Jeff Keith picked Signs, a protest song in which the hippie protagonist sticks it to The Man. The band rehearsed for three days on a setlist that mixed original songs with a selection of covers chosen by each of the five members. The first two, at Slim’s in San Francisco, were scheduled just before the Mötley Crüe tour began. It ended up sounding so good that we booked these half dozen shows.” “But still, we put together this 90-minute acoustic set – partly to spite Peter. “That idea just didn’t feel very rock’n’roll,” Wheat says. What the band didn’t fancy – as made plain to Mensch – was doing a whole acoustic show.

Likewise, both Love Song and The Way It Is from The Great Radio Controversy. Equally, as Wheat now says, “We always had acoustic guitars in our music.” This was true of two key songs on Mechanical Resonance – the Led Zeppelin-influenced Modern Day Cowboy, and a cover of Little Suzi, originally recorded in 1981 by brief-lived British pop act PhD. There were also times, during tours, when three members of Tesla – guitarists Frank Hannon and Tommy Skeoch, and singer Jeff Keith – would go to radio stations and play acoustic versions of various songs, including Signs, a 1971 hit for Canadian group Five Man Electrical Band. The reaction to their performance of Love Song at the Bammys was proof of that. The band knew that their music could translate to the acoustic format. I know you can.’ At the time we thought he was fucking with us, but he knew what he was doing.

“But what he was really saying was: ‘You don’t think you can do this. “When he said we were not talented enough, we were like, ‘Fuck you!’,” says Wheat. Mensch’s response was a classic piece of reverse psychology. The cover of Tesla’s Five Man Acoustical Jam (Image credit: UMG)

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