MATTHEW NELSON We were out promoting the After the Rain album for five months before it was even released. We went out to all these radio stations and kind of overtook their morning shows—introduced ourselves and sang and played. This was right after the whole Milli Vanilli scandal, so we were definitely guilty until proven innocent. We went out with two acoustic guitars and our voices because we had to show people we were for real.
LARRY MAZER The buzz started building in the industry. So the first thing that happened was my friend Jody Gerson, who was at EMI Publishing, said, “Hey, I want to be involved with this.” And I said, “Well, I want a lot of money.” She goes, “What do you want?” I said, “I want a million dollars.” And she said, “Really?” Luckily, her boss was Charles Koppelman, who had signed Wilson Phillips to SBK Records, a subsidiary of EMI. So he’s sitting there going, “Wait a minute, I have Wilson Phillips, and I can also get Nelson? This could be amazing!” So he gave me a million dollars. And then right after that, Dell Furano at Winterland Productions called and said, “Larry, I’m feeling a real buzz on this thing. We’d like to be the merchandiser.” I said, “Great. I want a million-dollar advance.” And he said, “You got it.” So before the record even came out, I made them two million dollars.
GUNNAR NELSON I don’t know how Larry Mazer did it, but he also got us on as the guest VJs on Dial MTV in place of Daisy Fuentes for the week before our record dropped. This is before MTV Unplugged or anything like that. People are not used to seeing people do shit live. We went in there with a couple of acoustics, we ripped on each other, and then we would do snippets of songs in and out of the commercial breaks. That’s what did it: Geffen sold out of their first pressing of fifty thousand copies in two hours. They spent two weeks trying to catch up.
MATTHEW NELSON The directors of the “Love and Affection” video were Jim Yukich and Paul Flattery, and they had done a lot of work with Phil Collins. They came in with storyboards and said, “When we’re shooting this, you’re going to see snow coming down and you’re going to be singing backwards. But when we reverse the film in post, the snow is going to be falling up and your mouths are going to be going in the right direction. So we’re going to write out what you have to sing phonetically and you’re going to have to learn it.” So it was like, “fa-an-nu-no-nu-sh-abba-abba.” It was the weirdest thing ever.
BOBBY ROCK The directors were like, “Wait a minute, if they’re playing, they’ve gotta be playing the shit backwards so that when we roll forward, the drumsticks will be coming off of the drums at precisely the time that the listener is hearing the drum being hit.” And same with the fingers on the guitar neck and all of that. So we had to learn how to play it all backwards. When the video came out, it always cracked me up because people—especially the harder rock guys—would say, “Oh, look at these faggots.” And I’d think to myself, If they only knew what we had to do. You gotta be able to really play to do that on camera. That level of musicianship is like some Frank Zappa–type shit!
GUNNAR NELSON We had very strong images, I can’t say that we didn’t. There’s a little bit of, I guess you could call it a glam element. But we never wore makeup and we never had big hair. And where everybody else was kind of black leather and all that kind of stuff, we made a counterstatement with our fashion. It was color, it was different. And we got a lot of shit for it. But the truth is we really wanted people to pay attention. The whole thing was “Love us or hate us, here we are.” We polarized and it worked.
JACK PONTI The desire to be taken serious was important to them, but they’ll be the first to tell you, because they’re pretty self-effacing, that their biggest mistake was allowing the image to get out of hand the way it did. I think if they have any regret, that’s probably it. “Fuck, why did we let that happen?”
BOBBY ROCK The first time that we were all out in public was when we did an in-store at the Sherman Oaks Mall. The record’s out, it’s going through the roof. That was the first time that I saw, up close and personal, what this shit was like. I mean, girls, like, tears rolling down their faces and just hyperventilating. I think there was three thousand kids at this thing. And when they all start pushing, it’s like, “Wait a minute, now. Somebody’s about to get crushed.” The police closed it down.
MATTHEW NELSON We did in-store autograph things that would last … I think our record was thirteen hours. It got to a point where I couldn’t go anywhere with my brother for about a year. Because when you walk around a mall on a day off, you just look like, “Look at that loser that looks like one of the Nelsons.” What are you trying to do, right? But when you go with your brother, they call the cops because you started a riot.
LARRY MAZER The week of their twenty-third birthdays, which was September 20, 1990, “Love and Affection” was number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
MATTHEW NELSON We had the number one song in the country and nobody would take us out on tour. Like, literally nobody.
LARRY MAZER For whatever reason, none of the hair bands would take them. They thought there was a credibility issue because it was such a pop thing, with that video with the long coats and the long blond hair and the twins …
GUNNAR NELSON Larry came to us and said, “No one’s giving you a tour. I’ve exhausted all my possibilities, and now you’ve got two options. Either you stay home, or you do it yourself. You’re gonna have to spend all of your own money ’cause Geffen’s already told me that they’re not gonna give you any tour support. You’re gonna have to spend your own publishing advance so that you can get on the road and start building your live story. Because people see the ‘Love and Affection’ video and they don’t think it’s a real live band.” We decided we were gonna start with a fifty-two-date theater-headlining tour. We put the tickets out on sale and they didn’t sell. We were really bummed.
MATTHEW NELSON We tried to do a headlining theater tour when “Love and Affection” was happening and we put tickets out and it didn’t sell well. I said, “Look, my gut is that the first video didn’t really put across the point that we’re a great live band. So whatever we do for our next video, let’s have a live element in it so people know that if they come to see us, they’re going to see a rock show.” And so when we did the “After the Rain” video there was still a concept, but the meat and potatoes was us playing live. It was actually at the old L.A. zoo—lion cages all lit up and stuff. After the video came out, we sold out forty-five cities in five minutes. So it really is the theater of the mind. People just have to know what you’re selling them. It was a great tour and we had Enuff Z’Nuff as our opener. We had a lot of fun.
BOBBY ROCK That tour was insane. The only thing I can compare it to is those early films that you’d see of the Beatles where girls are just losing their minds. And what you don’t get from the footage that you get when you’re actually in the venue, like in front of it, is how loud it is. Like when something hits your eardrums so loud that you get that almost rattling in your eardrum or whatever it is. And it was like that every night. As soon as we were on the side of the stage the lights would go out and that shriek would happen. And it would not really let up. We had to upgrade the sound system on two different occasions through the course of that tour. Like, actually bring in more shit, more cabinets, more power and all that to get the music over the sound of the screaming.
JOEY CATHCART The configuration of the stage was such that the audience was right next to me, and I remember a girl grabbing my hair—and I had a lot of hair at that time—and she wouldn’t let go. I finally had to beat her off with my fist and I felt really bad because I don’t want to do that, but she was going to pull this chunk of hair out of my head. So, yeah, it was nuts. And there were all the nutty fans, you know, that think they’re married to Matthew and Gunnar. I was telling our road manager, “This may seem funny to you guys, but these boys are scared because they’re being told that they have made these girls pregnant and that they are aborting the babies because ‘our spirit child still lives with us, Matthew, and he loves you.’”
DONNIE VIE (singer, Enuff Z’nuff) We opened for Nelson on that tour, and it was all twelve- or thirteen-year-old little girls all dolled up like strippers and shit. We had a song called “In the Groove,” and one night I decided to jump down off the lift and walk into the audience. I just got torn to shreds. I mean, handfuls of my hair ripped out and my shirt and everything gone. Almost my pants—I was holding on to my pants. That’s when I used to wear one of those Sid Vicious necklaces with the lock and the dog-collar shit, and I almost got choked to death and hung. I was screaming on the mic, yelling for my bodyguard instead of singing the words. “Ahh! Help me!”
BOBBY ROCK You could, at any given time, just crack your hotel room door open six inches, peer out in the hallway, and just wait. One minute, two minutes, three minutes, whatever, and there would be different girls in twos or threes, just roaming up and down the halls, trying to see if they could figure out which rooms we were in. And at that point, it was just “Hey, what’re you guys doin’? Wanna come hang?” Boom.
LARRY MAZER It was tough being married, managing that band. As tough as it was managing Kiss during that period, with Nelson it was like Penthouse, you know? It was like a Penthouse magazine show every day of the week. And those guys, they took advantage of it, let me tell you.
JACK PONTI One of Gunnar’s greatest moments was when he was engaged, and he comes off the tour on Christmas Eve and his girlfriend picks him up. They’re driving to her parents’ house and she nonchalantly says to him, “Gunnar, did you ever cheat on me on tour?” And Gunnar goes, “Yep.” Just like that! Now there’s complete silence till they get to her parents’ house. She goes crazy, Gunnar runs upstairs, and he’s locked in the bedroom. He calls me up and goes, “Dude … help me!” I said, “What did you admit it for?” And he goes, “Well, she asked.”
GUNNAR NELSON I think we had already sold like five million records, and Larry had us go out with Cinderella, who he also managed. He told us, “Look, you know, no one takes you seriously, they don’t think you’re rock, it’s gonna be great for your career,” yada yada yada. What he didn’t tell us is that we were gonna have to basically change everything about ourselves just to be able to survive out there. You know, we’d have to go out there and we’d have to rock and we’d have to be tough and we’d have to be doing all this stuff. So we went from an audience full of chicks that came to see just us and loved us unconditionally to Cinderella’s audience, who were mostly dudes that wanted to fucking kill us.
MATTHEW NELSON The other band on the bill was Lynch Mob, and I remember George Lynch walking up to me on day one and me doing the whole, “Hey, I’m a huge fan of yours, George.” And he said, “Fuck you. I’m not getting tour support because you motherfuckers are on the tour.” And then he walked away. I thought, Well, that didn’t go well …
ROSS HALFIN Tom Keifer from Cinderella said to me, “I’ll give you $200 if you ask Nelson if they’re gay.” I was on the Nelson bus and I said, “Which one’s the queer one?” And they’re like, “What?” I said, “One of you’s a homosexual, right?” And they were like, “Keep this guy away from us!” Keifer was like crying laughing. He had a great sense of humor.
LARRY MAZER The Cinderella tour wasn’t that long because it was not doing great business. I booked another month’s worth of dates, they didn’t do great, they did okay. We did Radio City, and it was two-thirds full. It wasn’t the same. For whatever reason, the heat was off.
GUNNAR NELSON I needed a break. I wasted down to 119 pounds. I mean, we would run the equivalent of six miles a night onstage. I’d been doing it for over a year, my hair was bleached absolutely shock white from the lights above us.
MATTHEW NELSON We were almost six feet tall and I was 123 pounds. We were emaciated. My poor brother was having tons of problems, emotional problems, vocal problems. It turned out his voice doctor had put him on some pills to help with his throat, which happened to be uppers. I remember I literally had to pull him off of a ledge because he wanted to jump out of a hotel window when we were on tour. He was so freaked out. He said, “I can’t take it anymore.” He was just fried out.