Tesla guitarist, Frank Hannon, recently had a conversation with My Weekly Mixtape where he was asked if the band received any pressure from the record company Geffen, in the 1980s to compete with the so-called “hair metal” bands that were popular at the time, or the record label was on Tesla’s side ”100′ %” by that time.

Regarding this, Hannon replied:

“Well, I would say it was both. There was some songs that we had to fight for, but we were always being directed by the people that we worked with to write the best songs we could possibly write and not have any filler material or cheesy garbage material on an album. They always insisted that the entire album be good, not just have one song on it that was good and the rest of it be junk.

”And when I’m talking about Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch and Tom Zutaut (Geffen A&R executive), they were directing us at the time and they were responsible for Rush, Def Leppard, Metallica, AC/DC, and Dokken, and so they were involved with some really high-caliber kick-a** bands that had integrity.”

The guitarist continued:

”So we were very lucky to be getting advice from them to try to write real songs that were gritty and from the heart and not cheesy. And they put a lot of high expectations on us because we were, again, in the company of bands like Metallica and Rush and AC/DC, Scorpions, Def Leppard.

”We weren’t trying to compete with the glam bands and the trendy stuff. We were trying to be ourselves. And luckily we weren’t having pressure put on us to be glam metal. We were having more pressure on us to be ourselves and to write the best songs that we could for ourselves.”