HEART

1994—1997 / FIRST OUTWARD TRANSMISSION

Sweet Vine

Hans Eberbach and I found each other in 1991, not long after I started playing guitar. I was still new to the instrument but already moving fast toward a serious life in music. Axis Blue, our first Sacramento band, was where we learned to write and record together. We cut a demo, the band came apart, and I went looking for other musicians through a classified ad.

That’s how I found Steve King. He’d just come out of a band with a record deal at A&M. He loved ’70s rock and hit the drums hard. When he asked if I knew a singer, I told him I did. I played him the Axis Blue demo. He heard Hans’s voice and lost it. He couldn’t believe I knew that guy.

Steve had the guitarist and singer he’d been looking for. I’d found someone whose ambition matched mine. I was young enough to know almost nothing, except that I wanted to make music. I didn't even know what a stage looked like yet. Steve knew Steve Clausman, a professional race driver and manager whose roster included Tesla and other Northern California bands. Clausie moved fast. He brought us into the Los Angeles music business and helped us land a publishing deal with Warner Chappell.

What started with three writers in a garage became the Core Four: Hans, Steve King, Jason Fluhrer, and me. That was Sweet Vine until Gary Frank Skaggs came in later. Joe Johnston became the band’s recordist and caught the music as it took shape. A Columbia deal followed, and then years measured in highways, radio reports, strange stages, and the records we made.

We made the album in 1995 at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, where Michael Barbiero produced, engineered, and mixed it. Michael was more than a first-rate engineer and producer. I was young. He was older. He helped me, and he became a mentor. I’m grateful for the dinners and the drives. He’d always say, “Look, we’re not sending anyone to the moon here. We’re just making records.”

The finished album then sat on a shelf for more than a year. We couldn’t tour behind it, and we couldn’t push into anything new. Columbia finally released the record in early 1997.

The album opened, fittingly, with “Mountainside,” a song built around the first guitar riff I’d ever written. I found it on an old cassette of myself practicing and thought, this sounds fun! That little fragment became the band’s lead radio single: the No. 1 most-added rock record in Radio & Records, and No. 23 nationally on Rock Airplay Monitor’s Heritage Rock chart. A riff I’d caught on a practice cassette was on the radio now. The kid who’d grown up listening was finally coming back through the speakers.

But even as “Mountainside” found its audience, the famous “creative differences” were pulling me away from the thing that held us together: writing songs. The same set night after night had worn us down. I wanted room to grow and write again. In the summer of ’97, I left Sweet Vine and went home to Sacramento.

Back home, I turned toward my own songwriting, co-writes, recording, and production. At Little Blue Studios, I recorded local bands and songwriters on my reel-to-reel machine, including Forever Goldrush’s first demo. I also did studio work for Empty Pages, Tim Bluhm of The Mother Hips, and Derek White. Over the next couple of years, I kept recording my own music and picked up technical work as the early dot-com boom got going. That side of the story continues in HEAD.