The first thing I ever worked on as a producer was a 58 Fury demo that I did with Frank in 1988.
I used to go to Oasis on Sunday nights, which showcased new artists, looking for talent. So 58 Fury was there one night doing all this old stuff like Faces and the Stones, and all this cool rhythm and blues music. They did a great version of “Heartbreaker.” I thought, Wow, that’s really cool, they’re going back to the ’70s. It was the stuff I grew up on, not Ratt or Mötley Crüe, which is what most cover bands were playing. The band was Ned, Chris, Virgil, Brett, and Darin Wood. The drummer was a guy I nicknamed “Scrumble Bum.” I started hanging out with them. I remember giving them Humble Pie tapes, turning them on to stuff I thought they’d like but didn’t know about. I thought Darin was a super cool dude. We hit it off. I got real close to Virgil as well.
I invited the band to make some tapes. I wasn’t that confident on my own, so I asked Frank to help, and we produced it together. The gear we used belonged to Waylin Carpenter from Steel Breeze, and we worked at Harbor Studios in West Sacramento. That was John Wiseman and George Gosling’s place. I gave the demo to Steve Clausman and he loved it. He loved old R&B: Little Feat and all that stuff. Steve got them a deal. They never made a record because they fucked it all up, but that’s where Darin and I developed our friendship. A few years back they got back together and did a few shows, and when Tesla played Thunder Valley, I had them open up. Because they were from South Sac and I felt this kinship to them, I wanted them to play a really big show. They kicked ass.
I started producing on my own when Tesla broke up, and I created Soulmotor. That was out of necessity. I got some gear and started recording in my house. Dan McClendon used to engineer and help me. I just gravitated towards it and started to dig it. I still enjoy it. It’s like a drug addiction. Once you get into it, you start buying all this equipment. You go crazy with it.
I built a little studio in my bedroom, but outgrew the space, so I built a proper studio at the back of my house. On one of the drives that Tesla was making from Sacramento to the Midwest to start a tour, I was sitting in the back of the lounge with my bass tech, Marco Bustos. A talented guy, he was also a general contractor. He said he could help me build it, so we drew up plans on the back of a napkin. I had been in enough recording studios to have a working sense of basic design.
He built houses, and I’d been in a lot of studios, so we just started researching and designing. This was going to be a two-story building out in back of my house. The lots downtown are really deep with an alley along the back. I had a garage on the bottom facing the alley, then a small kitchen, lounge, and office. I had another room that was originally a small satellite control room, but I converted that into a bunkroom with six beds, so I could have bands from out of town stay at the studio.
The studio took up the entire upstairs. Just about half of the upstairs were the recording spaces, and half was the control room. I knew I was going to have to get a Neve console, and I found one that was owned by Dominic Frontiere, who did orchestral arrangements on the Tubes’ first album and the ’60s TV show The Outer Limits. He also did the music for Clint Eastwood’s movie Hang ’Em High. We mixed Into the Now there, recorded Forever More there, and half of Real to Reel.
I took Built by Stereo through the whole process of learning to write songs and recording. Lots of people came and worked there including Papa Roach, Pat Travers, and the Deftones.
While I was mastering the Soulmotor and Built by Stereo albums in New York, my life changed. I was using one of the top mastering engineers, George Marino, and both of these sessions were on my dime, so I wasn’t staying at the Four Seasons. My bed was in a little shitbag hotel in Chinatown. I had Tesla’s road manager, Jimmy Dean, with me in the double occupancy room. That’s what a cheap bastard I can be.
As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.” That’s about as true as it gets. The second day in the mastering lab, my wife called. She was very upset that our cat had brought in a mauled squirrel, and she didn’t want to deal with it. She didn’t know if it was dead or alive. I called Marco to go over to the house and get rid of the little rodent. After finishing the session around six in the evening, Jimmy Dean and I grabbed some dinner before heading back to the shitbag to turn in early. Tesla was beginning a short run of shows in Michigan, and we were on an early flight out in the morning. It was around four in the morning when the phone rang. Only my wife would call me at that time, and only if something was seriously wrong. Sure enough the screen on my iPhone read “Monique.” In my waking-up fog I could only imagine it was another zombie rodent issue. It was one in the morning in Sacramento. What the hell?
Pressing the Answer button, all I heard was Monique screaming incoherently. I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I was trying to get her to calm down when I heard sirens in the background, quiet at first, but getting louder by the second. Monique was freaking out; she didn’t know what to do. “Fire!” I finally heard her yelling. “Fire!”
I said, “Take the fuckin’ dogs and get out of the fuckin’ house. We got insurance!” What the fuck? Was this really happening? First and foremost, obviously, were Monique and the dogs. They were going to be OK. But my Victorian house and studio—was I about to lose everything? I was three thousand miles away, and I felt confused and helpless. Talk about an anxiety trigger.
I gathered my thoughts and did what, in all the chaos, seemed like the most sensible thing. I called back and spoke with one of the firemen. “Look, it’s a recording studio; try to get everything you can out of there, my guitars and stuff, but especially the hard drives.” And they did. They saved tons of shit. They tried to save the console. It could be fixed, but it would be more to fix it than to buy another.
I asked him, “Is my house in danger?” I said, “Whatever you do, don’t let my house burn down.”
And he said, “Well there’s embers flying onto your roof and your roof is wood shake, which is dangerous.” I said just keep water on it. So there was water damage in my house. They blew the roof off. Those water hoses, they doused it. Water went straight into my attic and came down. But still, they did the best they could, and I was thankful.
Jimmy got us both the first flight back to Sacramento, and we raced over to the scene. They were able to save the house, but the studio was a complete loss. Most of the gear was completely fuckin’ ruined. Some of my guitars were OK, some of them were more fucked up. The insurance company wouldn’t pay me on my guitars; I fought with them for two years, and they wouldn’t pay. I said they were my personal property. No, no, they said they weren’t my personal property, they were business property. They said because I played music they were all in the studio, and I’m like, “No, they’re mine. So you’re saying if I’m a race car driver, and I have a race car, every other car I have aren’t my personal cars but are the race car company’s?” They waited me out and won; good old State Farm Insurance, any insurance, they just try to fuckin’ grind you down. I beat ’em up, I got a lot of money out of ’em, they just wouldn’t pay for my guitars. They paid for two of them, then they said fuck, we’re not paying for any other ones. They paid for the Hofner, and I still got it and it’s all right. I was able to get it restored, and I had a few extra bucks left over. People were hearing about the fire around town; people were coming over, and it was on the news. “The rock band Tesla’s studio burned down,” not Brian Wheat’s studio, but whatever, I didn’t care.
This guy, Mike Brown, was holding court, talking to all the news people like he was our press agent, “Well this is going to set the band back.” The whole thing was surreal; this dude’s holding court with the fuckin’ news people in Sacramento, my wife’s freaking out. When she left, she ran across the street. Out of everything in the house she grabbed a pair of sunglasses and two pairs of jeans and ran out with the dogs. At least she got the dogs.
I was numb. It was just like I was in a trance. I walked in there and saw all this devastation…fuuuccckkkk. I was almost paralyzed; I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t crying or freaking out, I was just like blown away, what in the fuck? You don’t know what being displaced feels like until you have a fire like that. All my stuff, everything that was in my house, in my studio, on the property, went to this big warehouse in West Sacramento, and it was under lockdown. The insurance company took this entire inventory, and they were assessing what was and wasn’t damaged.
They never thought it was arson, or I did it, or anything. The insurance company just didn’t want to pay on anything. I remember meeting the adjuster, and all my guitars were there. They all smelled like smoke, some of the necks were fucked up. And he said, “These are a complete loss, total loss.” I said OK. Waited two years, and they didn’t cover them. One thing I gotta say is if you have a fire, hire an independent adjuster, don’t use the insurance company’s adjuster. I had this guy, Richard Csaposs, who found all kinds of stuff in my policy for me. He was worth every penny I paid him.
I wasn’t able to get in my house right away; I had to go play. I’d missed another gig. I called a local bass player, Dan McNay, and said “Look, can you go cover for me?”
He said, “I can only do one show, Brian.”
I’m like, “OK, I’ll take whatever you can give me,” so he went and did it. Jimmy took off and met the band, and I flew out the next day. Dan knew my stuff because he had filled in for me when I got sick with colitis. That’s the three shows I missed: one for the fire and two for my autoimmune disease.
The insurance company rented us a loft down at J Street, and we stayed in there with Bonnie and Clyde for about six months. Then they rebuilt the house, and then it was like, well, what do I do with this back building where the studio was? I remember Troy telling me, “One day you’ll look back on this, and you’ll think it’s OK.” I didn’t know what he meant at the time, but now I know. I was better off after the fire in a lot of ways. I got to build the studio properly, this time with a designer. I got to do it at a different location. My first studio had a lot of drawbacks. It was in my backyard, it was on the second floor, and people who would just be visiting me were still at my house—too close to my personal stuff.
What I liked about it was I could go from my house into my backyard to work in the studio. Monique was thirty feet away. If there was a problem I’d come running in; fifteen seconds and I’d be in the house. Now when I go to the studio it’s ten blocks away, so I come home by one o’ clock in the morning; I don’t stay there until six, seven in the morning like I used to.
I didn’t get my stuff back for a year. I had to assess what was salvageable. They wrote a lot of it off. Tesla recorded Twisted Wires during that time. We recorded some stuff at Frank’s place and then we mixed it at Sonic Ranch. That fire was in 2010, and we’re sitting here talking about it in 2020, and I still got half of a three-thousand-square-foot warehouse full of shit from that fire that hasn’t been gone through. Some of it’s good, some of it’s shit that needs to go to the dump. Some of it’s been on my new engineer Jack’s plate. We still got the Neve console. We’re going to salvage parts off it. There’s just tons of stuff. What do I do with all this shit?
One simple thing caused all this. Somebody was barbecuing in the apartment house next door. No one got hurt, that was the main thing, and that’s what I told Monique—this shit’s all replaceable. But it was very depressing. It was like a death; you’ve put so much time and effort into it. Until I got the new studio up and running, I couldn’t produce anything or anyone. That took three years. I didn’t have a portable rig then like I have now. The technology wasn’t practical in 2010.
Once I got over the shock and was able to think clearly, the fire actually gave me the chance to correct a lot of things that weren’t right with the studio. I knew that I wasn’t going to rebuild the studio in back of my house. That was a big thing. It was going to be on the ground floor. That was another big thing. And then there were a whole lot of things to do with the electrical and the acoustics, the way the recording room and the control room were arranged, the materials in the walls and ceiling. The new studio has a clamshell over the Neve. That is an acoustic diffuser that keeps sound from echoing off the ceiling.
When Marco and I first looked at the building where the studio is now, I didn’t think it would be big enough. The place had been a photo lab, so it was divided up into offices and a few bigger rooms where they had the developing tanks and printers and stuff. Marco then suggested that I buy a warehouse, and we’d build the whole studio as a building inside the warehouse. He said it could be modular, so if I ever wanted to move it, it would come apart and could be moved to another warehouse. That’s some Magic Alex stuff there!
I leased a 3,500-square-foot warehouse in an industrial area of Sacramento. Half of it was for Tesla’s equipment, and the other half was for the studio. We started building the studio using all steel framing. I was using insurance money from the fire, and I put about $10,000 into this steel framing. It was looking kind of hokey, and I started having doubts whether I wanted to even have another studio. We talked about building a portable rig, just a control room that could be moved, but that didn’t go far.
I found a piece of land, an empty lot downtown that was at the end of a street right next to a new housing development. It was zoned commercial, so I called Brian Clausman. Brian had been into real estate for many years at that point, and we agreed to look into building the studio there as well as practice facilities and maybe even a music store and other stuff, a whole complex. Marco was still into the first building, the ex-photo lab. He kept telling me it was big enough, that he could make it work. I went and looked at the building again, and this time I could see what Marco was saying, how it could work. So I switched gears and committed to the photo lab.
Brian and I then decided that we’d put condos up on the empty lot. I couldn’t do both at the same time, so Brian loaned me $400,000 to get the studio going. We ran into a snag on the condo lot, because we needed to get an easement from the business next door to tap into their sewer line. Otherwise, we would have to run our own line all the way down the street, maybe a half-million dollars’ worth. The dude didn’t want to do it, so that project stalled out, and we just sat on the empty lot.
The owner of the photo lab building had a run-down bungalow right next door, and he would only sell them together. He suggested I tear down the house and use the area for studio parking. In the meantime, I had rebuilt the building in back of my house as a detached extension of the house but using the same paint and construction materials. I had to go around and around with the insurance company on all the destroyed contents of the studio, but they had paid right away on the burned building itself.
The Victorian house had a small kitchen. In 1896 when the house was built, kitchens were not the social centers they are now. So on the ground floor of the back building—I called it the Barn—I built a proper kitchen and a bedroom. On the front half of the second floor I had a theater/media room/man cave and, in the back, a gym and also a sewing room for Monique. So I had a bit of a renovation bug, and I wanted to fix that bungalow up. But the studio had to come first.
I hired Vincent Van Hoff to design the rooms. Marco and I had done the designs ourselves on the old studio. But room tuning and acoustics are very important in a studio, otherwise, you can’t trust what you’re hearing. So I learned from that and hired a professional to design the new studio. It turned out to be one of the last designs Vincent did, as he passed away soon after.
The first studio always had weird little electrical gremlins, being on the old downtown electrical grid, and we didn’t do a great job on the grounding; we didn’t isolate the circuits as well as we might have. We straightened all of that out in the new place.
Because I was planning on producing other bands, most of whom would be from out of town, I built three bedrooms, each with two beds, and a kitchen and dining area. Just recently though, my new house engineer, Jack, had some ideas about how to put those rooms to better use, so we converted them into a couple of mixing rooms and a storage room for mics and other gear.
Once the new studio was up and running, I didn’t have a lot of time to do other projects because Tesla was taking up most of my time. I went through several guys as producer/engineers who didn’t work out, and then finally one guy ripped me off. While I was out on tour, some amps, mics, and other gear went missing from the studio. When I got back I couldn’t get hold of him. It turns out the gear had been hocked. I changed the locks on the building to keep him out. I should have had him arrested.
The very day that happened I found this great guy, Jack O’Donnell, to run the studio. He came in to see me and brought a condenser microphone he had built. That was impressive. He had great ideas for the studio, he’s mellow and creative, and he wanted to rehab a lot of the damaged gear from the old studio. So I brought him on, and he became the house producer, engineer, and marketing guy. He still does it all. When we were in doing Shock with Phil producing, the engineer we were using couldn’t make it in one day. Jack just took over and never let go. He finished the album. I just want to keep the studio busy, and Jack is doing just that. You don’t really make a lot running a recording studio, but I own the building and the gear, so that’s where the value is.
The trick of the recording art today is knowing when a song or album is finished and then leaving it alone. I’m not a fan of vocal auto-tuning, which is very popular. You need to be able to sing in tune, otherwise, what’s the point? Anyone could do it, but it sounds unnatural. I had a girl in singing on a session, and she wasn’t hitting notes. I wanted her to redo those areas, and she said, “You can just auto-tune them.” When I told her that I don’t do that, she started crying. She got butthurt. Not everyone is cut out for this business.
I do grid drums a lot. That means that I manipulate the drum performance for the rest of the band to track to so that the performance is absolutely in time. There is just no room for even the smallest unintentional drift in meter. Otherwise, the bass is always trying to lock to something that’s off. You can’t have that. Records today are sonically huge, and the smallest shift in those fundamental things really stands out against the competition. On the other hand, I don’t ever grid guitars. I like to let them sway if it makes for a good feel. The same with vocals.
That’s today’s market. That’s just the way it is. And that’s why I’m not thrilled with Simplicity. The band was dead set against gridding the drums. I think the sessions for Real to Reel down in Texas got everyone thinking about going old school, but in order to compete with Kid Rock, Matchbox 20, or Train, that wasn’t very realistic. It really bummed me out.
On Forever More we used my first studio for everything. Terry Thomas stayed at my house, and we brought back Michael Rosen to do the engineering. Michael had a great feel for the band and was easy to work with. Although one time he did get on my nerves; I’m not always as patient as maybe I should be. While I was tracking the bass, he said it sounded like I was out of tune. I said it sounded fine to me, and Terry agreed. But Michael wasn’t having it, and I told him to just shut up and press the record button. I’m sorry Michael, that’s just me.
There’s no money to be made putting out records anymore, not for most of the bands at our level. The whole business model is backwards from before 2000. It used to be that you toured to support album sales, now you put out records to get people out to the shows. Selling merchandise at shows and through our website brings in money too. So expenses on the road are a major concern now; it can make or break a tour. We couldn’t survive without income from touring.
There’s a logical path that’s hard to avoid for a young band that gets signed and has success. You start with no money, no real concept of what it means to have money. Then you get a lot of attention, you get fans. Now you’re a celebrity to some degree. Then maybe you start getting the money. Then you pass the peak. Now you have to be smarter or else. All these things put you through changes, and your character either pulls you through, or you sink or burn out. I know; I’ve lived all of that.
I never thought I’d leave Sacramento. I was born there, raised there, my family is there, my band is there. I own a beautiful Victorian house there, and my studio is there. But there are several reasons why I moved to Texas in 2017. There isn’t one that is more important than the others; it’s really the sum of them all.
One thing is that there is no state income tax in Texas. My tax rate in California is no more than 10 percent. That’s a lot of money. Another thing is that Sacramento has developed quite a homeless problem, especially in the Midtown area where I live. I find human shit and piss around our house a lot. Our garbage is always thrown all over from them digging through the garbage cans. They even try tapping into our electrical box! Monique is scared all the time when I’m not there. She can’t go out around there at night anymore.
Another thing happened back in 2012 that probably had a bit to do with my estrangement from the Sacramento house. Both Bonnie and Clyde died that year of old age; they were both fifteen years old. When Monique and I got past that, we found another brother-and-sister pair of Jack Russells, Spanky and Darla. It took a while to feel like I could accept them. Spanky and Darla weren’t bred as domestically as Bonnie and Clyde, so they were kind of going stir crazy with the small yard they had to romp in.
I belong to this Victorian homeowners group on Facebook. While I was on tour in 2017 I saw this beautiful Victorian house for sale on the group. The price was $2.5 million, and I thought, Well, I can’t afford that. But the house was beautiful. I looked at it again later, and I realized I had read the price incorrectly. It was $250,000 not $2.5 million. That got my attention! This stuff I mentioned above was going through my mind, so I called Monique and asked her if she would consider moving to Texas. She was all for it since she grew up near Dallas, and it was like going home for her.
This house, in Baird about twenty miles west of Abilene, was 5,500 square feet, about 1,500 square feet bigger than the Sacramento house. In addition, it had a detached garage with an apartment above that. It was on an acre and a half of land. Spanky and Darla were so high-strung that we couldn’t even take them to a dog park, or any park. They would just go crazy, yelp, and try to fight other dogs. So this house would have a ton of space for them to run around.
The lifestyle in Sacramento was great when I was in my thirties and forties, lots of places to go drinking and party, including my house! But I’m in my fifties now, and I still spend six to eight months every year on the road. Now when I come home, I want more space, not as much noise and traffic. I only ever went about eight blocks from home in Midtown; I’m pretty much of a homebody. It’s about the same in Baird, only the blocks aren’t full of restaurants, bars, and clubs. I have to go about five miles to the next town, Clyde, to get some food. If I go twenty miles, I’m in Abilene, which has a population of about 120,000, so they have anything there.
It’s better for my health in a number of ways. Just the general energy level of life in Midtown always got me kind of fidgety; it was tough to get into relax mode. I eat healthier in Texas because I can’t just walk two blocks to get a heavy meal or fast food. I can’t even get a pizza delivered!
We make our meals at home much more than we ever have. I like to cook. Anyone who’s seen my Facebook page has seen pictures of me grilling up some fine food. The diet on I’m on now, called the HCG diet, has me eating more chicken and fish than beef. I dearly love a good steak, but I’m cutting back on the cow. The veggies I can eat are asparagus, broccoli, mushrooms, cucumbers, zucchini, and tomatoes.
A big help when losing weight is that your stomach shrinks so you don’t eat as much to get full. You can’t just gorge; you have to be sensible. Full means full. I have a weight coach, and she encourages me when I’m hungry between meals to snack on protein, like a chicken breast or grilled fish. On this program even fruits are not that good for me after the morning, so I won’t even eat an apple after breakfast. From lunch on it’s all veggies and then the meat for protein, but no pork or lamb and no organs, like liver or kidneys. I wouldn’t eat that shit anyway. The beef is always lean like a filet mignon or flank steak. Porterhouse steaks or ribs are loaded with fat, so I won’t eat those.
The only member of my family that I’m close to is my older brother, Buddy. He’s seventy-one as of this writing, and we get along great. I’m trying to get him to sell his house in Sac and move out to Baird. Right now he’s in the apartment above the garage, but you can get a lot of house here compared to Northern California. Buddy always looked out for me, so I want to repay him for that and have him around. I like to travel with him, and we enjoy going over to Italy when we can. Besides, I’ve already found him a girlfriend in Texas!
I think I’ve got something of a “Winchester complex.” Sarah Winchester was the widow/heir of the guy who invented the Winchester rifle, which, when the American West was being settled, was the rifle that was most widely used. Sarah, who they say was a little wiggy, had this guilt complex that the family fortune came from something that killed thousands of people. She had this crazy idea that if she kept adding rooms to her house that those souls would find peace. There are 161 rooms and forty-seven fireplaces in the famous Winchester Mystery House, which is in San Jose, California. I get where she was coming from!
There are some things I want to do with the house, not that crazy though. The kitchen needs to be bigger, so that will push the exterior walls out about eight feet or so. I want to put in a pool and a well. Also a storm shelter. Then there’s the whole new building for the recording studio and theater. There is one slightly crazy thing. The sky is so clear in Baird that I want to build an observatory.
I’ve developed a real love for photography, and I’ve found that I’m pretty good at it. When I reconnected with Ross Halfin in 2008, I started messing around with it. Ross and I did quite a bit of traveling during the time after my studio burned down. Ross always took this little Leica camera with him wherever he went. I don’t think he takes a shit without that camera. I got a Leica myself, and Ross started showing me how to use it. Then I got a Nikon, and Ross gave me a D3S. I use that bad boy mostly now. I really like shooting landscapes and architecture. Occasionally, I’ll take pictures of people, but usually only in exotic places, like Thailand or Italy, where the culture is different.
I try to go to Italy three or four times a year. I’ve been going for fifteen years now. It’s just so beautiful. It’s a place where I can relax and recharge. The pace out in the country is so much slower. I don’t have to be “that guy” over there. Nobody cares about that.
I started vacationing in Italy in 2005. We played Milan in 1991 with the Scorpions, but that wasn’t what got me interested. One day I woke up, maybe it was 2006, and I was watching that show, Rome, on HBO. I got really intrigued with Italy. My family’s from Italy; I saw the movie Under the Tuscan Sun. I just decided one day, I want to go to Tuscany on vacation. So Monique and I, and my brother and his girlfriend at the time went over. And when I got there I found this place that was magical to me, this villa. I knew Tuscany was the region I wanted to go to, but I didn’t know that much about Italy. I got there, and it just spoke to me.
I wanted to go back, over and over and over. It was like a magnetic attraction. I could not resist, so I kept going to the same place, and I found that I would go there before a tour to gear up for the work year and then at the end to decompress. Christmas or October, always. If the touring cycle was from April to September, then we’d take off October through February. Usually in March we’d start again. I’d go decompress in October for a week. It was like my sanctuary.
I went to this villa that a family named Poro owned. Michela, Mateo, Miko, Marta, Maximo, and Maria. Maximo is a molecular scientist. He invented the vaccine for spinal meningitis; he’s a pretty heavyweight dude. I guess he’s pretty wealthy, so he built Michela this villa as a business to rent out. Michela and I became good friends because I kept going back. She’s like a sister to me. Their family’s like an adopted family to me, Monique, and Buddy. And then I was like, I need my own place. In the back of my mind I started thinking about when I slow down, I want to spend three or four months a year in Italy.
At that point I’d like to have my own house instead of going to their place, which is beautiful, and great, as they don’t charge because I always bring people to fill the place up. They love me, they love me like family, and Monique and Buddy as family as well. But I just wanted to get my own place. So now we have our own villa in Tuscany, about a mile from their villa. The family lives in Scrofiano, and I live at the bottom of their village in Fontecchio, and the villa’s in the village over in Rigomagno. And Michela and her brother live in Siena.
It’s a peaceful place; I can go there and not have to worry about the pressures of being in Tesla or anything. People can’t get to me. They can’t call and say, “I need something,” because I’m fuckin’ gone, nine hours ahead of everybody; you’re half way around the world, and I’m able to really relax there. People live a lot slower there. At two o’clock, they take a siesta, a three-hour lunch, till five o’clock. They go home, eat, fuck, drink, sleep, whatever, and then go back to work. There’s a difference between dinner and supper in Europe; you eat dinner about nine-thirty, ten o’clock. In Italy, you eat late, but the big meal is lunch.
My Winchester complex will probably follow me to Tuscany. I’ve already kind of maxed out the main villa, but I have another piece of land across a shared private road. Over there I will build a garage and a small guest house. I’ll put a gate and fence around it, and that’ll be where you park the cars. But recently I spent a year redoing this one, remodeling two bathrooms, a kitchen, a living room, putting in a bunch of sprinklers and fences and new security cameras. Surveillance man, I have to see what’s going on, like Scarface.
Now the Sacramento house is fairly empty, and my primary residence is in Baird, Texas. We made the move, and I’m glad we did. I’m not going to get rid of the Victorian; my plan is to rent it for three to five years. The way it was set up, it was a single-family house. It was built in 1895 by Mr. Hill, who was a prominent buggy maker and had a lot of money. Unfortunately for him, the automobile came into common use around the turn of the century. That was the end of the buggies, and he lost a lot of his money. He divorced his wife and moved up to Loomis and started a pear farm.
Mrs. Hill stayed, she obviously kept the house, and she and her two children lived in the downstairs part. They turned the upstairs, where there were four bedrooms, into two apartments: one bedroom, living room, and a little kitchenette. Downstairs are two parlors, a dining room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. So I turned it back into three apartments, like she had it, and I’m renting them out. The back house, the Barn, I’m going to turn into two Airbnb apartments. There’s still stuff being stored there in the gym and the theater room. Jonathan, one of the guys who works with me, is living in the downstairs part of the Barn, he and his lady, India, and getting the upstairs ready for rental.
I was going to redo the whole basement in the Vic, which would have added eighteen hundred square feet to the J Street house, and in that basement was going to be a huge gourmet kitchen, but I bought the place in Italy instead, and there went that year’s budget for Winchester disease.
Baird is nice. Our new neighbors are coming over, offering help, bringing us home-baked pies and things. No one ever did that to me in Midtown, and I lived there twenty-two years. No one ever came over and said, “Hi, I’m your next-door neighbor.” So it’s kind of nice, I like it. Eventually that will all settle down, and there will be a familiarity with everybody, and I’ll know how much I like it here. I know, deep down in my heart, it’s a good thing being here. I definitely want a quieter lifestyle when I’m not on tour, and I like having a big yard for the dogs.
Just saying “dogs” isn’t easy because of what happened a few weeks after we settled into the house. Spanky and Darla were having a gas playing in their new big yard. In preparation for the move, we had gotten them vaccinated for rattlesnake venom, because in West Texas that’s what you should do. One day just before Thanksgiving in 2017, a rattlesnake got in the yard, and Spanky and Darla, being natural born hunters, went after it. Darla got struck three times and died on the way to the vet. Spanky was struck once, but the snake had used most of its venom on Darla, so he survived. Monique was right there when it happened and was just devastated. I don’t know if she’ll ever get over it completely. Because I had to hit the road for a while after that, I felt like I needed to hide my guns. I was that worried about her. I had one of her close friends fly out for a few days to be with her. Darla and Spanky killed the snake, by the way.
Not too soon after the move to Texas, I started to experience weakness in my right hand. It looked initially like it might be my neck, something serious. Tesla was going to South America in December of 2017 for some shows with Deep Purple and Cheap Trick, and I didn’t know if I could play. After several MRIs and different doctors’ opinions, it turned out to be a nerve impingement in my shoulder. I had some physical therapy done and it subsided, so I was able to go.
Before I left, Monique found a Jack Russell puppy in Paris, Texas. It was going to be ready for adoption in about six weeks. We said OK, great. Then while I was in South America, Monique saw another puppy online that looked a lot like Darla. Now she wants this one as well. I’m kind of in a fog by this point. Two, three, six dogs, whatever. I just want to see my wife smile again, right? So when I get back from the tour, we drive to Dallas to see this second dog and bring her back to Baird. We named her Thelma.
As I said, for the past several years, Monique and Buddy and I always go to Italy for Christmas. This year we were going to take Spanky and Darla. We got the emotional support animal papers so they could fly with us. But now it’s just Spanky, and we can’t take Thelma; she’s just too young. She stayed home with the housekeeper, Brandi. We were just licking our wounds, so to speak.
When we got back, we went up to Paris for the first puppy. We named her Louise. While we were there, Louise’s brother came trotting out and was just the cutest little guy. This was Alfalfa. I wasn’t sure if Spanky would accept a new male dog in the house. But it seems to be working out fine. Spanky lets the puppies know when he doesn’t want to be bothered, but it’s just a little growling, nothing physical.
In addition to the big move to Texas, I grew a lot creatively around 2017. I had been traveling all over the world both on tour and on vacation, oftentimes with Ross. Basically, I would mimic what he would be shooting, from landscapes to landmarks, and one day he said to me, “You know, you have a good eye.” I told him I didn’t know shit about the technical side of photography, but he continued, “That doesn’t matter. You have a good eye for composition, which is a very important thing.” That made me feel pretty good. Shortly after that we were on the Monsters of Rock Cruise, and I saw Rick Allen was on board selling his paintings. I’m an enterprising guy, always thinking about business, so I tracked down the head of the Wentworth Gallery, Christian O’Mahoney, who was on board helping Rick facilitate the on-ship gallery.
“Hey man,” I said to him. “What are the odds you might want to take some of my photographs and create a gallery so that fans might be able to purchase them?”
He explained to me, “Look, these are really good photos that you take. But I do fine art, not photography. Sorry.”
The next day he tracked me down and seemed to have had a change of heart. “I have an idea,” he said. “I really like your photos. Would you consider painting on your photos?” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
“I’m not a painter,” I said.
“Look, you don’t have to be a painter, per se,” he said. “You can enhance your photographs by painting right on top of them.” Once we all got back home, I sent him some of my images, and he sent them back after having had them produced on a variety of services like metal and canvas. I liked the canvas best. So I started painting on top of them. Monique had taken some art classes, so she had a bunch of easels and paint. Once I sent a couple of samples back to Christian, he said “This is great. This is something I can definitely work with.”
What makes the works so special is that even if I use the same photo, I never paint on the same photo the same way, so each piece of art becomes completely unique, a one-of-one. It’s really like stress therapy for me. It helps to ease so much of my anxiety on the road. After you have a sound check, you’ve usually got four, five hours to kill. So I started going into my dressing room, burning some incense, playing some Beatles, and painting. I mostly use acrylics, because I find them more forgiving, along with paint pens, colored sharpies, and some other things. I’ve had a number of exhibits in galleries and on concert cruises. The first piece I ever sold was to a woman who had never even heard of Tesla, which made me feel good. I know fans like these pieces because it helps connect to them to the band. But I’ve also had a lot of people who know nothing about rock ’n’ roll come up to me and say they like the art for what it is. Wentworth represents other rock stars like Paul Stanley, the late Ric Ocasek of the Cars, and Mickey Hart from the Grateful Dead. They even rep the renowned artists Peter Max, Michael Godard, and Romero Britto. I am honored to be in all their company.
I started something else that has become very important to me. As I’ve written here, there have been times when I attempted to manage young, up-and-coming bands and produce the records. It never really came together the way I wanted it to, but in 2017 that all changed. I decided it was time to really take the idea seriously of creating an entertainment/management label that would let me act as a one-stop shop for young bands. I would develop young bands, write songs with them, produce them in my studio, engineer, and even manage them. Hell, I had been managing Tesla at that point for ten years, so I knew what the hell needed to be done. Starting my own label just seemed like a natural progression. I had learned from so many guys over the years, except none of those guys were really musicians (except for Terry Thomas). To me, a producer especially is much better at the job when they are a musician, because they speak our language. They can really get something out of musicians because they know what they’re talking about. I got Jimmy Dean to help me launch J Street Music Group because he’s so smart and hard-working. Away we went. So far it’s been a really great experience for both of us. It’s a lot of work, but it’s something I think I can really expand in the future. I think I provide a service that is so top-to-bottom, and I have so much experience in all these areas that I’m qualified take a band and help shape their future at every level. I like hard work, so I love all the shit. I’m all about the ability to diversify. I may not be able to play bass in a band for the rest my life. But I’m always going to want to be creative. So whether I’m painting, taking photographs, or helping guide the way for the next hot band, I will never be stagnant creatively.