The First U.S.
Promotional Tour

In the summer of 1977, when I was still fifteen, Tony Scotti sat me and my mom down and laid out what the plan was for the next several months: basically, lots of travel and lots of promotional appearances. That was the strategy. No real concerts or anything; it was all about radio appearances, mall tours, and generally trying to capitalize on the excitement generated by the teen magazines. That was my audience. They wanted those girls who waited each week for new pictures of me to come out and see me in the flesh. My job was basically to look good, smile, be friendly, sign autographs, and move on, from city to city. Accompanying me on this first major road trip was going to be Tony’s brother, Ben, and another one of my Scotti brothers handlers, Craig Dudley. We would be heading east—starting off down South in Florida and Atlanta and working our way up the coast to upstate New York, then back down the coast again to Florida. We would hit as many major markets as we could, and the real goal was to try to get the record played at radio stations. I was told we would visit with radio programmers and promo guys and that it would be an exciting time for me.

I felt like I was growing up fast. It was going to be weird not having somebody my own age—or even my mom or any family—traveling with me. I wasn’t sure I was comfortable hitting the road with two grown men, but this evidently was going to be my new life. My mom and I were both excited at the idea of my being a rock star, but I’m not quite sure we thought through the way it was all going to shake out. I had been acting long enough that I understood that part of the business. I was fairly seasoned. But this was all totally new for me.

Our first stop was Atlanta, and it gave me a taste of what the next few years were going to be like. As was reported in a local Atlanta newspaper after my first appearance, “Lots of little female hearts beating faster this weekend because Leif Garrett was visiting Atlanta. Leif, for those who haven’t heard, is a superstar of fan magazines, a 15-year-old actor with a full decade of experience behind him and, most immediately, the spark plug behind a hit recording. His rendition of the old rock ’n’ roll tune, ‘Surfin’ USA,’ has moved onto the popularity charts with spectacular speed. The song broke into the top 100 after only one week and release, which is quite difficult because of the tabulation process. Now after two weeks and release, the tune has moved even higher in the rankings.”

Wherever we went in Atlanta, from record stores to shopping malls, the crowds got bigger and bigger, and clearly something was happening there. It struck me just how powerful those magazines were. This was not because of the music; it was because of publications like Tiger Beat. That’s what was drawing the young girls out.

I think I was doing a pretty good job of dealing with the crowds and the attention and being a nice, polite kid with all of the radio programmers, but I didn’t like traveling with Ben Scotti. He struck me as kind of a thug. He had a foul mouth and always seemed to be bullying the people we met at the radio stations. In one of the cities (it may have been Boston), I was headed back down to the car with Craig, but realized I had forgotten my jacket in the studio. I went back up there and saw Ben yelling at the guy—practically threatening him to play the new record. I couldn’t believe that’s how business was getting done. Ben stormed out of the studio and I went back in there, meekly, to apologize for what I’d witnessed. I said to the guy, “Look, do what you have to do; play the record or don’t play the record, but I’m really sorry you had to go through that.” For years to come I’d end up playing that part: apologizing for the behavior of adults around me, whether they were too drunk, too stoned, or just hell-bent on breaking kneecaps to get my new album played.