Earthshaker came together in 1980 with Jeff Harper (vocals), Bobby Contreras (drums), Paul Contreras (no relation, guitar), Frank, and myself. We got the name from an album by Y&T. Ironically, Y&T were originally named Yesterday & Today, which was the name of a Beatles album! Frank and I built a rehearsal room in the garage at his grandfather’s. We were playing AC/DC, UFO, Scorpions, Van Halen, and Def Leppard; that’s how we learned to write songs. This guy who lived across the street from me, Rick Jackson, came on the scene and got us into clubs. He took a tape of one of our rehearsals to Steve Clausman, who was booking a club called Gopher’s Gulch. It was originally a country music place. They had a mechanical bull and everything. They were featuring rock on some nights, but eventually switched over and renamed the club the Rock Factory. Steve liked the tape and booked us to open for a band he managed called Ian Shelter for twenty-five bucks a night. We kicked their ass!
The local music scene was pretty hot then. You could play in a band and make a living. There were nine or ten clubs in Sacramento, and you could play that circuit. There was the Oasis Ballroom, which was to play a big role in my future. Then there was the Rock Factory, the El Dorado Saloon, C Street North, Shire Road Pub, Galactica 2000, Slick Willy’s, The Cattle Club, Club Can’t Tell, and Bittercreek Saloon. Today the scene is not so healthy, but several bands have come out of there. Obviously we were the biggest, but there’s also the Deftones, Cake, and Papa Roach.
Earthshaker kind of fizzled out, but Frank and I stayed together and started a band called City Kidd with Jeff, Brook Bright on guitar, and Bobby. I think Frank came up with the name. We wanted to change names because musically we were going in a different direction. We wanted to play clubs, so our covers became more commercial. Plus, we started writing originals. That’s when that fuckin’ new wave shit came out, Flock of Seagulls and Men at Work, so we started playing that shit. Frank and I just wanted to play clubs. Once we had a solid set that was entertaining people, Steve Clausman approached us again. He said, “If you can play this kind of shit, you can play in the clubs and play five nights a week at the Rock Factory.”
At the beginning, City Kidd’s original material was really bad pop songs with titles like “Teenage Dream,” “She’s My Only Love,” “Tell Me No Lies,” and “Be with You”—shit like that. Jeff Harper quit to join a band called Target, and these two girls from Georgetown, a foothill town fifty miles from Sacramento, said, “We know this local singer and he’s really good.” His name was Jeff Keith. Apparently, he had won a karaoke contest where he wore a pair of headphones and a Walkman and sang along to Sammy Hagar. He came down from the hills one night in 1984, wearing furry white boots. He had this Afro and had never been on stage with a real band. He was holding the microphone about four feet from his mouth. You could barely hear him, and there’s all this squealing from the monitors because the sound guy kept trying to turn up his microphone. I thought he sucked, but Frank was next to him and could hear his singing.
He said, “This guy’s got a great voice,” so we hired him.
Now it’s me, Frank, Jeff Keith, Brook, and Bobby. Jeff and Brook didn’t get along. Brook was a hard-headed guy, and when he drank, he was obnoxious. They got into a couple of fights. We were doing a showcase in San Francisco one time, and Clausman had booked one room with two beds for the band. Brook brought his girlfriend to the show and decided that they should have one of the beds. I told him, no way, the beds were for the band. Jeff, being the trooper that he is, had already sacked out on the floor in a sleeping bag. When he heard Brook claiming the whole bed, he jumped up and got in his face. Brook told Jeff to fuck off. Well, you say that to Jeff, and you’d best be ready to have a go. So the punches started flying. After they got tired of throwing haymakers, they cooled off and apologized. Brook said, “Yeah we’re cool, but if you ever come at me again I’ll knock you out.” Jeff went charging at Brook. Round two was on! So we got rid of Brook.
We knew about Tommy Skeoch. He played in a band around town called Nasty Habits, who were like the Rolling Stones. Tommy was older, and he looked like a rock star. Frank was very young; he was only fifteen at the time. He looked up to Tommy. Frank was innocent. I don’t think Frank had an ego then. He was just a kid who wanted to play music. Tommy looked so cool that Frank and I were always on him to come play with us.
Tommy didn’t want to leave Nasty Habits. I remember Frank and I went to his house one time to jam. I had bought this ’65 Chevy Bel Air four-door from this woman, Lilly Feather, who went to the same church that my mom went to. We drove that over to Tommy’s house in Fair Oaks, which is one of the more affluent Sacramento suburbs. We went up to this little room on the second floor and we jammed. Frank couldn’t keep his guitar in tune, and Tommy didn’t like that. He said, “Hey man, you should come back and jam again, but Frank should keep his guitar in tune.”
A little while later, Tommy came over to Frank’s house and we jammed again. That day was great. Bobby was playing drums, and Frank and I were just jamming music, no singer. It sounded great, but Skeoch still didn’t want to join us. He was in J. L. Richards at the time, another one of the bar bands playing the circuit. He was making money playing the clubs and we weren’t. I remember he brought out a big bag of weed, rolled up this big joint, and smoked it. Skeoch was rockin’ out, banging his head, and swinging his long hair all around.
Finally, he joined us. When Skeoch got in the band, all of a sudden we were more of a hard rock band. He just had the whole rock-god thing down pat.
I’m not that precious about my bass playing. I know that I have a style, but I’m not precious about it. I’m more precious about a song I wrote. “Paradise” was a good one. I think I’m good at producing. If you asked me, “What are you?” I’d say, “I’m a producer.” Whether it’s producing a band, producing a house, creating an environment, you name it. Management and production are my strengths. Songwriting I developed into. I still work on it, but I think I got a couple good ones in there—and a lot of shitty ones!
While we were pulling in big crowds at the clubs, Steve Clausman became our manager. I don’t remember signing a management deal, but there certainly was a legal thing, and we wound up paying him back for a lot of the expenses that he had. He was the guy that instilled in us that we had to write our own songs. We went to what we called Clausie Boot Camp. He would make us rehearse five days a week, eight hours a day. He was like a drill sergeant. We hated him. Looking back, though, we completely owe our work ethic to him.
Steve had this checklist of things that we needed to do. Brian, his youngest son, is like my brother. He’s my business partner, and like father, like son, they do research, research, research. If they read an article in the Wall Street Journal that says you have to follow these five steps to be successful, then they follow those steps. Someone along the line told Clausie, “Send them to vocal lessons, get them groomed, like Brian Epstein.” To Steve and Frank’s credit, they recognized Jeff’s natural ability right away. I didn’t like his voice. Shit, was I wrong about that!
Steve got involved with a music lawyer from San Francisco, Bob Gordon. Bob had worked with several Bay Area artists, including Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, the Doobie Brothers, Van Morrison, and Ronnie Montrose. He hooked Ronnie up with Steve to produce some demos, and we got some pretty decent attention from them. Working with Montrose was a big deal to us, especially where we were from in Northern California. Steve said, “Ronnie Montrose is going to produce some demos for you.” We were blown away about that.
Ronnie came in, and we worked on four songs. We had “Tell Me No Lies,” “Be With You,” “Modern Age Rock,” and “Born to Rock.” Those last two were Thunderwing songs that we were covering. Thunderwing was a band that my brother Mike played drums in. Ronnie stitched them together and made one song out of it. Ronnie was responsible for a lot that people don’t know. The first thing he said to us was, “You got two different styles.” We had this Loverboy side like “Teenage Dream,” then we had our rock side like “Tell Me No Lies.” He said, “You gotta pick a side. You’ve either gotta be like Loverboy or Def Leppard.” Pyromania was out at the time, and “Photograph” was huge, so we said we wanted to be like Def Leppard.
He had a song by this European band called Ph.D. It was a keyboard kind of song. Tony Hymas and Simon Phillips were in that band. They both went on to play for Jeff Beck, among others. Ronnie said, “I think this song will be great for you guys, you should do a version of it.” It was called “Little Suzi’s on the Up” but we just called it “Little Suzi.” It sounds completely different than the version we do now. Max Norman produced the version of “Little Suzi” that we play today. He came up with that treatment. But Ronnie brought the song to us. It sounds really light now but was kind of like our version of Loverboy, I suppose, at the time.
In the beginning I think he was amazed at Frank’s playing and, obviously, Jeff’s voice. I didn’t like the recording because Ronnie took the tone knob on my bass and turned it completely off, so there was no definition to the bass, just low-end rumble. Ronnie kind of blew me off. I didn’t like him much when we were doing that session. You couldn’t talk to him about anything. He was Ronnie Montrose and you weren’t. That’s OK. He was a brilliant guy, but tortured. Obviously he had demons; he killed himself. Toward the end of his life, he and I became really friendly after I saw him at a Def Leppard concert, around 2001. He was backstage. He was bald, he had cancer…he was just a different guy. He gave me a big hug. So I started speaking with him, and we’d talk on the phone. He told me that when we got signed he told Steve, “Those guys owe me a big flat-screen TV for taking them ‘Little Suzi.’”
Years later I called Frank and said, “Let’s buy Ronnie a flat-screen TV, because he’s told a few people we owe him one.” I went to a show he was playing in Modesto. I drove ninety miles with a sixty-five-inch flat screen TV in the back of my SUV.
He doesn’t know I’m coming or nothing, and I just roll up to the backstage with it, and he looks at me and says, “Wheat, what the fuck are you doing here?”
I said, “Ronnie, come here.” I open the back of the SUV, and out comes this plasma TV. I said, “I know it’s late, but here you go.” He started crying. Literally in tears. I’d never seen that side of him. When he found out I was good friends with Jimmy Page, he’d ask me for information, like what’s he like, and I thought, Ah, this is cool, man. I remember when I was a kid with Ronnie. It kind of came around full circle. I enjoyed the last couple of years that we were friends. RIP, Ronnie.
We recorded those songs with Ronnie in Sacramento at the only real pro place there was back then, Heavenly Recording Studios. I was blown away by the whole thing. I didn’t really get to hang out in the control room, as that’s where all the professionals were. It was really that kind of class thing. The manager and producer were in the control room; you were out in the recording room. It was kind of a trip.
Ronnie was the first one to comment negatively on Bobby’s drumming, and Duane Hitchings said the same thing after he got into the producing picture. I think Bobby was blaming me for some of that. But part of that fucked me as well. It was kind of a chicken-and-egg thing. Who’s fucking up, the drummer or the bass player? When Troy got in the band, he was really solid, and the next demo sounded like I got incredibly better, but I think Troy gave me something solid to lock on to. I wasn’t very good either, and certainly being a bass player you gotta be tight with the drum groove.
Ronnie did some wild shit, changed some sounds around, melodies, lyrics. He definitely produced it, for good or bad. I don’t think he was much of an engineer, to be quite honest. Tear the erector set down and rebuild it. That’s kind of what he did.
I had moved out of the house with my mom right after I graduated from high school. I moved into a friend’s on the same street, but that didn’t last long. Eventually I moved in with my girlfriend, Jolene, in her mom’s house. At first that was OK, but the more I started playing with the band and enjoying the night life and all that went with it, the more she started getting jealous and resentful. Then we took off for three months to Guam. An agency was sending other bands to do three-month stints there. We went there because Tommy Skeoch had just joined, and we wanted to get tight with him, earn a bunch of money, and have the experience of being away from home, and see if we could live together.
We played at a club called the Pescador, and the clientele was mostly US military because they have air bases on the island. Guam was a small island, about eighteen miles long. I went crazy. I wasn’t the type of guy who was into going to the beach. I wasn’t getting any pussy. Jeff met his first wife there, so that was good for him. I didn’t enjoy it much; I couldn’t wait to get off that fucking rock. I learned a lot from it, but it was like doing a jail sentence. Frank, Jeff, and I wrote “Cumin’ Atcha Live” while we were in Guam.
We were playing six sets a night, six nights a week. Sunday was our day off, but sometimes people would offer us a lot of money to play somewhere, at the opening of a store or something. So we wound up playing a lot. At the club we did sets of mostly covers and as many originals as we could sneak in. We got tight, but people kept saying that the drummer was weak and we needed to replace him.
This was the first time we had lived with each other. We had two apartments. Tommy, Jeff, and I lived in one apartment, and Frank and Bobby lived in another. We actually behaved pretty well. We were up till four or five in the morning every night, but we never got thrown out or hassled. Maybe we were cool because we were afraid of what Clausie would do to us if we got thrown out. Guamanians were very friendly people. They would have these fiestas which basically were barbecues. If you drove down the street and saw one, you stopped; you had to eat and be sociable.
We had this friend in Guam who was in the navy. I’ll call him Ted, to keep him from getting court-martialed. He was cool. He used to steal food from the submarine that he was on and bring us steaks and lobsters and shit. He was on kitchen duty on the sub, and he’d come over and cook these massive meals for us. We also met this guy, Keith. He wasn’t navy, just a Guamanian native, a Chamorro, and he’d cook fried chicken and stuff for us.
When we got back from Guam, things between Jolene and me went downhill pretty quickly. We had moved into a house with Jeff and his first wife, Elaine. Jolene was very possessive and jealous. I was just starting to experience the rock-and-roll life, and she wasn’t digging it. We began to fight all the time until I just said fuck it. I was going to move back in with my mom, but she laid down all these rules, including a curfew. You’re not going to do this; you’re not going to do that. I just looked at her and said, “You know what I’m not gonna do? I’m not gonna move back here.”
I called Buddy and told him what was going on. I asked him if I could rent a bedroom from him. I moved in with Buddy and stayed there until I bought my first house many years later. Even though I had that argument with my mom, we stayed close. I called her almost every day to make sure she was doing OK. David had gotten out of prison and moved back in there, and then my nephew Butch was living there too. Butch was Shari’s son. She had him when she was seventeen. Butch bounced around foster homes when he was a kid. He’s five years younger than me, so he’s really the younger brother that I never had. He’s had a tough life too. His eighteen-year-old son died in a car accident a few years ago.
During Earthshaker, and for a while in City Kidd, I was working at McDonald’s, and I could eat all the free food I wanted to, so I did. It was like that documentary, Super Size Me. I put on a bunch of weight working there. So I became the fat kid in the band. Then I broke up with Jolene, and now I wasn’t getting laid. Who wants to fuck the fat kid?
A subtler effect of being overweight is that it saps your energy and gives you a shitty attitude. I was into the Pete Way vibe on stage, but as I put on the weight, it looked kind of stupid to try and bust moves, and it was tiring. If you’re gonna be a rocker, you have to have good aerobics and stamina. So I started to become the stands-in-back-by-the-drums guy. It just creeps up on you, pound by pound, and you don’t notice the slide, until one day you’re short of breath, your clothes don’t fit, and you feel like shit.
There were a lot of jokes and snide remarks about my weight going around the band and audiences. That brought out the obnoxious side of my personality. It came from my insecurity, and I handled the shit by throwing it right back. Whether you deserved it or not sometimes didn’t matter. Because the girls didn’t want me, I was particularly mean to them. I’d cut them up for any little thing I could think of, their clothes, hair, voice, whatever. I could be a real prick. That was my defense mechanism. It didn’t help that I had a sharp tongue and I’m quick-witted. I could shred you up pretty good if you got me going.
It came out in my relationship with the band too. In Guam I would try and assert myself as the guy in charge. Clausman wanted me to do that because he knew I had the personality for it. He wrote me a letter saying how I was the sensible one in the band, and it was up to me to keep everyone out of trouble. He saw that I had leadership capabilities, although I was too young and dumb to see that. I was supposed to keep guys from drinking too much, or partying, or smoking pot. He wanted the club owner to be happy, so I had to keep the sets running on schedule. I’d snap my fingers at the band to get them onstage if we were late, or even if we weren’t. I was irritable for any or no reason. Jeff came to me afterwards to try and get me to mellow out. The band actually had a meeting to talk about kicking me out. It was kind of an intervention, and it scared me. It was my dream to play music for a living, not get kicked out of my own band, so I just backed off the authority trip.
My weight was an issue with the band. It was talked about when I wasn’t around. Tommy, and later Troy, would say that the band should get a bass player with a better image. I don’t think Jeff thought like that. He never has gone for any image shit. Frank always stood by me. He knew I played an important role in the band and felt that I just needed to chill out.
While we were in Guam, Steve Clausman took the tapes from the session with Ronnie and went shopping. He never stopped hustling until we got signed to Geffen. When we came back from Guam, we did showcases in LA at Madame Wong’s, the Troubadour, the Country Club, and lots of other places. It was at one of those shows where Duane Hitchings came to see us. He was a songwriter/producer, and he got in with us and completely took us the other way from Ronnie’s approach. He had a Grammy, played with Cactus, worked with Kim Carnes, and had co-written “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” with Rod Stewart.
We were going left, and all of a sudden we made a turn right, but it was good because he taught us how to write songs in more of a commercial arrangement, with melodies too. Real strong, catchy vocal melodies. Basically saying, “Look, you got three minutes on the radio and you can only do so much with that.” Now there was a whole second set of demos, with two of the songs kind of rock and two of them kind of pop-rock. While we were doing those demos with Hitchings, Tom Zutaut from Geffen got involved. Zutaut said, “You gotta stay rockin’,” and boom, Duane was out!
Before he went away, Duane had told us, “Your drummer’s got to go, he’s holding you back.”
We told Bobby, “Hit the drums harder!” He did, and he’d get blisters. The poor guy was missing one and a half fingers that he’d lost in a table-saw accident. It was inevitable. I think, down in his heart, he knew it wasn’t working.
Duane knew Herbie Herbert, who managed Journey and the Eric Martin Band. Troy Luccketta played drums with the Eric Martin Band, and they had just broken up, so Duane got Troy to come up to Sac and play with us at the Oasis Ballroom in April of 1984. I used to go see the Eric Martin Band, so I’d seen Troy play. Also, Troy’s wife was a friend of my sister’s. In one of those thousand-to-one coincidences, my sister lived in the Bay Area, and Troy’s wife, Linda, was a stylist who cut her hair. When Troy started playing with us, it was definitely like “Whoa!” Everything went up ten notches.
I remember Troy coming up to Sacramento that day. We were doing a weekend gig or something with Bobby. Everything was hush-hush. Troy came in and set up, and we ran through three or four songs with him. It was pretty obvious that he was what a drummer should sound like in this band: really powerful. So Steve told Bobby he was out and Troy joined. Bobby was bummed out, no two ways about it, but we had to move on. Thankfully, we are still friends with Bobby.
We started playing at the Oasis two nights a month and increased our draw. We were getting six hundred people. When Jeff and I needed extra cash, the owner of the Oasis, Dave Dittman, let us do work stocking the bar. Dave was a great supporter of the band. We were starting to transition from just being a bar band at this time. We had gone from doing four or five nights a week to doing two nights at the Oasis, ninety-minute sets. It was pretty much all originals with maybe a couple of covers. Plus, we were opening for a lot of the national acts that played the Oasis: Dokken, Pat Travers, whoever. It was a great showcase room to play in front of those crowds. It was our Cavern. (That’s a Beatles reference for all you kids.) The clubs we played were all eighteen and over to get in. Frank was too young to be in there, as he was still sixteen or seventeen. He’d have to sit in the back room between sets and come and go through the backstage door. That went on for about a year.
We wrote a lot of our first album during that period. In January 1985, Teresa Ensenat, an assistant A&R person at Geffen Records, had come out to see us open up for Montrose at the Crest Theatre because she liked the demo tapes we had done with Ronnie. We had a good set that night. We had some choreography going. Steve got us into better stage clothes, and with Troy in the band, we had gotten tighter for sure.
Teresa told us about her boss, Tom Zutaut, and then they scheduled time for us to go down and record at the Record Plant in LA with Duane. This was our second session with him. We did four songs—“I Know What I Need,” “On the Run,” “Curious Eyes,” and “Headed for Disaster”—and Tom came to the sessions. At that time, he was leaving Elektra, where he’d signed Mötley Crüe and Dokken, to go to Geffen Records. We thought he was just jacking us off. He said, “You’re not ready, you still have to write a lot of songs.”
Tom didn’t like Duane because he wimped the band out a bit, and Tom wanted us to be a rock band. It was actually the song “EZ Come EZ Go” that did Duane in. We had a version, the version we do now, and Duane changed it. He put in a “Cum On Feel the Noize” soccer-style chorus. Zutaut went mental and said, “That’s it, he’s going to ruin you, he’s gotta go.”
So Duane kind of fizzled out, which left the five of us making demos. Tom came over and started buying records by all these organic blues-based bands like Humble Pie, Bad Company, and UFO. He said, “Listen to this stuff, this is what you need to be doing.” We’re just coming off playing songs from Pyromania and Blackout, and Tom’s saying, “You need to do a rootsy thing.” He knew songs. On that first record he was very involved. He developed us for over a year and a half, from the time we signed in 1985 until our record came out at the end of 1986.
Everyone in our hometown said that we were full of shit, and we didn’t have a record deal. But all through that time we were working with Tom and Teresa. Teresa was like Tom’s mouthpiece. Tom would tell Teresa what we should be doing, and she would deliver the message. She got the demos first, and looking at it thirty years later, she saw us first, but Tom was the one who pulled all the strings.
Before we signed with Geffen, we had to fire Steve Clausman because of his unusual business practices. Steve was perfect for us when he started managing City Kidd. He taught us how to be hard workers and made us disciplined. He got us a place to practice and gigs to play. He brought in Ronnie and Duane to produce demos. He did a lot for us, but he just didn’t know the music business. It’s a cutthroat business. Record companies don’t like to fuck around with beginners. They have to with the bands because they’re the product. But when it comes to management and agents, not so much. Of course, when you do something like fire your manager, all the lawyers come out of the walls, and everything gets a little messy. Steve had expenses that we had to pay back, and his numbers didn’t match our numbers. So we had all these lawsuits before we even signed anything. And we had to settle them before we could sign.
Now that we were getting signed, everyone was coming after us for money. Steve was cool; he just wanted to get paid and get his investment back. We had this lawyer, Mark Fleisher, that we hired to deal with Steve. And when we got Peter Paterno as a lawyer later on, Fleisher wanted part of our record deal because he figured we had gotten it on his watch. Steve came in to testify for us against Fleisher. It was kind of a trip. We never really fell out. When we fired him, before we even signed, we sat for a year and a half writing songs while this whole thing was going on. We had a few conference meetings in San Francisco. The first one he showed up in a suit and tie. We were all laughing at him, and he got mad. We’re like “What the fuck’s with you, dude, the suit and tie?” He got all bent out of shape. But the night we signed our contract, he rented a limo and drove us to our gig at the Oasis, because it was a feather in his cap. He wanted us to be successful, he just didn’t know how to do it. But he can still say, “I developed them, I got them to that point.” He did it.