The Reel Thing
Hard-rock survivors Tesla salute their roots
by Chris Neal
Yes, the members of Tesla are well aware that a lot of other veteran rockers have been recording albums of cover songs lately.
“We know that Def Leppard did a covers record, and Styx did one,” says bass player Brian Wheat, whose band released its own version, the stripped-down Real to Reel, June 5. “Hell, Poison put one out [Poison’d!] on the same day we did. But we don’t really care. All we really worry about is what Tesla’s gonna do. If we followed trends, we’d never get anywhere.”
A lot of artists say things like that, but the sentiment carries a little more weight coming from Tesla. When Wheat, singer Jeff Keith, drummer Troy Luccketta and guitarists Tommy Skeoch and Frank Hannon emerged from the Sacramento area in the mid-1980s, their straightforward hard rock had little in common with the glammed-up pop-metal being churned out down the coast in Los Angeles at the time. Their music had brawn and brains—1991’s “Edison’s Medicine” is most likely the only hard-rock hit ever written about the rivalry between Thomas Edison and the band’s namesake, the enigmatic inventor Nikola Tesla.
Then there was their look, or the absence thereof. The scarcity of hairspray, makeup and spandex from their dressing rooms immediately set Tesla apart in the ’80s rock scene before a note had been played. “There was a point at the beginning where the record company wanted us to do that, because they figured everyone that looked like that was selling records,” Wheat recalls. “We just said, ‘No, that’s not us.’ Tesla’s always been about music.”
Well, there was that once. “Actually, there was one photo session where we let them do that to us,” he admits. “That was it. Never again.”
After crossing over to the pop charts with the 1990 ballad “Love Song,” Tesla spearheaded the “unplugged” craze with the live album Five Man Acoustical Jam. That album’s breakout single was a remake of the Five Man Electrical Band’s 1971 hit “Signs,” which demonstrated their way with a cover version. A few years ago, the band members began discussing the idea of making a full album of covers—and when Skeoch departed last year, the idea seemed like a low-pressure way to break in new guitarist Dave Rude.
Real to Reel (recorded on analog tape, hence the title) finds the band roaring through 13 favorites, including Deep Purple’s “Space Truckin’,” Traffic’s “Dear Mr. Fantasy” and the first single, Led Zeppelin’s “Thank You.” Fans buying tickets for the band’s current tour, including Friday’s Ryman Auditorium stop, will receive Reel Two, an additional CD with 12 more songs. “We recorded 25 songs, and it was like, ‘Well, we can’t put out a double disc. We’re not The Beatles, and this isn’t ‘The White Album,’ ” Wheat explains. “But we had 12 extra songs, and I said, ‘Somehow we’ve got to get these to the diehard Tesla fans.’ ”
Real to Reel is the first release from the band’s own label, Tesla Electric Recording Company, run chiefly by Wheat and manager Tom Zutaut. “We worked for ‘the man’ for many years,” Wheat says. “You never got paid a fair wage to begin with, and then you had people putting tracks out that weren’t necessarily the tracks that should have been put out. So we just decided on this record to take the bull by the horns.”
With Real to Reel in stores, the band is already writing its first album of new material since 2004’s Into the Now. They’ll go into the studio in February, by which time they hope to have released a planned 20th-anniversary box set. “We’re gonna empty the vaults,” Wheat declares.
After two decades together (except a brief breakup in the late 1990s), Tesla is proud to have stuck it out through countless changing trends and commercial ups and downs. “We’ve been going in and out of style,” Wheat observes, paraphrasing his favorite band, The Beatles. “But we’re guaranteed to raise a smile.”
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