Best known for such late ’80s/early ’90s hard rock hits as “Heaven,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Cherry Pie,” Warrant has weathered many musical trends to continue rocking for more than 20 years. Though the band’s lineup has fluctuated over the years, and original front man Jani Lane (who had already been replaced by current singer Robert Mason) died last year, the band’s core lineup is back together and going strong. With a show tonight at Biketoberfest and tomorrow with Skid Row at The Forum Civic Center, founding guitarist Erik Turner talks to Wrestling with Pop Culture about hair metal, red wine and wrestling.
Warrant and Skid Row have done a few shows together. Seems like a good pairing.
If you like Skid Row, you’ll like Warrant and if you like Warrant, you’ll like Skid Row. So it’s a great package and a great night of ’80s rock ‘n’ roll.
Did the two bands play together very often in the ’80s and early ’90s?
You know, we didn’t. I can only remember doing a couple of shows with those guys in the late ’80s/early ’90s. But in the last few years, we’ve played quite a few shows with them and we play a handful of shows with them every year. And it always goes well. Back in July of this year, Skid Row and Warrant played at Fremont Street in Las Vegas and they had their largest crowd of the summer, over 15,000 people. That was a lot of fun.
You have a couple more shows scheduled with Skid Row this weekend, as well as a performance at Biketoberfest. What’s planned after that?
We’re starting to wind down our year. We’ve played about 45 shows this year, and it’s been all types of shows from large festivals with lots of other bands to casinos and state fairs. Last weekend, we played with Trixter and Firehouse and we’ve done ten or so shows with that package. We’ve played some shows with Winger, Dokken, L.A. Guns and on and on. It’s a real mixture of touring. We go out on weekends, then we go home. We don’t just grab three bands and go on tour for three months. It doesn’t work that way for us anymore. We like to come home during the week and go out and rock ‘n’ roll on the weekends.
I understand you have another project that keeps you busy during the week.
We all have side projects, but I’ve become interested in the wine business over the last few years. I live in Temecula, California and there are about 30 wineries down here. I’ve put out three wines through South Coast Winery and I released a wine in July called Warrant, I Saw Red. “I Saw Red” was a top ten hit single for Warrant and now it’s a cabernet. In the last couple of weeks I released a syrah called Erik Turner: Rocker Red. So I work on that during the week and we’re all writing songs for a new record hopefully to come out in June of 2013. So it’s wine and music for me, but everybody’s got different stuff going on.
We do some TV music placement, as well. There’s a show called Duck Dynasty and they played a little bit of our song “Dirty Jack” from our Born Again album on an episode last week. So we’re dabbling in that as well.
Warrant’s style of ’80s rock appeals to many of the same people who watch professional wrestling. You mentioned your music being used in TV shows, but have you ever done wrestlers’ entrance music or anything like that?
I’m not sure if any of our music’s been used in any wrestling events. I think I might have seen something with “Cherry Pie” and some girl wrestlers, but I’m not sure. But I see the shows and they’re huge, bombastic and exciting – it looks like a rock concert. On more than one occasion I’ve thought, “I’d love to be involved with wrestling.” It just seems like a great thing to be involved with. So if there was ever an opportunity for Warrant and wrestling to work together, we’d be all over it.
Your most recent album came out last year. How will the stuff you’re working on for next year’s album compare to that album?
Last year we released Rockaholic and we shot two videos for “Life’s a Song” and “Home”. I was actually excited to see “Home” on VH1 Classic when they do Now & Then, and it’s been played a few times on Palladia. We’re proud of that record and anybody that comes out to the shows this weekend will hear two or three new songs from Rockaholic. But we mostly play the stuff everybody’s familiar with from all the singles and videos we’ve released like “Down Boys,” “Heaven,” “Sometimes She Cries,” “I Saw Red,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “Cherry Pie” and some other deeper tracks from those records like “Mr. Rainmaker,” “Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich” and we’ll dabble into the Dog Eat Dog CD, as well. It’s a nice mixture of mostly the classic songs everybody knows us for, then we mix in some other familiar tracks and a few new ones. It’s a nice set of rock ‘n’ roll, in my opinion.
Will you be performing any of the stuff off next year’s album?
No, we’re not ready for that yet. Those songs are still in the development stages. Next year, as things start moving along, we’ll start testing some of the new songs on live audiences. There’s a song off of Rockaholic called “Sex Ain’t Love” that we started playing live a few months before the CD came out and it was going over really well live. So we kept on playing it and we still play it.