BRAD TOLINSKI Grunge didn’t kill all of the hair metal bands. Some of them did it to themselves.
VITO BRATTA It always cracks me up when people say that Nirvana killed us. As a matter of fact, I’m going to look it up, ’cause I want to give you the right dates here. Okay: “Nevermind is the second studio album by American rock band Nirvana, released on September twenty-fourth, 1991.” And White Lion broke up on September third.
JAMES LOMENZO It was becoming apparent that White Lion needed to be bigger and wiser and more pop-oriented for our next record. Richie Zito had produced those Heart and Cheap Trick records at the time and given them a second life. Especially after Big Game, we needed something to put us in that pantheon. It was time to start moving, and that was where Richie Zito came in.
VITO BRATTA I’m like, “This is gonna be a huge thing for us.” And then it was actually our worst record.
MIKE TRAMP Somehow the day “Broken Heart” got released as a single, half of Atlantic’s promotion department went on vacation. The song died, and the video died. Then we come into New York and we play a sold-out show at the new Ritz, but nobody from the record company showed up. Actually, I think Jason Flom was there, but he was hanging out more like just doing these stupid Italian jokes with Vito. “Yeah, wassup?” The next day while we were still in New York I went up to Atlantic Records and asked for Doug Morris. The secretary didn’t know who I was so she said, “I don’t think he’s available.” And I said, “You tell him Sebastian Bach is here.” Doug Morris came out and I turned around and walked out.
JAMES LOMENZO We finished the Mane Attraction tour in Europe and we were going to continue in the States. I essentially told the guys, “You know, we’ve got to make this more equitable. And I think we should do that with our drummer as well. If that can be accomplished, then I have an incentive to keep going.” And a decision was made, and basically it was like, “Well, we’ll take care of one of you, but not the other.” I decided I’d had enough of doing it.
MIKE TRAMP They want to renegotiate and Vito just says no.
GREG D’ANGELO It always comes down to money.
VITO BRATTA The mistake that we made is that we should have went on a hiatus instead of just saying, “Okay, we’re broken up and that’s it. I never want to see you again.”
MIKE TRAMP Two nights later we were playing at an amusement park up in Boston or Rhode Island, and the power cut off and Vito and I are standing behind the stage. And somehow I just reached out and said to Vito, “Vito, it’s the final show. I’m calling it off.” Vito just said, “Okay.” And we did not speak about this for almost twenty years.
ERIK TURNER I think on the first two Warrant records we got a lot of love from the fans, but Jani didn’t get a lot of love or respect from his peers. And so when it came time to do Dog Eat Dog in 1992, he wanted to write a record that his peers would find undeniable. “Hey, I’m a songwriter. I can write great songs that aren’t all about chicks and stuff like that.” He started listening to bands like Mother Love Bone around that time as well. So maybe he saw something coming that the rest of us didn’t.
JOEY ALLEN There were a bunch of songs that he had written for the third record which were poppier. One of them was called “Pop Music.” That could have been another “Cherry Pie” for certain because it was that type of song, but we sabotaged it in the studio because the rest of the music was so dark and different for Warrant. In hindsight maybe we should have kept with the formula we had and done Cherry Pie 2. Who knows.
MICHAEL WAGENER Dog Eat Dog was a great record and it didn’t get what it deserved because it got pushed aside. We just made the record they always wanted to make, because they were forced a little bit to make more poppy records than they would have.
JOEY ALLEN For Dog Eat Dog we got offered tours from a lot of different bands and I know Kiss was one of them, but we opted to go out on our own. The tour went from, like, four semis and arenas down to two semis and theaters pretty rapidly. And by the time we rolled around to the Carolinas, Jani’s drinking had gotten pretty heavy. And at the time Vince Neil had just left Mötley and gotten a big advance from Warner Bros. to do a solo record. His wife back then, Sharise, and Bobbie Brown were hanging out quite a bit. Jani said he got sick and said he had to go to a doctor and have his voice looked at, but instead of going back to L.A. to look at his voice he went down to Baton Rouge to hang out with his wife and party. Then we all rode the bus from North Carolina down to Dallas and got on a plane to go home, thinking that our boy was at home being seen by a doctor.
Well, the next day we went in, met with our manager, and he told us that Jani wanted to leave the band and do a solo run. Some of us were starting families, and we had a huge merchandising contract that we had all gotten big advances from that we needed to play thirty-five more shows to fulfill, and the company turned around and sued us. Then Columbia dropped us. They had record number four coming up and they had a huge advance they were gonna have to pay us millions of dollars for. We could’ve gone in, made it for about half, and put the rest of the money in our pockets. But Jani bailed, and then he turned around and called Columbia and said, “Hey, I wanna do a solo record.” But he had pissed them off so bad that they said, “We’re not interested.”
JERRY DIXON I think I was twenty-five?
LARRY MAZER Heartbreak Station limped to a million sales and then I said, “Well, look, let’s put out ‘The More Things Change’ and recapture the pure Cinderella.” But at that point Nirvana was smoking and it was like … What could you do? Then to put us into complete blackness, Tom calls me and goes, “I can’t sing.”
TOM KEIFER The voice problem started overnight. And unbeknownst to me at the time, it had nothing to do with singing or the touring schedule. I never really studied voice but I was using it properly. They say it’s important if you’re gonna scream that you scream properly. I had figured that out, because we were playing night after night. And ultimately what it ended up being was a neurological problem: I had a partial paralysis of my left vocal cord, which can be caused by flu or common cold viruses lodging themselves in the nerve that controls that vocal cord, and it just degenerates. It can also be caused by general anesthesia if you have surgery. I was told I would never sing again.
LARRY MAZER It took Tom three years to get his voice back, and then we made Still Climbing, which has some really good Cinderella songs but isn’t the album that the others were as far as beginning to end. But at that point, it was obvious that the train had left the station, so to speak.
JEFF LABAR I really like that record and I think it’s our best-sounding one. It was sort of wasted at the time that we put it out.
ERIC BRITTINGHAM The Still Climbing tour, which was in 1995, was a disaster. We were playing to, like, nobody. It was the height of the grunge era. When we played Seattle, the radio station was so anti-’80s that it would not even sell advertising to us for our show. It was crazy. I think that we played to, like, fifty people. We had some good shows, but they were few and far between, so when it was over, the label dropped us and we said, “Fuck it,” and hung it up.
ROB AFFUSO When Subhuman Race came out in 1995 Skid Row started touring and we didn’t have the support. We had been the darlings of Atlantic Records, we were the priority band for years and years, and all of a sudden we weren’t. Hootie and the Blowfish were. If we weren’t fighting amongst ourselves, I think there may have been a much better chance to survive that and keep moving on.
SCOTTI HILL At that point there was just a lot of bad energy between Baz and the rest of us.
RACHEL BOLAN The hill got too big to climb. And it was the musical climate that really was the final nail. We weren’t having fun with each other anymore, we were doing shitty tours, people just weren’t accepting us.
SCOTTI HILL We showed up that first day of the Subhuman Race tour and we had to cut our budget. We went from a really nice bus to a really shit bus. I remember showing up to the hotel and there are homeless people in the lobby. I was like, “Whoa, this is different…” A few steps backwards. And those shows were really, really poorly attended. The shows in the States, there was nobody there.
SEBASTIAN BACH I can just tell you that we tried to play bigger venues at the start of that tour and we didn’t sell them out, so we moved to smaller venues but we sold those out. We sold out, what the fuck is the place in Hollywood? The Palladium. It was packed. It was fucking outstanding. So we did very well at mid-level places all over the world. But to be honest with you, by the time the Subhuman Race tour was over I was exhausted.
SCOTTI HILL Everybody’s not getting along at this point. Everybody’s got their ideas of what they wanna do. And then all of a sudden there’s no audience for it anymore and you’re fucking miserable. Why go on?
RACHEL BOLAN And then that phone call happened and Snake was like, “I’m done with this shit.”
DAVE “SNAKE” SABO It was Christmas and I had a family gathering at my house. The phone rings and I let the machine pick it up. And there was just this rant from Sebastian that was so expletive-filled and demeaning. It was a man who sounded like he was losing his mind. I could see the look in my family’s eyes, like, What was that? You know? “Don’t worry about it! It’s all good!” I got up and I called Doc, I called Rachel. And I said, “I’m not playing in a band with that guy again.”
SCOTTI HILL This was over some sort of offer to tour with Kiss [which Bach wanted to do but the band ultimately declined]. So when Baz called Snake’s house that day and left a message on his answering machine, his family’s sitting at the table and he’s got this guy just fucking cursing up and down, calling him every name in the book. That ridiculous verbal abuse was just the last straw for Snake.
RACHEL BOLAN It wasn’t a Kiss tour. It was a Kiss show. But there was really no point in doing it, you know? Me personally, Kiss was one of my all-time favorite bands, and I could have driven there and driven home that night. But I just didn’t care. But to this day I don’t regret that decision at all. I always said, “If I’m not having fun I’m not gonna fucking do it.” If it becomes a job that I wanna quit? I’m gonna fucking quit.
ROB AFFUSO Basically Snake got us all together, said, “Well, Rachel and I were talking and we just feel we really don’t want to go on with Sebastian and we think it’s time that we kick him out of the band. Let’s take a vote.” I mean it’s kinda silly taking a vote with four people, but I was the only one that didn’t want him out of the band. Even though he and I were the ones that fought the most.
SCOTTI HILL I think it was three years maybe that I sat at home and didn’t do anything. I played with guitars, I bought a bit of recording equipment. But aside from that, nothing. You’re just kind of shell-shocked from the whole experience. Rising and falling. And when we fell, man, we fell fast and hard. As most bands did in those days.
SEBASTIAN BACH I kind of turned the phone off and enjoyed time with my family at my big, gigantic house. I was okay. I just didn’t really pay attention. I’ve always been good at compartmentalization.
SCOTTI HILL We got back together [in 1999] with [new singer] Johnny Solinger … and did a Kiss tour.
RACHEL BOLAN Pretty ironic. But it was awesome!
STEPHEN PEARCY Everything was way copacetic with Ratt until, like, ’87. Then everything got a little weird. And I can’t blame it on our addictions. We were led around, we had to do an eight-month, nine-month tour, two hundred and forty dates a year, and then have, what, a couple weeks off and go in and start writing a new record. And when we got in the studio, Beau Hill was just cracking that whip, man. Crack crack crack. Then it was back out on the road. And it got to be longer and longer. Then we started getting introduced to other drugs and situations and things, to just kind of deal with the stress and shit. Everybody was at fault, depending on what chemical they were into.
WARREN DeMARTINI I think in our case it was just the direction of the business—is the glass half-empty or half-full kind of stuff. I really think it was stuff like that because creatively, you know, I think we were doing good work. It was the other twenty-three hours where we couldn’t really seem to manage.
STEPHEN PEARCY It was pretty much just beating ourselves up and nobody really making sure we had rest. There was no rest for the wicked, man. We’d be a mess when we got back from tour.
MARSHALL BERLE When Robbin [Crosby] got sick and things sort of went sideways, that was the end of that. It ended. It was a period of time and it’s not there anymore. I’ve seen it before.
NEIL ZLOZOWER I knew Robbin liked doing junk, but he always seemed to be in control. It wasn’t like he was always dozing off or anything like that.
WARREN DeMARTINI The whole Detonator recording process in 1990 and then the video process was when it was clear that this was not something Robbin could handle anymore. And with Robbin, and I think with that kind of thing in general, like, people get pretty good at hiding it for a long time, you know, and then they have a harder time continuing to hide it.
BEAU HILL If somebody is a junkie from the first day you meet them, then that sort of establishes the baseline. My understanding is that Robbin was using when I met him.
WARREN DeMARTINI So by the time we were recording Detonator and doing the videos it was at that point where, you know, like, he’s not supposed to be doing this, but he wasn’t able to hide that he was doing it. And that’s when I realized, Wow, this is something that has taken over. It was something that I was lucky enough not to get involved in.
BEAU HILL I completely lost touch with Robbin for years. Then I got a call from one of our assistant engineers at Atlantic and he said, “Do you know what’s happened to Robbin?” And I said no. He said, “He’s in the hospital and here’s his number.” I called him and he was at a convalescent home.
So I went over there to see him. It was quite bizarre. He had nothing. He was morbidly obese. I’m going to say, without exaggerating, he was four hundred–plus pounds. He was so big that he could not get out of bed to go to the bathroom. If you just sort of cut out a little circle around his nose and his eyes and his mouth, that was the only thing that looked like him. The rest just was Jabba the Hutt. It was bizarre.
That was not a good day for me because I remember thinking when I walked out of the hospital, because Robbin was talking about, “Yeah, I’ve got my guitars here and I’m working on a solo album and all this,” and I was just, You’re not ever walking out of here, ever. About six or seven days after I saw him, I got the call that he had passed. [Crosby died on June 6, 2002, after a long battle with AIDS and drug addiction. He was forty-two.]
JOEY ALLEN On our 2008 reunion tour with Jani it was a sober backstage. I mean, if you were on our guest list they would take your alcohol away from you. We had AA meetings backstage. We really tried to help him as much as we could. Even though no matter what we did he found a way around it. Addicts …
HEIDI MARGOT RICHMAN For all of his amazing, amazing, really strong personality traits, Jani had so many demons and a lot of self-sabotage in him.
JOEY ALLEN That was why we made the decision during the reunion tour to stop doing the reunion tour. He just wasn’t healthy. And the last thing we wanted to do was wake up one morning to go to soundcheck and knock on his door and the guy’s not answering.
EDDIE TRUNK We taped an episode of That Metal Show with Jani about a week before he died. He had been going through a lot. He was in and out with Warrant and not doing well, and they were having some rough shows with him trying to hold it together. But he came on the show, and he was wonderful. He didn’t seem impaired in any way. He was really grateful that I had him on, he was really grateful that we treated him with respect, and it wasn’t like, “Oh, here comes the ‘Cherry Pie’ dude,” and all that. When he passed away, I had a ton of people say to me, “Hey, did you notice anything? Was he off or in bad shape when you saw him?” And I said no. And it’s true, he seemed fine. The only thing I really remembered about him is that he had kind of given me a hug and he was very, very thin. He felt very frail.
BEAU HILL Jani called me shortly before he died … I hadn’t talked to the guy in probably eight years. I knew peripherally all the crazy shit that he was going through, and he’s trying to get on a game show on TV [Lane appeared on the VH1 series Celebrity Fit Club] or whatever silly stuff he was doing. He called me and it was one of those weird calls where it was like I hadn’t seen him since yesterday. It wasn’t awkward. He was as lucid as you could possibly imagine. He told me about his new girlfriend and that he was getting ready to get married. Very optimistic, just as warm and cordial as you could possibly imagine.
Then two days later my phone starts erupting and everybody that I hadn’t spoken to in months and months or years and years is calling me going, “Did you hear about Jani?”
JOEY ALLEN Warrant was on the road with Robert [current Warrant vocalist Robert Mason] in North Dakota and my phone rang and it was Jeff Blando, who plays in Slaughter now and with Vince Neil. And I answered it, like, “Hey, what’re you doin’?” You know, just laughing. And he goes, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry…” And I hadn’t … we hadn’t heard yet. It literally had probably happened within the hour. [On August 11, 2011, Lane, age forty-seven, was found dead in a Comfort Inn motel room near his home in Los Angeles; the cause of death was later determined to be acute alcohol poisoning.] We were all sitting there at a band dinner on a night off and it just sucked. It still sucks. It sucks. And who it really sucks for is his family. His kids, his two beautiful daughters, his brother and sisters. It just … it didn’t have to be that way.
RIKKI ROCKETT Poison was so not on the same page at that point in time. We were not communicating correctly.
BRET MICHAELS C.C. was getting fucked up and I was drinking. He’s high but I’m drunk. We were having rows; he slammed me, I slammed him. We kept having really stupid arguments—stuff like his guitar was too loud for me to hear myself sing … We just couldn’t get it straightened out. I called it our “substance egos.” We had just been on tour way too long. Everyone was paranoid and down.
RIKKI ROCKETT Then at the 1991 MTV Music Video Awards we went into the wrong song—the one we were gonna do for the commercial break as opposed to what we were supposed to play live. That’s what happened. Everybody starts blaming each other, and pretty soon it’s a fistfight. And that’s national TV. Our manager always used to tell us, he’s like, “Don’t do TV.” He goes, “You build something up for thirty years and blow it in five seconds.” And he was right, you know?
MICHAEL SWEET We started drinking right as Stryper started rehearsing for Against the Law. So this is about 1990. You know, one guy brought a six-pack into rehearsal and everybody went, “Oh, yeah, I’ll have a beer!” And the next day at rehearsal it’s a twelve-pack. It just kinda progressed and started spiraling out of control, so to speak. So by the time we were making Against the Law we were drinking in the studio—and I mean getting drunk, you know? Not just having a drink or two but by the end of the session we were all hammered. It wasn’t anything to be proud of, certainly. But it’s very easy to fall into that trap.
ROBERT SWEET I watched myself go from being incredibly successful and then a couple of years later to not having a band, right? It was hard on everybody, but, you know, that happens every day, unfortunately.
MICHAEL SWEET I left because of the hypocrisy. There was a lot of guilt on my side because of the fact that for a few years we had been going up onstage and telling people about God and then after the show going to the bar and getting drunk with them. I got sick of that. I just felt like, You know what? I don’t wanna do this anymore. I’m not saying that the other guys did want to do it, I’m just saying that I wanted to get my life in order. I had a son and a daughter being born in ’91, and I just wanted to change my life and not be a fake and a phony and a hypocrite. That was the priority to me. So that’s why I left.
FRANKIE BANALI With us, we had Kevin DuBrow, and I really fucking loved Kevin [DuBrow passed away from a cocaine overdose in 2007. He was fifty-two], but Kevin’s biggest fault was the fact that he was the most honest person I’ve ever known in my entire life. And what I mean by that is whatever he thought about something, he said it. The difference is that, you know, he used to say it in his apartment, and all of a sudden he was saying it to the world.
CARLOS CAVAZO Even the guys in Ratt told me one time they pulled into some town and some kid comes up to them, “Yeah, Quiet Riot was just here. Kevin DuBrow says ya’ll suck!”
FRANKIE BANALI I tried to explain to Kevin, but he wouldn’t listen. “If you’re a Quiet Riot fan, there’s a nine out of ten chance you’re going to be a fan of a number of other rock bands in the same genre. And if you start picking at those bands, then the fans are going to have to make a choice.”
CARLOS CAVAZO Kevin, we all know that he had a drug problem. And I’m not trying to place blame on him because we were all doing it. But I think he may have said a few wrong things because he had a cocaine hangover, an alcohol hangover. Whatever. But I think he said a few wrong things and then it started putting a crack in the band. I saw it all falling apart. I saw it a million miles away. I knew it was gonna happen.
DEE SNIDER We did different things. DuBrow had his mouth. He shot off his mouth a lot and turned his audience off. My actions turned the core audience off. I misread the room so badly. I thought releasing “Leader of the Pack” [as the first single from 1985’s Come Out and Play, the follow-up to Stay Hungry] was the slickest move I could fucking make. But I remember when [MTV VJ] Mark Goodman introduced it as “Twisted Sister’s latest cartoon video.” I was like, “What? Did you say ‘cartoon’?” I went, “Holy fuck…”
JAY JAY FRENCH The band crashed and burned in ’87. We crashed and burned well before hair metal crashed and burned at the foot of grunge.
DEE SNIDER I’m angry seeing that I’m not in what’s going on. It’s going on, I should be in the thick of things.
CARLOS CAVAZO We could’ve gone a lot further. You know, there’s no reason in the world we shouldn’t be up there with Bon Jovi and Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe right now. We were then. We were right up there with them. But it just started a downhill spiral. We were not prepared.
FRANKIE BANALI Even back then, I was very aware that maybe ten percent make it, and maybe one percent of that ten percent sustain a long career. So it never affected me in any way. Music changes, tastes change. Maybe if Kevin hadn’t said some of the things he said, things would have been different. But I can’t really blame any one thing or any one person for how it went down. I had no idea the band was even going to be as successful as we were.
JAY JAY FRENCH On the one hand, you’re praying for your success. On the other hand, you’re always like, How’s it gonna fail?