Rock And Roll Forever - The Legacy of Kingdom Come
Los Angeles - 1987
By 1987, German-born singer Lenny Wolf had been in Los Angeles for four years, having most recently been the lead singer in a rock band called Stone Fury. “I decided to go a separate way (from my Stone Fury partner), we broke up. Of course, we wanted to go in different directions immediately. I wanted to get back to the rootsy kind of music, right? So, to make a long story short, we broke up. I was locking myself up in my room for two to three months writing songs, and then my manager went shopping with the tape.” Very soon, that tape lead to Wolf managing to secure a Development Deal with Polydor Records, who, along with Mercury Records, was a subsidiary of the Polygram Label. A&R man Derek Shulman, who had previously signed both Cinderella and Bon Jovi, gave Wolf a budget with which to put together a new band.
By the spring of 1987, Wolf was looking for musicians to help bring his new project to fruition. In the coming months, Wolf would audition dozens of guitarists and bassists in his search for the right band members and the right chemistry. Unlike most auditions where you had one song to make an impression, anyone looking to audition was given a cassette with four prospective songs to learn.
On May 27th, Pittsburgh-born guitarist Danny Stag and Ohio native, bassist JB Frank, showed up for their audition, having heard about the cattle call through a woman named Lucy Forbes who was running a musician referral service. Frank would later recall, “I was a big fan of Stone Fury's. When they said do you want to try out for the new Stone Fury, I said great, man! So I was real psyched! They asked me if I knew any blues guitarists, and I got to bring my best friend, Danny Stag down."
Stag would add, “I heard about this singer who was putting together a band. He was looking for a blues guitarist with a riffing oriented feel, and I immediately thought, ‘This is my gig. I am gonna get this job’.”
Stag and Frank came in together. Wolf, talking about his first impression of the guitarist, said, “ So when Danny came in I asked him to improvise a solo for the blues, ”What Love Can Be", and uh, once he played the solo for the blues, I knew that he is my man!"
Frank later said of the try-out, "I remember when we auditioned, I had an all-white Sunn Coliseum bass stack that I had just bought for like, $350, or something, in LA. I later learned that it had recently been stolen from the Beach Boys!” Stolen gear or not, the pair got the gig! The first pieces of the puzzle were in place.
Danny “Stag” Steigerwald had grown up in Western Pennsylvania. In the mid-seventies, he received a call from his younger brother, Paul, who told him to come check out a local jazz fusion band called Imajaz perform near his college at Kent State, in Ohio. Danny took his brother's advice, drove to Kent State, and immediately hit it off with the keyboard player from Imajaz, who had grown up near Akron, OH, named Johnny B Frank - or JB for short. Stag & Frank became friends, and within weeks, Frank had fired his own brother from the band, and replaced him with Stag.
Kingdom Come
In June of 1987, the band began an intense regimen of rehearsals at LA's "Missing Person's" rehearsal space, working eight hours a day, five or six days a week, for two full months. Under the watchful eye of legendary producer Bob Rock, whom the label had tapped to help Wolf produce, the songs came together. Eventually the band traveled north to Vancouver, British Columbia. Upon their arrival north of the border, two more weeks in a tiny 12x12 rehearsal space were needed before it was time to finally record their first LP, entering Vancouver's Little Mountain Studios, in August.
As Stag later recalled, "I think Bob was pleasantly surprised just how fast we worked. By the time we began recording, we were so prepared." Rock had put aside three days to record the drum tracks for the album, but Kottak finished them all in one day! "Almost everything you hear on the album was done by James in one take!"
Kottak himself once said, "He was just awesome and brought the best out of us all. And if we're being honest, he really produced the album. Of course, Lenny had a lot to say, but it was Bob who wound up making it all sound so special. There was a magic touch that Bob had which made that first album so good."
