Gary James' Interview With Dave Sabo
Skid Row



Their first two albums were multi-Platinum. In fact, their album "Slave To The Grind" went all the way to number one on the Billboard charts. They've shared the stage with some of the biggest acts in the world, including KISS, Motley Crue, Van Halen and Guns N' Roses. As headliners they brought along an all-star line-up that included Soundgarden, Panera, L.A. Guns and Love/Hate. Skid Row is hitting the road in 2022 that includes a residency at the Zappos Theatre at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas, an Australian and New Zealand tour, a European tour, and a U.S. tour. Their new album, "The Gang's All Here" will be released on October 14th, 2022. A single of the same name was released on March 22nd, 2022. Lead guitarist Dave Sabo spoke with us about the group's upcoming tours and the new album.

Q - Dave, in the forty-four years I've been interviewing Rock musicians, you're the first guy I'm interviewing from Skid Row.

A - That's crazy.

Q - I've certainly tried over the years, but as they say, timing is everything in life.

A - Yeah, man. I'm glad we're able to change that.

Q - So am I. Your publicist works wonders!

A - (laughs)

Q - You have a single that was released on March 22nd (2022) and you have a new lead singer in the group. Things are really looking up for Skid Row, aren't they?

A - It's been a crazy few years, especially these last couple of months. It's been really, really nuts. Figuring how long we have as a history as a band and everything we've faced, all the ups and downs throughout our career, to say that things are crazy, they really must be. (laughs) We've experienced our fair share of it throughout our history. But we're really excited about what's going on right now. We just started a residency in Las Vegas with Scorpions. They're one of our favorite bands of all time. Incredibly great gentlemen. Amazing band. Have always been super kind to us and continue to be. We have a new record we're finishing up, a new single that's out, and a new singer on that single ("The Gang's All Here"), Eric Gronwall. He's from Stockholm, Sweden. He was in a band that had toured with us years ago, a band called Heat. He toured with us in Europe and we were familiar with him. He won the Swedish version of American Idol called Swedish Idol. His audition song was "18 And Life" (a Skid Row song). So we were aware of him from that as well. As luck would have it, we had reached a fork in the road with our old singer and so we needed to make a decision because the band and our singer were going in two different directions. So we reached out to Eric to see if he'd be interested in singing the track off the record just to see how it went, and twenty-four hours later we got it back and it was phenomenal. So we said, "You know what? We're going to have to make a changes so let's make a change right now," and we did and so we've been finishing up vocals on this new record. We were just in the studio yesterday here in Las Vegas. We'll have the record done and in stores and on the streets by October 15th (2022).

Q - The residency that Skid Row has at the Zappos Theatre at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas is the new trend for Rock groups, isn't it?

A - It seems to be, which is great. I mean, this business has changed so much in the last five, ten years. It's continually evolving. Las Vegas has embraced bringing Hard Rock and Heavy Metal into its area. So yeah, you see a lot of people doing it. Aerosmith, Scorpions. Sammy Hagar, and the list goes on. It's really great. Zappos Theatre is fantastic. It's like a 7,000 seater. It's beautiful. It's been here forever. They re-did it. I mean, people couldn't be nicer. People couldn't be more inviting to us. People couldn't be more hospitable. So far, this has been a great experience. We've only had one show so far and it was pretty crazy because we had it in a room with our new singer up until last Tuesday (March 22nd, 2022); We met at the airport in New York, flew to Las Vegas, hung out Tuesday night, went to rehearsal Wednesday and Thursday, had Friday off and played our first show on Saturday. So, it's been a whirlwind. It's been crazy.

Q - Is this a venue you will be returning as the year goes on?

A - No. We're booked for the rest of the year throughout the world. We'll be touring the States. We're going to Europe twice I believe. We're going to Australia and New Zealand. The in the New Year (2023) we're going to Japan and other parts of the world. We're booked solid into next year (2023). But I would like to come back and do something for sure.

Q - Of course when you're doing a residency in Las Vegas you save money on travel, hotels and restaurants. You don't have to worry about the acoustics. You get to sleep in the same bed every night. Is there any downside to a residency that you can think of?

A - I can't think of any right now to be honest with you. Again, we're just in the first week of it, so it's been wonderful. It's been a really cool change of pace. But like I said, we couldn't be treated any nicer. So that makes everything okay.

Q - You and Skid Row nave introduced your own coffee brand, Slave To The Grind. Was that your idea? Are you a big coffee drinker?

A - We all are. And so Rachel (Bolan - Skid Row member) had this idea playing around for awhile because we needed the right people to partner up with. So, our management got in touch with a company out of New Jersey called Deadsled, and they presented us with a bunch of different options. We actually did real taste tests of different blends and kind of came to the conclusion of what we all liked, collectively. And that's what we're selling. It's not like we put our name on a bag of coffee. It wasn't anything like that. There was a lot of back and forth between what we did and didn't like with the different samples they were sending us. So, I believe we settled on a Costa Rican/Brazilian blend.

Q - You were on the path to becoming a professional baseball player. And then you saw KISS.

A - (laughs)

Q - What did you like so much about KISS that you would put down a baseball bat and pick up a guitar? And, you never have been in a band that put on makeup.

A - No, but it was that whole spectacle, the larger than life, super hero quality that just opened my eyes to what was possible through music. I grew up in a household of music being played constantly. I'm the youngest of five boys and I got my musical education through my Mom and my older brothers. I was weaned on everything from Elvis and The Beach Boys to Black Sabbath and Hendrix, Humble Pie and Procol Harum, Spooky Tooth and Ten Years After, and then Pop radio of the '70s. And so, when I saw KISS it was just an explosion within me that occurred like, "Oh my God! I've never seen anything like this!" The power of their music and their image was just mind boggling. I didn't know what I was going to do within music, but I knew that I was going to do something. That was my calling. And I didn't end up picking up a guitar until a year later.

Q - What year did you see KISS?

A - December 16th, 1977.

Q - I first saw KISS in October of 1975. They sold 1,500 seats in a 10,000 seat arena. Two months later they opened for Black Sabbath, and blew them off the stage. One year later they headlined that arena and sold it out.

A - Wow! I believe it. That's awesome.

Q - So Dave, I beat you by a couple of years seeing KISS.

A - You sure did! I could've been to those shows.

Q - I saw one figure that said Skid Row had sold twelve million records. But that was back in 1996. How many records has Skid Row sold? Do you know?

A - I don't. I honestly don't know. We get different numbers all the time from people who were either at our label or are still at the same label we were at, Atlantic Records. So, I don't know. I know that we did well, (laughs) and that we're doing well. We still get to do this. We still get to tour the world. The greatest gift that I think has occurred in my life has been being able to play music for a living and being able to provide for my family and have a nice life through music. It's like the most amazing thing in the world. All of us in the band are so humbled and grateful for that, that we get to create and perform music for people and they like it and it's clearly a case where I'm kind of blown away at this stage in my life I get to do it. I'm inspired every day by bands like the Scorpions and Aerosmith and The Rolling Stones, that show you that you can continue to do this for as long as you put in the time and the energy. But it's got to be fun and thankfully it still is a lot of fun.

Q - Had you ever held a non-musical job before the band really took off?

A - Oh, yeah. Oh my God! I worked every horrible job there was. I worked in warehouses, selling tools out of the trunk of my car, worked at dishwashing and worked in the catering world. They were terrible! But, they were all a means to an end. My family wanted me to go to college and I had a great opportunity to go and be an electrical engineer at Rensselaer, R.P.I. I didn't want anything to fall back on. It was either music or nothing. And so, I didn't allow myself a safety net, if you will. So, I got out of high school and was working terrible jobs and playing in nightclubs and working on putting the right band together. It all came together when Rachel and I met in a music store and decided we would try writing songs together and it worked! And so we kept doing it. He was in a band and I was in a band and we were like, "Let's get rid of everybody and start from scratch." And that's what we kind of did. We got rid of our subsequent members of the bands that we were in and started forming a band based on our writing together. And we're still doing it that way. (laughs)

Q - Are you saying you could've gotten a scholarship to R.P.I to study electrical engineering?

A - Yeah. I don't know if it was a full scholarship. I believe it was a partial scholarship, but yeah.

Q - How fortunate you were that Jon Bon Jovi was your friend growing up. He said whichever one of us becomes successful first will help the other out. And he kept his word. He came through for you.

A - Oh my gosh, did he ever! But I have to preface it by saying nothing was "gifted". He was like, "Man, your band is good, but it's not great. You got to be great if we're going to do anything. If I'm going to help you it's got to be great." So, it was years of working and writing and putting the right pieces of the puzzle together, until it was like, "Now it's great. Now we can do something." And through him we met Doc McGhee and Doc was managing the band and they agreed to take us on the New Jersey tour. But it wasn't like Jon became famous and said, "Yeah, let's bring your band around." He wasn't going to do anything unless we stepped up. And like I said, it had to be great. And so we kept writing and writing, working our day jobs and writing until kind of like him and Richie and Doc were all like, "Man, this is really good. This can really do something," and that's when they kind of of opened up the doors and said, "Let's see how we can help you out," and they agreed to take us on that New Jersey tour. That tour was sold out. We had nothing to do with it selling out. No one knew who the hell we were when we first started that tour. Then two to three months later, people started becoming more aware of us because we were getting a presence on MTV and our live show was really good. We worked really hard. Still work really hard, but we worked really hard and we had an amazing education by being able to do it on the same stage as Bon Jovi, watching them play every night. It was the most amazing education you could have. You're watching a band at the top of their game. You got to see it every night and take notes and apply it to your own situation. And through it all we remained best friends. It's really amazing story. The fact that we've lived it is really incredible.

Q - How did Doc McGhee get you that record deal with Atlantic Records? Did he submit a demo tape to Atlantic or was it just on the strength of his reputation?

A - Atlantic and Geffen Records were coming to see us play in the clubs in New Jersey and New York. So we were constantly showcasing, and the more we showcased, and for lack of a better word, there was kind of like a bidding war going on. So, we went into the studio and cut nineteen songs in a place in New Jersey called the House Of Music. We utilized those songs to kind of figure out what the best of the lot were. Atlantic and Geffen went back and forth and for one brief moment we were on Geffen, but we said to Doc we didn't feel comfortable about it. We were a New Jersey based band. Geffen was an L.A. label. It was a different mentality than what we thought worked for us. And so luckily we kind of got out of the Geffen deal and signed with Atlantic, which was one of the biggest things we could have ever done because Atlantic was a great fit for the band.

Q - When Skid Row came back from Australia in February of 1993, Doc McGhee told you guys to take some time off and wait for the Seattle Sound or Grunge to die down. How could he have been so certain that Grunge was just a passing fad?

A - I don't remember it quite like that. I remember we came back in '93 and we had been touring for twenty-two months, pretty much nonstop, and we were exhausted. We were burnt out. I think they kind of happened simultaneously with that movement (Grunge) and us being completely burnt. We needed a break bad. And so, while we took that break the whole landscape of the Rock 'n' Roll business changed.

Q - Yes, it did.

A - And so when we went in to do our next record with Bob Rock, we had been three or four years removed from our previous record. Boy, it was a different world. We made "Subhuman Race" and it was a very difficult record to make. We were at odds with each other as a band. We were exhausted, to be honest. We had been on tour for pretty much six years straight, for five years straight, and we were just burnt out. So we did the best we could in that moment. I look back on that record and I like a lot of the stuff on the record, but it sounds like a band that is basically falling apart.

Q - Did you see, or should I say hear about the Seattle Sound when you were touring around the U.S.?

A - We took Soundgarden out on tour with us in '92. They spent a month out on the road with us. Pantera was out on the road with us and they went to Japan. So we brought Soundgarden out for a month and I loved 'em. I was familiar with Soundgarden already. I had been familiar with Nirvana through their "Bleach" album. They hadn't released "Nevermind" yet, but when "Nevermind" came out it was pretty obvious that things were going to change. You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to go, "Wow!" It just took off. It was an absolute movement. You could see it. People had been ingratiated in sort of a careless free-for-all of the genre of music that we were part of, the Hard Rock genre in general. And it was a response to that. I think people had enough of the party, party, party lifestyle. It was something different. It happens all the time in music. That's where great music is created and then you withstand the test of time. I look back and I understand it. I totally understand it. I saw our success start to go on the decline. While it was a bummer, it didn't break me by any stretch of the imagination. I was raised in an environment where humility and gratitude are two major forces in my life. I'm still grateful to this day to be asked to play music. We weren't playing to the same size audiences that we might have been a couple of years earlier, but we were still asked to play and that was huge for me. And so, it didn't break me. It didn't break us. It broke us up for a little while. Then we made some changes and stuff, but that happened because our personalities became quite distant from each other and a bit combative. Rachel, Scotty and I made a pact with each other very early on that once it wasn't fun anymore we weren't going to do it or we were going to figure out how to make it fun again. And that's what we did. We spent a couple of years, '96 through around '99, a few years, where we didn't play as Skid Row. We did some side stuff. Then we realized that while maybe we didn't miss the band in its original form because of the combativeness and the conflict, we did miss playing those songs. We missed what those songs meant to us as individuals and we wanted to perform those songs again. So we regrouped with a new singer and a new drummer and went back out and started doing it again. And here we are all these twenty-three years later.

Q - The single from your new album was released in March (2022) The album is going to be released in October. Why so much time between the single and the album?

A - We're going to release a bunch more singles before the actual street date of the album. We'll release at least two or three more. I know how people are setting up records these days. The Country world has been doing that for years. I think now the Rock world is starting to look at it like where there's a long set-up period and you kind of build a bedrock of a bass with three or four singles and then release the full record thereafter. I don't have the answers. I just look at the best ideas that are available to us, then we make decisions. A lot of it is other people's intelligence and our gut instincts as well. And so this is the way we're going to do it for this record and hopefully it works. If it doesn't, then we'll try something else for the next one. (laughs)

Q - I suppose you've been asked this question a million times, but I just have to ask. Where did this nickname of "Snake" or "The Snake" come from?

A - I've had that "Snake" since I was twelve years old. Jon Bon Jovi gave me the nickname when we were kids because we used to sit there in the summertime and we'd be out playing basketball or stickball. I remember I had one long hair on my chest. One day he said, "Dude, can you get rid of that? That's disgusting." I'm like, "Dude, I'm becoming a man. No way. It's growth. It looks like a snake." So, every day that I didn't get rid of it he would call me "Snake", and it stuck.

Official Website: www.SkidRow.com

© Gary James. All rights reserved.

The views and opinions expressed by individuals interviewed for this web site are the sole responsibility of the individual making the comment and / or appearing in interviews and do not necessarily represent the opinions of anyone associated with the website ClassicBands.com.