Tom Zutaut had made his bones at Elektra, so to speak. We were his first signing at Geffen Records, which was a brand new label. At that time he was just working with us. We were the first record he had. We actually had the first successful rock record on Geffen. Aerosmith’s Done with Mirrors came out before Mechanical Resonance, but it was a disappointment—I guess it was kind of done with mirrors. Our record came out, and it went platinum. Tom had gotten us to listen to the ’70s British bands like Bad Company, Humble Pie, and Led Zeppelin. Those influences had a lot to do with us developing our own sound. Right after Tom finished our first album, he signed Guns N’ Roses, and they went off the charts. We didn’t see a lot of Tom after Appetite for Destruction hit it big.
Tom brought Cliff Burnstein in to see us at the Oasis, saying, “You gotta see this band.” Cliff, who had signed Rush to PolyGram Records, really liked us. We loved Cliff because he had big crazy hair, a wild beard, and he looked like a homeless guy with this Tower Records bag he always carried to hold all his documents. That was a strange night because there was a historic flood in Northern California, and our equipment truck got stranded in Stockton. We had to use another band’s gear, but we didn’t miss a beat.
I remember Cliff talking with us for about an hour after the show. He was a real musical guy; he was good with “that song needs a better chorus” kind of stuff. Cliff and Tom pretty much did A&R for Tesla’s first two or three records. As things progressed over the years, Cliff did more A&R than Tom. In the beginning it was a lot of Tom with Cliff contributing, and by the second album kind of fifty-fifty, and Psychotic Supper was really Cliff’s. Tom was off in Guns N’ Roses heaven.
Tom said, “I can deliver you guys this manager,” and he did. Cliff saw us and started working with us. So we signed our first record contract in June 1985, and for the next year all Tom and Cliff had us do was write songs. They wouldn’t let us near a studio. Our team was Zutaut at Geffen as our A&R guy, and Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch as our managers.
We didn’t meet Peter Mensch until we were mixing Mechanical Resonance. Cliff said he had this partner in England who was a legend over there and had signed and managed AC/DC. He also discovered Def Leppard. I didn’t know who the fuck he was. We were in the last week or two of recording at Bearsville Studios when he came to Woodstock in upstate New York with Burnstein. I had this mental image of him being this old guy with a suit, and in walks this young dude wearing a T-shirt and jeans.
In the beginning, it seemed like Mensch didn’t like us too much. We were more Burnstein’s project. It wasn’t until Mensch saw us play live on tour that he kind of got us. Burnstein got us from day one. I personally got on with Peter and still do to this day. He and I connected on a human level. I think Cliff is a genius, but he was all business. Cliff wasn’t the kind of guy you could call and tell him your dog had died. He’d be, “Why are you calling me with this shit?” Whereas I used to stay at Peter’s house and go to baseball games with him. I still see him socially.
Getting back to making Mechanical Resonance, finding a producer was a chore, as almost everyone we contacted passed. We wanted Mutt Lange and Bruce Fairbairn, but they didn’t want to do it. We approached Rick Rubin, and he said we weren’t extreme enough. So, Tom brought in Chas Sandford, who wrote “Missing You” with John Waite, and Jim Faraci, who engineered Ratt’s Out of the Cellar and had worked with L.A. Guns. We went into Cherokee Studios and cut six tracks—“Too Late For Love,” “EZ Come EZ Go,” “Changes,” “Lil’ Suzi,” and “Better Off Without You”—but the demo came out like shit. Neither Chas nor Jim seemed to be in charge. They both had different ideas about how it should sound, and halfway through, Chas walked out. All the while, we’re still writing songs.
After that they brought in Max Norman, who had worked with Ozzy Osbourne, Megadeth, and Bad Company. Max came to Sacramento and hung out for a couple of days. We partied and fucked some chicks. We got on fine, but, ultimately, he passed. The next guy we approached was Peter Collins. He had just produced “Out in the Fields” with Thin Lizzy bassist Phil Lynott, and also Rush, which was amazing. I remember we went out for this huge meal right before we played a showcase, so when we hit the stage we were all full and didn’t play that well. I don’t think Peter was that impressed by us, and he passed as well. Six years later, while producing my first wife’s record in Louisiana, he said to me at dinner one night, “I should have done your record. I fucked up.”
At that point Teresa sends me a record by Phantom, Rocker & Slick, who were the two sidemen from The Stray Cats with Earl Slick, who played guitar with David Bowie. It was produced by these New York guys, Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero. Steve was a DJ, and Michael was an engineer who had worked on Sesame Street and a lot of remixes including “Harlem Shuffle” by The Rolling Stones. They came out to see us, and they were about ready to pass. The story from Tom Zutaut goes that he literally got down on his knees and begged them to do our record and they agreed.
We were still writing and doing demos and had about half of a record. Tom, to his credit, would come up and hear what we had done. He came up one time and was furious because we hadn’t written a song in three months. He threatened to drop us, and that scared the shit out of us. We went into this writing frenzy and wrote about twelve songs in two weeks, and half of those appeared on the album: “Modern Day Cowboy,” “Gettin’ Better,” “Before My Eyes,” “We’re No Good Together,” and “Cover Queen.” It started to fall into place, and we went into rehearsals for two weeks.
Thompson and Barbiero were interesting cats. We didn’t know how to take Steve. There were times in the past where I might have said that Steve wasn’t that vital to the success of Tesla, but today I would say that I was absolutely wrong. Steve did things that you couldn’t really see because he wasn’t at the console messing with shit, and he wouldn’t talk to you in musical terms. But in terms of dynamics, energy, and pumping you up, he was there. He was like, “I’m here for the vibe,” and we thought that was kind of silly, and we actually dumped on him in interviews a couple of times, which I feel thoroughly bad about. When you’re young, you don’t realize that some of the things you say about people can be hurtful.
Another thing that came up during this time was that Steve and Michael didn’t like Troy. Steve wanted to bring in Tony Thompson (Chic, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin post-John Bonham) to play drums on our record, and we were like, “No, we’re not having any of that.” I don’t even think Troy knows that to this day.
Troy and I have had a lot of conflict over the years. Troy was the last guy to join Tesla, and he was older than us. If you look at the pictures of the guys in the band, we all look like we’re in a rock band while Troy has got more of a conservative image. He had five kids. He joined the band with this chip on his shoulder. He’s actually said to people in interviews that the band wouldn’t have made it without him. Today we’re OK, and I think we’ve both grown up, but there were times that he could be vicious with his mouth. I make no bones about the fact that Frank Hannon taught me how to play, and that when I first started, I wasn’t a very good bass player. But the quality I had that Troy didn’t see was that I’m the one who drives the band. I’m the one who made all the business contacts. Of course, today I think I play the bass pretty well, but fuck, I’ve been playing thirty-five years! On the first album I was no virtuoso, but rock bass players don’t need to be virtuosos. The bass is there to support the music. When you have two guitar players who are both doing solos and a drummer who plays freely like Troy, someone must be solid and hold it down. I come from the school of Cliff Williams and Tom Peterson. Even though Paul McCartney’s my favorite bass player, and I’ve learned to play like Paul over the years, that melodic style, I’m still very meat-and-potatoes. Troy has said some things in interviews on the history of Tesla, like when he first saw Jeff and Frank and they mesmerized him and that I still needed a lot of work to improve, which I don’t think he realized wasn’t the coolest thing to say ’cause it was hurtful.
We had to write and demo songs to get ready to make the first record. Generally, one of us would have a musical idea. Mostly it was Frank who would work on a music piece and then Jeff would write lyrics to it. I didn’t really write too much. “Love Me” was the first complete song I wrote with Frank. I wrote part of “Cumin’ at You Live,” a couple of chords, little bits for “EZ Come EZ Go” and “Too Late for Love.” Jeff always wrote lyrics to whatever music we had at that time. It wasn’t until the second album when I started developing as a writer and wrote stuff like “Paradise.” Now you can give me an idea about a guy who rows a canoe through the Amazon, and I’ll write a song about it. That’s developed over the years, but it wasn’t like that in the beginning.
Frank would have a riff, then Tommy would play a riff, then they’d put together a piece of music, then we’d play it with the band. We’d record a demo on a little four-track recorder we had at that time, and then Jeff would write lyrics. That’s kind of how it always went until the last couple of years.
The only part of the process that was painful was that it took Jeff a while to write lyrics, and we were impatient. Once we wrote the music, we expected lyrics the next day. He thought about it a lot, and he had to do whatever process he had to do to write them. I much prefer playing live, to be honest with you. The songwriting process with Tesla sometimes could be difficult and tedious.
We were always jockeying for songwriting credits. It made us competitive, and it inspired me to write so I could get some of my songs in the mix. There was a healthy competition between Frank and Tommy. Jeff just writes what he feels. He doesn’t write in third person or in character, he writes about things that directly affect him.
Jeff’s lyrics were pretty positive. There’s no negativity. Jeff’s a pretty positive guy. He always looks at the brighter, hopeful side. The one thing we did change when we were in Woodstock was Barbiero changed the chorus to “Modern Day Cowboy,” and then Jeff kind of steered that. That wasn’t the chorus we had originally. But that was a year-and-a-half process.
We went to Bearsville in the summer of 1986 to start making Mechanical Resonance. Bearsville was an amazing studio in Woodstock, New York, where there were a bunch of hippies living. You’d see people who maybe went out for a pack of cigarettes during the concert in 1969 (which actually took place in nearby Bethel) and think it’s still going on. It was a great place to make a record. Four of us lived together while Troy lived at a different house. There was always this division between him and us. Troy was probably the biggest drug addict in the band until he got sober. Up until 1991 we would lose him for a couple of weeks at a time. When we made The Great Radio Controversy, after his drum tracks were done, we didn’t see him until it was time for the photo shoot. He would be off doing a lot of cocaine. I only drank back then. I didn’t do drugs until about 1993.
I think doing the record at Bearsville was Thompson and Barbiero’s idea, partly because they were from that part of the country, and partly because Zutaut wanted us to go to a residence studio where we could live while recording. Thompson and Barbiero said there’s this place in upstate New York that was a couple hours from their houses in New York, or New Jersey, wherever they were from. It was a legitimate studio. Cheap Trick, Foghat, and Todd Rundgren, among others, had recorded there. The Pretenders were there at the same time we were.
I think we were in rehearsal for two weeks, so we were there eight weeks total. It was like an old compound. It had a couple of houses and a cabin. Then there was this big place that looked like a barn that was the recording studio. We were there, and all we did was work on the album. We recorded in Studio A on a Neve desk that Bearsville got from The Who—a great console. It was an old desk from the ’70s. We always recorded on Neves. The only things we ever did on an SSL (Solid State Logic) board before we got signed were the Hitchings demos and at Cherokee.
They didn’t want us going into New York City, so what did we do the first weekend we had off? We rented a car and drove to Manhattan. We wanted to see Harlem. All five of us went, with Jeff driving. We had never been to New York. We were going through Manhattan, through Harlem, checking out the whole city. Jeff went up to the top of the World Trade Center. He also got ripped off by a cash machine for twenty dollars. Welcome to New York City. That was a great time. You only go the first time once!
Because Bearsville was a residence studio, there was a cook on the premises. She was a French woman named Martine. She would cook all this rich gourmet food. We said just give us the money, and we’ll cook ourselves. That’s what we did in Guam, so we knew how to use a stove. We were still into South Sacramento meat and potatoes. We hadn’t discovered Thai food, or Vietnamese food, or Indian food. When we hit the road that would all change.
Most of the first album was just re-recording the arrangements we already had from doing all the different demos. “Getting Better,” “Too Late for Love,” “We’re No Good Together,” “Rock Me to the Top”—they were all the same. We just re-recorded them. But “We’re No Good Together” and “Cover Queen,” the jams in those songs might have been Steve’s idea. Those were the kind of things that Steve did that I never even really thought about, like those jams. He didn’t tell us what to play; he just said, “You gotta do something different here. We need to inject some energy here!” Frank put some big energy into the talk-box solo at the end of “Cover Queen.”
We had a lot of fun making that album. In the early days there was a lot of support from the record company and the management; they were pretty hands-on. As we get deeper into the story, you will see how it waned after that. I suppose they were there when it counted, which was when we made that first record and turned the band into a brand. It certainly wouldn’t have happened without Peter, Cliff, Tom, Teresa, Michael, and Steve. But when we finished laying down tracks, we were told by Cliff and Peter that we couldn’t attend the mixes, which later on became a big resentment of ours. Their thinking was that we had never mixed a record, and we would get in the way and slow things down.
Mechanical Resonance was mixed at Media Sound in New York City, the same place we mixed Great Radio Controversy. When we finished tracking, we came home and started getting mixes from those guys. I didn’t like the way it sounded. The guitars weren’t loud enough. If you listen to that record, there’s too much drum reverb, and Jeff’s just buried in it. I don’t remember if there was an EMT plate there, or what they were using for reverb, but there was a lot of it. It’s certainly not as prevalent on Great Radio Controversy; it was toned down. It’s still too much for my taste.
I guess Cliff and Peter didn’t have a problem with it. They liked it, and it worked, so who am I to complain? All I can say is one day I’ll take those tapes and remix them, and if it wasn’t an issue with money or whatever, I’d love to do it with Thompson and Barbiero, and say, “Alright guys, let’s redo this.” We could do it at my studio for free. Just put it up, dump it into Pro Tools. But then you get into the whole thing that people want to get paid. I don’t think I’d get anyone to cover the costs for us.
I think Troy has a copy of the master tape, but he can’t remember where it is. I asked him about it because I would just go in and remix it. A couple of years ago, when we did the Simplicity album, we wanted to do it with Steve Thompson, and it just never worked out. We could never get the scheduling together, the budget together, whatever. Thompson and I had a couple of conversations, saying, “Wouldn’t it be great to go back in and remix that first album?”
Back to the sessions. Funny thing was that unlike the mixing, we could be in the control room when tracks were being recorded. Michael would let you watch him mic up the drums, for example, and tell you what mics he was using and why. I didn’t really get some of what he was saying, but later on, when I had my own studio, a lot of what he said came back to me.
I remember when Barbiero called me one time after sending a mix to review. He said, “Hey, did you get the mix of ‘We’re No Good Together?’”
I go, “Yeah.”
He goes, “What’d you think of that chorus effect on the bass?”
I went, “What chorus?” I couldn’t hear any chorus on the bass. I was like, “What are you talking about?” My criticism of that record is just that it’s drenched in reverb. The reverb return is louder than the actual drums. I guess it was the style at that time, but fuck, Guns N’ Roses, they didn’t mix like that. And Guns N’ Roses was at their mix sessions.
I think had we been there it would have been a little bit more in your face, the guitars especially. That was the bummer. We thought it was OK until we heard Appetite for Destruction, then we’re like, “Well, fuck!” It was a lot punchier, and drier, and in your face. Axl’s not buried in all the reverb they buried Jeff in, and to a degree they did that on Great Radio Controversy as well. It wasn’t until we got to Psychotic Supper that I think there’s a fair representation of what the band actually was supposed to sound like.
People in the industry and fans still come up to me and say, “Mechanical Resonance is a classic first record.” I just hate the sound of it, and I don’t think the other guys are particularly fond of it either. We could re-record it if we wanted to; there are no recording restrictions in our contract. But records are a snapshot of time in history, and you never finish a record, you just turn it in. Mechanical Resonance is an accurate snapshot of what was going on with Tesla in 1986. In hindsight, I’d like to have remixed it to the way all the rest of the records sound. Who knows? Maybe one day.
At the time of recording the album we were still called City Kidd. Cliff and Tom (who had known each other since their early days in Chicago) said, “You gotta change your name. City Kidd sounds like Loverboy, that kind of pop band, and you’re going to be a much rougher, tougher band.” We’d sit around making up names.
Sometimes we’d sit around and talk to Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders. She was real friendly to Jeff and me and would come up with some real vulgar names. She’d go, “Imagine this: ‘Modern Day Cowboy’ by the new band, Dog’s Balls!” I thought she was really cool. She’s the kind of broad that if she had a dick, she’d pull it out and piss.
We’d almost finished recording and were about to mix the album, and Michael Barbiero had a barbecue at his house with his family. We’re sitting at this cookout and Cliff says, “I’ve got an idea for a name for you guys—Tesla!”
So we’re like, “What the fuck is that? It sounds like a black girl’s name.”
And he said, “Well, Nikola Tesla was this guy who invented all this stuff and never got credit for it and there’s speculation as to whether the American government killed him.” Cliff described Tesla as an underdog and equated it with rock ’n’ roll, and we were like, “OK, we can wrap our heads around that.”
A week later Tom flies out with this book on Tesla called Man Out of Time, gives each of us a copy, and tells us that he’s going to have a quiz on it, and whoever gets all the questions right gets a hundred bucks. Tom was a good motivation guy! That’s how the name Tesla came about. For the logo we brought in this guy, Nick Egan, and said, “Make the Tesla logo like the old RKO sign.” I don’t think anyone ever got that hundred bucks, by the way.
Frank came up with the album title. He said, “Oh there’s this chapter, Mechanical Resonance. It was a theory Nikola Tesla had that everything has a resonant frequency and that the earth has a mechanical resonance, and if you turned that tone up loud enough, you could split the earth and blow it up.” That was the idea behind the album. Our songs were going to blow up, and we were going to step on the scene and be this band with this whole new thing. Frank came up with the title The Great Radio Controversy, too. Frank is a creative motherfucker!
Troy got really into it and started this whole campaign of getting the bust of Nikola Tesla in the Smithsonian museum in Washington, DC. I didn’t really give a fuck, to be honest. It was like, we couldn’t come up with a name, Cliff and Tom told us a name, and we went “OK.” And that gave us something to talk about at interviews. I personally was never really a Tesla trumpeter. You can’t put too much into that name, because if we were called Club Sandwich, the songs would have been the same. We still would have been those guys from broken homes, and the story of the band and the music would have been the same. It just conveniently tied itself into this crazy scientist, and maybe if you believe in God and cosmic destiny and all that shit, then maybe it was it was meant to be. I’d like to believe that it was kind of meant to be, because I’m a spiritual guy. But Tesla wasn’t a name we picked. We didn’t come in there like Joe Elliott, who drew “Def Leppard” in his song book. He picked that name. We couldn’t come up with one. Tom and Cliff can take credit for it; I don’t know who really did. I somehow think it was Cliff to be honest. Cliff was a pretty intellectual guy. Cliff would know about him. Cliff looked like he could have been a fuckin’ mad scientist!
I don’t think we would have gone back to Earthshaker either. Tesla’s as cool a name as any name. Especially with the car now, people really know the name; they know more of the car now than they do us, which is kind of a shame because we did it twenty fuckin’ years before that car ever came out and had two top-ten singles. It kind of bums me out sometimes, but I’ve reached out to Elon Musk, and we kind of communicate back and forth through his assistant. He knows of us, and we know about him. We sent him some Tesla shirts because we saw a picture of him wearing one of our shirts, and he sent us some car shirts. That’s all cool. It gave us something to talk about in interviews.
Many kids today know who Nikola Tesla is, and I’d like to think that we had something to do with that. That was probably in the back of Cliff, Peter, and Tom’s minds when they chose the name. It was nothing to do with us; we wouldn’t have picked that name in a million years, now it rolls off the tip of your tongue. But if you’ve never heard it, it’s like “What the fuck’s a Tesla?” Now we’ve met all kinds of kids named Tesla.
After one show, at a meet-and-greet, a guy came up to me and said, “Hey man, I named my son after you.”
I said, “That’s cool, I haven’t met many boys called Tesla.”
He said “No, I named him Brian Wheat!”
I was like, “OK, security!”