Tuff was one of those bands that epitomized the Glam side of the Sunset Strip back in the day and their 1991 debut ‘What Comes Around Goes Around’ remains one of the ‘big-haired highlights’ of the era. Like a lot of bands Tuff suffered from the onset of Grunge and even though it took a while for the follow up ‘Religious Fix’ to get released, it was well worth the wait. After the break-up of the band singer Stevie Rachelle went on to form his own label RLS Records one meaning of which was “Record Labels Suck” – clearly a man ahead of his time! A few years later he discovered and went on to manage ‘Vains of Jenna’ a band I met at the Whisky a Go Go and who subsequently blew me away before we shared a few drinks. Now he’s heading to Australia with Tuff to show us how to put the ‘Glam’ in Glam Fest!
Mark: Finally I get to meet the great man from ‘Metal Sludge’!
Stevie: And I get to meet Mark from The Rockpit, that name ‘The Rockpit’ is so familiar.
Mark: We’ve been around for a good few years, and I think you may have picked up on a few things from our interviews over the years. But it’s you who were a big inspiration for me to start the site along with websites like ‘SleazeRoxx’ and ‘MelodicRock’.
Mark: You’re over in a week or so to play at Glam Fest but it’s not your first visit Down under is it?
Stevie: No. The first time I came to Australia was in February 2007 and I played the Espy in Melbourne and a place I can’t recall the name of in Sydney.
Mark: I’ll remember by the end of the interview I’m sure! (I didn’t but it was ‘Candy’s’ for trivia fans) I’m doing a few Glam Fest interviews today so that makes you the meat between Taime Downe and Chip Z’Nuff today!
Stevie: (laughs) Yeah! I’ve known both those guys forever! I’ve known Taime since I got here on the Sunset Strip, I believe they were already signed but I don’t think the record had come out yet. That was in the summer of ’87. And then I met Chip in ’89 when Enuff Z’Nuff’s debut came out. We opened up for them in Orange County which is like an hour South of L.A. So I met him and Donnie and Derek and Vic that week when the first record had come out. Steve and Pretty Boy Floyd I’d known of them from the beginning, since before they even played when they started ‘flyering.’ Wednesday, I know him as well. I didn’t meet him till many years later but it turned out that he was a fan of Tuff and he told me a story about how he and his girlfriend were like 15 years old and they couldn’t get in the club but they had their Grandma drive them to the venue and they waited in the parking lot and when we got off the tour bus they came up to us. (laughs)
Mark: That’s so cool (laughs). So who is in Tuff these days?
Stevie: As far as the band is concerned Todd ‘Chase’ Chaisson the bass player and the guy who started the band, he’s in there and he’s the guy who has officially told me “You’re our singer” – he gave me the job!
Mark: (laughs)
Stevie: And our guitarist is a guy named Billy Morris, he’s most known for being in Warrant after Joey Allen. Billy is from Ohio, the Cleveland area where Jani Lane was from, so Billy and Jani were really close so he took Billy into Warrant and whenever Jani left Warrant he took Billy with him, you know. So Billy had played shows with him in Warrant and also played shows with him as a solo artist. And then our drummer is a guy named Tod ‘T’ Burr – his name is also Tod, but because there are two Todds at one point people would go “Hey Tod” and they’d both look, we decided that he had to change his name so we just shortened it to ‘T’! But a lot of people just call Todd ‘Chase’ anyway! But ‘T’ has a long history – ‘T’ has played with Tuff off and one for 20+ years, and the irony is when Todd ‘Chase’ quit Tuff at the end of ’91, early ’92 , he left the band for 15+ years. He went and formed a heavier band, a darker 90’s Thrash band called ‘Substance D’ and Todd ‘Chase’ was the bass player and the singer, and they were a three piece, the drummer was Tod ‘T’ Burr. Then fast forward ten years later when I reformed Tuff in 2001 I needed a drummer to play some shows ‘T’ started playing with me and then Todd ‘Chase’ came back in 2008. So there’s a long three decade history between me and Todd and ‘T’ and me and Todd ‘Chase’ have a history that goes back 35+ years. And Billy even though he’s from Cleveland, his band opened up for every national band whenever they came through Ohio. Billy was like ‘The guy’ in Ohio. He eventually ended up in Warrant and played with some other guys, and the about mid 2000’s I started using him to play some shows for us.
Mark: You’ve got a great line up. So the big question has to be what will you be playing for us live? For me growing up Tuff was a band that released that fantastic debut album and then we waited…
Stevie: (Stevie holds up a vinyl copy of that album) This is the remastered reissue (he opens it up) which we made it a gatefold, and it also has a full colour insert with all lyrics and additional photos. There’s also a deluxe version of the CD with a 16 page booklet and extra photos we had from that ‘Merry-go-round’ session that’s on the cover. We’re gonna be bringing a really cool custom shirt we had made for the tour (he holds one up) which says ‘Tuff Down Under 2023’ and then it’s got the cities and the dates on the back.
Mark: Well I should be seeing you in Adelaide so let’s hope there are some left!
Stevie: Cool.
Mark: So we had that fantastic first album on Atlantic records, plenty of interest from fans, everything going your way and then the gap – we didn’t get a second record for so long. Was it all down to the label?
Stevie: Well really it was a combination of things. And I don’t say this in a negative manner but it was really what changed, it was Grunge, it was Seattle, it was Nirvana, it was Pearl Jam. So the 80’s as a decade brought us great music, aside from the New Wave bands from MTV – the Devo’s, the B52’s, you had Billy Idol who was this cool ‘Punk Rock meets Rockabilly’ whatever, and then you had the Motley Crue’s of the world, the Ratt’s and Bon Jovi and Poison. Then Skid Row and Guns ‘n’ Roses and then of course the Thrash and the Metal bands that were coming up – the Metallica’s, the Anthrax’s, the Megadeth’s – and it seemed like there was room for everybody. There was alternative music that existed at the time – R.E.M., the Talking Heads in the early mid part of the decade, and New Wave bands like Duran Duran, and we all pretty much co-existed. But when Grunge came along something happened, something changed. It was no longer cool to look like Van Halen and Dave Lee Roth, or Motley Crue. Not only was it not cool, it was very much a negative, you were immediately written off as ‘the Poser’, or you couldn’t play, you were a ‘pretty boy’ or a ‘fag’. Your music had no substance, your lyrics were meaningless, you know. Your guitarist wasn’t ‘soulful enough’ and all that kind of stuff. So when Grunge came in and Seattle came in and the 90’s came in, everything just got darker.
Mark: But some bands survived the cull?
Stevie: They did. It went from everyone wanting to look like Van Halen did in the late 70’s or Motley Crue looked like in the 80’s or Bon Jovi and Poison. Even Guns and Roses had elements of the 80’s with long hair and leather pants but they were also right on the cusp of being able to kind of ‘fix it’ – if you think about it Axl at some point came out in the ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ video with his hair sprayed up, purple eye shadow and Duff an Steven with bleached hair and eyeliner, and then a couple of years later Axl walks out with biker shorts, a ‘catcher’s mitt’ over his body, a backwards baseball cap and converse tennis shoes with his legs showing (laughs) and then he’s playing the piano! How did that happen? Then he threw a tux on with tails still wearing those biker shorts, running around on stage with a microphone stand made out of a crutch! It was this really obscure thing that was happening but at the same time, it worked. So they got past that and they became this iconic band. You know Poison went through a point when Poison was kinda goofed on. Motley Crue was even goofed on, especially when they got John Corabi in the band and the record didn’t do so well. Then Tommy quits and they get a girl drummer. So Motley Crue went through this kinda phase when they were like and L.A. Guns or a Ratt where you weren’t sure who was in the band or who was singing. but they righted themselves. They were such a big band in the 80’s and you can’t take away from what ‘Shout at the Devil’ was, or ‘Home Sweet Home’, ‘Doctor Feelgood’, ‘Kickstart My Heart’, ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’. And all that stuff kinda became cool again. But during the 90’s it was not cool to be in an 80’s band. And looking like (Stevie hold up the Tuff record again) I did…
Mark: (laughs)
Stevie: Looking like a David Lee Roth, Vince Neil, Brett Michaels second-hand version – that’s what people said, and hey, I wouldn’t deny that. But it’s not like I woke up one day and said “I want to look exactly like that”. It was Van Halen and Motley Crue I saw in 1984 and thought “Wow! I like those bands” It was something that moved me as well as millions of kids across America and around the world. So I just started, I guess, emulating what I liked. But when that time frame changed it was not a good thing. And when you ask why was there such a gap, it wasn’t that we weren’t ready to make another record. And we did another record, we basically recorded in the early part of ’92 – only 6-8 months after releasing that first album. But then Atlantic dropped us and they had signed a band called Stone Temple Pilots – STP was their Nirvana, that was their Pearl Jam, their Alice in Chains. And so just like Jani Lane talked about in those interviews about Warrant. ‘DRFSR’ sold a couple of million, ‘Cherry Pie’ sold a couple of million and then Jani walked in with the new record to hand it to the President of the label, and the whole label was Alice in Chains promo everywhere, and Warrant was no longer required.
Mark: It was a horrible time for music the later 90’s but the good news is that we all made it out and there’s a Glam Fest going on in Australia I understand next week and you’re invited!
Stevie: We’re getting ready to pack!
Mark: When I let the readers know I was talking to the international bands at Glam Fest this week a lot of questions came in for Tuff. I think a lot of that is because despite Tuff not always being there you have been, whether it’s with Metal Sludge or side projects like Shameless, you’ve always been a part of that scene and flying the flag. Reading some of the questions there’s a real sense of love and a feeling that you’re one of the Gurus of the whole Glam scene. Is that a cap that fits comfortably? And more importantly do you like terms like ‘Hair Metal’?
Stevie: It doesn’t bother me at all, I mean I put out a song called ‘American Hair Band’ in 2001! So being called the Guru of 80’s Hair Metal or 80’s Metal or The Sunset Strip, I’ll accept that. I got interviewed at some point in the 2000’s – I did one of those VH1 things where they talk about things like 50 most ridiculous videos or all time, or Greatest Hair Metal something! So they come and they interview me and the guy says to me, do you know any other 80’s guys that we could interview about the Sunset Strip? And I said well I pretty much know everybody, who have you interviewed and who haven’t you? And he mentioned a bunch of bands here and there, so we’re going back and forth and then he says “We’re going by referrals.”
Mark: OK.
Stevie: So I said “How did you find out about me?” and he said “Sammy referred you” so I said “Who is Sammy?” and he said “Sammy Hagar”. I said “Really?” and he said “Yeah we interviewed Sammy a couple of weeks ago and we were telling him about this 80’s Metal thing and trying to find guys who would be a good fit for that,” and Sammy Hagar said “Interview that Stevie Rachelle guy from Tuff and Metal Sludge, he knows everything about that.” Now I’d never met Sammy Hagar in my life so the fact that Sammy Hagar at some point was telling someone at VH1 to call me, that made me feel good. I thought I guess I’m getting recognized somewhere, you know. Sammy’s no slouch, he’s an iconic Rock singer – you know Montrose and his solo band and obviously Van Halen and he’s still out there today. So I’ve always embraced where I came from and what I did, and not just for me and Tuff, but for the whole scene. So when I put out ‘American Hair Band’ the song – you know (Stevie raps) “Give Pearl Jam and Eddie a big Fuck You” you know “Kurt Cobain is gone but I’m back wearing leather pants and a backwards hat, with a guitar slung low where the Down Boys go, Nighttrain’s back so on with the show, Metal Health so I’m dressed to thrill like an SMF with the looks that kill. Rock and Roll the long hair is back and I grew up singing Strutter and Back in Black. I’m going back to ’89. I went platinum zero times.”
Mark: (laughs) It’s a great lyric.
Stevie: I have no shame in saying that! Sure I would have loved to have sold ten million records or even one million records but I didn’t. So I wear my heart on my sleeve when it comes to me, when it comes to Tuff, when it comes to Metal Sludge and when it comes to this whole scene. So I was flying the flag for those that might not want to, or who don’t have the platform. I shout out ‘Sleeze Beez and ‘Johnny Crash’ in American Hair band you know.
Mark: Great bands.
Stevie: Sure I shout out all the big ones but I also shout out Dangerous Toys, Bulletboys and Bang Tango – “Who cares about Weezer and The Screaming Trees when we got White Lion and the Sleeze Beez.” And when I put that out I remember that there were a lot of guys who reached out to me. I remember Tracii Guns said to be “That might be the dumbest song ever or the most brilliant song ever! I’m not quite sure, but I think it might be brilliant Stevie.” RIP magazine gave me pops, Kid Rock himself gave me props and a lot of other guys. The only complaint I had was, and I had multiple guys who complained. Ron Keel complained, Steve Brown of Trixter complained and their compliant was – “You didn’t name us!”
Mark: (laughs)
Stevie: How could I have forgot about Trixter?! (laughs) I told Steve I didn’t forget about Trixter I just had to think of bands that would rhyme and at some point I’m thinking “Who rhymes with Slash?” – and it’s Johnny Crash! (laughs) It was an interesting time and that was kind of the comeback song for Tuff when the 2000’s hit and the 1990’s were in the rear view mirror and I thought “Hey I want to restart this, I want to reboot it and I want to fly the flag and put my fist in the air and say ‘We’re here whether you like it or no and this is who we are’.
Mark: It was fun. In those days Rock and Roll was about having a great time, a good laugh, getting out with friends and having that party – the weekend was yours!
Stevie: You’re right.
Mark: And every few years, even though for some of us it has never gone away, I do get the feeling Rock is coming back. There’s great new bands here and in the U.S. who are looking to the 80’s for inspiration, maybe even more so in Europe where there’s a whole new wave and one of them is playing with you – Eclipse. How do you see bands like Eclipse, Hardcore Superstar, Crashdiet and all those other great Scandinavian bands?
Stevie: Well I don’t know if you know this but I used to manage a Scandinavian band?
Mark: Vains of Jenna – one of my favourites.
Stevie: I met those kids in 2005 – Jacki, Nicki, who had just graduated High School in June, I saw them on July 30th and they had literally just turned 18 years of age. Jacki’s older brother JP was 21 and Lizzy the singer was the old man at 23 but he looked like he was 14! I was like “Who is this band?” So I saw them play and I went up to them and said “Give me your phone number, where are you staying?” They were in town for four or five days and staying at the Days Inn next to In-N-Out Burger on Sunset, and within 48 hours I had got in touch with Gilby Clarke of Guns ‘n’ Roses and said “Hey I need you to do me a favour” and two days later we were demoing at Gilby Clarke’s house and then the following spring of 2006 I brought them to L.A. I said “You’re going to come here for 90 days, stay at my house and I’m going to throw you guys down on the Strip and you’re not going home until you get a record deal!” And we did. And everybody who saw them loved them – Stephen Pearcy of Ratt loved them, C.C. Deville loved them.
Mark: They were great I remember seeing them at the Whisky I think 2008 or 2009 and they were ‘on fire’.
Stevie: And they were part of that scene you know. They played with Crashdiet after I’d started managing them and sadly Dave committed suicide a couple of weeks later. That was January of 2006 I think. (It was sadly 17 years ago yesterday, 20th January 2006 – Rest in peace Dave)
Mark: So very sad.
Stevie: But yeah, Hardcore Superstar, 69 Eyes, Reckless Love, there’s a whole bunch of that stuff that’s been going on for like 10, 15 years and Eclipse is I think a little bit newer. I don’t know too much about them but am looking forward to seeing them. I was on the Monsters of Rock Cruise and I heard people talking about Eclipse a lot! A lot of good stuff being said about Eclipse. So Glam Fest coming to Australia, playing 4 cities, all of these bands together, three of us from the Sunset Strip, I think this is going to be a great time. I’m excited and hopefully the shows will be packed and packed early!
Mark: I think they will be. The logistics must be scary though – you’ve got ten bands to get to together and to get from one place to another all in one hit!
Stevie: I know right, at least we’re flying and not on a bus! We’re coming into Brisbane on Tuesday, we play Brisbane Wednesday night, early Thursday morning we will fly to Melbourne, play Melbourne then early Friday we fly to Adelaide play Adelaide Friday night. Then early Saturday we fly to Sydney, play Sydney Saturday night and then by Sunday at noon we’ll be at the airport and everybody flies home! So yeah it’s a lot of moving parts in a very small window.
Mark: We’re just about out of time and I have Chip from Enuff Z’Nuff up next, so as a first timer we get to ask you a couple of traditional questions. The first is: “If you could have been a ‘fly on the wall’ for the creation of any great Rock album, just to see how the magic came together. What would you like to have seen being made?”
Stevie: Motley Crue ‘Shout at the Devil’ – for me that record that changed my life. I went to an Ozzy concert – the opening band was Motley Crue, this was March 8th 1984. I had just turned 18 the week previous. At that point I had never sang in a band, never had interest in being in a band and I watched Nikki Sixx run out, Mick Mars, Tommy Lee and Vince Neil and play ‘Too Young to Fall in Love’, ‘Red Hot’, ‘Looks that Kill’, ‘Shout at the Devil’, ‘Live Wire’ – all of that stuff. And I left there completely changed. If I would have went backstage and they would have said “Kid drink the blood out of this goat skull” I would have!
Mark: (laughs)
Stevie: I became what they call a ‘Crue head’ I became obsessed by Motley Crue, and then Van Halen and Ratt, all within 1984. So seeing ‘Shout at the Devil’ being made would be my choice.
Mark: A great record. And we always leave you with an easy one – “What is the meaning of life?”
Stevie: Balance. It’s simple. About 25 years ago in the 90’s I was turning 30 years old. In 1996 I turned 30 and Tuff had ended and I was working a job at a moving company and one day I had an envelope just like this (Stevie holds up a letter sized white envelope) and on the bac of it I wrote down a handful of words that were important for me. And the number one word on that envelope which I still have was ‘balance.’ You have to have balance in life – food, love, drugs, sex, sports, sleep, health, fitness, whatever. And I’m not condoning drugs if you’re a complete addict and out of control it’s not going to go anywhere good, but some people like to smoke a little pot to relax, some people like to have a couple of glasses of wine after their dinner, you know. So balance is important in everything you do and I live and die by that, it’s a very important word to me. In everything I do.
Mark: Wise words indeed. Thank you so much for your time Stevie, I shall see you in Adelaide in about a week’s time!
Stevie: Come back stage and find me. I’ll be there. Thank you so much for your time I appreciate it. Bye.
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