The summer of 1979 was going to be a big one for me. I was going to do my first American tour with a real band playing live music. Outside of the two shows I had done back in Florida and at the Astrodome, believe it or not, I still had not performed a proper tour with a band, and now I had one, which included Jimmy George, Don Cuccini, Tommy Sexton, Richard Cole, and Bobby Donati. This one was going to be grueling—basically nonstop for several months all over the country, and up into Canada as well: Six Flags Atlanta, the Mississippi State Fair, the Montana State Fair, the Indiana State Fair, the Kentucky State Fair, the Canadian National Exhibition, Six Flags Dallas, Kansas City Worlds of Fun, the Illinois State Fair, Busch Gardens Virginia, the Washington State Fair. See the theme? Lots of state fairs. The Scottis were smart when it came to this. In my opinion, they didn’t want another fiasco of having to cancel the tour due to slow sales and have to put me back in the hospital. So instead they decided to book most of the shows at state fairs. It made perfect sense. State fairs had built-in audiences every day. For the price of their entrance ticket, people would get to see the show for free. That meant I would always have big crowds.
Around this time, Parade magazine unveiled a huge cover story featuring me and Shaun Cassidy. The headline read, “The Boy Next Door Is a Millionaire.” What’s interesting is that even though Shaun worked closely with Michael Lloyd, who had certainly helped shape my music, we’d never met. In fact, to this day I have never met Shaun. We were always getting pitted against each other on all of the teen magazines, almost challenging girls to take sides. But there were obviously enough teens to support both of our careers.
I was ambivalent about the tour. On the one hand, I was excited about finally being able to get out there day after day singing music in front of crowds, developing a stage persona, and even getting to cover some of my favorite tunes by Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. Maybe this is how I would finally be taken seriously as a singer. But wait. Not so fast. The ubiquitous Jim Haas would also be on the road with us, no doubt with a much “hotter” microphone than mine to make sure all of the notes were in the right place. Michael Lloyd had been telling me that he thought I was becoming a better singer, but clearly I couldn’t hold my own yet. But I was getting better.
Would it be obvious out there onstage that my voice was not the most prominent one? Would I look foolish? Would I be exposed as the fraud that I thought I was? That’s what scared me. That’s what intimidated me about going out and doing a full-scale tour. Nevertheless, we hit the road in May, and it became one of the blurriest periods of my entire teen idol experience. We would usually play two shows a day, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. Right out of the gate, I learned that the problem with that was that one show was going to be better than the other. There was no way around it. It was almost impossible to go out and deliver your best in two complete shows. It was asking too much. That said, after the first couple of shows, I didn’t think the audiences were going to care that much. The audience was full of lots of screaming girls who were super excited to be in the same place I was.
There wasn’t much time to screw around on this tour. We would hit a town, play the shows, hop on a plane, and get right to the next city. It wasn’t like the way most bands would tour—with their own bus or anything like that. This was pretty much plane to plane and out. I could bring a girl back to my hotel room, but this tour was less about that and more about grinding it out.
I think the guys in the band were very skeptical about me too. Once again, these were seasoned players who found themselves backing a singer I’m sure they knew wasn’t really a singer. But they were good sports, they were getting paid, and hey, there’s nothing like being on the road with a band. At the end of the day, it’s still just a bunch of guys out there having a great time, checking out pretty girls, and basically living the life. I have to say though, it bothered me that we couldn’t function like a true band. I was always being hustled in and out through private entrances and exits, and oftentimes was isolated from the guys.
One aspect that kept me apart from the band at times was that I was still doing a ton of press on the road. I would get into a city and do a bunch of radio and newspaper interviews while the guys in the band had some time off to either go explore or have some fun. I was basically booked out the entire time. In terms of the crowds at the shows, I felt the love, whether it was coming from the front row or the back of the grandstand. It didn’t matter. My audiences and I had our own communal thing going on, and it was positive; everybody seemed to have a good time.
The Scottis also had a pretty smart merchandising setup by then. Fans could buy key chains, wallets, programs, and so on. That was something you didn’t see a lot of back then, lots of items besides just T-shirts, and I think they had great foresight in understanding that once fans were there with their parents at the state fair, there was plenty of disposable income to be had. Now, did any of that money make it back to me? I don’t know. I’m not blaming the Scottis; I take responsibility for my irresponsibility and not asking the questions, but I still wonder to this day if I ever saw any of the merchandising money generated.
One thing I remember about the tour was how frustrating it was to be tucked away backstage all day at a state fair without being able to go out and enjoy what was going on. Hey, I was a teenager. I loved going on rides and eating junk food. I loved checking out pretty girls. I would’ve loved to go out and blend into the crowd and hang out and have some fun, but obviously that wasn’t possible. Occasionally fans would climb up on top of bleachers to try to get a peek of us backstage, and when they did, we heard the screams. To kill time, I always kept a soccer ball to kick around, or we would throw a football, and I usually had a skateboard with me too. That way I could have some fun and get some exercise in, because otherwise, it was sort of like being trapped backstage in a cage. The guys in the band could wander around, but not me. It wouldn’t be safe for anybody.
Something else I noticed on tour was how much work it is to go out and perform every day. That was a grind I had no experience with. It gave me a lot of respect for all of my rock ’n’ roll idols. And even though most of the guys I looked up to did a lot of drinking and drugs, they still managed to go out and put on amazing shows day after day after day. I’m sure, subliminally, that gave me permission to believe that it was okay for me to still do those things too. But on the road, I kept things a little bit cleaner than before—for one reason, because I didn’t have access to everything anymore, and for another, I needed to be in good shape every day. I would smoke pot and drink with the guys, but it didn’t get much crazier than that. It had already been such an insane year, with the television show and the trips to Japan and throughout Europe.
I had started doing some commercials—including one for Idaho Potato Sticks that ran in Japan. I was doing ads for sneaker companies and clothing companies. And now I was spending this summer performing all over the United States. Many fans today tell me this was the one time they had a chance to see me in concert because it wound up being the only American tour I ever did during my teen idol days. If you saw me sing back then with a live band, this is when it would’ve happened. I love hearing memories from fans about this tour. A woman told me recently that she had thrown her shoes up onstage in, I think, Illinois. And she remembered that I was holding them up looking for who threw them because I knew she would need them to get home. She caught my eye, and I had one of my bodyguards take them to her. I so enjoyed watching the fans in the audience on this tour, and I tried to be very careful in giving them everything I had. If we were leaving one of the fairgrounds or other venues and I saw fans waiting late for a glimpse or an autograph, I would not leave until everybody had what they wanted. I would pose for thousands of photos and sign just as many autographs. The band would be waiting and my tour manager would be freaking out that we were going to miss the next plane, but I didn’t care. If people had taken time out to come see me, I was going to do whatever I could to make their experience that much more special.
Recently I heard another fan’s story from this tour that stuck in my mind. She was just fourteen years old when the band and I were rolling through upstate New York, near Niagara Falls. She stole her father’s truck, loaded up her girlfriends, and drove to the concert and sat in the front row. Can you imagine that, being that determined at fourteen years old to make a dream come true? It’s mind-blowing. But that’s the kinds of things fans would do. And I loved them for it. Not that I would encourage anybody to go steal a vehicle to come see me, but in hindsight, it’s pretty impressive.
As if I wasn’t stretched in too many directions on tour, something else came up in the middle of that summer: I got booked for an episode of the TV show CHiPs, playing—what else?—a singer. This was going to result in the cancellation of several shows down in Florida, which was a reminder of what had happened when I’d been placed in the hospital back in 1978. But one simply could not miss shows that were being promoted by the all-powerful Y100 radio station; it was a problem. Marsa Hightower, the Scotti brothers’ publicist, was brought in to run interference, and she issued this statement on my behalf:
I was so upset to hear that the concert was canceled, because I consider Miami my second home. I had my attorneys contact the producers of CHiPs and an agreement, as of today, has been made with them. They were advised that I would not be able to shoot for two days and I have secured permission from them to go ahead with the Miami concert. Love and kisses to everyone, Leif.
Although I would be appearing in Miami, I had to reschedule two other concerts that conflicted with the CHiPs shoot days, in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Evansville, Indiana. To make all three shows in two days, I had to fly back to Los Angeles after the Miami show, film CHiPs the next day until nine o’clock at night, then head back east on a private plane. The CHiPs shoot was a blast, as I got to drive a red Ferrari 275 GTB long nose—twelve cylinders, black leather interior—a perfect car. In one dramatic scene I was speeding along a part of the not-yet-opened 210 Freeway in Los Angeles, and the producers had to call for a second take. “Leif, slow down; the highway patrol needs to catch you in the scene.”
Why do I have this running theme in my life with cops, real or not?