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42 years into touring, heavy metal rock band considers its legacy

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When heavy metal band Armored Saint started in 1982, even the band members couldn’t imagine still going strong more than 40 years later.

“No. So this fact is a great reminder of how much we appreciate this opportunity to still be able to do this,” bassist Joey Vera said in a recent interview.

But that’s exactly what the veteran band out of Los Angeles is doing. They’re on the road now, playing in support of Queensryche. The tour plays Wednesday in Anaheim.

The band’s current lineup of singer John Bush, guitarists Phil Sandoval and Jeff Duncan, drummer Gonzo Sandoval and Vera has been together since 1989 — not including a few hiatuses while Bush served as Anthrax’s lead singer.

Their debut album, “March of the Saint,” in 1984 helped land shows and tours with bands like Quiet Riot and Whitesnake (with a tour featuring all three of those bands hitting the Syria Mosque in Pittsburgh on Nov. 30, 1984.) At various points in the 1980s, Bush and Vera each had offers to audition for spots with thrash metal titans Metallica but decided to stick with Armored Saint.

Early albums like “Delirious Nomad” in 1985, “Raising Fear” in 1987 and “Symbol of Salvation” in 1991 cemented their spot in the heavy metal landscape. Their latest album, 2020’s “Punching the Sky,” received strong reviews, and work is underway on more new music.

In an email interview in late February, Vera discussed the band’s legacy, touring, artificial intelligence in music and more.

Q: What do you see as the biggest changes to touring since you first started?

A: For one thing, it’s way more expensive than it used to be! Bands these days are forced to rely on merch sales and VIP experiences in order to help make ends meet.

Q: With Armored Saint part of the metal scene for decades, how do you think your music has evolved over the years?

A: I think we’ve been able to remain honest songwriters while navigating the changes in the music scene. I think we’ve paved our own path.

Q: How do you view Armored Saint’s legacy in the broader context of heavy metal?

A: Again, I see ourselves as a band that has pretty much done what we wanted to do musically and along the way we’ve been fortunate enough to have touched enough people to have amassed a very loyal following.

Q: Do you think the band has grown more comfortable over the years with its identity and where it fits in the music scene?

A: Yes I do. I think we started feeling most comfortable in our skin around the time of writing “La Raza” in 2009.

Q: With “Punching the Sky,” was there an overall theme that the band wanted to tackle with that album?

A: Not necessarily. We don’t usually write with an overall theme. But one thing we’re always aiming for is growing, expanding our knowledge, taking chances. So “Punching the Sky” alludes to that fact.

Q: It seems like with everything that’s happening in the world, you will never run out of material/inspiration for songs.

A: I don’t think so. There’s always something going on in life that either pleases you or (ticks) you off.

Q: In “End of the Attention Span,” you railed against the distractions caused by electronic devices/technology/social media. With that in mind, how do you think AI is going to affect the music industry?

A: Kind of worried about that. Even with the advent of making recording music to the general consumer, that was a double-edged sword. Now all it takes is a few prompts and you have a fully written and recorded song.

Q: In a related question, do you wish you could go back to a day when you didn’t see a hundred phones in the air while you’re playing?

A: Ha. Yes, definitely. What ever happened to being in the moment? People are forgetting about one of the greatest qualities of the life experience.

Q: What can we expect from Armored Saint in the future? Are there any more albums/videos in the pipeline?

A: We are currently writing new music for a new record. We’ve recorded a single along with a video for that single which should be released this summer. We have a European tour this summer and then we hope to go into the studio in late 2024.

Queensrÿche with Armored Saint

When: 7 p.m. Wednesday

Where: House of Blues Anaheim, 400 Disney Way, No. 337, Anaheim

Tickets: $45

Online: houseofblues.com/anaheim

Palm writes for Tribune News Service.

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Quiet Riot (formed in 1973) is an American hard rock and heavy metal band, known for their singles “Metal Health” and “Cum on Feel the Noize”, hailing from Los Angeles, California, U.S.

Quiet Riot formed in 1973 with the original line-up of guitarist Randy Rhoads, bassist Kelly Garni, lead vocalist Kevin DuBrow, and drummer Drew Forsyth. Originally under the moniker Mach 1 and later Little Women, the Quiet Riot name was inspired by Rick Parfitt of Status Quo whose thick English accent made the potential band name “Quite Right” sound like Quiet Riot. After becoming a well-known band in the Los Angeles area, opening for such acts as Van Halen, Quiet Riot signed with Song in 1977 and released their eponymously-titled debut the same year.

The band subsequently released “Quiet Riot II” in 1978, but like it’s predecessor was only released in Japan. After which, Garni was kicked out the band and replaced by Rudy Sarzo and in 1979 lead guitarist Rhoads departed for Ozzy Osbourne’s band essentially derailing the whole project, which officially ended in 1980. The band returned in 1982 with a line-up of DuBrow, guitarist Carlos Cavazo, bassist Rudy Sarzo and drummer Frankie Banali, which turned out to be their most commercially successful. Quiet Riot recorded and released their American debut album “Metal Health” in 1982, which became the first heavy metal album to ever reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Led by the eponymously-titled lead single and spawning the cover of Slade’s “Cum on Feel the Noize”, the latter of which became the first heavy metal song to break into the Top 5 on the U.S. singles chart, the album was their American breakthrough.

With this new found success, Quiet Riot were able to tour as the opening act for Black Sabbath on their Born Again Tour from October 1983 to March 1984. The band’s subsequent release, “Condition Critical”, despite reaching No. 15 in the U.S. album chart and No. 14 in the Canadian album chart, failed to live up to the success of “Metal Health” and marked the band’s decline from the mainstream. Quiet Riot released “QR III” in 1986 and “QR” in 1988, the latter of which proved to be their last album to chart on the Billboard 200.

The band didn’t let this halt their flow however and continued to record and release a host of new albums , and still maintain an impressively extensive touring schedule and live show. Quiet Riot’s subsequent albums include “Terrified” in 1993, “Down to the Bone” in 1995, “Alive and Well” in 1999, “Guilty Pleasures” in 2001, “Rehab” in 2006 and “Quiet Riot 10” in 2014.

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It really speaks to the complex - and ultimately, quirky - nature of the English language, that two words so completely opposed in meaning can actually rhyme and sound so fitting together; Quiet Riot, of course, will have seen their name as nothing more than a cheeky pun, but existing within the musical era that they did, the name took on an extra level of irony; they were together during the worst excesses of the glam metal era of the eighties, where there was plenty of riotous behaviour - superficially, at least - but very little in the way of peace and quiet. Since seeing their album Metal Health, bolstered by a smash-hit cover version of Slade’s classic ‘Cum on Feel the Noize’, go six times platinum after its release in 1983, Quiet Riot have continued to tour and record, although their lineup has had a revolving door quality to it over the years, with an enormous list of alumni available online. The most signficant departure, in recent years, saw the death of frontman Kevin DuBrow; the band have ploughed on without him, though, releasing Quiet Riot 10 this year and playing an extensive, typically raucous U.S. tour in support of it - expect UK dates to follow soon.

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A riot perhaps, quiet most definitely not. The American rockers rose to prominence in the 80's partly for the strength of their music and partly for the strength of their magnificent glam rock hair dos. The hair may not be what it was, but the music sounds as fresh now as when originally recorded.

It is fair to say that youth has escaped both the band as well as the majority of their audience yet it does not stop the collective rocking out to classic hits such as 'Slick Black Cadillac'. The band tackles their discography with as such aggression as ever and really still have a masterful ability with their guitars.

The showmanship also remains as they bait the masses between tracks and whip them into frenzy before teasing the instrumentals of 'Bang Your Head (Metal Health)' as the stage explodes in lights and sound. There was one track that unified the whole arena in a mass singalong and that is the iconic 'Cum On Feel The Noize' and despite being a grammatical nightmare, it is well and truly a rock anthem.

Quiet Riot rocked my socks off! I know the drummer since the 80’s . I never would have known about the concert if it wasn’t for receiving an email from Songkick.com. Thanks so much for making my night a wonderful experience . I wish I could have done the meet and greet but knew nothing about it. Keep sending me the emails to keep me updated to local concerts for me.

Quiet Riot gave a great performance at the M3 Festival in Columbia, MD. They brought the house to their feet from the moment they took the stage until the end of their set. Fantastic hearing everyone singing "Cum on Feel The Noise" together.

Quiet Riot was badass, especially cause I got to meet Frankie banali after the show. Me and my family had a good time, was our first time seeing them live couldn't have asked for a better night.

I was looking forward to this concert all spring and summer, and then about a week before the show it got cancelled. Pretty bummed out about it. Still don't know the reason it was cancelled.

Great show!! There will never be another Kevin Dubrow, but the new kid is pretty good! They rocked it and recognized we didn't want to hear new stuff. The last couple songs killed!

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QUIET RIOT Announces 2022 Tour Dates

QUIET RIOT has announced the first batch of shows for its upcoming 2022 tour season, which is set to begin on Friday, February 18 at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut. The concerts will feature bassist Rudy Sarzo who recently rejoined QUIET RIOT after an 18-year absence.

Rudy was one of the members of QUIET RIOT 's "Metal Health" lineup. He played bass on the classic LP, which sold over ten million copies and spawned the hits "Cum On Feel The Noize" and "Metal Health" and on the follow-up record "Condition Critical" .

Sarzo appeared in the most notable music videos in the MTV age and toured with the band until 1985 and again from 1997 to 2003. During his years out of the band, Sarzo was a member of OZZY OSBOURNE , WHITESNAKE , DIO , BLUE ÖYSTER CULT , QUEENSRŸCHE and THE GUESS WHO .

Joining Sarzo in QUIET RIOT 's current lineup are guitarist Alex Grossi , vocalist Jizzy Pearl and drummer Johnny Kelly .

Drummer Frankie Banali , who joined QUIET RIOT in 1982 and played on "Metal Health" , died in August 2020 after a 16-month battle with pancreatic cancer. A month after Banali 's death, QUIET RIOT announced that it would carry on.

Grossi was in the last version of the band, from 2004 through 2007, before founding singer Kevin DuBrow passed away, and was asked by Banali to return in 2010.

"We can't wait to get back out there and see everyone," says Grossi . "The first few shows with Rudy back have gone over really well and the audiences are very excited to see him perform these songs again."

Adds Sarzo : "I'm excited to be back home and celebrate the QUIET RIOT legacy, which began 40 years ago next year with the recording of 'Metal Health' , the first heavy metal album to reach #1 on the Billboard top 200 albums chart."

Initial dates are as follows, with many more to be announced in the coming weeks:

Feb. 18 - Uncasville, CT Feb. 19 - Redmond, OR Feb. 20 - Great Falls, MT Apr. 01 - Green Cove Springs, FL Apr. 29 - Bullhead, AZ May 29 - Nashville, TN Jun. 03 - San Bernardino, CA Jun. 04 - Hollywood, CA Jul. 09 - Xenia, OH Jul. 15 - Ft. Wayne, IN Jul. 16 - Roanoke, VA Jul. 29 - Kansas City, MO Jul. 30 - Beaver Dam, KY Aug. 20 - Crownsville, MD Aug. 21 - Des Moines, IA Aug. 25 - Niagara Falls, NY Sep. 09 - Hinkley, MN Sep. 10 - St. Charles, IL Sep. 15 - Hutchinson, KS Sep. 16 - Hudson Falls, NY Sep. 18 - Warrendale, PA Oct. 08 - Shelton, WA

QUIET RIOT went through two vocalists — Mark Huff and Scott Vokoun — before settling on Pearl in 2013. Pearl announced his exit from QUIET RIOT in October 2016 and was briefly replaced by Seann Nichols , who played only five shows with the group before the March 2017 arrival of "American Idol" finalist James Durbin . Pearl returned to QUIET RIOT in September 2019.

For a complete list of upcoming QUIET RIOT shows, visit QuietRiot.Band .

Sarzo discussed his return to QUIET RIOT in a recent interview with Adika Live! . He said: "My decision, in addition to [it] being Frankie 's request that I return to the band, was a decision that I had to meditate on it, because it is that important. Not meditate whether it was the right decision to make or not — no, that wasn't the point — it was to meditate about the timing of it. Because it could not be an abrupt decision that you drop everything you're doing and you change the band.

" Regina [ Frankie 's widow] and I, we sat and we talked about it, and we said, 'Okay, the best thing to do is to let everybody fulfill their commitments.' Because I have commitments to the band that I've been playing in for the last five years, THE GUESS WHO . And I wasn't about to tell them, 'Hey, I'm outta here, guys. Good luck.' I've never done that. So I have commitments with them. And QUIET RIOT has commitments with [longtime bassist] Chuck Wright . And we felt that the only thing that we can do, really — [we felt] that all these commitments must be fulfilled so our agreements with everybody is fulfilled."

Rudy went on to say that he has been "making the transition" and "embracing again the whole QUIET RIOT consciousness" by going "back and playing the songs" again. "And actually, it's been wonderful because, I've gotta tell you, to be able to go back to something that you did 40 years ago with the musician I am today, I'm looking at the songs a little bit different, as far as my own contributions," he said. "Of course, it's not gonna be something that is gonna turn into completely something else, but there are certain note choices that I can improve on."

Photo credit: Julie Bergonz

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QUIET RIOT Announce First Round Of 2022 Tour Dates

January 20, 2022, 2 years ago

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Quiet Riot has announced the first batch of shows for their upcoming 2022 tour season, which is set to begin on Friday, February 18 at The Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, CT.

Quiet Riot recently welcomed legendary bassist and founding member Rudy Sarzo back to the band after an 18-year absence.

"We can't wait to get back out there and see everyone” says guitarist Alex Grossi “The first few shows with Rudy back have gone over really well and the audiences are very excited to see him perform these songs again."

Quiet Riot continues its historic journey as per the wishes of Frankie Banali, who passed away in 2020, and the Banali estate. The band continues to play live with the lineup composed of guitarist Alex Grossi, vocalist Jizzy Pearl, and filling Frankie Banali’s shoes behind the drums is Johnny Kelly of Type O Negative.

2022 marks the 40th anniversary of the recording of the landmark Metal Health album with Rudy on bass, which has sold over ten million copies. It spawned the hits "Cum On Feel The Noize" and "Metal Health" and the entire hair band craze in the 1980s. Sarzo appeared in the most notable music videos in the MTV age and toured with the band until 1985 and again from 1997 to 2003. During his years out of the band, Rudy Sarzo was a member of Ozzy Osbourne, Whitesnake, Dio, Blue Öyster Cult, Queensrÿche, and The Guess Who.

States Rudy Sarzo: "I'm excited to be back home and celebrate the Quiet Riot legacy, which began 40 years ago next year with the recording of Metal Health, the first heavy metal album to reach #1 on the Billboard top 200 albums chart."

Initial dates are as follows, with several venues still to be confirmed. Expect many more shows to be announced in the coming weeks. For more information, head  here .

February 18 - Uncasville, CT - Mohegan Sun Arena     19 - Redmond, OR - Expo Center        20 - Great Falls, MT - The Newberry Theater     

April 1 - Auburndale, FL - Clay County Fair 29 - Bullhead, AZ                                         

May 29 - Nashville, TN - Creatures Fest at Sonesta Hotel & Convention Center

June 3 - San Bernardino, CA - San Bernardino Fairgrounds 4 - Hollywood, CA - The Whisky A Go-Go

July 9 - Xenia, OH - Ceaser Ford Park 15 - Ft. Wayne, IN - Headwater Park 16 - Roanoke, VA - Dr. Pepper Park 29 - Kansas City, MO   30 - Beaver Dam, KY - Rock The Dam  

August 20 - Crownsville, MD  21 - Des Moines, IA     25 - Niagara Falls, NY - Thursdays on 3rd Concert Series  

September 9 - Hinkley, MN  10 - St. Charles, IL  15 - Hutchinson, KS  16 - Hudson Falls, NY - The Strand Theater  18 - Warrendale, PA - Jergels

October 8 - Shelton, WA - Little Creek Casino

(Photo - Julie Bergonz)

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Rudy Sarzo talks Quiet Riot, Ozzy Osbourne and reshaping his bass tone for Whitesnake

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Rudy Sarzo is a hero of no fewer than six decades of bass guitar . In the 1960s, as a Cuban refugee living variously in New Jersey and Florida, he plucked the bass in garage-rock bands. In the ‘70s, he made his bones with Quiet Riot, pioneers of Hollywood's hair-metal scene. Catapulted to fame in Ozzy Osbourne 's band in the ‘80s, courtesy of a recommendation from his erstwhile Quiet Riot colleague Randy Rhoads , Sarzo toured the planet with bands such as Whitesnake.

By the mid-‘90s he was a classic rock bassist who commanded enormous respect, laying down lines with Yngwie Malmsteen, Dio and Blue Oyster Cult in the decade that followed. In recent years Sarzo has also trodden the boards with Geoff Tate's version of Queensryche, Animetal, and the Guess Who.

He's a bassist with much wisdom to impart, and where better to share it? Read on as he talks essential gear, professional attitudes, dealing with the still-shocking tragedy of Rhoads' death in a plane crash in 1982, and the skills you need to take the big sounds to the big stages...

The late '70s in Hollywood sound like an amazing era.

“Back then, if you were from the Sunset Strip, you weren't really labelled as a metal band. You were just a rock band – hard rock, like Van Halen. By the time that I joined Quiet Riot in '78, we were going through the rock versus new wave and punk period. As I learned when I joined Ozzy and started spending time in England. Bands like Iron Maiden, Saxon, Motörhead, and so on were already making their statement in the late '70s in England, whereas that was not really the case in Los Angeles.”

What were the basses you were playing back then?

“Washburn and Music Man, and I also carried with me a practice bass, which happened to be a Roland GR. You remember the first Roland synthesiser bass? You could actually go through a big synthesiser, or you could go out analogue and use the pickup.”

What happened to that really cool black-and-white Washburn you had?

“It's somewhere in Japan. I sold it to a Japanese collector back in the '90s. I look back and I think I should have kept it, but we entered the grunge period in the '90s and that was not a grunge bass, if you know what I mean. It had a certain tone, with original Bill Bartolini handwired pickups. Bill used to wire everything for me personally, so it's definitely a collectable. Actually, I used that bass on Speak Of The Devil , Ozzy's re-recordings of Black Sabbath songs.”

I always wondered how you approached Geezer Butler's bass parts on those Sabbath songs. Did you deliver them as they were originally, or did you add your own spin?

“I played exactly what was on the records, which was very challenging because there were a lot of really cool riffs that are very exclusive. It's a very original style of bass playing, very stylised, so when I played on the record I was just trying to do justice to Geezer's blueprint of what the song is.”

What kind of guy was Randy Rhoads?

“If it wasn't for Randy, I would have never had the career that I've had, because he trusted me. This was the scenario: Ozzy was about 10 days away from going on the road, and they were in Los Angeles looking for a bass player. Not only a person that could play those songs, because there were many qualified musicians who could do that, but they needed somebody they could trust.

“I had already worked with Randy in Quiet Riot, so he told Sharon, ‘Listen, Rudy is the perfect guy because he's not going to be a bad influence on Ozzy. He looks good, he's reliable, and he's going to be somebody to hang with on the bus!’”

Randy knew you well, of course.

“He trusted me. He put his reputation with Sharon and Ozzy on the line to bring me in. That's how I got in, because I had no track record. And then, in addition, I am a thousand percent convinced that Randy saved everybody in Ozzy's tourbus, keeping the plane from crashing into us. It clipped the bus, but it did not crash directly into the bus, and if that had happened, we would all have perished along with Randy and the others in the plane.”

Jumping from one massive band to another, did you just slot right in with Whitesnake when you joined them in '87?

“One of the blessings in my career is that I get to play with musicians and bands that I am a fan of. That's very rare, especially for some kid from Miami. At the time I wasn't an American citizen yet. I was just an immigrant, a permanent resident, basically – a Cuban refugee that became an American citizen. So for me to go and play with Ozzy and with Tommy Aldridge, whose playing I loved in Black Oak Arkansas, and Randy in Quiet Riot... it was incredible.

”Now, one of the bands that supported Quiet Riot on the 1984 Condition Critical tour was Whitesnake. That's how I got to know David Coverdale and Neil Murray, and of course John Sykes and Cozy Powell. I recalled the last night of the tour, as we were saying our goodbyes, David said, ‘Someday we're going to play together!’ I had already given notice to Quiet Riot that it was going to be my last tour with the band. So I was wondering, ‘How does David know that I'm leaving?’”

”As soon as I finished my commitment with Quiet Riot and was a free agent, I got a call from Whitesnake's management, and we met. David and John were working in the south of France, writing the new record, and Tommy and I went into the office. I was witness to internal conflict within Whitesnake during that tour, and I thought that it would not be wise for me to leave one situation for another situation, so I passed on the opportunity to make a record.

”A couple of years later, in '87, when David was ready for the 1987 record to be released and for the tour to start, I got the call to do the Still Of The Night video, along with Vivian Campbell and Adrian Vandenberg. So we all met at that video shoot and it was instant chemistry. We were like, ‘Oh wow, if you're doing this, I guess I'm doing this too.’ The chemistry was right and it just felt perfect. It was a great combination of people.”

You had a bass back then that I absolutely loved, an Aria Pro II.

“Yeah, it was a custom. I asked them to put Alembic pickups in some of them and Bartolinis in others. I really had to reshape my tone for Whitesnake, because it was the first time I ever played with two guitar players. Vivian was on my side of the stage, and his sound at the time was huge. It almost went into my bass frequency, so I had to really change my tone.”

You played Peavey basses for a long time.

“I was with Peavey up until Mike Powers, the master luthier that I worked with for so many years, passed away in 2013, but I'm very proud of that Peavey. It's gotten so many great reviews, all five-star reviews. When I first sat down with them to design the bass, I was thinking about my first real working bass, a Jazz that I bought in ‘67 for maybe $300 or $400.”

Are you equally happy with five strings as well as four?

“I play four, I play five, and I also play six. They're all tools for the job, you know. I mean, you can't show up for a job with just a Phillips screwdriver.”

What was your first bass?

“My first original four-string was a Kingston bass. I sold it to a kid in Miami and then I bought a Gibson EB. Mine was just a single pickup model with volume and tone. It was headstock-heavy, so I got rid of it. My next bass was a Rickenbacker.”

What advice can you give kids buying their first bass?

“I do these events called Rock and Roll Fantasy Camps, and we get a lot of beginners. They come to me with their instruments and say, ‘Can you tune my bass?’ So I wind up tweaking their basses, spending about half an hour fixing it for them. Then I talk to their parents and I say, ‘I know that you don't know if your son or daughter is going to stick with playing this instrument, but try to give them something that inspires them to get up every morning and want to improve and learn. That's the most important thing.‘”

Any other tips for readers who would like to make a career as a bass player?

“I would say that the key element to a sustained career would be trust. That is something that you can only build by experience, from gig to gig. Be the first guy that everybody's going to call because they know that you're going to be professional, you're going to learn the songs, and you're going to add something to the band that would help them get to the next level. And I'm just being superficial here; I'm not even getting in deep, because I can spend hours talking about the importance of this.

“The other important thing is to learn. It's always about improving. A musician never stops learning and progressing. And never set limitations. I've come to the realisation that I'm never going to be the bass player that I aspire to be, because I really don't want to do that. I never want to get to the point that I say, ‘Okay, I'm done. I've learned everything.‘ There's always more to learn.”

A lot of musicians think of music as a job, but of course it's bigger than that.

“It is way bigger than that. I think I can say this for every musician: we were fans before we were professional musicians. And we must always remain fans of music, of what we do, of the bands that we play with, and of the legacy of the bands. At the end of the day,  the audience comes to watch our show to reconnect with a certain moment in time, and we bring that joy to them again. It's a celebration, what we do on stage.”

Are you still improving as a bass player?

“Oh my God, yeah – which is a problem, because I hear my old recordings and I go, ‘I wish I could re-record this now!‘ It's a journey, though. I play more bass now than I ever have. The bass is always in my hands. When I'm on tour, it sleeps next to me, in bed – because I keep playing until I'm too tired to play, then I just lay it down next to me, and then I wake up in the morning and pick it up again.”

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Bassist Rudy Sarzo on His Years With Ozzy Osbourne, Quiet Riot, Whitesnake, and Dio

• By Andy Greene

Andy Greene

If Rudy Sarzo had done nothing more with his career than play bass on Quiet Riot ‘s Metal Health , he’d be a heavy-metal icon. That 1983 LP was the first metal album to hit Number One on the Billboard 200 and it introduced teenagers all over America to the genre thanks to hit singles “Cum On Feel the Noize” and “Metal Health.” The tsunami of hair-metal acts to hit MTV and Top 40 radio in the following years can be directly traced back to that lone record.

But Quiet Riot is just one part of Sarzo’s incredible legacy. Before he even joined the group, he was a member of Ozzy Osbourne ‘s Randy Rhoads–era band. He went on to enjoy stints with Whitesnake , Ronnie James Dio , Yngwie Malmsteen, and Geoff Tate’s Queensrÿche. Simply put, he’s played with more metal icons than just about any other bassist in history. And today he’s a member of the Guess Who, featuring original drummer Garry Peterson.

We called up Sarzo at his Los Angeles home to speak about his childhood in pre-Castro Cuba, emigrating to America, joining the Randy Rhoads incarnation of Quiet Riot in the Seventies, teaming up with Ozzy Osbourne right after the completion of Diary of a Madman , the tragic loss of Randy Rhoads, and his stints with Dio, Whitesnake, and many other groups.

How has your pandemic year gone? Great. It’s amazing how much work I can actually get done at home on Zoom. I’m busier now than I’ve ever been in the past. Back in the day, you just schedule things based on the time of day. I know it’s going to take me at least an hour or an hour and a half to get anywhere in L.A. with traffic. That brings it down to, like, “Do one thing a day.” Now it’s almost like we’re quantum. We can be anywhere at any time.

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Do you miss playing live, though? I miss playing live, but there’s two things we do as musicians and as creative beings. We create and then we re-create. Let’s say you record an album. If it’s a hit, you’re going to be playing certain songs for the rest of your career. It’s nice. It’s fun. But the act of creation is much more fulfilling than anything else.

I want to go back here and talk about your life. Tell me your first memory of hearing music as a child that really left an impression on you. That’s easy. I was born in Cuba. It was Latin music. But when I was a kid, we just called it “Cuban Music” or just “music.” It was big band. I’m 70 years old. When I was a toddler, I was dancing in my crib to some kind of rhythm.

I used to go to sleep with the kids in my neighborhood in Havana gathering around an old Fifties car and beating on different parts of the vehicle, like the fender and the bumper or the hubcaps. They had different tones. That was like a tribal gathering of the kids in the neighborhood, and that was our social media. Those rhythms, that’s what I’d fall asleep with every single night.

Who were some of your favorite artists as a kid? Benny Moré, Celia Cruz, Rolando Laserie. They were just bandleaders in Cuba. Celia Cruz then migrated to the United States and continued her career. These were all local Cuban musicians. Most or them left or were cast away right before the revolution.

I’ve read so many stories about Cuba before the revolution and seen so many movies. What was it really like? Since it was an island, everything was concentrated. There was mafia, at the time, in the United States. Well, there was mafia in Cuba. The gambling being 90 miles away from Key West, people used to take ferries. You put your car in the ferry and within a couple of hours, you were in Havana, driving around. That’s how most of the people traveled. That’s how rum-running became an industry. They’d bring in Cuban rum during Prohibition. You’d bring it on the ferry, unload the trucks, and just continue to the point of distribution.

There’s this perception that communism came in because things were so bad that communism was actually a good thing for Cuba. I think things were just as bad as they were in the United States. If we’re talking about corruption with the mafia or politics, it’s the same thing in the United States. It wasn’t that it was that bad.

It was just that Castro came in with a really good sales pitch about communism. One major difference about selling communism in the United States versus selling it in Cuba is that Cuba, before it was liberated, was a colony of Spain. That’s a whole different political and social system than the United States, which was a colony of England. It’s more of the Anglo mentality.

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The same problems that exist today in Spanish colonial countries throughout South America, it’s what Cuba, at the time, was suffering from. It wasn’t as much as far as economics, but certain strictures, like inequality. There were many inequality issues. It was still a Spanish colonial mentality.

How did your family wind up coming to the States? Once Castro came in, he had a plan that looked good on paper. Unfortunately, power corrupts and he became a ruthless dictator, with the help of communism. You could see things shifting really quickly, immediately I would say.

In Cuba, like the United States, we had different cultures and diversity. There were Chinese who had fled Communist China and wound up in Cuba. That’s where you get a lot of the Cuban fusion cuisine, which has become popular throughout the decades in the United States. And when they saw Castro declare himself Marxist/Leninist, they understood what it was. They had just left China to go to Cuba, getting away from that. Then the new guy is saying, “This is who I am.” And they were like, “We’re outta here because this is not going to turn out good.” They wound up in San Francisco with the Chinese community there.

But my family had to find a sponsor, somebody who would claim the responsibility of us. It took about a year, a year and a half. By 1961, we arrived in the United States. And we thought we wouldn’t be here too long. We thought that there was a good possibility that Kennedy was going to take Castro out because he had become a threat to the United States, obviously winding up with nuclear missiles pointed.

Then he stayed in power for the next 60 years. Yeah. And when I checked this morning, Cuba was still a communist country. At this point, I can just roll my eyes. There’s nothing I can do about it. I just have to go on with my life.

Did you feel welcomed when you came to America? Did you feel like an outsider? That’s a really good questions. I came from a country where all I knew was to be Cuban. We were all Cuban, even if you came from different cultural backgrounds. Let’s say you were Jewish and happened to escape Poland during the Nazi period in the Forties and you wind up in Cuba. Now you’re Cuban. You’re Jewish, but you’re Cuban. The Chinese were Cuban. We were all Cubans.

And now, all of a sudden, as a child, I migrated to a place where it was a different language. My parents put me and my brother in school. We had some real growing pains learning the language. As you can tell, I still have an accent after all these years. It was difficult. It’s very difficult for any child to be uprooted.

I came to the United States when I was 11. I was almost a teenager. I was uprooted. Here you are in a new place, new language … there was not a whole lot of migration from Latin America to the United States. Miami, which was the first place we wound up because of proximity, there were certain Cubans who owned vacation homes in Miami, the people that were wealthy enough to have second homes. My family was not one of them. I had no prior experience about coming to Miami or the United States.

Miami was very, very American back then. South Beach was mostly a Jewish retirement community. They’d come down from New York and return after Passover. I know this because I used to work in the Royal Palm Hotel in the kosher restaurant. I got the drift of the flow of what happened every year

What happened in 1963, my family was given the option to relocate. It was like, “You can’t stay here because there’s not enough jobs for the influx of Cubans that are coming in.” This is when Kennedy was still alive and before the embargo.

Where did you move? We picked New Jersey. What I experienced there was a bit of isolation. The Latin community did not exist there, not even what it was today. There’s a lot of Cubans and Puerto Ricans there now, but not back in 1963.

We got there right before Kennedy was assassinated. In school, I noticed that all the kids were in little groups. The Italians hung together, the Polish, Jewish … some of the blacks, but they were mainly in Newark. It was basically the Latinos, Irish, Germans … but it reflected how the little groups gathered in school, that was a reflection of the neighborhood. It was little pockets of each cultural group in blocks. One block would be mostly Italians, and another block would be mostly Jewish, and so on.

Kennedy gets shot and it was the worst holiday season, from Thanksgiving on to Christmas and New Year’s Eve. It was awful. And then the Beatles happened, February 1964. The very next day, all the kids went from combing our hair back like pompadours, like Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, to combing our hair forward.

And then you knew. We became a tribe. Everybody was like, “You’re into the Beatles? So am I.” And we had this thing in common. Music became the common denominator. And now everyone wanted to talk to me and I wanted to talk to everybody. We were exchanging ideas and the songs. “Did you hear this new song? Did you hear this new band? The Rolling Stones. They’re cool.” All of a sudden, music became the gateway to the new social network that we had in school.

When did you start playing music yourself? I was dabbling in music, as were most kids at that time. There was music in schools. It wasn’t mandatory, but it was a cool hang. If you really want to hang with everyone else, join the marching band. But it wasn’t rock & roll. It was standards. And I struggled with it since it was basically brass instruments and I was an overweight kid and I didn’t have much breath.

We were poor, so my parents could only afford to get my brother and I one of anything. If we wanted some roller skates, we’d get a pair and we had to share them. So when it came time to get a guitar, we did the same thing. We bought a Sears catalog Old Kraftsman acoustic guitar. That became our instrument.

All I could do was mimic what I saw on TV because I wasn’t getting any lessons. My parents couldn’t afford them. So it was just mimicking, opening my ears. Nobody knew how to tune an instrument back then. It wasn’t like today where we have these little tuners we just click onto guitars. I spent over a decade being out of tune, even playing in clubs.

Who were some of your biggest influences back then? At first, I was playing for all the wrong reasons … and I say that because there was no bigger chick magnet than playing music. I saw the Beatles and I was like, “I want that adulation from the females.” I was not getting it for so many reasons. I was fat and Latino. They just didn’t understand. “Why are you here? What are you guys doing here?” [ Laughs. ]

One thing that I found through the years about racism is that racism is just somebody who has no understanding or perception of what the other human being is all about. At an early age, I understood that. “You know what? Wait until you get to know me. I’m looking forward to getting to know you.” For all my life, I really had practiced that, about me or me towards people of other cultures or religions.

When did music start to seem like a viable career for you? [ Big laugh ] I’ll let you know when that happens! “A viable career!” C’mon!

I think music is a calling, but it’s also a dream and dreams can be crazy. And music as a career is different than music as a fan. Every great musician, or even any musician, they get into music at one point because they are fans. There’s a certain connection. It’s a vibratory experience to make music, to listen to music. I hear songs that instantly place me in a certain mood, make me happy, make me dance, whatever. They all have their own vibration.

To flash forward a bit, you were in L.A. when you encountered Quiet Riot for the first time in the late Seventies. How did you find yourself there? I tried New York before I went to L.A. and it was a little bit harsh to survive there. The weather is much more suited for survival in Los Angeles. That’s why I wound up in L.A. I kept running out of money. On one of my initial attempts, I think my second attempt in 1977, I saw Quiet Riot at the Starwood in L.A.

I was completely impressed. They came off as an arena band. They had an arena attitude and the whole package. The songs were not as great as they would have been for a band that goes into the studio with producers and the arrangements get polished. Then you’re ready to be heard by the masses, not just the local kids.

I bumped into [lead singer] Kevin DuBrow when he got off the stage. I went, “Hey, man. I really dig what you guys are doing. Just keep doing what you’re doing and I think you guys are going to make it.”

Then I left L.A. and wound up playing lounges in New Jersey with my brother, the Howard Johnson lounges. This is 1977 and early 1978, up and down Route 80. I was trying to get money to move back to L.A. And so I did that and spent maybe six months there, just putting everything away. When I felt I had enough money, I went back and gave it another try.

A week before I was going to come, I get a call from Kevin DuBrow. He says, “Hey, man. We’re looking for a bass player. Everyone says we should give you a call.” I said, “That’s great. I’m going to be in L.A. next week.” I went down to an audition, got the gig, and I started playing with them.

Tell me about first seeing Randy Rhoads play guitar. My first impression of Randy Rhoads was something that captivated the local fans. By that, Quiet Riot, even though they had an arena persona, it was one built around the Seventies Sunset Strip image. It was glam rock, glitter rock. It was the same scene that the Runaways came out of. It was Sunset Strip glitter rock, which was the London glitter look, but with a suntan, so it had a little healthier look to it. If you can imagine Ziggy Stardust with a suntan, it was a little like that.

I saw that and I could connect with it. Even before I left Florida, I was really heavily into the whole glam-rock scene. I saw Bowie perform in Florida in 1972. As a matter of fact, the opening band was Frankie Banali’s band, which is how I met him. We met the following day at the local hangout, the Flying Machine. I introduced myself and went, “Hey, man, I love your band, man, especially your drummer.” He goes, “Oh, thanks. I’m the drummer.” Then we started playing together. It was my [22nd] birthday, November 18th, 1972.

Getting back to the whole L.A. scene, I thought they just really stood out. Watching Randy perform with Quiet Riot during that period, and there’s plenty of videos on YouTube, it was like he was overqualified for being in that band. Growing up as a classically trained musician, he could not bring that side of his playing in a glitter-rock band. It just didn’t make any sense, sonically, with the arrangements of the songs, so he just stuck to what the Quiet Riot songs were all about.

It wasn’t until I joined the band and learned about Randy … And then I started teaching at his mom’s school. He was in the room teaching [another class] next to me, and I’d hear him playing things he’d never play at rehearsal. Our rehearsal was just Quiet Riot music, that was it. He wouldn’t come in and play classical music. I didn’t know he could play classical music until I heard him at his mom’s school.

That’s basically what he brought to Ozzy. I recall having a conversation with him when I joined the Blizzard of Ozz about how the whole thing came about. When he played with the Blizzard of Ozz band, I couldn’t believe it was the same guy. It was so non-Quiet Riot. To me, that’s how you create something brand new. You don’t bring your past into your future. You create a vision of what you want your future to be like and you move that forward.

Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads are obviously two of the best guitar players of all time. It’s amazing that they grew out of the exact same scene at the exact same time. Yeah. And I would throw [Dokken’s] George Lynch into the mix, too. George is really respected by a lot of guitar players and musicians, but he doesn’t seem to have that popularity X factor that Randy and, of course, Eddie have coming out of that same scene. These were guys that created something new, something completely different.

Why did Quiet Riot flame out by the end of the Seventies? I played with the Randy Rhoads version of Quiet Riot from 1978 to 1979. I don’t even think we considered ourselves heavy metal. We left that to Black Sabbath and Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. We were just glam rock, which later on became known as “hair metal” in the Eighties. But to us, it was all about Mott the Hoople, Elton John, Queen, Bowie, and Marc Bolan and stuff like that.

But we were becoming dinosaurs [due to the rise of punk]. Randy was just turning 22 or 23 and they were calling us a dinosaur. It was every single band, every single musician. A lot of bands that in the Eighties became MTV darlings, we were dinosaurs four or five years prior to that. The record company said, “You guys will never make it. You’re done.”

But that’s all I knew how to do. Trust me. I tried. I cut my hair short and started playing with some guys, but we just sounded like a bunch of hard rock guys trying to be New Wave. [ Laughs ] It just didn’t work.

If you move to L.A. like I did, and many others, you are basically burning the ship. There’s no turning back. By “burning the ship,” I mean you land somewhere, you burn the ship, and there’s no going back to where you came from.

I personally went through a lot of experiences that actually prepared me for the future. It was kind of like your own personal pandemic lockdown. We were not doing a whole lot, but we were conditioning ourselves for better things to come. At that moment, we couldn’t see that far, but we had no other choice other than to keep moving and keep getting better at what we’re doing.

Tell me about what it was like to join Ozzy’s band and suddenly be a part of this enormous thing. Before that, I went through my lowest material level. I was sleeping in Kevin DuBrow’s apartment. I was playing with him during the weekends whenever his band DuBrow booked gigs. DuBrow is kind of like the missing link between the Randy Rhoads Quiet Riot and the Metal Health Quiet Riot. Most of the songs that were recorded on on Metal Health were songs I’d do in DuBrow with Kevin because he wrote a lot of that stuff during that period.

Songs like “Thunderbird,” he wrote that when Randy left. I used to play that song live with him. And “Slick Black Cadillac” was the only one left over from the Randy days that was recorded for the Metal Health record. And “Let’s Get Crazy” and “Love’s a Bitch” were DuBrow songs that he wrote during that period.

That’s what I mean by improving yourself, preparing yourself, keeping the faith, knowing that opportunity will come at some point.

So, I was on the floor. I had a spiritual epiphany. And I’m saying this because this is the series of events. This is how it happened. I do not believe my life would have been the same without these events coming into play. I surrendered my life to a creator, to a power higher than me. I made peace with God that I was going to keep trying. And if I never made it, that’s fine. My relationship with God was stronger than anything else.

And within a few days, I got the call to join Ozzy. At the time, I was playing in a band called Angel in addition to DuBrow. I was pleased even though I was still sleeping on the floor and we didn’t have a record deal. But I liked the guys and I liked the hang. Here I am, in a cool band. My first call to join Ozzy was from Sharon. I declined. The next day, Ozzy calls. By then, I was ready to say yes. That got my attention. I said, “I’ll come down tomorrow.”

How did you feel about being credited on Diary of a Madman when you didn’t play on the album? Did that feel weird? I’ll never forget looking at the sleeve of that record and going to [drummer] Tommy Aldridge, “We’re going to spend the rest of our lives explaining to people that we didn’t play on this record.” [ Laughs ] It was awful, but it was like, “I didn’t play on this.”

You did play on Speak of the Devil. It must have been fun playing on all those old Sabbath songs. That was really an interesting one and it has a real interesting background. I think the genesis of that record has a lot of nooks and crannies. Someone in that organization, either management or Jet Records, got wind that Black Sabbath was going to release a live album.

Back then, there was a real rivalry between Black Sabbath and Ozzy. This time, it was more of a business rivalry. And trust me, every single call that was made, I had no control over it. I was just the bass player that was living on the floor, “Rudy from Cuba.” When I saw my name in print for the very first time in Circus magazine, Ozzy had just done an interview. I had just joined the band and he didn’t even know my last name. He said, “We got Tommy Aldridge on drums, Randy Rhoads and Rudy from Cuba.” [ Laughs. ]

That’s fine with me, but I’m pointing out that I was as green as they came. I was there with no résumé. I was there because Randy Rhoads came to Ozzy and Sharon and was like, “Listen, I know the guy you’re looking for is Rudy.” That’s the only person in L.A. that he knew he could trust. The qualifications for joining the band: “Not to be a bad influence on Ozzy with his drinking or doing drugs.”

Again, I had no résumé. They trusted Randy. I had never done anything. And here I am, from sleeping on the floor, I had the audition that night, I’m living with Sharon and Ozzy and her dad [Don Arden] in this huge mansion in Beverly Hills. [ Laughs. ]

How did it feel to be onstage at these basketball arenas, playing these incredible songs with Ozzy and Randy, and watching the crowd go nuts? Everything got so fast. There’s a certain thing about being in L.A. and you’re struggling, things are very slow. Once you get on that fast lane that you’re traveling on with a band like Ozzy on its way to the top, especially in the United States, oh, my God … It was like going at a speed as fast as the Concorde.

I would call Kevin every week and I would say, “Oh, what’s new?” He’d go, “Oh, nothing. So what’s new with you?” I would be telling him about all the gigs and this and that and he’d go, “I hate you.” [ Laughs.]

Do you have good memories of the last Randy show in Knoxville, Tennessee? Of course. Wonderful memories. I have wonderful memories of every show I did with them. It was such a blessing. The only reason I left the band was, let’s face it, Randy wasn’t there anymore.

Going back on the road just a couple of weeks after he died must have felt weird. Within 10 days, we were back on the road. We were actually attending services for Randy and Rachel Youngblood and then going back to audition and practice with whoever was being considered for the guitar spot.

I didn’t have time. … Nobody had time to mourn or to get closure. It took me decades to get some sort of closure.

Why did you leave the group? I just couldn’t see myself staying past the end of the tour we had already scheduled. I couldn’t see it and it felt like an impossibility because nobody could replace Randy. How could we continue without Randy? To me, he’s the other part of the component. I saw Randy and Ozzy as being Ozzy. With nothing negative to say about Tommy, when you look at the material we were playing onstage, it was a lot of compositions by [bassist] Bob Daisley, of course, and [drummer] Lee Kerslake. But they weren’t in the band anymore. What was carrying Ozzy was Randy and Ozzy.

Once Randy wasn’t with us anymore — and this is in addition to the horrible fact of his tragic death — you could carry on, but it was never going to be the same. That’s what I knew. When I came in, I knew that band. I experienced Ozzy with Tommy Aldridge. And all of a sudden, it wasn’t that anymore. My joy of playing music live in front of an audience eroded, quickly. By the time we played Madison Square Garden, which was about a week after we resumed touring, I just cried the whole show. I look out at the audience it was a wake for Randy. There were posters like “Randy We Miss You. God Bless You.”

I’d look at Ozzy and think, “What an incredible courage to be able to sing through all of this.” I know he was suffering and feeling his own pain. And so was Sharon and so was Tommy. But the only way I knew how to deal with it at that time was to run away from it. I didn’t have the tools that I have now to deal with grief. The only way I could deal was to move on.

How did you wind up back in the new incarnation of Quiet Riot? I got a call from Kevin during the last break I had from Ozzy before we recorded Speak of the Devil. He goes, “Hey, we’re here in the studio and we’re going to record ‘Thunderbird.’ Do you want to come down and record that as a tribute to Randy?” I said, “Yeah, of course.”

I brought in my spare bass and I plugged it in. Of course, I used to play that song with him in DuBrow. This time, the lineup was [guitarist] Carlos Cavazo and Frankie Banali.

We cut the song and it went by really fast because I already knew it from previously playing it with Kevin. They said, “Hey, do you remember ‘Slick Black Cadillac?'” I said, “Yeah, let me go over it a couple of times.”

We tracked it, and before I knew it, we had recorded four or five songs that wound up on the Metal Health record. Just being in the room with Frankie Banali, who I had been playing with, off and on, for 10 years, almost to the day, in different bands all over the United States, and playing with Kevin, my former Quiet Riot bandmate and roommate, and Carlos who I knew from the scene in L.A, there was definitely a comfort, an emotional refuge that I felt.

That stuck with me. Then I went back that weekend to start rehearsing for the Speak of the Devil album. We only had five days rehearsal and then we did it live at the Ritz over two nights. Again, that air of loss still permeated. I said, “You know what? I gotta move on.” That’s when I made the decision to join the Metal Health version of Quiet Riot, just so I could find the joy of playing music again.

Again, I went into the complete unknown. There was no promise of anything. There was no big advance. I had some money because I had been saving my money from when I went on tour with Ozzy. But the other guys, they didn’t have money to put gas in their cars to go to the studio.

During the making of the record, I can’t imagine you thought you were making a record that would hit Number One, knock the Police out of the top spot of the chart, and make you guys pop stars. No. [ Laughs ] It was so, so far away from that. That’s the case for everybody. We were the first metal record to reach Number One on Billboard . It’s hard to visualize something that never happened before.

What did it feel like to see your record at Number One on the chart for the first time? [ Laughs ] It felt like a runner that’s running up a mountain and is so busy huffing and puffing that you don’t lift your head to look at the beautiful scenery of what you reach. [ Laughs ] it was a lot of hard work to get us there. It was more of, “Finally we’re here!” It wasn’t like we knew for sure it would go to Number One. It was more like a relief, like “Finally! We’re here! Number One!” Because it wasn’t just a long, steady climb, but long and hard.

By the time we were on the top, we were exhausted. And then comes the, “What now? What are we doing now?” “Now we’re going to headline? Start all over again!” [ Laughs. ]

Then the labels saw the money in this and they head to the Sunset Strip and start signing every band that looks and sounds like Quiet Riot. It’s part of the business. Through history, that’s happened with every genre. But like the Beatles, Quiet Riot were turned down by every label in L.A. It was the same with the Beatles in England. I’m not comparing us to the Beatles. I’m comparing our failures to the Beatles’ failures, not our successes. And what happens is, it becomes a formula.

Tell me about making Condition Critical. Why do you think it didn’t do better? It’s very simple. We had climbed so many hills by that point. It was like, “OK, now we’re going to headline, so that’s another hill to climb because we are no headliners.” By that time they literally dragged us off the road. The record company said, “ Metal Health was released over a year ago. We need new product.”

It was the music industry talking. “We need to release new product by the third quarter, so we can get those late-summer, Christmas sales.” We had to cancel a tour and there was an opening band, the Headpins, that got really upset. They just joined the tour and committed whatever financial resources to that, but the record company told us we had to go in the studio. We had to cancel and they were not happy campers, but we had no control.

They were like, “You guys are going in the studio next week to do pre-production. Oh, my God, what do we do now?” The worst time you can be creative is when you’re in survival mode. We’re looking at this mammoth of a record, sales-wise.

And Metal Health was one song from the Randy Rhoads era; two songs that Carlos Cavazo brought in from his own band, “Metal Health” and “Don’t Wanna Let You Go” were done before I even went in to play on “Thunderbird.” And then “Cum On Feel the Noize” was added on. There were five or six DuBrow songs and the rest was added in by Carlos Cavazo.

Every single day when we were in a city, we’d go to a radio station to promote the album and the tour. Many of the DJs told us we should record [Slade’s] “Mama Weer All Crazee Now.” It was something we put on the back burner. “Yeah, OK, sure.” When it came to make that record, we were pretty much under the gun. And so doing another Slade song wasn’t such a bad idea, at the time. [ Laughs ] And we thought the stations would play it because they told us to record it.

We started working on songs and “Condition Critical” was one of the first songs. There were two or three songs that were actually … It’s not that I would consider them “rejects” from Metal Health , but they were songs that were around during Metal Health , but they weren’t picked for the album. Also, there’s a song called “Winners Take All” that for some business reason beyond my control, Randy Rhoads wasn’t allowed to be credited on the album as the co-writer of the song. It was originally called “Teenage Anthem” and Kevin re-wrote and updated it so it could be on Condition Critical.

One of the reviews for Condition Critical was just two words: “ Condition Terminal. “ [ Huge laugh ] Well, at least we got mentioned! [ Laughs ] Oh, my God. I love that.

How did you feel by the mid-to-late Eighties when every band on MTV was seemingly a Quiet Riot clone? That’s really an interesting observation, but the way I looked at it is, most of the bands that followed us also came from the Seventies. We all had the same influences, musically and visually. I don’t think that Nikki Sixx would have been any different in the Seventies. He may have been more outrageous later on because he could be afford to be outrageous. It was like, “Now, I have enough money that I can set myself on fire properly rather than going to a 99-cent store and buying cheap alcohol and putting on my leather pants and lighting myself up at the Whisky a Go Go.”

But the vision that we all had was basically the same, and it carried on from the Seventies. It was like, “Wow, look at these guys. They’re new, they’re fresh.” No, we were doing that a decade before on the Sunset Strip.

Why did you leave the band before the third record? I gave them notice right before that I was going to leave the band. There were certain things that happened during the making of Condition Critical . To be honest with you, it’s just personal things, just personality conflicts. I don’t want to mention them. It doesn’t have to do with Frankie, but with Kevin, and he’s no longer with us. I just don’t want … I love him and I love all those guys. Quiet Riot will always be the home that we all built. We were there and we created that. I don’t want anyone to think that’s the way that I remember Quiet Riot, with any baggage.

But at the time, it became a situation because of certain personality conflicts, I was beginning to lose the joy of playing again. I again left for for the complete unknown, which turned out to be Whitesnake. [ Laughs. ]

Tell me about joining Whitesnake. It’s another situation where you join right after a huge album was created and people think you played on it. None of us play on the record. Adrian Vandenberg played the guitar solo on “Here I Go Again.” Any other contributions of the four guys you see in the music videos, like Tommy Aldridge, [guitarist] Vivian Campbell, Adrian, and myself, we were just acting in the video as the band. [ Laugh ] We did get to record Slip of the Tongue.

Ironically, Whitesnake was the support band for Quiet Riot in 1984. I had given the band notice that I was leaving at the end of the tour. Somehow, Coverdale heard that that even though it wasn’t public. The last night of the tour, Quiet Riot threw a giant going away party for Whitesnake. David gives me a big hug goodbye and whispers in my ear, “Very soon we’re going to be playing together.”

I had no idea what he meant, but I thought it would be cool. And so I finished my commitments, I’m home, Tommy Aldridge starts talking about putting a band together. And then we get a call from Whitesnake management to come in and talk about possibilities. We go in and they offer us to join the band. But I had experienced certain conflicts with the members of Whitesnake, just hanging with them on off-days and hearing about whatever situation was going on. I didn’t feel like it was good for me to leave one situation and join another situation.

A couple of years later, it was just David. Nobody else was left. I said, “OK, it’s safe to go in the waters now.” And I’m glad I I did.

You guys opened for Mötley Crüe on that tour. Yeah. We were special guests on the Girls, Girls, Girls tour. There were some interesting dynamics between Mötley Crüe and Whitesnake. Mötley, of course, were being Mötley. But Whitesnake had been around the block a few times by then. We were veterans and we understood the great situation that we found ourselves in, playing in the band. Not only were we in a great situation, but they were really great people. It’s a band with a wonderful legacy.

How was the experience of making Slip of the Tongue ? That was a little … uh … let me find the right word … We started out as the same band with Vivian Campbell in it. And then certain things happened, not having to do much with music or the musicians in the band, but we have families and we have wives and girlfriends. Sometimes there are certain things that happen like in shows like Dynasty and Dallas . It has nothing to do with the music. Nothing to do with the business. It’s just this backstage soap opera going on. That can get in the way of the band and the music and the future of the band. And one day, Vivian wasn’t there anymore.

Where did thing go from there? There was a string of uncertainty from that point on. We had a dynamic that really worked onstage and offstage. All of a sudden, Vivian wasn’t there. We used to share the same side of the stage. I was used to having him there. We learned how to play off of each other. We would EQ our amplifiers to play off our personal sound. There was this harmony that we had as performers and as musicians. Then it just wasn’t there anymore. What is going to replace that?

And then I was like, “If Vivian can be gone today, I can be gone tomorrow.” You don’t feel the same security, no matter what your contribution has been to the success of the band. The future was very uncertain.

To make a record under that emotional stress is not the most desirable situation. Having said that, we all poured our hearts into the record and I’m very proud of the way it came out. I really am.

And Steve Vai joined the band. There was a mutual decision to have him join. Before he was contacted to come in, he already embarked on his solo career. He was in the middle of recording Passion and Warfare , his own album. It was kind of like, “Hmm, do I put my solo career on the back burner? I’m on a roll here.” I’m glad he decided to join us on the tour. And he recorded all the guitars on the Slip of the Tongue album.

That gave me a sense of balance or harmony, having Steve Vai there. I really admire him musically, and as a human being. But during the making of the record and my own contribution, which is laying down, along with Tommy Aldridge, the basic tracks, there was a lot of questions up in the air as far as what was going to happen. We carried on without Vivian and then Adrian got injured when he was laying down his own rhythm tracks. There was a point where the album had come to a stop.

How did you feel in the Nineties after Nirvana hit and guys like you were looked at differently? Was that a difficult time? Of course it was. That’s because I didn’t know any better. I didn’t have the perception that I have today, the understanding of the order of things. It can even be applied to nature. There’s always change going on. It’s universal. It applies to the planets in the solar system and the music industry. That’s due to changing tastes in music and the powers that be that control that. It’s about about different generations. My generation when I was a teenager said, “No, I don’t want to listen to jazz or classical. I want to listen to the Rolling Stones.”

Miles Davis was going, “Are you crazy? Look at what I’m doing.” But these changes come for better or worse. But as I looked at these changes, I didn’t understand that. I felt it was never going to end. Now I know differently, but there were some growing pains on my journey to where I am now.

How did you wind up back in Quiet Riot in 1997? That’s a really good question. I got a call from Frankie Banali. He said, “Listen, would you like to come down? We’re doing an after-show party for Marilyn Manson at some club called the Dragonfly on Melrose in Hollywood.” I was drinking at the time and so I said to Frankie, “Is there an open bar?” He says, “Yeah, there’s food and an open bar.” I said, “I’ll be there.” [ Laughs.]

I had a couple of drinks. I brought my wife with me, we hung out, and it was a party. I think Marilyn Manson brought us in as a joke. [ Laughs ] But we didn’t take it as a joke. I took it like, “I’m going to jam.” It was never supposed to be my continuation of playing with Quiet Riot. But at the end of their set, they asked me to come up and play “Cum On Feel the Noize” and “Metal Health.” Chuck Wright gave me his bass because he was playing with them at that time, as he is today. I played those two songs and the next day, we’re all back together again. [ Laughs. ]

It’s sort of an interesting time. You guys were suddenly a group with a legacy as opposed to a washed-up Eighties band.  It’s all perception. It really is perception. My own perception from being there is what when we got back in 1997, there was a sense of, “Maybe, maybe if we put the original band together, maybe we can take this somewhere, not necessarily to the same heights as we had 10 years before, but definitely out of the clubs.”

I gotta be honest with you, I’m not a big fan of playing clubs. It’s like high school. You go to high school, you graduate, you move on. You don’t go back to high school. You might visit high school once in a while for a reunion. But you do not get re-educated in high school. You move on. You’re past that.

How was it to be back? Did you guys get along well? Did you fall back to the old routine? [ Laughs ] I laugh because I’ve been trying to avoid the subject. For you and anyone reading this, I gotta be honest. When you look at any band, it’s a journey. My perspective is of my own personal journey. Everybody had a perspective in that band. We’re all in the same bus, but once we get off that bus, we go our different ways and do different things. Then we get back in the bus again. It’s like a marriage. It is like a family you pick, but it’s not like a marriage. When you’re married, no matter where you go, you’re going to be there with your significant other.

But in 1997, I felt it was very important for me to find out … I used to think, “What if?” That’s something I don’t do anymore because I’ve learned about that. I left Quiet Riot in 1985. And by 1987, I was in Whitesnake and we were bigger than Quiet Riot ever was. It was a global band. Quiet Riot wasn’t really a global band since we spent so much time in the United States. But there was a burning question, “What if I had stayed in the band and tried to make things work out? What would have happened?”

As I keep saying, Quiet Riot is the home. I was there in one incarnation with Randy Rhoads and then another with Metal Health . We all carried a heavy load to build that band. That’s home to me, it really is, of all the bands.

But when you came back, things were very different. Yes. All of a sudden, we were playing dives, really bad clubs. It’s a circuit. It’s 1997. Grunge was still king. These bands, the hair bands, are all playing these divey clubs in the Midwest and all that. I’m going, “Wow, I just got off the road with Whitesnake in 1994 and we were still headlining festivals.” But I said, “You know what? I have to live through this. I have to come to a closure with this.”

And so I quit drinking because the situation was making me a very angry drunk. And for my family and myself, I quit drinking.

And so I go through this process with the band. And little by little, things started looking up. VH1 did a Behind the Music on Quiet Riot. All of a sudden, Eighties bands started happening. There were all these little tours like Rock Never Stops.

All of a sudden, these guys were selling out sheds. If you put Poison and Warrant and Quiet Riot and maybe some version of Ratt, people are going to show up. They’re going to hear these songs and have a good time. But we never seemed to get out of this thing of not headlining or co-headlining. We were stuck right there.

And what caused me to leave the band was that old conflict started rearing its ugly head again. I kept saying, “Nope, I’m not going to leave. I’ve gotta see this through. I have to get closure.” Eventually, inevitably, the band imploded. One day, we said, “No, we cannot carry on like this. Not anymore.” That was the end of it.

When they re-formed the next year, Chuck Wright was back on bass. Yeah. I think Alex [Grossi] was on guitar too. But nevertheless, I look through the years and I look back … My God, I was at Frankie’s death bed last year. His wife Regina made it possible during the pandemic that I was able to go and see him in the hospital and hold his hand hours before he passed away. We just remained family. It’s a 48-year friendship.

That’s beautiful. Yeah. All my memories, really, if I look back at being with the band, it was my home. I felt at home there, just like everyone else. I’d say the same thing about the Randy Rhoads version.

Did you speak with Kevin in the final years of his life? No. But you know what? That doesn’t change anything. It could have been resolved with a phone call. That never happened, unfortunately. What’s important is how I feel and how I carry on with my memory of the band.

How do you feel about them carrying on now without Frankie? I think it’s very important for the memory and legacy of the band. We worked really hard to put that band on top. It wasn’t just the guys in the band. We had so many allies along the way since everyone wants to be part of a winning situation. There were a lot of people in the industry that were rooting for us on the way out. They were like, “Wait a minute. What we used to call ‘dinosaurs,’ maybe that’s happening now.” [ Laughs. ]

How did you wind up joining Dio in 2004? Quiet Riot imploded in 2003. And then in 2004, I get a phone call while I was touring with Yngwie Malmsteen. It wasn’t really an audition. It was to record on Ronnie James Dio’s record Master of the Moon . I was in the middle of a tour and I just couldn’t walk away from Yngwie. And so I told them that I would love to join the band once I was done with my commitments. By then, they had finished the record. And I joined the band and played with him from 2008 until he passed away.

Was it a positive experience? It’s interesting. By that point, I was like, “I’ve been at this since 1981. I’ve done it all. I’ve seen it all.” I was wrong. Ronnie just showed me a whole different level of humanity and musicianship. What a joy.

We were neighbors. I lived 15 minutes away from him. When we were off the road, I’d go to his house two or three days a week to hang out and listen to new music that he was writing and just watch some soccer on TV.

I think he had one of the best rock voices in history. He had so much power and range. Yes. And he knew how to sing rock. He knew how to deliver the message. And what a great messenger. His lyrics were just exemplary.

I only met him once, but he was the nicest guy. I’ll tell you a little story. When I first joined the band, we did the only American tour, in 2004. Everything else we did after that was Europe, South America, and Asia. We’re in the bus every night. And after the show, the tour manager would come in and say, “Ronnie, we have some guests here that want to say hello.” He’d go, “I’m tired. … OK, I’ll do it.”

He’d ask for a beer, but I never saw him drunk and I never saw him finish the pint he had every night. He had it for a prop, I guess. And so he’d go to whoever was backstage. “Hey, Bill, how are you doing? How is your cousin Peter?” He’s naming all these people that aren’t even there that are relatives of this person. I was like, “He must really know that person.”

After doing that for over a week, every single night, I was like, “Wait a minute — this guy remembers every single guy’s name and their relatives. There must be a trick to this. He must be writing down notes, or something.” But no. He had that memory. He would memorize because people really mattered to Ronnie. He cared about everyone he met.

You met him? If you could see him right now and you had talked about the Yankees, he would talk to you about them again. He was amazing.

What’s also amazing is, you’re one of the few people to be a part of the Ozzy camp at one point in your life and then part of the Dio camp. As you know, they were big rivals at one point. Yes. I think Bob Daisley was with them both also.

They are two of the greats. Oh, yeah, but very different singers. They are equally grand and unique in their own way.

How was your experience with Geoff Tate’s Queensrÿche? It was interesting. I got a call from Geoff’s label. This is at the moment that the Queensrÿche brand was up for grabs. This person said to me, “Listen, Geoff wants to know if you want to do this tour with him. They need to establish the fact that he’s the songwriter, main contributor, and voice of Queensrÿche.” Somehow or someway, there was going to be a trial and a negotiation. A judge was going to define the outcome. I said, “Yeah, sure.”

At the moment, I wasn’t doing anything. And it gave me the opportunity to go out for the very first time with my brother playing guitar. I thought, “Wow, this is great. This is really cool. It’s something I’ve never done before.”

We went out also as Queensrÿche. Now, if you ask me if I played in Queensrÿche, no. I didn’t; the other guys have the name. And they opened up for Quiet Riot in 1983 when they just did the “Queen of the Reich” EP. I’ve known them ever since. I have respect for them. They accomplished a lot and worked very hard for it. I’d never take credit for having played in Queensrÿche. It wasn’t really Geoff Tate solo. He was trying to create a new Queensrÿche for legal purposes.

Once it came to an end and it was defined that there was another Queensrÿche and Geoff had certain other rights to certain things that were none of my business and I didn’t really know the details, that was really the end of my playing with Geoff.

How did the Guess Who period start? Another plus of playing with Queensrÿche is that at one point, we had [singer] Sass Jordan playing the part of Mary because the tour was all about performing Operation: Mindcrime live. There’s the character of Mary from the album and Sass Jordan came on tour. I had known her before. But we weren’t as close prior to that tour as we became traveling on the same bus and talking and hanging out and talking about spirituality.

She’s married to Derek Sharp, who has been the singer in the Guess Who for about 15 years or more. When it came time that the Guess Who’s Jim Kale, the founding bassist, decided to retire, they asked me if I wanted to join.

At first, it was like testing the waters to see if I’ll fit. I’d never seen that version of the band. And so I came down and did some shows with them. I felt really at home with them as people. And this is music I grew up with. It’s the soundtrack of my life. It’s been incredibly fulfilling and really a blessing.

They have so many great songs. You can do a whole set that’s nothing but hits. Exactly. But it’s very important for all the new members … Garry Peterson is the only remaining founding member, our drummer. For everyone else, we want to contribute new contributions to the legacy, the ever-growing legacy of the band.

You were on tour when the pandemic hit. The last show that we did officially was Epcot Center in Orlando. We were doing a residency. We played there for five days and did three shows a day. The first day, it was packed. The last show, it was about four people. And they officially shut it down at 9 p.m. that night. We thought it would only be for a few months, and here we are. [ Laughs. ]

Are there tour dates booked in the future? We have a bunch from 2020 that have been transferred over to 2021. It seems like we’ll start picking it up in May or June.

Are you vaccinated? Oh, yeah. I’ve been vaccinated for about two weeks.

Great. You feeling good? Feeling ready to go? Yeah. I get flu vaccines every year. This, to me, is just another vaccine in my body, re-arranging my DNA. [ Laughs. ]

Do you speak to the current members of Quiet Riot? Yeah. I speak two or three times a week with Regina, Frankie’s wife. I stay in touch with them. Frankie would have done that for me would I have left. He would have made sure that my wife Rebecca was OK. Frankie, especially after he was diagnosed, he made sure all Quiet Riot business was in order. Even though I’m not still playing with them, there’s still a lot of Quiet Riot business with recordings and record deals and certain royalties and such that we’re still receiving. And Frankie made sure that everything was taken care of.

You’ve seen lots of people close to you die, like Randy Rhoads, Dio, Kevin DuBrow, Frankie Banali. What has that taught you about grief and loss? When Randy passed away nearly 40 years ago, I had no clue. I had never experienced anything like that. I was like, “How do I deal with this?” You have to deal with it, but I had no tools. And then through life, I take it upon myself to learn and become a better human being. You know what actually gave me closure? It was writing the book Off the Rails . I was not expecting closure when I sat down to write the book. I was able to go through what happened day by day. I kept a diary, so I had dates and events that happened and so on.

I was able to get closure because I kept Randy alive in my head during the writing of that book until the last chapter that he was alive, which was 18. And then Chapter 19 on is dealing with the accident and the aftermath of how we all dealt with it, or how it changed us, basically. I don’t think we were trying to deal with it. We were re-shaped by the events and how we dealt with the new shapes we were becoming.

It wasn’t until later that my perception of loss became based on the importance of maintaining the legacy of what my dear bandmates helped create. Once I’m gone, there’s one less person than was actually there. Let’s say I get onstage and play certain songs certain ways, I’m the guy that was there to record the song and tour the song, or that played it a thousand times. I am connected to just about everyone that has been part of the Quiet Riot legacy. That’s what’s important. We have a responsibility, the ones left behind, to keep that legacy alive for as long as you can.

Keeping that legacy alive is a big responsibility. Basically, I’m here and it is my responsibility to bring my perspective and love and dedication that I have for Quiet Riot, and really all the great bands and musicians that I played with. That’s because at the end of the day, it’s not about how many records you sold. It’s not about how many gigs you’ve done. It’s about the people in your life that you shared those moments with.

Do you ever think about retirement? Retirement? We play for a living. I don’t work. I play. I get paid for traveling and all the crap that goes with that when I’m not onstage. Once I’m onstage, I’m doing that for free.

If you’re still onstage in your eighties, that’s a victory? Eighty isn’t that far away, but it sounds so … eighty. I don’t know. But you know what? There are artists like Keith Richards that are still out there and doing it so well. So who knows? I can’t predict that.

Well, thanks for taking the time to talk. It was really emotional hearing parts of this. It’s funny you say that. When you look at the music we created, and especially the videos, “emotional” isn’t a word you associate with it. But coming from you, it has a whole different meaning to it. You’re watching it from a completely different perspective, from a different degree and angle than we did. And you’re right. There’s so much emotion attached to it.

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Rudy Sarzo Reflects on a Storied Rock Career, from Quiet Riot to Whitesnake, and the Timeless Influence of Randy Rhoads

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Interview by: Mark Lacey

Photos: Myglobalmind

Rudy Sarzo discusses how Randy Rhodes inspired his journey with Quiet Riot, and why he continues to return home to perform their music

When history looks back on rock ‘n roll, there will be few greater servants than Rudy Sarzo. Aside from his lengthy, but intermittent, tenure with Quiet Riot, across a 40-year period, he has performed and recorded with some of the biggest rock bands in the world. From Ozzy Osbourne, Whitesnake, Dio, Geoff Tate, Blue Oyster Cult .. the list goes on. Despite his advancing years, recently turning 73 years of age, he remains a youthful, and energised force of nature, and 100% committed to commemorating the legacy of his fallen Quiet Riot comrades in the twilight of his career.

“My inspiration when I first joined Quiet Riot in 1978, was Randy Rhodes. He’s the single most inspiring musician I’ve ever played with. Randy was one of those pure musicians. We never talked about religion, politics, or who was going out with who. It was all about concentrating on how we were going to write the next song to get the attention of the record company so we can get a record deal”

MGM: The last time many fans will have seen you in the UK was Donnington 1990, when you played with Whitesnake. What are your memories of that?

Rudy: It was really interesting because at the very beginning of that 1990 tour for the ‘Slip of the Tongue’ album, David announced to the band that he was going to take a long break. At the time, he was still happily married with Tawny, and so, I looked at every single show as an experience that I would probably never have again. It was just very bittersweet. It’s the whole thing about playing like there’s no tomorrow, because eventually there was no tomorrow for Whitesnake, as far as I was concerned. So, every show was completely meaningful; it was like the Superbowl every single night.

MGM: You initially joined Whitesnake after the 1987 album, alongside Tommy Aldridge, Adrian Vandenberg and Steve Vai, who’d taken over from John Sykes, and you became a completely new line-up for Whitesnake at that time. How do you remember it?

Rudy: Whitesnake were the special guest to Quiet Riot in 1984 when we toured America and headlined. I got to be very familiar with the band members, and I was a fan long before we ever toured together. I got a really good glimpse at the dynamics that were going on within the band. There was a bit of conflict, so I became aware of that, and I was going through my own conflict. I had given Quiet Riot notice that I was leaving at the end of the tour, but we kept it quiet. And then the very last night of the tour, we threw a going away party for Whitesnake and David gives me a hug as we’re going our separate ways. He whispers in my ear, “We’re going to be playing together very soon”. And I go, wow, how does he know that I’m leaving the band, because we didn’t make it public. So, I leave Quiet Riot, and within a couple of weeks, Tommy Aldridge and I got together to start a new band, and we got a call from Whitesnake’s management. We met with them and they offered us the rhythm section spot. I knew about the conflicts within the band, so I declined. Tommy also declined. It wasn’t until a couple of years later in 1987 that we got the phone call to come and be part of the video for ‘Still of the Night’. By then it was just David left in the band, so I felt, OK, this is going to be safe to go in now. It was blissful. It was an incredibly positive experience, and one of my favourite memories of everything that I’ve done so far, being in that band.

MGM: Changing the subject briefly, I discovered that you have the longest name in rock music circles – and one destined to put you on a path to rock stardom. Rodolfo Maximiliano Sarzo Lavieille Grande Ruiz Payret y Chaumont. Is that correct?

Rudy: Yes, but that’s the only thing that they have correct on Wikipedia. Thank God, I changed it to Rudy Sarzo before the Internet, otherwise my email address would be that long.

MGM: Your professional career started out back in the mid-seventies. Aside from Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath, rock music was still in its early days, so who did you look to for guidance and inspiration at that time?

Rudy: I got inspired mostly by non-bass players. I’m looking at their passion and their love for music. That’s what I sought. Musicians that were great performers, passionate performers, but also musically very complex and dense, with a lot of knowledge about theory, harmony, and so on. Even musicians like Jimi Hendrix; I don’t think he was formerly trained as a musician, but he had such an incredible imagination for music. What an incredible writer. He could be the greatest electric blues player and then all of a sudden write something like ‘Angel’, and it just really inspired me. But what really sealed the deal for me, as my source of inspiration when I first joined Quiet Riot in 1978, was Randy Rhodes. And he’s the single most inspiring musician I’ve ever played with. Randy was the only musician that I’ve ever played with that was born into a musical academia family. His mum and dad were music professors. They built a music school called Musonia, which still stands in Los Angeles, not far from where I live. His family has kept it going. Randy was one of those pure musicians. We never talked about religion, politics, or who was going out with who. It was all about concentrating on how we were going to write the next song to get the attention of the record company so we can get a record deal. At one point, I started teaching at his mum’s school, and that’s when I first heard him play classical guitar, and I was not even aware that he could play like that. We had songs in our set where he would do classical picking on an electric, but that’s a whole different technique to actually playing a classical piece. I was blown away. I asked him, how come you don’t play like that in Quiet Riot? And he says, well, that’s not the direction that we’re going. That was in ’78, around the time when new wave and punk started to get the attention of the record companies. And we were then termed dinosaurs with the type of music we were doing. Randy would teach 8 hours a day and I would be there for a few hours with him, and then we would go straight to rehearsal, rehearse for 2 hours, and then the next day do it all over again. That was our life. I would say 80% of the day that we were awake, we had an instrument in our hands and we were playing. That’s what we did. Randy kept to that. When I started playing with him and Ozzy, he got the Guitar Player magazine ‘Best New Guitar Player’. He received the award on December 30th 1981. That was the first show of the ‘Diary of a Madman’ tour, and it was then he realised that people were listening and paying attention to what he was doing. He felt that he had a responsibility to improve and get even better than he was. Those are the things that I live by every single day. If I wasn’t doing this interview, I’d be watching YouTube and learning something new about music. How to take those twelve notes that we have to the next level; my own personal level.

MGM: You’ve played with so many amazing musicians and different bands in your career, from Whitesnake, Dio, Ozzy, Geoff Tate, Blue Oyster Cult, and many others, including obviously Quiet Riot. Has your career taken the path that you expected over that sort of 40-50 years? And did it feel planned?

Rudy: It was actually better than I could ever imagine. I wrote a book about Randy, and in it, of course, I had to include myself because I had to let the reader know who I was and why am I so appreciative of everything that Randy has done for me. Not only Randy, but also Sharon and Ozzy; they don’t get enough credit, at least in America they don’t; for what they’ve done, not only for music, but for the musicians that Ozzy has had in his band. Sharon recently just got ‘cancelled’ here in the United States, and I got to tell you, I’m Cuban, and I was even more Cuban than I am right now, 40 years ago when I first joined the band. There were never racist comments towards me. I lived with them. I moved into their home, and I was living in the same tour bus, and we would get off the road and I would go back to living with them. They’ve had other ethnic musicians in the band, such as Robert Trujillo, Mike Inez, Randy Castillo, and I might be missing one or two. This whole thing about Sharon being racist is the biggest pile of bullshit I ever heard. There was a totally different motivation behind that. I am very grateful and I really appreciate what people have done for me in my career. Without them, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

MGM: Throughout your tenure with Quiet Riot, you’re recognised as the longest-serving member of the band, across four different time periods. What is it that keeps drawing you back to Quiet Riot?

Rudy: I’ve actually only left the band once. In 1979, Randy left to join Ozzy, and the band ceased to exist. Kevin put out his own band, DuBrow, and it was like a revolving door of musicians, and I was one of them. I was playing in another band, too, but also, I was living with Kevin. Then Randy died, and I lost the complete joy of making music, and I needed to go back to my original Quiet Riot consciousness. When I say that, what I’m actually saying is Ozzy and Tommy had been rock stars for 15 years, at least, before I joined Blizzard of Oz. Randy and I were the only ones starting out our career. So, that mindset is what we share, that consciousness. And I needed to go back to that. I needed to go back to the people that I grew up playing with, and there were two. There was Kevin Dubro, who I already played with in Quiet Riot, then lived with him, and played with him in DuBrow. Then there was Frankie Banali, and we went back to 1972. That’s when we first met, and started playing together locally in Florida, then disco happened. We left Florida, and we toured the whole Midwest, and then we moved to LA in ‘77. We ran out of money; we went separate ways. And I came back to LA in ‘78, and that’s when I joined Quiet Riot. Four years later, Frankie’s playing in DuBrow, and I get a phone call while I was still a member of Ozzy from Kevin saying, “Hey, there’s a possible record deal. How would you like to come down to the studio and record ‘Thunderbird’”. That was the song that he wrote for Randy, when Randy left Quiet Riot. And then I started playing that song with him in DuBrow, so I knew it. I go in the studio, and there is Frankie already. I’m like, this is incredible. It’s taken us ten years to actually get to this point of the two of us recording a song. It went by really quickly. Carlos Cavazo, who I’d never met before, was the guitar player. But what really hit home with me was playing with Kevin and Frankie again; the people that I’d been growing up making music with ….. going through all those trials and tribulations of trying to get a record deal. By the time I left that session, I had recorded ‘Thunderbird’, ‘Slick Black Cadillac’, which was the only song that made it from the Randy Rhodes era to the ‘Mental Health’ record. There’s a song written by Kevin, and then two DuBrow songs, ‘Love’s a bitch’ and ‘Let’s get crazy’. So, I already recorded four songs, but I was still a member of Ozzy. And then I went over a couple of days later to record ‘Speak of the Devil’, which were the Ozzy / Black Sabbath re-recordings. But the thought of reconnecting with Frankie and Kevin just kept lingering. By the time I finished that session with Ozzy, I went back to LA and I made the toughest decision I’ve ever made, which was to leave one of the biggest bands in the world, and the people who treated me great for the complete unknown. It was renamed Quiet Riot from DuBrow once I rejoined the band, and then we signed the record deal. I was going to get the joy of making music again, and to me, that’s what drives me. If I don’t have joy in what I’m doing, I can’t go on.

MGM: That junction sparked the creation of those two iconic albums; ‘Mental health’, and then ‘Condition critical’. Those two albums still play a major part in your live set, and still resonate with fans 40 years later. Why do you think they have lasted the test of time so well?

Rudy: One of the things that I have to give credit to is the band, and the consciousness of the band. The only compromise that was made was, in order to get the record deal, Kevin had to agree to sing ‘Come on Feel the Noize’. That was it, Kevin wanted to keep it as original as possible.

MGM: Quiet Riot have seen many line-up changes throughout the years. Your current line-up includes yourself, Alex Grossi, Johnny Kelly and Jizzy Pearl. Whilst all of you have had varying tenures with Quiet Riot throughout your history, the four of you have never all played together on the same record. Also, Johnny hasn’t recorded with Quiet Riot at all, although he and Alex both played together in Dizzy Reed’s ‘Hookers & Blow’ band. What is it about this line-up that makes it quintessentially Quiet Riot rather than just four musicians? And how would you describe the sound and feel of the band in 2024?

Rudy: I have a very simple answer for that . We were talking earlier about me leaving only once. The band broke up in ‘79 when Randy left. Then I came back for ‘Mental Health’. I left the band in ‘85 because it became toxic. Then we reunited in ‘97 and the band imploded. I can tell you exactly the moment in time that it happened. In 2003 …. 21 years ago, it imploded. So, then I joined Dio, and slowly, Frankie and Kevin started playing together again. They never asked me back. I guess they figured I was playing in Dio and I wasn’t interested, but they never did. And then recently, right before Frankie passed away, he expressed his wishes that I would return to the band, which is why I’m here. This is exactly the same reason why I returned to what became known as the Mental Health version of Quiet Riot after Randy died, because I needed to go home. It was the best way that I could celebrate the memory of Randy Rhodes, because everything that he had revealed, internalised and realised as a musician had roots in what we were playing in Quiet Riot. Not exactly the musical direction, but the integrity of who Randy was as a musician.

In 2003-2004, when the band reformed with Kevin and Frankie, Alex Grossi has been the guitar player ever since. He was groomed by Kevin in the whole Quiet Riot belief system. And then Frankie joined the band, and then Kevin passes away, so Frankie brought in Jizzy Pearl. So, you got two members groomed and approved by members of the band. Before Frankie passed away, he asked Johnny Kelly to substitute him. Frankie never really formally said, “I’m quitting playing”, because that’s what kept Frankie alive, going “I can beat this. I can beat this”. But unfortunately, he passed away. When I rejoined in 2021, we only did about three shows in 2021, but we picked it up in 2022. By the time I rejoined this version of the band, these were musicians who had already been handpicked by the original previous members. So, I could not ask for a better bunch of guys to be on stage with than Alex, Jizzy and Johnny, if the other members are not with us. These guys are incredible to go on stage with.

MGM: During your recent shows in Canada, you paid tribute to those former members Randy, Kevin, and Frankie during the song ‘Thunderbird’, which was a really touching moment. The band are finally returning to the UK to play two special shows on 9 th and 10 th March. The band first performed here in 1983, supporting Judas Priest, and returned for some headline shows in 1984, but the only other Quiet Riot show performed in the UK was a one-off date in 2016, when you weren’t performing with the band.

Rudy: The first time I performed in the UK was actually Port Vale, 1981 with Ozzy. That year we came back; we started the pre-production and the touring for the ‘Diary of A Madman’ record. We did some shows with the band Girl opening up for us in England. And then I came back with Quiet Riot in November / December of ’83 with Judas Priest. That was the first time that Quiet Riot, the Mental Health version, actually got to play there. Then we came back and we did our own headline tour in ‘84. And I believe that’s the last time that I actually did play the UK with Quiet Riot. It’s 40 years ago.

MGM: After you finish these dates in the UK, you’ve got many other dates in the US, but what else does the future hold for you and the band? Do you think there might be opportunities for you to record anything with this line-up, either in the studio or live?

Rudy: We did release one new song last year that has a little bit of a history because it was the last release, including Kevin DuBrow and the song is called ‘I Can’t Hold On’. But besides that, we haven’t. The issue with us releasing new material is that our set list is like all the favourites. And if we start removing favourites, people are going to come to the show expecting them to be performed and they’re not there. We go on the road every weekend. And this is the first time ever in my career that I actually have a purpose besides rocking out and banging my head. My purpose as a band member, and this is something that we all agree on, is to celebrate the legacy of the band; the musical legacy and the memory of Frankie Bonali, Kevin DeBrow, and Randy Rhodes. That’s my purpose. And that’s what gets me out of bed. To do that gladly. And every single show is a celebration.

MGM: You and Glenn Hughes are a similar age, and both are in the twilight of your career. When MGM interviewed Glenn last year, he was showing no signs of slowing down. No one can play and tour forever, but how much longer do you think that you can still be out on the road and doing this at the level that you want to?

Rudy: Recently I’ve been studying quantum physics and I came to learn that according to quantum physicists, there’s no time, there’s no space. It’s all continuous. It’s in the now. So, I live in the now. I don’t really think about the past as much, but I don’t really look too far ahead because now is all I have got. And right now, I’m just getting started, from my perspective. I wrote this in my book, and while I was still a starving musician sleeping on Kevin Dubrow’s spare bedroom floor, I made peace with God. And my agreement was that as long as my fingers kept moving, I was going to keep playing. And they’re still moving, so I keep playing.

https://www.quietriot.band/

Quiet Riot will be performing in the UK:

Saturday 9 th March: HRH AOR, Great Yarmouth

Sunday 10 th March: O2 Islington Academy, London

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His grooves helped give ’80s rock/metal hits some swing

• Updated: May. 20, 2022, 7:50 a.m. |
• Published: May. 19, 2022, 3:53 p.m.

Rudy Sarzo performs in 2014.(Photo by Jeff Daly/Invision/AP) Jeff Daly/Invision/AP

• Matt Wake | [email protected]

Rudy Sarzo calls it “being greasy.” Playing hard and heavy rock & roll in a way that still swings. It’s mostly a lost art among modern rock bands. But one of the hallmarks of Sarzo’s bass-guitar playing, which has made him one of the most in-demand rock bassists of his time. Quiet Riot. Ozzy Osbourne. Whitesnake. Dio. Yngwie Malmsteen. Blue Oyster Cult. The Guess Who. And beyond.

In 2022, Sarzo has returned home musically. He’s back with Quiet Riot, a root to the Los Angeles band’s classic days, including 1983 album “Metal Health,” considered the first heavy-metal LP to ever top the Billboard 200 album chart. The band’s kerranging cover of 1973 Slade glam nugget “Cum On Feel The Noize” was a radio and MTV smash.

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Quiet Riot’s success was hard-earned. The band paid their Hollywood dues for years, including a late ‘70s to early ‘80s period when hard-rock/metal was considered completely passe. The blockbuster success of “Metal Health” opened doors for Motley Crue, Ratt and many other L.A. rockers who’d soon become stars during the flamboyant fun ‘80s.

Powered by frontman Kevin DuBrow’s in-your-face vocals and persona, Quiet Riot’s other hits included the “Metal Health” title track and “Mama Weer All Crazee Now” another Slade cover. (Sarzo is quick to point out Chuck Wright played bass on the song “Metal Health” and another song from that album, “Don’t Wanna Let You Go.”)

In addition to Quiet Riot recordings, music videos and a performance at 1983 US Festival, a mega concert that helped metal go mainstream in America, Sarzo turned up in several other high-profile ways that decade. As bassist with Osbourne, Sarzo can be heard on the live albums “Speak of the Devil” from 1982 and 1987′s “Tribute.” The latter, released in honor of guitar genius Randy Rhoads. Rhoads’ classically-influenced metal chops played a huge role in Osbourne becoming a solo superstar, after he’d parted ways with metal progenitors Black Sabbath. Rhoads and Sarzo had been friends and bandmates for years. Both were members of a pre-fame Quiet Riot, before Osbourne shrewdly hired them. Rhoads first, then Sarzo.

Sarzo also can be seen as part of the band in those iconic Whitesnake videos, including “Still of the Night” and “Here I Go Again.” Although he didn’t play on Whitesnake’s breakthrough self-titled 1987 album, in addition to appearing in those hit vids, he played bass on the tour supporting the LP. Sarzo also played on David Coverdale and co.’s hit 1989 follow-up LP “Slip of the Tongue,” as well as that Whitesnake tour, which featured Steve Vai and Adrian Vandenberg on guitar.

If it sounds like Sarzo’s career is book-worthy, well, he’s done that too. The tome “Off the Rails” chronicled his Osbourne experiences, including the tragic 1982 plane crash that killed Rhoads at age 25, extinguishing a generational talent on par with Eddie Van Halen.

Sarzo appears in the new documentary “Randy Rhoads: Reflections of a Guitar Icon.” He’s been in other music docs too, including 2016′s “Hired Gun” and 2014′s “Quiet Riot: Well Now You’re Here, There’s No Way Back.”

With DuDrow, Banali and Rhoads all deceased, Sarzo’s return to Quiet Riot gives rock/ metal fans a glimpse now into what made this band special. QR’s current lineup also boasts singer Jizzy Pearl (known for late ‘80s/early ‘90s cult-faves Love/Hate), longtime guitarist Alex Grossi (also Bang Tango, Steven Adler) and drummer Johnny Kelly (Danzig, Type O Negative).

Before returning to the road with Quiet Riot for a run of shows with Skid Row, Winger and Warrant, Sarzo checked in for a video call from his Los Angeles-area home. He looked fit as a cheetah. In conversation, Sarzo struck a spiritual, passionate tone. Below are edited excerpts.

Rudy, coming back to Quiet Riot and getting ready for this tour, did you have to relearn any of the material? Or is that music just embedded in your DNA?

It’s such a multi-level question. The challenge was actually - and here’s the tricky part - I am not the same bass player. I am not the same musician. I’m not the same human being. It’s kind of like taking a photo 40 years ago and trying to mimic the expression that you have on your face for the rest of your life. No, you don’t. Every time you go into a studio, that’s a snapshot of that moment. And then in my case, 40 years later, you’re playing the same songs again. [Laughs]

I was a member of The Guess Who right before I came back to Quiet Riot and before that I had played with Blue Oyster Cult. Which is not necessarily known as ‘80s metal. I’ve played in so many genres. So all of that is part of my DNA now. Now, if I would’ve been a lifer, meaning a guy that’s only been in one band, that kind of musical path, what happens is you really don’t have as many of those outside influences, musically.

But going back to the energy and physicality involved in what we do (in Quiet Riot), I work out. I get on the treadmill, I work on my cardio and all of that just to be able to sustain a high-level show that 40 years ago you would go out and on tour, get on a tour bus and do it every night. And that was your workout. You didn’t have to go to the gym. So the more shows we do, the more we become that band that people were familiar with from watching us going on tour for months and sometimes a year and a half.

What’s different about Quiet Riot is Quiet Riot was the first band - and I’m going back to 1978 when I first joined with Randy Rhoads in the band - that every single individual, we all had the same musical tastes. We all liked the same bands. We were all influenced by the same bands. And that is a bit different. That’s what really creates a cohesive collective sound, style and a philosophy for the band I like to call a consciousness.

What were those common influences in Quiet Riot back when you originally joined?

The consciousness of Quiet Riot was purely ‘70s-based. whether it was Mott the Hoople or of course Humble Pie. You’ve got Bowie. You’ve got Queen. It was glam rock, which that consciousness wasn’t just Quiet Riot. If you look at Motley Crue, if you look at Ratt, that’s what was going on at that time on the Sunset Strip. Everybody does it a little bit different, but we all basically drank from the same well. Now, there was a Quiet Riot consciousness that started out before I joined the band, and then I joined and it’s like, “Yeah, I’m a perfect fit because we have the same consciousness.”

And so then Randy leaves the band and the band stops being Quiet Riot. It became known as DuBrow, because it was basically Kevin’s solo band. But what happened was back in ‘79, ‘80, which is that DuBrow period leading it up to ‘81, the last time that I was playing with Kevin, because I was a member of DuDrow and living with him right before I joined Ozzy. But in between that, I did other things. One of them was a band with Frankie Banali.

What I’m trying to get at is, that period was very, very tough for heavy rock musicians to survive, because new wave and punk was the flavor of the day. It was even hard to get club gigs. The clubs just wanted to book punk and new wave. And you really had to go out of town in order to play rock music.

But we were diehard. It was like, “No, this is not me.” You’d give it a go because you’ve got to eat, but then it’s like, you know, “I’m not really a new wave artist or a punk artist,” even though I appreciate the music. But you are what you are.

So going back to the whole essence of what Quiet Riot is to me, I am completely 100 percent Quiet Riot. As a matter of fact, every time I joined other bands, I always bring - in the past - a percentage of Quiet Riot with me to it. So to be back in Quiet Riot, my home group, my consciousness, my family, it’s just amazing.

What’s your secret to making heavy music still swing?

I’ll explain it to you the best I can. I’m Cuban. The first music that I was exposed to was Latin music. Latin music is not metronomic. It’s not on the beat. It swings. Especially traditional Latin music, Cuban, Afro Cuban. So for me to play rock, and this is what’s really interesting, I’ve been playing metal wrong or rock & roll wrong, according to the rules of rock & roll, the whole time until I started playing with The Guess Who.

Now, The Guess Who patterned themselves after the sound of The Beatles just like that generation did. All right on the beat. That’s where you get that da-da-da-da, that drive, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4. That is the British sound. Motown doesn’t have that. Motown has syncopation. It’s a whole different thing. R&B has the influence of the blues ‚but then to me it has a lot of Caribbean influence. It’s jazzier. And in jazz there’s a big African influence, especially with Dizzy Gillespie, when he started incorporating percussion.

So taking all these elements, I grew up with all of this and that’s the way that I feel when I play. And now I’ve become more aware of it. Especially at the time that I was playing with The Guess Who because they brought it up. It was the first time that somebody brought that up to me, and I thought, “Wow, this is really interesting.” But then again, it was the first time that I was actually playing in a band that was rooted in that generation. So the basslines are very designed to follow that sound that The Beatles made popular on the radio. That’s the way you had to sound, in order to get on the radio.

Something I’ve always wondered about Randy Rhoads. If you listen to his playing on the first two Quiet Riot albums (released in Japan only), his playing sounds a lot like (David Bowie guitarist) Mick Ronson. But the next time we hear Randy, on the first two Ozzy albums, Randy’s technique has become much more advanced. Was that magic always in his playing and Quiet Riot just wasn’t the right outlet for that style? How did that happen? How did Randy go from that to that ?

Well yeah, I even asked Randy about it. Because that was my impression when I first heard the (1980) “Blizzard of Ozz” record. Like, “What happened? What’s going on here?” [Laughs] I used to teach at his family’s (music) school, Musonia, and that’s the first time I ever heard Randy playing classical guitar. I didn’t even know he owned a classical guitar. Because we were very focused when it came to anything having to do with Quiet Riot. It was rehearsals or writing music to bring to the labels to see if we could get a record deal. And at that time, we were basically chasing our tails, by trying to please the record company, taking their advice: You guys should write a song like this one or this one that’s on the Billboard charts. Even though we knew what we liked, we were trying anything possible to break in so we could be ourselves later on.

So Randy went through that. I mean, he had so much deeper musical knowledge and capabilities, because he was schooled. He had a proper musical training - composition and reading and all that – because his family owned a music school. That was natural for him. So when he joined Ozzy, he asked Ozzy, “What do you want me to write?” And Ozzy said, “Just be yourself.” That’s when the real Randy showed up in the studio and started composing all those songs.

With Quiet Riot, Randy was teaching about eight hours a day and then he would come over and rehearse with us for about an hour and then go home and do it again the next day. So there wasn’t room for jamming and experimenting. It was pretty much focused on we’ve got to write a hit song, or something commercial that gets on the radio. And when you start approaching music like that, you’re not going to be digging in too deep. And you’re going to be second guessing a lot and playing it safe also.

As a singer, most people think of Kevin DuBrow as this Steve Marriott-influenced belter. Which he was. But what’s something else more nuanced about Kevin’s vocals you think some people might’ve missed?

You know, that is such a great question. I think Kevin made sure that everybody knew where he was at vocally by putting it on record. So anything you really want to know about Kevin, listen to the music. It’s all there. And he was not shy about it.

Look, I played with three different Kevin DuBrows. I played with Kevin the ringmaster that showcased Randy Rhoads every night on stage. And it makes sense. You’ve got Randy Rhoads is the band, that’s it. It really wasn’t about Kevin. It was the essence of Quiet Riot featuring Randy Rhoads.

OK, so then Randy leaves to join Ozzy. So now Kevin, that’s when he really developed his songwriting and singing-as-a-performer skills, because it was all about Kevin now, as far as his focus. And there was not even a Quiet Riot at the time. It was just DuBrow, with people coming in and out of the band, which is the reason why he named it DuBrow.

And then you have the “Metal Health” version of the band. And that’s very different. Because, again, it becomes a band. So you’ve got Kevin in a rock band, but this time with a number-one album, and that was the tricky part for anybody to survive that. Because there’s no orientation.

Once you sign a record deal, they don’t take your into a room, and give you orientation or play you a video, that tells you like, this is what you need to watch out for. Don’t let this happen to you. [Laughs] And I think they should. I think that the record industry in general did a very poor job in warning musicians about the pitfalls of being a celebrity.

What’s your most vivid memory from Quiet Riot playing the US Festival in 1983? After that festival, metal’s popularity really took off.

Our experience at the US Festival was completely different from any of the other bands that were playing there. The way that we got added on, like, two nights before the show happened was because we were on tour with the Scorpions, who were doing a very short warm-up touring leading up to the US Festival. They had been in the studio, and wanted to get their act together again before they played as one of the co-headliners. It was Van Halen, and then Scorpions right underneath them. So it was a very important slot.

And so the very last show of that tour was in Denver, where Barry Fey was the promoter of that show. He was also in charge of the lineup of the musicians for the US Festival. So they had just moved (former Eagles and James Gang guitarist/singer) Joe Walsh from that day, Metal Day, to the following day. And there was an opening. And (Fey) sees us (in Denver) and comes in running into a dressing room, right as soon as we finish playing. And he says, “Listen guys, I’ve got this show the US Festival in a couple of days, can you guys make it?” And I had no idea what the US festival was. I was too busy touring with Quiet Riot. And even if I did I couldn’t afford to go anyways, at the time.

So we say yes. And we didn’t have a crew. Our crew was driving our truck to the next gig. Back then you didn’t have backline companies in every market that could supply a backline where you come in and play. Back in the day, you had to like take a truck and bring all your stuff from show to show. And you had a couple of guys to drive the truck and be members of the crew, which were usually family or friends at that level. If there was anything S.I.R. (Studio Instrument Rentals) provided in Los Angeles, being the only backline company at the time 40 years ago, everything else was taken by the other (US Festival) bands, because they have booked that backline way in advance. We were just added.

So we scrambled to borrow gear from friends and relatives and so on. And so yeah, we got some gear up on stage. But my bass rig did not work at all, whatsoever. So fortunately, the sound company that was running the show was the same sound company that I worked with when I was touring with Ozzy, which was a few months before that. So they came in and they helped me out, put my bass sound through monitors. And of course, it doesn’t sound like it’s coming out of a bass amp, so that wasn’t like my desirable bass tone. But hey, we survived the gig. We did it. And we flew right back out again.

We didn’t see anybody (other bands play at US Festival). We came in the night before. We did the show the following morning. We were the opening band, so we had to get out and leave our hotel at 10 o’clock because we didn’t have a helicopter. We have to go through the crowd in our van to get there. All of that. No road crew, nothing. Just plug in, play and then get out. Go back out through the crowd to go on the road, for the dates that you have booked. So that was pretty much my memory of that. Outside of that when I watch the video, yeah, it was an amazing opportunity to do that. But there were so many components, so many challenges that we’re facing, just because we were added two days before.

Amazing. The music on the Ozzy Osbourne live album “Tribute” has always been so spellbinding to me. How did it feel making this music every night, being in the middle of it?

Well, I listened to that record, and I know where that music came from. That’s a set that we would do during the “Blizzard of Ozz” tour which ended a I believe in August or September of 1981. Yeah, September. Because the following month, October, we took one day off, and then we went back out on the road again, because “Diary (of a Madman,” Osbourne’s 1981 sophomore album) was already recorded when (drummer) Tommy Aldridge and I joined the band.

There was only maybe two or three degrees of difference in every show. It was always at that level. That could have been any show anywhere, anytime, with Randy in the band. Some people claim that’s Cleveland.

The music is taken from Westwood One or King Biscuit Flower Hour, there were two major broadcasts, radio shows, but they would go out and bring a mobile unit and record the band and then play that syndicated through all the radio stations. So we did three of those with Randy. We did another one with Brad Gillis (Night Ranger guitarist who played in Osbourne’s band after Rhoads’ death) later on. But with Randy, we did three. Only two aired. OK, we do the first one in Cleveland. That was broadcast. Some people claim that’s the recording. If that’s Cleveland, that’s us like two weeks after we have been together. If it’s from Montreal, that did not get a broadcast because Ozzy did not like the way it sounded for whatever reason. And that we recorded that show in Market Square in Indianapolis, which had a theater and an arena. And in the arena (R&B group) The Jacksons were playing that night and we were playing in the theater. And that got recorded and broadcast too. So I’m not really sure. Some people claim that they take the tracks and they put them together in Pro Tools and compare … You know what? I’ve got a life. Let’s just move on and whatever it is, it is.

Well, the music on there sounds magical.

It is magical, even for me to hear it back. Because one thing is being on stage as part of this ensemble, of course you feel it, you hear. You’re part of this. But another thing is, it’s 40 or 41 years later, I’m working out in my little room and I’m listening to this music and then I hear Randy play his solos and I go, “My God he doesn’t miss a note.” Every single note is like starbursts, a creation, like The Big Bang, all the sequence of all these notes. It was amazing. Unbelievable. But I know the next level that Randy went to … Because let’s say if that is Cleveland, well, that’s about a year before he passed away. A year later he was beyond that level.

What did you enjoy most about your time in Whitesnake?

Well, it was interesting because Whitesnake was a support band for Quiet Riot in 1984. So we knew each other, we knew what we were all about and I was a huge fan of Whitesnake. I mean, pretty much the original version of the band is three guys from Deep Purple. You can’t go wrong with that. [Laughs]

So when I joined the band, I just asked David (Coverdale, Whitesnake frontman), “What do you want me to do?” And he just said, “Be yourself.” Within a blues-based rock context, that was pretty much me being Rudy from Quiet Riot. But again it was a whole different energy, different frequency. But still it was me vibrating for me fully and completely.

The “Metal Health” album known for the big hits, the homeruns. What are your favorite deep cuts off that album?

You know, they’re all so close to me, because I would say most of the material with the exception of “Metal Health” and “Don’t Wanna Let You Go,” those songs were brought into Quiet Riot before it was even Quiet Riot, it was still DuBrow, by (post-Rhoads guitarist in Quiet Riot) Carlos Cavazo, from his old band. The original title of “Metal Health” was “No More Booze.” [Sings, to “Metal Health” chorus melody ] “No more booze!” And what happened was Randy I, we’re on a break from Ozzy and always as soon as we get to the airport and landed, let’s go get Kevin. Let’s go to the Rainbow and keep him up to date with what’s going on. Because at the time, there was no social media. So things were really slow and gloomy as far as heavy rock in L.A. Meanwhile, this new wave of metal was happening, and we were a part of that with Ozzy. You had Motorhead, you had Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Saxon, all these guys and many more. So it was like let’s go hang with Kevin and give him some support. Because we knew how much he was struggling. So we were basically reporting this was going on. Stick with what you’re doing because eventually something is going to come this way.

And so we told him, “Wow, you’re not gonna believe this. The fans in England are so crazy, that they go to the front of the stage, and they bang their heads on the stage.” They did. And so we were telling Kevin about that. Because a lot of punk made a transition into metal. There was a gray line of punk and metal going on. And so a lot of the punk, everything with the music was so fast, the speed of it. So, these guys used to take like “uppers” and go out to a concert and just be kids, I guess. And you know how it is when kids are just challenging each other, taking one to the next level. “OK, well then I’m going to bang my head on the stage and show you something cooler.” And then moshing came out of that later. But it was getting that energy out. So we’re telling Kevin about headbanging and then I guess he heard the song “No More Booze,” and he wasn’t much of a drinker back then. At all. So I guess he couldn’t connect with the booze thing, so he came up with (the “Metal Health” lyrics) “bang your head.”Anyway, so going back to those two songs – and then you have “Cum On Feel The Noize” being a Slade cover – everything else was from the DuBrow period or one song that made it from the Randy Rhoads era, which Kevin wrote, “Slick Black Cadillac.”

“Slick Black Cadillac,” that’s a good one.

Yeah! So I was very, very familiar with the music. And each song basically has a story, like say (the song), “Love’s a Bitch.” I’m living with Kevin, and he’s got this chord pattern, and just like we would do, he would ask me, “What do you think?” And I said, “Yeah, try [sings] ‘Love’s a bitch.’” I just go about my business. He writes a whole song around that and then we started playing that song during DuBrow, that was one of the songs that we played.

That (“Metal Health”) record for me came together really quickly. I went in to record one song, “Thunderbird,” Kevin wrote that song when Randy left to join Ozzy, and I had played that song in DuBrow. I had my bassline to that song and that’s what you hear on the record. So they go, “Wow, we’ve got time on the session here. Do you remember ‘Slick Black Cadillac’?” And I go over it a couple of times, and this time with Frankie playing drums, which I have been playing with him for 10 years prior to that! We came to L.A. together, so it was very familiar ,musically, rhythm section, all of that it, so it came together pretty quick. And by the time that I left that session, I had recorded at least four songs.

I was still a member of Ozzy when I did that. I left the next day. I went to New York to start working on “Speak of the Devil.” Then I came back (to Quiet Riot), when I officially joined the band and left Ozzy, I recorded about three more songs, one of them being “Cum On Feel The Noize.” And I believe “Breathless” was another one.

On this 2022 Quiet Riot tour, your back with the band doing these classic songs. What do you hope the people who come to these shows get from them?

That’s an interesting perception. Because for me, is not what they get, is what I’m capable of giving. Because they’re not gonna get anything unless we give as a band, we present something for them. And my mission, when I go on stage, or even when we have the conversation like this, is to actually celebrate the memory of Frankie Banali, Kevin DuBrow and Randy Rhoads. And to celebrate the musical legacy of Quiet Riot, what we were able to accomplish and touch people’s lives with our music and how they touched us. You know, it’s all collective. You can’t have the success Quiet Riot has experienced without a loving audience. We love the audience, the audience loves us back, which to me is the ultimate experience of being in a band. And you’ve really got to appreciate it and realize the blessing that it is to be able to do this, for so many reasons.

Quiet Riot will perform May 21 at Sand Mountain Amphitheater, address 700 S.M.P.A. Blvd. in Albertville, with Skid Row and Winger also on the bill. Showtime is 7 p.m. Tickets start at $40 plus fees via etix.com. Get a 50 percent discount by using the code “LIVE.” More info at quietriot.band and sandmountainamphitheater.com.

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