4

The Tomato Farmers
from Sacramento

Up until the time we made Mechanical Resonance I was the fat kid. I topped out at 250 pounds at 5’8”. The free food I got from working at McDonald’s is what started me down that path. Growing up poor, I never got McDonald’s; that was considered a real big treat. I’ve been known to go into a supermarket and spend two hundred dollars on sweets. I do that because when I was a kid, I didn’t have any. I live in a big house because when I was a kid, I lived in a tiny house. That’s the psychology behind who I’ve become. I also saved a lot of money, which was instilled in me by my mother. She said, “You should save half of everything you make.” She had to stretch dollars to feed all of us.

The first time I met Peter Mensch, he said to me, “You’re going to do a photo session with this famous photographer, don’t worry about being fat. I’ll tell him to put you at the back of the photo and tell everybody you’re not the lead singer.” Then he smiled at me with his big teeth. That really hit me. He was brutal. And I realized that he wasn’t the only one on me about it. I knew this was a crucial point in my career…my life. I had a shot at playing rock ’n’ roll for a living. I’m sure it weighed on the band’s minds. I’m sure there were people at Geffen who were ready to have me replaced. Image is a huge thing, and looking like I did just wasn’t going to cut it. I could wind up like Brook and Bobby, kicked to the curb. So when I came home after making that record in September, Peter didn’t see me until we did a tour with David Lee Roth. I went on a diet and lost eighty pounds.

It was called the Rotation Diet. It was something I found at a local grocery store called Raley’s. The idea was that you had 800 calories one day, then 1100 the next, 1400 the third day, then repeat the whole thing. My mom cooked for me and prepared all my meals. I was living with Buddy, but I’d go home to eat. She bought a scale and got a good measuring cup, and that’s the amount I would eat, no seconds! I think it was about four months, and then the weight started dropping off fast, and when I lost about thirty pounds, I started playing racquetball and running six miles a day at the Hiram Johnson track. Once you get that metabolism going, it’s nothing. I couldn’t run one fuckin’ lap around the track when I started, then later I was running half-marathons.

Oddly, but helpfully, exercising at this level started knocking the edges off the anxiety that I’d always had. But on the downside, years of running on hard surfaces like streets and sidewalks have fucked up my feet, and I have heel spurs pretty bad, so now I just ride my elliptical bike. I never really learned the warm-up routines either, I’d just take off running. I hurt my Achilles tendon one time running a race in cold weather because I didn’t warm up properly.

Losing the weight taught me that everyone has the power to control what they need to do. Personally, it was just sheer discipline. There was nothing fun or enjoyable or easy about it when I first started. But when the goal is in sight, it gets a lot easier, and you feel good about yourself. Attaining that goal shows you that it’s possible. Then you can start to think that way about other things in your life: relationships, career, whatever. It’s willpower and perseverance. That’s the formula. It got me there where I needed to be.

We all get lazy at times or we don’t care, but that’s not an excuse. That’s the key. Don’t make excuses because they’re easy to find. I think of myself like a car. Nobody wants an ugly car. I’m a public personality: a commodity. Fans look up to us, many of them would trade places with us in a heartbeat. It’s partially a false image. We’ve got the same issues as most people. They’re just magnified because we’re in the public eye. That’s why you have to present that enviable image. That’s what the fans want.

Cliff Burnstein didn’t recognize me when I walked past him twice at the Newark airport. That was all the result of Peter Mensch. That’s what I respect about Peter to this day. He puts people off because he’s blunt. When Peter said that about my weight, I just left thinking, “I’ll show you, you cocksucker!” That’s how I got the nickname Shredded Wheat because then I became Mensch’s hero. The guys in Def Leppard knew about me before I ever met them. Steve Clark told me that he admired me for overcoming my weight problem. Maybe he equated it with what he was going through with alcohol at the time. Keeping the weight off was relatively easy for me, at least compared to losing it, because I was very active. Between playing on most nights while touring and exercising every day, I burned enough calories that I just had to avoid bingeing to maintain my weight. I really became obsessed with my weight. Chicks were paying attention to me now. They actually wanted me! That was just a mind blower. I’d never had that before. There was no way I was gonna go back to being the fat kid in the back. I had a scale on the road, and I’d measure out portions, just like my mom did. If I put on a couple of pounds, I just wouldn’t eat until those pounds came off. And until 1998 I kept the weight off. When I wasn’t exercising as much as I should have been, I’d stick my fingers down my throat after a meal and puke it up. I actually became borderline bulimic for a while from doing that.

I struggle with my weight now because of the medication I take for my autoimmune disease. I’ve learned to accept it a bit more. But it doesn’t matter. I’m not the lead singer, and I’m not trying to create a brand. When you’re young and trying to break into the business, you’ve got to be good looking, have great songs, and a great live show.

The famous photographer that Peter was talking about was Ross Halfin. At the time he was the guy. He was shooting everybody. He’d done the UFO stuff that we liked, and he was really good friends with Peter, so he was doing Def Leppard: portraits, live shots, everything. He was the tour photographer, studio photographer, did the album covers, press photos. We did our very first photo shoot with him in New York when we were finishing up Mechanical Resonance, before we started mixing it. We thought he was a dick. Everyone in the band couldn’t stand him.

We did the shoot in the Meat District in the back of a meat truck. This black hooker comes over to us, and she’s wearing a nightgown and holding her tit. She looks at Ross, squeezes her tit, and milk comes out. He screams at her, “Get out of here, you skank.”

And she says, “I’ll suck all y’all’s dicks for fifteen dollars,” as she’s sticking her tongue out. And we’re freaked out because we’re just kids, and here’s this crazy English guy with this crazy accent who’s rude to everybody. And a lactating prostitute as well. It’s a pretty funny picture: Jeff’s got long hair, and I’ve got fat cheeks; my head is like a basketball. This is the shoot during which Mensch told me to stand at the back. Ross has since embellished the story saying that some of the band had a go with the hooker, which is bullshit.

We went back to Peter and said, “We don’t like that guy. We don’t ever want to take photos with him again.”

And Peter said, “He’s just that way. The next time you do a shoot, just yell back at him. Tell him to fuck off.” So we did. Eventually when we went to England, we saw a lot of him, and that’s how Ross and I built up our friendship. He’s one of my best friends now. And people still think he’s an asshole. What’s funny is that we’ve only really started using his pictures in the last few years.

Mechanical Resonance ended up going multiplatinum. The first single we released was “Modern Day Cowboy,” and as soon as that came out on radio and then the video got played on MTV, bang! All the stations started adding it to their rotations.

At that time, the Russians had shot down a Korean airliner, killing 270 people. And there was that cold war tension between us. Then you had the Olympics in the USSR, which we boycotted; all that was still pretty fresh. That was a Frank and Tommy composition, and Jeff was telling me about the lyrics one day driving down to Stockton to rehearse. He said something about modern day cowboys playing cowboys and Indians, kind of like Russia and the US, and that made for the storyboard. It was pretty clever. The first thing people saw about us wasn’t in hot tubs with chicks. It was good timing.

We didn’t have any input on the “Cowboy” video. They plopped us on a stage in an empty theater, and we just played the song over and over. The makeup people gave us ratted and sprayed hair. They tried that for “Cowboy” and “Lil’ Suzi,” and that was the end of that. That didn’t work. We went along with it on the first two videos. “Suzi” was the real awful one. Ratted-out hair and extreme close-ups. Just horrible. We were like, “Fuck that, we’re not doing that again.” So the next video, which was “Gettin’ Better,” was really stripped down and workmanlike. We did it in Pennsylvania, played in a little club, and that was the end of the hairspray for us. This isn’t Poison or Mötley Crüe. Nothing against those bands; I toured with both of them, and I liked both of them, but Tesla is a different kind of animal, more like Bad Company. If you look at Axl Rose in the video for “Welcome to The Jungle,” you can see they did the same thing to him! It was just cookie-cutter marketing.

The record came out in November, and we sat around until February. For three years we had played and rehearsed in Sacramento, then Tom signed us and was developing us, and then we put out this record and it went to radio. It got thirteen adds its first week, and the next week it got forty. It’s snowballed, and the next thing you know we’re on tour in front of ten thousand people a night. David Lee Roth was going on tour at the time with his first solo album, Eat ’Em and Smile. The story is that he got a list of videos from MTV of young bands, and he brought his crew in to watch them. He asked, “Which of these bands do you guys like?”

The crew all liked “Modern Day Cowboy” and Roth said “OK, that’s who we’re taking.” Maybe the hairspray in the video was a good thing!

Mechanical Resonance shot up the charts, and we were on tour with David Lee Roth. We were blown away that people knew who we were. It was like overnight. We went from playing six-hundred-seaters as City Kidd to our first gig as Tesla at New Haven, Connecticut, in front of twelve thousand people. They just threw us out to the lions. We kind of had it together, and when they put us on that big stage, it wasn’t completely alien. We did well because the Oasis had a pretty big stage. We had this crew guy, Dan McClendon, who used to be in the back, lighting smoke bombs, fire pots, and shit. We used to take all these lights in there, and we’d do mini-concerts. We had watched the Scorpions and Def Leppard, and saw how they jumped around, so we did all that. We were imitating what we’d seen.

It was louder than the clubs for sure. We had a wall of Marshall stacks, and the arenas just sucked up the volume, so we had to turn everything up just to hear ourselves. Back then there were no in-ear monitors, so the floor wedges and side fills added even more volume to the stage. I don’t think we got one sound check on the entire tour.

Dave Lee Roth was fine. He did some stuff that was kind of funny. Like if he was walking down the hallway, you had to duck into a room and get out of his way. We were green at the time, but I wouldn’t put up with that kind of shit after that tour. But he talked to us a couple of times. After a show in Lakeland, Florida, his security guy, Eddie Anderson, called us and said, “Dave wants to see you now!” So we went up to his room, and he’s got two chicks with him, and there are panties on the floor. It looked kind of like a setup. I don’t know if he was trying to impress us. He’s got this big bag of cocaine, a long fingernail on his pinkie, and he’s snorting blow. He’s playing this whole Diamond Dave thing and starts giving us a rap about doing interviews and then he just comes out with, “Me and Pete [Peter Angelus, Roth’s manager] want to manage you. We think you’re great.”

And we say, “Well, we have managers.”

And he said, “We don’t care, we want to manage you.” We were flattered. We sent him a gold record and have never spoken to him since. Having said that, the band and crew were great and really looked out for us. David was cool, but the rock-star stuff was weird. Billy Sheehan, the bass player, and Gregg Bissonette, the drummer, were pretty cool to us. Steve Vai was kind of standoffish; he had this guitar-hero trip kind of going on. Replacing Eddie Van Halen, right?

Being on tour was a big party, like going to Disneyland. I’d get up at noon or so, eat breakfast and work out, maybe go do a record-store appearance or a radio interview, go back to the venue, and get ready for the gig. After our set I’d pull a chick and have some sex, drink, get on the bus, go in the back lounge, turn off all the lights and listen to Motown, or Zeppelin, or whatever we were listening to back there until we passed out. Then do it again the next day. We were in a different city every day—Charlotte, Nashville, Chicago, Denver, Boston, Houston, Miami, wherever. The lifestyle was coming at me a hundred miles an hour, I was just trying to take it in. We were doing five shows a week.

We made friends with David Lee Roth’s wardrobe person, Robin Lemon, and she did our laundry for us. Until we were headliners, we’d just slide the headline staff a few bucks, and they would take care of it. That was pretty typical. Our own crew was minimal at that point. Dan, whom I mentioned earlier, was the stage-right tech. Then we had a stage-left tech for Frank, a drum tech, a sound guy, and our road manager, Nigel James.

We started seeing our fan base grow right out of the gate on that first tour. It was only six weeks, but we saw a lot of our fans in the audiences during that time—meet-and-greets, in-stores, that kind of thing. People were really digging our album and live show. Somebody branded us “America’s Band,” and in a lot of ways it made sense. We had big followings in the Northeast and Florida, but we got pretty huge throughout the rust belt. I think it’s just because of the way people live their lives. I think it’s the message in our songs. We’re normal Americans. A lot of it is Jeff because people relate to lyrics. If we were an instrumental band, people wouldn’t care. I’ve told everyone that without Jeff there’s no Tesla. But that’s with any band. They always identify with the singer. If something happened to Jeff, if he quit, would I want to go on with some guy like the dude that took Steve Perry’s place in Journey? I don’t know.

Where we never have done really great has been on the West Coast. LA has always been hit or miss, San Diego too. We do OK in Seattle and Portland now. There was a time Seattle wasn’t too friendly. But the place that meant the most was New York City. As soon as we got there, which was the third gig, there were people who said, “I love your record, I came to see you guys.” People in the music industry as well. Someone asked Nikki Sixx about Tesla when our first album came out, and he said “Oh, those guys, they’re tomato farmers from Sacramento, right?”

After the David Lee Roth tour, we sold about three hundred thousand records in a couple of months, and the next tour was with Alice Cooper for six weeks. That just kind of popped up, so there wasn’t much time between Roth and Alice. It wasn’t like the Roth tour. The arenas were half-full, and we were playing in B-markets. You’d walk in, and the upper level of the arena would be curtained off. But it was a good experience for us, as we were still honing our live show and getting better. We filled up days with record-store appearances and interviews at radio stations. We were up for any type of promotion. We were very hungry.

The schedule was tighter too. Alice would often do six shows a week. He was a hard worker. That was OK, it was one more payday and one day less a week that we had to pay for hotel rooms. Unfortunately, like the Roth tour, we didn’t get many sound checks.

Alice was a nice guy. The entire star-trip, pretentious shit was out the window. Alice didn’t make you get out of the way if he was walking down the hall. He didn’t have any of this heavy groupie scene on his tour, so that left all the chicks for us. Vince is a cool guy except for when he puts on the makeup and becomes Alice! Then he was in character, and you didn’t want to try any small talk or anything. We didn’t see him much, to be honest with you. You wouldn’t see him at the gigs hanging out or anything. We knew his band and hung out with them, but you didn’t really see Alice much. Never really had a serious conversation with him. Not because he didn’t want it, it was just he was a private guy.

Alice didn’t do sound checks. The band would do them; he didn’t. He’d just come and do the show, then split and go to his own bus. I think he was sober at the time, coming off of the ’70s when he was all wild and shit. It wasn’t like he was hanging out. But I’ve seen him a few times over the years. He’s come to our gigs in Phoenix.

Peter Mensch came out to visit when we were with Alice, and he had come out a little bit when we were with David Lee Roth. Peter was the guy who would come out for a day or two. Cliff wasn’t really into that. He would stay in the office. Cliff came to the last David Lee Roth show, in Lakeland, Florida. Kind of an end-of-the-tour thing. But he came. Peter would actually ride on the bus with us, and we would talk about things. Peter was my buddy. He always critiqued the band; you should do this, do that. We should have listened to him more. Some things we did listen to, some things we didn’t. Cliff and Peter were real involved in the beginning. We just wore them out and were more trouble than we were worth because we didn’t listen.

Peter and Cliff’s company was called Q Prime. In the ’80s they were managing Def Leppard, Metallica, Queensrÿche, and Dokken. We weren’t selling the numbers those other bands were, so they weren’t prepared to take our bullshit, because the money wasn’t warranting it. But Peter and Cliff loved Tesla.

I remember Peter thinking we were a great live band. I think what impressed him was that we could play together live and sound like our records. Our records were not as polished as Leppard’s ever were, and maybe that’s why he wasn’t that crazy about how the records sounded. Maybe that’s why he didn’t like our first album. He liked the second album. Now he thinks the first album is a classic. Funny how time and success can alter one’s point of view.

The Roth tour was six weeks, the Alice tour was six weeks, and I think we did four weeks on our own in clubs. Back then you could play like fifteen shows in Texas. We played some small clubs and stuff on our own. And then we wound up, I think the last show on that run was the Texas Jam with Boston, Aerosmith, Whitesnake, and Poison.

After that we went out with Def Leppard. We were just waiting for the right time for that to come up, waiting for them to finish their album. Leppard was coming off a four-year break. When we signed with Peter and Cliff, the first thing we asked them was, “Can you get us on the Def Leppard tour?”

They said, “Well, we’ll try, it’s up to the band.” That tour just busted us wide open. But it really started earlier, because of MTV and David Lee Roth and the radio all at one time.

When we were in Earthshaker, we wanted to be Def Leppard. I saw them open up for Pat Travers in 1980 on their first tour for On Through the Night. Then, in 1981, Frank and I went to see them tour High ’n’ Dry, opening for Blackfoot. I met Pete Willis and Rick Allen that night. Somehow, my buddy Terry Muñoz and I were out by their bus, and Terry said, “Hey, I got some pot.”

Rick Allen said, “Well look, we’re staying at the Holiday Inn, on Forty-Seventh off of Ninety-Nine. Would you come over?” So we drove over there and hung out with them and smoked weed. I tell Rick about that, and he says he remembers, but he doesn’t. He’s just being nice about it. But I remember. Five years later we were fuckin’ opening up for Def Leppard!

When Leppard was finally done making Hysteria, Peter Mensch played us a few of the tracks: “Women,” “Hysteria,” and “Rocket.” We loved “Women” and said, “That’s the fuckin’ single, man!” Later on, Mensch told us that Frank and I were the reason they chose it as their first single.

Prior to the Leppard tour, we were in Europe doing some shows on our own including Montreux, Düsseldorf, Amsterdam, and two shows at the Marquee in London. People in England liked us because we were a blues-based rock band with English influences like Bad Company, Led Zeppelin, and Humble Pie. It was great.

When Leppard finally finished Hysteria, Cliff and Peter got us on their tours of the US and UK. Joe Elliott was a bit standoffish in England. I hung out a lot with Steve Clark. I remember one night we were in the bar, Jeff Keith came in and Steve gave him a hundred dollars and told him to take his wife out to dinner. He was a really generous guy. I just used to sit there and get shitfaced with him. I remember one night we were sitting at a bar in a really nice hotel in Manchester, and the bartender refused to sell us any more booze because we had already sunk two bottles of Jack Daniel’s. So we went up to Steve’s bedroom and started jumping up and down on the mattress, throwing shapes and posing, imitating Jimmy Page, because Steve worshipped Led Zeppelin. I go back to my room and jump into the shower because I’m so fucked up, I’m scared that I’m going to end up like John Bonham. The next thing you know, I’m wandering around the hotel corridors butt-ass naked looking for Dan McClendon. I end up knocking on the door, and it’s fucking Peter Mensch!

When we got to America, the tour started off to half-full houses. Like Alice Cooper, the upper levels were draped off. We did six months, and it gradually kept getting bigger and bigger because of the singles they were releasing. Joe would get really discouraged, and I remember I kept saying to Phil Collen, “As soon as you release ‘Love Bites,’ this record is going to be really fucking massive!” By this time Mechanical Resonance had gone platinum, and we’re playing in the round; it was a big thing. We were young, and we didn’t have anything, no cars or houses. I was still living in Buddy’s spare room. But I was now partying every night, fucking chicks, and playing rock ’n’ roll. Every night was Friday night, and it couldn’t get better than that!

The Def Leppard tour had a lot to do with Tesla becoming big. The David Lee Roth tour took us from zero to three hundred thousand albums sold. The next million records came from being on tour with Def Leppard. When the tour got to America, I bonded with Joe Elliott. We went into Glens Falls, New York, for three days’ rehearsal, and Frank and I had a room next to Joe. He must have heard us playing music, because he knocked on the door and said, “What are you guys up to?” So I invited him in. We started jamming on all these Paul McCartney songs, because Joe’s a big Wings fan. We became good buddies really quick. What I didn’t realize was that this was the night Steve Clark tried to break his hand by punching it into the wall because he didn’t want to go on tour. So Joe was probably troubled by that, and that’s why he came over and hung out with us.

When I met Steve Clark, I was a kid; I didn’t know he had a problem. I didn’t know what a drug and alcohol problem was. This was his way of life; he just liked to have a drink, and I didn’t realize that it was so out of control. I did later. I saw him two weeks before he died. There was a lot of sex and drugs in the early days, but we’ve never really talked about it compared to bands like Mötley, Guns N’ Roses, and Poison. We always talked about the music, which was the thing with Tesla. If you saw Jeff Keith walking down the street at the height of our career, you probably wouldn’t know who he was because we’re not an image band.

We’ve only had one cover story in the whole of our career until last year. Even though we were on MTV a lot of the time, we were never at the VMA awards. We had the number one song on MTV in ’91, which was “Signs”; they didn’t even ask us to come to the VMAs. And I think that was because there was no Steven Tyler or Angus Young in our band. At the height of our career when we were playing arenas, I used to walk around the venue when the opening band was on, and no one even knew that it was me.

On the last day of the tour in El Paso, Texas, the Leppard guys came to our dressing room and gave us portable four-track recorders and said, “We want you to go and write a great second album.” So I guess they looked at us as their young protégés and they were mentoring us. Joe Elliott always was and still is a big mentor to me in my musical life.

We went away to write and gave Joe our demos. “Party’s Over” went on The Great Radio Controversy because Joe liked it so much. Cliff and Peter didn’t like it, but we said, “No, you’ve got to put it on because Joe likes it.” It’s a piece of shit song, actually. Joe is one of my best friends to this very day.

When my studio burned down, he phoned me and said, “If you need any gear, Def Leppard will loan you a back line, anything.” No one else in the music business reached out to me like that. There’s a definite kinship between us. He’s Fat Bastard One, I’m Fat Bastard Two.

One of the things I wanted to do when we got to England was meet Paul McCartney. I knew that Mensch was a friend of Richard Ogden’s, McCartney’s manager, and I asked him if he could arrange a meeting. Peter said, “I ain’t fucking doing that. Why would Paul McCartney want to meet some kid in a band that I’m managing who doesn’t mean anything?”

I thought, “Fuck you! I’ll do it myself!” So I’m at Geffen’s London office with Frank Hannon one day, and we’re walking through Soho Square, and opposite Geffen’s office is MPL (McCartney’s office). I look up on the third floor, and there’s Paul McCartney standing at the window, looking like he’s smoking this big joint. I said “Frank! There’s fucking Paul McCartney!” He sees me and I give him the thumbs-up, and he gives me the thumbs-up back. I pointed at him and made a gesture like, “Can you come down and take a picture?” He looked back and held up all ten fingers.

Ten minutes later he comes out of the building and I’m shaking. We take a photo, and I say nervously, “Hi I’m in a band and we’ve come over from America and my first record is out and we’re playing the Marquee.”

And he said, “Oh, that’s great, lots of people started there.” He was really nice, polite, and courteous, and I took five shots with him. Frank fucked off and went to look at guitars.

The next day we played Amsterdam, and Peter was there with Leppard, and he took Phil Collen, Steve Clark, and Richard Allen down to the show. We worked it out where we had a jam at the end of the night playing “Rock of Ages,” and there’s a clipping somewhere that says Def Tesla. They were great to us and took us out partying for the night. Phil was sober by then, but Steve definitely wasn’t. Anyway, at the sound check I see Peter and shout out, “Peter, come here, I got something to show you!” He comes over and I pull out a folder of these photos of me and McCartney. Mensch just grabs me, gives me a kiss, and says, “Man, you’ve got balls the size of Texas.”

The second time I met McCartney was backstage at Arco Arena in Sacramento, 2002. I was with our wardrobe person, Ali Amato, backstage. She had been with Tesla from Great Radio Controversy to Bust a Nut. In 2002 she was working for McCartney. Paul just walked in and said, “Who’s your friends, Ali?”

“This is Brian and Monique.”

He said “Hi, I’m Paul.”

We said, “We know who you are!” He was checking my wife Monique out, and I said, “I play bass in a band called Tesla.”

He said, “Ah, cool.”

I said, “I play a Hofner like you.”

“Ah, great, are you the singer?”

“No, I don’t sing, no.”

I know his drummer who played on “Live and Let Die,” and “My Love,” and all the records up to “Band on the Run,” Denny Seiwell. And Denny’s wife is named Monique as well. So I was telling Paul I saw Denny, and he said, “Oh yeah, I saw Denny the other day, he came to the show in LA,” and he went, “Monique, that’s Denny’s wife, cool, man.” Again, he was really nice. I was kind of freaked out, as I wasn’t expecting him to walk in. We were just hanging out in wardrobe with Ali. It wasn’t a meet-and-greet thing. He just walked in to see her about something.