In fact, Martin, 30, and his well traveled, hard-rock cohorts—bassist Billy Sheehan, 38, drummer Pat Torpey, 32, and guitarist Paul Gilbert, 25—didn't begin to feel they had arrived until they performed on Late Night with David Letterman. "It was mega," says Martin. Adds Sheehan: "I had called my mom and said, 'Our single went No. 1.' She was like, 'Oh, yeah?' Then I called and said, 'Mom, we re going to be on Letterman. She said, 'I gotta tell the neighbors!' "
Ironically, Martin's softly romantic "To Be with You" is one of the few songs on Big's Lean into It album that doesn't aim to generate a neighbor-riling ruckus. "Eric was shy about it," says guitarist Gilbert. "I'm a heavy-metal fan, but I thought the song was real cool." Added to the album, the song moldered in record bins for months before a Nebraska deejay took a liking to it last June and began playing it. After that broadcast toehold, other stations followed suit, prompting Atlantic Records to issue the cut as a single.
The musicians are still blinking in the sudden spotlight. Martin, an erstwhile Army brat who lived in Europe; for more than a decade before settling with his family in Sacramento, began his career at 16 by answering a talent scout's ad. When the scout heard his still adolescent voice on the phone, "He goes, 'Yeah, but I'm looking for a male singer,' " Martin recalls. "I said, 'I am a male.' "
Martin went on to make three solo albums and was once a 16 Magazine pinup, but by 1988 he was home in Novato, Calif., with wife Stacey, a former San Francisco 49ers cheerleader turned department-store buyer, when he received a call from the Buffalo-born Sheehan, a former member of David Lee Roth's backup band. Sheehan was auditioning vocalists for a new group of his own and had remembered Martin's voice from those earlier solo albums. "I wanted somebody who was not your typical figernails-on-chalkboard rock singer," says Sheehan. Martin quickly signed on, joining Torpey (who had once made his living lip-synching songs on TV's old music-variety show Solid Gold) and Gilbert, a graduate of Hollywood's Guitar Institute of Technology.
Some aspects of success are proving quite easy to adjust to. ("We get to have single rooms now," reports Torpey.) Also audiences are getting younger. Invited back to Daytona to headline an MTV spring break concert, the nonsmoking, light-drinking bandmates were surprised when, thanks to their gentle single, a horde of bikinied teens turned up at a photo shoot—instead of the usual leather-and-studs hard-rock crowd. With their album already topping a million in sales and a second soft Martin ballad, "Just Take My Heart," steaming up the charts as well, Mr. Big can probably expect more of the same. Says Torpey happily: "The future's so bright, we gotta wear asbestos."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
