Brian Wheat lays it out. “If you believe in God,” he says, “then on the eighth day, God created Paul McCartney.” For a kid from Sacramento who grew up idolizing the Beatles’ left-handed bassist, that statement isn’t blasphemy — it’s biography. Wheat built his life around that faith: first as the low-end anchor of Tesla, one of the few hard-rock bands from the ’80s to avoid both spandex and irony, and now as the author of Son of a Milkman, a memoir that tells the unvarnished truth about a life that looked charmed from the outside but was, more often than not, chaos behind the curtain.
The idea for the book actually started in therapy. “My doctor told me I should write about what I was going through,” Wheat recalls. “Back then, I’d only put out two records. Who wanted to read that?” Thirty-six years and fifteen albums later, the story had grown legs — and scars.
At the height of Tesla’s fame, Wheat was drowning in the machinery of success: bulimia, anxiety, depression, and a nagging sense that he was the odd man out in a supposedly indestructible rock band. “It was my deep dark secret,” he admits. “I did it for five years. Eat and purge, eat and purge. It’s horrible. It’s not good for you, and it does damage you don’t even see until later.” The revelation that a male rock star — a bassist in a denim-and-beer band — was battling an eating disorder wasn’t something anyone expected. “You’d be surprised how many guys were doing this,” Wheat says. “It was actually another guy in a rock band who told me about it.”
He finally stopped in the mid-’90s. “The drugs and the bulimia are long gone,” he says. “I still deal with anxiety, depression, ulcerative colitis — all that — but I’m here. I’m 58. I’m lucky.” His tone isn’t self-pitying; it’s more like someone who’s learned to coexist with his ghosts. “Some days are better than others,” he shrugs. “That’s life. It’s not one big smooth carpet ride.”
The book isn’t all pain. There’s plenty of joy, too — like the time he met McCartney. “That was God, man,” Wheat insists. “What are the odds? This kid idolizes Paul McCartney, goes to London, and in this ten-minute window, there he is, in his own building. That’s cosmic.” When asked about McCartney III, Wheat beams. “It’s wholesome. His voice sounds great. He’s 78 and people complain he can’t hit all the high notes? Give me a break. He’s been singing like a bird since he was fourteen.”
Tesla’s story, like Wheat’s, has always been about survival. When hair metal crashed, they kept touring. When MTV stopped playing guitars, they picked up acoustics. Five Man Acoustical Jam turned what could’ve been a career death sentence into a platinum reset. And they’re still at it — their 2019 album Shock had Def Leppard’s Phil Collen producing, a kind of full-circle moment for a band often linked to their British “big brothers.”
“Phil once called Shock a modern-day Sgt. Pepper,” Wheat laughs. “That’s Phil’s comment, not mine. I’m not that arrogant. But yeah, it’s a record full of different sounds. We tried things we’d never done before.” Songs like “California Summer Song” flirted with pop, while “Taste Like” returned to Tesla’s crunchier roots. “We just wanted to mix it up,” he says. “Whoever had the idea, we made it the best it could be. We’re not airplane pilots. This is what we do.”
Even after decades on the road, Wheat hasn’t lost his sense of perspective — or humor. “You start realizing you’re getting old when you look back and go, ‘Wait, The Great Radio Controversy is 30 years old?’ Holy shit.” But he’s grateful. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” he insists. “I’ve got a beautiful life. If I can help somebody by being honest about what I went through, then that’s what it’s all about.”
Rock’s center of gravity may have shifted — fewer videos, fewer record stores, fewer kids buying guitars — but Wheat still believes in its cycles. “People said rock was dead when disco took over,” he says. “It always comes back around. It’s been here since it’s been here.”
Tesla, for their part, are proof. Still touring, still recording, still defiant enough to name a record Shock in their fourth decade. “We just put our heads down and go for it,” Wheat says. “Some days you fly, some days you crawl. Either way, you keep moving.”
If Son of a Milkman is any indication, he’s still doing both — crawling toward grace, flying toward McCartney.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
