How a good idea went
wrong
By Peter Lindblad
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| Randy Rhoads - The Quiet Riot Years Red Match Productions |
Chasing an American record deal was ultimately a dispiriting
experience for the first version of Quiet Riot, featuring the late, great Randy
Rhoads on guitar.
Time after time, Quiet Riot, through its management company
the Toby Organization, had opportunities to perform showcases for various record
label executives, and they got a few nibbles, but they just could not land that
big fish.
This despite having Warren Entner of The Grass Roots in
their corner, pushing them to create a flamboyant, pre-glam look that would
surely attract a great deal of attention. He was a part owner of the Toby
Organization and he had connections. They represented Angel, who was on
Casablanca Records. Still, he could not get anybody interested in Quiet Riot,
despite the fact that they were playing to crowded houses at famed Sunset Strip
rock and roll haunts like the Whisky-A-Go-Go and, their home away from home,
The Starwood – that is except for label called Buddha. But, Buddha had financial
problems, and so, even though they’d signed with them, when Buddha went under,
their deal was null and void.
Being the resourceful types, the Toby Organization did secure
a deal for Quiet Riot in Japan with CBS/Sony, and the band put out its first
record there – basically on the strength of its cover, it did well, although
the band was not thrilled with the production, as is explained by original drummer Drew
Forsyth in the engrossing new documentary “Randy Rhoads – The Quiet Riot Years,”
directed by longtime Quiet Riot photographer Ron Sobol, who has also authored
an accompanying coffee table book of the same title.
Though they still dreamed of getting that elusive American
record deal, Quiet Riot had obligations in Japan – namely, they had a second
record to make. And they did it, and when the time came to do the artwork for
it, Sobol, the band’s photographer, lighting director and good friend, had an
idea for the cover.
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| Quiet Riot II 1978 |
“Somehow the concept was thought of – I can’t remember it
exactly. Kevin [DuBrow] wanted to call the record – it was their second record
– 2nd and 10 – 10 songs on
their second record,” remembers Sobol. “It was a football term. And I said, ‘Can
I shoot it? Here’s what we’ll do: We’ll have you guys in a locker room, with
these football players, and the juxtaposition of you skinny guys with these
huge football players might make an interesting picture.’ Kevin said, ‘Okay,
let’s do it, but it’s on spec. You’ve got to pay for it. If we can’t use it,
I’m sorry.’”
Undeterred, Sobol set the whole thing up.
“To me, it was worth the expense to try to get it done,”
says Sobol. “So I rented all this equipment, and I paid the football players …
I went to this school. I was going to Valley College at the time. It’s a junior
college in Van Nuys, Calif. And first, I got permission to use the locker room,
and then I asked the football coach if I could use the players. And he said, ‘Yep,
that’s fine with me.’ So I offered them $50 to be models. Four of them jumped
on it right away. They said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I’ll do it.’ And
they were great. They did everything I wanted. And the band was great, too. So,
we went to the locker room, and we spent about four hours in there that day
shooting pictures. It came out great. And our concept was like the back cover
has the baseball cards … football cards or baseball cards. That was our
concept, too.”
There was only one problem: It did not occur to them that in
Japan, nobody knew what 2nd
and 10 meant, being mostly unfamiliar with American football vernacular in
the Land of the Rising Sun.
“We sent a mock-up of the thing to Japan, and it came back
where they said, ‘Yeah, great,’” recalls Sobol. “The record comes back, like
the finished copy, and it’s called Quiet
Riot II. And we were going, ‘Why did they call it Quiet Riot II?’ Well, because they don’t play football in Japan.
So, 2nd and 10 meant
nothing to them. It’s just one of those things that people don’t think about.”
A bit deflated by the packaging of their second album, the
men of Quiet Riot were not too upset, and neither was Sobol. After all,
they’d had a blast at the photo session, and they could only laugh about the
mix-up. Looking back on it now, Sobol has only fond memories of Quiet Riot’s
pre-Metal Health days, although,
having been good friends with DuBrow from the start, he was around for the band’s
meteoric rise in the early-‘80s, when Metal
Health became the first heavy metal record to shoot all the way to No. 1 in the States.
There are great candid shots from that photo session in Sobol’s
book, including one of a huge lineman carrying Rhoads around as the guitarist,
wearing a flashy, colorful bow tie, vest and flared pants, clutched a stuffed Snoopy toy –
“Snoopy” being one of Rhoads’s nicknames. And at one time, there was talk of
DuBrow doing a book on Quiet Riot with Sobol, but it never came to fruition.
“Yeah, everybody
had a great time that day. It’s just like, hey, I never imagined when I was
taking those pictures just for fun that they’d end up in a book,” says Sobol. “Kevin
actually wanted to do a book with me, and he said, ‘Get your stuff together,
we’ll write a book about the Quiet Riot years.’ And then he called me back, and
he goes, ‘You know, I found out it’s going to cost X amount of money to make
these. I don’t know what we could sell them for. Plus, I have to go out on tour
again with Quiet Riot.” You know, they were playing clubs. And so that idea got
put by the wayside. But I got all the stuff together, and now it’s almost like
Kevin was there with me doing this.”
Stay tuned for a more extensive Q&A with Sobol coming this week.
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