Just before we started writing what was to be our third studio album, Psychotic Supper, Peter received a letter from Queenie Taylor, a woman in San Francisco who owned a nightclub with Boz Scaggs called Slim’s. She was inviting us to play a full hour-and-a-half acoustic set. We had played one song acoustically, “Love Song,” at the Bay Area Music Awards—BAMMIES—in San Francisco, and Queenie was there and really liked it. We told Peter that it’s fine doing a couple of songs, but we’re not playing a whole show acoustically. It’s just something we didn’t think about. It was a one-off, we had had fun, but that was it. We were an arena rock band. Who the hell wanted to think about a full acoustic set? He challenged us and said, “I bet that’s because you can’t.” That’s the brilliance of Peter in a nutshell. This fucking guy knew us inside and out. He knew how much pride we had and how much we loved a challenge. He played us perfectly. He’s like a great coach, figuring out a way to make you step it up. That’s just what he did. So we thought, Fuck you! and we put a ninety-minute kick-ass set together and played the club, doing two shows in one night.
The next day we were flying out because Mötley Crüe hired us to play six weeks of summer dates with them, mostly amphitheaters and a few stadiums. Mötley Crüe was touring in support of Dr. Feelgood, and they were pretty big. They were sober at the time and were really nice to us. They were certainly big rock stars, but they didn’t act that way. Vince was a little weird at times, he wouldn’t let anybody watch him during sound check, but they were cool and they liked Tesla a lot, even though Nikki had called us tomato farmers. It was almost like touring with Leppard. There were lots of women, and there was lots of partying. By this time, we were a bit more settled down. Jeff, Tommy, and Troy were married, I had just started dating my first wife, and Frank was going through a divorce.
That’s when we really saw what it was like to have a hit single. Those crowds of twenty to thirty thousand people went bonkers when we played “Love Song.” Peter and Cliff would pop out every week or two to see how things were going. During this time our fourth single was released, “The Way It Is.” It made it to fifty-five in the Top 100 Singles chart. Although it did better than “Heaven’s Trail” or “Hang Tough,” it didn’t equal or surpass “Love Song,” so, in that sense, it was a disappointment.
There were a lot of off-dates on the tour, as Mötley Crüe would only play three days a week. We couldn’t afford to take that time off, so we did a series of acoustic shows in Detroit, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. We could do that now because of the Slim’s shows. We had a whole set of original acoustic material and decided to add some covers. I picked the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out,” Frank picked the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’,” Skeoch chose “Mother’s Little Helper” by the Rolling Stones, and Troy picked “Lodi” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Jeff said he wanted to do the old ’70s song “Signs.” I knew of it because it was a hit by a band called the Five Man Electrical Band when I was a kid. One day on the tour, Jeff, Frank, and Tommy went to WAAF in Boston to perform it acoustically. Right away, the radio station got swamped with requests for that little three-piece version of “Signs.”
We recorded and filmed the last show at the Trocadero in Philly. Unfortunately, the mobile truck didn’t get a usable feed from the bass direct line. Dan McClendon was going to mix whatever we decided to do with it in Sacramento at Paradise Studios. We were thinking the recording would be just a toss-off, so we weren’t going to spend a lot of money on it. We decided to overdub the bass there. I had one condition. Dan would roll the tape, and I would do it in one pass, beginning to end. This was like two or three in the afternoon. I had a couple of shots of scotch, sat down just like I did at the acoustic shows, and off we went. I didn’t start any of the songs, so I had band cues for all of them. There were three breaks because a reel of tape only lasted about fifteen minutes. But if we didn’t need to change tapes, I still would have done it in one fuckin’ take.
After the Mötley Crüe tour we started writing songs for what was to be Psychotic Supper. One day our record company phones Cliff Burnstein to say that WAAF has been playing “Signs” in rotation, and it’s in their top five most played songs! They said he should put us in the studio to record the song. We said that we had a whole acoustic show that we recorded and filmed in Philadelphia. They said, “Mix it up and maybe we’ll put out an EP.” So we mixed a few tracks, and they said, “This is really good. Mix the whole thing and we’ll put it out as an album.” That’s how Five Man Acoustic Jam came about. The whole thing cost about thirty thousand dollars to make.
Frank and Troy didn’t think it was good enough quality, cool enough, or whatever. Jeff and I thought it was a raunchy-sounding live record like Aerosmith’s Bootleg album. Cliff and Peter loved it, especially Cliff. This was before all the MTV Unplugged hype. Not a lot of bands had the ability or balls to take their rock songs and play them acoustically. But we always loved the acoustic mini-set that Led Zeppelin did in their shows, and we knew we were good enough to pull it off.
I thought we could sell about a hundred thousand copies, that it would be a cool underground thing. Much to everyone’s surprise, “Signs” took off, went through the roof. It was all over MTV and the radio. It became the biggest record of our career, selling almost three million copies. It doesn’t really bother me that “Signs,” a song that we didn’t write, was our biggest song, because it sounds like us. We could have written it, and a hit is a hit. We play it every night because the crowd loves it. Since we had filmed one of the shows, it seemed only natural to release a video of it as well. We’d never been the darlings of MTV, but “Signs” was the most requested video of 1991. And like the rest of the album, the video was just the one live take from the show, warts and all. Music industry insider and writer Bob Lefsetz, whose popular, informative, and entertaining newsletter is read by just about everybody in the biz, incredibly, said this: “From Five Man Acoustical Jam, the surprise hit, the inspiration for MTV ‘Unplugged,’ then again, so many claim that title. However, this is one of the most magical albums of all time. They say that Live at Leeds and Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out are the best live albums, I’d dispute that, Five Man Acoustical Jam is far superior.”
The coolest thing about Five Man for me personally is that a few years later I was visiting Ross Halfin, and we went to a David Lee Roth show, which is where I first met Jimmy Page. Along with Paul McCartney and Freddie Mercury, he is a hero of mine. We were having a chat, and he says, “I really like your acoustic record.”
I said, “What?”
He said, “Five Man Acoustic Jam, I love it.”
I said, “Really? I didn’t even think you would have known who I was.”
He says, “Of course I know who you are. You’re with Tesla, we’re label mates.” He was on Geffen when he did the Outrider record. One of the greatest things that can happen is when one of your heroes tells you he likes your record. We hung out that night and had a good time. I wasn’t sure if we would stay in touch but then, lo and behold, when the Robert Plant/Jimmy Page tour came through the Bay Area, Jimmy reached out and invited me to the shows. I went backstage to hang out and was surprised to find there was nobody back there but me. I was his private guest, and we just hung out talking about music. It was relaxed, laid-back, and really enjoyable. Our friendship just progressed from there.
Even though Five Man Acoustical Jam sounds fairly shitty, and it wasn’t recorded on the best night, it gave us credibility and separated us from our contemporaries at the time. People thought, These guys can really play. They’re musicians. I’m really proud of that record. It was the cheapest, easiest, and biggest record we ever made. It struck a raw nerve in people. It was an accident that gave us the time we needed to make Psychotic Supper, which had a lot of ups and downs; the madness was starting to set in.