album peaked at #113 and only spent three weeks on the Billboard 200.

After another live EP in 1992, recording their third album Love After Death marked the return of Benson in the production role, but with the rise of grunge and alternative music at the time, it was shelved. The album finally found release in the UK and Japan in 1994, but Stevens had already left the previous year and the rest of the band imploded in 1995.

In 1996, Lesté and Kyle took the band on the road for a few more years, also releasing two live albums, until Lesté formed Beautiful Creatures with guitarist DJ Ashba (who would later join Sixx AM and tour with Guns N Roses). Kyle then formed Newlydeads with ex-Faster Pussycat frontman Taime Downe. Separately Knight, Stevens and Ketler had formed the band Worry Beads. It wasn’t until 2003, between albums with Beautiful Creatures, that Lesté would reform Bang Tango – but with all new musicians. They released the album Ready to Go in 2004 and began touring again, including an outing with Faster Pussycat.

In 2009, the four original musicians of Bang Tango tried to contact Lesté to do a 20 year reunion tour for Psycho Cafe, but after getting no response they toured instead as Bang Tango Redux with singer Michael DeMay, who had been in pre-Bang Tango bands with both Knight and Kyle. Later that year, Lesté collapsed on stage during a show in Chicago with his own Bang Tango lineup.

In 2011, Drew Fortier began filming a video documentary of the band as they recorded their album Pistol Whipped in the Bible Belt. He worked it on for “four long soul crushing years”, then released it on YouTube for free in 2015. Soon after, he joined the band as their second guitarist.