Gary James' Interview With Stevie Rachelle Of
Tuff



They're an '80s band that first made a name for themselves in Phoenix, Arizona before moving on to Los Angeles where they found even greater fame. These guys were headlining clubs and later cross country tours without a record deal! Signed by Atlantic Records in 1990, their first album for the label, released in May, 1991, produced the hit song "I Hate Kissing You Goodbye". The group we are talking about is Tuff. Stevie Rachelle spoke with us about the group's history.

Q - I see you've been referred to as Stevie, Steven, and I call you Steve. How should I refer to you in this interview, Steve?

A - You can if you want. My real name is Steven. That's my birth name. All through school I was Steve instead of Steven. However, once I got into a band, everybody at some point, especially in the '80s, we all started adapting some kind of stage name, like P.K.A, professionally known as. Our drummer said, "There's already Stephen Pearcy from Ratt. There's Steven Tyler from Aerosmith. There's Steven Stevens with the Billy Idol band. Why don't you be Stevie? Why don't you use Stevie instead of Steven or Steve?" I said, "You know, that's actually a pretty good idea." There was obviously Stevie Nicks and Stevie Ray Vaughan and Stevie Wonder, but none of that really crossed into the Rock 'n' Roll world like say Aerosmith or Ratt or these other few guys that have a similar name in the Hair Band, '80s Rock 'n' Roll world. So I was like, "I think I'll use Stevie." My real last name is Hamseter, which is German. Just like a lot of these stage names I talked about here, you've got to have something that's a little bit more fancy than Joe Smith, you know? (laughs) So I opted to take a childhood sweetheart's name. Her middle name was Rachel. At one point I decided I was going to be Stevie Rachel and then Rachel kind of morphed into Rachelle, and the moniker I was given by an ex-manager was "Stevie Rachelle From Hell." (laughs) That's my stage name, Stevie Rachelle.

Q - Did the manager like you?

A - He did like me. We're good friends still to this day. We get along great. He said I was a hard worker. I would give him hell. So, he was like, "Stevie Rachelle will give you Hell. If you want competition, he's here." It's kind of like when you tell a team to go out on the court, "Give 'em Hell, boys!" So, it was kind of given to me that way, not in a negative way. That manager was Howie Hobberman. He's still around. He worked with us for many years along with many other bands in the '80s.

Q - Well, the obvious question as we speak, is there still a Tuff band together?

A - There is. The classic lineup that was signed to our major label deal was myself, Stevie Rachelle singing, Todd Chase (Chaisson) on bass, Michael Lean was our drummer, and our leader and our lead guitarist was Jorge De Saint. So, that was the classic and most well known lineup of Tuff, but for the last fifteen years or so, actually about a dozen years, it's me and Todd, the bass player. We're still together. The drummer has long since retired back in the early, mid '90s. He's in the food business. He's got some restaurants. The guitarist, Jorge, has kind of moved around. He's lived in New York, Florida, and from one end to the other. He hasn't really done anything musically full time. I know he's bouncing around from place to place, but I haven't been in touch with him for the last several years.

Q - Tuff performs where?

A - All over the world. We will still play occasionally in the States when there's some kind of a Heavy Metal or Hair Band or '80s Rock festival. The M3 Music Festival in the Baltimore area is always very popular in the Spring. We've played that before. We've had a couple of events on the West Coast in recent years, Hair Nation Live at Irvine Meadows. Hair Metal Holiday in Dallas, Texas. Rocktember up in the Minneapolis area. Most of these are festival style weekends with Predominantly '80s Metal bands. When I say that I mean Dokken, Whitesnake, Skindrow, Motley Crue's Vince Neil, Slaughter, L.A. Guns, Faster Pussycat, Lynch Mob, Twisted Sister. All of those kinds of bands. We usually got clumped in on those kinds of events. We're on the list of the Hair Band era. I'm okay with that. We'll usually be (in) one of the afternoon slots or a side stage at two, three, four o'clock when the day is kind of getting underway. Obviously the bigger bands that sold two, four, six, ten million records, they're the ones that'll go on as the headliner, co-headliner.

Q - In the '80s, the guys in bands had hair. Today's band members don't seem to have hair anymore. What happened?

A - Well, I think that's part of the reason the era was called the Hair Band era. Yeah, there was long hair in the '60s. Guys in Black Sabbath had long hair. Even for the time, The Beatles had long hair. They were considered raucous and rebellious with the way they looked. And in the late '70s, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Styx, Foreigner, a lot of these guys all had long hair, but it wasn't the same as when Motely Crue, Twisted Sister, Ratt, Bon Jovi came out. Then you started looking at; a great example is Motley Crue. Three guys had jet black hair and then Vince Neil's hair was bleached platinum white. Everybody had hair product. Jon Bon Jovi, now there's another guy. He didn't per se have the jet black hair or the platinum white hair, but he had what a lot of girls did in the '80s were they frosted just the tips. So, you'd be a brunette and then you'd go to the hair salon and they'd take just the last inch of your hair and they'd bleach that. They called it frosted. So, his hair kind of looked almost like an eagle's perfect feathers, a mane in his head. Then obviously Poison came along and C.C. was screaming pure white. Bobby Dall was again the jet black kind of thing. I think the guys in the '80s were being more experimental with their hair. Even though there was long hair in the '70s, nobody was bleaching or using hair dye. Billy Idol wasn't a Hair Band guy per se in the Heavy Metal area, but he was a punker and he became famous for that short cropped hair, but it was bleached platinum.

Q - It almost seems like men don't have hair the way their predecessors had in the '60s and '70s. Maybe they're getting bald sooner? I don't know. Something is going on.

A - Yeah, well, here's the thing: All this became fashionable at some point because of a few people. Now think about it, this is not Rock related, but Michael Jordan is probably one of the ten or twenty most famous people on the planet. He's almost in the Elvis status. And Michael Jordan was a professional basketball player and he started going bald, but at some point he had that male pattern baldness. He shaved his head and he looked good with it. He was the face of not just the N.B.A., but of sports drink Gatorade, Nike tennis shoes, the Air Jordans, and so a whole culture of fans, not just young, inner city Black kids that liked Michael because he was basketball player, there was a lot of mid-western White kids and kids from the suburbs that were like, "I want to be like Michael Jordan too." His mystique grew and I think he was somebody that really made baldness okay or sexy. Going back to the '70s, Kojak wasn't exactly a sex symbol. I mean, he was a cool guy. He had this lollipop. He was a detective, but he looked like an older man. All the women wouldn't look at him and say, "He's sexy." Michael Jordan made baldness sexy the way Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson does today.

Q - You may be on to something. And then along comes the tattoos and piercings and there's the new look for Rock stars.

A - Exactly. There's the declaration. See, the thing is with Grunge bands and new Metal bands that came around in the '90s to replace what was Heavy Metal or the Hair Bands, they knew that style of band was being dismissed. The Hair Bands are kind of posers the critics would say, or they're worried about their clothes or hair or image. But in reality a lot of those bands that came out in the '90s had a similar thing. Yeah, they didn't have bleached blond hair or jet black hair, but you have a guy with a shaved head. He'd have the extra long goatee and he'd put something in the goatee like a couple of beads. He'd braid part of it or put some little trinkets on his beard to look a little crazier and like you said, they added the tattoos or some kind of a weird piercing, not just in the ear, but I'm going to have a couple in my nose and in between my eyeballs as well. A lot of that is dressing or decoration that is part of the image as well. Just like punkers did and then obviously the Grunge and some of the bands in the '90s became interested in, "Hey! Let's have a guy with dread locks," and that wasn't something you could see on many White guys previous to the '90s. Usually it would be somebody like a Lenny Kravitz that had dread locks or a Bob Marley guy.

Q - I recall reading some of the big, Rock publications of the '80s, Circus magazine, Hit Parader...

A - Creem, Rock Scene.

Q - And they gave this impression that in Los Angeles the streets were just flowing with people going into clubs to see bands seven days a week. So, in February, 1984 I traveled to California, arriving on a Sunday. What I found was there were no clubs open with bands playing and overflowing crowds. It was just like any other city in the U.S. on a Sunday. A false picture was presented.

A - Right. I can't necessarily speak from experience because I'm from Wisconsin. In 1984 I was still in high school, but I was a Senior. I graduated in June of 1984. At that point everything I was learning was from three sources, well I guess four in a way. One was local radio and whatever local radio played. I'm in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, south of Greenburg, north of Milwaukee, so I'm hearing a small town playing Rush, Triumph, Def Leppard, Loverboy. Secondly, was MTV, which at that point was only a couple of years old. They were starting to become a major force that all us kids would come home from school, turn on the TV and watch these bands. Then the magazines, which I would go to the news stand like all young kids do, and look at all the different magazines. Occasionally there would be something word-of-mouth. By the time I was eighteen I could start going to bars or hang out with older people. I would occasionally run into somebody who had been to Los Angeles and went for the weekend or went to Hollywood. I know that compared to where I lived or even going into Milwaukee for instance, there were a couple of clubs that would have some cool shows a few nights a week, but I don't think Los Angeles really, really exploded until after Poison hit. When Poison hit, which was in '86, '87, and by that time we already had Motley Crue and Ratt and Kokken and Black And Blue. Poison was also looked at as a big, long shot. Nobody thought they were super great musicians. Everything was really simple about the music. The fact that they were able to put together what they did and suddenly sold three million records, I think it made a lot of people go, "Wow! If they can do it, I think I could do it." I don't say that to be negative about what Poison was, but when you did see Van Halen, yeah, Dave was up there and put on that show and it was kind of gimmicky with his talk and Eddie was also this world class guitar player. It was like, "Wow!" Nobody can play like him. No one. He's that famous. Even in Motley Crue, Tommy Lee was known and is still highly respected as a very good drummer. George Lynch from Dokken came out and people were, "Wow! This guitar player is like Eddie Van Halen." So, I think when Poison hit, it made a lot of people go, "Wow! We've got to go to L.A." I came out in the Summer of '87 and by the time I got here it was literally seven nights a week, The Whiskey, The Roxy, The Troubadour, Gazzarri's and another dozen clubs within that area code. It was hitting on all cylinders. From there, for the next three, four, five years, it continued to grow until the bubble burst when Nirvana and Grunge really came in.

Q - Grunge really sealed the fate of all those Hair Bands, didn't it?

A - It did, and this question has been asked and answered a million different times by a million different people.

Q - You're right. I've asked that question before to other musicians as well.

A - That's a quick answer that everybody says. Grunge did it or Nirvana did it. That's a yes and no question. Yes, because it did happen at that time. It was timing. It was due to turn over. It's like Disco in the '70s. I was like ten in 1976. A year or two later we were going to the YMCA dance, listening to all the Disco hits and going to all the roller rinks and "Saturday Night Fever" and "Stayin' Alive" and all that stuff was at a fever pitch. Studio 54 in New York City. But if you remember, after '81 or something when Disco died, it became so disrespected. It became hated. They had that big thing, you'll probably remember this, that thing where they had everybody bring their Disco records to the football stadium in the parking lot and they piled 'em up and they started 'em on fire and they took a steam roller and rolled over 'em. Do you remember that?

Q - I do.

A - A radio station put on that event. That's when Disco was going down and people were saying, "Disco sucks." So, the end of that era and all of that just kind of changed. Now the stuff is happening, the '80s. The Punk bands. The New Wave bands. It was a whole different movement and Disco was kind of shunned. It kind of correlates to what happened to the Hair Bands with that, at the end of the '80s, early '90s when Grunge and New Metal kind of shuffled in. Everybody suddenly, the industry, the radio, the fans, "That stuff is lame." Nirvana's got a meaning. It's poetry. He doesn't care whether his hair is nice. He's wearing his grandpa's sweater. He's just playing his guitar. It doesn't matter if one of his strings is out of tune. It was kind of like that whole critic's angle of acceptance. Going back to the question, I think the Hair Bands, we all kind of kept regurgitating ourselves. We were running out of names. It was bands that had dual names like Bang Tango, Bullet Boys, Dangerous Toys. By the end of the decade there were guys going, "That one's taken. We'll call ourselves Danger Danger instead of Dangerous Toys. We'll call ourselves Bang Gang instead of Bang Tango." Everybody started rehashing the same names. We need another word. Laser Boys. The Backstreet Boys. As time went by it was all too much. So then there were these bands that started coming out with just these simple names, Tool, Nirvana, Tad, which was another Seattle band. If there was two words being used it was Screaming Trees or Pearl Jam. Something that had nothing to do with Rock or night or boys or girls or leather or lasers. They were just going against the grain, and of course all the clothing, the hair dye. There was no stage clothes. There was no leather. It was literally like the guys in the band starting to look like the road crew. Guys were a little overweight, unshaven, and it was okay.

Q - Prior to traveling to Los Angeles, were you singing in local clubs? Did you have a straight job? Did you go to college? What were you doing?

A - No college. I did enroll in a community college, but I want to say I enrolled and signed up for two or three classes and I never went. (laughs) It was 1984. When you say February, I literally saw my first Heavy Metal concert in February of 1984. It was KISS with Heaven and Vandenberg were the openers. It was in Green Bay, Wisconsin and that was on the "Lick It Up" tour. A couple of weeks later I saw Ozzy Osbourne on the "Dark At The Moon" tour with Motley Crue. They had just released "Shoot At The Devil". That was the first week of March, 1984 and I just turned eighteen. Now, I went to that concert and before this I knew nothing about their musical movement. The only thing I knew about Ozzy Osbourne was one thing. What do you think that was?

Q - Lead singer of Black Sabbath?

A - No. He eats bats.

Q - What?!

A - That was a major news story. I didn't know he was the lead singer from Black Sabbath. I didn't even know who Black Sabbath was. I wasn't into the music scene. So, when I say I wasn't into it, I literally had no information. I heard songs on the radio at some point, but I never really cared. I was just a kid, working at Mister Donut. I worked at a doughnut shop.

Q - I know he bit the head off of a dove at a record company meeting.

A - Well, you know the story about the bats then, don't you?

Q - I know about the dove.

A - The dove happened after that. What happened was, he was on stage and somebody threw a bat on stage, like people throw lighters or bottles. Ozzy saw it and thought it was one of those rubber, Halloween bats, so he picked it up and bit it. Then when he realized it was a real bat after the fact, his first management and everybody else realized he bit the head off of a live bat. So he had to get rabies shots. That story was just a by chance situation where somebody threw that bat on stage and he thought it was a rubber bat. Then Sharon (Ozzy's wife and manager) had the record company meeting and they had the dove there and he took one of the doves and bit the head off the dove in front of all the record people. These things become huge. The word viral wasn't even around yet. That was a viral story forty years ago. So, as a young kid I was just going to school, going to the drive-in with my girlfriend, riding my skate board and listening to to whatever was on MTV. I heard Heavy Metal singer Ozzy Osbourne bites head off bat. That was on the news channel that night. That's the only thing I knew about him. But, going back to that concert, I just turned eighteen. I went, saw Motley Crue walk out and start the beginning of "Shout At The Devil" and when they came out and looked the way they looked, I left there and I was absolutely obsessed. I wanted to be a Heavy Metal singer. Only a few short months later, my friend said, "Van Halen is coming." I'd heard their song, "Jump". So I decided to go to that concert and once again David Lee Roth came out and I was mesmerized by this guy. I was a blond haired, blue-eyed, mid-west boy. I was just like, "Oh my God!" This guy just walks on stage, stops the show and tells girls he's going to screw 'em later and everybody screams. Like, how cool is that job, you know? (laughs) Between Motley Crue and Van Halen and soon after Ratt, all within a few months, these were shows that changed me and my direction from, "Okay, I'm just working a job and signing up for a community college," to saying, "I want to be in a band." Following that, I did a join a band or two, played locally, different clubs around Wisconsin, Michigan, but at that point I realized pretty soon, if I want to be a surfer I should go to Hawaii. If I want to be in the rodeo I should go to Texas. If I want to sing in a Rock band and get on MTV, I'm not going to get a record deal out of Oshkosh. So, in '87 I moved to Southern California.

Q - And you probably auditioned for the job or you met some guy and you're in the band Tuff.

A - Exactly. They were actually looking for a singer because their previous singer had left and they were handing these flyers out on The Strip. They handed out some that were like four squares on the page and one of 'em had the guitarist. One of 'em had the bassist, and one had the drummer. The fourth square was empty. It said, "Wanted: Lead singer. Influences David Lee Roth, Vince Neil, Robin Zander, Bret Michaels." I was like, "Those are all the guys I like." I actually tried to call and their phone was disconnected because that's probably what most bands did back in the day, they didn't pay their phone bill. (laughs) And then I called the rehearsal studio that was also advertised on the flyer and I said, "I'm interested in trying out for the band." They instructed me to send some kind of a press kit and a publicity photo and a resume and a recorded demo. It all sounded so professional. I had some of these things, but they were all so pretty local Wisconsin style. They weren't Hollywood, California quality. After a couple short days of thinking about it, I was like, "I don't want to just send this because I don't think this is a good representation of who I am. I need to go there." So, I packed up my bags and bought a one way ticket, and five days later I was here.

Q - Tuff went out on the road, playing clubs before any record deal. How does any band without a record deal go into a club where the people have never heard of the band and make any money? Did you get a flat rate? Did you get a flat rate and a percentage of the door? Was the band advertised?

A - Here's what we did: Not only did we go on the road, we also took a tour bus, a Provost $300,000 tour bus and went from California to Phoenix to Albuquerque to Dallas to Kansas City to St. Louis to Chicago to Milwaukee to Minneapolis to Iowa, to Omaha, Nebraska to Denver, Colorado. We literally went on the road. We already had started to build our name for a year in California. By that point there was a tremendous amount of buzz coming out of Los Angeles. As we know, Motley Crue came here and went huge. Ratt came from here, and Dokken. Like I said, when Poison did it, it became a bigger deal and then soon Guns N' Roses and L.A. Guns and Faster Pussycat and all those bands came out almost simultaneously and all of them sold Gold, Platinum or multi-Platinum records. So, at that point, 1987 1988, there were more eyes focused on Los Angeles than ever before. As everybody has always known, there's a lot of competition here. There's a lot of clubs and not just Hair Band guys. We had bands like Racer X playing here with Paul Gilbert and Scott Travis on drums. There was some state-of-the-art, quality musicians in some of those bands that came out here, like professional, world class talent. At some point within six months of being here and playing in clubs, we became a huge name. We became a big name. A lot of people were saying outside of Warrant, who was a little ahead of us, they were like Tuff, is the next Motley Crue or Poison from Los Angeles. That word was starting to get out a little bit and we would then send press kits to these clubs. Even by looking through tour books or Metal Edge magazine or Rolling Stone, you'd know about The Lone Star in Kansas City or The Thirsty Whale in Chicago. Some of these clubs had already started building a little bit of a national name. So we'd be like, "We gotta play Kansas City. We gotta play The Back Room in Austin where Dangerous Toys is from. We gotta play in Tallas, Texas." So, we just started picking parts out of the map and knowing they have a local scene and we'd send 'em a promo kit. It looked like we were on the verge of a big record deal and so a lot of times clubs would say, "Yeah, we'll give you guys a night or two." We'd do two nights at five hundred bucks a night. Okay, so we got two dates there. Now we need two more here. We need one in St. Louis. Some nights we'd get two hundred bucks or they'd say, "You've got to play for the door." But there'd be a few clubs that said, "We have a full Saturday. One of our friend's friends saw you guys in L.A. last Summer and said you blew the roof off the place. We'll give you a thousand bucks." "Let's do it."

Q - Your advance work consisted of what?

A - The advance work was sending out a Fed Ex envelope with a dozen posters on it. We were getting promos made. Even on the local level, our promo looked like something a label was putting out. We weren't just doing an 8 by 10 flyer like paper at Kinko's. We would do a photo shoot with one of these big shot photographers, William Hames, Neil Zlozower, Mark Weiss Guy, and then we'd go to a printer and make 24" by 36" wall posters, full color, and the photo was like something you'd see right out of a Metal Edge or Rock Scene magazine. The clubs would literally put that on the wall, "August 21st Live In Concert From Hollywood - Tuff. $10." Just putting that on the wall, anybody that liked Poison, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, Ratt, whatever, they were like, "Oh, my God. We gotta go see these guys."

Q - Tuff signed with Atlantic Records. How good of a job did they do for you?

A - Well, we got signed in the Summer of 1990. Did pre-production in October, November. Started recording the day after Christmas and then we were finished in early February (1991). The record came out in May and by the Fall our video was done and it was on Dial MTV in September. So, within a year's time of being signed, we were number three on Dial MTV, but timing was a huge factor because we were on Dial MTV and two weeks after we were going up the Dial. Nirvana debuted and once that "Nevermind" record came out, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"... I mean, that literally went through the roof, and Pearl Jam was out at the same time. Those bands really displaced the biggest bands, Poison, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Motley Crue. Those bands couldn't sell a million or two million records when previously they would sell three to five million records. So, a band like Tuff, that was just starting to scrape the surface, we really had no chance. I'm thankful for what Atlantic Records did because they did put us on the map. The only thing that would've been great is if we'd had come out a year or two years earlier or if Nirvana and Pearl Jam had come out two years later. (laughs) Those really were the two big players that made the biggest change. Alice In Chains was out before those two bands. So was Soundgarden. When Van Halen was on tour they took Alice In Chains with them and they got booed off the stage almost every night for six months.

Q - In 1994 you formed your own record label, RLS Records. When we're talking record company, I'm thinking distribution, promotion, recording studio, art work people. Did you have all that?

A - Yes and no. The straight up answer is no. I didn't have any of that. But the thing is, somebody said this, I forget who. Maybe it was a Punk guy like Henry Rollins. They said when a fan buys a record, do they look at the back and go, "Gee, they're on Mercury? I hate Mercury Records. I don't like those guys anymore."? No. They want to know who's in the band, does it have their favorite song? They want to see the pictures. They want to see how they can be in the Fan Club. They don't care who produced the record. They don't care who the engineer was or who mixed it or mastered it. They don't care whether it was on Geffen. When Motley Crue came out, they were on Leather Records. Leather Records was basically them and their manager. They were on Leather Records. Kind of like what NWA did with Eazy-E. They said, "We're Leather Records. Nobody wants to sign us. We're just gonna make our own records and start selling 'em at our shows." At some point, after signing with Atlantic and getting dropped and signing with Grand Slam, which was distributed through IRS, that was the deal we signed after Atlantic. But then what happened is, IRS went under and Grand Slam lost their distribution, so that deal went by the wayside. Then I just decided I'm not waiting on my record label anymore. I'm going to form my own label. Of course my band mates at the time and all my friends thought I was crazy. But I just said I'm going to call it RLS Records. It had a dual meaning. RLS stood for Record Labels Suck, which is kind of an oxymoron because I'm now the record label and I didn't like record labels. So, I called it RLS, which also stood for Rachelle Lyrics and Songs. I just basically made a list. What do I need to put out a record? I opened up a music connection magazine. We need to get a guy who can master it. Okay, here's a guy. We need a girl who can do artwork. We need a company that can make cassettes. I need a company that can make CDs. I need a company that can lay out films that we can approve the artwork for the booklet. I need to get a bar code. Okay, let me call this company called the UPC company and get my own bar code. I did all of that with my cousin and we literally just spent a month organizing everything we need. We already had the master tracks and instead of just putting them on a half-assed cassette or a CDR or the cheap version, we were, "Let's make it look exactly like a record label's record only instead of it saying Geffen or Warner Brothers, we're going to have a little RCS Records in the corner." Like I said, the fans didn't look at that and go, "Oh, Tuff is on RCS. We'll I'm not going to buy it." No. "Hey, we like Tuff. We're going to buy it." It doesn't matter what label it's on. (laughs)

Q - I would only say that in the '70s I did study what was put on the back of a record. Who was the producer? Who was the manager? What studio was the record recorded in? I can't say whether music fans in later years did that.

A - I'm not saying you wouldn't study it, but I'm saying as a fan, if you were a KISS fan and they put all their records out on Casablanca, right?

Q - Right.

A - But at some point, Gene and Paul went, "Screw Casablanca. We're going to start Destroyer Records, our new company." You would've still bought the record. You would just go, "Wow! They're on Destroyer Records." What you said in the beginning of this question, it's funny that you asked that because I've said this maybe a few times in interviews, nobody usually asks, "What is RLS Records?" But I've told people the perception of RLS Records to some fan who lives in the middle of the country is that Stevie Rachelle is a VIP in some building on Sunset Boulevard, ten floors up, in an office going, "Hey, get me this week's sales report!" (laughs) But the reality is, I was doing this out of my garage in a house in Reseda, in the Valley. And the reality is that Rick Rubin, who started Def American with Russell Simmons, those guys started it in their dormitory over in New York in 1979 or 1980. They didn't have a record label. Those two and a bunch of friends said, "Hey, let's put these demos together with The Beastie Boys and we're going to start selling 'em."

Q - And don't forget Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss started A&M Records in a garage.

A - Exactly. So, that's basically what I do, what I did, and still do to this day. RLS Records is twenty-five years old. It's probably twenty-five years old this week. (week of June 9th, 2019) because April of '94 I was home for my grandpa's funeral and Kurt Cobain commits suicide. A few weeks later I found out about the label going out for IRS and at the time they said, "You can have your masters back," and I told my cousin, "We need to put out our own record." So, we spent the month of May planning it and submitted everything and it was in June when I actually got the CDs from the CD plant, and the tapes. They came on a big truck and we started filling orders. So, it was June of 1994, twenty-five years ago. And to this day I still do the same thing. I've put out probably fifty or sixty products, but the only sad part is I didn't go on to have the success that the guys at A&M (had) or Rick Rubin or David Geffen had. I'm still doing things very small, but I'm in control of it. I'd rather do it this way than the way they do it in the big industry, which is hurry up and wait and hope that you sign with them and within two years they're going to put you out.

Q - Tuff has had quite a few personnel changes over the years. Why would that be?

A - Todd, our bass player, was the first to leave. He left us '92 and helped form this band in '85. So, he was already seven years into it and he kind of saw the writing on the wall. He was also a guy, out of all the guys in the band, who was into the heavier music. He liked Pantera. He liked Tool. He liked all the aggressive music that was happening in the '90s and so he opted to leave. So, myself, George and Michael continued for a few more years and then Michael quit, not just the band, but the whole music industry. He had been looking at moving along. Even though he was younger than everybody, he wanted to get out of the business. He wanted to start like a tanning salon or a coffee shop or restaurant. He just didn't want to do music anymore. So, he went on to do that. Then me and George, the guitarist, played 'til the end of '95 and we had a couple of different bass players play with us and a couple of different drummers, but it was him and I that were the two core members, the lead singer and the lead guitarist. Then, at the end of '95, the battle just became very trying. As much as I was militant, the hard worker, different record label, another different record label, a different booking agency, a different drummer, another different drummer. It just became like a black cloud and I just decided at some point to throw in the towel. So, we stopped doing Tuff at the end of '95. And then throughout the end of the '90s I did some other musical things. I did a couple of side projects that weren't really Rock related. I sang on a couple of tribute CDs in the studio. But then at the turn of the millennium, a lot of bands started coming out of the woodwork. Poison did a reunion tour. The '90s were gone. There was a stigma with that, that now that it was 2000, people were a little older and they weren't afraid of '80s Metal bands, the Hair Metal or whatever title came with it. They were more mature. So, nobody cared. "Poison's fun. Let's go." In '92, "93, '94 it'd be like, "You're going to Poison? We're going to Stone Temple Pilots. Have fun!" Nobody wanted to go see Poison at that time. And so when I re-launched the band I actually talked to a couple of the original guys and nobody was really interested. So, I had this idea for this song called "American Hair Band", and it was kind of a play on Kid Rock's "American Bad Ass", where I basically talked about all the Hair Bands. I put it out at the end of 2000, early 2001, and it kind of became an underground, cult hit where it was being played at all these '80s clubs. By this point Terrestrial Radio started doing weekly shows like '80s at 8 or Hair Spray Replay. Stuff that had to do with a solid hour on a Saturday night that we're only gonna play the '80s tonight. Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Def Leppard. People were kind of like, "Wow! This is cool!" So, that song I put out was kind of a tribute to '80s Hair Metal and it got picked up by some of those stations, actually a lot of those stations. It started charting some places, getting a lot of action. So, at that point it was basically Tuff with me singing, but a whole new lineup of guys. Then over the next fifteen years or so, I had guys that would play with me for a few years and then they'd get a gig in WASP or Beautiful Creations or some other group, and they'd move on. At some point, about twelve years ago, I convinced Todd to come back and play shows with me, who had previously quit twenty years earlier. I said, "Hey, let's go do this and have some fun. It's not a full time gig. It's like a few long weekends out of the year, maybe a Summer trip. We'll play some music and reminisce with our buddies." And that's kind of what we've been doing for the last fifteen years.

Q - So, who is the tough guy in Tuff?

A - You're asking physically who's the biggest and strongest guy? (laughs)

Q - Not necessarily, but who's the tough guy in Tuff?

A - Well, that's me. In contrast to the photos of me from the '80s, I'm not the pretty boy. I'm not a small guy. I'm six feet and change and I probably am 215 (pounds) right now and I can bench 300 pounds. I've always been bigger than most people imagined. I've also always been more of a sporty guy, go to the gym. A jock. I liked to work out. A little bit more of that kind of dude. I'm a bigger guy than some people expected, I guess. In the heyday, Michael wasn't the tough guy in the band, but he was our leader. Our drummer was our original leader in the band. He was the businessman. When he left I kind of took that role over. But we all held different positions. Todd, our bass player, is the musical director in the band and he's the musical force in the band. He's the one that usually commands rehearsals and organizes things related to recording sessions. That's more his forte. I've been more on the business end of it. I enjoy that aspect of it as much as performing. I like putting things together and being organized and prompt and responsible. Are you aware that I'm the one who started Metal Sludge? Started it in 1988.

Q - The site with all the groupie talk.

A - Correct. That's one of our features. We call it the Penis Chart. All the girls talking about the guys they had sex with. Kind of like the Plaster Caster days. I started it with a partner in 1998, but him and me had a falling out in 2004 and I've been the sole owner/operator of it ever since. So, we're in our twenty-first year right now.

Q - I remember e-mailing the website, enquiring about doing an interview with someone at Metal Sludge and I received a rather nasty reply, "We do not do interviews!"

A - Here's the thing. We did it anonymously for the first six years. Nobody knew who we were. It was me and a partner and the other guy, for what he was worth, he was more in control, playing the webmaster role at that point. It was my idea, but he helped kind of make that idea come to life. He was more internet savvy. We laid very low in the ways of actually revealing ourselves. It was only a small, small, small group of people who actually knew who we were. It's funny because when we started it, we kind of started it for fun. It was kind of like a joke. We were kind of like making fun of bands. We had some pretty rude content on there. But at that point, nobody knew what the dot com was going to do. It was the Summer of 1998. It was in such an infant stage. And then at some point it took off!

Q - Do you know the girls who are posting their information?

A - We don't do the Penis Chart kind of groupie chart the way we used to. We had other people that were involved, including a couple of girls, but a lot of content that was given to us was e-mail. A lot of stuff was anonymous. There was a lot of, "Hey, this happened. Hey, that happened. I was with this guy for that reason."

Q - You just have to wonder how much of this you can believe. Is it true? Is it exaggeration? Is it actually being written by a groupie or maybe a publicist?

A - Right. Exactly. Do I think that all of it was made up? Absolutely not. It's like anything. Gene Simmons goes around saying he had sex with four thousand women and he's got a picture of every one to prove it. The folklore of some of those things is interesting. Okay, cool. Great. The way the internet was published in 1998 or 2005 or even in 2010, think of all the new social platforms that have taken off in the last five years, ten years. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. There's so many different things and avenues to get information that at some point we had to start publishing ourselves, meaning each other, and obviously people were held accountable when things clearly did become malicious. That's clearly slanderous. There's ill will intent. We need to try and dial that back.

Q - Did you ever get in trouble posting some of that content?

A - Borderline, yeah. We've had a few incidents like that, but for the most part we've also published a lot of stuff over the years that everybody was absolutely positive we were full of shit. They were like, "There's no way that's happening." And more recently I could say when Ratt fired Warren De Martini, we broke that story. Everybody and their brother was calling me and saying, because at this point I'd been out of the woodwork and no longer anonymous in running that site. People were like, "There's no way they fired Warren De Martini." We had that story for a month and half and a bunch of related reports and then in the Spring, Stephen Pearey and Juan Croucier announced their lineup and went on tour and it's now June and a year later and he was fired. We broke that story that D. J. Ashba was the new guitarist in Guns N' Roses ten years ago. We broke the story that Motley Crue was back together. We had their commercial before it ran on VH-1. I put it on the site and their management, Tenth Street, called me at 11:30 PM on my cell phone and said, "Is this Stevie Rachelle?" I said, "This is." She said, "Hi. I'm with Tenth Street Management. We manage Motley Crue. Can you tell me where you got that video from on your website?" And I said, "No, I can't." (laughs) I said, "Where did you get my number?" She goes, "I have sources." "Okay, well I have sources that I got your video." At some point they asked us to change it. Some people came to me and said, "We think Tenth Street leaked that to you on purpose," because at that point Metal Sludge was at a very high point and they thought if Metal Sludge runs this, it's going to go everywhere. So, they think that Tenth Street possibly leaked us the context, knowing we'd put it up and then called us and tried to act like it wasn't supposed to be there and said, "Oh, too late now. You've got us."

Q - In the words of the late, great Joe South, "Oh, the games people play!"

A - Exactly.

Official Website: www.TuffCDs.com

© Gary James. All rights reserved.