You’ve heard the story a zillion times: A band comes together, records a demo, and catches the attention of record labels before subsequently self-imploding and fading into the mists of time. What if this time around, the story involved the one-time singer for one of the most beloved American metal bands of all time? This was exactly the case for Dr. Dirty: A short lived melodic hard rock band from Canada who are finally getting their due with a retrospective release via BraveWords Records. The Complete Dr. Dirty Sessions 1992-1993 features the final band recordings of none other than Riot singer Rhett Forrester, available to the public for the first time ever. We had the honor of sitting down with Dr. Dirty guitarist Rob Robbins to discuss the life and times of this incredible band, working with Forrester, and where it all went wrong.
Greetings Rob and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?
Rob Robbins: I’m doing great man! How are you doing?
I’m doing fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. Before we get into the story of Dr. Dirty, I’d like to get to know a bit about you. Who were your favorite bands growing up and when did you start playing guitar?
RR: My favorite artists varies from Eagles to Iron Maiden. There’s a huge, wide variety because my dad was a musician and he turned me onto a lot of things, so even back in the ’70s, I was listening to The Bellamy Brothers and stuff like that *laughs*. From ABBA to Queen to Rush to Zeppelin. One of my first loves was James Gang in the early days. In 1971, when the live album came out, my dad got that, live at Carnegie Hall, Live in Concert, and hands down was like, “Oh my gosh!” Joe Walsh has been there a long time for me, and April Wine! Early April Wine was another one, On Record from 1972. I’m giving away my age now because I was born in ’66, so I’m 58 now *laughs*. I’ve been around the planet a long time.
That was the incredible thing about the ’70s. You could have ABBA next to Alice Cooper next to Queen on the charts and it was cool.
RR: That whole time period of the ’70s is absolutely…I get goosebumps when I think about the ’70s because it was so amazing. When you listen to an artist, you could always tell that it was them. When you listened to Sabbath, you knew it was Sabbath. When you heard Queen, you knew it was Queen. When you heard Yes, you knew it was Yes. Every single artist had their sound and that’s what made the ’70s absolutely amazing. Even up until that point, up until say The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, lots of stuff sounded the same because it was going through the same processes. They had the same microphones in the room with the artists, so the Motown stuff all kind of sounded the same because they recorded it exactly the same. When the recording techniques got shifted around and everybody started getting their own sounds, that was the whole perfect storm for artistic abilities to come up with new things. That’s why I love the ’70s so much.
What was the hard rock and metal scene like in your part of Canada back in the ’80s and early ’90s?
RR: My early band, Steel Lily, was all part of that whole metal thing. We started around 1983 and got playing in the clubs. We played all the famous places like Gasworks and all the Toronto clubs that were around at the time, Rock ‘N’ Roll Heaven and all those places. We toured quite a bit, so we saw how everything started coming into play. I saw the whole Maiden thing start to happen because there was a TV show called The New Music. Do you know who John Roberts is?
I can’t say I’m familiar.
RR: I can’t remember his network, but he’s an anchor on network news. He used to be the host of a show in Toronto called The New Music. He went by J.D. Roberts back then. They showed a lot of stuff back then. Maiden, when they first hit the scene, “Women in Uniform”, that was the very first one. Just so you know, I’m kind of a a music knowledgist of the older shit, or I try to be anyway *laughs*. The early scene, we had local bands that came out of it too like Coney Hatch and that era of things. Killer Dwarfs came out of that whole early ’80s thing out of Toronto. Anvil!
The funny thing is we were paying all the same clubs as Anvil. They would play one night and we would play another. I got old fliers they’d put on tables at a club in Quebec. It was Anvil, Toronto, Coney Hatch, my band Steel Lily. We were all on this list, so those days were pretty cool. We were told, when Steel Lily first came out, that if we wanted gigs, we would have to play cover songs. We were almost all original when we were kids. We were teenagers. We were told, “If you want gigs, you gotta play cover songs.” So we were learning The Rolling Stones and Zeppelin. We even played Billy Idol and stuff like that *laughs*.
Clearly this burgeoning scene caught the attention of some here in America because at a certain point, Rhett Forrester of Riot makes his way up to Canada and crosses paths with you. When did you first meet Rhett? From there, when did he end up joining Dr. Dirty?
RR: Well, it would’ve been the summer of ’92. He was playing in a band called Black Symphony. (Guitarist) Rick Plester brought him up to Canada for that project. Things didn’t work out with that project and I had a writing partner, Scot Gaines, who had also toured around the scene in the ’80s. We met back in 1986, way before any of this transpired we had become friends. I went to Calgary to meet up with Scot. I disbanded Steel Lily. He had been playing with bands like The White with Michael White who was the Zeppelin tribute guy. He had been doing all this, so we got together in late ’91 and started putting songs together.
He had some older songs, so we revamped some of those. I had some songs from Steel Lilly that we had done and we changed a lot of stuff up. We started writing these songs and we actually had a band early on without Rhett. It was with a guy named Tommy Vitorino who actually manages The Cult and Robby Krieger and all those guys right now. We had a band called No Man’s Land with him and we were trying to get a deal. Things didn’t pan out completely with that, so we had some of the songs that were from that, we had Rhett come in to sing on. We just had met him out of…I can’t remember.
He was living with some people in Calgary that knew Scot, I think. Somehow, we connected. It was like, “This guy Rhett is in town. Do you want to have him come and try out stuff?” I was like, “Sure!” Everybody was like, “Yeah, he was in a band called Riot.” I went, “I remember Riot! Wow! OK!” We all got together and things clicked! It was good. He was a really damn good singer. That’s what impressed us the most. We would say, “Lay something down on here.”, and we gave him a little bit of guiding and whatever. He would just lay it down. It was pretty cool.
So we did a few gigs up in Canada, so I do have videos of his last live performances ever because after he left, after the Dr. Dirty situation, he never did do anymore live gigs. I got his last live gigs from 1992 that he played with a band. We’ll see if BraveWords puts that out. We’ll see because I’ve actually did whatever editing and cleaning I could of it, a little bit, because the camera microphones don’t always sound the best. There was no board recording from any of it. It was all live off the camera, so what you hear is what was happening. There’s no doctoring of anything *laughs*.
While we’re on the topic of live shows, did the band ever jam on any Riot songs? If so, which ones?
RR: Oh yeah, we played a few Riot songs! We even did covers. They did “Devil Woman” and I always loved the Cliff Richard version of that song, so I was just like, “OK, let’s do this! We’ll make our own version of it.” So we kind of did that. We did “Hard Lovin’ Man”. I think that was pretty much it for Riot songs, but we did “Assume the Position” and a few of his solo songs, but we were showcasing songs that you hear on this new release: “Coming Home”, “Redbone Rock”, “In and Out”, “Smokin’ Gun”. Those were the ones that we had completed in Canada.
There was some stuff that was written in between the Clearlake sessions and those original Calgary sessions where we…actually, “Too Little Too Late” and songs like that, we had already been doing them, but we finally recorded those in L.A. When we got our apartment and we had our little eight track machine, we started doing demos and that’s how we actually landed a deal with the studio. Brian Levi agreed to produce us in ’93 because he heard the demo and was like, “These are good songs.” That came through our attorney that was wanting to shop our deal for us.
It was definitely a bombastic time period where everything was happening. Everyone started really getting like, “Wow, this is really starting to happen!” We were based out of Calgary until December of ’92. Then, we relocated to Los Angeles because Scot was from the Los Angeles area and Rhett, being American, they wanted to get the hell of Canada *laughs*.
Who else played alongside you and Rhett in Dr. Dirty and did you have any past connections with them?
RR: Well, when we did our original demos, there was a guy named Jaret Hunchak that did our initial demos. He had been in a cover band with me and Scot when we were playing around western Canada. Actually, we had one drummer before that, Kevin Parrott, and things didn’t work out, so we brought Jaret in. We completed those first four songs with Jaret in Calgary. Earlier this year, we released this on vinyl, but not with the same song order. There was another one called Sessions that had some other stuff that Rhett had been doing, and we put the Clearlake stuff all on that one, so there was a double release. There was The Canadian Years and Sessions.
You mentioned earlier that these songs were written by yourself and Scot prior to Rhett joining the fold. What was that songwriting process like and who handled what facets of the songs?
RR: It was interesting because some stuff Scot had a couple musical ideas of, but had lyrics going on a lot of the time. Scot was more of the lyricist of the whole thing. Anything that he had, I kind of took and made it into something. I’d change some stuff around and say, “OK, this is where we should probably take it.” Scot had a lot of good ideas and that’s why we got together. We were clicking so much with all the other influences that we had through the years and everything. It was very easy to completely write things. For instance, I would have a complete musical idea from the Steel Lily ideas and he would go, “I got a good lyric for that!”
Everything was kind of put together. It was all a process that happened before Rhett. When Rhett was in, that’s when songs like “Hold On”, “Rescue Me”, “Love Song”. “Too Little Too Late” had already been done, like I said. Those were the other four that we had on top of “In and Out”, “Coming Home”, “Smokin’ Gun”, and “Redbone Rock”. Those were done in Calgary and then we did the other four in the living room in Long Beach, California *laughs*. The Ocean Boulevard sessions, that’s what I called it earlier on! Then, we let Brian Levi pick the songs. From the eight songs that we had, we were gonna cut five, so he picked the five. He picked “Rescue Me”, “Hold On”, “In and Out”, “Love Song”, and “Too Much Too Little”. That’s where it all went from, but I still liked and loved the songs that we didn’t include on that.
That’s why when it came to this new one, I took the older vocal demos and did a rerecord of the tunes because I wanted to update it a little bit, make it a little but more sonically cohesive. I basically had to match the sound of the cassette tape stuff along with the 16 track reel to reel that we had done in Calgary of all the demo stuff. That was the interesting thing. It was cool. I loved doing it. It was amazing. I had good friends. Rod Albon cut the bass and Brent Gattoni cut the drums on it, so I was able to really produce it up the way I even really wanted to hear it. In the early days, it was me and Brian Levi that produced that five song demo, but it was Brian’s studio, so it was kind of his sound.
Some of these cuts, particularly “Redbone Rock” and “Smokin’ Gun”, boast a real bluesy edge to them. Who or what would you attribute this to?
RR: Scot had the original idea for “Redbone Rock” because of Leon Redbone. When we were originally writing it, he was like, *sings* “Will you be my baby? Will you be mine?” We were treating it like that. That’s why the early part of the song sounds old school, like it was recorded with a single mic in a room. Then, it becomes modern and back. That was the cool thing. I always had been influenced by the blues, even from being a little guy because I actually started out on drums, and then started playing guitar seriously around 15, so I was a late bloomer.
I had picked it up here and there when I was 10, 11 years old. My dad was just getting out of the music business, so he had his guitars, a Les Paul and a Tele, and he goes, “Here!” I started learning old Rush and Zeppelin. One of the first leads I ever learned was “Mother” from Pink Floyd. “Tangerine” from Led Zeppelin was the other one. Those were the two first guitar solos I ever learned *laughs*.
How long did it take to record these songs in the studio and what memories stand out from those sessions?
RR: We had tracked everything on those first four songs as a band early on, prior to Rhett joining. What happened is Rhett came in and he basically sang our arrangements. We told him, “This is what we’re looking for.” So he wasn’t really coming up with melodies too much. Don’t get me wrong, here and there, he made it his own where he took it and went, “OK, I’m gonna do this with it.”, but we basically said, “This is what we want.” He said, “OK, cool.” He loved all the songs. It was right down his alley.
You gotta admit though, the songs were a little bit more commercial sounding compared to the Riot stuff and Black Symphony. He was more wanting to be the metal guy and we were a little bit more tame compared to what those were. That’s why even on the newer recordings, I toughened it up a lot. That’s why I wanted to rerecord it, because I wanted to make them tougher sounding compared to even what we had in the early days. Rhett, he delivered every single time we were recording. He was in the hallway and I was in the bedroom in Long Beach and we had, literally, one condenser microphone, a C-1000. It wasn’t even meant to be a great vocal mic or anything. That’s what you’re hearing his vocals cut through. That’s the thing. It took a little bit to do treatments on it to make everything be cohesive before this. That’s why it took a little while.
The early sessions in Los Angeles, when the whole Dr. Dirty thing was kicking in, it was kind of a whirlwind. We did it all in 5 or 6 days, something like that. We were roughly in there for a week. Me and Brian mixed the songs a little bit later on down the line. Our attorney kept saying, think about this at the time, “You guys are the new Damn Yankees!” That’s what we were noted as *laughs*! Our attorney, Robert Dorn, he shopped us around, and we actually got a couple bites. Unfortunately, by the time it was all coming together, this is what I recollect.
We were getting an offer from Virgin Records and by that time, everything had imploded with the project. It was just…we were basically starving and going broke. The three of us were eating Kraft dinner. I would make Kraft dinner and we were all eating Kraft dinner with no milk or butter to make the sauce. It was crazy! We were starving. A few opportunities came to Scot and he was the first to leave the situation. Rhett basically said, “I’m gonna just take the songs and go solo.” And I went, “No you’re not!” *laughs* That’s when it all went downhill unfortunately.
That’s the perfect segue into what I think is the biggest question I and others have.
RR: What the fuck happened?
Yeah, exactly. What the fuck DID happen? If I’m to word it more elegantly, why did it take so long for these songs to see the light of day, how close did they come to being released upon their initial recording, and what events led to this eventual release that we’re seeing now?
RR: Well, what had happened…what was really wild was when the project imploded and exploded and did whatever had happened, everybody went their separate ways. Being from Canada, I was living in Los Angeles now and going, “What the fuck am I gonna do?” I had found another singer and I put another band together. I called it Harbinger L.A. at the time. I rerecorded the vocals on the songs with the new singer and KLOS played us a little bit on a homegrown thing. That’s about all that ever happened from that.
Rhett had just been shot when we were recording these in early ’94. I had the project all put together and a guy named Michael Nagy was the new singer. While I was mixing it, somebody came into the studio and said, “I just heard Rhett was shot and killed.” I was like, “Wow…” I was absolutely dumbfounded. Wow. What the fuck? I go, “Where the hell did that happen?” I think he said, “I think he went back home to Atlanta. That’s where it was.” “Oh, OK.” I’m still in touch with Lori Plester who was Rhett’s girlfriend at the time when that all went down. I still keep in touch with her every once in a while.
Anyway, it was a real crazy rough time at that point. Unfortunately, we never ever had the ability to even reconvene or do anything later on down the line. I’m pretty sure that we probably could’ve put something back together again. I stayed in Los Angeles for about another 5 years. I did all different kinds of music and genres from being on the road with Dave Mason to a girl named Lamya who was the singer with Soul II Soul and Duran Duran at that time on “Come Undone” and “Ordinary World”, all that stuff. That was what ended up happening.
That’s why I was thinking, man, if he would’ve stayed alive, maybe we could’ve reconvened at some point because there was still interest in things. In ’96, a guy named Todd K. Smith put out that Hell or Highwater CD. It was a tribute to Rhett. That had some Riot songs, some solo songs, and it also included, not everything, but four songs from the L.A. sessions that we did. We called them “the Clear Lake sessions” *laughs*. That was put out in ’96.
Answering your question in a roundabout way how this new thing came together was Giles Lavery, who works with BraveWords, he was a fan. He always loved Rhett and he always loved those songs from Hell or Highwater. He approached me and asked me, “Is there anything else?” I went, “Yes, there is.” He went, “Oh yeah!” *laughs* I presented some of the early demos and I said, “Gimme a little bit of time and let me re-track some stuff and make a cohesive album out of it for you.” He went along with that and that’s what happened.
Giles decided he was going to be putting together The Canadian Years instead of having one album of material with me on it. He brought in Rick’s stuff with Black Symphony for The Canadian Years, so he put three songs from Black Symphony and the eight that I contributed to it, the songs that we wrote. That’s how that all got put together for that album. It’s available on vinyl on High Roller. Then, we had the Sessions with the L.A. stuff. The stuff he did with Bryan Jay and everything is on this one, as well as his last sessions with Jonathan Grell, which was his final studio sessions. We were the final band thing that he had done, but Jonathan Grell was his last vocal sessions that he had done.
An excellent video has been released of the band recording “Hold On” in the studio. Were all of the Clear Lake sessions taped and can fans expect anymore archival footage in the future?
RR: There is still some stuff that I’ve given to BraveWords. There’s all the behind the scenes at the studio and a lot more stuff. There’s bits of us recording “Recuse Me”, bits of “In and Out”. The camera was on the most for “Hold On”, so that’s why I edited that up and I fucked up. I thought I had changed the dates on Rhett’s birth and death, and it still had Brian Levi’s (birth and death) in there. I didn’t even know until Michael from BraveWords said, “By the way, that’s fucked up.” I was like, “Well, I can fix it.” “Nope, we already uploaded it.”
Within a couple days, it had 3,000 views, so it was like, let’s just leave it and put the correct dates in the description. I edited that whole thing up from multiple takes of the song. That’s why it doesn’t line up perfectly, but you get to see what was actually going on at that time of recording and everything. It was exciting. That was my very first L.A. sessions. I had recorded in Canada plenty, but never in L.A. I was like, “Wow, this is really fucking cool.” *laughs*
The songs are one thing. Seeing those accompanying visuals was like opening a time capsule.
RR: Don’t you wish they would’ve actually done that kind of stuff back in the day too? Have an 8mm or 16mm camera going on stuff? There’s the video, I believe, from My Father’s Place, where they (Riot) do “Restless Breed” and there’s maybe another for “Born in America”. One of the songs off of that, there was one other video, and that’s it dude. Until they did the one where he’s (Rhett’s) all chained up for “Assume the Position”. Have you seen that one with the girls and the titties and everything? That was pretty cool *laughs*!
Of course! Aside from those videos though, like you said, that’s about it. I was very impressed.
RR: You know why I actually made sure that was happening? I made a tape for (Rhett’s mother) Lafortune (Forrester) a long, long time ago, or Lori more than anything, of just the stuff of Rhett that I had. I put it onto a VHS. That had been uploaded and I was kind of pissed off at first because Lafortune had given the tape to one of Rhett’s friends and it got leaked out there. So I had this personal footage that got released. The guy said, “I’ll take it down if you want.” I was like, “You know what? Fuck it. Let’s leave it up there.”
Eventually, I’m gonna release my own versions of it and it’ll be from the original tapes. It’s not gonna be third or fourth generation or whatever that was that’s been online for the past 12 or 14 years that’s been out there. I was able to, with new technology and everything, clean it up a lot and make it a lot more high def than anything. That was all shot on hi8 tapes, no digital nothing. It was all on hi8 tapes that I had to clean up. It took a little bit of time, but it was cool to look back at everything and see it all coming together at that time.
A couple of things were going on with the drummer at that point in time. Me and him weren’t getting along so great during the sessions, but it was what it was. He was one of Scot’s buddies. We didn’t have a drummer in L.A. It was only the three of us. That’s why in the picture, there’s Scot, Rhett, and myself. The drummer never made it into the photos because by the time he had come into the situation, we had already shot the photos and everything was already done. Dr. Dirty was us three. The drummer was a hired gun, Ray Malbaum.
What is the biggest lesson you took away from your time with Rhett and Dr. Dirty?
RR: Know how your real friends are. *laughs* I’m just kidding. In all seriousness, don’t give up. Perseverance pays off. Never lose your dream. I’m still friends with Scot to this day. I just talked to him yesterday because he’s seeing all the attention that’s going on with the release of things. I’m like, “Dude, I told you years ago this was gonna end up happening!” Its been in the works for at least two, almost three years. It was during COVID that it all started to unfold and come together when Giles got a hold of me and said, “I want this to become a thing about Rhett.” He’s done it with a few other bands as well. He’s put compilations together and released it, the material that hasn’t been released by other bands and all that stuff. He’s kind of got a little niche for that.
Since Dr. Dirty, you’ve gone onto have a successful career with acts like Dave Mason, Moxy, and more. What are you currently up to and can we expect anything in the near future?
RR: Moving forward, I’ve got a few things going on, believe it or not, in Jamaica. I’m gonna be doing some gigs down there, doing some band stuff. I have a project called The Very Best Of. We’re doing “The Best of the ’70s”, “The Best of the ’80s”, and so forth. We actually have some shows next year in Canada in the theaters with that whole project. That’s gonna happen as well. I’m actually becoming a booking agent as well for Jamaica and doing some stuff. As far as band gigs and all that, I was kind of retired for a year and a half. Then, a buddy of mine, John, said, “I wanna do this project.” He had the idea of The Very Best Of and said, “Let’s do a Skynyrd show!”, so I brushed up my chops! You have to if you wanna play Skynyrd properly!
The Complete Dr. Dirty Sessions 1992-1993 is available now on BraveWords Records.
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