Mr. Big guitarist Paul Gilbert is barely 20 years old. Bassist Billy Sheehan is nearly 40. But when the two first met, sparks flew from their guitar strings.
Mr. Big will perform with The Scorpions and Great White on Friday at the World Music Theatre and Saturday at Alpine Valley. Winger will also perform at the Friday night show, and Steelheart will guest at the Saturday concert.
Sheehan is widely regarded as the world`s best rock bassist. After playing for 14 years with his hometown band, Talas, in Buffalo, Sheehan joined David Lee Roth`s band in 1985. By 1987 he was planning Mr. Big.
Gilbert has been showcased in guitar-players` magazines for years, and his smoking solos have won contests across the U.S. In fact, Sheehan was judging a guitar contest when he first heard Gilbert perform as one of the contestants. Gilbert`s band, Racer-X, was heating up the Los Angeles club scene when he got a call from Sheehan, who remembered Gilbert`s dazzling fretwork.
The two now front Mr. Big, a Los Angeles-based quartet that also features scratchy-voiced singer Eric Martin and drummer Pat Torpey, who assembled an impressive resume of his own after touring with Robert Plant, Belinda Carlisle and others. The group just released its second album, ”Lean Into It” and is on a worldwide tour.
”Everyone expected Mr. Big to be a war of clashing egos,” Sheehan says. ”That was the perception, but it wasn`t the reality. We wanted to emphasize what the band was about on our albums.”
The band, according to Sheehan, is about integrity.
”What we play is real,” he says. ”The music business has lost all integrity with sampling, lip-synching, hidden offstage keyboards to help recreate things the musicians can`t do, and tons of technology in the studio to make a bad band sound good.”
Sheehan is adamant that Mr. Big will never become the group of technical show-offs it is capable of being. ”We don`t inflate or deflate our talent,” he says. ”We go into the studio to record what we really play, we don`t go in to build a technical monster. The studio is only there to document what we do, not to create our sound.”
”The second side of our first album is basically our first two weeks of rehearsal. It was 15 months from that first call to Paul to having the record in the stores.” Considering that some bands take longer to simply record a follow-up, it was an operation of lightning speed.
The self-titled debut fell short of gold record status, with 400,000 copies sold, but ”it wasn`t bad for a new band,” Sheehan says. ”Then we joined the Rush tour and there was a great response. Everyone thought our show would be a mass of solos, but it was based on songs with spice. I think people were pleasantly surprised.”
Not that they don`t occasionally show off. Sheehan and Gilbert use power drills to play guitar for ”Daddy, Brother, Lover, Little Boy.”
Sometimes the act gets dangerous. ”We were in England, and the guitar picks were glued to the drill and the glue was still wet when I started,”
Sheehan explains. ”I turned on the drill, the glue went straight into my eye, and there I was, one eye glued shut, standing on one leg trying to hit the right control pedals, and still trying to sing while playing guitar with a high-speed drill.”
Although ”Lean Into It” is selling well, the band is still a long way from the multi-million sales of pop-metal bands like Winger.
The goal of a larger audience is what keeps the talent in Mr. Big in check, Sheehan says. ”Musicians think we don`t live up to our potential-they want a jazz-rock fusion record. Well, we ain`t going to make a jazz-fusion record because then we`d only draw musicians.”
Sheehan is outspoken on the topic of musicians and their attitudes.
”Musicians think that to push the boundaries they have to reach 500 people and really blow the minds of two. Take (guitarist) Allan Holdsworth for example. Man, that guy is amazing . . . he`s too amazing to listen to! But he can`t reach people. Talas sold more records than Holdsworth, and he`s probably the most brilliant musician that ever walked.”
”I don`t need to make a million dollars, but I do want to reach people. I want to bring the quality of music up-from this pop swill and rap and dance- but if we can`t reach people, we`ll just be replaced by machines.”
