So, we had no bass player. The thought of getting rid of Keith had
always been in the back of our minds, and I remembered a guy that I'd
talked to in a night club right before we'd done Power of the Night. His
name was Johnny. Johnny asked me at the time if we could guarantee him X
amount of dollars a week, and I told him no. I said, "We're doing a
record. Do you want to do a record with us?" Johnny said, no, that he
was making great money playing in a band called Lefty. A year had passed
since that conversation, and then I heard that he was playing at the
49th St. Mining Company, so I went down there. I asked if he remembered
me, and asked if he wanted to play with us now as we'd just gotten rid
of our bass player. He said, "Yeah."
That was it. I told him we were going to rehearse for the next record
and then go to London to record it, which had already been pre-decided.
He started rehearsing with us immediately. He was still playing with
Lefty and rehearsing with us. It was kind of precarious because the
singer for Lefty was pissed off with him even though he gave proper,
two-week notice. Johnny was practicing with us and this guy from NY,
Stefan Galfas who had just produced John Waite's record, came down
because he was scheduled to produce our next record because Max Norman's
busy doing all these other bands now. We couldn't get Max Norman, so now
we have Galfas. We all went to London with Robert Zemsky and Galfas.
I had trouble getting into the country because we didn't have the proper
paperwork to work in another country. On the plane we'd filled out these
little cards, which said "what do you do?" Everybody else put
"vacation," and I put "golf instructor." I had long hair, moustache, and
put down "golf instructor." Well, they said, "Okay Mr Wacholz, follow
me." They pulled me aside for seven hours, interrogated me, went through
my luggage, and I had no money on me at the time. They asked me how I
planned on surviving, and I told them my buddies had the money. They
were telling me they were going to send me back to America, but somehow
I got out of there. I think Stefan came back to vouch for me and get me.
Everybody left me there. I'm stuck in this office with these English
assholes who are about ready to give me the rubber glove treatment. They
gave me a permit to stay for two months in England.
We recorded in a studio called Tridet Studios on St. Anne's Court. It
was neat, we recorded Fight For the Rock, which was our weakest record.
We did a show at the Marquis in January of '86. We stayed over there for
Christmas at a flat on Baker Street--all of us, Johnny, me, the two
Olivas and their wives and Jon's baby, Nicholas who was maybe two or
three at the time, and Scott Bellis. We had a weird Christmas, but we
all got through it, even though we were homesick. We got done with the
album and flew back to the states. I stayed in NY for a little while and
started handling a lot of the business now that Keith was gone.
That year, we barely toured. We were back in NJ, staying in this hotel
in Hackensack. It was called the Jade East, a Pakistanian owned hotel.
From there, we would go out and do Baltimore, Washington, Boston... we
were centrally located in NY doing all these shows. For one of these
shows, Jon and me and some roadies were driving in one car, Criss and
Johnny and T (one of the techs) were in this little VW. We got to the
venue, and we're doing the soundcheck, and wondering where Criss, Johnny
and T are, because they're way late. So me and Jon were doing the
soundcheck with a couple of roadies. The others finally showed up about
8 p.m., just two hours before show time and they're just flipping out.
Johnny said, "I've had it, it's over! I'm going home! This is nuts, this
is stupid..." I asked him to tell me what was wrong, and this is the
story I got:
They were driving down the interstate in this little VW and it conks
out. They pulled it over to the side of the road and tried to start it,
but it wouldn't start. They decided to push it to get it going. They
were on the side of the road in the grass, they started pushing it, it
backfired, and it caught the grass on fire. Instead of trying to put out
the grass, they kept pushing the car, trying to get it going. Meanwhile,
there's this grass fire on the road that starts turning into a
full-fledged forest fire! It just caught on because it had been so dry.
Now there's a forest fire on the side of the road, they can't get this
VW going, so they ripped the plate off of it and threw it in the bushes,
because the plate was stolen and didn't go with the car. They hitch-hike
on the side of the highway with their guitars, and finally a cab picks
them up. As they're driving, they see the fire engines coming the other
way to put the fire out, and they're looking back, seeing smoke just
everywhere. T told the cab driver, "here are the keys for that VW.
You can have the car," and he gave it to the cab driver for the cab
fare, because they were about 20 miles out of DC with no money. This
little incident of course flipped Johnny out to the point where he
wanted to leave and quit.
Then we did some dates on the Ted Nugent tour. It was kind of a pain in
the ass, but fun. I was road managing and drumming and doing the
accounting. We had no real road crew, just a couple of guys with us who
had done the Power of the Night tour with us, and Scott Bellis, and a
sound guy, Ralph Destrangelo, and I think we brought a light guy with
us on the Nugent tour, Manny Serrano. We were all pretty gung-ho about
doing Nugent's "Little Miss Dangerous" tour. We rented a van from Ken
Marks Ford, headed up to Vermont for the first date--way up there in
Vermont. That's a long ass drive! Of course, along the way, the usual
flat tires and stuff happened. We got to Vermont only to find out the
first show has been cancelled. That's always nice...
We headed back down to Connecticut for the second date. We were all
pretty burned out and stupid. We hooked up with the Nugent guys in
Connecticut, and they're all really nice. I happened to be the road
manager now for the band because we really couldn't afford a road
manager at the time. I was dealing with the production manager for
Nugent and it worked out pretty good.
Every night on the tour, Nugent would bring up this little girl (Little
Miss Dangerous) out of the audience and make her strip. We used her
about four or five dates, doing shows in Pennsylvania now, and this girl
was following the bands around. I became friendly with her, and Jon
became very friendly with her. Somewhere on the Jersey shore, the cops
show up looking for this girl. We found out she was only like 14! Of
course, they're quizzing Oliva, quizzing me, quizzing Nugent, and we're
all just playing dumb like we never met this girl. "We don't know what
you're talking about. Leave us alone, etc..." I guess it worked. That
was the Nugent tour. It was a lot of fun.
Metallica was to play a festival in Oulu, Finland, but cancelled out
becuase of the Chernobyl incident. We were offered $27,000 to fill in,
and of course, we accepted. From PA, we flew to NY. We thought our
guitars were coming with us, but they never left NY. From NY we went to
London, and from there to Helsinki, and then to Oulu. It was 24 hours of
flights! We got to Oulu and were trying to track our guitars down, but
all our guitars were still stuck at Kennedy Airport, so it really kind
of sucked. We went out to the site, having to borrow guitars from the
other bands. We were playing with the singer from Hanoi Rocks. There
were two stages, and he opened up for us. Stephen Machat, our manager,
flew up to Finland to see our show, and he collected our money, the
$27,000. It was our very last day in Oulu and we're getting ready to
leave the hotel and the clerk tells us our bill hasn't been paid. We
told him the promoter was paying it, but meanwhile, we don't know where
the f*** our manager is, and he has all our money. We got on a plane,
headed to London to do one more show at the Marquis before we head back
to the states. We got out of the hotel in Oulu without paying the bills,
and I'm sure our phone bill was high since we were trying to find our
guitars back in the states.
We stayed in a really nice, expensive hotel in London. We played at the
Marquis, and then I said, "Guys, look, here's the deal. Machat stole our
money, all we'll have is several thousand pounds from the show at the
Marquis. It's either A) pay ourselves, or B) pay the hotel bill."
Everybody said, "Let's pay ourselves." What we did, the night of the
gig, when we left, we took all our big bags, all the guitars out. We
loaded all our bags into the car of a friend and returned to the hotel,
without anything. We spent the night in the hotel room and in the
morning we left, to actually get a cab to the airport, but we said we
were just going to breakfast. We were walking out with nothing in our
hands so they thought nothing of it. Well, we got into the cab and our
buddy meets us with all our clothes and guitars and head to the airport,
and we flew out of there leaving our hotel bill, and of course,
everybody had ordered room service that day... We called that our "Escape
From London Tour."
It was a bad year for us, since we didn't tour much. The album sucked,
it didn't sell. We knew we had to get back into the groove, and decided
to fire management. We had to write a new record, it had to be Savatage,
had to be heavy.
After we got back to NY, everybody headed back to FL, but I stayed in NY
and hooked up with this chick, a friend of mine named Randy. She told me
I had to meet someone, a mangager, film maker named John Goldwater with
Crash Management. I met with him and we discussed some things about the
band, and he asked that I meet with a friend of his, Paul O'Neill, and I
did. At this time, we had been "technically" dropped from Atlantic. We
were still sort of being managed by Zemsky, but we were so pissed with
the other guys for stealing our money. I went back to FL with this new
contact: John Goldwater/Paul O'Neill. I had thought about going over to
NJ to Q Prime management, which was working with Tesla, Metallica, all
these big bands... But I started dealing with Ray Brody who was an
attorney at Atlantic, and asked him to let us do this new record. I
renogotiated the deal. Ray Brody agreed to give us $75,000 for the new
record, and asked me, "Are you sure you're a musician and not an
attorney?" because he was so impressed with me. I renogotiated, and Rob
Zemsky actually helped in some ways. He takes claim for it, but doesn't
really realize how much I was talking to Ray Brody at the time.
We got a two-page contract to bring us back up to date, and we all
headed back up to NY. Rob Zemsky had some apartments set aside for us,
and we got there to discover they were in Spanish Harlem, and we got
there and checked them out and I decided we weren't staying there. It
was bull-shit. You had to share a bathroom with every other tenant in
the hall, there were holes in the ceiling, garbage on the floor, an old
mattress on the floor, and there was just no way we were staying there.
I got on the phone with Paul O'Neill and said, "We got a problem. We
have nowhere to stay, this is not acceptable, we're going to have to go
back to FL!" So Paul O'Neill comes to the rescue and puts us up in the
Times Square Motor Lodge, which is right around the corner from the
studio, Record Plant, which is where we're going to do the record. We
were staying in this hotel, which wasn't bad. We started pre-production,
doing Hall of the Mountain King. In the meantime, our other managers
didn't know we were up there. They thought we were sunk and dead in FL
with no record deal! This was all kind of a hush-hush thing. We started
recording the record at Record Plant, and Paul O'Neill was helping,
producing and he came up with the Grieg/Hall of the Mountain King thing.
I finished my parts, and then I had to let the axe fall on the other
managers. I fired them and they're totally blown away that we're even in
NY, much less that we've finished an album. I started working with
Goldwater more then, and Paul O'Neill. During this same time period, I
had a nervous breakdown because I was just dealing with so much. Not
only was I doing the record, I was dealing with a girlfriend down in FL
who was getting into big coke deals and stuff. I went down to FL for
about a week during the recording of the record and just had to chill
out and get my head back together and then flew back up. We finished the
record and Paul O'Neill calls Wendy Dio (Dio's wife and manager), pulls
a couple of strings, and the next thing we knew, we had the Dio tour.
We spent almost three months on the road with
Megadeth and Dio, so our careers were back on the upswing. We did a
video for Hall of the Mountain King, up in Howe Caverns before we left
for the tour. We had a lot of fun. One night Jon and Dave went out
drinking, and Dave decided he could drink Jon under the table. Instead,
he came back pale white, and they had to get a doctor for him because he
had alcohol poisoning, and Jon had just wasted him. By then they were
telling us to keep Jon and Dave separated.
1987/1988--DIO TOUR.
In Pittsburgh, it was just Megadeth and Savatage playing. After the
show, Savatage and crew decided to stay in town, and the truck driver
and Dave Mustaine decided to stay and hang out with us. Jon and Dave
were the biggest troublemakers on the tour. That night, I walk into
Jon's hotel room and he's got a chair on the bed, with a lampshade on
his head, and all his little followers are around the bed. Well, Dave
Mustaine walks in and says something to Jon, and they exchange some
fighting words, obviously both drunk men. Dave picked up the phone and
threw it at Jon, who wasn't about to stand for that. Jon grabbed
Mustaine, who's whimpering, "No Mountain King! No Mountain King!!!,"
picked him up like he was just a little twig and body slammed him.
Needless to say, Mustaine went away crying and he and his truck driver
headed to the next night's venue in Dayton.
The next morning when we got to Dayton, they had decided not to let us
play because of the incident the night before. There was another date in
Cleveland where Jon's microphone cord was getting caught up in the
monitors and he was getting pissed about it. He was walking in front of
the monitors, kicking Ronnie James Dio's laser lights and breaking them.
We also had these big scrimms at the back of the stage, and he picked up
one of the Mountain King and he tried to throw it out into the audience,
but it hit the pit, luckily; it didn't hit anybody.
After the show, backstage there were roses for me. It must have been my
birthday or something. Well, Jon picks up my roses and throws them
against the wall, crashes and breaks the vase and the roses went flying.
The next day when we went to the gig, they take it out on me. They took
my drum riser away! What would they do to Jon, take his microphone away?
So they punished us by taking away the drummer's drum riser. So it was
just a series of things that never stopped. Back then, I wasn't handling
the business of the band, so I could drink, and I would too. We were all
just in that stage. But it was great, because we were the type of band
to go out and hang and bring people who we thought were big fans
backstage. It was a fun tour. It was actually our first tour-bus tour. I
think we went through about four tour-busses, because they'd just break
down. That's another story... tour-bus hell!
We did dates on our own, headline dates, and obviously toured over in
Europe, and after the tour, we decided we had to take it to the next
level. Goldwater and O'Neill got more money from Atlantic so we could go
in and start recording our sixth album, which would be Gutter Ballet. We
kind of did Gutter Ballet in pieces. We came up with a lot of ideas, and
then Jon flew back up first. Criss went up to help him, and Johnny and I
went up last. We recorded at 321 Studios (used to be Record Plant) at
the same time Badlands was recording. Badlands was upstairs and we were
downstairs, and Paul was running back and forth between the two. It was
really cool hanging out with Jake E. Lee, who is one of the most
pleasant guys in the world. Ray Gillan, at the time, was a genuine
gentleman. Another real good guy was Eric Singer. He used to watch me
and get licks, and I'd trade off licks with him, we'd go back and forth.
And Greg was a great guy too, but the nicest guy was Jake E, who had
always been a rock-god in my eyes, and he was a genuine gentleman.
We decided to take a break on the record, and Jon and I stayed in NY. We
were living together in a hotel on 57th Street, and I was trying to get
him into shape. We were working out at this gym, where we actually met
Tony Randall (and he's got some "big ass" biceps, let me tell you!). We
were working out, trying to do good, and John Dittmar, who was our
booking agent, and had been from the Power of the Night days, came up
with some tickets to see Phantom of the Opera. We had great seats, and a
great time, and we left the theatre about midnight, and Jon and I went
up into the studio and Jon sat down and came up with Gutter Ballet. Jon
wrote it on the piano, and I was kind of tapping on the drums just
following him. And that's where Gutter Ballet came from... Jon's
fascination with the story of the Phantom.
Shortly after that, Crowds was written and a lot of those lyrics came
from Paul O'Neill, obviously. We brought the other guys back up to learn
these two new songs, which were the last two songs recorded for the
album. I was working up in John Goldwater's office, sending out cards
that said, "Tempation Revelation is coming," because we had decided to
call the album Temptation Revelation. After writing Gutter Ballet, we
changed the name of the album. We finished the album. I left to come
back down to FL, and Jon stayed in NY to master it, and follow it
through. I started working with Gary Smith on the artwork. It was a
week-long process of gathering different pictures and such from the
library and we did the Gutter Ballet album cover together I actually sat on a ladder watching him most of the time.
Jon came back down and we did the photo shoots for the album and we got
ready for the tour. That year we toured for ten months! I just about
handled all the business of the band then, and on the road, dealing with
the accountants. That year, I don't know if the band knows it or not,
but the year Gutter Ballet was released, the band actually grossed one
million dollars. As fast as the money came though, it went. When I got
off tour, I already had my Corvette, and after the tour a friend and I
did a lease/option on a 7 bedroom/5 bathroom house in the middle of
nowhere, and called it the Dag/Wacholz Party Mansion. There were
actually three of us in on it and we put our money together to lease
this house. The house had a ghost, a gazeebo, we had parties out there
for New Year's Eve. I had all the original artwork for the album covers
hanging on the walls.
After Gutter Ballet, we were all of doing our own thing, as we all did
when we got off the road. Criss was married, Jon was between being
married, and I think Johnny was going out with Michelle. Gutter Ballet
was a phenomenal hit for us. It was #1 album of the year on college
radio, and #2 single of the year. It was something to be proud of. The
band was in a building stage, because every year we kept getting bigger
and bigger. So who would have thought that Streets the next year would
have been a flop?
Jon went up early to start writing, and they came up with this stupid
rock opera idea. I guess it wasn't stupid at the time... it was the
logical thing to do to top Gutter Ballet. We got the backing from
Atlantic, who believed in it, and were excited because nobody had done a
rock opera since The Who's Tommy back in the seventies. Johnny and I
were the last two to come up again and we learned about 30 songs within
2 weeks, just crammed it in, it was unbelievable. Even in the studio we
were learning songs. Jon was writing, Paul was writing, and then they'd
say, "Let's do this one! Come on let's hammer it out." We were working
12 hour days, working, working, working, eating pizza, working, working,
working...
I put about a month into recording and Johnny and I were told we were
done and we had to go home. They said we weren't needed and they
couldn't afford to keep us up there. I was upset. They had a quarter of
a million dollar budget, yet said they couldn't afford to keep us there.
I asked what they were paying us to sit on our asses at home. They said
they couldn't afford to pay us anything because they were putting all
the money into the record. We felt like we were used, like they should
have just gotten studio musicians to do it.
The whole album took about 9 months to finish. Jon and Criss came back
about mid-July and they had the tape, and it sounded okay. Different
songs, like Jesus Saves and Can You Hear Me Now?, weren't the same, so
Jon played drums on those. We decided to make a big production out of
the tour, since we'd just had #1 album of the year. So we built these
gigantic sets, 10 foot tall pyramids each side of the stage for Johnny
and Criss. The drum set reached 10 feet high, it was just crazy, custom
made microphone stands, and everything matched. Tom Falicon from Falicon
Design actually helped build and design it for us. My drums alone took
seven months to build. It was just incredible. The first time we used it
was at Livestock 2. People couldn't believe it was us, we were like a
different band.
We took full crew, full monitor with us, and we were out on the road
doing okay on a headline tour, but then we weren't really getting
recieved. Radio wasn't picking up the record, MTV wasn't picking up the
Jesus Saves video, college radio doesn't get it, the kids don't get the
record, and so the tour was deemed unsuccessful. The tour was costing us
$15,000 a week, and we weren't breaking even. So on a Friday night in
Chicago I sat down with the tour manager and knew that Atlantic was
supposed to be sending our check. I figured it out, and the check would
cover our short fall and pay everybody off. So I said, "Look, we've got
to pull the plug on this tour." I pretty much called the shot at that
point. After the show, we headed back to FL. Nobody in management or the
record company even knew. We were supposed to be in Buffalo, NY on
Monday, but instead we drove to FL to end the tour. Come 3 o'clock
Monday afternoon I called management and told them the tour was over.
They were in total shock, and told us we were going to ruin our career.
We didn't really do anything after that. They wanted me to go back out
with a small kit, loaded under the bus, but I thought that was
half-assed. The record wasn't selling, kids thought it sucked, and
that's what mattered. We were losing touch with the kids...
Next thing we knew, Paul flew down and told us we needed to start
working on a new record, and find a new singer. At this time, Jon wanted
to step aside because his health was getting bad and he wanted to just
write for the band (other sources say that Jon left to spend more time
with his family). I started thinking about other ways I could make
money, and I set up a race-car track, and it was very successful. I was
rehearsing with Savatage during the day, and it was going well, until
one day I show up and they said, "hey, I want you to meet someone. This
is our new singer, Zak." I'd been in this band for 12 years or so, and I
had no say who was going to be singing for that band... Then I started
realizing it was getting stupid, I was being told what to do, who to
play with. I was learning the material for Edge Of Thorns, but I thought
Zak sounded like every other bar singer I've ever heard. He wasn't Jon,
and in my eyes, Jon was the most talented singer in the world. So I was
playing with what in my eyes was a second rate musician.
We did Edge Of Thorns, and Zak did a pretty good job for the pressure
that was put upon him, and he was starting to impress me a little bit,
but still it didn't have the same feel of Savatge to me. I go back to
the early days, and not only do I love playing with Jon Oliva, I'm a Jon
Oliva fan, and so to have this guy sing in my band was like settling
for second best. I remember Criss and I arguing over Miles Away because
I couldn't get it. There was a part in there that I wrote, but I just
couldn't play it again. I got real pissed off, left the studio, came
back from lunch, and I got it on the first take, so Criss was impressed,
and there were no hard feelings. After I finished my parts on that
album, I never stepped back in the studio. Jon played Carves His Stone
on that album, and when I heard it there were all these songs that I've never
heard of.
In the meantime, I'm getting real pre-occupied with this girl Cathie who
helped us on the Jesus Saves videos. I had just moved in with her, and
when I told her I was going back on the road, she told me if I did, I
might as well kiss her ass goodbye. Since I didn't want to do that, and
since I was making a 4-digit figure a week with my race-track, I told
the guys that I wasn't going to tour with them. They were going out for
two months, and I didn't want to interrupt my life for two months. I
told them I'd help them with the drummer, though. I picked Andy James, a
local drummer, he'd played for Roxx Gang, and he was a friend of mine, I
brought him in and we started rehearsing him, and he caught on. A good
drummer can, and it's not like my parts are that brilliant....
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