Tales Of A RATT (2 page)

With my family watching their famous sibling in front of 15,000 screaming fans, I almost kill the tour.

My right foot catches on the leg turning my ankle onto its side, and slamming the side of my foot flat into the floor! The snap penetrating the screaming crowd could be heard by the lead singer, was immediately followed by the most immense pain I've ever experienced...

...and the Blotz is terrified.

The 15,000 adoring worshipers immediately become 15,000 fans that have expectations! Expectations that I can't deliver. The weight and pressures associated with being the band that carries an arena tour come crashing down like a fucking mallet.

My ankle is pulverized. A few seconds, and it's the size of a grapefruit. I'm going to have to cut my shoe off, and my whole lower leg is a white-hot ball of pain. But, I HAVE to play. I don't have a choice! Everyone; the band, the fans, the label and promoters; has expectations of me.

So, I play.

My trusty drum tech feeds me shot after shot of my good friend, Mr. Jack Daniels. This warm and soothing nectar of Tennessee will get me through it. I play the entire show, hardly able to think through the haze of sour mash and broken ankle.

Thus, you have an example of RATT. A band with so much talent and drive, yet so much cannibalistic ego and self-deprecation, so much misfortune, that it can barely hold together through five consecutive multi-platinum records.

RATT. The greatest band ever to almost become rock and roll Gods.

This is my story. Bobby Blotzer. The Blotz. The dubious backbone of the strongest underachievers in heavy metal.

Sit back and enjoy.

I've mentioned Mötley Crüe several times in this book. It’s well known that those guys were close to RATT for a long time. They were bros, but also, they serve as a dead on example of what the fuck I'm getting at. Mötley hit the highest of highs, so, as a result, they were destined for the lowest of lows.

They had the furthest to fall.

RATT wasn't as high as those guys. So, when we fell, we didn't make as loud a noise as Mötley did. That's the rules of stardom. It's all about blessings and curses. The good and the bad. The riches and the soullessness.

Fame likes to eat it's young.

RATT has given me some wonderful things. I've experienced so much that I never would have gotten close to otherwise. There's a thousand dudes sitting in their garages, beating the shit out of some off-brand drum kit. Those guys would give one of their balls to have had the run I've had so far.

So, I am a blessed man.

Then, there is the other side of that coin to look at. There's that side that reveals the turmoil and pain involved in this business. It's dealing with the Devil, you know? You're gonna get exactly what he promises your ass, but when you ask for it, you seldom understand the costs. It's never as good as you expect.

When we started out, and hit it huge, I wanted to do this forever. Despite the turmoil that was there from the beginning, I wanted to record with these dudes for the rest of my career. But, shit changes. I've said before, RATT wasn't a family. RATT was a gang. And, while those two things are built on similar standards, they are very different.

I love my brother Ronnie, even though he was a bit of a prick growing up. But, he's family, and family is built on love. When you fight with your family, at the end of it, you'll still be family. That won't change.

But, when you fight with a gang, someone's gonna bleed. RATT has done a lot of bleeding in the past 25 years. I'd never change it, though. Give me my gang. I don't always like them, but I can always trust them to be what they are.

Pi-RATTs.

Our first show was in Denver, Colorado at the Rainbow Theater. That was like, February 15, of 1984. The album had just come out, and we had just shot the video for Round and Round. I.C.M., which is a huge booking agency in LA, was handling all our booking.

That was an amazing feeling to see their roster, and know that we were a part of that. They had everybody. Not just bands, but actors and directors; stars of every kind. They had everybody. That's probably the biggest reason we signed with them.

We had the opportunity to go to Texas and open for ZZ Top.

Ironically, the very first arena I played with RATT was the last arena I played with Vic Vergat. There in San Antonio. It was that old circular dome there in San Antonio. I think it's called the Alamo Dome now.

More about that in a minute.

ZZ Top was very cool; total gentlemen, and really approachable; very different from the metal heads of the day. We played with them again a few years later in England during the Monsters of Rock Tour.

Every step was a huge step, by our standards. Every step felt like a gigantic leap forward. Fame is like that. You fight and fight; you have dozens of setbacks, where you think it's never going to work; and then fame hits! Within a couple of months, you're life becomes a fucking Cheers episode where everybody knows your name.

The "Out of the Cellar" tour lasted close to fifteen months. We weren't quite ready for something like that, but we jumped in with fervor, because we were starved cavemen, out there trying to find food. The longer we were out there, the better life was becoming. The general feeling was "don't ever send us home," even though, by the time that tour finished, we were completely burned out.

Kalamazoo was the first giant gig, and soon to come, it would be small by comparison. We did that show at the ski lodge, and they put the stage at the base of the ski runs. You could look out at the crowd, and just watch this sea of people flow up the side of the mountain. It was a very cool sight. There were a lot of people there that day.

From that show, we went to Wichita Falls, Texas and played some place called the Twilight Zone. So, we went from the biggest gig we had ever played back to the reality of a club tour. The stage in that place was eye to eye with the audience. That stage set-up is the worst in the history of live music. The people in the back of the room can't see shit, and the drummer is buried at the rear of the stage. It's a miserable playing experience.

The headlining bands on those opening tours treated us pretty well. Particularly Mötley Crüe.

We went out with Motley in 1984, while on the Cellar tour. That was...that was...fuck! Oh, my God...

Mötley Crüe is, hands down, the most out of control, decadent, soulless, monstrosity of a band that has ever been. They were also our closest compatriots. T-Bone and I are great friends to this day.

That leg of the tour was nothing but drink, snort, fuck and party day and night.

Complete, out of our mind, debauchery. We Pi-RATTs would invade your port, pillage your town, drink your rum, and fuck your daughters, all while you bought our T-shirts and albums, which we were happy to sign for you ... once we finished with your daughters.

We played this 4000 seat theater in Boston. The place was sold out, and in the dressing rooms, there were windows that looked out on the parking lot. Normally, you don't have windows in the dressing rooms. So, after the show, Tommy and I were getting fucked up, doing shot after shot after shot of Jack Daniels.

Just another day at the office.

We kept looking out the window and seeing all these people hanging out, trying to catch a glimpse of us in the dressing room. They probably thought they'd get a peek at us getting dressed or something. We would keep popping our heads out the window, and the crowd down there was going ape-nuts.

For some weird ass reason, we decided to start throwing them food from the deli tray. Like gasoline on a fire, the whole moment exploded with insanity. They were clamoring and climbing all over each other; tackling one another for these pieces of salami and bologna and cheese!

It looked like "Night of the Living Dead", and they were all cannibalizing a corpse, or something. I'm sure a couple of people actually got hurt in that melee. At the very least, a couple of them were bitten. We laughed our ass off at that crowd. They were so desperate for anything that we did. We couldn't have enough fun with it!

"We love you people!", as David Lee Roth was fond of saying.

The last night of that tour, we played two sold-out shows at the Beacon Theater in New York. Motley decided they were going to fuck with us, which is customary. The headlining band always has some joke or prank that they pull on the opening acts on the last night. Anything to fuck with them.

Mötley Crüe excelled at this.

For us, it was an all night thing. It started off with a dead pigeon on a string. They kept lowering this nasty assed thing down from the roof during the show. It would jump and flop around in the air, this dead bird on a string, right at eye level to the band. The guys at the front of the stage were ducking and dodging, trying not to get hit with this thing.

All right, very funny. The audience loved it.

The pranks continued, and I was a sitting duck for this shit. Behind my drum set, I had absolutely nowhere to go. I was Ground-Fucking-Zero. Unbeknownst to me, directly above my head, they had these huge bags of popped popcorn. Halfway through one of the songs, they promptly dumped this shit all over me. All right, even funnier. Snowing popcorn. Very nice.

That happened pretty early in our set, but I figured the fun was over, and we could get through the rest of the show without too much embarrassment. Popcorn wasn't that big of a problem to deal with. It was just messy.

Then came the coup-de-gras! Towards the end of the show, a giant cloud of white powder cascaded out of the rafters onto the stage! They had dumped huge bags of flour on us. Again, I'm a sitting duck. Nothing I can do about it, but play on.

This shit was everywhere! Clouds of flour went into every nook and cranny on stage. The worst part was my drums. When you dump 50 pounds of flour onto your drum heads, it's like playing with them draped in wet towels. RATT sounded like we were playing from inside a well.

That was pretty hysterical, thought. Really creative.

Cocksuckers!

I guess this joke really worked out for Motley. Because, it turned into a mainstay for their opening acts. They pulled the same trick on Guns N Roses when they toured with them in 1987.

The flour gag immediately made me think of the Vic Vergat tour with Nazareth. All that baby powder.

Karma. What a bitch.

We’ll talk about that in just a minute.

Our next big run was with Night Ranger. It lasted about three weeks, and turned out to be the calm before the storm. Night Ranger was a good bunch of guys to work with, and when we left them, all of a sudden, it was on! RATT was huge, with a single roaring toward the top ten.

We got two semis, production, lighting, minor staging with ramps, and Fastway and Lita Ford rolling with us as our opening acts. I had two very good friends playing drums with Lita Ford. One was Eric Singer, and the other was Randy Castillo. Lita was pretty cooperative, despite the fact that she was bumped from our Beverly Theater show the night we were signed. From this point on, the tour really took off.

Twisted Sister joined us, later, as an opening act. Their home turf was New York City and upstate New York. We had three or four shows in those areas, and knew they drew really well up there, so as a favor to Atlantic Records, we went on first for those dates.

In New York City, we played at this place called Pier 18, right on the water in the bowery. Huge. There were 10,000 people in that place, including a very young Jason Bonham, who had just been signed to Atlantic with his band Airrace. Of course, I just wanted to talk about his dad. I mean, one of the main reasons that I play drums it the legendary John Bonham.

These days, Jason and I are still friends. He's got a couple of good gigs. Led Zeppelin and Foreigner. I hope the Zeppelin thing happens for those guys. That will be a monstrous tour. It would set the records for any tour in history. Guaranteed.

I guess it was the middle of June when we really started noticing the changes. Our shows at clubs had been selling out, and after the Kalamazoo show, we were really starting to feel something. By June and July, we were becoming monsters. The next big thing. I remember we did an in-store in Arizona. We were shooting the "Wanted Man" video down there, and we had the film crew with us at the time.

Like all of our in-stores, there were three or four a week, the place was utter chaos! There were so many people packed into that place, it was insane. The film crew actually shot some of that, and the footage appears on a DVD collection of RATT videos, which we released in 2007.

I looked around in this mall, and was like, "Oh, my God.” There were cops everywhere, trying to maintain order. It was crazy. But, a lot of our in-stores were becoming like that. Especially after "Round and Round" hit MTV.

…but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s step back a bit and get a little background.

On October 22, 1958, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Charles "Chuck" Blotzer, and his beautiful wife, Lois, welcomed into the world a small, pink bologna loaf with a penchant for making loud noises. They see in their hearts to give this noisemaker the moniker Robert John Blotzer. Bobby, from that point on.

There begins my first day on this rock.

Mum and Dad were good people. Mum was a small-town mother with three kids at a very young age, and Dad, well Dad is a little hard to remember, to be honest. I only have two strong memories of him that I can recall with any clarity.

In one, I'm driving the car while sitting in his lap. It was one of those moments when a kid looks in his dad's face, and knows that he's gone from being his father's "son," to becoming dad's "Little Man.” A lot of sons have this memory, and it is one of my earliest.

My second memory of him was on the night I heard he had died. But, I'm getting ahead of myself a little.

They had been married since 1952, and my older brother Ron was six years my senior. I guess you could call him a "wedding present.” I also have an older sister, Carol. She is only a little more than a year older than me. Carol was my rock. She was my confidant. She showed me music for the first time, and she let me ogle her friends when we were teens. She gave me music and women. I don't think I've ever thanked her for that. Finally, there's my younger brother Michael, who my first son is named after. Mike was born in 1967.