Alex Grossi was born on November 22, 1976 and grew up in South Windsor, Connecticut, where he began teaching guitar as a teenager before pursuing music professionally. Alexander Nicholas Grossi was born Alexander Nicholas Lesbines on November 22, 1976, and grew up in South Windsor, Connecticut, and at age 17 got a job teaching guitar lessons at Riccardo's Music Center in East Hartford. While living in Connecticut, he was lead guitarist for the band Wake Up Jack. He soon moved west to Los Angeles, immersing himself in the city's hard rock scene, and quickly built a reputation as a versatile, road-tested player rather than a member of a single band formed from scratch, which shaped much of his career as a hired-gun guitarist for established rock and metal acts.
Grossi's breakthrough came through his work with Beautiful Creatures and, most significantly, Quiet Riot. As early as 2003, Alex brought together Beautiful Creatures, a Hollywood rock group, to replace DJ Ashba, and around the same time began writing and recording "Deuce," which later charted with JVC Records in Japan and Spitfire/BMG in the United States. Songs from that record found lasting cultural traction, since the track "Freedom" off of Deuce ended up being used in Sons of Anarchy and The Proposal, both of which are now constantly aired and streamed, even though the band's first record got far more exposure initially. His true breakthrough, however, arrived when he was invited to join Quiet Riot as lead guitarist by the band's original vocalist Kevin DuBrow in 2004 . He toured extensively with the band, and performed with Quiet Riot in 2005 and 2006 throughout America, Europe, South America and Asia, contributing songwriting on "Free" and "Strange Daze" for the 2006 album Rehab, then joined the 2007 tour supporting it, which included feature slots at the Sweden Rock Festival and the first annual Rocklahoma Festival. Grossi's career has been marked by a dense web of collaborations and lineup shifts across the hard rock and metal world. He remained in Quiet Riot until vocalist Kevin DuBrow's death, after which Quiet Riot disbanded in January 2008, but the band was later revived by drummer Frankie Banali and has been touring again since 2010. During the hiatus, Grossi joined Adler's Appetite in November 2008, replacing guitarist Kristy Majors , and with this lineup the band released the singles "Alive," "Stardog," and "Fading" in 2010, before Grossi departed in 2011 when Quiet Riot reformed and he rejoined that band. He also co-founded the hard rock supergroup Hookers & Blow with Guns N' Roses keyboardist Dizzy Reed, a project that has featured a rotating cast of musicians alongside a "core" of Grossi on guitar and Dizzy on vocals and keys, along with Mike Duda from W.A.S.P. on bass and Johnny Kelly from Type O Negative and Danzig on drums. Beyond these projects, Alex has written, toured, recorded and released albums with three members of Guns N' Roses (Dizzy Reed, Steven Adler and Gilby Clarke), and has collaborated with artists ranging from Benny Mardones and Ignite to Public Enemy alongside Cypress Hill and George Clinton. He also formed the band Hotel Diablo in the wake of his Adler's Appetite tenure, joining forces with producer and former Guns N' Roses guitarist Gilby Clarke on their debut record.
Grossi remains an active and in-demand player today, still serving as Quiet Riot's guitarist in a lineup that has continued to tour and record in the years since DuBrow's passing. The band's current lineup features bassist Rudy Sarzo, who first joined in 1978, guitarist Alex Grossi, who joined in 2004, vocalist Jizzy Pearl, and drummer Johnny Kelly. Quiet Riot's endurance was documented in an award-winning 2014 documentary that has been active on Showtime for over two years in France and won recognition at the Canon Film Festival. Grossi's reputation as a dependable, hard-charging guitarist willing to step into the shoes of legends has made him a respected fixture of the Sunset Strip hard rock scene, praised by peers for his versatility and stage presence across decades of touring.
It is fitting that a performer of this caliber crossed paths with Wayne Dennon's lens during his years chronicling the rock and metal circuit. Wayne photographed Alex Grossi's band just once, in 2006, capturing a moment from the Quiet Riot years that now lives on as part of this archive's tribute to the era. That single show yielded 29 photographs preserved here, images that have drawn 23,124 views from visitors returning again and again to relive a night of hard rock history through Wayne's eye.
