By 2007 the industry had completely changed. The one thing I feel we never got a fair shot on with Sanctuary was being able to take a song and work it like a single should be worked—getting airplay on new outlets, creating innovative promotions, trying to broaden our audience, stuff like that. They were working Tesla based on the laurels, not our new music. Now, having our own label, we didn’t have to ask anyone to do this. We could spend money where we wanted to on the tracks we wanted to and not have to get approval from some fuckin’ record company.
When we were on tour in England in 2007, we reconnected with Terry Thomas. He came to a few gigs, and everybody was happy to see him. So I asked him if he would be up for doing another Tesla record, one where we wouldn’t be all fucked up, out of our minds, and falling apart. He was up for it, so we started working on demos for Forever More. We were writing and recording at the same time, and it took five months to make. At this time Jeff was preoccupied with problems with his second wife and not contributing much to the writing process, but I don’t think anybody was tripping on it. Terry co-wrote all the songs with us. At this point we didn’t care where the songs came from as long as they were great.
Hindsight being twenty-twenty, the only problem from a financial point of view was that writing songs in the studio can be expensive. I love working from scratch, but it can be costly, and when you get into running your own label you’ve got to do things with a budget in mind. Today I’m very conscious about the money we’re spending. We did spend some time writing and rehearsing before we went into the studio, but it was nothing like the old days when we had every note basically finalized. That’s not to say that things wouldn’t get changed in the studio, but we would have everything coming in.
When we finished the record, we went out on tour in the States doing twenty-five hundred- to four thousand-seaters. Things were different with the band. We were more stable and weren’t worried about one of us fucking things up. It was a really good time. We also went to Europe to do some festivals and club dates.
Business-wise, things ran smoother. We were running our own management company, merchandise—everything! All the work we did on our own I’m really proud of. That’s not easy to do. Before, we would get a small piece of the pie. The biggest change was that we weren’t selling a million records anymore, we were selling a hundred thousand. But we were making more money than when we were selling a million records because we had turned Tesla into a cottage industry. We were being smart about how we spent our money; it was all very focused.
We were sitting at the top of this new organization, thinking we were the Beatles and Apple. But Apple went down the tubes, and we didn’t want that. Once we were running the show, we found out how lucrative this business can be and how to work it to keep costs down. Making records, and the mechanics of promoting records, was fun. I enjoyed it. But doing that and managing the band while trying to be a bass player and write songs just got to be too much.
I don’t think my songwriting suffered, but when you do anything in this business, it takes something out of you. You don’t come out unscathed, whether you become a drug addict, or get an autoimmune disease, manic-depressive, whatever. It’s not a stress-free environment, and I had a lot on my plate. I was also producing this young band, Built by Stereo, and I still had Soulmotor responsibilities.
The processes of recording Into the Now and Forever More were similar. We rehearsed some before going into the studio but didn’t have everything locked down or even completed. The big difference was having Terry Thomas producing on Forever More. I like different things about those two records. I think the songwriting was better on Forever More. Terry had something to do with that. But I think Into the Now is better sonically. The mix is better. It was our comeback album. It sold around two hundred fifty thousand records, so it was really important that it sold well, otherwise, there might not have been a Forever More or anything else.
I think Frank would say that Into the Now is the better record because we did it ourselves. Frank likes Simplicity as well, which was not on par with Forever More or Into the Now. That’s not to slam Frank. He’s more of an organic guy, and I’m more of a production guy. There wouldn’t be a “Love Song” without Frank. I’m, frankly, more of a manufacturing guy; I have to really work at my craft. With Frank, it just flows out of him.
The title for Into the Now came from one of the songs. It wasn’t a big statement that Tesla was back or anything. That was a coincidence. But Frank and I used to joke that the skeletons in the grave on the cover of Forever More were us. That’s how we’d be buried when it came time.
Our lawyer, Shawna Hilleary, called one day in 2008 and said Universal wanted to put out a Greatest Hits album. They have a series of those called Gold. I asked if it was in the contract that Universal had inherited when they bought Geffen some years before, and she said, “No, you don’t have to give it to them.”
I asked, “Why should we?” But it was kind of like an anthology and covered a lot more than Time’s Makin’ Changes. So we decided OK, we’d give it to them. They’d done this Millennium collection already, which was a ten-song, pretty-as-tits disc that did two hundred thousand copies. Millennium was just a shorter version of Time’s Makin’ Changes.
We didn’t have to do this third one, but I figured they’ve got the catalog, and there’s all this cool stuff like “Ain’t Superstitious” and “The Ocean,” which weren’t on any Greatest Hits album. Gold would include some Into the Now songs. Gold seemed like it could be a great compilation album. We were involved in picking the tracks, Ross Halfin did all the photos, and it was a double album. But Universal fuckin’ didn’t do anything, didn’t market it, or provide any support. I don’t know if that’s typical for that series, but we shouldn’t have done it. We got kind of fucked on that. We got our mechanical royalties and stuff at least. We thought we could have done a better job with Tesla Gold on our own label.
There was a three-CD set called Power Surge that Geffen put out in 1987 after the first album that was all hard rock stuff. Whitesnake, Guns N’ Roses, Sammy Hagar, and Y&T were on it. It was basically a compilation of all the rock bands on Geffen. We had four tracks on that! That was kind of interesting being packaged with those veteran bands. It was the first time seeing our material with somebody else’s like, “Tesla is as good as these guys.” It was a radio promotion release only, but you can find it on eBay.
Geffen released Power Surge 2 in 1989. We had three tracks on that one, including “Rock the Nation.” Geffen was great back in the day. They were the biggest, baddest fuckin’ label on the planet. They drilled everything home, even Bust a Nut, even though it only did seven hundred thousand copies. To be able to do that at the height of the grunge movement is pretty amazing.
During the Forever More tour I sat down with Frank and said, “We should record a live concert and put out a DVD,” as we hadn’t done one since Five Man Acoustical Jam. I got hold of the Record Plant mobile truck, and we filmed a show in Minneapolis. Unfortunately, it was the middle of winter, and Jeff had a bad cold. But the video, Comin’ Atcha Live 2008, was really well done and sounded really good. The only bummer was that Jeff’s voice had a little bit of raspiness to it. On the newer songs, there was a growlier, gruffer sort of tone that fit in with the new material. It was more contemporary. It wasn’t about how high his range was. We ended up selling almost thirty-five thousand DVDs, and all we did on the Acoustical Jam DVD was like twenty thousand. So we outsold what Geffen had sold on the biggest album of our career!
Throughout 2008 I managed to lose some weight—not back down to the ’80s–’90s years, but enough that it was noticeable. In 2009 the stress started getting to me again, and I had another bout of colitis, this time severe enough that I had to miss two shows in the Midwest—the only two I’ve ever missed because of my illness. I called up one of my Sacramento homeys, Dan McNay, to fill in for me on short notice. Thanks, Dan! There were days when it was too painful to move around, and I would lay in my bunk in the bus until it was time to play. I’d go out and rock like there was nothing wrong and then go fall back into my bunk and try to sleep away the pain. Honestly, I’ve never been a woe-is-me kind of guy. I’m not into self-pity, in myself or others. We all have our crosses to bear, and this health thing just happens to be mine. I’m a fighter, and I’m about winning. Autoimmune disorder is my opponent. Fuck him.
It’s not that easy, of course. Pain is pain, and it’s a motherfucker when it’s deep inside you like colitis. I get depressed sometimes, but that’s different than self-pity. One thing the depression comes from is not being able to work the way I like to. It’s hard to concentrate sometimes on the task at hand, whether it’s onstage or in the studio. Even traveling on the bus can kick my ass. Sometimes I’ll take a drink to try and kill the pain, but now I get monumental hangovers that can last a day or two, almost like a migraine. I’ve spoken to a lot of different people about depression, many of them doctors. I think the world today fuels the depression crisis that’s going on not just in our country but all of the world. Just too many pressures, many of them brought on by social media. We know that depression can come in many different shapes and forms, so it’s important to monitor your behavior. Persistent sadness that lasts for several weeks is a telltale sign of depression. Losing interest in your favorite things. Finding no fun or enjoyment in life. Losing self-confidence. They are all indicators. For me, it involves increased feelings of anxiety, wanting to go to sleep and never wake up again, and feeling empty, useless, or unable to cope with life. If and when you start to feel any of those things, it’s really important to reach out and talk to somebody.
Because I have this autoimmune problem, I’m predisposed to cancers that effect the digestive system. I have to have a colonoscopy every eighteen months. But I never feel sorry for myself. It’s just the price I’m supposed to pay for this great life and career.
The DVD and shows pretty much took up the next two years, and then we decided in 2011 it was time to feed the fans something new. We had these acoustic sessions that we did with Skeoch and Zutaut in 2005. They were originally supposed to be a part of a boxed set with all these unreleased demos, live tracks, videos, and stuff. It was going to be three audio CDs and two DVDs. We wanted to release it on our twenty-fifth anniversary. The problem was that we wanted to do it on our label with our promotion team, and Universal wanted to do it on theirs. We weren’t going to let them fuck up our boxed set like they’d fucked up Tesla Gold, so we argued with them about who was going to release it, and it halted the project. I think one day we’ll come to some kind of mutual agreement.
At that point in time Universal didn’t own the part of the compilation that Tommy Skeoch was on. They only owned material until we broke up in ’95. So in 2011 we decided to take the recordings of those acoustic sessions with Skeoch plus a couple of covers, acoustic versions, and two new tracks and build the album Twisted Wires. We didn’t go full tilt on it like it was a brand new record. I thought people would be interested in hearing the last things Skeoch did with us, and they weren’t! It didn’t do very well.
Forever More, Real to Reel, and the DVD were all winners on our own label. Twisted Wires was the first release that did not meet the expectations of the band and distributors. Not everything you do is successful, but it has its place; it fits in the grand scheme of things and has a purpose. It’s the truth. There’s a great song called “2nd Street,” and the first thing we did when we got back together, “I Love You,” by the Climax Blues Band, the song we had recorded for Jeff’s wedding. At the time I felt we should have been working on a new record, as it had been almost three years, but Jeff had just had his first child, a son, and was tied up with that. Twisted Wires gave us some breathing room. It was also the twentieth anniversary of Five Man Acoustical Jam, so we were doing acoustic shows, and Twisted Wires fit right into that.
Now it was time to do a new studio album from the ground up. Jeff and Frank wanted to try a different approach. Tom Zutaut said, “Let’s go back and make a record like 1986.” He said we could stay at his farm in Virginia, live and write together just like old times. There would be no distractions. So we did that. Then we went into a warehouse and rehearsed it all, just like we’d done with Mechanical Resonance. We wrote some good stuff, but making the record sound like it was 1986 was a bad call. I was outvoted. I hated it. It was a miserable experience. You can’t go back in time. Make a record like Tesla 2013 is what we should have done, but Tom’s like, “No,” and he was wrong. There’s some really good performances, but, in my opinion, it should have been approached differently. There were sloppy performances, too, and sonically it was just flat.
I thought it was going to be more of a raw approach but with modern production techniques. Instead we went with a Real to Reel kind of approach, but not as good. Because these were new, original songs, the performances were under the microscope. On Real to Reel they were classic songs we were covering. My big problem with it was Tom wasn’t that much of a song guy, so I think there were half-finished things on there. I would have loved to do those songs with Phil Collen and really bring them to their full potential. But it was an experiment; we did it, some people liked it, some people, like me, didn’t. It is what it is. It’s history now.
On our next headline tour we opened up with “MP3” off of Simplicity, but on the Def Leppard tour we were doing our hits. The truth of the matter is when we go out and play these summer gigs with Leppard and Poison, or Leppard and REO, or Leppard and Styx, those people want to hear the hits. Our catalog’s too deep. They’re not there to hear tracks they’ve never heard. They want to hear familiar songs. They want to reminisce. I play to the masses, I don’t play to the few, I want them all. That’s probably where Frank and I butt heads sometimes, because he thinks that because fifty people on the website say they want to hear an obscure song, we should play it for them when there’s ten thousand people in the audience. Well, the other 9,950 want to hear the hits, that’s the majority, and I go with the majority. Always. Call me a pussy, I don’t care, it’s my book.