I first met Brian Wheat in 1986. I was in NYC, and Peter Mensch (Manager to the Stars) told me he’d just signed a new band from Sacramento and asked me to shoot them. His words were, “They need some direction, and hide the bass player at the back.” So I met up with what looked like a group that had styled themselves at Walmart. They had no clue and were just annoyingly naive and completely uncultured. We walked around, and as I do, I’m trying to get some form of connection, and there was none. The only one who seemed to have any idea of what I was trying to do was the bass player; the others just followed me moronically. At one point I lined them in the back of a meat truck, and as they were lined up a black woman appeared in a robe. She opened it to reveal that she was naked, grabbed one of her breasts, and said something like “I’ve just had a baby, any of you want any milk?” She squeezed her breast, and a stream of milk shot out. She then offered to blow all of us for ten dollars each. Me being me, I was like, “Why don’t you fuck off?” The band looked genuinely excited at the prospect, far more than being photographed by me, but none of them had any money, and I was asked if I could come up with twenty dollars. Taking charge, I’m like, no. I called Mensch up afterwards and said, “I never want to see this band again.”
Of course, they ended up being the openers on the Def Leppard Hysteria tour, and I still didn’t like any of them apart from the bass player, Brian, who I started hanging out with on most of the tour. In fact, if I went out it was always with Steve Clark and then Brian would come along. I ended up shooting Tesla in England when they first came over. I did sessions for them on the West Coast, and in Los Angeles, even a weekend in Sacramento where Tommy Skeoch decided he was Keith Richards, which meant he took as many pills as possible and turned up the whole weekend falling down drugged and drunk. On the last day I saw him at the bar, I took him aside and said, “Why are you doing this?”
He looked at me and said, “I am Rock ’n’ Roll.”
My actual reply was, “Rock ’n’ Roll? You’re just a stupid cunt.”
Jeff Keith had arrived by then and was like, “Hey, don’t pick on my brother Tommy.”
I said “Enough, I’m done,” and I’ve never seen him since. Brian, who by now had had enough, looked at me and I went berserk.
He said “Honestly, I’m trying.” I ended up not shooting Tesla again for years, but we always stayed friendly, although from afar.
I went through a really bad personal period in 2006, and out of the blue Brian called me, whom I totally did not want to talk to, but he could tell that I was not in a good space. Much to my surprise he got on a plane and came to England and stayed with me as a friend. Let me point out that in my business, I can count my real friends on one hand. Since then we’ve become very close. I’ve spent a few Christmases with him in Sacramento and London, and we got into the habit, which I’m rather pleased with, of picking somewhere in the world and going off to it, places like Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, Japan. The only thing wrong with traveling with him is I like to get up at dawn, and he thinks the day starts at 3:00 p.m. My other great passion in later life is collecting vinyl, as does Brian, which we both seem to have regressed to our youth, listening to bands we grew up on. Although he’s still trying to make me like the Beatles, a band I loathe.
Let me just finish with this: in anyone’s life there are very few real friends, and Brian is truly a real friend of mine, someone who I can always count on.