In The Studio with Redbeard

Tag: top selling albums 1987

  • Motley Crue- Shout at the Devil- Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil

    Motley Crue- Shout at the Devil- Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil

    Even now decades after  their breakthrough album Shout at the Devil, this Motley Crue moment is crystallized in my memory. After appearing earlier that afternoon on my Dallas/Ft.Worth radio show, Motley Crue lead singer Vince Neil now was running from side to side at the front lip of their huge stage during a 1989 stop on their Dr.Feelgood  tour in front of 18,000 Texas fans, everyone on their feet. Motley Crue is ripping through a pile-driving version of “Looks That Kill”, and from my vantage point on the  side stage floor, Vince ran straight at me out onto a wing which extends almost to the first loge of seats just above my head, which are occupied by row after row of dancing, innocent-looking young women. Suddenly, as Neil reached the edge of the stage closest to these wide-eyed young female fans, the girls simultaneously all lifted their tops to expose matched pairs of bare breasts. In that instant, Vince Neil dropped the wireless microphone from his face to his side and, looking down at me in breathless bewilderment and amazement, rolled his eyes as if to say,”Can you believe this is my life?” It wasn’t Spinal Tap. It was pure Groucho Marx.

    Motley Crue as model citizens? Hardly. Harmless except to themselves? Mostly, but not to the friends and family of Hanoi Rocks drummer Nicholas”Razzle”Dingby, who paid with his life for riding with Vince Neil in 1985; or Tommy Lee ex-wife Pamela Anderson, who was kicked by Lee while she held their infant son ( Lee did four months in jail for assault ); nor harmless to the family of 4 year-old Daniel Karven-Veres, who drowned in Lee’s pool during a June 2001 birthday party. Essential to the evolution of rock music? Probably. It’s arguable that without Motley Crue and Guns’n’Roses, grunge bands including Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden would not have had a reason to exist, or at least not in the same rock binge-and-purge way. Likable, funny guys those Crue characters? You bet, in that same lovable way that a puppy pees on your shoe as you are scratching his ear. You’ll hear when you listen to Nikki Sixx and Vince Neil with me this week In The Studio for  their four million-seller Shout at the Devil. – Redbeard

  • Joe Satriani- Surfing With the Alien 35th anniversary

    Joe Satriani- Surfing With the Alien 35th anniversary

    From 1984 until 1990 it was a dismal time for Rolling Stones fans with the band on indefinite hiatus, but two great things emerged from Mick Jagger’s haunting of New York City’s rock clubs  looking for suitable replacements during that period. Jagger launched the careers of Vernon Reid and Living Colour, and separately, an unknown six stringer  Long Islander-by-way-of-San Francisco fret phenom named Joe Satriani.

    Growing up the youngest of five kids on Long Island in the late 1950s and through the Sixties, Joe Satriani credits his mother’s excellent record collection with exposing him to Wes Montgomery as well as Jimi Hendrix. Satch fans from Mick Jagger to Sammy Hagar & Chickenfoot owe a debt of gratitude to Joe’s oldest sister, Carol, who donated her first paycheck as an art teacher to buy little Joe his first guitar, a Hagstrom 3, for $126.

    Recorded for $13,000 which he financed on his personal credit card, the mult-million copy sales of Joe Satriani’s 1987 second all-guitar album, Surfing With the Alien , effectively closed an era in contemporary music where the rock “guitar god” had become self-consciously cliched, supplanted for the first time in rock music history by the versatile electronic keyboard. Joe Satriani’s Surfing with the Alien  didn’t merely open the door for the re-emergence of rock guitar, it kicked it in.  –Redbeard

  • George Harrison- Cloud Nine

    George Harrison- Cloud Nine

    To borrow fromWhen Harry Met Sally, the Rob Reiner/Billy Crystal/Meg Ryan hit movie of that day, George Harrison’s Cloud Nine comeback album could alternately be titled “When Harri(son) Met Lynne”. You see, by 1987 Jeff Lynne had ceased to make neo-Beatles-influenced music with Electric Light Orchestra/ELO, while ex-Beatle Harrison simply had stopped making music, period. After a  series of very public well-intentioned but ill-fated charity causes (the Concert for Bangla Desh cost George $2.25 million in personal tax- no good deed goes unpunished), business lawsuits, scathing British press attacks, boring critical reviews and diminishing album sales, Harrison mercifully left the music business for five years, instead  making Monty Python movies with his Handmade Films and tending to his garden at Friar Park.

    But according to what the late Tom Petty told me, in October 1987 there they were, the ex-Beatle and the ELO exile, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne, all beaming smiles backstage, first in Birmingham England and then again in London’s Wembley Arena when Petty and the Heartbreakers toured the UK as Bob Dylan’s band. “George Harrison had given me his unreleased Cloud Nine  album, it was just about to come out,” Petty told me. “He had given me a cassette of it, & when I got home (to Los Angeles) I put it on and thought,’Man, this is amazing! The sound and the songs and everything, Lord this sounds good, and original, and different. Man, that Jeff Lynne just blows my mind.’ I was playing it all Thanksgiving Day 1987.”

    Later that Thanksgiving day Petty would find himself stopped at a traffic light, only to spy none other than Jeff Lynne sitting in the car next to his. Coincidence? Fate? Urban planning? We’ll never really know for sure, but of this we are certain: George Harrison’s Cloud Nine  set off a musical chain reaction which would revitalize not only the Quiet Beatle’s music career, but result directly in Petty’s Full Moon Fever,  Roy Orbison’s Mystery Girl, and spawn the supergroup the Traveling Wilburys. – Redbeard

  • R.E.M.- Document- Michael Stipe, Peter Buck

    R.E.M.- Document- Michael Stipe, Peter Buck

    Document was the mainstream breakthrough for R.E.M. in a five album stubbornly eclectic alternate route to the top of the US album sales chart  in September 1987. My conversations with R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe and particularly with lead guitarist Peter Buck about those early IRS Records reveal a band remarkably cohesive and certain about its vision. This interview includes the earliest days of the Athens GA R.E.M. with songs from their first five full albums Murmur ( a perennial “desert island disc” for me, released April 1983), Reckoning a year later peaking at #27 on Billboard,  Fables of the Reconstruction,  Life’s Rich Pageant, &  their biggest seller to that point, Document in September 1987. “We played for $40 a night for years,” R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck says matter-of-factly.”There were many $8 nights. Yet we never lost money on a tour. We’d always start in Athens GA, and make $800. And then we’d go to North Carolina and make $300. Then when we got out of that area we’d open for somebody, and they’d give us $50 or $100 to open for Bow Wow Wow in Detroit.”( From left Mike Mills, Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Michael Stipe. Photo by Sandra Lee Phipps)

    R.E.M. Murmur  quietly emerged April 12, 1983 and has never left my essential music list, along with its follow-up Reckoning. Songs include “Radio Free Europe”,”South Central Rain”,”Can’t Get There from Here”,”Driver 8″,  and an ultra-rare live acoustic performance of “Maps and Legends” from McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. This edition of In the Studio lovingly dedicated to the memory of Barney Kilpatrick, who tirelessly promoted all of these albums for R.E.M.- Redbeard

  • Def Leppard- Hysteria- Joe Elliott, Ric Savage

    Def Leppard- Hysteria- Joe Elliott, Ric Savage

    It is like a greatest hits package all on its own: Def Leppard’s August 1987 Hysteria  album, one of the most popular albums ever at an estimated twenty-five million copies. Yet as Joe Elliott and Ric Savage remind us in my classic rock interview, it is a miracle that it ever was finished. The epic saga is revealed behind “Pour Some Sugar on Me”,”LoveBites”,”Animal”,”Women”,”Armageddon It”, and “Hysteria” as Def Leppard copped a first-ballot induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017.

    After World War II the worldwide success of The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, Cream, and a bit later Led Zeppelin all had a profoundly positive effect on the British self-esteem. All of these predecessors of Def Leppard were almost entirely influenced musically by the blues, rhythm and blues, and soul music of African-Americans, yet it is most telling that when the Sheffield England quintet compiled an all-covers tribute album a few years ago made up of their most-loved  formative impressions, all but one were by white British musicians.

    “We grew up on a bunch of British pop music that never even infiltrated the American psyche,” asserts Def Leppard lead singer/songwriter Joe Elliott.” Of course we dearly love bands like Led Zeppelin and (Deep) Purple,what you may call heavier album track bands, but I think when we first started listening to radio it was the British Top 40 on (BBC) Radio One and Radio Luxembourg, which was a little more adventurous with their playlist. They’re the kinds of songs that we obviously got to listen to a lot. We were fortunate that the British music scene from ’70- ’71 to ’74 had a lot of the bands like Slade and Sweet and David Bowie and T Rex were very guitar-based three minute pop songs, which by today’s standards may be called ‘hard rock’, because it was just big drums and guitars and big honkin’ choruses. Some of them cheesy, some not. But you have to weed through the dross. A lot of the Slade singles were top notch.” Phil Collen: “Where we came from, Thin Lizzy was a huge influence on Def Leppard, you know, the two guitar thing. And Queen was. We wanted to sound like Def Leppard, but we wanted people to know where we come from…We got the blues stuff second hand from Zeppelin and whomever, really.”

    JE: ” We have been influenced by what they kind of call ‘glam rock’, but I know that term offends half of the artists, so I’m trying to avoid that phrase. Bowie hated being typed as ‘glam rock’. A lot of the songs were basically just twelve bar, based around the same three chords that the blues were. But they were kind of sped up, and they started to introduce a lot of the tricks that Motown used to do, like the the hand claps on the snare drum. But they didn’t have the R & B sound about them, they didn’t have the blues about ’em.Unless you studied them really hard, they don’t really sound like B.B.King or Chuck Berry or the Stones, or even early Who or Kinks.There was more emphasis on the production by the time the ’70s came around. They were starting to invent a whole new sound: (producers) Chinn and Chapman were doing it for Sweet and Susie Quatro, and even (producer) Bob Ezrin was doing it for Alice Cooper. Equipment was getting better, studios were improving, and all of a sudden production got taken to a whole new stage by (producer) Roy Thomas Baker and Queen come ’73-’74. The first time we heard Sheer Heat Attack, before we even knew what musicians were, you listen to that record and it’s just an amazing adventure…how to use stereo to its absolute maximum effect, and panning and phasing and flanging, just clever techniques that take a song further than live performance ever could.” –Redbeard           L-R Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen, Redbeard, Def Leppard tour manager Malcolm

  • Whitesnake ‘87- David Coverdale

    Whitesnake ‘87- David Coverdale

    For the architect of one of the best-selling hard rock albums in history, Whitesnake ’87, here are some of the questions I posed to Whitesnake king cobra David Coverdale  In The Studio: what happened when the former Deep Purple and Whitesnake powerhouse singer was diagnosed with a chronic sinus infection midway through recording? What does a professional singer think and feel when presented with the daunting prospect of throat surgery that, at best, has 50/50 odds of being successful or destroying his livelihood? If a band falls in the forest and no one’s there, does it make a sound? And just how do you rock yourself out of $3 million in debt?

    Hear the eyebrow-raising answers straight from the ‘Snake’s mouth, while rocking to the 1984 excellent “Slow and Easy”,  the #1 hit “Here I Go Again”, the hard rock juggernaut “Still of the Night”, and the primo bonus track “Looking for Love”, among others from the eponymous Whitesnake ’87  eight times platinum U.S. seller (15 million copies worldwide). – Redbeard 

  • Guns’N’Roses- Slash

    Guns’N’Roses- Slash

    guns-n-rosesA full year in advance I predicted during my interview with  GNR guitarist/composer Slash that Guns’n’Roses would be voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the first ballot. But as you’ll hear, Slash was totally surprised by my prediction, and also by the fact that Appetite for Destruction  is now the top-selling debut album in history at over 18 million copies in just the U.S. Here’s the expanded interview in which Slash, who has guested on albums by Michael Jackson to Bob Dylan and performed live with the Black-Eyed Peas at the Super Bowl halftime, discusses a wide variety of subjects from Aerosmith Rocks  to Iggy Pop to American Idol to immigration. –Redbeard