Talkin' Rock with Tom Werman

Beasley Digital

2 days ago

Transcript

00:00Rock, metal, prog, and everything in between.

00:04If you're into rock, you've come to the right place.

00:07Welcome to this episode of Talkin' Rock with Meltdown.

00:11Don't forget to follow the audio-only Talkin' Rock podcast on all podcast platforms.

00:15And now, it's time for today's conversation.

00:18Here's Meltdown.

00:20Hey, Tom, good to see you, man. How are you?

00:22I'm good. How are you?

00:24It's the day of your book release, correct?

00:26It is, and I don't know what that means, whether they ship it from the warehouse, whether it arrives at the bookstore.

00:34I'm not sure, but it's nice to have it finally out. It's been a long time.

00:39Yeah, people tell me all the time, I should write a book, which I don't think I'm ever going to.

00:43But what does it feel like to hold a book in your hand as opposed to like an album or something?

00:48It's really great for me.

00:50Yeah, I mean, they did a very nice job on the book, the cover art, you know, everything is good.

00:57And it's the only book I've ever written.

01:00And, you know, it's been a process.

01:04It takes a while to put this thing together with a proposal and an agent.

01:08And, you know, anyway, I'm delighted that that it's out and people are surprised that a record producer can actually write a whole sentence.

01:19It's it's it's really good.

01:21It's been received very well initially.

01:24And I'm going to do an audio book.

01:25So are you going to record it yourself?

01:29I am.

01:31My son doesn't think I should.

01:32He thinks I should get all kinds of musicians.

01:35But I'm not.

01:36No, I'm very excited about recording myself.

01:39I know the text pretty well.

01:41Yeah.

01:42So, of course, you just mentioned you've worked with all sorts of musicians and your book, like we just mentioned, is out today.

01:47But I mean, obviously, being here in in Detroit, I have to just ask you, like what it was like working with Ted.

01:53And you worked with him early, early on in his career, didn't you?

01:57I did.

01:57Ted, we did not discuss politics.

01:59I want to make that pretty clear.

02:03We had a great relationship.

02:05We still talk.

02:06He still still texts me new music.

02:09It was great.

02:10It was great.

02:11And I learned a lot from him because, you know, he showed me another perspective on several things.

02:19And I we got along very well.

02:24And, you know, Stranglehold was the first song I ever mixed.

02:30He was delighted with that album.

02:32And I was delighted that he was delighted.

02:34And I think his, you know, some of his observations have overshadowed his musician, his career as a musician.

02:46And, you know, I think people know him just as much for his, you know, his outspokenness as they do for for his music.

02:55But he's still at it.

02:57He's a very he loves life.

03:00That guy.

03:00He's he's he's very, very.

03:03He's the fastest mouth in the country, you know, I mean, the guy never pauses for a second.

03:11And I always thought it would be great to have a talk, a talk radio show with the hosts being Ted and David Lee Roth.

03:19Oh, talk about talk about herding cats.

03:22I don't know if that would ever work.

03:23But, you know, we got to listen to him as a morning show host here in Detroit in the late 90s there for at least a couple of years.

03:29But but back in the 70s and stuff, you had Ted and you had Molly Hatchett.

03:33You know, all these bands that were like playing stadiums.

03:35I mean, that's unbelievable.

03:38It was great.

03:39People were buying records.

03:40And I had a I had a really good run as a staff producer at Epic.

03:45I signed the bands and then I produced the bands that I signed and had a great time.

03:51And they were all either gold or platinum, 13 of them in a row.

03:55And that was great.

03:58It was just great for a young guy who was, you know, a refugee, an escapee from the advertising business.

04:06Yeah.

04:07Yeah.

04:07And it's like, you know, obviously, I've been in radio for over three decades now.

04:12But back in the day when you were making records, radio was king and you had to get those albums and those songs on the air, didn't you?

04:19Absolutely.

04:20We were we relied on on, you know, the the national promotion staff is they you know, they'd have their favorite stations.

04:28They'd go in and and and plug the records.

04:31And without them, you know, I don't think I don't think any any airplay would have resulted there.

04:39You know, they were very effective.

04:42And it was nice because a radio station could break a hit and and they all wanted to do that.

04:49Yeah.

04:50You just mentioned Stranglehold, of course, an eight minute song.

04:53A band that you wanted to sign was Rush and they broke a hit with Working Man, a seven minute song at a radio station in Cleveland.

04:59There was a couple that got away, wasn't there?

05:00Well, Rush, Leonard Skinner and Kiss.

05:06Right.

05:06And actually much later in my career, Whitney.

05:11Yeah, I tried to I tried to get the president of Elector Records to sign her and he passed.

05:16So I have, you know, four big ones got away.

05:21And, you know, having having been thwarted on on those three artists at Epic, I was eventually they said, no, maybe Wurman knows something we don't.

05:35And I was able to sign Ted without, you know, without too much trouble.

05:41Now, did you go out and see Ted play live?

05:43Yes, I saw him at Illinois Institute of Technology, IIT, and maybe 200 people in the audience.

05:54He had broken up with the, you know, he'd broken up the Amboy Dukes.

06:00Yeah.

06:01And he was a bundle of energy.

06:04I loved what I saw.

06:05I went backstage and we talked and hit it off and it was, you know, I'd never met anybody quite like that.

06:15Yeah, I bet.

06:16So so then the 80s comes along and and I mean, there's obviously a musical shift like it seems to be every, you know, 10 or 12 years or whatever.

06:23What are your thoughts on on some of those hair bands?

06:25Well, you know, they they just happened.

06:28And I I guess I I got into it because, well, Dokken was a little note.

06:37Motley was first when I left Electric Records.

06:40You know, I just started working with with Motley Crue.

06:45And all of a sudden there was a you know, everybody kind of was influenced by by a few bands out there.

06:53And then everybody had the hair and the glam and the makeup and and, you know, they wanted to rock hard.

07:03There weren't that many acts available that weren't like that.

07:10So so, you know, I I got into that thing, Poison and Dokken and Motley Crue and Twisted Sister and so forth.

07:21Yeah. And speaking of Poison, my friend Toby Wright says you came in a studio one on one on one with him with Poison one time.

07:28Is that right? Yeah.

07:30Wow. That's interesting.

07:33Yeah, we did use one on one and the record plan, I think.

07:39But most of it was done at one on one.

07:42Where was that? Was that in Burbank?

07:43Burbank. That might have been in California.

07:46But Toby's question for you actually was, where's his book?

07:49He wants to know where his copy is.

07:52Tell him to email, you know, email me and his address.

07:57Yeah. But all those bands in California, I remember when I first started in radio, there was a band called Nevada Beach.

08:02And they said the name of the band was because there were so many bands in California is going to fall right off the face of the earth and right into the ocean.

08:08And there's going to be a Nevada beach.

08:09So it's like, yeah, it was probably was somewhere in California with that poison recording you're talking about.

08:15Yeah. Yeah.

08:16I remember it was it was it was a really I know one on one was it was very good.

08:22And I haven't, you know, I haven't thought about Toby in, what, 40 years?

08:29Is it? No, maybe 35.

08:31I was going to say, after all the work he did, I mean, you know, I mean, for God's sake, he mixed injustice for all.

08:37And that's a story for another time.

08:39Yeah. Yeah.

08:40So so then another one of my producer friends, Jay Rustin.

08:44I don't know if you know Jay, but he says you're one of his mentors.

08:48He's never even had a chance to meet you.

08:49So Jay is like one of the he's one of the hotshot rock producers.

08:53Now he produces a lot of stuff.

08:54He's actually in the studio right now with Anthrax working.

08:58Wow. I didn't know they were still recording.

09:01It's amazing.

09:03Some of the you know, REO is 50 years on the road now.

09:07It's a pretty remarkable stuff.

09:09How long some of these acts last and how long for how long they want to be on the road.

09:17Not just that they need the money.

09:19Yeah. And your mind, looking back on your career and stuff, what was like the keys for like, you know, as far as you know, you probably saw a lot of bands that you didn't sign.

09:27But what were the keys, the ones that that you saw that you liked that you wanted to work with?

09:31What were you looking for?

09:33Something new, you know, and something different and something that I simply liked because it just turned out that when I liked it a lot, it usually struck a chord in the listener.

09:45You know, they liked it a lot, too.

09:49I don't know why.

09:51I just had an ear for what had a lot of commercial potential, I guess.

09:57There's no way to define it, to say, well, this band had these following qualities and so I signed them.

10:07You just say, wow, these guys are good.

10:10They offer something new and they offer something that nobody else can offer.

10:15Songwriting, musicianship, appearance, whatever it is, or a combination of all of them.

10:24And you jump at it.

10:25There were some bands that I signed that nobody else was interested and they were very big.

10:31So that was it.

10:34I liked it and I signed it and it worked.

10:37Yeah, sometimes I see a band which I don't understand or I don't get or it's just not for me, but I could see how it could be popular.

10:45Right.

10:46A lot, a lot of those in our lifetimes.

10:48Absolutely.

10:49Yeah, for sure.

10:51Working back in the day, you know, these bands were young and they were hungry.

10:54And of course, there was all sorts of, let's say, extracurricular going on.

10:58How many times did you use hired guns or how many times or, you know, like a percentage or whatever, did you use like ghost musicians?

11:04I had no musicians without credit, except Cheap Trick did not want to credit Steve Lukather with, you know, fabulous session guitarist and who was in Toto.

11:20Everybody else got credit.

11:22And I only hired, I think, in 52 albums, maybe four or five different kinds of musicians to play on one or two songs.

11:35I mean, I did not want to have ringers in there.

11:39But, you know, I hired a cellist.

11:40I hired a percussion player.

11:43I think that was, I always had keyboard players come in, you know, because I would use Hammond B3 organs or pianos.

11:57You know, the guy playing the TAC piano on I Want You to Want Me, the studio version.

12:03He was one of my regular guys.

12:05And so, so, you know, but no ghosts.

12:10They were, they were plainly credited on the back of the album.

12:14That's interesting.

12:15Yeah.

12:15One of my friends is a drummer and does that.

12:17He does the session work and he's not allowed to talk about a lot of the bands he plays for.

12:22Yeah.

12:23Well, you know, they had, there were guys who would come to sessions and be the only one there because you would hire them for a specific purpose.