Bonus Content: Unreleased Interview with Vince Welnick from 1989

Thom Jennings (0:01)

Hello, everyone. This is Tom Jennings, the host of Missing Man-The Vince Welnick Story. If you've been paying attention, episode 5 has been a little bit late and coming. And I actually experienced a keyboard curse of my own. I had a huge liquid spill on the keyboard of my laptop, which made the battery expand, which fried the motherboard and eventually corrupted the hard drive, which meant that weeks and weeks of editing were lost.

Full interviews, of course, have been saved. So I've just had to go back and restart some of the editing process. And I can promise you, episode 5 will hopefully be worth the wait. In the meantime, though, I wanted to present some bonus material. And for fans of Vince Welnick and for fans of Todd Rundgren, this should be pretty cool. There's not a lot of Vince Welnick interviews out there in the first place, but very few that have never seen the light of day. Well, an old friend of mine, Bill Salom, who I met at a Utopia Festival back in 1985, messaged me when I started working on this project and said, Hey, I have an interview with Vince Welnick on Todd Rundgren's tour bus back in 1989 for a publication called the Utopia Times. Would you be interested? Of course I was interested. Now Bill sent me a DVD, took me a little bit to figure out how to get it from the DVD into a digital form so that I could present it as bonus content. But I have done that. Now, before we run this particular interview, I do want to say something about some of the content that's in it. Vince does say some things about Fee Wable that probably came from a time when he was still feeling a little bit upset about what had happened with the tubes. I've interviewed Fee three times, and I've listened to tons and tons of hours of Fee Wable interviews and other interviews by Vince Welnick. And this by no means is characteristic of how Vince eventually felt about Fee. They were both very close. I think we all know that sometimes in life we can get mad at other people and say things that we regret later. I just don't want this to cause any kind of problems for anybody or anyone to use it as some kind of fodder for a social media post or anything like that. It's just a guy sitting on a tour bus probably feeling a little bit frustrated. So and again, I was thinking about potentially editing that segment out, but I thought for historic purposes, we might as well just leave it in. And you can listen for yourself and realize that Vince was just probably saying things because he was a little upset about how the tubes eventually ended. And who can blame him? It wasn't a great ending in the mid 80s. Nevertheless, I'll shut up so you can listen to this amazing, never before heard interview with Vince Welnick, conducted by my good friend Bill Salom. Bill, thank you so much for giving this to us and to the rest of the world. And in the middle of this interview with Vince Welnick, there's just the three of you? No, it was us and who wrote it?

Bill Salom (3:20)

Who wrote it?

Vince Welnick (3:21)

Yeah, me and Laurie and Todd.

Bill Salom (3:23)

Because like you never know on your albums, the Tubes albums, because it just says Tubes, you know?

Vince Welnick (3:28)

Yeah, well, that was a deal we had where everything was the Tubes. So that way, because Perry's influence on songs was so strong that it didn't feel fair to cut him out of writers royalties when we were paying back all the albums to publishing royalties, which would have left Perry with nothing but a session pay and very little of anything else.

Bill Salom (3:51)

There's one other group who does that too. Yeah, well, I think it's... It was Utopia.

Vince Welnick (3:54)

I think it's only fair. Yeah, well, we kind of run along the same line.

Bill Salom (3:58)

Yeah.

Vince Welnick (3:58)

But if the song is covered by another artist named Todd, then it reverts back to the actual writers.

Bill Salom (4:05)

I see.

Vince Welnick (4:05)

And that's how it got down to... Laurie and I wrote it on our little ranch a long time ago. And then we presented it to Todd. Oh, we recorded it.

Bill Salom (4:14)

That was in 84, I guess. Was that 84 when Love Bomb was recorded?

Vince Welnick (4:18)

Yeah, we had already recorded this. He and Laurie and Roger Steen came in on the arrangement of Perry's Son in Sebastopol, where I live.