BILL HEIN One of the things that kept the major label A&R people away from Mötley Crüe was that it wasn’t trendy. It wasn’t new wave-y. It wasn’t what was happening at the time. It was raunchy metal, you know?
ALAN NIVEN I took them to KMET. I took them to KLOS. There was no interest at radio in playing them. So basically everything was done by word of mouth and press. I had a relationship with Sylvie Simmons, who was based in L.A. and wrote for the British magazine Sounds.
WES HEIN Sylvie Simmons was writing about them as if they were the biggest thing on the planet. So people in L.A. were reading about this L.A. band, but in a London-based magazine. It made them seem larger than life.
SOUNDS MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 20, 1982 Four of the most striking looking guys this city has to offer the exiled headbanger, with their un-L.A.-pale skin, ratted hair, killer leathers and stiletto heels … the first LAHM [Los Angeles Heavy Metal] band I’ve seen in a long time that can really give Van Halen a run for their money.
BILL HEIN Eventually we sold something close to thirty thousand records of Too Fast for Love. And that was in a very short period of time. It was just blowing up. And Tom Zutaut and Elektra Records came calling.
VICKY HAMILTON Licorice Pizza is where Tom Zutaut heard about Mötley Crüe. He saw the display we did and went into the Whisky and saw them and ultimately ended up signing them to Elektra Records.
ALAN NIVEN I was at a NAMM [National Association of Music Merchants] convention at the Century Plaza hotel. I grabbed the few Mötley Crüe posters that Allan Coffman had and put them up in our booth. And this young man came up to me and looked at the posters and said, “Do you have something to do with Mötley Crüe?” I said, “Yes, they’re signed to our label.” He said, “I’m very interested in them.” I said, “That’s wonderful. Why don’t you come and have dinner on the weekend?” He did, and that was the start of a very long friendship with Tom Zutaut.
The one thing I understood from Tom back in the day was that a good friend of his had told him to look out for Mötley Crüe. And that good friend was Cliff Burnstein.
CLIFF BURNSTEIN (manager, Def Leppard, Dokken, Tesla, Metallica) Tom Zutaut was at Elektra, and Tom knew about Mötley Crüe. This is what I think happened: I think Tom maybe hipped me to Mötley Crüe and asked me what I thought. And I heard their first record and I said, “This is gonna go…”
ALAN NIVEN There was a highly entertaining moment when Tom Zutaut and I were having a drink with Allan Coffman at a place called Casa Cugat, which was right next door to Elektra when it was still on La Cienega. Allan went off to the bathroom and came back very red of face and perspired, and told me and Tom that he’d just had a “battle with some gooks.” Obviously trying to infer some sort of Vietnam flashback, if he had ever been there. So I went to investigate, and there was a pay phone hanging off a wall by a wire or two. I went back into the bar and looked at Tom and said, “I think it’s time we should go…”
CLIFF BURNSTEIN I had a meeting with Mötley Crüe and I thought, I could never handle these guys. Plus, they had Allan Coffman, who didn’t want to give up managing them. So I decided, This is too messy. They have a manager, they’re unmanageable anyway. Or at least that was my impression. I can’t do it. I’m not cut out to do that kind of thing.
ALAN NIVEN The minute they were at Elektra, Allan Coffman was no longer the manager.
VICKY HAMILTON Allan just seemed to disappear at that point. And Doc McGhee and Doug Thaler came in.
BILL HEIN Elektra offered what was for us a very nice deal to buy out our contract with Mötley Crüe—give us a nice advance payment, give us a royalty, which was very welcomed.
ALAN NIVEN So one day I roll into work and the receptionist at Greenworld asks if a friend of hers can come in and talk to me. He has a record that he wants me to listen to. I said sure. And a white 1956 Bentley pulls up outside …
DON DOKKEN I was a mechanic, so we’d go out and try to find these really cheap beat-up cars and just try to bandage them back together and sell ’em for a couple hundred dollars’ profit, just to make the rent. So I was totally poor but I’ve got a white Bentley. It was sitting in a movie sound lot a couple blocks from the house with flat tires, just rotting away. I asked someone who it belonged to and they said one of the directors. I hunted him down and I said, “Would you consider selling it? I’ll give you five thousand bucks for it.” I borrowed the money from various people, and my brother and I fixed it up and got it running. It was such an ostentatious car. The old, big giant fenders, the giant round headlights. So the joke was, I’m a starving musician but I’m driving around in a Bentley. People thought, Wow, Don got a record deal. He made it!
ALAN NIVEN And out steps this guy. He comes into my office, puts his feet up on my desk, throws the European release of Breaking the Chains at me, and says, “I want you to do for me what you did for Mötley Crüe!” And that was a guy called Don Dokken.
DON DOKKEN Alan knew somebody that worked at Elektra. And Breaking the Chains had come out on Carrere and he says, “You should take it to this guy I know, Tom Zutaut, and play it for him.”
ALAN NIVEN But Tom had just made a major decision by signing Mötley Crüe and was a bit reluctant to make another one. So for Dokken I said, “Tom, look, I know you’ve got a relationship with Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch at Q Prime management. Do you mind if send this record to them?” And he connected me to Burnstein, who said, “Have Don call me.” And of course with Cliff and Peter on board that enabled Tom to be more aggressive at Elektra and that’s how Don got on Elektra.
DON DOKKEN I get a phone call from a guy named Cliff Burnstein and he says, “I saw your record in an import store and I liked it.” So he comes to L.A. and meets me. And you know how Cliff looks, right? Like a homeless person. He has that big scruffy beard. I was expecting someone in a suit and tie.
CLIFF BURNSTEIN I felt that I was excited about Dokken and that I could do something with them. So Tom Zutaut said, “Great, let me sign them over here to Elektra.” And Joe Smith was the head of Elektra at the time, as I recall. So Tom goes in there and, quote, “gets them signed.” And we make some kind of deal. It’s not an expensive deal. It’s a cheap deal. The record is already made. Then Joe Smith leaves the company and Bob Krasnow takes over and Tom Zutaut calls me and says, “Cliff, I have some bad news. Krasnow is not interested in this, so we’re backing out of the deal.” And I said, “Oh, this is terrible.” Because, really remember, obviously we had Def Leppard as management clients then, but they weren’t Def Leppard with a capital D and a capital L. We didn’t know if we had a future with Def Leppard. I would know it in a few months, but I didn’t know it then. So this was really kind of a big blow.
DON DOKKEN It became like a joke: “So, Don, do you have a record deal or do you not have a record deal?” I’d say, “I don’t know. It depends on what day it is. Ask me tomorrow.”
ALAN NIVEN Don and I formed a friendship, we lived together. He was the guy who introduced me to Dante Fox, who became Great White.
MARK KENDALL Back then there was only a handful of bands getting deals. The crazy signing mania had not really begun yet.
JACK RUSSELL It all happened through Don Dokken. Our drummer at the time, Gary Holland, had played with Dokken in Germany, and he introduced me to Don. So Don brought Alan down to the Whisky to see us, and Alan liked what he saw.
ALAN NIVEN Fucking abysmal. Mark Kendall was in white. The bassist was in black. The drum kit was half black and white. Jack Russell was half black and white. He had a huge fucking knife gaffer-taped to his biceps. The songs were not very good. I was unimpressed.
MARK KENDALL I didn’t know this till later, but Alan had seen us a couple times and kinda passed. And Don Dokken told him, “No, man, you’re missing it. These guys really are good!”
ALAN NIVEN I went a second time and they were just as awful. But after the show I was driving back to Palos Verdes at something like three o’clock in the morning and I had one of those rare moments of lucid thought, where I evaluated the situation and I said, “I trust Don. He has a competence in songwriting and performing. I must be missing something.”
So I went to the Troubadour and looked a third time. And the third time I saw them they still weren’t very good. But when the encore came around, if I remember correctly, they did Humble Pie’s version of “I Don’t Need No Doctor.”
MARK KENDALL That’s what sold Niven, believe it or not. A cover song.
ALAN NIVEN Kendall just took the fucking roof off. And Jack had a voice. So I realized it was just the material that was an issue. At that moment, I said, “Here is something that definitely has possibility…”
JACK RUSSELL He wanted to sign us to Enigma. And we’re all like, “Yes!” So one night we go to Alan’s house up in Palos Verdes and he’s like, “Guys, I’ve got some bad news. I quit my job today.” What? He goes, “Well, the company didn’t want to sign you, so basically I told them to eff off.”
ALAN NIVEN I had been running the sales and marketing at Greenworld, and after the Mötley Crüe thing, I asked to be a partner and they said no. So when I threatened to leave, one of the guys there said, “Let’s start another label and you can be the label.” And that was Enigma. But when I wanted to sign Great White to Enigma, that wasn’t going to happen. Bill Hein wouldn’t do it. So I left.
JACK RUSSELL So I said to Alan, “We’re out a record deal. You’re out a career. Why don’t you manage us?” He said, “C’mon, Jack, I know nothing about managing.” I go, “You’ll learn.” And not only did Alan become a manager, he became one of the best managers in the business. He ended up managing Guns N’ Roses.
MARK KENDALL Niven flat-out hated the name Dante Fox. I was less than thrilled with it myself.
JACK RUSSELL He said, “What do you think about changing your name?” Me and Mark looked at each other and we went, “We’ll lose all our following!”
ALAN NIVEN I said to him, “All thirty-seven of them, Jack?”
JACK RUSSELL So we finally said okay. And Alan goes, “What about Great White?”
MARK KENDALL I was just like, yuck. I mean, that’s a really stupid name, too.
JACK RUSSELL I used to call Mark the Great White, because I’m a shark fisherman and he’s got a really light complexion. So when we’d play a show, before he would do his solo I’d announce, “Mark Kendall—the Great White!”
MARK KENDALL Jack did used to call me that onstage. But I don’t think Niven had ever heard that. What he told me was one night he was standing outside a club where we were playing, and I drove by and screamed something into the crowd. And the kid next to him says, “There goes Great White!” And that’s when the light went on in his head.
JACK RUSSELL I said, “You get us a record deal, you can call us whatever you want.”
ALAN NIVEN We did an EP with Don Dokken and Michael Wagener. It cost us $5,000 to record it. In hindsight it makes me smile when I remember Wags would be in the studio and Jack would be doing vocals and Wags’ guidance would be [in German accent], “Make a fist, Jack! You’ve got to make a fist!”
DON DOKKEN Great White asked me if I could help them do a record and I said, “Sure, I can help you. Michael Wagener’s a great engineer and I could probably get you studio time cheap and yada yada yada.” And I took them in the studio and recorded them.
ALAN NIVEN At the time, neither KLOS or KMET played independent rec-ords in regular rotation. But I went and managed to get KMET to play “Out of the Night,” which was a big breakthrough. So the record companies were sitting there and they’re looking at someone who has a certain amount of energy and determination, and who can get a little bit done because here’s KMET playing a record in regular rotation.
MARK KENDALL I’d never heard of a band with a song in rotation. Not Ratt, not Dokken, none of them. It was something that was unheard of. But Alan was able to do it. And that really got a buzz happening. Everybody was going, “What the heck’s going on here? Great White’s on the radio!”
JACK RUSSELL I remember the first time I heard myself on the radio. Alan came into rehearsal and he goes, “Hey, stop, guys. I want you to hear something.” He turns the radio on and here comes “Out of the nii-yiiight. Your mama tells you baby…” We’re like, “Are you kidding me?” We were just high-fivin’, jumping all over each other. It was like a tree full of monkeys. It was one of the greatest moments I can remember.