“I was visiting family in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and my brother-in-law said, ‘You have to see this band.’ They were playing the lounge in this bowling alley called the Sunset Bowl. They weren’t signed, and I don't think many people knew about them.

“I was a little unsure, but I went to see them, and I was floored. I couldn’t believe it. They were so good – everything about them was tremendous. I told them that night, ‘I’m going to get you guys a deal. We’re going to do this.’

“I called up Tom Werman at Epic, and I said that I had something really special. ‘If you don’t get here by tomorrow night,’ I’m going to take them to RCA,’ I told him. He flew out, and he fell in love with them too. He offered them a deal, and within a month we were in pre-production.

“I wanted to capture what I heard live. I wanted it to be raw, straight-up and true to what the band was. We did it really fast. There was no reason to mess with what they were. The only thing was, by the time they did the second record, I was doing Draw The Line with Aerosmith, which took a year, so Tom ended up producing them on a few albums.”