MAX ASHER There was a studio called Pitman Studios, right across the street from a newsstand called Centerfold, where Slash worked. We went and recorded the first Warrant demo there, and I still have a cassette. It was a three-song thing. We’d still never played a club gig.
JOSH LEWIS Adam and Max went to a few Black ’N Blue gigs, and there was this group of girls that were at these shows all the time, they loved Black ’N Blue. And one of them was Erik’s girlfriend.
MAX ASHER I had a girlfriend that lived in the Valley, and we’re at a stop sign and her friend Liz is at the other stop sign, and Erik Turner was in the car with her. My girlfriend says, “That’s Liz’s boyfriend, he’s a guitar player,” and I’m like, “Okay, whatever.” Then we went to Liz’s backyard party that weekend, and there was Erik again, so I said, “Hey, we’ve been thinking about adding a second guitarist. Do you want to come have a jam?”
JOSH LEWIS We played a few parties here and there, then we decided we would play our first show at the Troubadour. It was a Tuesday night, and I think we actually broke a record because it was all our high school friends.
JERRY DIXON (bassist, Risk, Warrant) My band Risk was on the bill at the Troubadour with Warrant. And this girl—this is sort of dumb—she was like, “Oh, you look like Matt Dillon. You have to stay and watch my friend Erik’s band.” I didn’t even know who Matt Dillon was.
MAX ASHER My friend Gina told me, “Jerry wants to be in your band like nobody’s business.” And I was like, “Oh, well okay…” And I remember talking to Adam and Adam was like, “Dude, all you saw was girls in front of him the whole night. Girls loved him.” It was kind of a no-brainer.
JOSH LEWIS We were with a girl who was dating Bret Michaels, and she called him and we got on the phone and said, “We want to play with you. We should do shows together.” He was super cool. We opened for Poison at a lot of Troubadour gigs and we opened almost every single Country Club show they did until they were signed and out of L.A.
MAX ASHER We didn’t have production right away, but the last year that I was in the band we had a guy named Val who was a really good carpenter. He built these massive Marshall cabinets on both sides of the stage where the actual cabinets would go inside.
JOSH LEWIS When we had our first headline show at the Troubadour, some girls decided they would rent a limousine for us, and they took us to the show in it. And I’ll never forget, we drove up to the Troubadour and the line was all the way around the block.
MAX ASHER Our singer, Adam, was not happy with Josh’s guitar playing and he was feeling like we weren’t getting any stronger. There was another band that we used to play with that Adam really liked and thought their guitar player was great, and we hatched this idea that we could form this superband of those guys and us.
JOSH LEWIS We did our first out-of-town show in San Diego. And the next morning, Adam and Max pull us aside and they’re like, “We’re quitting the band. We’re gonna start a band with the guys from Mickey Knight.” Me and Erik and Jerry drove home in Jerry’s truck and everybody was crying.
JERRY DIXON We told Adam and Max, “We’re going to keep the name Warrant.” They were like, “All right, that’s cool.”
JOSH LEWIS Warrant played at least one show with Jani and Steven’s band, Plain Jane.
JOHN MEZACAPPA Plain Jane’s other guitarist, Paul Noble, was living in Woodland Hills. We all moved in and were sleeping in the living room on the floor. Paul and his wife and Jani had the bedrooms.
AL COLLINS Jani was really cranking the songs out.
JOHN MEZACAPPA We all had day jobs … except for Jani. Everybody kind of supported him because he was doing all the writing.
STEVEN SWEET Other than being broke, I loved L.A. because I fit in with all the other misfits. I came from a little town in Ohio where Bruce Springsteen was the hot musical ticket and I was the outsider. I was the kid with the long hair and the earring, and practically nobody else in my school was into the kind of music that I was into. So when I got to L.A., it was like, Oh my god! There were all these people that were like me, that came here from somewhere else and needed to get out. So I felt more at home there than any place since I was a kid.
AL COLLINS Honestly, I thought it would be a little bit easier than what it was. But once we got to L.A., we realized we really had to seriously buckle down and do some work. I remember Jani coming home one night and saying, “Man, I saw this band called Poison, and there was like maybe two guys in the audience. It was nothing but girls, and they were just killing it. We really need to go see this band and learn something.”
STEVEN SWEET People put the label “glam” on it, but it was more of a look than a sound.
AL COLLINS We designed a stage show. We had a drum riser where the drums actually could revolve like 180 degrees. They had to stop and turn and go back the other direction, and there was a smoke machine underneath it.
JOHN MEZACAPPA I bought this drum riser from this other band that could turn 180 degrees. It kind of looked like a spaceship. The motors and the wheels that were put into it weren’t really heavy enough to hold Steve and the drum kit, and there were a couple times where it started spinning and it stopped with Steven’s back facing the crowd. People figured it was part of the show, but for us it was pretty embarrassing.
STEVEN SWEET Al Collins and Paul Noble were a little bit older than us. Meaning that they were in their thirties and we were in our twenties. And I think they wanted a little more security or a little bit more of a sure thing. When they left, we were resigned to just go back to Florida to regroup. We thought we could be a big fish in a small pond there.
JOHN MEZACAPPA Honestly, I never took the talk of moving home that seriously. I just kind of did what I did and said, “Hey, we can hang through this, and things are going to work.” And they did work out.
JOSH LEWIS I just remember that Jerry and I saw Jani and we were like, “Wow, this guy, he’s got balls.” He went out in the audience and was singing to all these people that didn’t even know him.
JERRY DIXON I think it was in a park and there was, like, thirty people there. I remember Jani climbing up this tree. He was up there singing and screaming like he was playing a stadium. I was like, “That guy’s a star.” When it came time when we had to find a singer and drummer, I said, “Who is that guy that climbed up that tree? I want that guy!”
ERIK TURNER (guitarist, Warrant) Jani and Steven lived in an apartment just down the street from Jerry and I, so he left a note on the door: “Hey, it’s Jerry from Warrant. We need a singer. If you’re interested, call us.”
STEVEN SWEET We got together and played and it was great. We played “Down Boys,” which was a song that Jani had just written, for the first time.
JOSH LEWIS We needed a writer, because none of us could write at the time. Jani could sing his ass off, he was confident. We pretty much let him have control of the band at that point.
STEVEN SWEET Warrant had already developed their flyering thing before Jani and I joined. “The Horniest Band in L.A.” was one of their slogans. I wasn’t always comfortable with everything that we chose to do, but you know …
JOSH LEWIS But then it kind of started getting a little more vulgar … We knew this girl who was a stripper and we were like, “Maybe she’ll come up onstage at the Troubadour and she could sort of simulate giving Jani a blow job.” We had these big walls in front of our amps that we could hide behind, it looked like a cowboy saloon or something, because that was when Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” was big. We were wearing cowboy hats and holsters and shit.
Anyway, Jerry is up there playing a bass riff and it’s sexy-sounding. Then this girl comes up and starts sort of stripping. Then she gets on her knees in front of Jani, and while this is happening the lights are going down, and by the time anything could have happened, the lights were completely off, and the drums stop and Jani says, “I don’t know, did she or didn’t she?” All of a sudden you hear all these girls yelling, “You guys fucking suck! This is disgusting!” People were pissed.
JERRY DIXON I was flyering out on the Strip and a photographer who was about to shoot an ad for Capitol Records came up and said, “Hey man, we’re shooting and we’d like to use you for it.” We exchanged numbers and I did the photo shoot. It was funny, because it was a promotion for all the bands that Capitol had signed, like W.A.S.P. and Poison.
STEVEN SWEET This woman named Jamie Shoop who worked for Prince’s management saw the ad in BAM. It was Jerry leaning up against a telephone pole flipping the camera off, wearing a motorcycle jacket, his hair long, and looking cute. And she goes, “I would love to get this young rocker-looking guy on a soap opera.” She was also managing Luis Miguel at the time, who was a Mexican soap star and singing sensation.
JERRY DIXON Jamie tracked me down and called me. And I’m like, “No, I’m a musician. I’ve never acted or done anything like that … But you gotta come see my band!”
JOSH LEWIS Then I got kicked out. I just wasn’t ready. I didn’t have the best equipment, I was kind of wild onstage, I’d sort of slam my guitar, guitars would be out of tune all the time … I think Jani was just at a level of professionalism that I wasn’t at at the time.
JOEY ALLEN (guitarist, Warrant) The way I got in Warrant was I lived in Hollywood, I was looking for a band, and I happened to be on the Sunset Strip one weekend partying and having fun and I was at Doheny and Sunset, right across from Gil Turner’s liquor store. And lo and behold, Erik Turner walked up. And Erik and I had been in a band together two or three years prior. He said Warrant were looking for a lead guitar player, and I was looking for a band. You know, timing’s everything, right?
So I went to a Warrant show at a backyard party somewhere out in the Valley and watched them, and what’s funny is that Josh was hitting on my girlfriend and I was just sitting there laughing. ’Cause I’m like, “Dude, I’m about to take your gig!”
STEVEN SWEET Jamie Shoop somehow got Prince interested, because at the time he was looking for a young, white, long-haired rock band to sort of mold into his own Prince thing, kind of like he did with Apollonia 6 and Vanity 6.
JERRY DIXON She got Prince to put us in the studio with the producer Ed Cherney. That was the first time we actually were properly recorded, and we ended up using that demo to get signed.
JOEY ALLEN Prince liked the demo, but then he saw a live video of us at the Country Club. We were, you know, five guys in their early twenties with hormones raging …
STEVEN SWEET He thought, “Well, these guys aren’t dancers, so they’re not really what I’m looking for.”
JERRY DIXON Everybody else was gone. Guns N’ Roses and Van Halen and Mötley Crüe and Ratt and W.A.S.P. We were the only ones left in L.A. It got right to the end and it was like, “God, is this really not going to happen? Why can’t we get a deal?”
BRET HARTMAN (executive, CBS Records, MCA Records) In 1987, before I was at CBS Records I was an intern at RCA. I’d go there from nine a.m. to two and then I’d take the bus down to Tower Records and work there from three to midnight. I had just moved from Seattle to L.A., and the second day I was at Tower I walked up to Gazzarri’s on my lunch break, it was like three or four in the afternoon, and Warrant was soundchecking. So it was like the first band I saw. And they were already really huge. They had all the full-page ads in BAM and Rock City News, they had their flyers everywhere, they were selling out the Country Club on Friday and Saturday nights. But all the other labels had passed on them because they figured the market was already saturated and nothing was really going on beyond Poison.
STEVEN SWEET It was frustrating because we were selling out all the nights in places, and people were asking us, “Why aren’t you guys signed yet?” But really, from the time that Jani and I joined together with the guys in Warrant, and the time that we got signed, it was only a matter of a couple years—a blink in time.
BRET HARTMAN Jani was such a great singer, they had great songs, and they were amazing live. And I was like, “They’re not doing anything new but they’re really good at what they do.” And then the people from CBS Japan came and saw them at the Country Club and they really loved them, so I went to Ron Oberman, the head of CBS, and got him on board. He brought in Beau Hill and Jani was down with that. Jani called all the shots.
JOEY ALLEN I don’t know if Bret worked at CBS as an intern, I don’t know if he had signing authority. But for all intents and purposes I would have to say that Bret Hartman–slash–Ron Oberman signed Warrant to CBS/Columbia. Absolutely.
BRET HARTMAN They were like the biggest band in L.A., you know? It was pretty much an easy picking right there. I mean it was like, “Why isn’t this band signed yet?” But I’m fresh from Seattle so I had a fresh perspective. Where everybody else, maybe it just blurred together with all the other hair metal bands on the Strip and they couldn’t tell the difference.