Sleaze Roxx: Ratt: The Rodent Explodes!

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RATT: THE RODENT EXPLODES!:

RIP Magazine, October 1990
By Sharon Liveton

It's a Wednesday afternoon in the center of Los Angeles's oh-so-trendy zone. On one side of Melrose Avenue is what is euphemistically referred to as a "retirement home," complete with old folks in rockers surveying the action. Down the street sits the Music Grinder recording studio, where veteran rock band Ratt have been holed up for almost two months recording their sixth album, Detonator. In between the two spots the sidewalks are packed with the usual hipsters and punk poseurs parading for each other.

"Good God," mutters the remarkably healthy looking Ratt singer Stephen Pearcy, tossing his bandanna-ed head in the direction of the home. "Who would put their grandparents there, on this street? I love old people, and this street is no place to grow old."

Gathered in the studio's kitchen/dining area are Ratt guitarists Warren DeMartini and Robbin Crosby. (Drummer Bobby Blotzer and bassist Juan Croucier are nowhere to be seen.) Warren follows Stephen into the somewhat dingy main studio space. Actually, it's the only studio space. This appears to be a far cry from Ratt's heady early days, when the band would virtually move into some of the poshest recording studios in the country and stay months spending money and, almost incidentally, making an album.

Appearances are deceiving. Looks to the contrary, do-gooders around the country needn't begin organizing Ratt-aid. They are not exactly hurting for bucks--they have downgraded their studio by choice.

"We picked this place," says Stephen as he adjusts the bandanna on his head, "because there's always the illustrious studios where you can go in and spend a million bucks, which we certainly have done in the past. But we decided to put ourselves in a situation with no distractions and fewer, well, comforts, to give us the grit and the bite and the razor edge we wanted on the record. This situation is perfect. There are no distractions. We're alone, and there's no other bands; there's no pinball games. It's music, music, music. It turned out for the best."

That it turned out at all comes as some-what of a shock to a lot of people. The previous year had been a traumatic one for the Ratt boys. They topped it all off by doing something they'd never done before: They walked out of a tour. Just upped and split. Not very nice, or even professional.

Nor did it go unnoticed. The action set the band up for a flurry of interesting speculation: that they all hated each other; that they all were sporting horrific drug problems; that the band was over. And so on.

The Ratts are less than definitive about addressing any of this. In fact, they dance so beautifully around the subject that these guys could be in politics. Or Lambada.

"For one thing," insists Stephen, his legendarily short fuse burning awfully fast, "we didn't leave in the middle of the tour. There was about three weeks left. That's when we quit it."

Semantics, dude. Fact is, there were ticket-holders to nonexistent shows.

He continues, a little more quietly. "We had some problems, which we had to take care of, which we did."

Drugs? Alcohol? Gambling? The flu? Care to expound on that a bit, Stephen? Or on the fact that guitarist Warren DeMartini started playing in various other aggregations--including one with Guns N' Roses' Slash and Duff--all over Los Angeles?

"No." He frowns slightly. "I'm really glad that people care enough to want to talk and babble about us, but what we do outside of Ratt is no one's business. There is no law that says that we have to hang together every moment and that we are committed every waking moment to each other. We are married to the band, not each other. What happened was that Warren had some friends he wanted to play with, and Juan is preparing for a solo project--but not to leave the band. Other than that, we had some problems, and we took care of them."

Among those problems was their management. Since the band's flashy beginning, with the multimillion-selling Out of the Cellar, which featured the single that defined the Ratt sound, "Round and Round," the band had worked with Marshall Berle (yup, Uncle Miltie's grandson). But as time wore on, the band didn't become more popular. Or less popular. It just sort of remained the same. The band decided that Something Had To Be Done. So, following the abrupt conclusion of the Reach For The Sky Tour, Mr. Berle was shown the door.

"It wasn't that radical a switch," claims Stephen. "The last management did what they could, but we needed more. We wanted to clean house for the '90s, so we did. What we wanted in the '90s was new blood."

Indeed. And whether it's due to the management or not, Detonator has some striking differences from earlier Ratt projects. Most notable is that star songwriters Desmond ("How Can We Be Lovers," "What It Takes") Child and Diane ("When I See You Smile") Warren cowrote about 90% of the album's lyrics. Huh? Just a bit of a left-of-center choice for a partnership. Pearcy doesn't think so. Or so he claims.

"We had never really written with any outside writers before," says Pearcy, "so when Desmond's name was brought up, we hooked up with him and tried a few songs. Eventually it turned into a project. It's been unbelievable, the stuff that he's contributed to us. It was pretty cool, because even though Warren really knew what he wanted this album to sound like, and he wrote most of the music, bringing in someone from outside the circle really helped. Desmond has the ability to listen to stuff we had already done and twist it around to make it better. There is no reason we shouldn't be working with other people, whether they are Desmond, or friends of his." He points at DeMartini. "Some of the best stuff came from things Warren did with his friends. It doesn't matter who wrote it, good music is good music, and that's what counts. It's the delivery. It's going to sound like Ratt."

Good point. It must also be noted that with Detonator, the band, propelled by DeMartini, had the clearest idea of what they should sound like since their first records.

"Focused," says Warren firmly, "that's one of the differences this time around. If you like the first song, you're going to like them all. We made sure that all of the songs were the best. We always try, but this time we were determined. I don't know that there is a right or a wrong direction for the music, but you have to find what is going to work for you. It's really hard, but I think I finally got it figured out. The trickiest thing is getting the sound down. It's so hard to do that, to get it the way you hear it and tell someone else what that is. I mean, there's really no dialect for that, except, 'Radical! Heavier, dudes!' I've always liked our songs, but I haven't always liked the way they sounded on records. On a few songs on a few records, I thought the sound wasn't as accurate as it should be. But this time," he grins happily, "it's working."

It pretty much has to. Though the band's last album, Reach for the Sky, sold well over a million copies, it didn't spawn any huge hits, and was perceived by many as being a flop--the band's swan song. Naturally, Pearcy disagrees.

"It was a hit for us," he states with some irritation. "All our records have been successes to us. How do you measure success anyway? It's up to the individual. I'm sure that every band wants to have a mega-selling record every record, but that just doesn't happen in the real world. So we consider ourselves very fortunate that we have platinum-plus records consistently. They've all been platinum. The last was a Top Twenty album. So we don't sit around and mutter, 'Shit, it didn't have a Top Twenty single.' We have always tried to deliver the best music, and we do that as well as we can."

This time they also had the help of a, literally, new producer. Detonator is one of the very first major-label projects producer Sir Arthur Payson has worked on. Which, apparently, was exactly the point.

"Nobody really knows him yet, which is why we're using him. We checked out a lot of other producers, and we didn't want to get stuck in a situation where this well-known guy--whether he was fantastic or not--had three months with us, and then was looking forward to his next three months with someone else, and so on and so on. We didn't want to have to hurry up because he's got to do so and so next. We didn't want to be on the tail end of someone else's project. Producers burn out too. They just can't do one right after another. We wanted to try new ears; someone that was new and excitable with great ideas."

It seems to be working so far. Even the rough mixes (which were all that were available for listening at press time) are a little tougher, with more zip, than the last two Ratt albums.

When Detonator hits the racks, Ratt will simultaneously be hitting the road. And though they left the streets early last tour, they plan on making it up this time. The Detonator Tour will be a lengthy one, says Pearcy.

"We're talking about going out for over a year," he says. "We want to be out for a long, long time. We're setting up to be gone for the long haul. There really isn't any psyching up necessary to be touring for that long, because we like it. We love playing on the road. Hey, I like sleeping in a different bed each night." He grins wickedly. "And not just in L.A."

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