Interview: Ron Wikso
Hardest Working Drummer
by Fergie Frederiksen


TONE: Where were you raised and when did you start playing music?

Ron: After being born in Dover, Delaware while my dad was in the Air Force, I was raised from age 3 in a town called Islip Terrace, which is on Long Island in the great state of New York! I started taking drum lessons when I was 7.

TONE: At what age did you start gigging?

Ron: I started messing around playing with other musicians in our basements by the time I was 11 or 12 and, if memory serves me correctly, I did my first official gigs when I was 12 at local parties, school dances and such. I would love to have a tape of that to see what we really sounded like back then! I'm sure it would not be pretty!

TONE: When and why did you move to L.A?

Ron: I moved to Los Angeles in May of 1982. The motivation there was mostly weather related! In October of 1981, I took a gig playing in the show band on a cruise ship that went to the Caribbean and South America. That gig lasted until the second week of January, at which point I returned to New York. Needless to say, it was quite a difficult transition to go from the 90 degree weather of the Caribbean to the 20 degree weather of New York. I had made some friends on the ship who said that, if I ever wanted to come and visit them in LA, I could stay with them, so I took them up on it. After a few weeks in L.A. I returned to New York, gathered up my things and made the move.

TONE: I know you've played for one of the hardest people to work, for David Lee Roth. How was it, and tell me something interesting about your days on the road with Dave?

Ron: Well, you said it not me! Dave is definitely a character, and a lot of the work I did for Dave was tough but I do have to say that it was definitely an experience I'll never forget. In fact, whenever I see the other guys that I worked with in that band, we are always reminiscing about some of the things that happened on that tour. It was a fairly long tour that lasted (including rehearsals) from January of 1994 until October of 1994 and included Japan, Europe and North America. We were out supporting Dave's "Your Filthy Little Mouth" CD which had just been released. The tour started off with Terry Kilgore on guitar, Jamie Hunting on bass, Brett Tuggle on keyboards and of course, yours truly on drums. One of the first gigs we did was Rockline, which is a live nationwide syndicated radio show, where we set up in Capitol Studios in Hollywood, and played for a live audience of contest winners and invited guests. That show was broadcast to several million people and went on to become a limited edition CD called "Night Life". The second gig was a Fox television special in Honolulu that was hosted by Pauly Shore and Pamela Anderson at The Hard Rock Cafe. That was pretty wild too! After that, we did a promotional tour of the U.S. for a few weeks and then went to Japan. While we were there, the guitar player started acting a bit strange so Dave fired him and hired Rocket Ritchotte to replace him. That was kind of funny because he had fired Rocket a few years prior. Anyway, after we finished the Japanese tour we flew straight to London (over Siberia in a 747!), where Rocket met us and we rehearsed for a few days before the European tour started. The best thing about the European tour was that we got to have a very cool Beatles experience in the process. We went to Liverpool, got a private tour of Abbey Road studios, played at the Kaiserkeller in Hamburg etc. I've got it all on video tape and it was fantastic! After Europe, we returned to America and toured here for the rest of the summer. We also did a special event on the Howard Stern radio show live in Cleveland that was pretty amazing. He was celebrating becoming #1 in the ratings there, so he had a big concert in The Flats where about 10-15,000 people showed up at 8 am and the backstage area was a strip club! We met Roger Clinton, who was also playing in the show, and I got to play with Howard and his house band (which included Nils Lofgren of the E Street band), because the house drummer went missing in the middle of the live broadcast! There were about 200 people on stage so I guess it wasn't too difficult for him to get lost! Anyway, that was a lot of fun.

TONE: You also toured with Cher. What was she like on the road? That had to be cool!

Ron: Touring with Cher was quite interesting to say the least. She has a very different perspective than anyone else that I've worked with because she's such a big star and is so well recognized. I think that she is constantly having to size up the people she runs across to determine what it is they want from her. Because of that, I tried to just treat her as normally as I do anyone else and I think she appreciated that. After she got comfortable with the people that were working on the tour, she loosened up a bit and she would sometimes rent out a whole movie theater so we could all have a night out together on a day off. There was one time where some of us (including her) went to a shopping mall in Pittsburgh and you should have seen the security measures they went through. You would have thought she was the President or something! Anyway, I worked with her for 4 years and the touring was always first class. Great hotels, great venues etc. It was quite a large tour in terms of the number of people and amount of equipment that went on the road. I think there were close to 70 people all together with about 6 or 7 tractor trailers full of gear. Including her, there were 10 people in the band (11 when her son Elijah played), 7 dancers and a Cher impersonator (if you can believe that!) plus tour managers, production managers, accountants, wardrobe people, sound & lighting people, assistants, assistants for the assistants etc. Several of the highlights of the tour were playing for close to 100,000 people at the Adelaide Grand Prix race in Australia, doing a CBS television special (which later went to home video) called "Cher Extravaganza - Live at The Mirage", doing a benefit show for ABC television that also included such well know performers as Goldie Hawn, Robin Williams, Meryl Streep, Olivia Newton John, Lily Tomlin, Ted Danson, Bette Midler and many others, doing the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards at the Universal Amphitheater to a live television audience of something like 60 million people and doing one of the first segments of the ABC show "Prime Time Live". All in all, it was quite an experience!

TONE: You met Joe Porcaro when you moved to LA. Tell us the story of your first meeting.

Ron: Joe is a very special kind of guy, as I found out. He is one of the most well known and well respected percussionists in the Los Angeles area and he is the father of three very accomplished musicians who have all made their mark as session players in LA and as members of the group Toto. When I arrived in LA, I thought that one of the things I should do is get some drum lessons from someone who is really good and knew what it took to make it as a musician here. I soon found out that Joe was teaching and would be a great guy to study with so I made an appointment with him. When I went to his house for the lesson, he basically put me through my paces in a variety of musical styles for about 45 minutes (the lesson was supposed to be for an hour). After those 45 minutes, he basically told me that there wasn't all that much he felt he could do for me and that what I really needed to do was to just go out and find gigs and immerse myself in the LA music scene. I was both flattered and disappointed at the same time. I was flattered because, coming from him, it really meant a lot that he thought I was a good player and that gave me a lot of confidence. I was disappointed because I really wanted to study with him and learn as much as I could, not only about playing but about the music business and how to survive in it. The most amazing part though, was when I tried to pay him for the lesson. He would not take my money! He said that he hadn't taught me anything and that I didn't have to pay him, despite the fact that he had spent almost an hour of his time with me. I tried several times but he wouldn't take it. I've never forgotten that. Several years later, when I was in Cher's band, I found out that he had passed that generosity trait on to his kids. I was on tour in London and staying in the same hotel as Jeff Porcaro, who was there recording with Dire Straits. We met in the hotel lounge and found we had a lot of mutual friends so we hung out for the better part of a week after we were both done working for the day. He just would not let me buy him a drink, pay for a cab or even pay for my own dinner! He kept saying that he enjoyed helping me out as an up and coming drummer. I had always known how great Jeff was as a drummer and musician but I also found out what a great guy he was too.

TONE: You just did some work with Gregg Rolie's new solo CD. (More on Ron's studio next month)

Ron: I met Gregg (member R & R Hall of Fame, founding member Santana), when I joined a band called The Storm. He had started that band along with two of his former bandmates from Journey, Steve Smith and Ross Valory. When Steve Smith decided to leave, I was asked to join the band just as they had a song called "I've Got A Lot To Learn About Love" climbing up the charts and they were about to embark on a nationwide arena tour with Bryan Adams in 1992. I quit Cher's band (right before I was supposed to go to Europe with her) to do it and it was a lot of fun. In fact, Cher didn't wind up liking the drummer that replaced me in her band so her manager called me from Europe near the end of their tour to see if I might be available to do some dates that she had in the US that year. As luck would have it, her dates fell right in the breaks on The Storm's tour so I wound up doing both tours that year! We later did a second album with The Storm called "Eye of The Storm" (on which I co-wrote a couple of songs) that did moderately well in Europe and the Far East. As far as what's coming up recording wise, I've been doing drum tracks for a bunch of different people recently and there is more of that coming up. I've also just finished producing the new WCR Live CD that will be out shortly. Check my website out at www.ronwikso.com for more info.

TONE: Foreigner must have been a great gig. Tell us a little about your time with the band. Also is there any one gig that sticks out that's fun and juicy?

Ron: Foreigner was an awesome band to be a part of. Lou Gramm has one of the greatest Rock and Roll voices of all time and the songs that Foreigner made famous were a big part of the soundtrack. I worked with them for several years and toured all over the world. The first touring I did with them was to Europe, Australia and New Zealand with the Doobie Brothers opening up for us. After that we went to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Japan and Alaska before taking a slight break and continuing the tour throughout North America. One of the gigs we did in the U.S. that year was one of the most bizarre I've ever seen. It was in Michigan somewhere and it was called Nudestock. Basically, it was an outdoor festival with several bands (I remember Kansas and Alan Parsons Project being among the other bands) playing at a nudist colony! It was very strange to be onstage, fully clothed, and to look out and see thousands of naked bodies dancing and getting crazy. The next year we did a co-headlining tour of North America with REO Speedwagon and Peter Frampton. That was a great bill and, since I knew the guys in REO and had toured with Peter before (when I was in The Storm), it was a lot of fun. We even had some of the same tour support people that I worked with when I was on the Cher tour so there was a lot of familiarity. I also did some recording with Foreigner that year but I don't know what ever happened with any of that because the following year, as we were gearing up to do some more touring, we found out that Lou Gramm had been diagnosed with a brain tumor the night before we were scheduled to leave for Japan. That pretty much ended our year and the following year I joined Richie Sambora's band.

TONE: What is one piece of advice you'd have for any young drummer to help them prepare for this day and age.

Ron: In my opinion, the most important things are to develop good, steady time, play with all the soul and feel you can muster and play appropriately for the song! The last thing a singer wants to do while they're trying to connect with an audience, is turn around to see what wacky thing the drummer just did!

TONE: Ron, we're in a band together, (WCR), tell us a little about the band.

Ron: For those people that don't know, WCR is short for World Classic Rockers and is a band that is made up of former members of such bands as The Eagles, Wings, The Moody Blues, The Spencer Davis Group, Steppenwolf, Toto and Foreigner. WCR is a great situation for me because it allows me to play a lot of different kinds of music, in one show with some legendary musicians and, although we travel a lot, it's not for months at a time like it is on a traditional tour. That allows me to keep up my studio work and have a semi-normal family life as well.

TONE: Ron, thanks for your time.


Published in City's TONE . Volume 1 . Issue 5 . May 2001

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