Turn It Up!: My Time Making Hit Records In The Glory Days Of Rock Music (Featuring Mötley Crüe, Poison, Twisted Sister, Jeff Beck, Ted Nugent, Cheap Trick, And More)

TURN IT UP!

MY TIME MAKING HIT RECORDS

IN THE GLORY DAYS OF ROCK MUSIC

TOM WERMAN

A Jawbone book

First edition 2023

Published in the UK and the USA by

Jawbone Press

Office G1

141–157 Acre Lane

London SW2 5UA

England

www.jawbonepress.com

Volume copyright © 2023 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Tom Werman. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.

Unless otherwise noted, the photographs in this book are from the author’s archives. If you feel there has been a mistaken attribution, please contact the publishers.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD: WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK

PREFACE: ‘DUDE, THEY’RE JUNKIES!’

INTRODUCTION: THE GLORY DAYS

SIDE A ROCK’N’ROLL DREAMS

1 PARADISE BY THE PING-PONG TABLE

2 THE BRITISH INVASION

3 THE BURDEN OF PRIVILEGE

4 THE GREAT ESCAPE

SIDE B THE EPIC YEARS

5 THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD

6 EVERYONE WANTS TO BE AN A&R MAN

7 THE A&R MAN SCORES ... AND THE ONES THAT GOT AWAY

8 ABRACADABRA, I’M TED NUGENT’S PRODUCER!

9 BOSTON: THE A&R MAN STEPS IN SHIT

10 LONDON CALLING

11 CHEAP TRICK: A TREAT

12 SO, WHAT DOES A PRODUCER ACTUALLY DO?

SIDE C LIFE IN THE FAST LANE

13 WELCOME TO LA

14 (MOLLY) HATCHET JOB

15 THE STUDIO: SANCTUM SANCTORUM

16 THE STIFFS

SIDE D BURNING HOT

17 ELEKTRA: A ROADBLOCK AND A PRODUCTION DEAL

18 MÖTLEY CRÜE: ORGANIZED CHAOS

19 COCAINE (BLINDED BY THE LIGHT)

20 FIGHTING DOKKEN TOOTH AND NAIL

21 HOW I ‘DESTROYED’ TWISTED SISTER

22 FAMILY MAN

23 ALMOST McCARTNEY, GUNS N’ ROSES

24 POISON: NOTHIN’ BUT A GOOD TIME

SIDE E BURNING OUT

25 THE DECLINE

26 A RANT: MY DESPERATE ATTEMPT TO CONTINUE

27 THE ROCK STAR AND THE INNKEEPER

28 CRITICAL THOUGHTS, CRITICAL VALUES

AFTERWORD: MAN VS. MACHINE

APPENDIX 1 SELECT DISCOGRAPHY

APPENDIX 2 GREATEST HITS AND MISSES

APPENDIX 3 THE PMRC LETTER

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD

WHY YOU

SHOULD

READ

THIS BOOK

Tom Werman produced hit records. Lots of them. His records have sold fifty million copies, and while the golden age of hard rock may be over, a surprising number of people still listen to the albums he made with Mötley Crüe, Cheap Trick, Poison, Ted Nugent, Molly Hatchet, Jeff Beck, Twisted Sister, and many fine bands that never achieved rock stardom.

But what are these millions of fans fans of? Mick Jagger gave us his answer back in 1965: ‘It’s the singer, not the song.’ We cherish the product because it connects us with the creative artists who made it.

Mick’s stress on connecting with the artist opens the question of just who ‘the artist’ is. For many savvy rock aficionados, ‘the artist’ now includes more than the guys with the Stratocasters and the drumsticks in their hands. It includes the producer, who, like the movie director, helps the band define and realize its vision. Whoever dubbed Sir George Martin ‘The Fifth Beatle’ was expressing this idea.

You won’t catch Tom himself arguing for his own status as an artist. He is modest about his contributions. Too modest. Of the more than twenty bands he produced, all but one had their biggest-selling album with him as producer.

So, read this book and let Tom tell you in detail what a music producer actually does—what his art consists of. You will learn about song structure, refining and balancing the instruments’ sounds, adding instruments and harmonies. About revising bass lines, vocals, and percussion parts. And above all, about coaxing the best performances out of an often unruly bunch of young musicians. Along the way, you’ll learn about many of these unruly young musicians, too.

Then there’s Tom’s personal story. His personal trajectory takes him from the Ivy League into the drugged-out, money-lined world of rock royalty, and then back to professional obscurity, as the musical tastes of the culture change around him. But Tom’s professional story features a seriously successful next chapter in a brand new field, working alongside his wonderful wife Suky. No resting on wilted laurels here. I’ve known the man for decades. It isn’t luck.

CHARLES KARELIS

Dr. Charles Karelis attended school with Tom Werman from the sixth grade through high school. He taught at Williams College and served as president of Colgate University.

PREFACE

‘DUDE,

THEY’RE

JUNKIES!’

‘Mötley Crüe bass player Nikki Sixx was pronounced dead from a drug overdose early this morning.’

My bedside clock radio was always tuned to KFWB, the all-news station. The drone of the announcer’s voice helped me get to sleep. As I lay there stunned and hoping my ears had deceived me, I flashed back to my recent visit to Nikki’s house.

I had made the five-minute ride over to his surprisingly suburban Sherman Oaks home—no rock star castle yet. I walked in to find him on the living room couch next to Vanity, Prince’s stunning protégé who had launched her solo recording career a couple of years earlier—and who now may possibly have launched a pretty serious drug habit. She was also charming, well-spoken, and serene. Truly arresting, this girl.

They were sitting close together with Cheshire Cat smiles that I figured must have been prompted by whatever drugs they were doing. By now, Nikki’s drug habit was fairly serious, though oddly I had seen no evidence of it when I was with him in the studio, nor did he ever seem obviously high. In the studio, he and Tommy Lee were generally focused and involved.

I was oblivious to Nikki’s romance with heroin until one day during the Girls, Girls, Girls sessions at One on One studios in North Hollywood, when he arrived at the studio with a shopping bag full of candy bars and poured them out onto the recording console with a laugh. Later on, I asked my engineer Duane Baron what that was all about. Surprised, he looked up at me and exclaimed, ‘Dude, they’re junkies!’ Until then, I’d never known that a sugar craving accompanied a heroin habit. If Tommy—or ‘T-Bone’—was involved in this scene, too, it seemed to me that he was just dabbling in it because, as with Nikki, I never saw him visibly under the influence of anything other than Jack Daniels or cocaine (or both).

As I continued to lie there, dumbstruck, I must admit that the next thing to cross my mind was, What would this mean for me? If Nikki was dead, it was the end of Mötley Crüe. There would be no more touring, no more rowdy recording sessions, no more decadent record-release parties—and after the label rushed out the predictable ‘Greatest All-Time Hits’ memorial album, there would certainly be no more Mötley Crüe records without Nikki Sixx.

Girls, Girls, Girls—the third hit album I produced for the band, following Shout At The Devil and Theater Of Pain—had gone to #2 on the Billboard chart, and the Crüe were now huge. They’d become the biggest act I’d ever produced, and I was planning on doing the next album and having it go to #1. The Girls LP might have been edged out of the #1 spot by Whitney Houston’s Whitney, but Mötley had the momentum, the popularity, and the management and label teams to go all the way to the top—and maybe, with some more good songs written by Nikki, they might just stay there for a while.

Damn it, what made this band so incredibly self-destructive?

Right after we entered the studio to record Shout At The Devil, Nikki slammed his sports car into a utility pole, and he had to play his bass parts with his arm in a sling. He had reportedly been kicked out of high school and busted for selling drugs, and would be arrested in Japan for throwing a bottle on a train that hit a hapless Japanese gentleman in the head.

Vince Neil, meanwhile, was jailed for driving under the influence and crashing his car, resulting in the death of Hanoi Rocks member Razzle and serious injuries to two other individuals; and even the well-behaved Mick Mars had been arrested in a Denver hotel in a case of mistaken identity. Yet, even as their bad behavior seemed to worsen daily, we had still managed to crank out three huge albums over the last four years.

Now, here I was after decades of dreaming about being a top-drawer record producer, all primed, ready, and eager to hit my stride. What could I possibly do to keep this train rolling? It had been a long slog to get to this point from an obedient, conventional childhood in a Boston suburb—a lot of work, a lot of luck, and a lot of good timing.

And now Nikki had overdosed and killed himself.

* * *

Incredibly, I got a phone call later that same day from the band’s accountant, who told me that not only was Nikki alive, but he had checked himself out of the hospital and returned home! I called him to see how he was doing, and he suggested that we go out for sushi at a restaurant in the San Fernando Valley. Talk about resilience ...

The myth simply continued to grow. Nikki’s experience apparently inspired all four band members to change their ways, get sober, become a fitness SWAT team—and to find a new producer. After three projects with the same producer, it wasn’t unusual for a band to choose a new direction. I was disappointed, but Bob Rock did a great job on their next album; until then, I had always produced every one of my bands’ biggest-selling albums, but the sales of Dr. Feelgood eclipsed Girls, Girls, Girls by at least a million.

In the end, though, I realized that I was both fortunate and happy to have been part of the Mötley Crüe legend. I have more to say about the Crüe later, but that morning I reflected on what a long, unconventional, and bumpy road I had traveled before completing the first half of my life’s journey—from a suburban Boston public school through a starchy New England prep school, on to two degrees at an Ivy League university, followed by an unpleasant first job, a move into rock’n’roll talent scouting, on to producing hard rock record albums, and finally working side by side with four of the kind of rock’n’roll animals that I had heard about but never before encountered. Decades before, who would have known that someday my immediate future would depend on the recreational indulgences of a rock band’s bass player?

INTRODUCTION

THE

GLORY

DAYS

Music pushes our emotional buttons. Consider The Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again,’ the boys’ choir at the end of the Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’ the guitar solo at the end of Tom Petty’s ‘Runnin’ Down A Dream,’ the Hammond B3 organ section between Boston’s ‘Foreplay’ and ‘Long Time,’ John Lennon’s ‘Imagine,’ Ministry’s ‘Jesus Built My Hotrod,’ ZZ Top’s ‘La Grange,’ the theme from Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived TV series The Newsroom ...

For me, the ‘glory days’ of rock’n’roll extended from the mid 1950s to the early 1990s. These years provided a virtual cornucopia of songs that colored and enriched our young lives. The guitar-driven music inspired and empowered us, and I was fortunate enough to be there when Elvis appeared—and fortunate enough to become totally immersed in popular music for the next four decades.

In the past few years, interest in the music of the 60s, 70s, and 80s has grown dramatically, and the audience for classic rock now includes those from ages fifteen to eighty. I began doing an increasing number of podcasts and interviews, and I was asked to write eighteen episodes for a popular blog. People wanted information about all aspects of this unique musical period. Seeing this, I sat down to write about what I consider to be the most musically creative stretch in the last century, and about my journey through it; about how major record labels operated, about how we discovered and recorded the acts, and about who the rock stars I worked with and met along the way really were. It was a very special time for music, and I suspect this is why it’s earned the label ‘classic.’

Since rock’n’roll was born with my generation, I never imagined that someday it would be regarded as art, or that we would be in a position to recall it or relive it. I find much of the music of the new millennium annoyingly perfect. We may never hear a vocalist hit a bad note again, and the drums will always be in time, with every snare hit sounding exactly like all the ones that preceded and followed it, because they really are all the same digitally reproduced single snare hit. So I continue to revisit the music of my youth—songs that were created, warts and all, by real people with real instruments in what was arguably the most creative musical period of the twentieth century.

What’s become clear is that rock’n’roll defined an era, and that era has passed. There’s simply no recorded music as creative or as potent from any other period in the last century, and there was simply no way I could avoid being consumed by it.

SIDE A

ROCK’N’ROLL DREAMS

CHAPTER ONE

PARADISE

BY THE

PING-PONG

TABLE

In 1955, Newton, Massachusetts, was the perfect American suburb. I rode my bike to school and left it unlocked in the bike rack; when we were dismissed at three o’clock, the bike was still there, untouched. Wooded tracts of land dotted my neighborhood and doors were left unlocked during the day. Ice cream cones, Devil Dogs, and sodas were a dime each and gas was twenty cents a gallon. Ike was in the White House, and it didn’t matter too much to Democrats that he was a Republican. American cars were really important to young boys like me, and we could identify every make, model, and year at two hundred yards.

While it was a near-perfect little world, by the time I was in fifth grade I’d encountered the neighborhood bullies. A few of the sixth-grade kids would ambush me on the way home. They dragged me into the woods, kicking and screaming, either because their parents were antisemitic or because I was the tallest kid in my class, or because they were products of fear and ignorance—or a combination of all three.

Eventually, my mother met with the principal and things cooled down, but I developed and nurtured a pool of seething anger that still boils over today whenever I encounter unfair treatment of any kind. People charitably characterized me as ‘combative’ or ‘confrontational,’ but the fact is that I’m easily pissed off.

I didn’t have smooth relationships with authority figures, and when I found Elvis I quickly embraced the rebellion and anger of rock’n’roll. I was a behavioral challenge to my teachers—I spent hours facing the wall in the corners of my elementary school classrooms—and by the sixth grade, my parents had decided to send me to private school. The unruly behavior didn’t stop there, though; I clocked a lot of detention time on Saturday mornings, and I was even suspended from school for a few days in the tenth grade.

Music became a refuge. I’d turn on the radio in my bedroom when I awoke, and at night it would rock me to sleep. My personal pre-Elvis mid-1950s hit parade included ‘Doggie In The Window’ by Patti Page, Perry Como’s ‘Don’t Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes,’ ‘That’s Amore’ by Dean Martin, ‘Oh My Papa’ by Eddie Fisher, and Mitch Miller’s ‘Yellow Rose Of Texas.’ I absorbed every note and stored every vocal nuance. I didn’t try to do this—it just happened. If I liked something I heard, it would be internalized and installed in the jukebox in my brain. To this day, my memory banks are overflowing with masses of useless but treasured musical input.

Dad put a hi-fi in the den so he could enjoy classical music. The turntable came with a fat 45rpm spindle that lay unused until 1956 when I bought my first single—Elvis’s ‘Milk Cow Blues Boogie.’ There were very few record stores at the time, so I bought it at our neighborhood grocery store, and it was the only Elvis record they had in stock. If you wanted a 45rpm single, you went to the record kiosk up front by the cashier and slid the record off the peg.

It cost about seventy-five cents. Almost all 45s were one-sided hits, and the B-side was a throwaway. An early exception was Elvis’s ‘My Baby Left Me,’ the B-side to ‘I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.’ This two-sided hit made me a lifetime Elvis fan. ‘My Baby Left Me’ is one of Elvis’s lesser-known, underrated gems.

Like many other pop music fans, I was floored by ‘Hound Dog’ the first time I heard it. I couldn’t get enough of it, and I never will. It was explosive—different from anything I’d heard in my young life. I spent hours in the den in front of the antique convex mirror with the eagle on top, lip-synching and air-guitaring to Elvis. I loved the way he casually slurred his lyrics. In ‘All Shook Up,’ the line ‘I’m proud to say that she’s my buttercup’ became ‘Umpradassaydasheezma ... buducup’; ‘Dancing to the jailhouse rock’ morphed into ‘Dana tooda jay—hadara’; and ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ offered the line ‘Don’t stop thinking of me,’ which Elvis sculpted into ‘Dohstop tha-hankin ah-mee’—emphasis on ‘ah-mee.’

When The Zombies were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, lead singer Colin Blunstone had similar praise for ‘Hound Dog.’ If not a life-changer, it was certainly a major influence on our young minds. Vince Gill once said about music, ‘There’s something that it does to my DNA that I can’t explain.’

What I hear determines how I feel. For me, there’s no such thing as background music. If there’s music playing, what’s in the background is everything else.

At ten years of age, I didn’t fully understand the implication of Elvis’s hip thrust, but I’d never seen anyone do it before, and I liked it. The bottom and top halves of his body moved in opposite directions, and his arms flailed to the sides; he looked like he was enjoying being electrocuted.

Elvis introduced me to real musical emotion. I got misty over his heartbreaking rendition of ‘Old Shep.’ I was moved by his songs: they strengthened me and pumped me up. I wanted to be Elvis in the same way I wanted to be George Harrison a decade later. Elvis moved in a way I couldn’t possibly move. He looked incredibly cool. He drove girls crazy. His songs were strong, his voice superb, his phrasing perfect, and his pitch was flawless.

And grown-ups hated him.

While my parents regarded rock’n’roll with utter disdain, I didn’t actually reject any of their music. I found some of the classical stuff (Mahler) a little boring, but I listened to many of their LPs of Broadway shows and even grew to love some of them (West Side Story, Carousel, South Pacific, Damn Yankees). I liked Sinatra’s ‘Come Fly With Me’ and his Songs For Swingin’ Lovers album.

I did enjoy some classical music very much—especially the weepy, minor-key composers who evoked a sweet sadness in me. When my third-grade teacher played Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite in the classroom, it gave me goosebumps. I asked my folks to buy it for me, and I could see they were delighted that I was moved by a piece of classical music. I listened to it so frequently that by the time I was twelve, I could have conducted it.

I’ve always cherished the surrender to music and to the special emotion that can reduce a listener to tears—an emotion somewhere between grief and elation, a very special breakdown that can be instantly produced by a series of chord changes from an orchestra’s string section or a Hammond organ with all the stops pulled out.

Soon after my parents delivered this Grieg composition, their joy turned to disappointment when my fascination with the string section of the Boston Symphony Orchestra turned to a fascination with the section of strings on the Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. In the baby book my mother kept, she wrote, ‘Tommy loves music and rocks back and forth, slapping his thighs to keep time.’

I guess they thought this was cute, but not necessarily an indication of any musical aptitude. I had little or no talent for math and science; I needed to be tutored by a Harvard graduate math student in order to pass trigonometry in my senior year of high school, but I was a quicker study in the arts, languages, and music.

I thought little of my ability to say words backward, to correctly spell any word I’d ever seen, or to retain hundreds of guitar solos, note for note, in my head. To this day, I can make a few bucks at a bar by inviting someone to read aloud the entire serial number (twelve characters) from a dollar bill and then watch me recite the whole thing backward. If I succeed, I get the bill. Fortunately, when it came time to choose a profession, I would be able to put this seemingly worthless talent to work—and I managed to avoid the technical side of life by working with a good recording engineer.

* * *

Home on vacation from college one winter, I asked my parents to sit for a few minutes in the living room so I could play them The Beatles’ ‘She’s Leaving Home.’ I was always trying to get a little nod of appreciation from them for the music I loved. I asked them how they could possibly say this wasn’t art. ‘Well dear,’ my mother responded, ‘we’ll see if it stands the test of time.’ So far, so good.

Songs like ‘The Great Pretender,’ ‘It’s All In The Game,’ or ‘It’s Only Make Believe’ made me feel sad and hopelessly romantic. Gogi Grant’s ‘The Wayward Wind’ really put me in