The Return of Tesla—
Why the Fuck Not?
In 1998, three years after Tesla split up, I had a New Year’s Eve party and Jeff turned up. He’d cut all his hair off and looked really good. What I didn’t realize was that he’d been in jail after being busted with crank. He got thirty days in the hole. Part of his sentence was that he had to do twelve-step meetings, stay clean and sober, and get piss tests. We were both sober for the first time in many years.
You could see he was lonely. I felt really bad for the guy. You could see that he had to deal with a lot of shit that he’d never dealt with before. It was like old times. If there were any weird vibes, it was over that night. We started hanging out together. I was keen to rekindle our friendship.
There’s a radio disc jockey in Sacramento by the name of Pat Martin. He used to come around my house a lot and was really supportive of Soulmotor. He was always asking if I ever thought of getting Tesla back together, and at the beginning I would say, “Absolutely no fucking way!” Jeff was out with his band Bar 7 with Skeoch, and Frank had his own band. We weren’t mad at each other anymore. Eventually I was like, “Well, you never know, it could happen. If everyone was in agreement, I would do it.”
One night Pat came over and said, “What would you say to Tesla playing at our big yearly radio festival?”
I said, “I’ll tell you what. If they all say yeah, I’ll do it. But it’s got to be the original band, it’s got to have Tommy Skeoch in it as well.”
The thing is that Jeff was having the same problems with Tommy in Bar 7 that we had with him in Tesla. One day I get a call from Jeff about seven in the morning. I’m like “What the hell? Hey Jeff, what’s up?” He’s live on this radio station on the East Coast, which is three hours ahead.
He said, “Hey Brian, I need Frank’s number!”
I said, “Get me off the radio and I’ll talk to you.” Tommy was all fucked up again, and Frank ended up playing on the last three weeks of a Bar 7 tour. When he got back, Frank told me that Jeff was still in good shape. So after hearing that, when Pat came around and asked about a reunion, I was much more open to doing it. He said that he wanted the band to do it at Arco Arena in Sacramento. I said, “Dude, that’s like eighteen thousand people. I don’t know if we can do four thousand people.” We’d been away for almost five years.
He said, “Trust me, if you get back together, you will be able to sell out the arena.”
All I could say was, “You’re fucking nuts!”
In the meantime, Jeff was getting married again. He asked me if I knew who did this song called “I Love You,” and he sang a bit over the phone. There might be two dozen songs with that title, but I thought it could be one by the Climax Blues Band. Jeff said, “Yeah, that’s the one. I want to play that at my wedding.”
I said, “Tell you what, I’ve got a proper studio now. I’ll get Frank and Troy, and you can sing it; your wife will love it!” So that’s what we did for our first get-together, and we wound up putting it on the Twisted Wires album.
Everyone agreed to do the show, and after a few phone calls we scheduled a rehearsal. We did the first two days without Jeff, as he was in England doing press interviews for Bar 7. The first two nights were just the four of us. The first song we played was “EZ Come EZ Go.” After the last note faded out, we were jumping up and down, high fiving each other. It sounded like we’d never stopped playing. When Jeff got back, we rehearsed for a couple of weeks. We did an in-store appearance, and two thousand people showed up. All the local news stations were running stories about Tesla getting back together for one night, and sure enough, we came close to selling out the arena.
It was a pretty highly charged night. It was heavy seeing all these people come out who weren’t there in ’95 when grunge happened, and there was this love and support for Tesla. It was really emotional for me; I started crying before the first song. They were running this film going through the history of the band. We were in the back, and you could hear the whole arena rumbling, and it was like, “Oh my god!” None of us had felt that since we broke up. We did the show, which was good, and then we went back to my house and had a party. Tom Zutaut turned up; there were a lot of good vibes in the room.
While we were rehearsing, Jeff came over to me and said, “Maybe we should do some shows. Let’s go out for two or three weeks. We could all use some money.” I was cool with that. I was getting ready to make the second Soulmotor album at the time, so I was up for it. We agreed to do a three-week tour. We put the tickets on sale and quickly sold out every show. After that we thought, Fuck it! Let’s be a band again. Why not?
It was that simple. All it took was doing a show, and someone extending an olive branch. We weren’t pissed off with each other anymore, and everyone was up for it. You would hope that everyone was over the silly bullshit that broke the band up in the first place, the drugs and acting stupid. Some of us had spent and lost their money. To have that taken away was a very humbling experience. You realized that you weren’t the shit. You were just in a band, and you were lucky to have a career that lasted that long and still have a fan base that would support you. Unfortunately, later in the story it becomes apparent that one of us never got it.
I called Cliff Burnstein and said, “Hey, Tesla is back together, are you interested?”
He said, “No, I’m not into nostalgia.”
I said, “OK.”
Then I asked Mensch if he was interested, and he said, “If you write great songs I might be.”
I was like, “Didn’t we write great songs before?”
He said, “You gotta write great songs now.” Thompson and Barbiero said the same thing. I thought when we put the band together that we’d go back to Bearsville, like the first record, and the whole team would be ready to go. I quickly learned that they weren’t ready to go because they didn’t give a shit.
We tried a few managers, but no one could manage the band the way I wanted it to be done. The problem was that I had learned too much through the years and was having to tell managers what to do. If I had to tell them what to do, why should I be paying them? Any new manager who came in on the backs of Peter and Cliff was making money on something that was established fifteen years before. They’re not looking at what the band needs to do now that’s new, or creative ways to repackage us. None of them thought like that.
When we were on tour, the famed record executive John Kalodner turned up one night and asked us to sign with him and Sony Records. I’m like, “Why should we sign with you when we can do it ourselves and make six dollars a record versus your two dollars?”
He went, “You know you’re right, you could do that, but you wouldn’t have the machine of Sony Records behind you.”
I’m like, “What’s the machine going to do for us?” These guys wanted to put us out with the old bands, and Tesla wanted to be associated with groups like the Black Crowes.
There had been a formal dissolution of our relationship with Q Prime some years prior. Tesla, the partnership, always owned our logo, the brand, the symbols, the icons, the unique spelling of the word Tesla, all that stuff; we still do. I guess that’s something that doesn’t necessarily always happen, so, to Peter and Cliff’s credit, they made sure that we owned that stuff going forward, even when they weren’t going to be involved. It wasn’t like we had to re-invent our brand.
They had a long sunset clause in the contract, a slow fade-out of their commission. We paid them, and I don’t begrudge paying them; they earned every dime they ever got from us. I was a little disappointed that they didn’t want to work with us again, but that was just natural because I thought they were the best, and I still think they’re the best, but I’m over it. I wouldn’t want to work with them today.
We needed to hire another lawyer, and we went back to Peter Paterno. We went back to his office, but we didn’t have him, we had his underlings, and they put us all back together like Humpty Dumpty. We’re back up in it now, and the machine’s been running for seventeen years. Longer than the first time around—almost twice as long. It happened so quick, the first time around. That’s what the machine can do when it chooses.
It’s become a career now; it wasn’t a career back then. It’s funny, every night on stage Jeff says we’ve been together thirty years, thirty-one years, minus those four bad years that we were apart. We’ve learned now how to cohabitate, and if we get on each other’s nerves, we don’t want to break up; it’s like, “Look, we’re going to do this ’til we fuckin’ die.”
I was talking to Tom Lipsky, who had signed Soulmotor to Sanctuary Records, and I said, “Tesla is back, would you be interested in doing a record? I want a fifty-fifty deal on the royalties.”
He said, “Yeah, I’ll do that.” He came out to see us, and we ended up doing a two-record deal. One was a double album called RePlugged Live, which started out as a live album, but everyone kept going into the studio and fixing and re-recording things. It came out on September 11, 2001. What a day to release a record, right?
The rationale behind RePlugged was to celebrate getting back together and to make up for the fact that we had never done a proper live album. It was a great idea. We should have thought, “We’re back together, it would be cool to put out an album of the live reunion, not a quick product that we rush out.” But we didn’t think like that. I think like that, but as a group, we don’t. The Five Man Acoustical Jam was so raw, and so attractive because of that, but RePlugged couldn’t stay that way. I think it was because some of the guitars started to sound out of tune, and then Roger Summers was there, and he didn’t come from the Tesla school, so he had kind of planted in our brain that we needed to make this sound amazing. We should have stuck to our guns. Look what happened with Five Man Acoustical Jam.
Troy was like that too. Troy’s never liked a record we made until ten years later. It’s like, “That record didn’t sound good,” then ten years later he’ll tell me how amazing it is. That’s just Troy’s character; he was on the negative thing. Jeff didn’t want to re-sing anything, and they kind of made him re-cut some vocals. We recorded a bunch of different shows, and then Troy got involved because he was worried about his drum tracks, picking songs because it was a good drum performance instead of a good band performance. He was too focused on what he was doing. We were letting Troy take the reins, and that was a bad move.
We should have just picked the best performances, which is what we did on Mechanical Resonance Live. Frank and I picked the performances, and I mixed them. We just told Troy, “Here it is.” We didn’t care if the drums were great, as long as the performance on the whole was good. All Troy cared about was the drums. He said, “The drums were great. You guys can overdub.” That’s where that whole overdub train of thought came from on RePlugged Live. We should have just found the tape that was, on the whole, good, even if the drums weren’t perfect. It was all based around Troy’s drums. Sometimes he gets into these things, and we allowed him to get into it. It’s as much our fault for allowing it as it is his for suggesting it. We could have said no, but we were trying to be all peace and love, “Hey, we’re all back together, let’s respect and love one another,” all that happy horseshit, instead of doing what was right. I’m always preaching, “Let’s do the right thing no matter what.” If there’s three out of five in favor of it, that’s what we need to do. Not this unanimous decision, ’cause it wasn’t unanimous. I can’t listen to RePlugged; it’s terrible sounding, it’s all high end, it’s not live, that wasn’t the real performance. There was other stuff that we recorded that was better.
After the album was finally put together, we just kept touring to support it. Next we started working on our comeback album, Into the Now.
Now I had added all this Tesla responsibility and stress to go along with the Soulmotor load. I had occasional bouts of colitis, some worse than others. When a particularly bad episode flared up, the gastroenterologist put me on prednisone, which is a synthetic steroid. I was on that for three months, and in that time, I gained about fifty pounds. I didn’t really think about the weight gain or connect it with the prednisone, it just seemed to be there one day.
Although Tesla was back together, it didn’t mean the situation was stable. It was quite the opposite, actually. We still had our big egos and demons, and I always felt like the rug could be pulled out from under me at any time. One big argument had done it in the past, and that could be all it would take now.
So I’m doing this balancing act between having colitis attacks or being on the miracle weight-gain drug prednisone. Both sides sucked. On top of that I was still drinking heavily, partly as an escape, partly because I’d quit doing drugs, and a young man just has to have a go-to vice. Mine was Scotch.
During this time Steve Clausman was married to a woman named Rosie. His health was in decline, and he had a couple of bad incidents, a couple of open-heart surgeries. He was laid up in his living room for a long time, hooked up to tubes that were pumping juice through him and electrodes exercising his muscles. Steve’s kind of a tough guy to live with, and when he got back on his feet, Rosie couldn’t take it anymore. In 2002 Steve called me and said, “Rosie threw me out, and I’m sleepin’ on this guy’s couch.” Monique and I used to hang with Steve and Rosie all the time; they’d come by when they were in Sacramento.
I said, “We can’t have him sleeping on that couch. If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be in this house with all this shit.” So I told him he could come move in with me and Monique, and he stayed about a year and a half.
Steve always had a tendency to rule over whatever situation he was in. He cut down some of Monique’s camellias, and it was game on. You don’t mess with Monique’s garden. He went out there one day and decided they needed trimming. It pissed her off, but she loved him and he loved her.
“You know,” his son Brian had told me, “Hide your Home Depot card if Pops moves in with you. He’ll piss you off sooner or later.” It was no big deal to me, but it was a big deal to her.
Then he started rearranging the kitchen. That was Monique’s territory as well, and I told Steve, “Hey bro. You gotta go live in Southern California, down to Brian’s place in Newport Beach.”
We loved him like a dad. His diabetes got bad. There were a couple of times when he lived with us and he had attacks; he was starting to lose toes. They were cutting this toe off and that toe off. His health was deteriorating, he got tired, and I think he threw in the towel. To be honest, I think he just said fuck it, went in hospice, and said, “I’m not taking any more medication.” He literally got tired of being sick all the time and on medication. I think everybody’s got a certain point they set in their head and say, “If it gets to this, that’s it.” It was weird because that whole last week, when he was doing so bad, he wouldn’t talk to me; I couldn’t get him on the phone. We were going to go down and see him. I don’t think Steve could do it. It was too much for him. He died on his son Brian’s birthday.
I’d speak to Brian every day, “What’s going on with your dad,” this, that, and the other. The old man was the closest thing I had to a dad, outside of my godfather when I was a kid. I wanted to please him, and I was happy when he was proud of something I’d done. It’s that kind of thing. I could tell that he was proud of me and what I did. He and I had a pretty interesting relationship. One time he pissed me off and I said, “You ever wonder why you’ve been married five times? Did you ever think maybe it was you?” I could get in his ass, and he would listen, but that took years and years and years. But we loved him, especially Frank and I, till the day he died, the old dude. He’d come and see us play in LA.
We cried when he left. When he was here, he just hung out. He was past that stage of going out to look at bands; he would play me stuff in his room and say, “Hey, come listen to this.” He didn’t go out. When he came to live with us, it was the last part of his life. The dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, loved him. Clyde always used to piss on his bedroom door because Steve wouldn’t let Clyde into his room. Steve was kind of finicky about how he had his room and stuff. So Bonnie and Clyde had a little bed in the kitchen, and his bedroom was right next to the kitchen, and he would shut the door, and Clyde would piss on it.
I remember one time I was in Italy and I called him. He’s like, “That fuckin’ Clyde.”
I’m like, “What happened?”
He goes, “That fucker pissed in front of my door. I went out to get a drink of water, and I slipped and fell on my fuckin’ ass right in the middle of the fuckin’ kitchen.”
I said, “Clyde was saying, ‘Fuck you, you’re not going to let me in the fuckin’ bedroom, I’ll piss on your door.’” Clyde pissed on a lot of stuff. He was my boy.
Steve taught me, Frank, and Jeff how to work. When we were under him, man, we were rehearsing eight hours a day, five days a week, cutting his fuckin’ grass, raking his leaves. You’d go up there and live with him, and he’d feed you, and he taught you, “Nothing’s free in life.” He was into mentoring people. I think he was a good mentor. I never really talked to him about business. When I first met him, we all thought he was rich, and the next thing you know he’s fuckin’ broke and living up in Foresthill. So I don’t really think he was a businessman. He said, “I’ve been rich and poor three times in my life.” Well, that’s not good business. What did he see in City Kidd that was special? He saw Jeff Keith; he knew Jeff Keith was a star. He knew Frank was a star, and he was absolutely right about it. He could see talent. He couldn’t really put his finger on how to describe it or whatever, but anyone he ever worked with, I understood why he worked with them. He saw something in them. He could have been a great talent scout because he could recognize raw talent, he just couldn’t develop it. He would piss people off because he was so blunt and acted like he was a drill sergeant. When you’re a young kid that doesn’t go down too well, but you need that.
We didn’t appreciate it at the time, but we do now, especially me and Frank; we dealt with him more than anyone. Jeff was there, but he didn’t spend as much time with Steve as we did, and certainly didn’t spend the time with Steve after we fired him like Frank and I did. We both say that a lot of who we are is because of Steve Clausman. In some sense, he’s a little like a Brian Epstein. He saw things in us but didn’t know quite how to relate to any of it. I think he had the heart of an entrepreneur; he wanted to be his own guy, his own boss, even if it cost him.
I think once he got a bunch of money, he got kind of wild. I remember when he had two Porsche 928s, he’d give you the keys and say go take a ride, bring it back tomorrow, crazy stuff. But you don’t get that and then lose it by having good business sense. He was up and down a lot. But he was a generous motherfucker. He would take whole bands out to dinners and get you hookers. He was good hearted.
I knew a side of him from living with him when I was a kid, then a real vulnerable side of him when he lived with me the last part of his life. When City Kidd was working with him, we were his family. Jeff and I stayed up in Foresthill. We were up there doing household chores, and then going to Auburn, to our rehearsal place. That’s how we worked our rent off. He taught us there’s a price for everything, you have to work. We didn’t mind. I remember being sick and having to go to the doctor. He was like, “Go to the doctor.” I didn’t pay for it, he did. I didn’t have health insurance. He was good like that.