One of the bands most closely associated with the tail end of the glam metal movement, Trixter, led by guitarist Steve Brown, enjoyed remarkable success with their 1990 self-titled debut album. The group’s 1992 sophomore effort, Hear!, was released two weeks after Nirvana’s Nevermind and was virtually ignored.
I was twelve years old. It was 1983 and I had started playing guitar in 1978. I discovered Kiss and two weeks later I told my mom that I wanted to be a guitar player. Then a couple months later I heard “Eruption” for the first time and I was just like, “What is this?” It hit me like a ton of bricks.
I did finish—by the skin of my pants. By sophomore year of high school I had long hair, I was a rock star. This was what I was doing. So I had pretty much given up on school. Luckily, my father was the vice principal, so he was able to sweet-talk some of the teachers.
We rehearsed in my mom and dad’s house in Paramus. So we had all these record company people who wanted to sign us coming out there because we would rehearse all day long. My mom would make lunch, or we would order food and we’d drink ShopRite iced tea with them. That was part of the appeal—“Hey, you’ve gotta see these kids! They’re real!”
We had been out on the road supporting Stryper and Don Dokken, but when MTV added that video in September or early October of 1990, it fucking flew through the roof. It debuted at number eight on Dial MTV, and then the next day it was number one. And it was number one for thirteen weeks. That’s when the phone calls started coming in: “You guys are going to go out for a week with Poison, and then you guys are going to go out for six months with the Scorpions. You’re going to fucking play every arena throughout the country, multiple nights.”
It was, like, the greatest thing in the world. The Poison run was our first arena tour. Muskegon, Michigan—Trixter, Slaughter, Poison. Sold-out ten-thousand-seat arena. We get there the day before. We go to the arena like Rocky—you remember how Rocky went to the arena before the fight? We go to check it out. “Holy shit, we’re going to play this fucking place! It’s going to be awesome!” Get there the next day, do soundcheck. Here it comes, man. We get onstage and destroy the place. First arena show, dude, and nothing went wrong. I’ll never forget coming offstage that night. Bret Michaels is there. He’s standing at our door, he’s holding two bottles of champagne. We look in our dressing room and there’s, like, fifteen strippers in there. And he goes, “Welcome to rock ’n’ roll.” There’s a case of champagne, naked chicks everywhere. It was fucking unbelievable.
Totally. Jim Barton, our producer, was like, “Guys, I’ve got this great studio in Wisconsin. We can do the whole record for $150,000.” It was the studio where Skid Row had made their first record and they were going out of business, so they were dying for bands. And I’m like, “Fuck that. I ain’t going out to fucking Wisconsin to record a record! I want to make a fucking big-boy record! I want to be home. I want to be near my family. I want to fucking do this right.” So I do my guitar tracks at Right Track in the city. Fifteen hundred bucks a day for the studio.
Jim was starting to get homesick, so he goes, “Hey guys, can we do the rest of the record in L.A.?” And we’re like, “Fuck, yeah. Let’s go to L.A. for a month!” So we get suites at Le Dufy Hotel in Hollywood. We each get a Mustang GT convertible to drive around in. We’re living it. We’re doing the thing. It was kind of like, here it is. We’re going to fucking spend some money. We’re going to do this like the big boys. You know? And as long as we don’t spend two million bucks, we’re going to be okay.
I think we spent six hundred grand on that record.
We did a $250,000 video for “Road of a Thousand Dreams” with the guy who did Mötley Crüe’s “Smokin’ in the Boys Room.” Big budget, cool video … but not that cool. We got the Kiss Revenge tour, but I knew there were going to be problems when the record came out and MTV didn’t air our video. Our manager would be going, “Oh, they’re going to add it next week.” They didn’t add it next week. We’re a month into the Kiss tour and finally we get the call: “MTV’s not playing your video.” A year earlier we had played ARCO Arena in Sacramento with the Scorpions and sold it out, twenty-two thousand people. When we did it with Kiss, there were fifteen hundred people there.
We had just signed a huge merchandising deal, so we had another eight months’ touring we had to do. Luckily, we had a great booking agent, Mitch Rose at CAA, who saw the writing on the wall. He kept us in theaters, at festivals, fairs, made some money. We did ten months of touring on that where most bands would have gone home. The good news is the Hear! record did well in Japan, did well in Europe. So we got to go to Japan. But the final nail was we got an offer to do the Bon Jovi Keep the Faith European tour, but there was a catch—they wanted a $100,000 buy-on. The record company wasn’t going to pay it, so they came to me and said, “Do you want to use your publishing money?” And I was like, “Fuck no.” So that was a bummer. That was ’93.
Look, I say it all the time. Every dream I ever had came true a thousand times over. Do I wish we came out two years earlier? Yeah, to get a little bit more of that wave. But we rode a nice wave. I just would have liked to have ridden a bigger one, and for a little bit longer.