Gary James' Interview With Rock Promoter And The Former Manager of Poison
Howie Hubberman



He started his music career as a Rock promoter in Rochester, New York. Then he opened a vintage guitar shop. He would go on to manage Cheap Trick's bassist, Tom Peterson. Moving to California, he would continue promoting concerts and eventually became the personal manager of Poison. The gentleman we are talking about is Mr. Howie Hubberman.

Howie Hubberman spoke with us about the Rock business.

Q - Howie, you're a Central New Yorker or Upstate New Yorker, however you want to put it, who eventually made the move to the West Coast.

A - I spent the first twenty-three years of my life in Rochester, New York. That's where I cut my Rock 'n' Roll roots. It's funny 'cause I used to have the guitar shop in Rochester and I met most of my original bands (there) and some of 'em I still work with like Cheap Trick and Brian Setzer. The bands I would've really liked to have helped in the '80s and '90s when I was a somebody back in the early '90s, most of the members like The Good Rats, T. Ross And Another Pretty Face, they kind of fell by the wayside. There were some great bands that used to tour Upstage New York all the time. Even though they weren't from there, they based themselves there. The Good Rats did great in that area.

Q - Do you remember any clubs in Syracuse like Lost Horizon or the Brookside?

A - I think I remember Brookside. Remember, I left to work for Van Halen in late '78. So by December '78 I was gone and never came back.

Q - Do you remember the Rochester group, Wale?

A - Yeah. I'm still friends with a couple of 'em, Jimmy Youngerman, who was a part of Wale, and then the guy who wound up playing with Alice Cooper. I think it was Michael Marconi. Then he played in a band called Billion Dollar Babies. It was right around the time he worked with Alice Cooper on the "Billion Dollar Babies" album. I wound up doing three albums with Bob Ezrin later on and the most famous guitar player who worked with Alice Cooper was a guy named Steve 'The Deacon' Hunter. He was the guy who did all the real work for Aerosmith in "Train Kept A Rollin'" and all that other stuff. And he got there from Ezrin, who did that album. Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner were probably the famous guitar duo of all time, by far.

Q - Who did you promote in Rochester? Local bands? National bands?

A - I'll give you the brief run down. At age six in Irondequoit, my sister, who was three years older than me, got a Silvertone guitar for Hanukkah one year. She strummed it three or four times and never strummed it again. I picked it up when I wasn't supposed to pick it up and I broke the high E string. So I wound up taking a bus to the nearest guitar store that I knew of, five or six miles away and I didn't know if it was going to cost me a dollar or a hundred dollars. But I took whatever change I had on me and I walked into the store and I had the guitar with me. I pointed out what string I needed. They asked me if I wanted them to string it for me and I said, "No, no. I'll do it myself," and bought the string for ten cents. (laughs) I got home, put it on. She never noticed it, but I went to her and said, "Roseanne," that was my sister's name, "I broke the string on the guitar I wasn't supposed to be playing with, but I put another one on and it's fine." And she goes, "Well, thanks for being honest. I never used it anyways. Why don't I just let you use it and I'll still own it, but you can use it." I said, "Okay." So I started to teach myself how to play guitar. Through that I got an interest in older guitars and different kinds of guitars, twelve strings, six strings, basses, weird guitars, Fenders, Martins, and Gibsons, which are your normal, good quality USA guitars. At age thirteen I started buying and selling vintage guitars, even though they weren't called vintage back then, I guess that's what they were, from my basement to people I knew. I started a couple of different bands with a bunch of friends of mine from high school. Some of us were going to go on musically and some of us wouldn't. I went on musically, but I didn't go on musically as a band. I went on musically at first as a buyer and seller of vintage guitars and amplifiers. I didn't get into management 'til I came to California. I actually worked and helped promote some bands at a club called The Orange Monkey in Rochester, which is not far from my guitar shop called Six Strings Sales. I would go down there. I had pretty much had carte blanche. I would spin records I wanted to hear. I'd be able to get behind the bar and pour myself a drink or any of my friends a drink, and I would work with the bands that were going in there, whether it was Cheap Trick or local bands from Syracuse. I remember doing a band called The Frogs and a band called Freeze. I got to be friends with every band that came through there. I used to hang out at other clubs, the Penny Arcade down by the beach. In late '78 I picked up what was left of my guitar store, Six Strings Sales in Henrietta, and I moved to California, Los Angeles. I originally came out to Los Angeles to go to work for Van Halen. That didn't work out. They actually did want me to go out and be kind of a roadie/guitar tech liaison for them, but when they told me the figure they were willing to pay me per week, I couldn't understand it and I said no. So I started guitar shops out here (California), my first one being in North Hollywood that lasted about a year. My next one being a very small shop off Sunset Boulevard, we didn't have a name for it. It was three hundred square feet. To open up the shop in the morning I used to have to move all the guitars out on the street in order for me to get in there and get any customers in there to try (out) guitars. That was basically in 1980. From there an old friend of mine stumbled in there from Cheap Trick. His name was Tom Peter Peterson, who was the original bass player for Cheap Trick. Tom came in and said, "You know, I have a band with my wife. We really need a manager." What he really meant was we really need someone to put money into us because we have a tough time paying our bills right now. So, I learned quickly that management should not be involved with the investor or investments or their own money. Four projects later I kind of learned it for good. He was on Enigma (Records). He wound up meeting me and wanted me to partner up with somebody I didn't know and the only thing I can say is that person ponied up half the the money I had in the project. It didn't work. The next project I had was a bass player named Julian Raymond. He had a band called Bang Band, which was really popular locally. We got him a good sized deal on Epic (Records), but that didn't work either. He fired me to go with a guy named Larry Larson. Larry Larson was a manager doing Kenny Loggins. He put on the the Victory Tour for Michael Jackson. Nice guy, but he couldn't break a brand new band. Even if the stars were in his corner he couldn't really do grass roots stuff like I did. Well, it didn't take long from 1985, a band flopped in my lap called Poison. C.C. De Ville had just joined the band. The manager was Vicky Hamilton. She decided she wanted to sell the rights to the band. I paid $4,000 for the rights to Poison.

Q - Before you go on with your account of Poison, how did you make that connection with Van Halen?

A - It was from a company called Charvelle Jackson. It was actually called ISA back then, International Sales Association. It was Schekter, Boogie Bodies. They actually didn't make guitars yet, but Eddie Van Halen was going in there, with the help from friends of his, and making his own guitars, the early Van Halen guitars like the striped guitars and the weird star guitar, which was nothing more than an Explorer with a chunk cut out of it to make it lighter. When I met Mark McKee and Grover Jackson, they were already doing stuff with Eddie Van Halen. That was my connection with Van Halen. He said, "Hey, I got this guy from the East Coast who knows a lot about vintage guitars that maybe you want to incorporate in your crew." I got out there and I got along with everyone famously. Not a problem. But they offered me $150 a week to go to work for them and I already had my own store. My tastes were more than $150 a week even at that time. So, I turned it down. Looking back on it, I might've thought about it and accepted it just to learn the ropes instead of putting in my own money and not learning the ropes. But I stayed with guitar stores for another, at least a decade after that. When Tom Peterson dropped in and said, "I'd like you to manage me," I was in Heaven. I thought, Hey! What's better than Tom Peterson? Who's going to ask me to manage them that's going to be better than Tom Peterson?

Q - How did your skills as a promoter transition to you being a manager?

A - Well, it's pretty simple. I had carte blanche with most of the clubs like The Whisky, The Roxy, and the big club there was called The Country Club. I went through three regimes and was the last man standing at The Country Club, which would be Jerry La Conte, John Harrington and Puggy Mabers, and the last was a girl named Nellie Olan, who became Nellie Naben, who I'm still partners in management with to this day. In fact, we just picked up Jazz great Norman Brown for full management within the last three months. So it's a very small world out here in California for music. As far as promoting goes, I was doing shows at The Roxy, The Whisky, The Country Club. I was investing in most of the shows. I had partners like Vicky Hamilton, Nellie Neban. We did some shows at the Palace from John Harrington 'cause he went on to run The Palace for a couple of years. In fact, the first Poison video was shot at The Palace. I put that together. But being a promoter helped me out to slot these bands in and put 'em on fire in Los Angeles so I could build their story outside of Los Angeles and start going to neighboring cities, neighboring states and building up Poison as much as I could. They gave me the opportunity to do it. I put my own money in, of course. Enigma gave 'em $15,000 all in to the band. I was into the band before I blinked for six figures, but then the first album, "Look What The Cat Dragged In" is sitting around seven or eight million copies right now. Even when I was with 'em it started sitting at one, two, three, four million, going up. So that was a lot of fun for me.

Q - How much influence would you say you had on the personal lives of Poison?

A - Well, I'm very close with C.C. De Ville. I was close to him before he changed his name to C.C. De Ville. (born Bruce Anthony Johannesson) I was close to him and his family, his Mom and Dad. Even when I left Poison I still managed C.C. two separate times and we remain friends to this day. You know there was a time in his life when he had to choose sobriety over partying and I kind of went hand in hand with him and tried to help him with that. That worked out good. He's been clean and sober for well over a decade and a half now.

Q - Would you have influence on say the way they dressed onstage?

A - No. That was pretty much them. They invented themselves. I went with whatever they wanted. That was their own thing. As far as the way they were playing the music, I got involved with it in the very, very beginning on a very short scale. They did that on their own too. It was mostly C.C. De Ville who was the musician in the band. He pretty much cut the way for them as far as how they presented (themselves) live. When they went in the studio they worked with some great producers and they came up with a couple of great albums. Each album sold more than five million alone in the United States for the first three albums. Worldwide they did well over forty million.

Q - I didn't realize that.

A - Oh, yeah. They did forty million back in '95, '96. That's worldwide. And that was the first three albums.

Q - So those guys made a lot of money.

A - They did very well.

Q - Did you handle that deal when Poison signed with Capitol Records?

A - A hundred percent with Tom Walley from E.M.I./Capitol. Tom Walley became a great friend of mine, a great ally. We went at that time with my lawyer, who was Peter Paterno. He did the deal. I know all the deal points on it. Remember, at that time point we did it, not too long after that I was looking for my out contract with Poison, so I would reap the benefits of that first album that I was involved with. We were both happy with the deal.

Q - You're fortunate you had a good attorney.

A - I didn't need an attorney. I never had anything on paper with Poison at all. It was so easy to prove up who I dealt with. There were people who stood by me. Poison wasn't looking to steal anything from my pockets. They were just looking to go ahead and link up with different management, which incidentally they wound up leaving pretty quickly and they went with HK Management. During that whole time I was kind of a straw dog, saying they never left me. (laughs) So it was kind of funny. HK Management was linked up with Irving Azoff at one time. They were called Frontline. They broke it up 'cause they kind of had a monopoly between the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. As you look back, and to this day at Irving Azoff's roster, he still has the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. It's pretty funny. At one time they broke it up and they just get it back together. They used my name as a straw dog. They were with HK Management for a couple of decades and everything worked out well. Howard Kaufman died not too long ago and Denny Rosencrantz was their point man down there. Really nice guy. Did great things for Poison. HK Management really kept Poison on the map. They did really well for them. Also, I want to mention Troy Blakely, who I brought them to as a booking agent. He was with ICM (International Creative Management) at that time. Troy has passed away too. Troy was the last booking agent through Irving Azoff, not only for Poison, but for the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. So he had a really good career. He passed away really young. I think he was 67.

Q - I was watching this series, Breaking The Band featuring Poison on the REELZ Network. It seems to me anyway that Poison's heyday wasn't all that long. Why did they become so popular?

A - They're very popular still. You'd be surprised. They can still draw, by themselves, six thousand to eight thousand people. They can do an arena by themselves in some areas. Here's why they were so popular: It's their hard work and their efforts. Between Bret, Bobby and Rikki and C.C. they worked the streets so well that they even learned how to go out of town and work the streets. Every interview they did, went well. The biggest problem they had, if you watched Breaking The Band, you saw when thy did the MTV Awards Show and C.C. wasn't quite up to doing it. That was a rare occasion. They keyed on that, but that was a rare occasion for Poison. Poison, for the amount of talent they had and the amount of credit they were given by journalists and musicians alike, went further than any other band I know of and it's because of their integrity. They had great musical, great promotional talent far beyond most bands of that era. Far beyond. Where the other bands relied on the people around them to do what they could do, Poison did almost everything themselves. I had to help them out financially and go out there and scratch with the chickens when I was working with them. But the fact is they carried on and did it themselves. So, you've got to give them credit for that.

Q - Back in 1982 I was talking to promoter Cedric Kushner. He said when he started in the business he started with $500. In 1982 you needed $250,000 and had to prepare yourself to lose $100,000 before the whole thing turned itself around. Does that sound right to you?

A - Yeah. That's on the small promotions end of it. At The Country Club, which was nothing more than a glorified thousand seater in Reseda, California, Nellie Naben, who was eighteen years old back in '86 or '87, walked in there and the Landis family, who owned The Country Club, asked me if things didn't go right if I would back her. So I made a quick deal with Nellie and told her all the big shows that were going in there like Robin Trower, The Tubes, John Entwistle, of course Poison. We didn't even know back then, but Guns 'n' Roses was on that slate. All of 'em would be partnered up with me and I would go ahead and pony up the money in case we ever had a loss. Well, we never had a loss. Nellie never looked back. She's a very smart woman. Very, very, very educated. Way beyond her ways and means and her age. There were weekends when we had Robin Trower in there. Incidentally, I owned the booking agency that booked Robin Trower for over a decade. It was called ITT. We would book him for a Thursday, Friday and Saturday and I won't give you the exact figure that me and Nellie would split up after the three days, but we'd have a really good time out of it, (laughs) if you know what I'm saying. And we did that about six or seven times over the course of a year and a half.

Facebook Page: facebook.com/howie.hubberman

© Gary James. All rights reserved.


Howie Hubberman
Photo from Gary James' Press Kit Collection

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