Music production for film is a different animal from the music production I was used to; once you’ve assembled and installed the band in the studio, you’re all sitting in the control room literally on call to turn out a variety of arrangements of the same song as quickly as possible, depending on the requirements on the set. A couple of times we were required to learn, arrange, record and mix a song, all in one day. This was not a low-stress experience.

For Rock Star, because of the storyline, we needed two separate bands playing the same songs. One band had to sound as though it had been playing as a unit for 20 years. The other was a tribute band, and had to be good, but not quite as good as the older band. In a couple of cases, I actually preferred the tribute band’s finished version to the more seasoned band’s finished version. For the main band, Budd Carr had secured the services of Jason Bonham and Zakk Wylde, so the choices for drums and guitar were already made. After spending a little time with the two of them separately, I knew that I would need someone really diplomatic and cooperative to play bass and keep things running smoothly. I called Jeff Pilson, the bass player from Dokken. Jeff is a great bass player, has a good sense of humor, and is a real team player. He wants things to work, and he’ll do what he has to in order to make sure they do. As it worked out, his presence was quite useful in the studio. We needed a strong, mature lead voice with a huge range, so I called the singer from Steelheart, Michael Matijevic. I had worked with Michael several years earlier on an MCA album, and I had never heard a vocalist with a greater range – especially on the upside.

The only real problem with Rock Star was its release date – it hit the theaters four days before 9/11. Nevertheless, it was a fitting farewell project for me – I’d never been involved with a movie at all, and now I had access to the filming, cast and crew, production meetings (mandatory), casting director, and the occasional party. At the kickoff party, where everyone was supposed to get acquainted, Jennifer Aniston brought Brad Pitt along with her, and it provided me with an opportunity for one of my best impromptu lines – after I introduced myself and told them what my connection to the film was, Brad offered his hand and said “Hi, I’m Brad.” I replied “Nice to meet you – so what do you do, Brad?” I don’t think he heard me over the noise of the party, but I loved the line anyway. Mark Wahlberg played the lead, and proved to be a serious method actor, who go t into character and stayed in character for the duration of the film, making the rounds of the rock clubs, seeing a lot of shows, and probably gathering valuable research material for what would become Entourage.

I also got to spend some time with the actor Dominic West (who became the lead on HBO’s The Wire), and found him to be a really decent and interesting guy. Regrettably, I didn’t get to spend much time with Tim Olyphant, who played one of the members of the tribute band, and who years later was cast in the role of the anguished sheriff in HBO’s brilliant series Deadwood.

Zakk Wylde, who had spent years with Ozzy on the road, was probably the fastest guitar player I’d ever seen. He was a unique stylist, and had perfected a tuning and playing approach to the instrument that was truly his and no one else’s. What this meant was that it was essentially Zakk’s band, and that anything we recorded would have his stamp on it. This was not really a problem in this particular situation, though, because it was a very strong and metallic stamp — but it didn’t leave too much opportunity for experimentation.

Jason Bonham was a fine drummer, and a fabulous character. Of course, he could do all the Zeppelin songs perfectly, and was technically an excellent drummer. He did say to me one afternoon, while discussing his exploits of the previous night, that he had “a reputation to uphold” – that of a major party animal. Now he’s apparently sober, but in those days he would drink without holding back, and one evening while we were doing guitar overdubs with Zakk at Conway Recorders, Jason came in feeling absolutely no pain, and in his mischievous stupor attempted to kiss Zakk on the mouth — all in jest, of course. Bad move for Jason.

Zakk abruptly recoiled, bellowed like a stuck rhino, picked Jason up and literally threw him several yards across the room — and Jason was not a slender fellow. He landed half on and half off the couch, and beat a hasty retreat from the control room. The next day nothing was mentioned and work went on as usual, but there was no visit from Jason. When the movie fell off the radar right after the 9/11 attacks, I thought it would never find an audience. But it has actually done quite well on DVD, and the soundtrack album recouped its recording costs.

Before the dust could settle on the making of Rock Star, I had resumed my daily routine, aiming to move ahead with the sandwich shop concept. When I wasn’t working (which was most of the time in the year 2000) I would frequently meet my good friend Tom Kelly for golf at Calabasas Country Club in the San Fernando Valley, where we both lived. We played about twice a week, and would talk things over as we played. Tom was retired and played golf almost every day; with Billy Steinberg, he co-wrote a lot of big hits, including “Like A Virgin,” “True Colors,” “Fire & Ice,” and also did most of the backing vocal s on almost every record I ever produced. He was aware of my situation, and one day he said “you know, I have a book that you should read,” and then next time we met, he handed me what appeared to be a small children’s book called Who Moved My Cheese?

I read it that evening in 40 minutes, and when I finished, I felt I could literally slap my forehead like the guy does in the V-8 Juice commercial. In brief, this is a children’s book for adults, which tells the tale of two mice who went into the maze every day to eat the cheese. One day the cheese wasn’t there. One of the mice said “Hey, somebody moved the cheese,” and the other mouse said “Well, it must be in here somewhere – let’s go find it.” The first mouse refused, saying “No. I’m staying right here until I find out who’s responsible for moving my cheese.” Thus the reader understood that there were two ways to react to an unanticipated change in your life. You could either sit there and curse, trying to lay the blame at someone’s feet, or you could adapt to the circumstances and pursue another course, which could eventually lead you to the cheese (financial security, love, satisfaction in the workplace, whatever turns you on). As the smart mouse searched the maze for the cheese, he would stop to write little pieces of advice on the maze wall for the impatient mouse, in case he saw the light and followed. One of the more memorable tips was “Make sure to smell the cheese frequently, so you’ll know when it’s getting old.” This was a perfect career analogy, and for me it was a genuine epiphany. I went to my wife Suky and said “we’ve got to go east.”

I sat down at the computer and began to research Bed & Breakfast inns in New England. Two weeks later, in February of 2001, I flew east, rented a car, and visited the towns of Brattleboro, Vermont, and Northampton, North Adams, Great Barrington, Stockbridge, Williamstown and Lenox, all in Massachusetts. I discovered that each of these towns had three or four working B&B’s, except for Lenox, which had 27. Clearly, something was going on in Lenox. I made this town last on my itinerary, and while driving around in a sleet storm on February 22nd, I emerged from a wooded section of the road into a clearing, and there on the right was one of the most breathtaking farms I had ever seen. To make what could be a very long story shorter, we sold our house in Los Angeles within two months, and moved into Stonover Farm in July of 2001. We undertook an eight-month renovation, and I’ve been blissed out here ever since.

When I decided to leave the record business for good, I was so disenchanted by some of my experiences that I literally stopped listening to new music, and didn’t go back to visit L.A. for almost a year. During the Spring of 2001, I had assembled a two-CD set called “Tom Werman’s Greatest Hits & Greatest Misses” — a private run of 500 CDs, packaged professionally with booklet included, and I gave one to family, friends and colleagues so I would at least have a collection of my radio hits on one CD, and on the other my favorite productions which few people had ever heard. The accompanying booklet tells a little story about each song.

In school, we learn very little about change and how to deal with it. Aside from death and taxes, it is one of the few things guaranteed to occur in life. Change occurs when you least expect it, and you need to be able to adapt and, in some cases, to re-invent yourself completely.

We opened our luxury Bed & Breakfast (an oxymoron, really) in July of 2002, with Linda Ronstadt as our first guest. I read four paperback books on operating a B&B, and learned enough to get us going nicely. We have never advertised, and we have a healthy business with a wonderful clientele who return again and again. We have quietly hosted some very big names, and we have resisted the temptation to add more accommodations (we have just five suites). We were named “Hideaway of the Year” by Andrew Harper’s Hideaway Report, an upscale subscription travel letter.

I make breakfast (full, cooked-to-order) and we have a nice wine & cheese service in the late afternoon. Our suites (sitting room, bedroom, bath) have 14-inch-thick mattresses, premium linens, two-headed showers, Jacuzzi tubs, private phones that are free, CD players with CDs, DVD players with over 200 movies from which to choose, big Sony TVs, full cable with HBO, robes, amenities, remote control air conditioning, and wi-fi. There is also a guest computer, a large selection of magazines and books in the library and living room, and 10 acres of woods, fields and gardens, all of which I personally maintain.

We have a separate residence that’s attached to the main house. Summer is incredibly busy, and winter is sublimely cozy and slow. Close by are Tanglewood (summer home of the Boston Symphony), Jacob’s Pillow (the largest modern dance center in the country), Kripalu (the biggest yoga retreat in the country), Canyon Ranch east, Shakespeare & Co. (theater), Barrington Stage Company, Williamstown Theater Festival, opera, five renowned art museums, lakes, skiing and golf, and Suky and I serve on the advisory board of the newly established (five years) Berkshire International Film Festival. Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 3 to 1 in Berkshire County, and the citizens of Massachusetts blew my mind this year by voting to decriminalize marijuana (by 65% of the vote). If any of you reach midlife and find yourself at a crossroads, do not hesitate to read Who Moved My Cheese? It may not lead you into the light, but it will definitely push you in that direction.

I intend to do a lot more writing this winter, and to develop a book using these installments as a starting point. My studio career is clearly over, and rightly so. Few people over 50 should be making music for teenagers. I worship the Foo Fighters’ In Your Honor (the harder of the two CDs in that package) more than I can accurately describe, and it’s still my main motivator at the gym.

Thanks to all you Popdose readers who have sent messages – overwhelmingly positive and courteous. If Jeff wants to print my words, I’ll continue writing, probably on a variety of subjects. This first foray has been great fun. I do love rock & roll music.

Finally, something to ponder, perhaps – a recent letter to the editor of the New York Times, responding to an article on the state of the music business, from one Polk Laffoon IV of Cincinnati:

“When Bing Crosby’s recording of “White Christmas” was released in 1942….it went on to sell more than 50 million copies over the next 67 years. Radio stations everywhere played it, and people everywhere heard it. Today, we download music we already know, or we hear something new within the narrow confines of others who share our auditory preferences. We cannibalize the past, and we starve the future. In the process, we are extinguishing what has been one of th e brightest lights of American culture.”

Rock on.

I sat in stunned silence for a minute, wondering how he could have obtained my home number – it must be a practical joke of some sort – so I phoned Sandy Roberton, a producer’s manager who represented me for a couple of years during the nineties, and asked if he would mind checking this guy out for me. Minutes later, Sandy phoned back and confirmed that this man indeed did work for Paul in London. More stunned silence for me, reflecting on the fact that Paul McCartney actually knew who I was, and might have even spoken my name. I was as big a Beatles fan as anyone I knew, and I held Paul in such lofty musical esteem that I really couldn’t imagine a greater professional honor. I thought that perhaps his daughter Stella may have been familiar with my name from the back covers of some of her albums, and maybe she mentioned to Paul that he should check me out. At any rate, it was an extremely gratifying event, even though I never heard from the McCartney people again.

Around this time I was called by A&M Records to do an album with the Supersuckers from Seattle – a ragtag band specializing in a genre of music probably best called country punk — a really enjoyable group, led by one Eddie Spaghetti, who was right up there with the nicest musicians I’ve ever known – truly a swell guy. We had some good laughs up there in Seattle. We used Pearl Jam’s studio, which was a comfortable complex of rooms in a commercial building in the more bohemian section of town. Later on, A&M decided not to release the album, and we all felt pretty disappointed. I know I have a copy of it somewhere, but I simply can’t find it. I know we did a good job, and that the band was happy with the record. I think Eddie is still out there doing shows and festivals.

Right after this, I got a call from Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick. I had been thinking about a reunion with the band for about 15 years, and Rick told me that the band was looking for a deal again, and that if I would come out and produce some demos, I could produce the album that they would make if they subsequently landed a label deal from these demos. I was happy to do so, and the band agreed to pay my airfare and lodging. I flew to their hometown of Rockford, Illinois, and we made the demos over a few days’ time. We took them to Chicago to mix, and I flew home from there.

The best of these demos, in my opinion, was a song called “Say Goodbye,” on which I played a few percussion instruments. It was nicely arranged, recorded and mixed. Once again, the band managed to get a modest label deal, and the first LP they released had the very same “Say Goodbye” on it, and it was the debut single from the album. I bought the album, and couldn’t find my name or credit anywhere. I certainly hadn’t been paid anything for the production, and here it was — the lead single from the new Cheap Trick album, produced and arranged for free. I called their manager and asked him what the idea was. He said “These things happen all the time.” “Not in my world,” I replied, and that was the last contact I had with the band – yet one more unfortunate and disappointing event in what seemed to be an endless series of disappointing events involving artists with whom I once had a tight bond. I had been to Rick’s house in Rockford, I knew his family, our kids had gone trick-or-treating in LA together on Halloween…. and I was chumped by a nicely orchestrated maneuver to get free advice and production. I still look back fondly on the albums we made, but it’s a shame that in the final analysis, people like this will gladly trade your friendship and their integrity for a few bucks.

I had tried to see Doug Morris (still president of Atlantic Records) about the newly-conceived A&R position I was trying to create. I made an appointment with him in New York, and at the last minute he canceled. So I tried to arrange another meeting through the office of Paul Cooper, Doug’s West Coast office head; he obliged, and when the time came for the meeting, I arrived at the office only to find that he had canceled – that “something had come up.” So I looked up my old buddy Jason Flom, who was in town for meetings along with Doug (Jason was head of Atlantic A&R at the time), and asked if he was free for lunch. We went to lunch at the Peninsula Hotel, and who was there having lunch with Paul Cooper? Doug Morris, of course. I made one more appointment and he canceled that one, too. I was 0 for 3.

Then one day when I was in New York having meetings once again with label executives, I was sitting in the 2nd floor waiting room of the Atlantic building on 52nd Street before my meeting with attorney Ina Meibach, and Doug walks through the room. I said hello, and asked if he could spare 15 minutes the next day. He asked what time I’d like to meet, and I left it up to him. He said 11 o’clock. I thanked him, and the next day when I showed up at his office at 11 o’clock, I was told that he wasn’t coming into the office at all that day. Zero for 4, and you’re out. I suppose it was his unique way of demonstrating his relative strength and my relative weakness in the industry. He was certainly trying to tell me something, but I thought the way in which he went about it left a lot to be desired.

Back in Los Angeles, I was called and asked to come to Universal City to meet with the members of Spinal Tap, as I was one of several producers being considered for their follow-up LP. It was a very pleasant meeting, and I was delighted to meet Harry Shearer, to whom I listened frequently on NPR; Michael McKean, it turned out, was a big Cheap Trick fan. Steve Lukather got the gig, though, and I was happy for him. I was beginning to consider getting out of the record business, but I didn’t have any idea of what I could do to make a living .

After some research and some thinking, I decided I would try to open a sandwich shop in Studio City, right on Ventura Boulevard. I’m a big fan of “pedestrian” foods. I make a killer tuna salad, egg salad, chicken salad, and other mayonnaise-based treats, and I had quite a few ideas about how to make a sandwich that would stand out as clearly superior to the ordinary sandwich that one could get at your average restaurant. Mine was to be a specialty food shop, and I’d bake my own bread. I was already a bread baker, having apprenticed to the head of baking at a great place in Nantucket one summer. I traveled to the Culinary Institute in San Francisco and found a wonderful bread guru who taught there and who had written several books on the subject.

Weeks later, as I was actually getting ready to sign a lease for what would have been “Tommy’s Lunch,” I got a call from the former head of marketing at Capitol Records, Bruce Kirkland. Bruce had been made the head of a new company called “EMI – Capitol Entertainment Properties,” and wanted to talk to me about being the Senior VP of A&R for this new company. The outfit was theoretically going to be in charge of exploiting the catalogs of Virgin, EMI and Capitol Records – a fabulous treasure chest of music. In addition, we were to package and market music for lifestyles, much like the Starbucks or Barnes & Noble lines of CDs sold only through the store.

I was pretty excited by the prospect of dealing with the catalogs of artists like Sinatra, The Beach Boys (The Beatles were not to be touched, thank you), Bob Seger, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Billy Idol, and on and on. The job paid well, and the benefits were good; Bruce said he wanted someone heading A&R who was not just a catalog guy, but also a real record producer with a body of work, who could attract new artists as well, if they fit the label’s profile. I started in September of 1997. The offices were in a nice building on Wilshire just east of the Tar Pits. I was allowed a company car, there was reserved indoor parking, and even membership to a health club right in the same building. All of a sudden, things were more interesting. In the twinkling o f an eye, I had a life again, along with a title, an office, an expense account and some clout. Producers, managers and attorneys started calling me and congratulating me and asking for lunch appointments.

During this time, we repackaged and re-issued a number of artists, and one day Bruce came to me and told me he wanted me to produce an album by a group called Jake Trout & The Flounders. I winced, but he went on to tell me that this was a tongue-in-cheek, musically legitimate group of three professional golfers (Peter Jacobsen, Mark Lye and Payne Stewart). Peter Jacobsen was a decent guitarist, a good singer and a big fan of rock music, and coincidentally he had a lot of friends in music who loved to play golf. He wanted to take hit songs from these artists, change the lyrics, and re-record them from the perspective of a golfer on the pro tour – so Crosby, Stills and Nash would give him “Love the One You’re With” and he would re-record it as “Love the One You Whiff,” and Glenn Frey would give him “Smuggler’s Blues,” and it woul d be rewritten as “Struggler’s Blues,” and so on.

The great part of this was that Tom would be able to work with all these donor artists in the studio. Beyond that, I was a passionate golfer, and Payne Stewart had won the PGA Championship and two U.S. Open tournaments. Peter had won seven PGA tour events, and was a very funny and friendly guy. Mark Lye had been on the tour, but was a reporter for the Golf Channel at this point. The band would play in the clubhouse following certain PGA tour events, and they had evolved into a musical unit that was serious enough to make a record.

I assembled a band, and we moved into the Record Plant to recreate all the tracks, copying the originals as closely as possible. The title track of the LP was I Love to Play – a recreation of “I Love LA” by Randy Newman. This particular track was no easy copy, but during the project, I did get to work with Glenn Frey, Stills and Nash, Darius Rucker and others. The album was meant to be distributed mainly through pro shops at golf clubs, but it never really got off the ground. A few months later, EMI closed the company, and I got paid for the remaining 15 months on my contract. I started playing more golf (including a very memorable round with Payne Stewart at his and Tiger’s home course called Isleworth, in Orlando) and thinking hard about what to do, now that I was once again unemployed for good. Months went by, and then I got a call from a music supervisor named Budd Carr, whom I had known from the old Epic days when he was managing Kansas. Budd had been named the music supervisor for a movie to be called Rock Star, based on a true story involving Judas Priest. It would star Jennifer Aniston and Mark Wahlberg, and Budd wanted to talk to me about producing the soundtrack. Hallelujah, I had work.

Myron Grumbacher, a drummer whose history includes a stint with Pat Benatar, became involved professionally with Lita Ford some time before I produced Lita’s album Dangerous Curves. I mention Myron because he was a great guy, a great drummer, and a great help with the album. Possessing a healthy sense of humor, he was able to offer suggestions all the time without seeming to butt in or to try to do other people’s work for them. He was a pleasure to work with. Lita, too, was very upbeat, funny and really pleasant. The one difficulty we had with the recording was vocal pitch.

While Lita was a good singer in a live situation, there was something about the headphone scenario that gave her trouble. She was just a hair off pitch when she sang with those headphones on. We tried opposing speakers for monitors ( you can try placing speakers directly facing each other on either side of the microphone, like giant headphones, and this should allow the singer to hear the mix while the two speakers theoretically “cancel each other out” so that the microphone hears only the vocalist), but this method is only occasionally successful.

The result was that we did record her vocals as accurately as possible, but then (remember this was back in 1990, still in the dark age of technology) we routed them through a synthesizer, and I manipulated the pitch wheel so that I could alter the pitch of Lita’s vocals. The corrected vocal was sent to another track. The finished vocal was considerably more accurate in terms of pitch, but nothing like today’s vocals, which are all basically perfect thanks to the miracle of modern technology. Each of Lita’s performances took about two hours to pitch-correct. Her guitar playing, on the other hand, was quite good, and while I really do try to avoid saying things like this, she played as well as most men – there, I said it – and I do feel that the electric guitar is basically a man’s instrument. Lita is one of a number of women who can play the electric guitar with authority, speed and taste.

She would bring her two dachshunds to the studio every day, and the one named Chili Dog would chase a flashlight spot that I’d shine on the studio wall. This became a daily20source of amusement for us all, including Chili, but I think Lita may feel I permanently sent the dog around the bend. I’ve heard she’s happily married and living in Florida. She’s a good person.

There were a number of albums that I did in the ’80s and early ’90s that I haven’t mentioned. I thought the Babylon A.D. record was pretty good, and had a very enjoyable time with this band. I thought the record was pretty solid, but things were changing musically at the time, and it really never made any noise to speak of. I think that by this time, music and concert fans had seen enough of loud, guitar-driven rock bands with aggressive song titles and themes and lead singers cut out of the Steven Tyler mold. I made a couple of records for Geffen Records – one with a band called Junkyard, and one with a band named Pariah.

Pariah was a pretty interesting group from Austin, Texas, led by two guitar-playing brothers named Sims and Kyle Ellison. They were easy-going guys, but very serious about their guitar playing. Tom Zutaut had signed them, most likely having found them at South by Southwest, and they were happy to come out to Los Angeles to make their album. Sims had brought his girlfriend with him – a really cute, 17-year-old blond girl with a wonderful smile and a great sense of humor. While we recorded during the day at Madonna’s studio, this girl would literally pound the pavement, looking f or an agent and going to open casting calls; she told us that she was going to move to Hollywood and become an actress (in the ’90s women actors were still called “actresses” instead of “actors”).

While she was dedicated, we all thought it was kind of cute that here was this young Texas girl who came out to Hollywood with her musician boyfriend and seriously thought that she had a chance of hitting it big on the silver screen. Unfortunately for Pariah, their album (To Mock a Killing Bird) was released at about the same time Appetite for Destruction started to break through, and all Geffen’ s money and focus went toward Guns ‘N’ Roses, and none toward Pariah. Meanwhile, about three years later, my wife and I went to see the Tom Cruise film Jerry Maguire, and I knew there was something pretty familiar about the female lead. Sure enough, it was Rene Zellweger, the cute little blond who was going to be an actress, and we all know the rest of that story.

I had made an album for a band in Iowa, signed by friend Gregg Geller after he had moved to Columbia A&R from Epic. They were called the Hawks, and they were a fine pop band with a great talent for commercial songwriting. They sounded very much like the Beatles at times, and I loved their music. The album was made on a soy bean farm in the middle of Iowa. Frank Wiewel, the bass player, lived on this farm in Otho, Iowa, which was actually a suburb of Fort Dodge, and he had convinced his father to allow him to convert the chicken coop into a recording studio. I think it was renowned studio designer Vincent van Haaff who actually did the conversion. Again, the album was put on a back burner by Columbia.

I recently tried to order it on Amazon, and it was unavailable. This means I have to go to the attic and dig into the cartons of CDs that I have stored up there. I do find that there are certain albums I did that I haven’t heard in 15 or 20 years, and it’s always a surprise to discover how much work seems to have gone into them. I’m still pretty happy with the production work I did, although I’m also a bit stunned by how little I remembered about the music on these forgotten albums.

I think it’s fair to say that by 1993 or 1994, my career had definitely peaked. There were fewer phone calls, the offers that I actually did get weren’t particularly attractive, and music was changing in a way that I found difficult – so much angst, so much discord, so little tuning….one day I was leaving my house and my daughter was playing Ill Communication by the Beastie Boys. I paused at the door, and said “Jules, how can you listen to this? This record sounds as though it was recorded in just a couple of minutes!” And my whole perspective changed when she replied “but Dad, that’s just the point.” I remember driving away from the house and beginning to understand that from that moment on, everything I knew was wrong. Ordered and neat was bad. Perfection itself was to be avoided at all costs. Neither guitars nor vocals needed to necessarily be in tune. I had always believed that there could be no real power in music without things being in tune and in time. Now the writing was most definitely on the wall.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what I should do about this impending professional crisis I was looking at, and I decided to try to reinvent myself – not completely, mind you, but to try to roll with the changes. Consequently, I began calling all my highly placed friends and colleagues at major labels, and making appointments to sit down with them and tell them why they needed to establish a new position for me at their label. I told them that their young A&R people were largely unschooled in the art of making records, and that they were wasting money in the studio and coming out with poor quality recordings.

In other words, if they hired me, I could help them make better records for less money. After all, I had spent years on both sides of the coin – the A&R side and the independent producer side. I was like an IRS accountant who leaves and becomes a tax attorney. Besides, I told them, I could solve specific problems that arose in the studio, because I had had such extensive recording experience. I would be the label’s behind-the-scenes go-to guy if an independent producer had a recording problem. I got in to see almost all of these label presidents, and every one said basically the same thing – “we respect what you’ve done, Tom, but I think we’re fine the way we are.”

During this period, I experienced the dark side of the recording business a couple of times. I was in New York having some of these meetings, and as I was leaving the Sony building and walking across 52nd Street, I heard someone shout “Hey Werman, what are you doing?” It was Tommy Mottola returning to the building in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes town car. I told him I was looking to “come back inside” in a new capacity, and he said “You should meet with Michele,” referring to his right hand person, Michele Anthony. He told me to call his office later that afternoon. I thought to myself “what a nice break,” and later that day when I called, he told me he had spoken to Michele, and that I was to call her office. I did, and made an appointment to come in and speak with her a few weeks later.

By the time our meeting rolled around, my family and I were in Nantucket at the summer house, and I made arrangements to fly into Laguardia, have the meeting, and fly back on an evening plane. It was an expensive day-long affair, but I figured it was definitely worth the investment. When I arrived at the building, I was shown into the tastefully appointed waiting room on one of the higher floors reserved for corporate executives, and after about 20 minutes Ms. Anthony came out and said that she was sorry I had to wait, but that something had come up that only she could handle, so I could either have five minutes right now, or I could come back tomorrow. Not having contemplated staying the night, I chose to speak my piece and hope for the best. In the allotted time, I explained my proposal thoroughly, and as she walked me to the elevator, she said “I like the idea – especially the part about saving money. Send me a written proposal and we’ll talk some more.”

To me, this sounded quite promising. I remember being in a pretty good mood as I flew back to the island. Maybe I could be headquartered in LA, and just travel when I needed to troubleshoot some situation. I spent much of the next three days not on the beach, but at the computer, polishing, refining and re-polishing a three-page document, explaining all facets of my proposal. I faxed it to Michele’s office, and also sent a hard copy via U.S. mail. Knowing how busy she must have been, I waited a week and then called to speak with her. Her office said she was busy, but at least I confirmed that she had received the hard copy. After a couple of more weeks, I called again, and left a message with her assistants (she had two of them). After I had called her office four or five times more and had no response, I decided to give it a rest. In the fall, some three months after our meeting, I went to New York again, and before I flew, I called her office and said I would be in New York for an entire week, I would make myself available to her at any time convenient to her, and that I only needed five minutes. I left both my cell phone and hotel number. That was about 15 years ago, and I never heard from her again. More fun and games next week.

It has been over two weeks since I sent the two emails to Dee Snider’s web site and to his publicist. No reply so far, so I guess I won’t be holding my breath.

I was called by my colleague Derek Shulman at Atco Records (Atlantic) regarding Kix in 1987. I wasn’t very familiar with them, but I did know that they were a high energy band who were very much in the AC-DC vein. I recall the night I first saw them that year, because they were playing at a Long Island rock club on a weekday night, and I had a difficult time understanding why their official start time was 1 AM. Even for a guy who considered himself a nighttime sort, this was absurd. I checked into the hotel next to the Nassau Coliseum, and spent the evening thinking that I should be in my pajamas, but tried to maintain enough energy and enthusiasm to leave the hotel for the night’s activity at 12:30 AM. I think the club was L’Amour’s, but I can’t be sure. It was a gold mine, jammed wall to wall with kids who by the midnight hour were drinking with a fair amount of abandon, and needing to hear some hard rock immediately.

The club was vast, and I waited around in front of the stage for about 45 minutes until the band came on at 1:30 or so. Sure enough, they kicked serious ass in that club, and I really liked their frontman Steve Whiteman. I also liked the guitar players, Ronnie Younkins and Brian Forsythe, who were serious shredders, but had a very calm and easygoing personal manner offstage. In stark contrast to Steve’s humor and Brian and Ronnie’s calm was Donnie Purnell’s angst and paranoia. He was the undisputed leader of the band, and the bass player and main songwriter. He rarely smiled, and seemed to feel that people were naturally going to try to take advantage of him. He was a fine musician and a dedicated professional, but he simply wasn’t very much fun to be around.

Like Twisted Sister had been, Kix was ready to make a breakthrough LP, and I had been asked by the label to do this, perhaps against the band’s wishes. So I was on Donnie’s shit list right from the start, even though I had a very good relationship with the other band members. Do we see a pattern here? When you take a producer with an established record and pair him with a band that’s been breaking its back on tour for years and years, it’s not that surprising that the band is reluctant to give any credit to this producer for their breakthrough when it finally does come.

The Kix recording was relatively straightforward, and I did like the music very much. When we started to record vocals, I discovered that singer Steve Whiteman had an audible lisp, and that Donnie’s sonic remedy for this was to record a separate track of s’s (esses) to replace (drown out) Steve’s lisp. It worked perfectly. The album, spearheaded by the power ballad “Don’t Close Your Eyes,” was a big hit, and did prove to be Kix’s breakthrough record. For this, I somehow managed to earn Donnie Purnell’s distrust, and when it came to the disappointing follow-up album Hot Wire, Donnie insisted that he mix the record personally, even though I had overseen the recording. The results are available for your comparison.

At this point, I was happy to split the actual production task with my friends and colleagues Duane Baron and John Purdell. Duane had been working with me as my recording engineer for some years by this time (I began working with him directly after I tired of battling the deadbeat, devious and divisive Geoff Workman), and he had introduced me to his friend John Purdell. I initially used John as a backing vocalist, but he was so eager to do almost anything required in the studio or control room that I hired him as a second engineer and general musical consultant on an hourly basis. The three of us had so much fun making records together that it was almost unthinkable that we should be paid. We would work hard for a couple of hours, and then take a half hour break to play basketball in the parking lot. John could play bass, keyboards, sing, write songs and was learning very quickly how to engineer and produce.

While Duane was content to remain (and I was happy to have him remain) a great recording engineer, it seemed that John was interested in literally every phase of music and recording. They were a natural working pair, and we divided the Kix LP into two groups of songs. They produced one group of songs as a team, and I produced the other. Eventually, when I retired from producing, they went on to produce Ozzy and several other artists, until John tragically suffered an early death from cancer. Duane still lives in Southern California and is a terrific, working engineer.

The three of us took the same approach with LA Guns. They had been making some noise in LA for a while, and again we found the key to their success through the album’s one ballad, called “What Happened to Jane.” I had a nice relationship with Tracii Guns, the guitarist, and I was astonished to discover, when his parents came down to visit the studio one night, that they were younger than I was. I had begun producing contemporaries, and then as I grew older, my artists grew younger and younger by comparison, until they were so much younger than I that even their parents were younger than I was, too. This was serious food for thought at the time. One night we were sitting around in the lounge, tossing around possible titles for the album, and I came up with Cocked & Loaded – not bad for a corny double entendre.

My daughter Nina had a pool party at our house for her 14th birthday on a Friday night during the project, and Traci brought Billy Idol over to the house for the occasion. They both arrived on enormously loud Harleys, and Billy’s presence caused quite a stir. At first, it was a treat to have him at the party, and he showed us photos of his wife and child, but as he drank more and more, he began to get fairly grabby with Nina’s 14- year- old friends, and after he sampled a bit of one of their backsides, we had to ask Tracii to haul him out of there. My wife called the girl’s mother and apologized for anything that might have happened to upset the girl, but the mother actually seemed to feel honored that Billy had selected her daughter’s rear end for the caress. Only in L.A., folks – only in L.A.

Right around the time of the Kix and LA Guns projects, I got a call from my old friend and associate Tom Zutaut, who was now one of the four-man A&R team at Geffen Records. He asked me to stop by a rehearsal room just off the Sunset Strip to see a new band he had signed. He thought I might make a good producer for them. I took Duane along, and we found the address, which was a room no larger than 20 feet square. Inside were four musicians without a singer, playing at ear-bleeding volume. The volume was so overwhelming in that tiny room that the music was distorted, and had no identifiable pitch, because the Doppler effect was causing it to waver. It was literally an undecipherable din. When they stopped playing, I introduced the two of us and asked them where their singer was. The blond bass player replied “He never rehearses with us ‘cause he can’t hear himself.” This was a logical response. I said “I’d like to hear more material, but it’s really not possible to evaluate any songs without a lyric and a melody. We’ll have to try and come back at a different time when he’s actually singing with you.”

So we left our first and only Guns and Roses rehearsal without Axl, and before I could get back a second time, they had decided to use Mike Clink, whom I had known as an excellent assistant engineer at the Record Plant. By the time Appetite for Destruction had come out, Duff McKagan had managed to embellish the story of my first visit so that in a magazine interview, he reported that I came into the room, “put my hands over my ears, said ‘oh shit’, and immediately walked out.” At a Record Plant party, I asked him why he had misrepresented the facts this way. He said “are you calling me a liar?” and threatened to hit me. The guy was only about 20 years younger and half a foot taller than I was. For some reason, they just love to make you look foolish.

In 1990, I got a call from a friend of mine who said he thought I might be interested in a band he came across. We went to a rehearsal facility in the valley and spent some time there listening to Love/Hate. What a band – just explosive. I was thrilled. Here I was in the autumn of my professional life, and I walk into a rehearsal room to find one of the freshest-sounding, most hard-driving bands I’ve ever heard. I wanted to sign them to a production deal immediately. I told them that I was positive I could sign them to a major label pretty quickly. I arranged a showcase for them and invited several heads of A&R from the major labels.

Ron Oberman was head of A&R for the Columbia label on the west coast. He came to see the band and was truly blown away – he called me at home and told me he wanted to sign the band. He loved them. I said I’d be happy to see them on Columbia, but I asked him to please wait a few days until I signed them to a production deal, so I could be aboard as the producer and get a percentage of the proceeds beyond my producer’s royalty. He agreed. The next thing I knew, Ron had gone directly to the band and offered them an $800,000 advance to sign with Columbia. Naturally, they did.

I was a little befuddled. I had known Ron for many years. We both moved out to L.A. from New York at about the same time, and he had always struck me as a straight-shooting nice guy. I guess his enthusiasm for the band got the better of him, because it was a done deal. I did produce the record, but I could never understand why he did what he did. The album was strong, and I had pinned my hopes on the cut “Why Do You Think They Call It Dope?” which was a great song in all respects. Regrettably, the advance was so large that there was little discretionary money left to spend on touring support, promotion or videos. The band languished, and never really got off the ground. Pity.

So at this point in time I was as good as my last hit, which was Blow My Fuse, the first Kix album, released in 1988. The LA Guns album had been certified gold in 1989, but the music scene was changing rapidly, and I and my generation of producers were largely regarded as yesterday’s news. At this point, I was concerned with securing three good projects per year, but the projects I would have been happy with were not all that available to me. I was only 45, but there were 25–year-olds out there producing music that seemed a little foreign to me, and I didn’t really relate to it emotionally. I got a phone call from Stryper’s manager, who happened to be the mom of the brothers Sweet — drummer Robert and singer Michael. They requested a meeting at Robert’s home down in Orange County.

Never have I felt like such a stranger in a strange land than on the day I arrived at the Sweet house. I had been to Orange County only to go to Disneyland, or to pass through on the way to San Diego. I entered the house and met the boys and their mother – all very nice people. Mrs. Sweet brought out a tray of bagels, lox and cream cheese. I thought this was very funny. Here was a nice Jewish boy in the heart of conservative Nixon country, and I could imagine them discussing what to serve for refreshments at our meeting. Anyway, we all enjoyed the food, and we got along well. I explained to them that I would have a difficult time producing a religious record of any kind, and they were quick to say they were anxious to make a straight-ahead rock and roll album with no particular message involving faith of any kind. We shook on it, and we made the album Against the Law. It was a pleasure to work with this band, and Michael Sweet proved to be one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. (He’s living on Cape Cod now, and we were in touch last year via e-mail.) I was entering my third year without a big hit record.

The previous installment provided some curious tales of Twisted Sister. An Australian musician/journalist friend of mine named Joe Matera frequently sends me items from the Web that he thinks may be of interest to me. Since I don’t get around the Internet as thoroughly as Joe does, this proves to be a service of great value, as I’d otherwise be unaware of what people may be writing and/or saying about me and my work. Just after I had forwarded the last installment to Jeff here at Popdose, I received an email from Joe, informing me of a recent interview with Dee Snider, who some 25 years later, still feels the need to bag on me in any way he can. [Note: Said interview was conducted by our own David Medsker, and can be read in full here.]

I include some excerpts from this interview, and my responses to these excerpts – truthfully, it may take the form of a rant, but I promise we’ll get back to more colorful history next week. The accumulation of two decades of bogus complaints from Dee Snider has prompted me to answer back:

DEE SNIDER: I mean the biggest hat-tilt towards commercialization was assigning Tom Werman, who was this pop producer, who was cleaning up people like TED NUGENT and MÖTLEY CRÃœE, and they figured, ‘Hey, we can clean these guys up too.’ And during the recording I was really having a lot of problems with our producer, Tom Werman, and we just didn’t agree and I really felt like he was compromising the record, and it was a real struggle for me to try to keep the band’s integrity…. He wanted to clean us up even more, you know, and I was really frustrated and the engineer, Geoff Workman, who really is responsible for all of the positive things on that record as far as sound and everything. And he said, ‘What’s the matter, man?’ And I said, ‘Fricking Tom is killing my record, he’s pissing me off!’ He goes, ‘Relax dude, this record is guaranteed to go platinum.’ And I said, ‘You want to put that in writing?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, I’ll put that in writing.’ So what it says here on this laminated page — it’s written on an old note sheet, it says: ‘The record that I am currently working on with TWISTED SISTER [because we didn't have a name yet] is guaranteed to go at least platinum or I resign. Signed: Geoff Workman. So, he knew.

Once again, I’m stunned at my apparent inability to recollect one serious moment of disagreement between Mr. Snider and myself, beyond the normal, minor differences of opinion in any project. I wonder if Dee ever bothered to consider why I had selected Geoff Workman to do this album… after all, I hired the guy for the album based on my knowledge of his capability and approach to sound, even though I was well aware that he could an incredibly divisive influence on the project. This guy was an excellent sound engineer who was a functional alcoholic and a creative storyteller, who had already done his backstabbing – best to erode my credibility with one band through secret recording and tape editing, and who knows what else when my back was turned. Meanwhile, his engineering skills were, I thought, worth the pain. He would always latch onto the leading influence in the group, become his best buddy and then run me down to the guy. Mr. Snider was more than a willing participant in this escapade.

Beyond that, I really am amazed by his allegations that I was “ruining” his record, when it was clearly a hugely popular and successful recording that established Twisted Sister as a global musical force. I guess if he had made the record he personally wanted, it would have come out much like the re-recording of Stay Hungry by the band, which I believe sold about 30,000 copies.

SNIDER: – and I have to point out with as much bashing of Tom Werman, I don’t know if you saw the liner notes but I’m the one who wrote that Tom Werman should be able to speak his piece – I want to see what he says, I’m sure he mouths off. He buries himself because he told me straight out that he would never have signed Twisted Sister when he was an A&R man. And I asked him to be honest, he was honest. He also did not want ‘We’re not Gonna Take It’ or ‘I Wanna Rock’ on the record and it’s a hard sell among those. With ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ he said, ‘Eh, it’s kind of sing-song, kind of childish, isn’t it?’ He totally mocked it, and I said dude, trust me. As a matter of fact they interviewed him on Behind The Music or something and he actually said, ‘You know Dee says this stuff about me and I wasn’t against ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It,’ but it is kind of childish, don’t you think?’…… “But he really didn’t do that much. They said they were going to bring in a producer who was going to clean us up, but we’re really not as dirty as you think.

Excuse me, but how does someone “bury himself” by speaking the truth? I told him straight up I wouldn’t sign his band if I had still been in A&R. And where is the venom when it comes to the guy who “forced” me on the band? I guess Dee thought it was in his best interest not to dump on Doug Morris.

Naturally, his paraphrasing of what I actually said in that interview is inaccurate and self-serving, but the important thing here is that I had written to Mr. Snider about a year ago, requesting in writing that he give me an opportunity to come on his show and presen t my side of the story. I never got a response. So when he says “I want to see what he says”, he clearly does not want to see what I say. I sent two emails to him ten days ago on July 6th (the day I received this interview from Joe in Australia), and I still haven’t received a response. Nada. Zilch. Not a peep.

My email of July 6th to Dee Snider:

This is an enquiry e-mail via http://deesnider.com/ from:

tom werman

“…with as much bashing of Tom Werman….I’m the one who wrote that Tom Werman should be able to speak his piece — I want to see what he says…” — Dee Snider.

I am accepting Mr. Snider’s offer. Please tell me the address to which I should send my “piece.” Thank you.

SNIDER: It’s amazing to see the significance of the record, you know the original and how many times I hear people saying, ‘This was my primer to heavy metal’ or ‘I was a disco boy or pop princess before I got my ‘Stay Hungry’ record and it changed my life.’ And then you’ve got ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ and ‘I Wanna Rock’ which sort of started – especially ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ – to transcend even the genre and become almost folk songs. And one thing a lot of people have said was, ‘Stay Hungry was Twisted Sister’s go-commercial, selling out.’ And I always laugh because it was anything but. ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ was added at 145 radio stations the first week it came out and that was two weeks before the video even hit. And just so you know that’s a lot of radio stations to play a heavy metal band in 1984.

So in the first breath, he lauds and exalts the record, and in the next breath he dumps on it because I was the producer. Generally, he seems really confused. Is he attacking me for being honest? It certainly reads that way, doesn’t it? I mean, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” can certainly be interpreted as sing-songy, or as a kids’ chant set to music. Even Mr. Snider goes along with that, while damning me for saying the same thing in another article:

So either Twisted Sister was about to release a great rock and roll album, or a great children’s album. “A great kid’s album,” Snider laughs, “Exactly! Play this in your nursery.”

So we have a guy here with some major issues, who seems to feel a need to continually insult me and to revise the history of that recording project, a full two generations after the fact. Maybe some day he’ll live up to the straight-talk image he promotes. Until then, I’ll need to continue to rely on people who help me out by advising me to read this and that, so I can do my best to defend myself against the relentless Dee Snider sniping machine. The guy simply can’t get past the fact that he has spent his life creating and shaping this band, and that I actually was involved in the one success that his creation has had.

Okay, we’ve probably had enough on that topic, right? Thanks for your patience. Let’s move on to another band for whom I produced only one album – Poison. In stark contrast to Mr. Snider, I’m not aware that any one of them has ever said anything negative about our recording experience, even though it certainly wasn’t the easiest project either of us ever did. Tom Whalley signed Poison while he was working in the Capitol Records A&R department in the mid ’80s. My friend Tom Mohler, who managed the band through the first half of the recording, has told me that they really wanted Paul Stanley to produce their follow-up to Look What the Cat Dragged In, but that both he and Tom Whalley held out for me. I can certainly understand why a band like Poison would want a member of Kiss to produce the record, but I appreciate that the manager and A&R man stood their ground.

A lunch meeting was arranged in Hollywood, in order for me to meet the band. I was seated next to CC Deville, and I remember that halfway through the meal, he looked at me and said “I hear you do drugs. Do you do drugs?” (Looking back on this, it’s fairly ironic, no?) I replied “Yes, I do recreational drugs from time to time, but I know their place, and I take care of business first” (or words to that effect), which was an honest response.

The combination seemed agreeable to the band, and we began rehearsing at a facility in the San Fernando Valley. Things went pretty well in rehearsal, though Rikki Rockett had some problems in changing the drum patterns to which he had become accustomed. There was one song that required a particularly complex drum fill coming out of one time signature and going into another, and Rikki was having trouble with it. Rather than making excuses or getting angry, he consulted with me, and together we came up with a good solution – call Bun E. Carlos of Cheap Trick and see if he would come in and walk Rikki through the changes. Being a gentleman and being in LA at the time, Bun E. did just that, and the problem was solved.

I recall quite clearly the afternoon when Brett told me of a ballad he had written. I handed him my Guild acoustic guitar, and he sat down and played what sounded to me like a very good country song, titled “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.” I liked the way he played it, and after listening to both his and CC’s delivery, I asked CC if it would be OK for Brett to play rhythm guitar on the song. CC obliged, and Brett actually plays the rhythm part with my Guild acoustic guitar on the recording. I still don’t understand why some country star hasn’t covered the song.

This was a long and demanding project. We had decided to record digitally, and this turned out to be a fortunate choice, due to the inordinate number of punch-ins required. CC was delving into some substances at the time that were a little more than recreational, and it wasn’t unusual for us to spend four hours on a guitar solo. This wasn’t because of his playing – he would simply change his mind after an hour, and start from the beginning of the lead break with a different direction. They all did their best, and outside of a few harmonica solos, there were no guest musicians at all on the album.

I’ve been asked countless times who played drums on the album. Every member of Poison performed every note of drums, bass, guitar and lead vocals, except for “out of the car, longhair!” on “Yer Mama Don’t Dance.” That was my voice. We never intended to create four hit singles, but indeed we had four Top 10 singles from Open Up and Say Aah, and the record went on to sell five million copies in the first year of release. One of the most interesting things about the project was the endless stream of pretty young girls who came to hang out with the band – I remember suggesting to Brett that it would probably be more efficient and less disruptive if we simply installed a numbered ticket machine at the door, like the ones they have at delicatessens.

I called my daughters to talk about Michael Jackson, because I know how important he was to them when they were teenagers. Young people all over the world were saying, “Now I know how my parents felt when John Lennon died.” I told them I was shocked by Jackson’s death rather than saddened by it: I was fascinated by him as an artist but not emotionally involved with his music as I was with both Elvis’s and John Lennon’s.

My daughter Julia mentioned going to see the Jacksons’ Victory Tour in 1984 with me. I didn’t remember it at all. She told me in detail how I had taken her to see the show at the Forum in LA when she was in fourth grade, and how I asked the person in front of her to please sit down so she could see the stage. And she told me about the time when I was doing something at Westlake Sound with Twisted Sister while Michael was making Thriller. Julia and Nina came over to the studio for dinner, and apparently I took them in to meet him. They were over the moon about this, and Julia said they were “queens of the school” the next day because they had met Michael Jackson. It was nice to hear that.

Speaking of Twisted Sister, they were all New York natives, so they had no problem working in the New York area. I agreed to come east to do both the rehearsals and the basic tracks for their third album, Stay Hungry, and they agreed to come west for overdubs and mixing. We rehearsed out in Long Island for a few days, and in January of ’84 we set up at the New York Record Plant. Normally, load-in and setup took about a day, and we usually needed one more day to mike everything and dial it in so we’d be ready to roll tape. The first day went fine, but on the second day we weren’t able to arrive at a satisfactory rhythm-guitar sound for J.J. French, even though that’s all we worked on all day long.

By the third day we’d been through half the rental amps in Manhattan and weren’t too much closer to a good rhythm-guitar sound. It took us three days of experimentation and trial and error before we were able to attempt any recording. On the morning of the third day I woke up in my room at the Warwick Hotel, and I remember wanting to just stay in bed and cry — I was desperate to get a guitar sound. I was used to spending about an hour on this particular task, and now I just couldn’t see our frustration ever coming to an end. Eventually, of course, we overcame the problem somehow and managed to record the tracks, but I’ll always remember that project as the most difficult one of all in terms of establishing a basic sound for a band.

The sessions in Los Angeles went well at Cherokee Studios, and Dee Snyder and I established a little competitive routine on the video game outside the studio door; I think it was Mario Brothers, but it could’ve been Asteroids or something else. I do recall that it had a catchy little tune that played between turns, and Dee used to do a little dance to it. So at least we know he wasn’t miserable at the time.

After we finished the record I came east for a little vacation with my family, and we traveled to a site in New Hampshire where Twisted Sister was headlining an outdoor venue. My wife and I took my kids and stood offstage during the hot midday set. Afterward, we waited patiently in the dusty parking lot outside the band’s bus … and waited … and waited … until we simply ran out of time, gave up, and left. The bus’s door remained closed with the band inside. I think we waited about an hour.

The aftershow backstage visit was certainly something with which I was familiar. If you went back to the band’s bus, they’d usually ask you in after they’d finished cleaning up or having a drink — within 10 or 15 minutes, anyway. In this case, Dee had decided that we were not to be entertained on the bus. Not only that, but apparently no one in the band was allowed to speak to us once they were on board the bus. So there we stood, for about an hour, in the hot parking lot while the band remained huddled in their air-conditioned bus with blacked-out windows. We got the message. Up to this point I hadn’t heard a contrary word from anyone in the band. I was really mystified by their behavior, but I let it go.

During the years that followed, I observed a pretty constant stream of abuse from Dee in the press. It continued when he got his radio show, and I would occasionally see something abusive from him on the Internet. I finally e-mailed his show, requesting equal time. I never heard from him.

I haven’t spoken with the guy since we left Cherokee, but he must have some fairly serious issues, as he continues to beat this very dead horse even now, a long 25 years after the fact. I have seen J.J., but he seemed reluctant to speak for Mr. Snyder. I assume I’ll never again speak with Dee, and that he’ll probably continue to create uncomplimentary stories about me in perpetuity. I guess it makes him happy.

Doug Morris was a pretty happy guy after we’d sold three million copies of Stay Hungry, but Dee insisted on getting Dieter Dierks to produce the band’s next album. I love Dieter’s work with Accept, but the Twisted Sister record he did, Come Out and Play (1985), fell far short of Stay Hungry. Realizing that this was obviously a dead end, I turned my attention to Dokken.

In the spring of ’84, we began recording Tooth and Nail at Cherokee. Tom Zutaut had told me a little about the band’s internal dynamics, mentioning along the way that guitarist George Lynch and singer Don Dokken couldn’t tolerate each other, but I could easily see that drummer Mick Brown and bassist Jeff Pilson were easygoing, agreeable, and professional. As the sessions progressed, engineer Geoff Workman, who apparently had some serious issues of his own, began to tell the band that I knew very little about my job and that he was, in fact, doing all the hard work and all the creative thinking. He also put together an E2 tape using random control-room conversations that he recorded without my knowledge. He edited them in order to create sentences I never uttered. Eventually he played the tape for George, who became irate and paranoid.

We were nearing the end of the recording phase, and George had a few lead breaks left to do. He’d already recorded the lead break to the title track; it was clearly one of the most brilliant guitar solos I’d ever heard. When he played it, it took only three or four “punches” (the process of repairing errors on a specific part of a track) in order to get it perfect. While he was working on another lead break, and not doing anything particularly wonderful besides shredding, I spoke to him over the talkback mike, telling him that I felt he was playing fast but not playing anything as important as what he’d played for the “Tooth and Nail” lead break. I told him how strong that solo was, and that it actually took the listener from point A to point B and that it had a “shape” to it. (You guitar players out there should really hear this outstanding solo.)

George responded to my little pep talk by slamming his guitar on the studio floor and pitching a first-class fit. He was so angry that I actually said to him, “George, you’re so angry that you might feel better if you could hit me. Would you like to hit me, George?” He declined. I called the session off and went home, unaware that he was under the impression that the tape Workman had played for him was authentic. It was years before I learned the extent of the damage Workman had done. He wound up leaving the state in order to escape debtor’s court; he owed significant sums of money to a large number of people, including $5,000 I’d advanced him as a loan.

Meanwhile, I was still scratching my head, wondering what exactly was going on with these musicians, and why I was having such a tough time with them. I spoke with Cliff Burnstein, who managed Dokken, and we reached a pretty quick agreement. I agreed to have my colleague Michael Wagener mix the album; he’d engineered for Roy Thomas Baker and was a good friend of Zutaut’s. So I left early and took my family to Italy for a summer vacation.

When I returned, I found a cassette of comparatively middle-of-the-road songs from a couple named George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam. They had a little songwriting studio and had made a demo of their songs featuring themselves as the singers. Even though they were professional songwriters who usually gave their material to others, they sounded really good singing their own material. I listened to the tape several times, each time enjoying it more, and wondering why on earth they would ever be interested in me as a producer. I finally called them and told them my thoughts, and they replied, “You seem to be able to get the best out of every artist you work with.”

They’d written “How Will I Know” for Whitney Houston, and they were on the A&M label. I liked A&M but had never done anything for them. I met George and Shannon, who recorded as Boy Meets Girl, and found them to be absolutely delightful people. He and I worked very well together on the tracks, and I enjoyed this new musical territory. The self-titled album I produced for them wasn’t a big hit, but “Waiting for a Star to Fall” was a huge single a few years later. I’m still in touch with George today, and they’re still writing successful songs together.

I don’t recall my first contact with the band Krokus, but I was contacted by someone on their behalf, and although I wasn’t a big fan of their music, I did know about them. I thought this might be a very good project for me, since they had an established sales base and they played the kind of music I was used to producing. To be candid, I think I viewed it as a business arrangement as much as I did a creative project — and that could be the reason why the result, Change of Address (1986), never did anything special.

We rehearsed in Switzerland, and it was pleasant enough. Then the band came over here and we recorded the album. But I feel like there should’ve been at least one overriding musical reason to do Change of Address. When we handed in the rough mixes — the band was on Arista, and Clive Davis always liked to hear things as early as possible — Clive said he didn’t hear a single, so we came up with the idea of covering Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out.”

In order to make it authentic, I invited my daughter’s fifth-grade class to come into the studio and do the choruses and bridge. They did a wonderful job, and I think the whole finished version of the song is great — but I think some songs are just untouchable because they’re such classics. Anyway, it wasn’t a hit, but I still prefer it to the original version.

In March of ’85 Mötley Crüe started recording tracks for Theater of Pain at a small studio called Pasha on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood; we moved to the Record Plant to do vocals and guitar leads later on that month. I remember it as one of their more difficult albums since Tommy and Nikki were heavily into heroin at the time. Tommy was dating a number of different exotic women, including Tawny Kitaen, and their visits to the studio were always a highlight of the evening.

I felt that the quality of the material was suffering as a result of the band’s very stressful and demanding schedule, and only four songs really stood out for me: “Home Sweet Home,” “City Boy Blues,” “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room,” and “Keep Your Eye on the Money.” Tommy played a nice grand piano on “Home Sweet Home” that we built the song around. And we found an ex-NFL player to provide the incredibly low voice for the line “Smokin’ ain’t allowed in school” on “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room.” Generally, Theater of Pain was a lot of hard work, and as soon as we were finished, the band went right back out on the road, where they were now spending most of their lives.

I departed Elektra after four months as Vice President in charge of A&R. I had signed one band (Stranger, whose album included a song called “There’s a Party in My Pants and You’re Invited”) and agreed to produce three Elektra albums per year for two years; I would receive an advance fee that would be collateralized against any future royalties (if the album recouped its recording costs), and I would receive a number of percentage points per album, based on the retail price (I can’t recall the number exactly, but I know it was quite acceptable to me after seven years of being underpaid for producing). I was happy with this, as it was competitive with the best production deals at the time. If I could be fortunate enough to produce a platinum album with these terms, I stood to make half a million dollars.

Before exiting the label, I attended the Grammys with Bob and a few other executives – a pretty boring affair lasting four hours (it’s actually recorded “live on tape,” which allows for reshoots), replete with orders to minimize the number of trips we made to the bathroom in order to avoid visibly empty seats. The next time I had an opportunity to attend the Grammys, I passed. I had one personally significant meeting at the office with a Mrs. Ellis McDaniel, who was Bo Diddley’s wife. I can’t recall the express purpose of our meeting, but Bo Diddley was such a heavy musical influence on me in my teenage years that I count this as one of the more significant meetings I had while at Elektra.

I also received a call from Irving Azoff, who requested that I get in touch with Tim Schmit of the Eagles and become involved in his plans to record a solo album. Irving wanted me to go to Tim’s house and hear what he planned to record. I did know Tim from the Poco years, but I hadn’t said three words to him during that period (Richie Furay was always the chatty one). I was a little anxious about calling a member of the Eagles and telling him I’d like to come and hear the material he was preparing for his solo album (imagine if Irving had wanted me to do the same with Henley and Frey…).

As expected, every time I did manage to reach Tim, he gave me the dodge or told me this wasn’t a good time, and for the first time in my professional life I learned what it was like to be considered the pesky jerk from the record company. I wanted to leave a message that said “Tim, I’m not a jerk – I actually have some understanding of the musical process,” but of course I never did; nor did I ever manage to hear one note of Tim’s music before I left the label. I had lunch in New York with Judy Collins, and had prepared for this by listening to her more recent albums. How was I to revive her career? To my ear, she was beginning to lose control of her pitch, and the only reason we were doing an album with her was because her contract required it. Elektra was actually in a similar position with many of its artists whose careers had peaked some years earlier.

I never did resolve the Judy Collins question. I accompanied Bob to the studio in LA to visit with Linda Ronstadt while she was making her album of love songs with arrangements by Nelson Riddle and his orchestra. Here was this beautiful woman whose career I had known for years and years, and I shook hands with her, said a few polite words and left; it felt like what it was — a visit to let the artist know that the label knew she was in the studio and didn’t want her to think we had no interest in the project.

Tom Zutaut and I went to Boston to meet with Ric Ocasek and the Cars – the most enjoyable trip I took while at Elektra. Here we went to Ric’s house, had some significant musical discussions, and I made the acquaintance of Cars tour manager Steve Berkowitz, who later moved to New York to run the creative side of the Sony Legacy label – the unit responsible for leveraging and repackaging the extensive Sony music catalog. I had a meeting in my LA office with George Thorogood, who wanted to self-produce his next album. I suggested that this might be acceptable if I could act as sort of a behind-the-scenes consulting producer. He declined. He wanted no one involved in his album, even though his career could have used a boost at this point. That was a particularly disappointing meeting.

I saw Mötley Crüe become involved with Doc McGhee and Doug Thaler for management. The extent of my knowledge of these two at that time was that Doug had been a former talent agent. Someone told me that Doc had been involved with a large shipment of weed, and had been doing a fair amount of community service as a result. I really had no idea at the time how fortunate it was that these two were going to manage this fairly unmanageable group. Doc is a very forward-thinking strategist with a brilliant and durable sense of humor, and Doug has a heap of both good sense and patience. Humor, good sense and patience would all play a very significant role in the handling of Mötley Crüe over the life of their career.

Tom Zutaut had brought Dokken to the label, and he accompanied me to see the band play at The Palace in the San Fernando Valley. I was very impressed with this band – especially with George Lynch’s guitar playing and Jeff Pilson’s bass playing. I liked their material, Don was a great frontman, and Mick Brown was a great drummer. Here was a great rock and roll band, period. Eventually, Tom promoted my involvement in the production of their next album, and they agreed. Dokken would become the second album of the three I was to produce in the first year of my Elektra agreement.

In June of 1983 I took Mötley Crüe into a soundstage at Studio Instrument Rentals on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, and we did the pre-production for the album. It went surprisingly smoothly and swiftly, in large part because Tommy was so good and so adaptable. Most of the changes I suggest in pre-production have to do with drum parts anyway, so we made a number of changes to the basic tracks, but we left vocals and guitar leads pretty much alone. This also gave me a false impression of how much time I would need to complete the album, since I could not imagine the number of hours I would need to have Vince behind the mike in order to get an album’s worth of strong vocals. We entered Cherokee Studios on Fairfax in July of 1983 with Geoff Workman, an engineer I hired for the project because I felt I needed a new engineering approach, with more bottom to the record. Gary Ladinsky and I had gotten along well, and I was very relaxed in the studio with him – but I thought his whole sonic approach was too pop for a band like the Crüe. Workman had done engineering for Roy Thomas Baker, and I had a great deal of respect for Roy’s producing talent. Geoff was indeed a good choice for this project, but he wouldn’t last more than three albums with me, as he turned out to have some serious issues of his own, which I regrettably discovered only after the damage had been done.

The Internet is loaded with sites and articles about Mötley Crüe. Some are probably fairly accurate, and some others are probably not. I know from scanning The Dirt that much of what is attributed to them — and even more of what they attribute to themselves – is exaggerated or pure fiction. Some is designed to titillate, and some is designed to place blame on others for what the band members brought on themselves. But the fact remains that the behavior and lifestyle of these guys was certainly among the most outrageous one could imagine. I actually saw very little of this behavior. I didn’t stay after sessions to party with the band, and I spent little time in social situations with them.

They all spent some time at my house (I started having swimming / barbecue parties to mark the finish of each album I produced, which often resulted in groups of pasty pale-skinned long-haired musicians in black leather and shades lounging uncomfortably in the Southern California sunlight) and I in turn spent some time at Nikki’s homes in both Coldwater Canyon (I think) and in Sherman Oaks. His behavior at this particular house, much of it allegedly spent under the influence of heroin, did not seem that unusual to me. I visited with him several times during his relationship with Vanity, and I had a sushi dinner with him the evening of the day he was released from the hospital, after having been pronounced dead. You won’t read about this anywhere, though, because he wouldn’t want to admit having been friendly with me after what he has written. I spent little or no time in their hotel rooms while they were on tour, so I never saw any of the destruction or mayhem. I was with them mostly in their dressing room or in the studio. I do remember a few bizarre situations, but very few – one being an incident with a girl of questionable morality who interacted with a coke bottle in much the same way that Monica Lewinsky interacted with Bill Clinton’s cigar. I enjoyed a good time as much as the next guy, but this simply wasn’t the kind of enjoyment I sought after a long day in the recording studio.

I attended Vince’s and Tommy’s bachelor parties – one at the Tropicana Mud Wrestling Club and one at a valley strip joint. I attended the record release parties for our three albums. But after the Girls Girls Girls album, I was simply dead to them. If you’re not actually doing something on their behalf, you don’t exist. Even though we ended our working relationship on good terms after five years, they didn’t invite me to attend the album release party for Dr. Feelgood, which was held right in Los Angeles. One wonders about people who can do this, and then greet you on the street with a big hug, as if you were a good buddy.

We recorded Tommy’s drum tracks swiftly and effortlessly, with dummy rhythm guitar tracks (for reference only). We started to overdub Nikki’s bass parts, which typically took several hours per song. His bass playing has improved substantially over the years, but in the beginning it was a little uneven. Before we could get halfway through the bass overdubs, Nikki ran his Porsche off the canyon road into a utility pole one night and dislocated his shoulder. Consequently, he had to finish his bass parts with one arm in a sling. This didn’t speed things up. Mick was well prepared with his guitar parts, and the basic rhythms went pretty quickly, although it would take us three albums until we managed to get a really nice guitar sound on him. His solos were interesting and well rehearsed, but he didn’t have a great feel for guitar fills, especially at transitional points between verses and choruses, and vice-versa. I helped him with these, and he was very cooperative, accepting and embracing most of my suggestions.

Vince was detached from the early portions of the recording, as are most vocalists, so he became accustomed to hanging around the studio during the afternoon and evening, being somewhat bored or distracted, and then he’d go out and party til the cows came home. This didn’t establish a healthy pattern for him when it came time to do lead vocals. He’d come in fairly trashed from the previous night and put in his hours at the mike like a good soldier, but we’d be left with very little usable vocal at the end of the day – so vocals took quite a while to complete. Geoff helped out with sound effects and a great reading of the album’s intro, which had been composed by Nikki.

The album was a pretty live-sounding affair with a decent bottom end. It was released in early October, while I was attending an annual music business golf tournament at Pebble Beach. One afternoon I was standing in my room, looking out at Carmel Bay over the 18th fairway, and I got a call from Zutaut back in the office, who reported “Werman, we’ve got a hit.” He went on to describe the brisk sales of the album, and I was very, very gratified by this. At that same time, though, I began to recognize a familiar feeling of anxiety that accompanied every professional success – and that was the pressure to make another hit next time, because it was now expected of you. I began to recognize this anxious feeling as the fear of success. By the time I had left the label world to become a totally independent producer, my gold or platinum record batting average was around .700, so the expectations for my producing a hit record were unusually high. I’m sure the band also experienced this feeling after the success of Shout at the Devil, since their drug habits were intensifying and their songwriting was suffering by the time we entered the studio to record Theater of Pain.

After I returned from Pebble Beach to enjoy a few weeks off, I was sitting in my kitchen and I received a call from Doug Morris, who was then president of Atlantic Records in New York. He said that he had a band he believed in who had been selling records in the European market, but who couldn’t get arrested over here, and that he was certain I was the only guy who could make a hit record with them for the US market. Would I please go and have a look at them and do him a personal favor by taking on the project? Now, in 1983, when a record company president tells you you’re his first choice, that it would be a personal favor to him, and that there’s nobody else for the job, you simply do it. But what if they were dreadful? I’d be forced to either undertake a project destined for failure, or to alienate a very important man in the industry.

Anyway, I arranged to make my way to Hershey, Pennsylvania, so I could see Twisted Sister at a local rock club. I remember flying directly over Three Mile Island and the cooling towers at the nuclear plant there. Fortunately, and to my relief, the show was different and strong; the band was in full costume and makeup, and they even had a portion of chain link fence onstage. Afterward, we all went out to discuss my involvement, and they were very enthusiastic. That’s right – even Dee Snider was enthusiastic, telling me what a great album it was going to be, and what a perfect time it was for them to be making their breakthrough album for the American market. I enjoyed their casual attitude, their humor, and especially their enthusiasm. When they told me they were basically teetotalers and weightlifters, I thought about what a refreshing change this would be from the normal hard rock experience, and I made up my mind to call Doug, to call my attorney, and to see if we could arrange to go into the studio soon.

Our little cul de sac in Los Angeles was short and narrow, just off Laurel Canyon and just south of Ventura Boulevard. Except for the occasional airport trip when I would call for a town car to pick me up, limos were generally scarce in our neighborhood — so when a big black stretch limo pulled up at about 6:30 one weekday evening, the neighbors knew somebody of some note must be visiting. John and Judy Belushi, accompanied by their driver/assistant Smokey and Paul Cooper of Atlantic Records, came into the house, and we introduced everyone to our daughters Julia and Nina, who were then eight and five. We had some drinks and some hors d’oeuvres, and John was as hyperkinetic as anyone I had ever known, even when he was sitting down. Every minute he was doing something with his hands or jiggling his feet, talking nonstop or walking around looking at things in the living room. At one point, while fooling around with Nina , who was a very petite five-year-old, he literally tossed her over the back of the couch onto the floor – she wasn’t hurt, but she still hasn’t forgotten.

At dinner, John explained that he was on the wagon at the time, and that Smokey was along to make sure he didn’t drink and to “take the cocaine out of his nose.” After dinner, we repaired to my music room, where John proceeded to thumb through my 1500 vinyl albums, and we pulled out a bunch of records and started to compile a list of songs that he would enjoy doing. He danced with my sister, who was visiting us, and we had a pretty enjoyable evening. We agreed that I would meet with Dan Aykroyd in New York, and further discuss what might happen on the next record. Some days later, I met with Danny at the midtown office he shared with John (where one of the office decorations was the actual passenger door from a Chicago police cruiser).

Later that evening, I cabbed down to John’s apartment, and we went out on the town, making visits to some of John’s favorite haunts. In my irresponsible and youthful way, I had halfway hoped that this might be a wild and crazy evening, but it turns out that he was being good that week. We started out at Jimmy Pullis’s place, JP’s, on the upper east side. This had been one of my favorite places in the ’70s as well, and the place where Billy Joel became famous enough in New York to land a contract, and possibly the place that inspired “Piano Man.” That night, we went upstairs to the owner’s living quarters where there was a small party of sorts, and after a few minutes of checking things out, John told me we had to get out of there because there were just too many drugs. In the ’80s, people were tripping over themselves to give John drugs, so they could claim “Hey, I did some blow with John Belushi.”

We headed back downtown, and entered another trendy restaurant/bar that was jammed with young people drinking and eating and generally having a good time. I’ll never forget our entrance, because John literally sucked every ounce of energy out of that room the second he walked in the door. All over the room heads turned, either obviously or imperceptibly, and I knew then for the first time what it was like to be with a really famous person. Standing next to him, I was invisible. People tap-danced around him like little marionettes, jockeying for position and saying anything that might elicit a reply.

It was a nice evening out, but in the end I passed on the album because I was anxious about the logistics of a large band of studio musicians with a brass section, and mainly because there was no movie to accompany it. A surprisingly brief time after my introduction to John and Dan, John died. I regret not doing the project; it could have been fascinating.

In 1982, I signed a band brought to me by Molly Hatchet manager Pat Armstrong. They were called Stranger and were a very popular band on the Florida club circuit. The lead guitarist, Ronnie Garvin, was a stunning player. They received marginal support from the label, but I can’t say that the album’s failure was due to that; my friend Bruce Harris, who was then in A&R at Epic, thought the problem was that they were, in fact, a “bar band,” and didn’t have the material needed for top 40 penetration. This disappointing experience, coupled with another unsuccessful album I did for a Chicago group called The Bzz (pronounced “bees”), furthered my frustration with Epic, and I began to think about a change in direction.

At that point, my current two-year contract was drawing to a close, and I requested a meeting with CBS Records President Dick Asher. The record business was suffering after the disco boom, and Mr. Asher was taking a cautious approach. I suggested a few changes to my contract and told him I had to have a considerably larger paycheck to compensate for my small royalty payments. Since I was contractually limited to producing records only for the label (with one outside project allowed per year), I was receiving about 12 cents per album while independent producers were receiving almost 40 cents. Considering that by this time my Epic productions had sold about 20 million copies, one could say that I had been underpaid by about $5 million over seven years. When Asher said “this isn’t the same record business anymore, Tom,” it seemed that my chances for a big raise were pretty slim. The meeting ended with no significant improvements in store for my deal, and I left his office considering that the time may actually have come for me to call it quits with CBS Records.

In September of 1982, an independent publicist named Wayne Rosso told me that Elektra Records was going to be looking for a new head of A&R, since Kenny Buttice was departing the label. Elektra was a prestigious label with an impressive roster of fine artists, including Queen, Judy Collins, Paul Butterfield, The Doors, the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt. The problem was that they had no current hits, and most of their big stars had seen better days. Joe Smith, who had been one of my favorite radio deejays when I was growing up in Boston, was now the head of the label, which had its headquarters in a modest white building on La Cienega Boulevard, just south of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.

I met Joe Smith at his house in Beverly Hills, and we talked for 20 or 30 minutes. I was keenly interested in Elektra because of Bruce Lundvall’s association with the label. Bruce had first interviewed me at Columbia Business School, and had facilitated my re-introduction to CBS after my year at Grey Advertising. I had known Bruce for 12 years at this point, and I liked and trusted him. I did have some reservations about my ability to see the “big picture” and actually run a department in a corporation (which would involve budgets, profit centers, annual reviews, expense accounts, goals, etc.). On balance, though, I figured that I knew enough about A&R at this point to be capable of revitalizing a label which had always been highly regarded in the industry. I began my job as Vice President of Elektra A&R on January 3rd, 1983, and I brought along an assistant with me from Epic.

I had no staff and a very limited budget, but Bruce had advised me to become acquainted with a young man who worked at the warehouse. His name was Tom Zutaut, and he knew a tremendous amount about music, both old and new. He had brought Mötley Crüe and Dokken to the label already, he was young and adventurous, and his only interest and responsibilities were in and to the music business. I hired him, and we began to plan the rebuilding of the Elektra roster. I had some meetings with artists who were on the label at that time — Greg Kihn, Josie Cotton, George Thorogood, Judy Collins, David Lindley and their respective managers — and was just getting familiar with most of the various people in the company when Bruce called from New York and told me to meet him at his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel the next evening. When I arrived at the hotel, Bruce explained to me that Joe Smith had been elevated to a corporate position, and that a man named Bob Krasnow was taking over as head of the label, right above Bruce’s level.

Bob had come from Warner Brothers (specifically Blue Thumb), where he had been responsible for signing many artists, including Chaka Khan, George Benson and George Clinton. He had a reputation as a bit of a wild man, but that was all right with me, initially. Bob showed up at the suite later, and the three of us spent some time discussing his plans. Bruce seemed to be pretty upbeat about this rather sudden change, so I left the meeting feeling that there would be some adjustment required, but that basically things would be all right. Two weeks later I flew to New York to have some meetings there, as Bob was living there and intended to staff a New York office. WhileI was in the city, Bruce mentioned that he wanted me to see an artist; he had arranged for a private showcase for just the two of us. He had hired a car, and in the late afternoon we were driven downtown to a rehearsal studio, where we saw a private 40-minute set by a beautiful girl, backed by a very tight band. A familiar-looking older woman was there, and after the set, I was introduced to both her and the girl who had sung for us, who turned out to be the woman’s niece. This artist was such a great vocalist that at one point during the set, Bruce and I simply looked at one another and laughed. I hadn’t seen anyone this strong in years. I was very excited, and grateful to Bruce for bringing this to my attention as the head of A& R.

The next day, we both spoke to Krasnow, and told him how wonderful this girl was. He agreed to see her; it became clear that he was going to be intimately involved in every A&R decision, since that was his background. A week or so later, he attended a showcase by this same girl, and when we spoke to him, he agreed that she had a good voice, but that “she sounds exactly like Chaka Khan, and I already signed Chaka Khan.” So that was how Bob passed on Whitney Houston, whose aunt Cissy Houston was an artist friend of Bruce’s and had brought her to his attention. Later that month, Clive Davis had a significantly different response to Whitney. Bruce and I were disappointed by this missed opportunity – at the time we had no clue of how big an opportunity it had been.

During Bob’s next trip to Los Angeles, he summoned me and Tom Zutaut to dinner with Bruce at a Chinese restaurant in Beverly Hills. Bob considered himself a fancier of fine foods, and was fond of taking people to new and unusual places. At this dinner, he laid out his immediate plans for the label, among which were to drop Motley Crue, as he considered them to be an embarrassment.

I tactfully tried to explain to Bob that under Elektra’s circumstances at that time, somebody had to pay the bills. I suggested to Bob that he do what he wished to shape the label’s artist roster, but to leave the meat & potatoes of rock & roll to myself and Zutaut. He seemed to give this at least a little consideration, and we left the dinner with the understanding that we would complete the second Motley Crue album, which was contractually called for, but that Bob would make it relatively easy for the group to leave the label. He was more interested in newer and less conventional styles of music.

Some weeks after our dinner with Bob, Zutaut told me he felt I would make a great producer for the next Mötley Crüe album. Their first record, Too Fast for Love, was selling pretty well. The original tapes had been remixed by Roy Thomas Baker, and Vince had redone all the original vocals. A friend of mine from Epic in New York had sent the LP to me just before I made the move to Elektra, recommending that I look into this band. I listened to the album and thought it was a little sloppy, but that it had a lot of energy and some good musical ideas. Now that Zutaut was in the mix, I agreed to meet with the band, and felt good about the idea of once again being able to split my time between the studio and the office — this time around for adequate financial compensation. Tom brought the band into my office, and we had a conversation. Nikki was fairly specific about what kind of album he wanted, and how we should go about it. The one thing I recall from that meeting was Tommy Lee saying to Nikki, “Listen, if this guy’s gonna produce our album, then I think we should listen to what he has to say.” I was grateful for that one.

After three months at the label, with Bob’s mercurial behavior and the realization that he was going to move the headquarters to New York, I began to feel fairly uncomfortable about what I had initially considered a great new job. It was obvious now that Krasnow was the only actual head of A&R, and that his and my musical preferences were quite different from one another. I was now faced with the possibility of being a powerless executive at a label whose artistic direction I didn’t particularly favor. I got a call from John Kalodner over at Geffen. I had known John since his early days at Atlantic, and he had become something of a legend in the music business. He said that he and Geffen’s president Eddie Rosenblatt had been discussing my situation, and they knew I would be having a rough time with Krasnow; they invited me over for a powwow, and offered to assist me in getting the right attorney to extricate me from this untenable situation. I was grateful for their concern, and I think Bob was satisfied in the end, when I settled for a lump-sum payoff and a three-album production deal, the first of which would be the new Mötley Crüe record.

By the end of the ’70s, I had just about made a clean transition from A&R man to producer. My corporate title was Senior Vice President/Executive Producer, since I had gone through all the promotions one had to have at CBS in order to justify my pay grade. The CBS Records offices in LA were located in the Carlsberg Building, on the western margin of Century City, on little Santa Monica Boulevard. If I went into the office at all, it was to catch up on routine paperwork, read mail, open unsolicited cassettes, and return messages. I was trying to settle into a nice three-project-a-year groove, with a summer vacation so I could actually spend some time with my family. There was really no one at the office to whom I reported, so if I wasn’t in the studio and I hadn’t any pressing matters or label meetings, the time in between projects was mine to use as I chose.

I was beginning to feel just the slightest bit of complacency about my situation, which was as unsettling to me as it was comforting. It seemed to me that a bit of repetition was creeping into the production process, even though I was eager to keep things fresh and exciting. I remember this period as a time when I started to formulate answers to the same questions being asked by journalists, and I recall saying that I tried to avoid having “a sound” to my productions, maintaining that each project required a unique approach. In theory, I truly believed this, but in practice I found myself relying more and more on things I had done on previous albums, because they produced great results. I don’t think that I had a sound, really, and I do think that I served each artist in the proper way.

At the same time, there were certain things you could find in common on most of my productions – doubled rhythm guitars, shakers and tambourines, hand claps, Hammond organ, and a way of dividing time to create a kind of locomotive feel – that actually worked for a variety of artists. What this really meant was that the common quality to my recordings was in the arrangements, really, and not in the actual sound of the recording. I didn’t have a routine approach to miking the drum kit, and I varied the application of echos and delays, so that there was nothing comparable to a “wall of sound” or a certain presence or lack of presence to the instruments, or booming drums – nothing t hat could possible lead someone to say “this sounds like a Tom Werman record.”

But clearly the early ’80s was a more restless time for me – one during which I felt a drop in the level of excitement and commitment I had to my work. Eventually I realized that I needed to begin looking outside the comfortable world of CBS Records. My agreement with Epic had allowed me to do one outside project per year, but this was pretty limiting. In 1979, that outside project was Blue Öyster Cult, who were on the Columbia label. I had known Murray Krugman and Sandy Pearlman (BÖC’s producers) when Murray was at Columbia Records, and Sandy was an independent producer. I liked Murray – he was intelligent and humorous, and the band’s records were good. I was excited to be given the opportunity to work with an established band, whose past work I could evaluate and try to take to the next level.

The material they brought to the project was really quite different from “Go Go Godzilla” or “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” It was more serious, more introspective, and in my mind less commercial. They seemed to have written songs around a vague kind of theme. But I liked the guys, and I respected their musical ability. The Bouchard brothers provided the rhythm section, Donald Roeser was a fine guitarist, Eric Bloom had a vocal style that was great for the music, and Alan Lanier was a great keyboard player with a distinct musical style all his own. Yet this album really turned out to be more of an experiment for the band, like what Their Satanic Majesties’ Request was to the Stones or Rubber Soul was to the Beatles.

Having never met the band, I was a little surprised to discover that the guitarist known as “Buck Dharma” (one of the cooler stage names I had heard) was a diminutive, soft-spoken guy with a voice somewhere between baritone and tenor, with a really wonderful sense of humor. From the name, I had expected some kind of tough guy or social outcast – at least a tattoo or two. But Donald kept me in stitches for most of the project, and one night in Record Plant’s Studio B, he literally had me on the floor. It was almost midnight, and he was trying t o nail a vocal in the studio, and had been singing for an hour or two. We were all a little fatigued and a little bugged by the pressure to finish the album by a certain date, and he naturally fell into a hilarious commentary about a number of things, which caused me to laugh so hard that I literally fell out of my chair onto the floor, helpless and clutching my stomach. I’ll never forget it.

Much to Eric Bloom’s disgust, I found Donald’s voice more appropriate for most of the songs they had written, so Eric was stuck in LA with not much to do. I learned early that Donald had been the voice on most of the BÖC songs that I knew and liked, so I was ready to proceed with him as the main vocalist. I felt badly for Eric, but at the same time, I wasn’t going to go against my artistic judgment in order to be a nice guy. The album did recoup its recording costs, but wasn’t a hit by the group’s standards. On a personal basis, I enjoyed the band very much, and saw Alan Lanier back in New York a few times following the recording – perhaps because he was the only one who lived right in the city. Alan was distinctly bohemian, compared to the rest of the band. I sometimes wondered how he wound up with these guys.

The year before this project, I was sent into the studio with Cheap Trick to do the Dream Police album, which set a record for the shortest project I ever did. We completed the album in exactly 30 days, from load-in and setup to final mix. By today’s standards, or even by the standards of the ’90s, this was not so big a deal; but in 1979, it was pretty spectacular, given the end result. Once again, everything went smoothly and easily, and once again the songs were great, and incredibly varied. The label had wanted this LP to be delivered by a specific date, so we were in there working like crazy to get it finished. Just after we finished, Live at Budokan took off, and Dream Police sat on the shelf for eight months before it was released.

I always called the title track “Son of Surrender,” but it was a great song in its own right. Engineer Gary Ladinsky and I are singing the answer vocals to “live inside of my head” and “come to me in my bed” on the choruses, and the falsetto “Police, Police” answer vocals at the end of the song. Rick Nielsen and Jai Winding wrote an arrangement for a large string section (Rick was always a big ELO fan) on “Way of the World,” and we recorded it with Jai conducting a 21-musician string section at the big room at RCA Recording Studios. I introduced the Hammond organ into the breakdown section of “Gonna Raise Hell,” and suggested that we get Steve Lukather of Toto to play guitar on “Voices.” Steve and I played the basic rhythm guitars on that song, too.

When Rick informed me that Tom Petersson was going to do the lead vocals on “I Know What I Want,” I thought he was kidding. He wasn’t. The result was not spectacular, but it wasn’t the last time Tom would come up with requests or demands that his girlfriend Dagmar had instigated. Around the time of this album, she started a campaign to convince Tom that he needed to have more personal exposure in the band, that he could sing well, and that he should be more of a frontman. This eventually led to his departure from the group for a brief solo career.

After Dream Police, which went platinum quickly, I figured we were ready to do a real blockbuster album. Instead, the group chose to have George Martin produce their next record. How could I object? I was disappointed, but I was also excited by the prospect of having one of my favorite groups working with the Beatles’ producer. I had mixed feelings when the album proved to be less successful than Dream Police. That was the last real association I had with Cheap Trick until I got a call from them a number of years later. They had been on and off a number of labels, and had fired their brilliant manager Ken Adamany. They left Warner Brothers after Mo & Lenny left the label, and they were looking for a new home. They asked me if I would come out to Rockford, Illinois and help them make some good demos; if those demos led to a record deal, I would produce the album.

I was excited at the prospect of a reunion with the band, and they paid my transportation and room and board. We worked for a week, made some good demos, and mixed them in Chicago. Months later, when they got a label deal with these demos, they called to inform me that they had decided to produce the album themselves. I was bummed, and I advised them against it, but there really wasn’t much I could do. Yes, they went back on their word, but it wasn’t a big money deal for them, and I thought it would be petty of me to complain. When the next album came out, there was my demo, track one, side one – the one I had played percussion on, and my mix – yet there was no mention of my name, no musician credit, and of course, no financial compensation.

Feeling completely chumped, I called their manager and asked him what he thought he was doing. He told me to calm down, that things like this always happen. “Not in my world,” I replied. And that was basically the end of my relationship with Cheap Trick. After that, I was just another in a long list of names they complained about – just about everyone who had worked with them or helped them over the span of their career. This was the first of a series of events that cemented my attitude toward successful rock musicians. Generally speaking, and with few exceptions, if you aren’t doing something for them, you don’t exist, and 10 years later you’re responsible for everything they failed to achieve. It was really small and pathetic behavior, and I was pretty disappointed.

We cranked out Flirtin’ With Disaster and Beatin’ the Odds for Molly Hatchet in 1979 and 1980, and then I worked with Gary Myrick and the Figures. This was something quite different from the stuff I’d been doing. The band was good, tight and lean, and the songs were compelling, Gary was a great guitar stylist and a great singer. There was space in the production, and not all rhythm guitars were doubled. I learned some things from Gary, and we had fun doing this album. As it turned out, maybe Gary was a little ahead of his time. KROQ in Pasadena played the hell out of “She Talks in Stereo,” and it appeared on the Valley Girl movie soundtrack as well. Still, it wasn’t quite enough to establish Gary in the big time. He was as accomplished a visual artist as he was a musician, and later I joined the band onstage in a few wacky club gigs we did, appearing as “The Souldads.” Gary would just start a riff on his guitar, and we’d all fall in line, spinning out these 15-minute jams while Gary just ad-libbed some humorous nonsense at the mike.

A friend of mine named Marty Cohn worked at Warner Brothers, and his brother Bruce was managing the Doobie Brothers. Marty told me about this new artist that Bruce was working with, and asked me if I’d like to come over and play some percussion on the demo. So this is how I wound up playing tambourine and shakers on the demo that got Bruce Hornsby signed. Marty and Bruce now have a very successful wine business in the Napa Valley, and Bruce’s early departure from the record business was an inspiration for my abrupt career change nine years ago.

That year, I also received a phone call at home from a fellow named Paul Cooper, who handled the west coast office of Atlantic Records for New York-based president Doug Morris. Paul told me that the Blues Brothers were planning to record a second album, and that he would like to arrange a meeting between John Belushi and myself when John was in L.A. Belushi was about the biggest name in entertainment at the time, and I was pretty jazzed. After thinking about how we should arrange this meeting, I called Paul back and told him to just bring John over to the house with him for supper, and we’d spend the evening. I looked forward to this dinner with great anticipation and curiosity.

1978 was a pretty busy year for me, with four album releases and a family move to Los Angeles: Ted had Double Live Gonzo, a two-record live set at the beginning of the year, and Weekend Warriors toward the end of the year. We recorded the first Molly Hatchet album in Orlando, and did Heaven Tonight with Cheap Trick, again in Los Angeles. As with the Jeff Beck /Jan Hammer live album, for Ted’s live album we recorded a number of dates, and then sat down to listen to the material. Again, we found that most of the best performances came from one night (in this case, San Antonio), and we did some repairing in the CBS New York Studios – the only time I actually did any recording in New York City, and the only time I worked in a CBS studio. Live LPs in those days (and I’m sure today, as well) were carefully crafted affairs, designed to sound as if they were recorded at the show, but in actuality fairly worked-over in the studio to repair the mistakes.

Live recordings had tracks for the hall’s public address system and for the audience, to capture the size of the hall and the size and energy of the crowd; because they already carried a record of what happened onstage, we couldn’t depart very much from what was actually played, but if you were careful, you could either correct or completely replace the vocal and guitar tracks. We brought Ted into the studio in New York, and we had a pretty enjoyable time fixing up this album, since Ted can be fairly zany in front of a mike. At the end of one song, we heard Ted onstage yelling “San Antonio! San Antonio!” Right after we heard this, as the tape played on and Ted was still in place behind the studio microphone, he added “suck my bonio!” This produced much mirth and merriment in the control room (we were younger and less mature then) and we kept it for the master — it’s just a little buried in the mix. After all, Tipper Gore and the Parents’ Music Resource Center had yet to come along.

I wasn’t happy with the energy or size of the crowd sound, so I asked the engineer to make a two-track (stereo) tape loop of pure audience from this San Antonio crowd. During the mix, I had three different audience tape loops going, so I could have as much or as little as I wanted from one or all three. One was just the crowd, one was the crowd with whistles, and the last was the crowd with whistles and firecrackers. The three two-track tapes ran on separate machines during every mix, and I used one, two or all three to beef up the crowd noise, being careful not to use any one section more than once. It was tedious, but worth the effort. It may be disappointing for readers to learn this information, actually, but I felt it was necessary to do this in order to compensate for the limitations of live sound recording at the time (that sounds good, right?).

The other Nugent LP released in 1978 was Weekend Warriors. It was recorded down at Criteria Sound Studios in Miami, and to me it was the least exciting of the five LPs I did with Ted. I thought that the material had become slightly repetitive at this point, and that Ted, brilliant as he was, had said most of what he had wanted to say musically. During the recording, I received a call from the Epic office in New York, asking me to fly to Tokyo and to supervise a live recording of Cheap Trick at Budokan. I declined, saying that I had another week to go before we finished this album, and that I couldn’t really leave now. So that’s how I missed producing Cheap Trick’s hugely successful Live at Budokan. Criteria was an excellent studio, and happened to be within a block of the first Tony Roma’s, the rib place. We used to call it “Tony’s Aroma,” since you could smell the ribs in the studio building if the wind was blowing in the right direction.

It was during this project that I pulled my last all-nighter. One night we worked very late and hung out afterward, liberally enjoying our downtime. The memory of driving back to the Holiday Inn on Biscayne Boulevard is indelibly etched into my mind. I was just ending my work day as the sun was coming up. I was exhausted, my brain felt as if it were on fire, my mouth felt like a dustbin, I was parched, barely conscious, and here I was behind the wheel, looking into the bright, cheery faces of happy commuters who had just awakened from a good night’s sleep. I felt horrible, and swore never to do this again. I didn’t. Nor did I ever take a redeye coast to coast after that, as I had several times in my youth. So at the tender age of 33, I crossed the behavioral line into middle age when it came to getting a good night’s rest. Without it, you just can’t put in a good day’s work.

Molly Hatchet was managed by a nice gentleman named Pat Armstrong, who was a fine, churchgoing pillar of the community, but pulled no punches when it came to dealing with this bunch. He ruled with a pretty firm hand, and he had a relationship with a studio owner in Orlando. I’m sure he negotiated an excellent deal for this one-room studio on a residential street in a quiet section of town. It remains the only studio I’ve ever seen that featured an in-house chapel. The couple who owned and operated it were born-again Christians, and it was ironic, to say the least, that the likes of Molly Hatchet were in there working. There was a small house next to the studio where the band stayed, so at least we didn’t have a problem rounding them up after a late night.

The wife of the couple who owned the studio wa s a very pretty young woman with very long hair which she wore in pigtails or a ponytail. She was, I thought, exactly what a nice young born-again Christian should look like. She had a nice way about her, and was always smiling. Her husband was a nice-looking, earnest young man who seemed like a “righteous dude.” Some time during the first month of recording, some of the road crew was given the afternoon off and decided to go to Disney World: they invited the wife to go along. It seems that she and one of the band’s roadies, nicknamed “Jughead,” ran off together that day, and weren’t seen again – at least during the project. I never did find out what happened to them, but I was pretty amazed by the whole affair.

There were times when we’d be in the studio and the Jack Daniel’s would be flowing, and some of the band’s friends would be visiting the session, and I would quietly wonder how I ever got so far from home. Here I was with a bunch of hell-raising, hard-drinking self-professed rednecks all from south of the Mason-Dixon line, and I was in charge of this project – a nice Jewish boy from a New England prep school/Ivy League background with a Master’s Degree in Business Administration. Somehow, though, it worked out very well, and we made five records together – three of them multiplatinum. Dave Hlubek, one of the guitarists, punched a door right off its hinges during that first session. It was an inexpensive, thin door, but it was still quite something to see. During one of the subsequent Hatchet albums we recorded in Orlando, we were missing Dave Hlubek for a couple of hours at the beginning of one afternoon session. Some investigation revealed that Dave had been arrested for “doing donuts” at a local gas station in his brand new Corvette. “Doing donuts” apparently meant driving very fast in tight little circles.

The guys would ask me to come out drinking with them after the session – their idea of a good time was to go to a bar, drink lots of good Southern bourbon, and then clear the place. They loved to fight. I passed. But I did enjoy the feeling of security when we all went out to dinner or to a club. Only Bruce Crump, the drummer, kept a cool head and tried to stay out of trouble. Duane Roland, the other guitar player, was a consummate musician, a soft-spoken guy, and had a terrific sense of humor. He had actually been shot in the stomach by his father when he was a teenager. Duane (what else?) used to do his guitar leads without ever looking once at the neck of the guitar, and then he’d proceed to double them – again without looking. Most of the time he’d just close his eyes.

When you listen to something like “It’s All Over Now” (a cover of the Stones’ hit), you’ll find this remarkable, because Duane actually played every single note that Keith had probably originally intended to play… and then he doubled it – all without looking at his instrument. Danny Joe Brown, the band’s singer, was large and very solid, and spoke with a whiskey-soaked voice and a great southern accent. He was as southern as you could get, and it was a pleasure to listen to him speak. In person he was gentle, but he could flatten you with one punch. He would punctuate his vocals with shrill whistles and an occasional “Hell, yeah!” Danny Joe was diabetic, and once shared with me his secret formula for getting around this – he said he shot himself up with more insulin than prescribed, so he could drink Jack Daniel’s, which he loved and which, of course, was loaded with sugar. Eventually Danny Joe’s hard living resulted in an unfortunate early death. Listeners would know that voice anywhere.

One time we were doing backing vocals at the Record Plant in L.A. after recording most of the album in Orlando. I had my friend Tom Kelly and Richard Page ( of Mister Mister) and Tommy Funderburk doing some chorus parts. One particular song called for a high, sweet Eagles-like chorus. After one playback of just the voices by themselves, Danny Joe turned to us and said “if they hear that in Jacksonville, they’re gonna clean beat the shit out of us.”

For the third or fourth album, we did the basic tracks and some of the guitar work at Compass Point in Nassau, which was Chris Blackwell’s studio. I had the apartment above the studio, and the others had cottages by the sea across the road. Gary Ladinsky and I would hang out at the pool until noon, and then we’d record with the band til about 4:30. At that point, we’d all take a break and walk about a quarter mile down the road to a place called Traveler’s Rest, where we’d have a couple of conch fritters and a Goombay Smash or two, then return to work and break at about 10 to go to the Playboy Club casino and gamble ’til midnight. On balance, this was not a difficult project to handle.

Steve Holland, the third guitarist, decided to get married during the recording, and we took a Sunday off to attend the ceremony at the studio and celebrate the event. Regrettably, Steve proceeded to get wasted before the ceremony and hurl an ethnic slur at me. I had had it with Steve by this point, and kicked off my sandals right there in the middle of the road by the studio, assumed the ready stance and said “Let’s go – right now.” To my utter astonishment, he backed down. The guy was bigger and younger, and probably could have pulverized me – but maybe he was too drunk, or maybe he could tell that I was fully adrenalinized by that point. We didn’t feature a lot of Steve’s guitar on that album.

We entered the studio in the winter of 1978 to record my favorite album, Cheap Trick’s Heaven Tonight. I was comfortable with the band, and the material for this album sounded particularly good. One of the pluses about working with Cheap Trick was the depth of their material. They didn’t have to write an album’s worth of new songs in a couple of weeks, because they had so many good ones that were saved for the second or third album. My favorite keyboard player, Jai Winding, played keyboards on this album, from Hammond B3 to grand piano to a variety of synthesizers.

I borrowed the synth line for “Surrender” (Conan’s a fan!) from the Who’s “Baba O’Riley.” It just seemed to sew the song together perfectly. On the fade, I suggested that they run through the band members’ names instead of just carrying out Mommy & Daddy. I also joined the chorus in the studio for “the “Mommy’s alright, Daddy’s alright” refrain. While Cheap Trick seem to find lots of things to complain about, you don’t hear them complaining about my keyboard ideas on songs like “Top of the World.” This was a guitar song until we put the piano part in, and I feel that it really nailed the song down. Rick was always a big ELO fan, and the band had been performing “California Man” for years at that point. It was a breeze to record. Robin’s voice was a little too pure to get the right scream, so that’s me screaming about 20 feet from the mike at the end of the song.

Robin Zander was indeed the man of a thousand voices. Where I’ve struggled for an entire day or night in order to get half of a complete song with other vocalists, Robin would come in and fire off two lead vocals in one afternoon, double them both and add harmonies. He was remarkable, cooperative, funny and a superb singer. Bun E. was the same on the drums. He never made a mistake in a take. He’d do three or four complete takes for a basic track, and then we’d choose the best. It wasn’t always easy to choose, but Bun E. knew what he liked. He rarely put his hand to his chin and looked skyward while deciding on something. As the song goes, he knew what he wanted and he knew how to get it. We’d usually complete our basic tracks in about three or four days, and the minute I said he was free to go, he would literally stand up, hang a sign on the front of his snare drum that said “gone fishing,” say goodbye, and leave the studio. I wouldn’t see him again until the tour started.

Jai put some pretty interesting programmed synth on “Takin’ Me Back,” and I wrote the script for the jive-talking deejay at the end of “On the Radio.” We actually hired the number one AM deejay in LA at the time to come in and read the script. We had lots of fun that day. For some reason, I always hear the songs “Heaven Tonight” and “Gonna Raise Hell” as being similar, even if they are completely different. They both have a sinister side. The middle of “Heaven Tonight,” when Robin repeats “You can never come down,” always reminds me of the breakdown in “Gonna Raise Hell,” when he screams “Mother” over and over. They both felt like epics.

I remember coming into the studio every day and just enjoying the hell out of listening to everything that went down. We had very few problems during the making of this album. As critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine said in his review, “Even with the fairly slick production, Cheap Trick sound ferocious throughout the album, slamming heavy metal, power pop and hard rock together in a humongous sound. Heaven Tonight is the culmination of the group’s dizzying early career, summing up the strengths of their first two albums, their live show, and their talent for inverting pop conventions. They were never quite as consistently thrilling on record ever again.” I like this guy.