I was born November 5, 1962, at the county hospital in Sacramento, California. I was an illegitimate child, and my father was the milkman. He came around, dropped off a little milk and cream, and then flew the coop. Literally. You’ve heard the term “son of a milkman,” based on the old joke that way back when, when the husband was at work, the wife would fool around with the milkman and end up pregnant? Well, that’s me. I have lived that joke since day one.
There’s a lot of history in Sacramento. In 1848, when gold was discovered by James W. Marshall at Sutter’s Mill in nearby Coloma (about fifty miles away), lots of people were drawn to the area. This city was incorporated in 1850 and today is the oldest incorporated city in California. It became the state capital in 1879. Sacramento became the western end of the Pony Express and then later a terminus of the first transcontinental railroad. A lot of interesting people come from Sacramento, including the actors LeVar Burton, Timothy Busfield, and Sam Elliott. Country singer Lynn Anderson is from Sacramento along with Timothy B. Schmit of the Eagles, as well as a lot of great bands, including Papa Roach and of course, Tesla.
I grew up in South Sac, a lower-middle-class part of town. Sacramento has a whole lot of government workers. It’s grown a lot. It was kind of a medium-sized town when I was young, and now I guess you’d say it’s a small city. I lived there until 2018.
Even though I’m known as Brian Wheat, Wheat is not my real last name. My mom, Amelia, was married to Buddy Wheat, this crazy guy from Oklahoma. He was an alcoholic who used to beat the shit out of her. She had four kids with him: Buddy Jr., born in 1950, Shari, born in 1951, Mike, born in 1953, and David, born in 1954. She had my other brother, Timmy, with another guy. Timmy is three years older than me.
I was her second illegitimate child. My mom couldn’t deal with it and decided that she was going to put me up for adoption. My aunt Annie managed to talk her out of it, but I was on the auction block for about five days, and it bites on me to this day. After Timmy was born, my aunt Toni laid down the law, telling my mom she didn’t want her having any more children. When my mom got pregnant with me, she was terrified of what Toni would say. Her way out was to pick a fight with Toni. They wound up not speaking for seven years. Being illegitimate was hard on me. There weren’t a lot of kids that were in my situation, which made me very self-conscious. That’s where I think this scarring came from, just being different. Kids at school would look at you weirdly or make hurtful comments. Now I look at it as a badge of honor. I never used it as an excuse, and I persevered. I can even joke about it, but it did leave emotional scars.
Back in 1962, society frowned upon women having illegitimate children, so my mom gave me the last name of Wheat. My biological father was this guy by the name of Norm Farrand. He was the milkman and was around after my mom had Timmy. She was really anti-men at the time. He would come for the check for milk, and she would just hand it over and slam the door in his face. Evidently, he finally got her to go out on a date, and they went out for about six months. After he got her pregnant with me he fucked off to Illinois.
I have a half-brother named Gary who is Norm’s son. He’s almost exactly a year younger than me, but I never talked to him growing up. When I was about twelve years old, my mom told me about Norm and took me to Illinois to see him. I thought my godfather, Cecil, was my dad, but my sister told me the truth when I was a little kid. She said, “He’s not your dad. Your dad is Norm, the milkman.” When Mom took me to see him around Christmas, we ran into Gary and his stepsister, or half-sister maybe, at the mall. They got in the car with me and my dad, and we gave them a lift to their house. That’s how we were introduced to each other.
Years later I would be in Gary’s wedding. By then he worked for the city of Chicago and lived outside of Waukegan. He worked for the water department, civil service, drove a snowplow. He was there forever. When Norm died I didn’t even go to the funeral. Gary told me about it. I said, “Hey, sorry to hear that.” I wasn’t very close to Norm. We had kind of a weird relationship. I met him when I was twelve and saw him again when I was fifteen. The last time I saw him was when Tesla was on tour with Def Leppard in 1988. He came to a gig at the Horizon in Chicago.
A few months later he called me drunk and asked for $50,000. I told him to fuck off. I was fucked up, too, so it was kind of amusing. He would call occasionally. He’d be drunk and talk shit, and I’d tell him to go fuck off or I’d come through the phone and whip his old ass. All through my twenties and thirties he’d call me when he was fucked up, all drunk, and would sing or ask me for money. I’d call him every now and again when I was married to my first wife, trying to be a good guy.
The sad thing about it is when I got old enough to not have any grudges toward him, he had dementia, so he didn’t know what was going on. I managed to go see him with Gary in 2000 while he was in the hospital. He knew it was me, and he knew it was Gary. That was kind of my making peace with him. I know Gary was stoked. But I didn’t attend his funeral. Like I tried to tell Gary, I didn’t know him. I didn’t have a relationship with him. It was all about my mom. He never paid a dime of child support.
When I was young I had a lot of animosity towards Norm. When I got older and went through all kinds of therapy, I kind of forgave him. Then again, I never knew him, so you can’t have any feelings for somebody you don’t really know. I don’t have any regrets. I don’t think, “I wish I knew my father, he was this great guy, I wish we had a relationship.” I’m fine with it. He didn’t have a big impact on me.
I didn’t feel compelled to jump on a plane and go back there. If I had, it would have been for Gary’s sake. Gary didn’t hold it against me, so I don’t regret it, not really. It’s the way I felt at the time. If he died again today I would probably go, because it’s been ten years since he died. It’s like, fuck it, you know, you die, and I didn’t know you. Really? What good does it do if I come to your funeral? Some people might have thought I was being a bit cold-blooded, sayin’ fuck you, my last fuck you, and maybe it was, I don’t know. I think I feel different about it now.
The cool thing is I got a brother out of it. Me and Gary are cool. We don’t see each other that much, but every time I’m in Chicago I see him. We talk all the time. We’re as close as me and my other brothers, with the exception of my older brother, Buddy. I don’t see Mike or David or Timmy that often. The guys that I see all the time are the guys in Tesla, and that’s how it’s been since I was eighteen. Frank Hannon and Jeff Keith are like brothers to me. I’ve accumulated way more hours with those two guys than I did with my actual family, the people that are my blood. Nothing against those guys, I’m really close to Buddy, we do a lot of shit together, and we’ve always been pretty tight. But I’m always busy. They don’t understand it, the rest of them. They can’t comprehend it. Buddy does. I don’t know if the others think that I’m just lying around counting money all the time. Unfortunately, a lot of people think that, and it’s not necessarily the truth. I wish it were, but it’s not. There’s usually money to be counted, but it’s mostly just for the bills I’ve got to pay. They have no concept of that. In all fairness, though, nor do a lot of people. Unless you’re living it, you can’t explain it.
Back in the ’60s, what I remember is having all these brothers and my sister, and there was always music in the house. The first real memories of music are from 1966 when I was four. I had a Close ’n Play toy record player. “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Supercalifragilistic,” all that little-kid stuff. I used to grab my brothers’ records and put them on. The first real record I played was Revolver, the Beatles classic, which is probably why I’m such a huge Beatles fan. The first song I can really remember listening to is “Eleanor Rigby.” Paul McCartney’s voice was soothing. It’s hard to describe what his voice did to me. There was something calming and mysterious about it, and it just made me feel good. That’s the voice I wanted to hear all the time: singing songs, reading me stories, whatever. Little did I know the effect that voice would have on my life later on. He became my musical hero early on in life.
I think the other reason I gravitated toward grabbing Revolver was the artwork, because the line drawing that Klaus Voormann did looked like a cartoon. I remember “Eleanor Rigby” because when I tried to play the first song on the album, “Taxman,” there was a scratch. It wouldn’t play, so I had to go to the second song, and that’s what started me on my quest. I was also hearing Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Moby Grape, and Blue Cheer—all that stuff—coming from my brothers’ rooms. I was well into music by the time I was six years old. If “Taxman” hadn’t been scratched, George Harrison might have been my idol!
Along with the music there was always the smell of marijuana coming out of the bedrooms, and I was exposed to a lot of sex. Lucky me, right? I’d walk into a bedroom and catch one of my brothers fucking someone. I probably looked through the window a few times. I could not believe what I was seeing. I was like “Wow! I wanna fuck!” There was just something so strange, compelling, and seductive about it. Believe it or not, I was only about seven or eight when I was trying to jack off. I don’t think it worked, though. I remember messing around with some girl when I was seven. I think it was in first grade. She was in first grade, anyway. My brother David busted us in the back yard in a little tent I had made on the side of the house. He told Mom at dinner, and I got my ass whipped. Lesson learned.
My brothers were heavy into stealing bicycles, stripping them in the garage, and selling them. There was a lot of crazy shit going on in my house when I was a kid, but for me it was kind of normal. I remember, out of the blue, Mike had a drum set in his room. I used to go in there and hit the tom-toms. I think if you asked Mike today how he got his first set of drums, I don’t think he’d say it was from mowing lawns. I think it was from selling stolen bicycle parts.
My oldest brother, Buddy, is twelve years older than me. In ’66 the whole Vietnam War protest thing was going on, and he was one of those hippies. He used to shoot dope, take all kinds of other drugs, and grew his hair long. My mom threw him out of the house for being a long-haired hippie. The funny thing about Buddy is that back in the day he was a hard-core left-wing liberal. Today he’s very conservative. He went completely to the other side, like a pendulum. I think as he got older and got more in control of his life (as head of the rice growers’ union) that he wound up being very conservative.
Shari is one year younger than Buddy. The first time I saw her, she was nineteen. I didn’t know I had a sister until then. She was away at reform school, as she was a bit of a problem child and used to run away a lot. Back then you could call up and say your kid was incorrigible, and they’d put them away in the juvenile detention center. There were no kids’ rights. If your mom wanted to whip your ass, you got your ass whipped. One day, when I was about six, this girl walks into the house, picks me up, and starts hugging me. That’s my first memory of Shari. Until then it was always my brothers.
As I said, it was Shari who told me that Norm was my father, not my godfather, Cecil Cayocca. He was my mother’s boyfriend from the time I was two until I was about thirteen and was in our lives until he died in 1993. I was baptized as a baby, and he stood in at the ceremony. When Shari said, “Cecil’s not your father. I’m sorry to have to tell you that, but it is the truth,” I didn’t believe her. I mean, I didn’t want to believe her.
But, when I was twelve, my mom sat me down and said, “This is what happened, and I want you to speak to Norm on the telephone.” It wasn’t long after that I went to Illinois to see him. We were staying at his apartment, and he said he was going out for a pack of cigarettes and didn’t come back for about five days. That’s the kind of character he was.
My mom raised me, and there was plenty of love in the family. My mom was a caring person and tough, too. She had to raise six children on her own, with no man of the house. That’s why my family can be kind of crazy. There were the typical issues between us brothers, the usual dysfunctions. David used to pick on me and Timmy, beat us up and threaten us with stupid kid shit. Every once in a while Mike, who was big for his age, would get pissed off at David and give him a good whomping.
Buddy, who was the oldest by several years, was constantly being told by Mom to keep us younger ones in line, which was pretty much a full-time job. He got tired of doing that, so to keep David and Mike in line, he gave them each five dollars a week to stay out of trouble. I think he wound up not giving them much because they wouldn’t behave. After a while they hit him up for ten dollars a week, and that was the end of the bribery-turned-extortion game.
My mom was on welfare until I was thirteen years old and then went to work for the State of California. She did that for about ten years and then started to develop health problems and, in the end, wound up on disability. But during my early childhood she didn’t work, she just tried to take care of the family. Buddy was a pretty good kid. He didn’t give my mom a lot of trouble. Timmy, Mike, and David were always in trouble with all kinds of shit. Three boys, no role model…they would try and run over my mom. She was a short woman, about five feet tall. She would stand on a chair when you came in at three in the morning, and she’d hit you over the head with a frying pan. Not me, I was always really good. Part of the reason I think I was always good was because I saw what my brothers and sister had done to her, and I didn’t want to be like that. I was close to my mom.
She was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and her parents were full-blooded Italians who came over from Italy in the early 1900s through Ellis Island. She had quite a large family. Her mother had had eight husbands. My mom was born in 1925, and she moved to Sacramento about ten years later with her mother and her little brother. My mom died in 2006, and we sold her house in 2010.
While she was alive, my mom would come over, and we’d sit up talking till the early hours of the morning. She’d tell me stories about working at McClellan Air Force Base during World War II putting together airplanes. She had several mental breakdowns. I know of three. She went away to the hospital when I was seven, and Cecil’s sister, Ethel, took care of me. Then I saw her have one when I was thirteen. I had to take care of her that time. Then, three years before she died, she had another one. I think she had some problems before I was born. I’ve heard strange rumblings from my brothers and sister that they had to go away and live with some family for about three or four months.
All the chaos around the house probably affected me more than I knew, at least until I got into therapy years later. I’ve always had this habit when I sit of rocking back and forth, like I’m in a rocking chair. I’d always thought it was just nervous energy, maybe a bit of attention-deficit stuff. But Buddy says that I did it when I was a toddler, like two or three years old. I’d rock myself to sleep that way. It seems likely that I was unconsciously building a little safe zone around myself, to tune out all the craziness. It was a coping mechanism. I still do it today. I rock when I drive. When I’m standing I sometimes sway from side to side. I’m still surrounded by craziness, just a different kind. It’s amazing the stuff that sticks with us our whole lives. All of the little habits and patterns seem so connected to our past.
My grandmother used to scare the shit out of me. Her name was Maria Fuma. Here we were in America in the ’70s where it was all peace, love, and marijuana, and she came from Italy on a boat in 1906. She didn’t really speak English, and Italians were not all that welcome then. She worked in a cannery and only spoke broken English. If I was bad when I was a kid, my mom would say, “If you don’t behave I’m going to send you to Grandma’s.”
And I’d say, “No, Mommy, I’ll be good, please don’t send me to Grandma’s” because when you went to her house, she wanted you in bed at 6:30. She was old school. I didn’t want any of that.
Today I think I would feel totally differently, you know, the whole heritage and culture thing. It would be way more interesting to me today, understanding my roots. She died when I was ten. By the time I actually got to know her, I wasn’t afraid of her. She was dying of cancer. I enjoyed seeing her when I was ten, and that’s when I started to understand her, but when I was six I was terrified of her. She never mistreated me, it’s just that she didn’t let me sit and watch cartoons. She had a black-and-white television she never turned on. The house smelled of Italian herbs and olive oil. My brother Buddy said that when she was younger she was an amazing cook, but by the time I got there, her idea of breakfast was a big pancake with Karo syrup. It was horrible!
Maria Fuma really got around. She had eight husbands. One of them was a Texan farmer named Guy Easton. He would leave the house after a fight, and she’d chase him down the street with a meat cleaver. The people that lived in my neighborhood, where we lived from the time I was ten until my mom died, used to tell stories about my grandmother chasing Guy down the street with a butcher knife, yelling “I cutoffa you balls you sonofabitch.” She had a fuckin’ temper, all right.
I went back to Italy with my sister, Shari, and my wife, Monique, in 2014 to look for kin. We went to Calabria, where my grandmother was from, and found her relatives in the same little village. I visited her brother’s son and his family. They didn’t speak English. We showed up on their doorstep ’cause my sister was relentless. She found out where they lived and blew their minds. We said, “Look, we’re your relatives.” They were cool. He was a doctor, and the family lived in this really nice house, like a villa, but it was straight up and down, more like a townhouse, four huge floors. His two younger sisters each had their own floors. Now all that’s left is his youngest sister. The doctor and the middle sister have died since then. They were as old as my aunts. Now I have no more living aunts or uncles on my mom’s side. My mom’s sister, Aunt Toni, just died, too. She was ninety-nine.
I go to Italy all the time now. Calabria is in the southern part, but I always go north, to Tuscany. That’s where I go hang out. It’s a little nicer, a little more scenic. But actually, I like the food in the South; it’s a little spicier there. I can’t drink the water in Italy though. I had a problem the first few times I went over, and then my doctor figured out it was the water, the ice cubes. So when I’m there I gotta drink bottled water or diet coke.
My mom put me in school when I was four and a half. Because of where my birthday fell, I had to do first grade twice. I went to Ethel I. Baker Elementary School. When we’d have those father-and-son events, everyone would have their father, and I’d have Buddy. That kind of broke my heart. We always lived in rental houses. We had to move quite a bit because my brothers were getting in trouble all the time, and the neighbors would get our landlord to kick us out. In the fifth grade we moved into my grandmother’s house. She had died and left her house to my Aunt Toni because my mom, with five kids and being on welfare a lot of the time, was considered irresponsible. Toni and my other five aunts and uncles made a deal with my mom that we could live there as long as my mom didn’t remarry and have any more kids!
I went to Peter Burnett Elementary School after we moved. Then I went to Will C. Wood Junior High School and Hiram Johnson High School. By the time I got to high school there were blacks, Mexican kids, and some Vietnamese kids that were coming over in the late ’70s and early ’80s. I didn’t go to an all-white school, I didn’t grow up in an all-white neighborhood, but I didn’t grow up in the ghetto either. I wasn’t in fear for my life, but I certainly wasn’t no silver-spoon kid. You worked in that neighborhood. You didn’t fuck around, or you would get your ass kicked.
In school I wasn’t very good at English. I’m a bit like Donald Trump. I’m not very well-spoken or well-written either! I was really good in math, and it turned out that that has been useful to me in my career. I was like a C student. Some years I had higher grade averages than others. I liked sports, I played baseball. I got pretty good, too, maybe even college material.
There were a few teachers in my life that I liked. I was really fond of my third grade teacher. I had the hots for her. She’s about seventy now. I found her on Facebook. In junior high I had a teacher in a wheelchair. He’d been in a car crash that left him a paraplegic. He could use his arms, but his hands were all fucked up. His name was Mr. Jeffers, and he taught history. I was his assistant in ninth grade. He was cool, and I bonded with him. In high school I had an English teacher, Mr. Lannon, who was just a cool dude. He was another teacher I bonded with, but that was it really.
I had the same friends all through school, these two dudes, Chris Johns and Mike Verras. They were my only two buddies in school. I had one other friend who was my boss at McDonald’s, Terry Muñoz. Those were the three friends I had. I didn’t meet Terry until I was fifteen. We remained friends through the early Tesla years, when I was trying to make it. From the time I met Frank Hannon, when I was eighteen, me and Terry were together a lot.
I tried to take guitar lessons, but it was too difficult, so I got out of it. From the time I was in eleventh grade I had the McDonald’s job. I took three classes in the morning, and the rest of the day I’d go to work. My senior year I cut two of those classes. I made them up at night school so I could graduate on time, which I did.
I had wanted to play music since I was twelve. I really got started because I broke my leg. How that happened was my mom had suffered a nervous breakdown. She was always searching for something, some kind of tranquility. Her doctor was this guy who looked more like a preacher. Oscar Newman was a Seventh-Day Adventist and a cool dude. He’d say, “You know, Amelia, you should try church. It works for me.” All of a sudden, I’m twelve years old, and she wants to start attending Seventh-Day Adventist Church. They go on Saturday. I wasn’t diggin’ that at all. It was fuckin’ weird. Other than that, they were pretty much normal; they always had these big cookouts with good food. They did practice vegetarianism and preached being a veggie, which was different for a kid at that time. They had a church outing where they were all going up to the snow in Soda Springs. My mom didn’t want me to go and was all pissed off.
I yelled at her, “You never let me do anything!” She let me go. We got up to the snow, and they pulled out these sleds and toboggans. I jumped on a toboggan, crashed into a big tree stump, and broke my leg.
It was my lower leg, the tibia and fibula. They both snapped and were twisted so that my foot was turned around backward. It was fucked up. I don’t know if I blacked out when I hit the stump, but when I tried to stand up, my leg was like an accordion. Then I started screaming. I was in shock. It looked like the end of my baseball career before it had even started. They said I’d never run again. But by the time I was thirteen, I was the best player in the league, and I was the fastest motherfucker in the league too!
We were on welfare, so I didn’t exactly get the best care. They set my leg wrong. Then they had to break it again. That hurt more than anything. They just cut the calf and put some wedges in, no anesthesia, nothing. My leg’s still got a big old knot on it. At the end of the day I was all right. Like I said, by the time I was thirteen, I was playing baseball again after missing the entire previous season. When I was fifteen I was one of the best players in the league. Then I was going to start playing baseball in high school, but at that point I said fuck it, I want to play bass guitar. I don’t want to play baseball anymore. That’s it, I’m going to be a musician. Buddy wasn’t happy about that. Everyone else thought I was nuts. I probably was! All I know is that I had a lot of drive.
Looking back on the way things kind of progressed in my early life, I don’t think they were merely a series of disconnected events. Seeing the way my brothers and Shari were, and feeling bad for my mom, set me on a more responsible path. Breaking my leg and changing my focus from sports to music set up the rest of my life. I don’t think it is a coincidence that my brother-in-arms, Frank Hannon, also came from a fatherless home, and he also broke his leg, was laid up in bed for months, and that’s how he got into music.
Having to constantly battle health issues is my burden to bear. I think everyone has that weight to carry. How you handle it determines whether your path will lead to your goals. Of course you can never see that kind of stuff when you are actually going through it. Only now, entering the backside of my life, can I see the full arc. I think there is a plan for everyone, but not everyone follows it. I think I did, even though I didn’t always know that I was. And I certainly strayed from time to time.
In 1975, when I was thirteen, I got colitis for about a year. It’s horrible. You shit blood and suffer really bad cramps. This was the first attack I had that was caused by my underlying autoimmune disease. But at the time, they didn’t know that. They just gave me some antibiotics to get me going, thinking it was appendicitis or the flu. It took about four months for them to diagnose it, and I probably went to the emergency room a dozen times until they figured it out. My doctor shot me up with antibiotics and put me on a bland diet to settle it down, and I lost a bunch of weight. I had a mild to moderate case, and it went into remission until 1999. Stress is a major trigger of the autoimmune flare-ups, and I sure had a lot of that waiting for me in the years to follow.
The stress also caused anxiety, which would get pretty serious. All of us in the house were stressed, and we had lifelong issues from that. David, Mike, and Timmy are all bipolar. Even Buddy has got some issues because there was so much put on him as a teenager. The first couple of times I smoked pot when I was a teenager, I had pretty serious panic attacks. I didn’t smoke pot for a long time after that. It turns out the anxiety was from all these underlying stress issues, and the pot just brought it out.
David and Mike both moved out during this time, and Timmy went to live with his father, so it was just me and my mom until I moved out when I turned eighteen. Timmy moving out was a big blow to my mom. Her goal in life was to keep her family together, in the old world tradition. But it just didn’t work out that way. There was too much animosity and disrespect.
Later on, when I was seeing some money from Tesla, the family started hitting me up for cash. Not my mom or Buddy, but the rest of them. And quite frankly, I never gave them very much, no matter what they said it was for. My mom, she got whatever she wanted. And I always helped out Buddy whenever he needed it, even though he never asked. That was the only thing that my mom got upset with me for. She didn’t understand why I wouldn’t give them money. But I just couldn’t do it. Not after what they put her through. And to be truthful, I did give them money. Thousands. Each. But they always wanted more. So I turned off the money spigot. I didn’t owe them shit. For my mom it was that Italian family thing. The broken leg put me in a cast from my hip to the bottom of my foot. I think my mom felt bad that I broke my leg, so she bought me an acoustic guitar. Cecil lived on a ranch, and everybody there played guitar. He taught me a country song, “Mosquito on Mah Peetah”:
There’s a mosquitah on mah peetah, ho ho ho
There’s a mosquitah on mah peetah, ho ho ho
There’s a dozen on mah cuzzin, you can hear those bastards buzzin’
There’s a mosquitah on mah peetah, ho ho ho
Those were the lyrics of the first song I ever learned on guitar, and the chords were a G and a C. I fucked around with that for a while, but I wanted to play the bass because of Paul McCartney. The guitar was too hard. Since then I’ve learned to play guitar basically to write songs. You don’t really write songs on a bass guitar, you write them either on a piano or guitar.
Tuning a guitar was a little frustrating, as there were six strings. McCartney was a bass player, so I wanted to be like Paul McCartney. That was it from day one, from the moment I heard “Eleanor Rigby.” I just remember those voices, that stacked harmony, and Paul’s voice mainly. From that time on, I was, “Oh, that’s that guy, Paul McCartney.” I was a McCartney fanatic, whether with the Beatles, Wings, or solo.
The first record I bought with my own money was Let it Be when I was eight. Up until that point I didn’t have any records. Paul was cool, with the beard, and the four faces of the Beatles on the cover. I didn’t know they had broken up. I knew whenever you turned on the radio you heard that voice.
I was lucky to be born in the ’60s. There was a real rich period of music between ’67 and ’75, probably the best period ever, in my opinion. After hearing Revolver, I discovered early Beatles stuff in my brothers’ record collections: “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Help,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” all those early records. I didn’t really discover the later Beatles records like Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour. When those Red and Blue greatest hits albums came out, I got the Blue album, their later songs. I thought, Oh wow, this is all different than those early songs. I had no idea there were later ones.
In those days I listened to the local station KROY, and KFRC, from San Francisco, on the AM dial. They both played top-forty hits. Then, when I got to be thirteen and fourteen, I started listening to Dave Whitaker on KSFM, and I started hearing bands like Aerosmith, UFO, Montrose, and all that stuff. That’s what I used to listen to as a teenager. As I started playing, I started listening to KZAP. DJ Bill Prescott on KZAP would end up being the first to ever play a Tesla song. I took the twelve-inch “Modern Day Cowboy” single to the station, and he played it. Right then and there we were buddies.
In the early ’60s, the Rolling Stones played at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, and Keith Richards got electrocuted and almost died. The Beach Boys played there as well, and later, Tower of Power. Back then it was the only real place for signed bands to play in Sacramento. My brother Mike took me to see my first show there in 1974. It was the Tubes. “White Punks on Dope” was their hit at the time. They were very theatrical. They had these girls singing background and dancing, and sometimes they were topless, just boobs bouncing around with little pasties on their nipples. That kind of made me want to be a rock star. I remember seeing UFO, Pat Travers, Randy Hansen, Head East, Scorpions, Judas Priest, and Rush, all at the Memorial Auditorium.
I loved UFO. I saw them every time they came to town. They were badass. I was just intrigued by Pete Way, the bass player. He played Gibson Thunderbirds and jumped around. He looked fuckin’ cool. That’s why I played Thunderbirds and still do. Pete Way was a big influence. He probably wasn’t that great of a player, but he sure looked cool, and that’s why I liked him.
I was way into English rock bands. I guess the first American thing I really heard and gravitated to was Van Halen in ’78. I never really got into the Aerosmith thing when I was a kid. I did much later and grew to appreciate them. Then there was Ted Nugent, the first Ted Nugent album. On the tune “Stranglehold” I think there are three notes for the bass in that song. I know five notes now, and I can play the fuck out of them!
When I was fourteen, I started cutting lawns. First it was the woman who lived across the street, then her husband’s mother’s lawn, then her son’s lawn. I used their lawnmowers so I didn’t have to pay for gas or fix it when it broke. I had a Schwinn ten-speed bicycle that I bought with the money I earned. When a friend of my brother’s was selling his bass guitar for forty dollars, I gave my brother the bike, and he gave me the forty dollars to buy the Mosrite. It was probably the best investment I ever made. Look it up. You can see the Mosrite on the internet. It’s kind of like a Fender with a funky neck. The guy in the Ventures played one. I remember it was a red starburst. I sanded it all down to the wood grain so it would look like Paul McCartney’s Rickenbacker.
The first amp I had I got at a place called Rader’s Music. It was like a PA column, a couple of speakers with volume and one tone control. Then I had a tiny Fender Champ amplifier, and I just started learning to play whatever I was hearing on records or the radio. The first thing I probably learned was Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.” I remember that riff coming out of my brother’s bedroom along with the smell of pot. That was the heaviest sound I’d ever heard.
I briefly played a stand-up bass when I was in elementary school when I was eight, but didn’t end up pursuing that. I think I wanted to try that because of Paul McCartney, but the thing was bigger than me. The teacher was an old alcoholic and didn’t really give a shit. I got bored and quit trying. Schools used to have really good music programs. They don’t anymore, and I feel sorry for the kids today.
I didn’t get into Led Zeppelin until I was fifteen. I knew this guy, Gary Burns, who played guitar. He turned me on to Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Ted Nugent, and Queen. But up until that point I was all about Wings. Beatles and Wings, that was it for me. I didn’t really discover heavier music until ’74, ’75. That’s when I started playing. I started learning that kind of stuff on the bass. We knew another kid, Richard Harvey, who played drums. The three of us would jam in Gary’s garage and try to play “Train Kept A-Rollin’.” We messed around in that garage for about a year.
That fizzled out, and I started hanging out with this guy named Joe Marietta, who was a really good guitar player. I was fifteen, and he was twenty. He taught me how to play specifics, showing me the bass lines of songs. He went, “This is how it goes, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom…” I was just playing by numbers, thinking, Oh, this goes here. I had no idea why until then.
When I saw McCartney on TV, he played with a pick. You never saw him play with his fingers. That’s why I play with a pick. I’m not very good at playing with my fingers. I actually suck at it. But I can pick the fuck out of it!
I started going out with girls when I was fifteen. I thought it was cool to have a girlfriend, so I began going steady right away. First there was Melinda, then Linda. That’s when I started getting into sex. I had gotten my job as the breakfast shift manager at the neighborhood McDonald’s, and Linda worked there too. She was a year older than me, and we’d park her car way down at the end of the block and fool around. After a while we’d get a cheap motel room and fuck our brains out. We’d tell our moms that we were spending the night at friends’ houses. Linda’s mom found my phone number in her room and called it. She and my mom figured out what was going on pretty quick, and we both got grounded for a while. But after that, we were right back at it.
That’s when my mom gave me “the talk” about getting someone pregnant and all that. It was good she did that because it did make an impression, and I never got anyone pregnant—that I wasn’t married to, anyway!
At sixteen, I started a band called Rage. It was me, Larry Test on vocals, Stacey Nick on drums, and Wendell Polk on guitar. I’d go around to Wendell’s house, and we’d sit around and jam. We played backyard keg parties. Kids’ parents would go away for the weekend, and we’d throw a party. We’d set up on the patio. There’d be a couple kegs of beer, and we’d jam. That’s how you built your following. Wendell is still around. I haven’t heard from him in years. I’d love to hear from him. I don’t know whatever happened to him. I looked him up on Facebook, but I don’t ever hear from him. I’d jam with him. He kind of got me into Black Sabbath and stuff like that. He was into that.
Frank Hannon lived in the same neighborhood I did, but we didn’t go to school together, as I had graduated by the time he was a freshman. There were a lot of musicians in South Sac, and Frank used to hang out with some who knew me. He was in a three-piece band that played high schools and keg parties. One night his singer got into a fight with my brother Timmy at a show. Timmy had loaned the band his microphone and wanted to play harmonica with the band, but the singer was being difficult and said no. So, Timmy laid into him and the next thing you know, the cops came, and the show got canceled. People were saying, “Man, that’s Brian Wheat’s brother.” That’s how Frank first heard about me.
Back then we rehearsed in the back of an ice factory. The guy who owned it said to us, “My girlfriend’s son is fourteen and plays guitar. He’d like to come and jam with you.”
We were like, “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” One day soon after, this ’47 Chevy Classic, a gangster-looking car, rolls up, and this skinny kid gets out of the passenger seat with his Fender Stratocaster and a Marshall amp. If you had a Marshall amp in those years, you were a bad motherfucker. And he was badass. He was better than the guys I was playing with. Suddenly, Wendell’s out, and Frank Hannon was in. Then, after a couple of more parties, Joe was out. He didn’t want Frank in the band. I think he felt threatened by him. So, now it’s me, Frank, Stacey, and Larry. Then Larry was out, and we got Jeff Harper in as singer. That all fizzled out, and Frank and I thought, Fuck you guys! and formed Earthshaker.