TESLA’s JEFF KEITH: ‘People Know We’re Playing Songs That We’ve Written From The Heart’

In a new interview with Mike Hsu of “The Pike Morning Show” on the 100 FM The Pike radio station, TESLA singer Jeff Keith was asked if he and his bandmates were bothered by the fact that they were compared to the so-called “hair metal” bands that were popular when TESLA was first starting out in the 1980s. Jeff responded in part (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Our first video, they put so much hairspray in our hair. In my hair, they spent a half an hour putting Aqua Net and everything, and I looked in the mirror and I went, ‘Nope. That ain’t gonna work.’ And they go, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘I can’t go out there with my hair looking like I stuck my finger in a toaster.’ And they go, ‘We just spent a half an hour.’ And they were, like, ‘Come here.’ And they dolled it back up, and we went out and did the ‘Modern Day Cowboy’ video. And then, after that, it was just, like, ‘You know what? We don’t need this 30 minutes of Aqua Net.’ No offense to it, because it works well for a lot of people,”We’re from the 80s,” Jeff continued. “And then people go, ‘Oh, you’re from the ’80s. You’re from the [era of the] hair bands.’ Sometimes it [doesn’t] get you in the door of some places, because they go, ‘No, we can’t have you. You’re too old.’ But you know what? However they label it, we are very grateful to be doing what we do.”Keith added: “We’ve always been told from the beginning, ‘Write songs from the heart because you may never play in front of more than five people and you may never sell five records. Just write songs from the heart because when you’re up there playing those songs, it doesn’t matter if there’s only five people and they’re drunk and they don’t care. It doesn’t matter if you don’t ever sell five records because you’re up there as a band playing songs from the heart.’ And we stuck to it, and we never stopped. Then when grunge came in, when we first were asked, ‘What do you think about the grunge movement?, we’re, like, ‘What’s grunge? What?’ And you know what? We just always said we’re always gonna do what we’ve always been told: write songs from the heart.”We’re not a disco band, we’re not a grunge band. And, really, when grunge came out, their image was ‘we don’t dress up at all.’ When grunge came in, which great music came along, by the way, it was just wear your flannel shirt and your jeans. That’s still a look.”Jeff concluded: “People always knew and will always know, if they know anything about us, we’re playing songs that we’ve written from the heart and we play them from the heart and when people see it, I strongly believe that they just go, ‘Hey, man, they’re just giving everything they’ve got from the heart.'”Back in November 2023, TESLA guitarist Frank Hannon was asked by My Weekly Mixtape if he and his bandmates received any pressure from their record company, Geffen, in the 1980s to compete with the so-called “hair metal” bands that were popular at the time or if Geffen was “100 percent” in TESLA’s corner during that period. Frank responded: “Well, I would say it was both. There was some songs that we had to fight for, but we were always being directed by the people that we worked with to write the best songs we could possibly write and not have any filler material or cheesy garbage material on an album. They always insisted that the entire album be good, not just have one song on it that was good and the rest of it be junk. And when I’m talking about [Q Prime management’s] Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch and [Geffen A&R executive] Tom Zutaut, they were directing us at the time and they were responsible for RUSH, DEF LEPPARD, METALLICA, AC/DC and DOKKEN, and so they were involved with some really high-caliber kick-ass bands that had integrity. So we were very lucky to be getting advice from them to try to write real songs that were gritty and from the heart and not cheesy. And they put a lot of high expectations on us because we were, again, in the company of bands like METALLICA and RUSH and AC/DC, SCORPIONS, DEF LEPPARD. We weren’t trying to compete with the glam bands and the trendy stuff. We were trying to be ourselves. And luckily we weren’t having pressure put on us to be glam metal We were having more pressure on us to be ourselves and to write the best songs that we could for ourselves.”In October 2023, Frank weighed in on the never-ending debate about how the rise of grunge in the early 1990s forced most hard rock bands off the radio and MTV, with album and tour sales plummeting. Asked in an interview with Real Music With Gary Stuckey how he and his bandmates were affected by the downfall of the 1980s glam metal scene, Frank said: “Well, the ’90s were definitely a harder period for us. But really, it wasn’t grunge; it was our own fault. [TESLA’s fourth studio album, 1994’s] ‘Bust A Nut’ is a great album, but we were already internally having problems. So the external stuff you’re talking about — grunge — it didn’t really matter for us and our fans, ’cause we were never really the poster child [for ’80s rock] anyway. Even during the glam days, we weren’t on the cover of all the magazines as being a glam band. So, when grunge came out, and NIRVANA and PEARL JAM and all the style changed, it didn’t matter, because we weren’t really affected by those trends anyway.”He added: “So, I don’t blame grunge — for us. [For bands that] were really cheesy or whatever, then maybe grunge kind of killed those bands. But for us, it was more our own fault. We were burnt out and partying too much and had problems.”In a 2015 interview with Southeast Of Heaven, Jeff said that he and his TESLA bandmates “never really relied on image which is probably why we survived when grunge came along. Our fans knew we didn’t rely on image so they had no problem keeping us around,” he explained. “A lot of bands who were heavily reliant on image just didn’t make it and they were out unless they were so huge. Bands that were at our level that relied more on image than anything just didn’t make it. I mean, we had a stylist putting Aqua Net in our hair for our first video but we didn’t know what we were doing. [Laughs] We didn’t stick with that and we didn’t rely on image. We relied on the music and our fans know that.”TESLA released a new six-song EP, “All About Love”, in October 2024. The effort includes four versions of the “All About Love” title track (acoustic, electric, hybrid, live); a live version of “Walk Away”, a concert favorite from “Reel To Real, Vol. 1”; and another new song, “From The Heart”, an instrumental track by Hannon.In August 2022, TESLA released a standalone single, “Time To Rock!” A year earlier, the band issued another new track called “Cold Blue Steel”.TESLA hasn’t released a studio album since 2019’s “Shock”, which was produced and co-written by DEF LEPPARD guitarist Phil Collen.[embedded content]