PETER PHILBIN I was working at Elektra, and the guy who was head of Elektra, Bob Krasnow, was a great guy. Volatile, but a really strong music man. Bob had moved the company to New York, and I was still in the L.A. office. I was the lead executive. So Bob comes out to L.A. and we’re having breakfast at the Polo Lounge. And he goes, “What d’ya got?” “Well, I’m looking at a band called Faster Pussycat.” And Bob loves porno. He’s well versed in Russ Meyer’s soft-porn film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! And he goes, “Great name. Let me hear the music.” And I go, “No.” And he goes, “What do you mean?” And I go, “You’re gonna hate it.”
MIKE BONE After Shout at the Devil was such a big success, Doc McGhee came in to Elektra to renegotiate. ’Cause they had the typical shitty rec-ord deal. And Bob told him, “Look, I’m not gonna renegotiate with you on one big record. You give me two big records and I’ll open the coffers for you.” And they did Theatre of Pain. And then Girls, Girls, Girls. Okay. So after the second big record Doc comes in and renegotiates and he walks out with a lot of money. Bob was true to his word but had still never even seen the band play live. So we were headed to a WEA [Warner Elektra Atlantic] national sales meeting in Miami and I said, “Bob, on our way down why don’t we go see Mötley Crüe? They’re playing in Oklahoma City, we’ll see ’em there, and then we’ll go down to Miami the next day.” And so he goes, “Okay.”
So we get to Oklahoma City and Doc is there. Tom Zutaut is there. I think the head of the A&R department, Howard Thompson, is there. And Bob’s complaining the whole night. Bob is not a person that likes being in heartland America! He’s a New York and L.A. and San Francisco kind of guy. We get to Oklahoma City and it’s, “Oh my god … who on earth would live here?”
PETER PHILBIN Bob Krasnow did drugs. This is well known and this is a guy I have a lot of affection for. Bob was like everything you wanted in the record industry. He was both a dream and a nightmare. But Bob was never a suit. Bob was never a corporate guy. I was a big fan of his. He passed away and I miss him.
MIKE BONE So the car picks us up and we go to the show. And Mötley, they’re not even playing Oklahoma City. They’re playing in a little town south of there—Norman, Oklahoma. There’s a big basketball arena there that’s part of the state college. I mean, it’s fuckin’ huge. We pull into this parking lot and about every third vehicle is a pickup truck. And Bob is still complaining—“Why am I here?”
BRAD HUNT Bob in Oklahoma City … I mean, Bob in Cleveland was, you know, an experience.
MIKE BONE So we go in and I say, “Bob, let’s go look at the house.” “Okay.” We go up to the front and there’s a merch table and they’re selling T-shirts, hats, headbands, sweatshirts, panties, fingerless gloves … I mean, it’s just crazy. And they’re selling this stuff so fast that they have a giant cardboard box there, and the merch guys are just taking tens and twenties and throwing them into these big boxes. It’s just bangbangbangbang. The idea is to get as much money out of that crowd as possible. I don’t remember the merch numbers per head but it was astounding. And Bob saw that. He may not have had an affinity for the music, but when he saw the merch he was in.
Anyway, the band comes out, they play, the crowd goes crazy. And at that point I think the drum kit was doing something wild. It was, like, flipping over with Tommy Lee in it, there’s a ton of pyro, the whole thing.
NIKKI SIXX With Theatre of Pain we figured out how to take the drum riser and have it lean all the way forward so you could actually get a view of what it looked like to watch Tommy play a drum solo. He wanted to be able to just slam it. What we did with lights, lasers, fire … that was different than everybody else. It became things that imprinted on your brain. You do it so people go, “Holy fuck!” There’s room for “Holy fuck!” and nothing else.
MIKE BONE So then the show ends, the band goes backstage, and Bob and I give ’em a minute to dry off and then we go back there. And we’re standing around chatting and one of the guys, I don’t remember who it was, Vince or Nikki, he goes, “Look at this.” And there’s a door there that says DOG POUND on it. And he opens the door and on the other side is a room full of Oklahoma City’s finest groupies. And we’re not talking four or five of ’em, either. We’re talking a lot of ’em. And as soon as the door opens they all perk up. They’re smiling and waving. And these girls had all been preapproved and carded by [Mötley Crüe tour manager] Rich Fisher. There were no juveniles in there. I don’t know what the age of consent was in Oklahoma City, but it was Rich Fisher’s job to know that, state by state. And then the door is closed. And whoever it was, Vince or Nikki, he says, “Watch this.” And he opens the door again, points at some girl, and she comes through. And he takes this girl into a bathroom stall, sits her on a toilet, and she proceeds to blow him in front of the whole room of people. And Bob looks at me and he goes, “Is it like this every night?” I say, “Yeah.” And he goes, “I gotta come out and see more of these shows!”
PETER PHILBIN To Bob’s credit, when I told him about Faster Pussycat, he said, “Great. Sign ’em.” He liked laughs.
VICKY HAMILTON The Faster Pussycat deal stretched out a long time. It was a long time coming.
BRAD HUNT We had Mötley Crüe, we had Dokken, we had Metallica. And all of a sudden now we had Faster Pussycat.
RIC BROWDE The very first day that we started the album, we were recording at Amigo Studios, which was in North Hollywood. That’s where the Poison album was mixed. We’re in there getting a drum sound and the head of A&R at Elektra is there, and he’s with another A&R guy, they’re like the big shots that came in from New York. One of the guys I think signed Simply Red. And Peter Philbin’s there. It’s literally the first day. Maybe two hours into the session. And one of the A&R guys, he calls me over, and he calls Philbin over, and he just lays into us. He goes to Peter, “If you hadn’t fucking given him all the money up front I would shut this fucking thing down right now. This is the biggest bunch of bozo bullshit I’ve ever seen. This is nothing but a con job. And you guys suck!”
PETER PHILBIN I mean, look, I honor Ric, because he was the perfect guy to be involved. But Ric isn’t one of the great producers of the world. And Faster Pussycat can barely play. So I don’t remember that conversation, but I’m not surprised.
ERIC STACY I know that when Elektra signed Faster Pussycat the expectations weren’t “Oh, this is an amazing band that’s gonna sell a lot of records!” I think the feeling was kind of like they’d be happy if we sold fifty thousand copies and they made a little money or broke even.
TAIME DOWNE It doesn’t matter. We got a record done. It took us, like, three fucking weeks to do it. We were kids in a studio. I didn’t know what all those knobs did. I do now. But I didn’t know what-the-fuck back then. I was just like, “Is there a place for me to fuck bitches in here?”
RIC BROWDE We had five days to mix the album, so we were doing two songs a day. And the band would only come in and listen to the mixes. And I remember when we got to “Babylon,” I was thinking, Ah, this song is gonna suck. Because it never really came together in the studio. If you strip it down it’s a bad version of the Beastie Boys and not very good. So me and [engineer] Tim Bomba were working on a mix for “Babylon,” and Taime came in with Brent and listened to it. And Riki Rachtman was in the room, too.
TAIME DOWNE Riki did the scratching on “Babylon.”’Cause Riki used to DJ.
RIC BROWDE So they’re listening to it and they’re kinda looking at each other. And I remember thinking, “Oh shit…” Because Taime had a very volatile temper. But I didn’t hate him or anything. That’s just who he was. He was a street kid. He was the only one of all the people I knew who were playing that street urchin angle who really was a street urchin. But anyway, we’re listening and all of a sudden Taime starts smiling. Then he goes, “Play that again.” And I’m like, “Fuck, he liked it!” And then everybody was just playing it for everybody, and I remember all these chicks came in and a couple of them started to have sex with the band. A bunch of the guys were on a couch with the girls and they’re like, “Keep playing ‘Babylon’!”
GREG STEELE Do I remember that? I wish I did. I’m pretty sure that probably happened. Because back then that would have happened.
TAIME DOWNE At that point all I wanted to do was bring girls in and have sex. We used to have contests and … no, I’m not going there. I don’t want to be too much of a disgusting pig. But I was doing it the whole fucking time I was doing the record. I’d just always find a new room.
PETER PHILBIN The woman who was head of video at Elektra, Robin Sloane, she went out and got Russ Meyer to do Faster Pussycat’s first video, for “Don’t Change That Song.”
ROBIN SLOANE Well, the band named itself after his movie, right? So it wasn’t that difficult. He was happy to do it. It wasn’t like he had a lot of work.
TAIME DOWNE He was an old codger but he was super fucking cool. And, you know, to have Russ Meyer make a little three-minute movie of me was pretty awesome. No one can take that away from me.
ROBIN SLOANE I would say that Russ had no sense of the music. And he wasn’t really that familiar with the music video form. But he certainly knew how to film young voluptuous girls. I think the best thing about it was that we got some publicity.
PETER PHILBIN Did Russ Meyer like the band? Here’s the real answer: I don’t know. But there’s a rule I have: When you hear “yes,” quit negotiating. So Robin goes and gets Russ Meyer to make this video, and that’s actually kind of interesting. MTV’s never going to play it, but I still don’t wanna be the guy who asks, “Hey, Russ, do you actually like this band?” I mean, shut the fuck up and say, “Nice meeting you. Can you sign a poster for me?” You know, you can really screw yourself up asking some girl who’s already in the car, “Do you really wanna go out with me?”
TAIME DOWNE At that point in Russ’ life I don’t really know what he was into. I know he was still into big titties. Because he was like, “We’re doing a casting, you’ve gotta come…” It was down in fucking Marina del Rey. I just remember hanging out and he’s showing me all this stuff, going, “Ah, I saved these…” And there’s Kitten Natividad’s bra, fucking Haji’s bra. I think I have them in a trunk with some photos up in Seattle.
ERIC STACY We were really hungry and we worked our asses off on that first record. We went out, we opened for Alice Cooper, we opened for David Lee Roth. We were out with Motörhead for a while. Y&T. Ace Frehley. We did the dinners and we did all the record store appearances. It was our blood, sweat, and tears that made that record sell 250,000 copies.
TAIME DOWNE Roth, we saw him like the first day, then we saw him on the last day. Alice Cooper we’d see all the time. But we did our own shit. We were kids in a candy store. We only played a half hour or so, and then the rest of the night was like, whoooo! We’re on the bus doing the rock ’n’ roll thing, livin’ the dream at age twenty-two, you know what I mean?
GREG STEELE I remember the Alice Cooper audience was very much older people. And so they didn’t like us too much. They were going, “What the fuck are these guys?” Alice Cooper was us when he started out but, you know, they didn’t care. Whatever.
ERIC STACY Taime documented everything on tour in the early days. Even in the back lounge of the bus, which was where all the business went on, so to speak. If you climbed on top of the third bunk, there was this space where you could kind of see over the floor to the back lounge. Many a night you’d be back there with some girl or whatever, and all of a sudden you’d look up and there was a video camera lens sticking out of that space.
GREG STEELE We had some crazy-ass videos of crazy situations, absolutely.
TAIME DOWNE There was a lot of cameras snapping away. I remember going to the one-hour photo places in the malls, and little kids would be standing there watching our photos come down the belt thing and out the dispenser. And it’d be like, fucking pizza-on-pussy. Just stupid shit.
ERIC STACY On the first tour we had roommates in order to save money, and me and Taime would share a room. And I remember one night I met some chick and I brought her back and we were on my bed. I’m sitting up against the backboard and she’s, like, facedown in front of me. I could see the whole room, and what she didn’t see behind her was basically every piece of furniture moving by itself. The chair was moving closer and closer to the bed. Because Taime was behind the chair with his camera trying to get good angles. And then Brent came in, and Brent was behind the coffee table. Now he wants a better look. It was kind of funny because you’d just see this furniture moving all over the place.
TAIME DOWNE The back of one of our tour shirts at the time said “And We’ve Got the Pictures to Prove It.”
ERIC STACY We always used to say to Taime, “Dude, one of these days you’re gonna have to get rid of everything. Because you’ve got too much shit on all of us.” But I think he realized to do anything with that stuff would be really fucked up.
TAIME DOWNE I have a couple photo albums from those tours with David Lee Roth and Alice Cooper. They’re in that trunk up in Seattle. I told my mom, “Never open that.” But yeah, it’s all still there.