The appropriately titled Psychotic Supper sessions were when the trouble started. Now we’ve got money, egos, drugs, wives, and everything’s kind of built up out of proportion. Nothing in our lives prepared us for what was to come.
Five Man Acoustical Jam was flying off the racks, and now we’d started to see a lot of money. We’ve all got a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank, and it started to weigh on the band. Jeff started to get a bit nuts. He started doing a lot more drugs, got really skinny, and became more erratic. During the first two records he was fine. He would occasionally get fucked up, have a meltdown, and make comments like, “I don’t want to do this anymore! It’s ruining my life!” The next day he would apologize and say, “I didn’t mean that, I was drunk.”
Simultaneously, Troy decided that he’s not going to come to rehearsals for pre-production. He wants to hang out with people he met in New York. They were a family, four brothers and three sisters. Troy would go over there and hang out with them, sing songs, and do a bunch of drugs. It was like one of those surreal scenes out of a David Lynch movie. He told us he was going to record an album with this family. We said, “No, you’re not, you’re the fuckin’ drummer in Tesla.” It was Jeff who said, “Troy, you’re fired. We’ll get someone else.” I don’t think Troy thought the band would call his bluff.
We hired a Sacramento drummer, Mike Frowein, who came in, rehearsed with us, and we were fine with it. Then Troy came back after a week, crying and saying he was sorry, and he was back in the band. We made Dan tell Fro the news. That was kind of chickenshit of us. But we did buy him a whole new set of cymbals. That cost us a couple of grand.
That’s how the writing process began on Psychotic Supper. Jeff was getting erratic, Troy was at the height of his addiction, and Frank and I were pretty productive. We had about thirty pieces of music ready, but Jeff wasn’t doing any writing. He had just bought a house, was doing some remodeling and, I think, a lot of methamphetamine. Jeff will tell you that. He’s pretty real. He’ll also tell you that drugs fucked Tesla up.
I remember one time we had a band meeting with our business managers and accountants, and Jeff didn’t show up. He sent his wife instead, who said, “I am me, and he is me, and we are Jeff.” And we’re like, What the fuck? He obviously wasn’t in his right mind. The four of us were getting frustrated with that. Peter and Cliff wanted us to keep feeding the machine. We were riding high with a couple of platinum albums, but that was yesterday’s news.
I took a break to get married in New Jersey. Sandi and I had this crazy wedding; it was huge. On one side there’s my friends, about twenty people including Cliff Burnstein, Peter Mensch, Joe Elliott, Tom Zutaut, Lars Ulrich, and my family. On her side were about two hundred friends and relatives, some of whom came all the way over from Ecuador. We were married for about three and a half years. I got Cliff and Peter to manage her. She was a great girl, but we were very young.
It was around this time that I started having anxiety attacks. They were almost like out-of-body experiences. The technical term for them, I found out later on, was derealization/depersonalization episodes. I was getting stressed out from watching the first signs of instability in Tesla. I would look in the mirror, and I wouldn’t feel like I was attached to my body. It was really fucking weird.
I came back from the wedding, and we carried on writing at a Sacramento rehearsal studio. If you look at band pictures from that time, like the inner gatefold of Psychotic Supper, you can see we have a worn look on us from three years of constant partying—all the drinking and drugging. Jeff was on an RIP Magazine cover. We were living the lifestyle and weren’t taking care of ourselves.
Michael Barbiero and Steve Thompson came out, and we had half the songs written. Jeff was having problems finishing songs, and you can see on the album that there are co-writing credits with Michael Barbiero. He helped Jeff with the lyrics to the point of following him around with a pen and paper. Michael wound up writing lyrics for “Call It What You Want,” “Song & Emotion,” and “Edison’s Medicine.” That was when Jeff started unraveling. It started a downward spiral for him that hit bottom in Reno a few years later.
How the title of the album came about was from one night when Tommy, Frank, and I were eating, and there’s no Troy, no Jeff. It was almost like we were having a therapy session at dinner, and Tommy said, “This is a psychotic supper.” We were starting to unravel. Because once Jeff goes, the whole band starts falling apart.
I remember going to rehearsal one night and having a really bad anxiety attack. Steve Thompson took me outside, and I threw up. I didn’t know what was going on. I thought I had a brain tumor or something. Steve took me to a hospital where his brother worked as a doctor, and he diagnosed me with the anxiety condition. He said I could take medication or therapy. I knew that I didn’t want to get on a regimen of drugs. That’s when I decided to go and see a psychiatrist.
Peter Mensch recommended his psychiatrist. His name was Isaac Herschkopf. At the time I thought psychiatry was bullshit. But Peter suggested I try it for a month and then decide. Isaac was a guy from New York who’s treated a lot of famous people, including a baseball legend and many others. He was one of three psychiatrists who interviewed Mark Chapman after he killed John Lennon. I got on with him really well. He just tried to get me to a place where I was comfortable in my own skin. I didn’t think I was that fucked up, but these anxiety attacks that I had were scary. Sure enough, after about a month, I did notice some easing of the attacks, so I continued to see him for the next ten years. I only stopped because after Tesla broke up, I couldn’t afford to see him anymore. By that time, he had taught me how to manage things on my own.
The first panic attack I had was when I was fifteen. I remember it was Halloween, and I was riding my bike around the neighborhood, and I saw one of my older brother’s friends. This guy, Larry Rau, was smoking a joint, and he said, “Hey man, do you want a hit on this?”
I said, “Sure, what is it?”
He said, “Panama Red.” I guess I got good and high, because I started feeling like I was hallucinating. I started having this depersonalization. I found out later on that pot could bring on anxiety. When I went to school the next day, I had to go to the nurse’s office because I didn’t feel that well. My mom took me to the fire department because that’s where you get your blood pressure checked, and it was high due to anxiety. But nobody knew about that stuff then. I figured out that the anxiety happened when I got stoned, so I stopped smoking marijuana. Alcohol didn’t have the same affect, so I started drinking when I was fifteen. Later on I found out that a lot of my anxiety problems came down to me being an illegitimate child and seeing my mom go through a lot of pain at an early age. I wasn’t mistreated, I always had food, and I wasn’t sexually abused. My life to me was pretty normal. But it was a bit dysfunctional. There wasn’t a strong family unit, even though certain members of my family would like to think that there was.
I’m a big advocate of psychiatry now. Isaac helped me out immensely. If you’re honest and do what your therapist says, you can deal with a lot of issues in your life. I enjoyed spilling my guts. It made me feel better. Sometimes it was painful because I wasn’t as honest as I could have been. But I was only lying to myself. He took me back to my childhood with the Freudian thing. We also did cognitive behavioral therapy. But the main thing with the doctor was my drinking—not how often but how much I drank.
Tesla was on a roll. A lot of money was being spent; a lot of drugs were being consumed. There were wives on the road—Jeff’s, Troy’s, and mine. Frank was rollin’ with the chicks. Some of the guys were taking drugs, and I was drinking and taking downers. Peter and Cliff were really involved, but you could tell that they were starting to get tired of our bullshit. We were at the height of our career at this time, so you weren’t going to tell us much.
Steve Thompson managed to corral us all back together, and we finished writing the songs. When it came time to record Psychotic Supper, we refused to go back to Bearsville. We talked about recording in London, but that was too extravagant. We wanted to be where there was lots of energy. We wanted to be in Manhattan. I really dug the vibe in New York. It was so different than LA. Maybe the weather had something to do with it. It was gritty. Lots of people in a little space, no time to fuck around. Just get it done. That was the attitude I got. So we did the sessions at the Power Station. Aerosmith had recorded there back in the ’70s, so that was good enough for us.
That decision turned out to be both a good and bad thing. Our managers probably thought it was going to lead to nothing but trouble. After all, we were young, successful, and out of control. And now were smack in the middle of New York City, 24/7. We had Michael Barbiero and Steve Thompson back as well. Jeff felt very comfortable with them, but the band wanted to go for something different. In the end Jeff got his way. That created a lot of animosity right off the bat between the producers and the band.
One difference from our previous albums was this time we each had our own apartment on the Upper West Side. They cost three grand apiece for the month: five apartments, one for each band member. That was $15,000 a month right there. Our stage manager/bass tech, Dan, shared my apartment. We needed a session roadie, so to speak, and Dan was our main guy on the road. There was nothing about what we liked and needed that he didn’t know. Also, I had married Sandi by this time, and she had a house in New Jersey, so I spent most nights there. Only when I got too fucked up did I stay in Manhattan. So it was mostly Dan’s room.
We had cocaine being brought to us and put on the recording budget. I wasn’t into coke; the rest of the band was. I would drink. We’d record, then go to the China Club or the Limelight until eight the next morning and then come back into the studios. There was a time that Frank got too out of it, couldn’t make it to a session, and Michael had to go to the apartment and sit with him. It was wild when we were partying. But we were laying down really good tracks. The recording process was simple; there was no drama. But then we were told, “OK, we’ll mix this record at Bearsville,” and that’s when it got crazy.
Now, instead of being three of us, it was all five of us working on it along with Steve, Michael, Cliff, and Tom. You’ve got nine opinions, which was maybe justified on the first record because nobody knew what they were doing. The second record was maybe the best one, when there were a couple of us working on it and didn’t have to go through a committee. None of us went to the mixes for Five Man Acoustical Jam, as half the band didn’t even want to put that record out.
On the first two albums, we had only tracked at Bearsville, not mixed. They had a Solid State Logic board for mixing instead of a Neve. I think Neve consoles are like Cadillacs, classy and simple, but elegant. At the time, Solid State Logic consoles were real popular. It was the first board that had automation designed in, instead of added on like the Neves, so mixing was a lot easier and straightforward. Producers and engineers loved that. Mixing manually meant making every move on faders, EQ, effects, in real time. Make a mistake, and you’d have to start over. The problem with the SSL was that it just didn’t sound as good as a Neve.
In the meantime, there was another bit of drama blowing up. After our first album, Guns N’ Roses had gotten Steve and Michael to mix Appetite for Destruction. During the mixing of Psychotic Supper, they started work on Use Your Illusion, and they wanted Steve and Michael to work with them. I remember Slash calling me up and saying, “Dude, can you do me a favor and take a break and let Michael and Steve work with us?”
I said, “No! I mean I’d like to help you out, but the bottom line is that we’re in the middle of making a record.”
Michael and Steve wanted to stop and do the Guns record because it meant a lot of money for them. So they had resentments towards us because they lost that record, and to this day Michael Barbiero resents me for it. We’ve talked about it, and I said, “Michael, it took a year to mix Use Your Illusion. If you had done that, you would have lost the four other multiplatinum records you mixed. I didn’t cost you any money.” The bottom line is that he committed to doing Tesla, and I wasn’t going to take a back seat to Guns N’ Roses again.
We felt we had taken a back seat to them throughout our whole career. We were on the same label, and any time Guns N’ Roses put out anything, they got the number one priority. Tesla would come in at four behind GNR, Aerosmith, and Whitesnake, even though we were responsible for the first successful rock record Geffen released. They put out Done with Mirrors by Aerosmith, and that was a flop. Guns N’ Roses was eight months after us, and Barbiero/Thompson got the GNR gig because they’d produced Mechanical Resonance.
So here we are three years later. We’ve got Guns N’ Roses wanting us to take a break. We’ve got Michael and Steve wanting us to take a break so they can make more money. Now there’s friction between them and the band. The mixes at Bearsville aren’t going well. Cliff and Peter want to bring in Terry Thomas. Jeff didn’t want to let go of Steve and Michael. He’s loyal, and once he starts something with someone, he wants to keep it going, which I understand, but the rest of the band wanted to try someone new.
The mixing sessions were fairly tense because of all the drugs and ego. We wound up recording in three different studios and mixing in three different studios. The mixes at Bearsville weren’t cutting it, so we scrapped that and went to Right Track in New York City. That was another SSL board, and that sucked, so we scrapped those sessions. On top of that, when we heard the tracks of “What You Give” from the Power Station, they sounded awful, so we had to re-record the whole song.
We put our collective foot down and said that we needed to mix on a Neve, no matter how tough it was. So we ended up at the Hit Factory, where they had an old Neve. It was a ratty little studio. Aesthetically it was a dump. We started mixing the record for the third time and were finally getting mixes that we liked.
At the end of the day we wanted the best possible sound, to hell with how long it took. Mixing is often a long, hard process, not for someone who wants results in a hurry. Through the first studio changes, the entire band attended the mixing sessions. Then Jeff quit coming, then Troy stopped coming. After that, only Frank and I were at every session.
Tom Zutaut came in to listen to some of the tracks. We were working on “What You Give,” and Tom asked Michael to increase the echo on the acoustic guitar. Michael didn’t want to do it, but rather than argue with Tom, he used the old engineer’s trick of turning a knob that didn’t do anything at all. Most record company guys couldn’t hear shit anyway, and usually the engineer would ask, “How’s that? Better?” and the company dude would say, “Yeah…a little more. There, that’s good.” But Tom, who’d been around the block a few times, turned around and asked the assistant engineer, who worked for the Hit Factory, “Did he turn up the echo?”
The guy, knowing the legendary Tom Zutaut is putting him on the spot, threw Michael under the bus! “No, that knob doesn’t do anything.”
Tom turned back around and started yelling at Michael, “You worthless fuck! I’m sick of your bullshit! Don’t be pulling that shit with me, I’ll have your ass!” Frank and I just froze, whereupon Michael just stood up and walked out. Frank, Tom, and I wound up mixing six songs on the album by ourselves with the assistant engineer.
By then we didn’t think we needed them, and they were getting tired of us. We couldn’t see what Steve was doing. People close to the band were always complaining about how the guitars sounded, because it didn’t sound like Guns N’ Roses. Michael contributed a great deal to the album. He wrote half the lyrics. But we were all fucked up in a haze. There was just a lot of crazy shit going on.
Despite all the craziness, or maybe because of it, I think Psychotic Supper is the best record we ever made. Everything was right. We were nuts when we were making it, but the songs were the best-crafted songs we wrote, and the performances were the best we’d ever done. It’s the best-sounding record, and it’s got that Tesla spirit. Frank and I were stretching out with our individual writing styles, so the songs varied more than on the previous albums. And our personalities came through as well.
Everyone was expecting our first single to be a pop song, but we come out with the heaviest song of our career, “Edison’s Medicine.” We got an incredible amount of airplay on rock radio, but it kind of freaked everyone out. They were expecting us to ride the same horse we rode eight months earlier. We were pissed at everyone by then, after all the studio changes and fighting. I was starting to pay attention to how much money we were spending, which was a lot. And now we had to go on tour.
We started going to Europe with our first record in 1987. There was a big buzz on Tesla because Mechanical Resonance had received a 5k rating in Kerrang!, which, at the time, was the rock bible in Europe. We went back there with Def Leppard on the Hysteria Tour, and that really exposed us to a bigger audience. It was time to get back there again.
While we were mixing Psychotic Supper, we went to a Scorpions show at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. Rudolf Schenker came up to me and said, “I love the acoustic record! I want Tesla to come and support the Scorpions in Europe.” It was their biggest tour, as “Wind of Change” was a huge hit for them. The next day their manager, Doc McGhee, called Peter Mensch, and a few weeks later, off we went to Europe. But before starting that we decided to do one acoustic show in London at the Astoria, and it was a fuckin’ killer. Thanks to some smart promotion, we even played an acoustic show for the king of Sweden in his private palace, all fucked up on his booze. We had a great time.
At that point, Troy had finally gotten sober. He got into a treatment program before we went on tour, and we didn’t know about it. Just before we set off, he comes to us and says, “Guys, can you do me a favor?”
We say, “Sure, what’s up, Troy?”
He says, “I got clean and sober, could you not do drugs and drink around me? I don’t care if you do them, but could you not put it in my face?” To be honest, no one really respected him on that request. Guys were doing blow and smoking pot on the bus. I felt like we let him down. I didn’t smoke pot or do blow, I only drank, so I thought I was all right. When I went out, I never went out with him, I always went with the crew guys because they were crazy. I admire Troy because he stayed sober through it all, and it wasn’t like he got a lot of help from us. We were like, “Yeah, whatever. It’s your problem.”
During the tour in Germany, some guy broke into Troy’s room, put a gun to his chest, and said, “Give me your money.” Troy managed to calm the situation and get the guy out of his room without giving him anything. When we heard the story, we thought Troy was high or hallucinating, but I believe it did happen.
We came back to the UK, and our first gig was at the Hammersmith Odeon, now known as the Carling Apollo. It was sold out, there was a big buzz around the band, and the press was all over us. This was the show that could have established the band in the UK and Europe. I can’t tell you what happened, but the set wasn’t put together very well. We were being self-indulgent. We played a bunch of songs off the new album first, and they just never got into that frenzy. The crowd was flat, and we feed off the crowd, so we got kind of flat.
It was a seated venue and, with Tesla, it’s always better if the audience is standing, because they are rowdier and more into it. We started the show, and the vibe from Hammersmith wasn’t how we remembered it when we played with Def Leppard three years earlier. The crowd was subdued, and the energy wasn’t happening. Frank sat down Indian style in the middle of the set facing Troy, because the crowd was lame. I don’t think the band was aware of the magnitude of that gig. No matter if the audience is shit, you’ve still gotta throw out all the energy you’ve got. The show was terrible.
Mensch came backstage and said, “You’ve just fucked your career in Europe.” Our agent, John Jackson, just had this ghostly look on his face.
The next morning, Ross Halfin called me and said, “You were shit, you need to change your set. You need to open with ‘Cumin’ Atcha Live.’ You can’t play so many new songs that nobody knows.” We had eight shows left in the UK, so we rearranged the set, and the remaining shows were great. But for some reason, from this one show, the press deemed us self-indulgent and boring. It killed any momentum we had built up in Europe during our previous visits.
Peter and Cliff didn’t want us to go back to Europe after that trip because they didn’t believe we could make money there. What could we do except come back sixteen years later and play an amazing gig at the Shepherd’s Bush in 2006? It was probably the best gig we ever did in the UK. Now every time we go back to Europe, we play great, and the reviews are good. We’ve sold out a lot of the shows on our own and went three years in a row. Some fans had been waiting since 1987 to see us. But it definitely wasn’t as big as it was in America.
When we got back to America, we did our first and only headlining tour of arenas and amphitheaters. The whole thing lasted about twelve months. Jeff got better on the road. He got healthy and stopped being erratic like he had been in the studio. Maybe it was because he wasn’t around the people who were supplying him with drugs. He did have a couple of meltdowns where he said he wanted to quit the band, but those passed quickly. Still, I always felt on that album and tour that the rug could be pulled from under my feet at any moment. I never felt secure in the band after Psychotic Supper, even though we were at the height of our career with our last-ever platinum album. It was all elevating my stress level.
So now we were legitimate headliners. On the Poison tour we had hired Howard Ungerleider to be our road manager and lighting director. He had been with Rush forever. Now that we were touring as top dogs, he was able to get us really nice hotel rooms at the Ritz-Carlton and the Four Seasons and so forth.
The whole show production was now under our control as well, but as a band we were pretty much hands off. We had a great lighting director and sound engineer, and we let them design the light rig and the PA. We didn’t really pay attention to what that cost. We didn’t get ripped off or anything, we just didn’t get involved.
We released five singles and made five videos for that record. It was the pinnacle of our career. The tour was successful; we made a lot of money. We were known, it was a good time, but it was also a bad time because you could see that things were starting to fall apart. We weren’t hanging out together like the early days. We were doing two-hour-and-fifteen-minute sets, which put a real strain on Jeff’s voice. That was insane. We should have never put that on him. We weren’t thinking about what we were doing to him, and he didn’t want to let anybody down, so he was trying his hardest.
There was an incident in Battle Creek, Michigan, at the first show on the tour. Peter Mensch came out to see us and was going to spend a week with the band, hang out, and critique the show. The acoustics were terrible in the arena, and the band wasn’t in a great mood afterwards. We got into this discussion in the dressing room, and all of a sudden Jeff starts having a go at Peter. He gets into this kind of manic state of mind and yells that he doesn’t give a fuck about hit records, and it escalated from there into a huge argument. Peter said, “You guys are fuckin’ nuts,” and left. We were shooting a video on tour, and that’s all on tape.
Another time Cliff came to Shreveport, Louisiana, to have a band meeting, and same thing; Jeff started having a go. Cliff just looked at us and said, “You guys are unmanageable,” and left. I think management was thinking, “This is becoming a lot more work than it should have to be.”
After the Psychotic Supper tour, we came home and told Cliff and Peter that we needed some time off, and they were cool with that. We’d been doing this for six years, and we needed a break. It was 1992.