Tales Of A RATT Read online

  I moved in with the Gonzalez family.

  Tom Gonzalez was a bro, and his family was good enough to give me a place to stay. Bonnie, Mark, Pierre, Alfonzo and Rudy. They were really great people, and were good to me. It made the transition into premature adulthood a little easier to deal with, I'll tell you that.

  I lived there for four or five months, before me and Marty Cory got an apartment together.

  Mum had started giving me the social security money from my dad's death that she got every month. It was supposed to be for living expenses, but being like most things involving the government, it was never enough. It was only like $211 a month, but it helped. I got it until I turned eighteen, and back then, rent was only $190 per month for an apartment. Today, that same place probably goes for $1800. Utterly unbelievable.

  So, I'd have a hundred bucks for rent, and another hundred for food, gas, and beer. Whatever else I needed.

  The apartment with Marty didn't last very long, and when I was eighteen, I moved in with Mum and John Ray. I was there for maybe a year, but after all that time on my own, moving back in with her was not a good existence. She wanted to tell me what and when, and that obviously wasn't going to happen. So, it was really short lived.

  And that's when I moved in with Jeni, Janet McCormick and Nancy English. We got this nice place in Torrance. Three girls and me in a two story, really old house. This was in 1976. It pretty much laid the groundwork for the rest of my life.

  Nancy's boyfriend, a guy named Dennis O'Neil, grew up over in Culver City with a singer named Stephen Pearcy. I had known Pearcy from house parties and such, but didn't really meet with him until we had a party at our place. So, Nancy is to thank and to blame for all the shit to come. Right?

  Sounds logical, I think.

  I wasn't working at the time, and hadn't finished school, so it was time for some heavy decisions.

  But, I was on my way, and I knew it. The decision made itself. My home away from home was going to be a mile and a half stretch of Sunset Boulevard, in Hollywood.

  The Sunset Strip.

  In store autograph signing in McAllen Texas, 1984.

  Over 3000 people showed up! Absolute Chaos!

  Stephen conducting class backstage, 1984.

  4

  The Gaudy, Tawdry Mecca Called Sunset Strip

  The Strip in the late Seventies was something to behold. It was all music, women and seedy brilliance flooded in too much neon and pretension. This was the place I had imagined when Pete moved us out here in 1971. It was everything that it promised to be.

  The Strip stretches from Crescent Heights Boulevard at its eastern end to Doheny Drive on the west, and it was the place where the best music of the time was being played. Every major player who went on to become part of the early 1980's music scene made a run through the Sunset Strip.

  Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, Guns N' Roses, Metallica, RATT, The Doors, The Byrds, Bruce Springsteen, The Seeds, Frank Zappa, and Elton John played at clubs like the Roxy, the Starwood, the Whisky-a-Go-Go, and the Troubadour.

  At night, the Strip was a grotesque slash of neon, where the giant billboards, clubs and sidewalk bars hover over a traffic jam of kids, people-watchers and celebrity wannabes. Everyone was an up-and-coming rockstar, a movie star, a star-fucker, or the kind of kid living in denial who eventually winds up a casualty of the scene.

  I was in the middle of this machine, doing anything and everything I could to make that scene; hanging out at the Rainbow, where you could eat downstairs, then sneak upstairs to the super exclusive club where all the stars and rockers hung out. This was the place where John Belushi ate his last meal of Lentil Soup.

  There was the Whiskey-a-Go-Go, where go-go dancing was born when a chick working as a DJ started shaking her ass in a cage above the floor. It was one of THE places to play if you were a band on the edge of breaking in.

  The Viper Room used to be a club called The Melody Room, and was a gambling joint run by Bugsy Siegel in the 40's. It's also the place where River Phoenix overdosed and died on the doorstep.

  The Roxy was a celebrity water hole that spends most of its time stroking the egos of the people who live just up the street in the Hollywood Hills.

  There was the Starwood, The Troubadour, Gazzarri's (where Mickey Cohen was shot), the list was endless.

  Every night, there were dozens of shows at these clubs, and they were always about the scene. But I took them as a chance to study, too. My new school was the Strip. What equipment were the bands playing on? What was the stage presence like? What was their style?

  It was all about who you were meeting and where they were going. One of the coolest bands on the Strip that never went anywhere was The Wheeze Show. They had a lead singer called The Big K. Dumb name, but completely amazing singer. That whole band was unbelievable. But, they just disappeared into the Sunset scene, and I never heard what happened to them. That happened quite a bit, actually.

  By the time I turned 18, I had already been in a couple of bands, in addition to Slicker. I had been jamming with Juan Croucier for a couple of years at that point. Despite the fact I didn't get the gig with his band Spike, he and I were fast friends. Most of the music scene viewed the two of us as THE new hotshot talent as far as rhythm players.

  I was playing in a band called Airborn, opening for acts like Van Halen, Quiet Riot, A la Carte, and Wolfgang (which later became Autograph). We played the Starwood when Van Halen was still playing cover songs, right on the edge of breaking in.

  Airborn was a pivotal point in my life from a friendship point. It was where I first met and worked with Don Dokken.

  It's a funny story, how I met Don.

  I was delivering pizzas one night in my 1961 Falcon station wagon, and needed to take a piss. So, I stopped at this donut shop on the corner of Aviation Blvd., and the Pacific Coast Highway.

  I recognized one of the dudes inside as the singer from Airborn. I was still in Slicker at the time. The guys name was Don Dokken. We chatted each other up for a bit, and Don said that Airborn was looking for a new drummer.

  It was tempting, but I had to think about it for a while. I mean, I wanted to leave Slicker because it had gotten stagnant and wasn't really going anywhere. But, here was another band, and true, they were playing bigger gigs. But, Don Dokken was twenty-two or twenty-three at the time. He was so damned old! To my seventeen-year-old mind, he was fucking Methuselah! In my opinion, if you hadn't made it by the time you were twenty, you weren't going to make it.

  I went down and jammed with them anyway, and it really clicked. I joined.

  We enjoyed some really strong success in the LA area in that band. There were shows at the Starwood, the Troubadour, the Whisky, and all the Strip hotspots. It was the end of 1976 or 1977.

  I went to visit family in Pittsburgh in Feb. 1978. I came back to find out that I had been replaced in Airborn with another drummer. No phone call. Nothing. Don and I were like brothers. And, I mean that.

  Airborn lasted for about a year and a half. My friendship with Don Dokken lasted for twenty-two years, and it ended badly. More is the loss, but we'll explore that mess as we go, okay?

  I was back to splitting time between my domestic issues, finding enough money to make a living, and looking for that perfect band that seemed to constantly be eluding me. It wasn't easy.

  There were some brilliant musicians in the LA basin, but there were a hundred times as many wanna-be's with no real vision.

  When I was 21, I started going to Pier 52. Mick Mars was in a band called Vendetta, and Don Dokken and I had shared a rehearsal space with them. The guys in Vendetta were all eight to ten years older than me. They were a cover band, and we were originals, doing our best to get a deal.

  They played Top 40, four or five sets a night, six nights a week, to pay their bills. It's a last ditch effort for a serious musician, cover work. But, I was just about to that point.

  Mick was a good guy, but really reclusive. He has some sort of degenerative bone
disease that's just getting worse with time. Tommy Lee set me up to see their show not long ago, when I lived in Houston. When I saw Mick on stage, I was stunned. I don't know how he was even able to tour. My gut hurt for the guy. It really did.

  Anyway, I had been bumping around after Airborn, looking for a new gig. Desperate for one, actually. Juan Croucier and a guitar player named Ron Abrams pulled me in and created this power trio called Firefoxx.

  Great band. It was in very short order that we started playing up around Hollywood in some of the bigger rooms. At the time, Airborn had been a pretty big act, and Juan had been in Spike, so we were able to use some of our popularity to our advantage. We started playing places like the Starwood and the Whisky. In fact, The Knack opened for us at the Whisky. That was in the summer of 1978, and by the end of 1979, those guys were huge.

  Firefoxx was a hot act, but was pretty short lived. The reason being, I let Juan and his girlfriend Shelly, this unbelievable bitch from Palos Verdes, move in with me.

  This chick was an absolute nightmare. A spoiled rotten, rich kid from Palos Verdes. Her parents had flipped out when they found out she was dating Juan; this longhaired, musician Cuban kid; and they forbid her to see him. So, I let them move into the apartment with Jeni, Nelly Herron and me.

  On a side-note, I actually introduced Nelly and Don Dokken in 1976. They started messing around and continued to do so for almost 30 years. They have a great, beautiful daughter named Jessica.

  I never got along with Juan's chick, Shelly. To give you an idea of what kind of person Shelly was, I came home one day and she had rearranged all of the pictures on the wall. So, I moved them back, and bitched her out. She was just staying there. She didn't own the place.

  It was becoming evident that this arrangement wasn't going to work, but I did try to accommodate them. With Jeni and I, we were clean people. We weren't neurotic about it, like Helga on the tour bus, but we liked to keep our stuff nice. When it became clear that Juan and Shelly were slobs, I left a nice, friendly note for them.

  "Let's all help clean up after ourselves, so that the place stays nice.”

  I wasn't an asshole about it, or anything. I was just trying to get my point across without creating tension with a face-to-face discussion.

  I found the note wadded up on the floor later that day.

  It wasn't long after that I came in, and the kitchen was in a total upheaval mess, as it had been many times before, with her and Juan not cleaning up after themselves. I told her to get in there and clean up the shit, or pack up and get out. She went out on the front steps and waited for Juan to get home. When he got in, she was out there crying. I told him, "Dude, I don't know why she's acting like this, but I'll tell you like I told her. I don't mind you staying here, but clean up the mess you make, or move out.”

  So, he moved out. Then he quit the band. A successful band on the rise. But, that was Juan. He was completely unreliable. He would never show up on time for rehearsals, just a complete pain in the ass nightmare. All through the days of any band I ever played with him in.

  We did go demo a tape in Firefoxx, and it was really good. The closest we ever came in that band was when the legendary producer Kim Fowley, who produced the Runaways and others, showed some interest in us. Kim was a trippy dude. I remember he was managing Helen Ready at the time. And, he always referred to women as "stink". We were all over at the apartment one night, and he gets a call. He starts fumbling for the remote, trying to find it. "What's up", we ask? "My stink's on the Tonight Show.” We turned the channel, and there was Helen Ready talking with Johnny Carson.

  In the summer of 1979, cash flow had reached critical mass. I started playing in a cover band, called Rocket 88, named for this old Oldsmobile one of the guy's had, just to pay the bills.

  In the end, it was a good thing. It really helped my playing. You just can't overplay when you're doing five or six sets a night. You'll have nothing left in the tank, come the fifth set. Jeff Naideau, who passed on about three years ago, was the singer / keyboardist; Bruce Bossert was on bass; and Steve Conrad was on guitar. And, we did cover shit. That was the first band I ever went out of town with.

  We went to Albuquerque, NM in Jan. 1979 and did a two-week stint there at a place called Bo Jangles. We stayed at this hotel that had this weird bar across the street with transvestites and shit in it. I'd never seen anything like that, really. Maybe a little, up on Sunset. But even that was still pretty tame. We came back and played all over LA, then went to Flagstaff, Arizona. I was gigging more than I ever had. At five sets a night, I'm lucky my arms didn't fall out of socket.

  Fire Foxx 1978. RATT Bassist Juan Croucier (left), Me, Lead Vocalist and Lead Guitarist Ron Abrams (right)

  Rocket 88 in 1979. We were playing in Flagstaff Arizona here.

  Brother-in-law took this picture while working as an interpreter in Russia 1984.

  5

  Lean Into The Strike Zone, And Take One For The Team!

  Be careful out there. There are things that go bump in the night. Actually, there are things that go 'Give me your wallet or I'll kill you' in the night. - John Larroquette It was through Rocket 88 (named after the old car from the 1950s, Rocket 88) that I wound up sacrificing a full year of my life to the court system.

  We were finishing this two-week run at a biker bar called the Hard Rock Saloon in Long Beach. This was a really rough neighborhood, and our look in Rocket 88 was that of a bunch of skinny rocker guys. Usually, that would have made us targets for some abuse, but the biker's never fucked with us. I guess they figured that skinny rockers are better entertainment on stage than nothing at all.

  In this particular place, there were seldom any fights. They were a "locals" kind of place, and there might be arguments once in a while, but nothing like what I was about to witness.

  It was the final show of the second weekend. We did four sets a night, Wednesday through Saturday, for a two week stint. That week, during the Friday night show, some random black dude came walking in and was dancing at the front of the stage. That was really odd, because normally black guys don't like being around bikers, and vice-versa.

  This guy, it turned out, had a saxophone with him, so he actually got up and jammed a Stones song with us. I think it was "Brown Sugar" or something. He wasn't very good, but it was funny and we were enjoying it, so everyone had a good time.

  As I'm looking out at the club, the bar is straight ahead, and at the left of my vision is the entrance to the front door, and to the right are a couple of pool tables.

  I noticed these two dudes hanging out at the pool tables. One of them really stuck out to me, because he looked like Chuck Daw. Chuck was my bro, but Chuck had an unfortunate habit of getting into trouble with the law. He was a really sharp guy, but not sharp enough to keep his ass out of jail. He had a drug problem which led to him stealing shit and getting collared for it.

  When Chuck would get out of jail, he would just be ripped! He was always a big guy, with huge arms. My bro had some major guns on him, and could flat out fight when he wanted to. But, when he would get out of stir, the guy was a monster. All he had to do while inside was lift weights, and it showed.

  Chuck was a total nice guy, you just don't want to be on his bad side. He would always wear those wife-beater T-shirts and have his hair cut real short.

  There was this guy in the bar, and he had that exact same look. Fresh, prison reject.

  For whatever reason, these two assholes caught the black guy outside after the show and beat the shit out of him. It really pissed me off when I found out about it.

  The next night, those two guys were back. They really stood out from the bikers. The bikers looked like they were bikers. These two guys looked like jailhouse Arian Brotherhood.

  It was at the end of the night. We always started out the evening with "Hello, Ladies and Gentlemen" by Cheap Trick, then we would close our last set with the same song, but change it to "Good night, Ladies and Gentlemen.” We were in that song when this a
ll went down.

  During the song, I was watching this fight break out over by the pool tables. It started, then worked it's way around the bar and toward this fake doorway that was made by the entrance. The thing had been built out of 2X4s and drywall, and was used to guide traffic into the club. When those guys hit that thing, I could have sworn it was going to come down, the thing shook so hard.

  We finished the song, and the ambulance chaser in me came to life. I went outside to see what was going on. The bikers were looking out, and I worked my way to the front by weaving in and out of them. I was a lot smaller than they were, to say the least. When I got out there, I was shocked by what I saw.

  There was a really big guy sitting on the curb, with his arms behind him, holding him up. These two assholes were kicking him in the head, over and over! It was bad enough that the bikers went back inside. They were too scared to do anything. That's how un-nerving the thing was.

  The Chuck Daw look-alike was a guy named David Lee something-or-other. He was the one who was really going off. He was kicking him in the head with everything he had, going, "You motherfucker! Don't you ever touch me!” His buddy kept going, "Come on, man. We gotta get out of here!” He kept trying to pull the dude down the street. David Lee broke away and delivered one more brutal kick to the victim's temple!

  The guy on the curb looked like he had a bucket of blood dumped over his head! It was unbelievable. I thought he was dead, and just hadn't fallen over yet.

  I had this moment where I was looking at the guy sitting there, and seeing myself in his place. Having my head kicked in, with literally no one raising a finger to help. It was a very weird scene. I could honestly feel myself sitting in his place.

  There was nothing I was going to be able to do for him.

  I ducked up the street and followed these two guys on the sly. I'd hide behind cars, or trashcans and wait for them to round the corner, then I would rush up and look around the thing to see where they went. Eventually, they got into a car, and drove away.