My brother the ex-rock star

My brother Dan's career as a rock guitarist took him from Pittsburgh to LA and then around the world in the '80s with the band Kingdom Come. He got a lot good ink and had his 15 minutes of fame.

In the late spring of 1988, as my brother Dan’s rock-blues band Kingdom Come was about to join the Monsters of Rock heavy-metal stadium tour, I wrote this free-lance piece while I was at the LA Times. The Washington Post and about 10 other papers in cities where the tour would stop picked it up.

MY BROTHER THE ROCK STAR

Washington Post

June 5, 1988

LOS ANGELES -- Friday afternoon, the 10-hour mega-concert Monsters of Rock tour hits RFK with music by Van Halen, Metallica, Dokken, the Scorpions and Kingdom Come. This is a look at how one musician hit it big in a band that hit it big -- and no one was more surprised than its own members.

The last time my brother Dan the rock guitarist performed live in L.A. was May 1987 at the Central, a funky little club on Sunset Boulevard.

It was a Tuesday jam night and Dan, who was living in my garage and working in a Hollywood liquor store for $100 a week, went on about midnight. He played some of his patented emotional blues licks while taking an extended solo on the Jimi Hendrix tune "Red House." He sang and played maybe 15 minutes in front of 100 people.

Despite his considerable talent and experience, not to mention his devout adherence to the L.A. rock 'n' roll life style, jamming once a week at the Central was his only steady gig. Occasionally, he played lead guitar in a friend's embryonic heavy metal band for free.

Dan's stalled musical career was pretty discouraging. Almost 27, he'd been been training to be a rock guitarist since he was 10 and had been playing professionally since he was 17. Although he released a new wave album on CBS in 1980, he had little to show for his seven years of working and hanging out in the L.A. music scene. He seemed forever on the verge of landing something but nothing ever materialized.

Back home in Pittsburgh our family had begun to lose patience with Danny Stag, as he calls himself. His prospects were as slim as guitar picks, but I -- his main patron -- didn't have the money, the connections or the know-how to make anything big happen. About all I could do besides cajole him to hustle himself and his songs more energetically was buy him a $300 car and give him a home.

And then it happened. The big break. The rock 'n' roll miracle of June, 1987.

It was simple. Dan went to an audition -- something he rarely did because he had so little equipment except for his faithful 1962 Fender Stratocaster that he bought for $195 in 1973. He easily beat out 30 other hopefuls for the lead guitar spot for a blues-flavored hard-rock band called Kingdom Come.

The band was being formed by and around Lenny Wolf, a talented, emotional West German rock singer-songwriter who was already signed to a PolyGram record deal. The music, with its '60s blues qualities, was made to order for Dan.

He was at long last going to get the chance to play what he played best -- heartfelt, blues-based guitar that came from somewhere deep in his soul. Plus, he would get paid decent money for doing it -- a $250-a-week advance against record sales, which for Dan might as well been $2,500. As an extra bonus, his pal and 10-year music partner, J.B. Frank, won Kingdom Come's bass position.

This would have been miracle enough for my Mom and anyone else who'd followed Dan's career from the black funk clubs and jazz-fusion days of Akron and Pittsburgh to the motel lounges of Florida to the Hollywood club circuit.

But the real miracle started after August, 1987, when the band recorded the LP "Kingdom Come" in Vancouver. In January a radio guy at hard-rock station WRIF in Detroit got a 10-song PolyGram sampler tape containing Kingdom Come's single "Get It On," what one critic would later call the best Led Zeppelin song Led Zeppelin never recorded. He started playing the tape on the air without saying who it was. The young metalheads listening thought this mystery band was Led Zeppelin reunited and lit up the station's phone lines.

"Get It On," taking advantage of radio's current Led Zeppelin revival, quickly became the No. 1 requested song on album-oriented-rock (AOR) stations around the country for six weeks and forced PolyGram to change its original release date and rush-ship 600,000 units of "Kingdom Come" into a clamoring marketplace on March 1.

As Dan set off on a furious 50-date European tour, the mighty miracle rolled on.

The LP became a record industry sensation, debuting on the Billboard charts at an amazing No. 51 on March 19 and screaming to No. 12 in just 7 weeks, an incredible feat for an unknown band. (Robert Plant's new LP, "Now and Zen," debuted at No. 55 a week earlier.) "Kingdom Come," which is now No. 25, has sold almost 1 million copies in three months.

My father, a Count Basie freak, started studying the AOR air play charts in Radio & Records. My mother started watching "Headbangers Ball" on MTV for glimpses of Kingdom Come's first video, which nobody liked much. Dan was suddenly Multimedia Boy: Videos. Giant posters in record stores. Pictures on metal magazine covers. Articles in Rolling Stone. Radio interviews.

The only bad news was in the record reviews. The band was critic proof -- it had found its audience -- but from USA Today to the Los Angeles Times, the pop scribes, to put it bluntly, hit the band pretty hard for robbing the grave of Led Zeppelin, considered by many to be one of the greatest rock bands ever.

They compared Lenny unfavorably to an early Robert Plant. They said James Kottak was no John Bonham, the late Zep drummer. And they said Dan was no Jimmy Page, though he seemed to be trying to be. Dan's response: "I sound like Danny Stag, always did. You can ask anyone who has ever heard me before. Anyway, Jimmy Page didn't invent the blues."

Even forty-something Robert Plant, who's richer than an archduke and should be a little more secure about his place in rock history, knocked Kingdom Come in Billboard magazine, though he pleased Steigerwalds everywhere when he said the guitarist was "excellent."

Amid the hype and furor, it was announced that Kingdom Come was to be the opening act for the biggest rock concert tour of the year, Monsters of Rock, the summer's nine-hour Tipper Gore-nightmare-on-wheels that's putting Van Halen, the Scorpions, Dokken and Metallica in 28 outdoor stadium concerts from Seattle to Washington's RFK Stadium.

Which means that the next time brother Dan plays L.A., he'll stand in the noonday sun on a stage the size of a cathedral in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and play for 100,000 of Southern California's most fervent heavy-metal maniacs. Two days in a row.

Here’s the version that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The Post-Gazette sports writer and future Pittsburgh sports-talk king Mark Madden wrote one of the best — and most favorable — reviews of Kingdom Come and Dan.

Madden also wrote about the demise of Kingdom Come

Dissatisfaction leads to Kingdom Come split

By Mark Madden

August 23, 1989

In the rock group Kingdom Come, it was always singer Lenny Wolf's will be done. But, says lead guitarist Danny Stag, Wolf's name wasn't so hallowed among his mates.

"No one ever got along with Lenny," said the Scott musician Monday.

"The dislike for him built up from the first day we met him. It was Lenny's band, true, but he made a lot of decisions that affected our careers without so much as asking us."

Note past tense is used in the story so far. That's because Kingdom Come disintegrated last weekend upon completion of its North American tour. The tour made a stop at the Syria Mosque Ballroom last Wednesday.

Stag, the brother of KDKA-TV sportscasters John and Paul Steigerwald and P-G staff writer Bill Steigerwald, at first declined to speak on the record about the band's breakup.

But he changed his mind, saying: "If I clam up, people will think that we ripped off Led Zeppelin our first album and we broke up because our second album didn't sell . . . That's just not true."

Kingdom Come burst into national prominence in the spring of 1988 with its self-titled debut LP, becoming an FM radio airplay phenomenon thanks to Zep knockoffs "Get It On" and "What Love Can Be." "Kingdom Come" went gold (sales in excess of 500,000) and is nearing platinum (1 million).

The band was part of Van Halen's Monsters of Rock tour that played Three Rivers Stadium June 15, 1988. But the follow-up LP, last spring's "In Your Face," dropped the direct Zep influence and has sold about half as many copies as its predecessor.

As Stag said, the German-born Wolf was never held in high opinion by his band mates. Opinion hit rock bottom when Wolf refused to play a recent show in West Virginia when KC was denied a pre-gig sound check.

"That was the tour's biggest crowd around 4,500 . Money-wise, we'd have made above our guarantee. But the big thing is that you can't let the kids (fans) down. They're what rock 'n' roll is all about.

"We might have sounded bad for a while with no sound check, but we have a great soundman who would have gotten it together. Two songs into the show it would have been fine. But he wouldn't play."

Stag also cited instances when Wolf berated the band after what had appeared to be successful shows, and also his paranoia about the Led Zeppelin comparisons — "Although he decided to play the bit of 'Whole Lotta Love' we do," Stag said.

After a while, "It just wasn't fun," Stag said. "It got to the point where we just couldn't continue. The four of us hate not being able to play together anymore, but ... "

When asked whether he and band mates J.B. Frank, Rick Steier and James Kottak had quit or been fired, Stag demurred.

"We fired Lenny," Stag said with a chuckle. "Well, he really fired us, because we couldn't fire him. But we would have fired him if we could have."

Neither Wolf nor Kingdom Come manager Marty Wolff could be reached for comment yesterday.

Kingdom Come's breakup canceled tours of Europe and Japan. Stag says none of the group's members has other projects lined up yet, but didn't count out the possibility of Wolf's resurrecting Kingdom Come with four new musicians.

"If Lenny does that, he'd better find four really good guys," Stag said. "Otherwise it'll be a pale imitation of what we were."

Despite initial depression over the breakup, Stag says he'll remember Kingdom Come fondly. "It was a big break," he said. "There were a lot of great moments that will live forever in my mind. And I'm doing a lot better financially, too. I take my sound with me wherever I go now."

***

In 1991, after Kingdom Come blew itself to kingdom come, Dan did a blues rock instructional video. It captures his Steigerwaldian sarcasm, his playing ability and communication skills.

Then came Royal Jelly

OCTOBER 26, 1994

By Ed Masley

Daniel Steigerwald is no stranger to life on the road.

Since leaving Pittsburgh in 1979 to seek his fortune in the land of mud slides, riots and Tommy Lasorda, the thirty-something guitar whiz has toured the U.S., Japan, Scandinavia and Western Europe. To paraphrase former tour mate Jon Bon Jovi, he's seen a million faces and he’s rocked them all.

You wouldn't know it from reading over the Royal Jelly bio Island Records is sending around, though.

Here’s the Royal Jelly LP, courtesy of YouTube.

Apparently, time served in Kingdom Come just doesn't cut it in the hip, alternative marketing schemes of the post-Nirvana '90s. And lead singer John Douglas Edwards' botched attempt at filling Lou Gramm's shoes in Foreigner? You can consider that safely swept under the same carpet, dude.

"I think the Foreigner thing is probably the worst thing that's ever happened to John," Steigerwald says. "It might have been fun for a while, but that wasn't his band. He was pretty much taking orders from Mick Jones."

And then there's Kingdom Come, the late-'80s AOR sensation whose plundering of Led Zeppelin resulted in an absurdly authentic-sounding platinum debut, truckloads of nasty reviews and, of course, the nickname Kingdom Clone.

Yeah, Steigerwald was in that Kingdom Come. Only then everyone knew him as Danny Stagg.

"I'm proud of some of the work I did, but it was basically Lenny Wolf’s band," Steigerwald explains. "He was like a dictator, you know?"

Even so, he insists, the secret history of Royal Jelly is more an attempt to move on than any sort of elaborate record company coverup.

"It's not like we're deliberately trying to hide it," he says. "It's just that it doesn't really serve any purpose."

He'd much rather keep the conversation focused on his new band. Royal Jelly, which admittedly sounds a lot more like Stone Temple Pilots than Led Zeppelin ever did.

"I think it would be a mistake to come out with a new band and say, "Yeah, we were all from these old bands,'" Steigerwald says. "It would be different if it was the same kind of music and stuff, but it's not."

Actually, Edwards' voice does sound slightly like Robert Plant's at times, though he mostly keeps it in a low, decidedly alterna-rock range.

But the thing that really separates Royal Jelly from all the other would-be Pearl Jams is Steigerwald's guitar work.

"I thought I wanted to be a jazz player," he says, And in fact, he was in the fusion band King Solomon with Kenny Blake and Howard Bennett before leaving town.

"I wanted to be a virtuoso, and I don't think I am. My thing is feeling and blues more so than technique. And the jazz guys seemed to be so technique-oriented and, dare I say, a little bit snobbish about it."

And so, at the suggestion of big brother Bill (and yes, his other brothers are John and Paul at KDKA; Bill works for the Post-Gazette), Steigerwald ditched the jazz band, moved to L.A. and within nine months had a record out on CBS International.

The band was the Industrials, the producer was Kim Fowley and Steigerwald handled the lead vocals himself.

He lets Edwards do all the singing these days, though. "When you're touring, especially at this level, you don't get really good sound checks," he says. "And if you have a bunch of guys singing, it's a lot harder to get your monitor mix. And you know, bands like Led Zeppelin, they never had any backup vocals and no one ever missed it.”