STEVEN SWEET When Warrant got home from the Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich tour we went to Hawaii with Beau Hill for pre-production on the next record. But out of two weeks of unabashed partying and fun and just living the island life, we may have rehearsed two days.
JOEY ALLEN We had done literally sixteen months on the road and we were burned out. We thought we would go over to Hawaii and get some work done. And once we got over there, you know, sun, sand, surf … what are you gonna do?
STEVEN SWEET We had been opening our sets on the Mötley tour with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” because it was one of the heaviest songs that we had. And especially in front of Mötley’s crowd it was a way to kick off our set and say, “Hey, we’re compatible with Mötley as an opener.” And people were into it.
JOHN MEZACAPPA “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was one of the songs that Jani actually wrote very, very early on. I probably heard that when I was twenty years old.
STEVEN SWEET Beau, he was a little bit more on autopilot the second time around. He was often preoccupied with other stuff. So we jokingly say that Jimmy Hoyson, who was the engineer, actually produced the record. He did a lot more hands-on work than Beau did.
JIMMY HOYSON (recording engineer, Warrant, Winger) It was at the time that Beau was involved with Jimmy Iovine and the creation of Interscope Rec-ords, so he was constantly on the phone. He definitely had his hands full.
JOEY ALLEN Beau actually pulled Winger into some of our sessions. We’re paying the money for the studio, and after we would leave and go home after recording all day, he would bring Winger in to record. That’s all you need to know about Beau Hill.
JIMMY HOYSON We had just finished Winger’s second album, and when they turned it in they were told by the label that they didn’t have any singles. So within the first couple of weeks of starting the Warrant album, Winger was coming into the studio at night to record “Easy Come Easy Go” and “Can’t Get Enuff.” It wasn’t done out of malice or anything like that. It was just like, “Man, we gotta get this done!”
BEAU HILL We were almost finished with the record but hadn’t delivered it yet. I went to Jani and I said, “I don’t think we have a single.” Again, it wasn’t a conversation that I was looking forward to.
STEVEN SWEET I don’t know that story. Donnie Ienner at Columbia heard the record and wanted another single, another song. He said he wanted it to sound like “Pour Some Sugar on Me” by Def Leppard.
BEAU HILL Jani said, “Okay.” The next day, not even twenty-four hours later, he called me and he played me the “Cherry Pie” demo. Shortly before he passed away, Jani told me that he really regretted that song because he was known as the “Cherry Pie Guy.” I got pissed and I said, “God, you fucking moron. You have written a rock anthem. That’s like the Holy Grail. You’ll have people singing the words to your song for the next forty years. Not only that, but you pulled one right out of your ass at the eleventh and a half hour. Are you out of your mind?” I hope I changed his mind a little bit.
HEIDI MARGOT RICHMAN What’s that bromide where you have your whole career to make your first record, and then suddenly you’re in the system and it ain’t that way anymore? I think that was the hardest part for him, that there were so many cooks in the kitchen that had to sign off on stuff. It kind of became somewhat outside of his control, and he really wasn’t gonna be able to change that.
JOEY ALLEN Jerry and I were in Denver at a celebrity golf tournament with Leslie Nielsen and a bunch of different celebrities, thinking our record was in the can. And I remember getting a call from Jani and him playing me the demo through the phone and saying that we needed to come home to L.A. to record.
STEVEN SWEET We actually went in and demoed it first at Sound City, in Studio A. And that’s when Donnie was like, “Yeah this is it.” So then we went back to Enterprise in Burbank, set everything up again, and tracked the song to its fullest. The guys from Danger Danger happened to be in town and they helped sing gang background vocals.
BEAU HILL Jani had C.C. DeVille come in to play the solo and I was really pissed at him for that. He did it for one reason and one reason only: to ingratiate himself with C.C. so that Warrant could go out with Poison on tour. I believe that got accomplished, but sitting in the studio with C.C. was the most painful experience of my life; C.C., on a good day, would never come up to my standards of something that I would want to put my name on and release to the public. But I bent over backwards to accommodate the greater good, if you will.
HUGH SYME (graphic artist, Bon Jovi, Whitesnake, Warrant, Slaughter) The cover photo was a pretty evident and shameless—yet one hopes, humorous—rendering of the band’s album title.
HEIDI MARGOT RICHMAN A lot of people think the woman on the cover of the Cherry Pie album is Bobbie Brown. It’s not. Bobbie didn’t come along until the video. That was just a model that they plopped a wig on. I was there.
HUGH SYME Jani gave me his nod of approval for where I wanted to take the cover’s look and feel. The roller skates, the drive-in waitress all played well to the airborne pie. Hence the ’50s-era cherry-red car for the band photo session.
HEIDI MARGOT RICHMAN One of the inside photos of the Cherry Pie artwork shows the legs and roller skates of what’s supposed to be the waitress from the cover, sticking out from behind the car door. It looks like she’s blowing Erik. The woman who had been cast for that showed up and she had just gained a ton of weight. So they sent her packing and sure enough, the photographer, John Scarpati, said, “Heidi, we need you, we need you to do this.” I was like, “Oh my god, you’ve got to be kidding me!” It is not the most dignified photo I’ve ever taken.
JOEY ALLEN When they were casting the “Cherry Pie” video, we were going through the model headshot books to pick out a girl. Jani was single at the time, so it was like him looking through a catalog for a girlfriend.
JOHN MEZACAPPA The moment Jani saw Bobbie Brown he just was absolutely infatuated. He told me straight up after the second day of the “Cherry Pie” video shoot that he was going to marry her. Everybody was like, “Dude, this is way out of your league.” And I just remember him telling me that Christie Brinkley wasn’t out of Billy Joel’s league!
MARK WEISS Jani was smitten. That’s all he thought about. I was there when he got her flowers. He’s like, “Mark, take some pictures when I give her these flowers.” He was courting her, you know?
HEIDI MARGOT RICHMAN The shoot took three days. The director, Jeff Stein, was a perfectionist, and don’t forget, the technology wasn’t what it is now.
JOHN MEZACAPPA The shots from above where you see Steve hitting his drums and they’re all cherry pies? Those are actually cherry pies that had to be replaced for every take!
JOEY ALLEN In the long run, I think Jani’s relationship with Bobbie caused more damage to the band than egos or anything. Jani left a tour of Europe with David Lee Roth because he heard that Bobbie was driving around in his Mercedes with some guy in a local L.A. band, which she was. They were both promiscuous and infidels and one infidel meets another infidel and you can imagine the fireworks that brings on.
HEIDI MARGOT RICHMAN Because he was sort of having trouble wrapping his head around this creative direction, perhaps feeling like he’d lost control, what he could do instead was spend all his time with Bobbie. We had these reclining … they were maybe like barber chairs or something, that were in the makeup/wardrobe space of the studio where we shot. Basically, he spent the whole time when he wasn’t shooting in one of those chairs with his arms around her. They didn’t talk, they didn’t do anything.
JOEY ALLEN When the record came out, we went on the road opening for Poison on their Flesh & Blood tour, which was great until the very last day. Even though “Cherry Pie” was a hit, we were still fired up to kick ass every single night, while they might have been a little burned out. We had two or three weeks left of the tour and were playing a show somewhere in Montana and they boarded up portions of the stage that they didn’t want us using. I broke a guitar over one of the barricades. We were just pissed, like, “What the fuck?” You can’t just dump some, you know, totalitarian “You can’t go there!” on a bunch of twenty-seven, twenty-eight-year-old guys that are in a rock band. And when we walked offstage, Scotty Ross, who was Poison’s tour manager, told us that it was over.
STEVEN SWEET After that we started headlining arenas and theaters with Trixter and Firehouse opening. We were firing on all cylinders. I think that was sort of the ultimate for us at that point.
STEVE BROWN It was called the Blood, Sweat & Beers tour. The Warrant guys were fucking party animals. They were like Mötley Crüe junior. But they knew how to handle it, I guess. Jani would smoke and drink tequila during the show, but the guy never fucking fucked up. He was unbelievable. Like, I’d be sitting there going, “This guy’s fucking amazing. How is he doing it?” I don’t know how those guys would be able to get onstage some of the nights. Because I know what we were doing with them the night before and we only had to play for forty-five minutes. They had to play for two hours! Then at the end of the show, all three bands would come out and do “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)” by the Beastie Boys.
STEVEN SWEET Jani would ask somebody in the crowd, “What’s the happening rock bar in town? Because as soon as we’re done here, we’re going to go over there and continue the party.” And we would do that. We’d go to whatever the local place was and whoever owned that bar was ready for something, because people would show up.
STEVE BROWN They would make a deal that Jani would announce that the bands were going to go hang out at the bar as long as we could drink for free. Before we’d get there there’d already be a thousand people there, so the place would make a shitload of money. They would have a fenced-out area for us and we would just party, play pool, and do whatever else. It was like that for five months!