BACH IN THE DAY
Snake Sabo recalls first meeting Sebastian Bach; “A great-looking guy, a great frontman, a great voice. Sang the songs great.”
Blabbermouth — In conjunction with a recent Metal Hammer retrospective on SKID ROW‘s self-titled 1989 debut, guitarist Dave “Snake” Sabo spoke at length about the group’s early years with writer Clay Marshall. Some select “outtakes” from the interview appear below (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).
On meeting Sebastian Bach:
Snake: “We had an idea — a very clear idea — of what we wanted the band to sound like. We were really close, but it wasn’t quite there. We knew that that was the missing piece. We had auditioned a bunch of singers, and through [photographer] Mark Weiss and a guy by the name of Dave Feld, as well as Jon Bon Jovi‘s parents, believe it or not, we were turned on to Sebastian. He had been with MADAM X and had been at Mark Weiss‘s wedding, and he got up and sang. Everyone was, like, ‘There’s this band in New Jersey called SKID ROW, and they’re looking for a singer,’ and so forth. We got his info — we exchanged phone calls back and forth — and then sent him four songs, if I’m not mistaken: ’18 And Life’, I think ‘Rattlesnake Shake’, ‘Youth Gone Wild’ and one other one. It may have been ‘Piece Of Me’; I’m not sure. We flew him down to New Jersey and got off the plane and we met up at my mom’s house in Sayreville. He was crazy and wild, you know, as he is. We went straight to a nightclub. We basically lived in this place, or at least I did, anyway — a place called Mingles. They had a big room upstairs, and a small room downstairs called Down Under. The owners were really good friends, so they let us do whatever we wanted there, and we ended up going downstairs and getting really, really hammered and commanding the stage. We went up and played a couple songs, and that was the first time that the five of us played together, and [we] announced on stage that night that Sebastian, he’s the new singer of the band. We were terrible, but we knew it was just… there was something magical about it for sure. You just knew it. We all did. We all knew, like, ‘Okay — now we’re ready to go the next step. Now we have five members of the band.’ There was a sense of chaos, I guess you could say. He ended up getting in a fight with somebody in the parking lot — threw a punch at somebody and missed by a mile — and we ended up grabbing him and throwing him in the car, driving down to Tom’s River and started rehearsals all hungover the next day, and just feeling each other out. You’ve got a guy who’s enormous — 6-foot-3, 6-foot-7 with the hair spray, but a great-looking guy, a great frontman, a great voice. Sang the songs great. Then it was just us figuring out who we were. We had the songs written for the most part. It was a case really of going out and getting into the garage and writing more songs, and really making it a band — basically, living together and playing shows together. After that, it was getting guys like Doc McGhee to see what he thought of it. Jon Bon Jovi brought Doc down, and everyone was like, ‘Okay — I think this is it. I think you guys got something here.’ Everyone was a believer in the songs that we were writing and the vibe of what we had created. We were missing that last piece, and Sebastian was that last piece.”
“Skid Row” was released on January 24, 1989 via Atlantic Records. Six years later, the album — which yielded the hit singles “18 And Life”, “Piece Of Me”, “Youth Gone Wild” and “I Remember You” — was certified quintuple-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for having shipped five million copies in the United States.
SKID ROW parted ways with Bach in 1996. Three years later, the group resurfaced with vocalist Johnny Solinger, who fronted the band until 2015. After an eight-month stint with former TNT vocalist Tony Harnell — who Bolan said last year was a “really bad match” that “just didn’t fit” — SKID ROW recruited former DRAGONFORCE vocalist ZP Theart, who has toured with the group for the past three and a half years.
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