Stephen Pearcy to Robbin Crosby When RATT First Played Madison Square Garden: “I think we’ve made it” – Interview
Metal Edge: It’s Stephen Pearcy’s birthday! Check out our interview with the singer where he tells us about busting out of Catholic school, meeting Van Halen and Ratt ‘n’ rollin’ through L.A. – You can read the entire feature @ this location.
INTERVIEW EXCERPT:
First Time I Felt I Had “Made It”
Stephen Pearcy:
There’s two times. The first is when we finished recording the Ratt EP. Robbin [Crosby] and I were out in Hollywood, tripping around, trying to get the word out. And there were two big stations in L.A. – KLOS was one and KMET was the other. And lo and behold, Robbin and I are coming back from town at, like, 2:30, 3:00 in the morning, and we hear “You Think You’re Tough” on KMET, probably on the Local Licks show or something. And then we heard it on KLOS like five minutes after. We were just screaming in the car: “They’re playing our song! We’re on the radio! We’re gonna be huge!”
Because you have to understand, even though we were a huge draw locally in L.A., Ratt were one of the last bands to get signed. That’s why we recorded the EP. We would be selling out places, with people lined up around the block, but nobody gave us the time of day. It was crazy. So that was a “holy shit” moment.
And then the other time that I thought we made it, I was with Robbin again, and we were in a limo driving into Madison Square Garden. To go park there you have to go through these round tunnels that are like a corkscrew, and they just go up and up and up. It’s like Led Zeppelin in The Song Remains the Same. I remember sitting next to him and actually saying, “I think we’ve made it.” Although by that time we had actually already made it, so maybe it doesn’t count…
First Song I Wrote
Actually this is an interesting question, because I kind of wrote a bunch of songs all in a batch, real quick. And a few of those, like “U Got It” and “Sweet Cheater,” ended up on the Ratt EP [in 1983]. And then there were also weird songs like “Valley of the Euphrates” and “Direct Motion.” I wrote them for Mickey Ratt, which then morphed into Ratt. But it was a big batch. I just wrote like crazy. And to this day I still get into these spurts where I’ll sit and just write song after song. I still like to write every day.
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