Tales Of A RATT (35 page)

First, we could still make money. We were still viable.

Second, we could still work together without killing one another.

Stephen loves that record, Warren loves it, and it actually made us a lot of money. So, I can't bitch. We got some pretty big advances for that record.

This is a picture of a fan with the band in 1997. Look how young we look in this shot.

We went out in 1997 and hired Tim Hyne and John Greenberg of Union Entertainment. Tim and John are cool guys. These days, they manage Nickelback, and before us, they managed Cinderella. They were two guys who had a stable of bands and producers at their fingertips.

Union Entertainment came on board and helped us whip our business into shape. Before we knew it, we were back in our vein and ready to tour.

We went out and started selling out everywhere we played.

That took us by surprise a little. Grunge had pronounced heavy metal dead on arrival a full six years earlier. We were proving that wrong, and it felt really good to be doing it!

As Mark Twain said, "Rumors of our demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

I was thinking, "Oh, my God! Thank you! I'm back on stage rocking where I belong.”

I hadn't been on stage since we broke up, other than little cover band things. But, of course, no one had.

It was hard to ride out those mid-nineties years, you know. Some of the other bands just refused to give in and kept plugging away on the road. The Warrants and Great Whites and LA Guns of the business were forced to fight through the bottom feeder aspects of this business.

When I say bottom feeding, I'm not slamming their talent. These bands were part of the royal court of 80s metal. It's just that, when you plug along like that, and you continually are available, you overexpose yourself. Your market value drops.

In contrast, we were doing really well. We were headlining the House of Blues sized venues. Come summer, we started doing some festivals.

We did this one festival called Rockfest. It was in Chippewa Valley, Cadott, Wisconsin. It's a yearly, three-day festival.

The day we were playing, we were second up to Boston, who was the headliner. We were being paid $35,000 for that show, so it was a very high paying show for us.

We were back where we belonged.

During our set, with the crowd amped up as hot as I've ever seen a crowd, Stephen disappears.

I'm looking at my tech, going, "Where the fuck is Stephen?”

I was getting pissed off, because I thought he was off drinking somewhere on the side of the stage.

Little did I know, he had fallen off the stage!

There was an ego ramp that went straight out from the stage. An ego ramp is what we called that long runway that allows the singer to get right out amidst the crowd. This particular ego ramp had a ten foot drop into a concrete drainage ditch all the way around it. There were no rails, no lights on this ramp.

You can see it in the footage from the show. I know, because we used the footage when we sued the city and the promoter.

Stephen had his hands up to his eyes, trying to see, and you watch him try to catch himself, with this look of complete, abject horror on his face!

Stephen fell ten feet, into this concrete culvert, and landed on his knee.

They had to take him away in an ambulance. All of this in front of 35,000 people.

It was really bad.

But, it could have been much much worse. We went to look at the spot afterward, and there were these fence posts with a pointed arrow tip sticking straight up. They were using them to tie the barrier fences around. A couple of feet to either side, and it would have been a case of "Mourners, please omit flowers. The Pearcy family thanks you for your thoughts and prayers.”

Stephen could have died that night, impaled on a fence spike.

But, thankfully, he didn't. Nevertheless, he was seriously fucked up. His kneecap and been smashed and dislocated, then turned completely around the side of his leg.

He was a wreck, and in the hospital for a while. July 27, 1997, and the tour was immediately over. Backing up, July 27, 1983 is when we signed the Atlantic deal. 14 years to the day. Odd paradox, when you think about it.

We went to see him in the hospital the next day, and it brought me to tears!

I just couldn't believe it, dude. We had to leave him there in the hospital! He was there for about a week or so. We went back home, and we were off for the rest of the summer. Then, in October, we went back out doing clubs again.

Stephen had healed up pretty well, but he was never going to be jumping around on stage doing his high kicks anymore. Now, he had a legitimate reason for being a little stiff on stage.

We finished out the tour from October on, and that leg of the thing did really well, too. But, the fractures started to show again. It was getting heated out there, and, it was snowballing into something unstoppable.

In 1998, we sat down to do the "RATT" album, which was produced by multi-platinum producer, Richie Zito.

We were meeting with John Kolodner every two weeks with batches of new material. We literally wrote about 50 or 60 songs for consideration on that record. This went on for about eight months, and, surprisingly John kept picking my songs.

I was about ten minutes late to one of the meetings, and I came in all apologetic.

"Sorry, guys. I'm a little late. Traffic was crazy.”

John looks at me and says in his raspy, nasally voice, "Congratulations.”

He confused the hell out of me. I'm like, "For what?”

"You just wrote the first single!”

They had been combing through all of the new songs. It was a song called "Breakout.” I wrote the music, and then Jack Russell from Great White came in and helped me develop the lyrics and melody.

There was another song on that record called "Live For Today" that I wrote with Jack. Over the phone, Jack and I were talking with Jack Blades from Night Ranger. We were having a problem with one section of the song, and Blades came up with the line. One line. But, he contributed, so he was listed as a writer.

Stephen saw that, and was like, "What the fuck? There's six writers on this song?!?” I go, "Look, you and DeMartini didn't do shit on this song, but you forced your way onto it. Jack Blades shouldn't really be on it either. He came up with one line. A couple of words. But, if you get credit, so does he.” Jack Russell and I wrote that song. So, I don't want to hear it. It's a strong song.

I really liked that 1999 Sony release, but it was the wrong time for it. It charted, but didn't really perform.

In the end, I don't think Sony really gave it any kind of a push. There was virtually no marketing campaign. It didn't have a video. Nothing. But, it was our first jaunt back into it since Detonator in 1990. That's almost a decade of being out of the loop, and it took some time to get into the groove of things again.

RATT and Poison co-headlined on that 1999 tour, and it was getting exciting. People started getting used to seeing these bands out on the road again.

That was the "RATT" album, not to be confused with the "RATT" EP way back in 1983.

This was the "RATT" record...

Not the "RATT" EP...

...fucking retarded.

I hated the cover. I hated the fact we didn't title the record. We already had a self-titled album! Why were we doing another one? But, that's the bitch with a democracy. The majority rules. Now we have the bookend thing going on. Hopefully, we will get back into the studio and knock out another record. It's been 10 years since our last studio album, so it's time. I think.

I'm not sure when it happened, exactly. I know that RATT's experiences through the Nineties were traumatic, and really took a toll on us all. However, the real impact, I think, hit us hardest in our personal lives. Maybe, it was because I was home all the time, where we had spent SO MUCH time on the road during the 80s. That's probably a big reason.

I guess it's easier to deal with a bad situation when you don't have to deal with it in your face every day. Relationships are no exception to that rule. My parents divorced. Mum and Pete divorced. Juan went through an ugly divorce, and it almost cost him his kids. King did it too, and his centerfold princess turned into a blood-sucking harpy who cried and moaned until the courts took everything he had and gave it to her. Laurie Carr was her name, and she was the quintessential gold-digger.

Jeni was no gold-digger, though. She was my wife, and the mother of my two sons. We had been married for seventeen years, and had been together for twenty-one. She was there when I was struggling to find the gigs. She was there when I landed my first break with Vergat. She was there when I joined RATT, and we marauded our way through the better part of the decade.

Jeni was always there, and our relationship had survived the best and worst of all those things. That is much to our credit, I think.

But, the one thing people tend to not understand about marriage, especially long marriages, is that things change. Sometimes, they change for the good. Sometimes, it isn't so good. But, make no mistake about it, who you are at twenty years old is a very different person than who you are at forty.

And, there's the rub.

I didn't see it during the 80s. I was always touring, or recovering from a tour, so Jeni and I were all right. We didn't see each other all the time, so the subtle differences weren't that noticeable.

When the Nineties hit, and grunge squashed the careers for a while, I was suddenly home all the time. All the time! We had become different people, Jeni and I. I expected the woman I married to still be there, but it wasn't really her. She was different. And, so was I. Add to that, the struggles of my music career, and the stresses of lawsuits and bankruptcy. It wasn't long before the battle lines had been drawn in the dirt.

Jeni and I were on life support as a couple for a long time. It had reached a point where I wanted out. I had been thinking of leaving as far back as 1992, right after the band split. Michael and Marcus, I felt, weren't old enough to really deal with that, yet. So, I kept putting it off.

I couldn't walk out on her and the kids like that. I remembered what that felt like, and while I survived the ordeal, I wasn't sure the boys could; not at their young age. My boys are my life, so we needed each other, at that point.

It was a fight, though. Almost constant conflict, and by 1994, Jeni and I were really battling hard.

I found my breaking point in the summer of 1997, after Stephen's accident where he fell off the stage. We were home, giving Stephen time to heal up, and then we were going back out on the road in October.

Jeni and I were fighting virtually all the time. We spent that whole summer in a constant state of battle. Jeni and I had always had an up and down relationship. She was a hot-blooded Italian, so she would get right up into my face and yell and scream. It would literally start the moment I woke up, and would last the entire day. We hardly spoke a civil word to one another, and any sort of positive comment was usually dripping in sarcasm and backhanded in nature.

By 1997, I finally sat down with her and said, "Obviously, this isn't working for us and has to end. Agreed?”

For once, we were both on the same page.

"We should start thinking about divorce, here. The kids are getting old enough to understand it. I'm back with RATT, making money again, so we can take care of things properly.”

To my surprise, she agreed.

It's hard to explain how I felt about it. On one hand, there was this huge relief. I had to get loaded just to climb into bed with her, and we NEVER touched one another. It had been six months since we'd had the notion of sex.

On the other hand, I'd been with Jeni since I was seventeen. At this point, Jeni had been a part of me for more than half my life. You don't walk away from that without it having some impact on you. Even today, I find myself dreaming and thinking about Jeni, she was ingrained into my existence for so long...for life, actually.

But, it had to be done. Michael was sixteen, and Marcus was almost fifteen. The damage to them should be minimal, and we were both smart enough to see what was going on here. There was nothing of our marriage left to salvage. If we didn't stop this thing, we wouldn't be able to have a friendship, even for the sake of the boys.

So I said, "Look, when I get off the road, we'll figure out how to do this. We will split everything right down the middle. 50/50. No lawyers. No courts. Keep it tight.”

We knew the outcome of lawyers coming in and taking everybody's money. We had seen it way too many times already.

She joked, "Well, that is, of course, unless you end up with some 23 year old blonde.”

"Yeah, whatever, Jeni. Like that could happen.”

Little did I know how prophetic she would turn out to be.

In October, we started the tour up again. Our first date was down in San Diego. Jeni and the boys came down for the show to see me off. When I got back in December, we would look at all of our assets, divide them up, then I'd get my own place.