GUNNAR NELSON Matthew and I were born and raised in Hollywood. We were born in ’67, so we were there at the very epicenter of the birth of country rock at the Troubadour when our dad, Ricky Nelson, put together the Stone Canyon Band. At the Troubadour any night, you could see Linda Ronstadt’s first band, the Stone Poneys, Jackson Browne, Buffalo Springfield … all that kind of stuff. That’s what Matt and I grew up watching our father doing.
JACK PONTI Matt and Gunnar’s life is unlike anything you or I could ever fathom. Their grandparents were Ozzie and Harriet. Their father was Ricky Nelson. Their uncle’s Mark Harmon, you know, from that TV show CSI, whatever the fuck it is. Their aunt’s Pam Dawber from Mork & Mindy. Their other uncle’s Chuck Woolery from Love Connection. So they’ve just grown up around massive fame.
GUNNAR NELSON Matthew and I got our first instruments when we were six and seven and did our first recording session at eleven. We started playing the L.A. clubs when we were just twelve as Strange Agent.
MATTHEW NELSON (singer, Bassist, Strange Agent, the Nelsons, Nelson) We hung out with punkers, new wavers, and rockabillies. That was our scene.
JOEY CATHCART (guitarist, Strange Agent, the Nelsons, Nelson) I met Matthew freshman year of high school. I bonded with him because he was the only guy in the class that had a blue tail. You remember rat tails? And he wore one of those jumpsuits like Sting used to wear. I was like, “Oh, that’s an interesting guy.” He was into new wave and so was I. We started talking at lunch about how we love music, and he said, “Hey, you should come up to my house sometime. My brother plays drums. I play bass. And since you play the guitar, maybe we can, you know, play some stuff.” I said, “Sure.”
GUNNAR NELSON We were playing five days a week on the same stages with the Knack, the Plimsouls, and the Go-Go’s and all of those bands. It was a rough fucking scene.
MATTHEW NELSON Hanging out backstage with new wavers and power poppers, these guys, we’re fifteen years younger than any of them, they’re the scariest motherfuckers I’ve ever seen. I mean far scarier than any punkers or rivet heads, you know, metal guys. These were scary people that sang really happy songs, but they were all heroin addicts. They would do stuff like sabotage your gear before a show; cut your power cable or kick your amps to where they would blow a tube.
JOEY CATHCART Before Ricky Nelson died in 1985, we had already changed our name to the Nelsons. In fact, the last club date that we played before their dad died was at the Central, which later became the Viper Room, and he actually came. It was the night before he was leaving for his last tour. We saw him in the stairway. He was such a shy guy that he never came all the way into the club.
GUNNAR NELSON Our father died when we were eighteen years old. It was devastating. He was our best friend and our mom was a horrible excuse for a mother. She basically shot us out into the world. So when he died, it was literally like the rug was pulled out from under us, and we spent a year of our lives spending money we didn’t have, impressing people that didn’t matter, just trying to medicate over our grief. We were sleeping on friends’ couches and living out of the trunk of a beat-up car.
MATTHEW NELSON Then we were asked to play Saturday Night Live in 1986, the night that Ron Reagan, Jr. was hosting.
JOEY CATHCART I thought we played great, and it was very fun. We all had a great time. I mean, it was like, “Woo, big-time!” There we were, eighteen, nineteen years old in New York City being treated like VIPs. Limos everywhere!
MATTHEW NELSON When you play Saturday Night Live and you’re the only unsigned band ever to play it, you don’t have to be a genius to think, Well, there might be something more freak show about this than “Hey, these guys are a really awesome talent and we really love them.” On the way back, Gunnar, who had played drums all those years, just said, “Look, this isn’t right and I wanna learn how to play guitar and come up front with you.” And I’m sitting there freaking out, going, “But we’re right there! We’ve been spending literally years doing this!” And he said, “I’m just telling you, it’s what I really think we need to do. I wanna write some great songs and I’m gonna take a year to learn how to play guitar and I’m never gonna get off it.”
GUNNAR NELSON I learned how to play guitar in a year of concentrated learning. I wanted to combine the country-rock vocalizing that I grew up with and the majesty and power of the guitar work that I heard with bands like the Scorpions, Dokken, and Boston.
MATTHEW NELSON And to his credit, he did it.
GUNNAR NELSON We put together a meeting with Marc Tanner, who had been a solo artist on A&M, because his publisher played us his demos and we liked almost all of them. Before you know it, all these songs started taking shape.
MATTHEW NELSON And we had some notable guys playing with us, like Vivian Campbell before he joined Whitesnake, and a great drummer named Andy Parker, who played for UFO. But a lot of players also just saw us as a meal ticket.
GUNNAR NELSON We shopped our demos to labels in New York and L.A. three times and were turned down by everyone before we got a development deal from John Kalodner at Geffen. We targeted him because he’d just done Aerosmith’s Pump, the Whitesnake record, Cher, Peter Gabriel. This guy was unstoppable.
MATTHEW NELSON We figured he wasn’t gonna get fired.
GUNNAR NELSON So here’s what I learned about John Kalodner. First off, you’d make friends with the secretaries. Which was not hard for me and Matt, okay? John was famous for always wearing white suits like John Lennon, right? Now, occasionally, John wore a black suit. Nobody knew this, but that was the easiest way to tell that John was having a shitty day and he was in the worst mood ever. You never want to be around John when he was wearing his black suit. So I always called the secretary and asked, “What color suit is he wearing?” If it was a black suit, I’d reschedule.
We also realized that when we came in to play him demos, he had an attention span of three songs and that, moreover, he was going to shit-can two of them. Finally, Matthew and I figured out that John never remembered what he’d already heard! So since we had the twelve songs that we knew we wanted on the record, we took the next fourteen months going in and having meetings with John, acting like we were working on shit, and we’d play him three songs at a time. We would keep the one song that he approved aside and cycle the two rejected songs back in with another new song at another meeting.
JOHN KALODNER (executive, Geffen Records) In working with them as an A&R person, artists learn to hate you, because you are the only person in their life that criticizes them. You’re the person who tells them no and you’re the person that is always pushing them to do better and not gratifying them or kissing their ass. So when they’re successful, they hate you and they feel contempt for you.
GUNNAR NELSON Okay, here’s a typical John Kalodner criticism: “I fucking hate it.” “John, what do you hate about it?” “You’re the fucking musician, you figure it out!”
LARRY MAZER John Kalodner and I were very close friends, and after Asia broke up, the keyboardist Geoff Downes was going to do a solo thing and he didn’t have a manager. So John said, “You should meet with Larry Mazer.” And I was a huge Yes fan, I was a huge Buggles fan, I was a huge Asia fan, so I said, “Oh, absolutely.” So I flew to London, and we’re talking, and I said, “What are you doing?” He goes, “Well, I want to put something new together, but I’ve been doing some producing, some songwriting, and as a matter of fact John has been feeding me a couple projects, and one of them is this group, Nelson.” I said, “Oh, who’s that?” He goes, “Well, it’s Ricky Nelson’s kids.” So he played me three songs and my head exploded. I immediately called Kalodner from the studio. I said, “John, why didn’t you tell me about this?” He goes, “Well, they have managers.” I said, “I don’t care.” I said, “I’ve got to be involved with this.”
GUNNAR NELSON Matt and I had gotten to the point where we were down to our last sixteen dollars in the bank. We couldn’t eat anymore. It had been about a year that we’d been courting John Kalodner, and he was still taking his time with us but no money, no commitment, nothing. We went to our managers and said, “Listen, we’re desperate, we need this to go to the next level. He’s not moving. We need to pressure him or do something.” They said, “We’re playing this politically. Don’t go in there. Don’t meet with him personally.”
MATTHEW NELSON We rolled in there without an appointment and said to Kalodner, “Listen, we know that we could be blowing this, but we have a great song and we wanna play it for you and we have nothing to lose at this point.” And we played “Love and Affection,” which we had just written with Marc Tanner. And I remember John kinda getting this weird smile on his face. He was rocking his head through the whole thing and tapping his feet.
GUNNAR NELSON When it was done it was silence for, like, thirty seconds. Then he just reached over and called business affairs and said, “Send the check for the Nelsons—they’re ready.” Then he got off the phone and he goes, “I’ve been waiting for you guys to do something like that. For you to not listen to anybody. Because when you guys release this, everybody in the world is gonna want to tear you down. And I felt if you didn’t have the balls to come in here and stand up to me, you certainly weren’t gonna have the balls to go stand up to anybody else.”