STEVIE RACHELLE When I was eighteen, I saw Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, and Ratt all within about a five-month period. This was 1984. That changed everything—I became obsessed with ’80s heavy metal. I started buying all the magazines—Circus, Hit Parader, anything that had Mötley Crüe and Ratt in it. And everything I read in these magazines was about the Whisky a Go Go, the Sunset Strip, Hollywood, the Troubadour, the Roxy Theatre. It all started painting this picture. So fast-forward three years, I’m twenty-one years old and I’m on the Sunset Strip. And the first time I walk into the Whisky I think, Wow, this is really small! The same thing rang true for the Troubadour and the Roxy and the Rainbow. All these places were just tiny little clubs. I’m comparing them to the neighborhood beer bars that were in Oshkosh.
JOE LESTÉ I moved up to L.A. from San Diego and it was mind-blowing. It was basically like walking into Disneyland for the first time—you see all the lights and all the glamour and all the people walking around in all these outfits. You’ve got Mickey, Minnie, all of ’em. I was in shock for a while until I got used to it.
STEVIE RACHELLE I can tell you I arrived here on a Thursday. June 25, 1987. I had a girl I knew from Milwaukee who picked me up. And the very next night some guys in her building said, “We’ll take you to Hollywood.” And we went to the Troubadour. I was probably in there for not more than five minutes … I might have been in the building not more than twenty feet … and two or three girls came up to me and said, “You look like Bret Michaels from Poison!”
KRISTY “KRASH” MAJORS I was playing around in some bands in New York City and a friend in L.A. kept sending me magazines like BAM and Rock City News. It just seemed like there were a gazillion bands and everybody was getting signed out of Los Angeles. Whereas in New York we had a small little scene and it was impossible to get a record deal. So I packed up everything I had and drove across the country. I set up a few auditions before I came out, and one of them was with Pretty Boy Floyd.
STEVIE RACHELLE I first saw a flyer for Tuff in Wisconsin. It had four squares on it: George, lead guitar. Todd, bass. Michael, drums. And then it said Lead singer and it was an empty square. And in that square was where they wrote Wanted: Bret Michaels /David Lee Roth/Vince Neil … I think it said Robin Zander and Billy Idol as well.
MARK KNIGHT (guitarist, Bang Tango) Bang Tango got together in 1988. Joe came up with the name. On the way home from work one day he saw a sign that said BANG and then another one that said TANGO. I’m like, “Well, it’s kind of Ted Nugent–ish, I guess.”
JOE LESTÉ We played anywhere we possibly could. We played the Whisky, of course, we played the Roxy. We played shows with Warrant, L.A. Guns, Faster Pussycat … a lot of Strip bands like that. Pretty much all of ’em.
STEVIE RACHELLE My first show with Tuff was at the Roxy, opening for Warrant. It was a pay-to-play show. We were second slot. Pair-A-Dice—and when I say that I have to discern it wasn’t Paradise, like, with palm trees, who were another band on the Strip at the time—were third. And then Warrant were the headliners. I didn’t even know who Warrant was, other than that everyone was saying they were the hottest band around, and that Jani was a superstar. I remember Michael [Lean, Tuff drummer] telling me, “Your competition is Jani Lane of Warrant and KK [Kent Kleven] of Taz. Those are the two hottest bands and the two hottest singers on the Strip.”
KRISTY “KRASH” MAJORS Pretty Boy Floyd did the Roxy, Gazzarri’s, the Country Club … I think those were pretty much the places we played. We never played the Whisky. We never played the Troubadour.
STEVIE RACHELLE The Troubadour, one night I walked in the door and met this girl—I couldn’t even tell you what her name was but I remember she was from Alaska. I had never met anybody from Alaska in my entire life! She was absolutely beautiful. Probably nineteen. Visiting L.A. with her family. She liked rock so she went to the Troubadour because she knew that was one of the clubs that rock bands played at. Within ten or fifteen minutes I took her outside, we went behind the club where the valet guys park the cars, and we ended up having sex against a wall. When it was done we walked back in the club and I never saw her again. That was not that unique.
MARK KNIGHT I was born and raised in L.A. I watched Mötley Crüe do their two nights at the Whisky when I was in high school. But by ’87 the only way to describe the Strip would be … it was like the Rose Parade or New Year’s Eve. Every night was just a complete spectacle. Every club was packed. And there’d be five hundred or a thousand people walking the streets, passing out flyers, promoting their bands.
STEVIE RACHELLE The clubs were at capacity so people would just stand outside Gazzarri’s or the Whisky or the Roxy. And all these places are within about a two-block stretch. So there were hundreds, if not thousands, of people crammed into this area, and maybe a hundred bands or more promoting their shows.
BRET HARTMAN Pretty much all the clubs back then—the Whisky, Roxy, Gazzarri’s, the Troubadour, the Country Club—they were all doing pay-to-play. ’Cause a lot of these bands were moving here from all over the country and they were doing anything they could to get exposure. So the clubs would have the headliner and then there’d be three opening bands. And they’d give ’em two hundred tickets at five dollars each and then the bands could sell the tickets for, like, ten dollars each, so they could make their money up front. Bands would spend all day long going around Hollywood delivering tickets because they didn’t have jobs anyway.
STEVIE RACHELLE I never thought pay-to-play was a bad thing. I looked at it like this: There were thousands of bands and tens of thousands of musicians. If a hundred of those bands say, “Okay, we want to open for Warrant,” well, we want that slot! We want to play in front of that crowd! So the club says, “You guys can play second. But you have to sell fifty tickets at twelve dollars apiece.” What is that, six hundred bucks? So we say okay. And we agree contractually that by soundcheck on the day of the show we will have six hundred bucks to give to the club.
BRET HARTMAN And the bands that didn’t have money to buy the tickets, they’d hook up with strippers at, like, the Seventh Veil. A lot of these strippers were paying for the tickets and the ads in the magazines.
STEVIE RACHELLE Some of these girls, maybe they came from good families and their parents gave them some spending money. Some of them were strippers making five hundred dollars, seven hundred dollars a night. And they saw the bands struggling, five guys all living in one rehearsal space or a one-bedroom apartment, and they’re like, “Hey, we’ll take you to Carl’s Jr.! We’ll buy you groceries! We’ll get you a new pair of cowboy boots for the show!” I think at one point or another most guys did take advantage of those girls.
KRISTY “KRASH” MAJORS “You wanna hang out? Bring a pizza over!”
STEVIE RACHELLE Looking back on it as a grown man now, I couldn’t imagine saying to a girl, “Would you pay my rent?”
BRET HARTMAN It was just hustle, hustle, hustle. Get all the girls you can to come to the show and create this illusion with smoke and mirrors that you have this big fan base.
STEVIE RACHELLE Within one to three square miles on a Friday or Saturday night there was probably fifty to seventy-five bands playing. So to try to get all these people to come and watch you at nine thirty to ten fifteen, it was competitive. It was like, “He has a bigger drum set! They have a faster guitarist! They have more Marshall stacks! That singer’s hair is bigger!” There was so much competition between the bands to try to draw those people. You had to play great, and you had to look great.
JOE LESTÉ As far as our look, I don’t know, we had this sort of “tipsy gypsy” thing going on.
MARK KNIGHT I worked at a big thrift shop on Melrose called Aardvark’s. Taime [Downe] was right down the road at Retail Slut. And then there was Lip Service, all that stuff. Guns N’ Roses took that Melrose look and kind of accentuated it. Jetboy, too. As opposed to, like, Warrant and Poison and all those bands who were more like the spandex-type vibe.
KRISTY “KRASH” MAJORS It’s kind of funny that people say Pretty Boy Floyd were the glammiest band. Because we were more like Kiss and Alice Cooper and early Mötley Crüe. We even used to do Mötley Crüe’s “Toast of the Town” live. And we wore leather, while other bands were out there wearing a whole bunch of colors and looking like Poison.
STEVIE RACHELLE At one point, people started saying I was trying to have surgery to look more like Bret Michaels, which was ridiculous. I mean, we have a similar background. He’s a couple years older than me but he’s from a small town in Pennsylvania and I’m from a small town in Wisconsin. We both have German heritage. We both had, sadly, thinning dirty-blond hair. But we were cute guys, you know?
KRISTY “KRASH” MAJORS Bret Hartman, I used to constantly see him around when we were promoting and flyering and this and that.
JOE LESTÉ He found Bang Tango before anybody.
BRET HARTMAN I signed Warrant to CBS in 1988. Then I went to MCA and I was going to sign Bang Tango but they got scooped up by Mechanic.
JOE LESTÉ We got signed within, like, six months of being a band. Really.
BRET HARTMAN There started to be a frenzy of signings. So then it’s like, Pretty Boy Floyd is next …
KRISTY “KRASH” MAJORS We only played about ten shows before we got signed.
BRET HARTMAN I saw them playing at the Roxy one time and they had super-poppy songs but they were really extreme. They had the red flashing lights, they had the smoke bombs, they had the dry ice, they had the big hair, the leather … they were definitely more extreme than anything else on the Strip. I mean, Tuff was pretty extreme, but they probably didn’t have the songs as much as Pretty Boy Floyd did. And Pretty Boy Floyd worshipped Mötley Crüe. I went to their rehearsal space once and their whole practice room was just Mötley Crüe posters. You figure, “Well, if they can do half as good as Mötley Crüe…”
KRISTY “KRASH” MAJORS Vinnie [Chas], our bass player, had been in a cover band with Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains before he played in Pretty Boy Floyd.
JERRY CANTRELL (guitarist, Alice in Chains) That was in Tacoma, which is where I was born. Vinnie was a friend of mine from about the middle of high school. He and I formed a band, and we had a couple gigs at, like, a roller-skating rink and a VFW hall. We would jam in a fucking storage unit. Then we moved to Dallas and we had a band called Sinister. It wasn’t anything big but it was fun.
JOE LESTÉ Bang Tango recorded our first album, Psycho Café, in San Marcos, Texas, with Howard Benson.
HOWARD BENSON (producer, Bang Tango, Pretty Boy Floyd, Tuff) I had worked at this studio in Texas called the Fire Station. And Bang Tango, to me they sounded like Billy Idol with, like, funk grooves. Yet they were styled as a hair band. So I thought to myself, Why don’t I take this Hollywood hair band to San Marcos, where we can get away from all the craziness and make a record? And, boy, the first night there, with me, a rookie producer? I had never seen anything like it.
JOE LESTÉ Well, how far did Howard go with this? I remember one night we’re in the studio with the lights out and, you know, I mean, I feel awful saying this because it’s a different time now. But we’re all standing there and this roadie of ours, he has this girl on all fours and he’s paddling the hell out of her with a ping-pong paddle. And she was a rather large girl …
HOWARD BENSON They started picking up girls from, I think it was Texas State University, and it was chaos. We were walking down the street to a pizza parlor and these girls come up and they go, “Who are you guys?” “We’re Bang Tango!” They go, “You’re gonna be huge!” Like, before they even heard a note. It was crazy. And the thing went on all night long. Drinking. Partying. I think they threw a girl through a plate-glass window into a pool. I’m not kidding.
JOE LESTÉ I don’t know anything about that …
MARK KNIGHT The first or second night we were there, our roadie and a couple of the guys in the band, they corralled these girls, brought them back to the studio. We played music for ’em, they danced, they did all this crazy stuff. They came back to our room where the whole band was in, like, a condo, and it just got completely out of control. We ended up trashing the place, breaking the entire front window out of the condo.
HOWARD BENSON I remember going over there the next morning and I see the broken glass and I go, “What happened here?” They said, “Well, we didn’t like this girl so we just tossed her out through the window.”
MARK KNIGHT Really, it was just a tennis shoe that went through the window. I made up the rest of the story on the spot.
HOWARD BENSON After Bang Tango I did Pretty Boy Floyd.
KRISTY “KRASH” MAJORS Actually, the Bang Tango record sounds a lot better than our record, Leather Boyz with Electric Toyz. I think if you look at Howard’s discography, I think we’re the only album that he excludes.
HOWARD BENSON I used to try to hide it on my résumé. But once I had a lot of hit records I thought, Ah, fuck it. And I put it back on there. And now it’s sorta a record that people like for some reason. I don’t know why.
KRISTY “KRASH” MAJORS Obviously Howard’s got a massive ego right now. [Benson went on to produce multiplatinum records for My Chemical Romance, All-American Rejects, and others.] But back then Howard was a new guy and he was pretty much begging to do the album. I wanted, like, Michael Wagener or Beau Hill or someone like that. But they were busy.
HOWARD BENSON You want to compete with the stuff that guys like Tom Werman and Michael Wagener are doing. And you’re just like, How do I do it? And so you’re hearing rumors—“Oh, they triple-tracked the singer from Poison.” And you know, Kristy Majors, he could play. But the bass player was barely able to play a note and the singer was just all over the place. And we didn’t have Auto-Tune back then. So we had to do quadruple tracking just to make a melody.
KRISTY “KRASH” MAJORS I wanted the record to sound more like a street record, a little heavier. And I think Howard tried to make it sound more on the pop element. He wanted to make us sound like the New Kids on the Block of rock ’n’ roll or something.
HOWARD BENSON Hair metal, to me, it was like pop music except we had guitars in it. And these were just poppy party songs. The label was like, “What’s the single?” We said, “Well, we’re gonna go with ‘Rock and Roll (Is Gonna Set the Night on Fire).’”
KRISTY “KRASH” MAJORS That video, it was like over $100,000. It’s crazy the amount of money they spent back then.
BRET HARTMAN There was a huge soundstage and these huge letters spelling out PRETTY BOY FLOYD behind them. And they brought in these six-foot-tall light rings—that’s a light that’s round and when you shine it on people it just makes them glow. We had caterers, grips, cameras that are on those train tracks. It’s like a three-day, thirty- or forty-person operation. These record labels were spending crazy money on these videos you would see once or twice on Headbangers Ball. It was ridiculous.
STEVIE RACHELLE Tuff’s label put, like, fifty grand into our “I Hate Kissing You Good-Bye” video. But by the time we got signed it was the summer of 1990. Did it feel too late? I mean, yes and no. Looking back after the fact, we could’ve said, “Fuck! We were too late!” But at the time, no one really could have foreseen these bands from Seattle were going to change the landscape.
HOWARD BENSON I did a band called Tuff. They looked like Poison … I couldn’t even remember what the bands looked like after a while. They were just all looking exactly the same. They all had headbands on, they all had long hair, all poofed up with hairspray, it was nuts.
STEVIE RACHELLE By the time we got signed, we’re meeting with Howard Benson and we’re playing him all these songs we had written and half of them were from 1988, 1989. Meanwhile, we were about twelve, fourteen months into hearing Skid Row, which is a band that had some hair band qualities, but they also had some heavy metal qualities. And their singer looks like, you know, Cindy Crawford. And he can sing his ass off! But we sold almost a hundred thousand records. Because the ballad [“I Hate Kissing You Good-Bye”] started getting some play.
HOWARD BENSON I would say that album [What Comes Around Goes Around] was one of the better projects I worked on at that time. And that singer, Stevie Rachelle, worked really hard. But they came so late in the process. They didn’t stand a chance. They could’ve literally made Sgt. Pepper’s and it wouldn’t have sold. It wouldn’t have mattered at that point. They would have had to reinvent themselves. A lot of bands actually tried to. They tried to look like Stone Temple Pilots, they tried to change their look. But, no.
STEVIE RACHELLE The week our video came out we were one of three adds on MTV. It was us, Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” and, like, a Kid ’n Play video. Eventually we made it to number three on Dial MTV. It was “Enter Sandman” and, I think, “Don’t Cry” by Guns N’ Roses that were ahead of us. But this was September 1991. The video at number nine or ten? “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
HOWARD BENSON Pretty Boy Floyd, I don’t even know what happened to them after we did that record. They got dropped. I did try to make a second record with Bang Tango, but they didn’t want to make it with me because I told them their songs sucked. Then they hired me for the third record but by that time it was over. We had no chance. It was ’92, ’93. I remember going, “This record’s never going to come out. We’re gonna compete with Nirvana?” And what happened was we handed the record in and the manager calls me up: “I have bad news.” I said, “The record’s not coming out.” He goes, “How’d you know?” I said, “I sorta figured! Where were we gonna sell this thing?” You know? Like, to who?