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• Ratt - Exclusive Interview and Lesson

As depicted in the Mötley Crüe autobiography, The Dirt, Crosby formed a bond with Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx, and they delved deeply, and detrimentally, into the “sex, drugs and rock and roll” lifestyle. “The stuff that ended up in that book was probably during one of the off-periods between album and tour,” DeMartini says, “so I never really witnessed firsthand what Robbin and Nikki were doing. I never stopped getting along with Robbin, but the nature of what he was struggling with made us have less and less in common.”

While Crosby’s drug use escalated, Ratt were dealing with the pressures of success. “Ratt had been a band that was just having fun playing in clubs, but we soon turned into a big business,” DeMartini says. “There would be a monsoon of work, and you’d be seeing people all the time. Then the record and tour would be done, and everyone goes back to doing their thing. There were huge gaps when I’d never see Robbin or, for that matter, anyone else from the band.”

Quiet Riot had suffered problems of their own. They had arrived on the scene in 1983 with Metal Health, a massive-selling majorlabel debut that hit Number One on the Billboard chart. Their follow-up, Condition Critical, went Platinum, but their third album, QR III, didn’t even achieve Gold. “We started off at the top and ended up at the bottom,” says Cavazo, who had joined as a replacement for Randy Rhoads, when the guitarist left to play with Ozzy Osbourne. “Our career was a succession of steps, all going down. Our producer, Spencer Proffer, led us in the wrong direction. By the second and third album, he pushed us into being a corporate rock band, which I hated. We should’ve just stayed as we were—a hard rockin’ American band.”

Ultimately, Cavazo says, what destroyed Quiet Riot’s integrity was lead singer Kevin DuBrow. “The fame and fortune got to Kevin’s head early on,” Cavazo says. “His partying got out of control and he was always ruffling feathers with people—our fans, the record company, and the band members. After our third album, we fired Kevin, because he was too difficult to deal with—he was usually whacked out of his mind. No one could deal with him anymore. He distanced a lot of people.”

After firing DuBrow, Quiet Riot recruited vocalist Paul Shortino for one album, and then disbanded. The group reformed in 1990 with DuBrow and went on to release five more albums, none of them memorable. (The last, 2006’s Rehab, didn’t feature Cavazo.) DuBrow died from a drug overdose in his Las Vegas home in 2007. “People grew to have such intense dislike for the name Quiet Riot,” Cavazo says. “We couldn’t have had another hit album no matter how good the music was, simply because Quiet Riot recorded it.”

Cavazo continued to work on various projects after leaving Quiet Riot in the mid 2000s. When guitarist John Corabi left Ratt in August 2008 to pursue a solo career, DeMartini placed a call to Cavazo to see if he would like to try out as coguitarist. DeMartini says, “About three years before I called Carlos, I actually envisioned how Ratt would work with him in the band. And then, one day out of the blue, I just took a shot and called him to see if he’d be interested. I thought it would be good to get Carlos in the band because it would be a great chance to get back to the double-guitar stuff that I did with Robbin.”

Working with Cavazo, he says, “is similar to working with Robbin in that there is an innate instinct of knowing what to do. It’s all there—the sound, the playing and the feel. There’s a certain telepathy in that things just gel. All three of us listened to the same stuff growing up—for the most part, blues-based hard rock.”

Cavazo, for his part, is glad to be working with Ratt and making the kind of music that thrilled him and so many hair metal fans back in the day. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be playing in Ratt,” Cavazo says. “But I think the world is ready for an Eighties-style rock album again. Why stray from what you do best and what made you who you are?”

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