TESLA's HANNON Talks About New Guitarist DAVE RUDE

Jan Kruska of the American Chronicle recently conducted an interview with TESLA guitarist Frank Hannon. An excerpt from the chat follows:

American Chronicle: Your newest band member, guitarist Dave Rude, he's filling in some pretty big shoes and he's handling it quite well. How did the band hook up with Dave?

FRANK: TESLA was pretty much at a standstill because of the problems we were having with our other guitar player (Tommy Skeoch) I also have my own band, the FRANK HANNON BAND and was auditioning guitar players for that with the intention of hopefully finding a guy for TESLA at the same time. I was desperately searching, and I started looking on MySpace.com, Dave was actually on my MySpace page as a friend. He had a metal band out of San Francisco. I started looking at his page and checking out his music. I really dug his style. I immediately felt that he was perfect, so I e-mailed him and asked him if he wanted to do the FRANK HANNON BAND tour. He said he was definitely interested and so he came out on the road with me for three weeks. I was so excited and relieved because I knew, I knew he was perfect for TESLA.

American Chronicle: Frank, you and Brian Wheat were the two that started it all. How did you meet up with the other band members — Jeff, Troy, and your former guitarist Tommy Skeoch?

FRANK: Brian and I started playing together in high school, I was 15. We played at a lot of parties. There were a lot of bands around town and usually they were always looking for musicians and we saw Tommy. I actually pursued him for quite awhile. He really didn't want to play with us. He felt he was better than us, even back then (Frank chuckles). The singer we had at the time decided that he wanted to join a different band. There were these girls around town, you know fans, kind of like groupies but on a club scene level and they knew that our singer was going to quit before we even knew and so they had arranged to have Jeff Keith come sit in with us at a night club we were playing at the same night that our singer was quitting. They (the girls) asked me on a break if Jeff could sit in with us. Jeff had just won a talent contest on a local radio station singing with headphones on. He could hear the music and sang along, but the audience could only hear his voice, not the music. So, Jeff sat in with us and his microphone was feeding back really bad. The rest of the guys in the band were looking at me like, who is this guy? They thought he couldn't sing very well, but I was standing right next to him and I could hear him with my left ear and I was thinking man this guy is great! He's got that natural raspy voice we were looking for, he looks young. He looked just like us. So I fought with the band and the management to get Jeff in the band. About two weeks later they all realized he was going to be in the band, for good. Our other guitarist had a lot of jealousy towards Jeff and eventually it erupted in a big fight one night at a Holiday Inn and we fired the guitarist. By then, the band (then known as CITY KIDD) had started getting some pretty good recognition on a local level. The crowds were getting bigger. So, we called Tommy (Skeoch) and he agreed to play with us. Troy was the last member of the band to join. We had another drummer but he just wasn't powerful enough. Troy had been playing with the ERIK MARTIN BAND and we had been watching him, we felt he was a very powerful drummer. He was looking for a gig and he auditioned for us and that was it. At that time we were already writing our own songs and actively pursuing a record deal. I was just 19 when we finally recorded our first album after being signed by Geffen Records.

Read more at the American Chronicle.