PAUL TAYLOR (keyboardist, Alice Cooper, Winger) My audition for Alice Cooper, I walked in, I literally had two days’ notice. I got the call, like, “Hey, we need a guitar player/keyboard player/singer. We don’t know anybody. Basically you’re all we’re auditioning.” I had played with Nick Gilder, who did “Hot Child in the City,” and I had toured with Aldo Nova for a year. Those were my only big professional things. But I came down and Alice walked up, and the first thing he said to me was “Hey, does your name start with a K?” I said, “No. I’m Paul.” He goes, “Okay, you got the gig.” What? He goes, “I already have a Kip, a Ken, and a Kane. I don’t want any more Ks.”
KIP WINGER (bassist, Alice Cooper; singer, bassist, Winger) I played on four songs on [1986’s] Constrictor, and Kane suggested that I tell Alice that if they went on the road, I would like to do that.
KANE ROBERTS (guitarist, Alice Cooper) I met Kip and as soon as I heard him play I said to Alice, “You gotta get this guy on tour with you because, first of all, he’s overloaded with talent. And he’s a really good-looking guy, you know what I mean? So that’s going to help since, you know, everybody’s kinda swarthy in the band.”
ALICE COOPER (solo artist) Well, Kane Roberts … Kane had Stallone’s body and Jerry Lewis’ brain. He was the most fun guy to work with because he made me laugh all the time. And he was this dominating character onstage.
KANE ROBERTS I was big instead of, like, a skinny, you know, glam guy. And I didn’t drink, didn’t do any of that stuff. That was a big deal. So Alice and I became really good friends and we were off and running.
PAUL TAYLOR I jumped in and joined the band for the Nightmare Returns tour. Those shows were crazy.
ALICE COOPER I saw bands like Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi, and it was the era of the video, when everybody could be very theatrical and glamorous. All the bands looked really good. And there were some really good songs in that era. And the bands would give you a show. So I went, “Well, who does that remind you of? That’s Alice Cooper!” All of those bands cop to it, though. I mean, they all were Alice Cooper fans.
KIP WINGER Alice had had a bad couple of years, he was coming out of rehab. He was trying to re-establish himself after, you know, being curled up in a fetal position in a hotel in Paris addicted to heroin. So I think the journey for him was just about, “Let’s get back up onstage and try to resurrect who I am and what I was at the beginning of this.”
PAUL TAYLOR It was full-bore. I mean, the shows were all about production. If a garbage-bag monster couldn’t make it across the stage in time, Alice would go, “Ah, just cut that verse in half!” The music came second. It was more about, “When is the monster going to come in and chop so-and-so’s head off?”
KIP WINGER But it was never about, “Let’s catch up with these bands who were all influenced by me.” Fuck no. He’s Alice Cooper.
ALICE COOPER I heard about Kip Winger from one of my producers. He said, “I know this kid that plays bass that looks really good.” We brought him into the studio and said, “Hey, why don’t you come out and play bass with us?” I never realized Kip was as creative as he was. He was a black belt in karate. He could score a movie. He could score a symphony. He took ballet.
KIP WINGER I started taking ballet as a teenager because I had a girlfriend that didn’t have any friends to do it with. But then I found I was really drawn to it. And that sparked my interest in classical guitar, and I started doing that and got really into baroque music and prog rock. But ballet, it’s very athletic and very artistic and it suits my personality well, because it’s outside of the norm. But I never was going to be a ballet dancer. I figured I had watched David Lee Roth as a kid, and I was just taking it one step further.
KANE ROBERTS He would do some spins onstage. But not, like, pirouettes and stuff. Although I did have to talk to him about not wearing a tutu. I’m kidding.
BEAU HILL Kip is truly a very gifted guy. And I wanted to help him as much as I could. So I would get Kip gigs. That’s where the Alice Cooper thing came in.
KIP WINGER It all goes back to Beau Hill. I met him when I was sixteen and playing in a band with my brothers.
BEAU HILL The Wingerz were a band in Colorado.
KIP WINGER And Beau had a band called Airborne, they were on Columbia, and he was living in Denver. And my manager at the time was a radio DJ in Denver. He met Beau Hill backstage at a Heart concert at McNichols Arena and Beau was like, “I’d like to produce them.” So we met Beau, he produced us when I was sixteen, and then he used us in the studio to do other stuff.
BEAU HILL We became incredibly tight, me and Kip and his two brothers. If you’ll notice, Paul and Nate Winger sang on almost every record I ever did. They were great, great singers.
KIP WINGER When Beau moved from Denver to New York I followed him. He would hire me on projects when he could. He helped me immensely.
BEAU HILL When Kip came off the road with Alice Cooper, I had him work on a Fiona record.
KIP WINGER And then someone in Fiona’s band brought in Reb Beach.
BEAU HILL I thought Reb was phenomenal. I introduced Reb to Kip and I said, “This could be the nucleus of a really great band.” That’s kind of how that happened.
REB BEACH (guitarist, Winger) It all started for me when I came to New York City. I had gone to Berklee, but I was only there for two semesters because rock was frowned upon at the time. It was, “You’re holding the guitar the wrong way. You’re holding the pick the wrong way.” So I got in my car and drove away. I wound up getting a job as a singing waiter on the Bowery. It was a lobster restaurant right across the street from CBGB—they had one-pound lobsters for, like, $8.95. I was the only guy there who wasn’t a Broadway hopeful. So I would kick the piano player out and just play Elton John and Billy Joel songs while everyone else was singing Pippin and Cats.
When I wasn’t at work, I would hang around at music stores on Forty-Eighth Street like Manny’s and Sam Ash, just playing guitar and talking with the people there. And I heard about this audition for Fiona. So I took a train way the hell out to Long Island, I started playing for one minute, and they said, “You got the gig.” I wound up playing on the whole album [1986’s Beyond the Pale], and Beau Hill was the producer. At the end of the sessions he came to me and said, “I don’t want to insult you, but how does five hundred dollars sound?” I said, “Five hundred dollars? Oh my god!” That was the most amount of money I had ever held in my hand. Because I was surviving on Oodles of Noodles.
KIP WINGER Reb blew everyone away. He became the hotshot guy at Atlantic Studios. He was playing on a lot of these records.
REB BEACH Beau told other producers about me—I was easy to work with, I was a nice kid, and I did it for cheap. I wasn’t in the union. You know, throw me some cash and I’d be happy. And so that’s how I got all those sessions. [Producer] Arif Mardin used me on the Bee Gees. I did Howard Jones, I did Chaka Khan. I did Twisted Sister’s Love Is for Suckers with Beau—I don’t want to say the wrong thing about that, but some of the guitar performances were a bit wobbly, so I would come in and fix things here and there.
KIP WINGER I was doing a lot of solo demos at the time, trying to get signed as a solo artist. And when I saw Reb, I wanted him to play on some of my stuff.
REB BEACH When I met Kip, I’ll never forget it. I was in the green room of Studio A at Atlantic Records, warming up. He came in and we hated each other. Just completely got off on the wrong foot. I totally didn’t get his mild demeanor and his monotone voice. He just seemed to be totally full of himself. I thought he had such a lead singer attitude. But Kip had some really great stuff. Although it was a little bit … it was like progressive techno music. It was great music but it was missing something—a human characteristic. It was all drum machine and lots of sequencing and stuff. So Beau said, “Why don’t you and Reb get together?”
KIP WINGER My music was a lot more progressive as a solo act. Peter Gabriel was my biggest influence. But Reb played on some of the demos, and he was great. And so when I went back to the Alice Cooper band I said to Paul, “Hey, I know this great guitar player, Reb Beach. Maybe the three of us could do a band.”
PAUL TAYLOR Kip and I had been writing stuff together on that first Alice tour, just for fun. The first song we wrote was called “State of Emergency.” But it was during that second tour [for Cooper’s 1987 album, Raise Your Fist and Yell] where Kip kept going, “You know, I think I’m gonna quit Alice and go work on this and try and get us a deal.” I remember telling him, “Dude, don’t quit. Wait till we have something…” He said, “No, I’m pretty sure I can pull this off.” So at some point he went to Alice: “I’m gonna try to go get me and Paul a deal.” And Alice was always extremely supportive of everybody doing their own thing. So Alice said, “Go for it.” And that’s what we did.
KIP WINGER My feeling was, Once a sideman, always a sideman. I’m leaving. Plus, with Alice we had bands like Tesla and Megadeth opening for us, and I was thinking, Fuck, I could do this with two hands tied behind my back! Because I had been writing, like, Peter Gabriel music on my own. Stuff that was so much more complicated. But now I was seeing these bands and it was like, Wait a minute—you mean I could do what I did when I was sixteen years old and get a record deal? I’m outta here! So I left and went back to New York, and Reb and I made a pact to not take any outside work for six months. This was in ’87.
BEAU HILL Kip and Reb moved in to my condo in Hoboken, NJ.
REB BEACH And either Beau or Kip knew a guy who had a Japanese management company called Amuse. And they had a place downtown on the West Side of Manhattan, and we would go into their back room where they stored all the boxes and record on a sixteen-track reel-to-reel Fostex. And the first day we wrote “Seventeen,” “Time to Surrender,” and one other song. In one day. And I remember walking out of that place kicking my heels just going, “Oh my god, I met a genius!” Because I had riffs, but I didn’t know that these were songs. But Kip’s a composer. He had studied this stuff. So everything came together really fast. We made demos—good-sounding demos—quickly.
PAUL TAYLOR It wasn’t like we just walked into Atlantic and got signed. It was a long process. But I guess Atlantic had faith in Beau because he had already made some pretty successful Ratt records.
BEAU HILL Okay, so here’s the way this worked. It’s kind of a funny story. I took some songs to Doug Morris, and I played them and I said, “Listen, I would really like to bring this band to Atlantic.” He listened to the demos and he said, “No. This is crap.” So I went back to Kip and I said, “Doug didn’t like these. Do some more.” They’d write some more stuff and record it, and then I’d go back to Doug and I would change the name of the band. Just so that Doug wouldn’t think I was still pitching the same guy over and over and over again.
KIP WINGER Call Your Doctor was one of ’em. I don’t remember the others.
REB BEACH I thought Call Your Doctor was just the dumbest name ever. But, you know, Beau could sell you on anything.
BEAU HILL It was Sahara, and then it went to Call Your Doctor, and then I came up with something else. But it was just something to put on the cassette. We went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. It was probably four or five submissions over the course of, like, a year.
KIP WINGER I mean, fuck, are you kidding me? Doug turned us down a gajillion times. He was like, “Don’t play me another Kip Winger demo.” I was fucking damaged goods. But the last time Beau went in, he played him “State of Emergency,” and Doug said, “Well, that’s pretty good…”
BEAU HILL I took “State of Emergency” to Doug and I said, “This is really incredible stuff. You have got to check this out.” He listened to it and he went, “Wow, that is really something.” I said, “Do you like it?” He said, “Yeah, I do.” I said, “Will you sign it?” “Yeah, I’ll sign it.” And I walked around his desk and I stuck my hand out and I said, “So we have a deal, right?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Thank you.” And as I was walking out of the office Doug stopped me: “Wait a second—who did I just sign?” I said, “You just signed Kip Winger!” He goes, “You fucking prick.” And he threw me out of his office.
KIP WINGER But we weren’t directly on Atlantic. Beau had us on a production deal. That was a last-minute bait-and-switch that he did on us.
REB BEACH He got a cut of everything. He got part of the merch, he got fifteen percent as the manager, he got a huge amount of money and half the points on the record for being the producer. He got publishing. Just everything. So really I never made the kind of money that all the other bands that we later toured with were getting. And my wife would say, “Why is ‘Wild’ Mick Brown driving a Corvette?”
BEAU HILL I was participating on the publishing side and participating obviously on the production side, but without just being a complete money-grubbing person. And we got probably the world’s smallest recording contract at that time. That’s when there were a lot of big deals going on. But we had an embarrassingly small budget for the first record.
PAUL TAYLOR I don’t remember who finally was like, “Let’s just call the band Winger.” Which was fine, you know?
KIP WINGER Doug was the one who said we should call it Winger. I hated it because I didn’t want to be the namesake of the band. I wasn’t into having it be like a Bon Jovi. But I asked Alice about it and he said, “That’s a great band name!” When Alice said that I was like, “All right. Whatever.” So we went with it, it worked, and it is what it is.
I still hate the name.