While Jerry was a student at Spanaway High School in 1982, a teacher named Joanne Becker asked him and his friends to try out for choir. Jerry spoke highly of his experience with Becker. “She was one of the few teachers I actually had fun being around,” he told The Seattle Times in 1991. “We did everything from modern pop to some really great classical stuff. It was really happening.” Becker is credited with alleviating Jerry’s fear of performing onstage—a crucial skill for his future profession. She eventually had him performing fifteenth-century a cappella music.
“You didn’t feel intimidated,” Jerry said. “That’s something that really stands out in my mind. I was really into rock and roll at the time, and I was getting into bands and jamming, and that was my only musical outlet. I’d seen teachers in other schools that had music programs, but I was never impressed with their attitude. And that’s something I look for now when I’m working with anybody, is somebody who doesn’t talk down to you.”10
In his senior year, Jerry was president of the choir, which had a quartet that sang the national anthem at basketball games and won competitions, getting ones from the judges—the highest possible mark. Years later, Jerry said his choir and drama teachers really pushed him early on in his quest for a music career. After Facelift was certified gold for sales in excess of 500,000 copies, he sent both of his former teachers gold records.11
Jerry graduated from high school in 1984. A year later, he moved to the Dallas area to join a band with a couple of friends and worked at the Arnold and Morgan Music Company.12 At some point in 1985 or early 1986, Jerry moved back to the Tacoma area. Bobby Nesbitt and Scott Nutter were the singer and drummer in a local band named Phoenix, which had their practice space at a storage facility, along with several other local bands. Nesbitt and Nutter were checking out the other bands when they walked into the unit where Raze—Jerry’s band at the time—had their rehearsal space. Raze didn’t have a singer—at the time the band was a trio with Jerry on guitar, future Pretty Boy Floyd bassist Vinnie Chas (real name: Vincent Charles Pusateri), and a drummer. They recognized Jerry’s talent immediately.13
“Our guitar player was going to be fired, but we heard of another band in the facility. It was Jerry,” Nutter recalled. Nesbitt added, “Basically we ended up kind of stealing Jerry from that band because we saw him and we were like, ‘Wow, this is the guy, totally,’ and it fit.”
Shortly after Jerry joined the band, they changed their name to Diamond Lie. “He didn’t like the name [Phoenix] right away, and he came up with the name Diamond Lie. I want to say he said it was some lyrics from a song that he had heard on the radio,” Nesbitt said, but could not recall the name of the band or song.
Diamond Lie’s original bassist quit sometime later. Shortly after this, Matt Muasau’s sister met Jerry and told him, “My brother is a really good bass player. Why don’t you talk to him?” A meeting was arranged, the two hit it off and began writing music, and Muasau got the job, for which he used the stage name Matt Mustapha.
The band relocated to a new rehearsal space in a rented basement in somebody’s house in Spanaway. The owner of the house, who Muasau said they called Big Mike, was the band’s unofficial manager and handled their bookings. Nutter described the band’s image and sound as “any of the glam bands that were big at the time. Poison. Not really Mötley Crüe—we were more pop, chick rock, that kind of thing.” Their set included covers of Sweet’s “Fox on the Run” and KISS’s “Rock and Roll All Nite.” Jerry was already writing songs at the time. According to Nutter, “I would say [Jerry] would write half of it or more, and then bring it to the band. They would work it out, and then I would add vocals to the top.”
Nesbitt said Jerry became the band’s leader fairly soon after joining. “I really liked Jerry a lot. I was not used to Jerry’s brashness. He definitely was the leader, and he let you know how he felt, but he wasn’t an asshole. He wasn’t a yelling kind of guy. But he was in his own way kind of intimidating because he was so confident.
“Jerry knew exactly what he wanted to do,” he said. “He basically wrote all the material. He took over the whole songwriting process. It wasn’t a bad thing or anything, because he was such an excellent songwriter. He could crank out a song. Every practice, he came back with new songs.
“Being in Diamond Lie was like being in the army. We worked our asses off. It was regimented; we had a goal. We worked our butts off to be the best. I’d say Jerry was kind of the general. He knew exactly what it took to get to that point,” Nesbitt said. Jerry set up large mirrors in their practice space so they could see for themselves how they looked performing live and make improvements as necessary. “I was horrified at the faces I was making while I was playing drums that I never even knew about,” Nesbitt said.
According to Muasau, “Jerry was always professional, and he wanted to make sure the show was professional. So when we hit the stage, it wasn’t just a band getting up there and jamming. It was a band getting up there and putting on a show. We were entertainers as much as we were musicians and songwriters.” Jerry also had the band working on stage choreography. He and Muasau worked out a move where they would toss their guitar picks at each other while standing about ten feet apart in the middle of a song, catch it, and keep playing.
Things didn’t always go according to plan. During one performance, Muasau and Jerry were doing the KISS move where everyone is swaying back and forth in synch with one another. Jerry and Muasau got out of rhythm, and eventually each wound up doing the opposite of the other while about two feet apart. Muasau felt the headstock of his bass hit something solid, a feeling he compared to hitting a baseball.
It was Jerry’s head he’d hit, giving him a cut right above his eyebrow, which began to bleed. According to Muasau, “The crowd was like, ‘Yeah, go on, man, kill yourself for us!’” Someone put a bandage on the cut and stopped the bleeding, and Jerry was able to finish the set.
At another gig, the band was told there would be pyro. Before the set, they were told to pay attention to the markers placed on the stage, noting that Nutter, Muasau, and Jerry had to be standing on those markers at specific times in the show. During the start of the performance, the pyro went off, but Muasau wasn’t on his marker.
“The crowd was just … their eyes got really big, and I went, ‘Wow, what did I do?’ Then all of a sudden, all these sparks started falling all around me like snow. I had enough hair spray in my hair, and I had enough hair back then to where I would have exploded,” Muasau said. He, however, avoided disaster, where others—Michael Jackson and Metallica’s James Hetfield—suffered severe burns and had to be hospitalized.
Diamond Lie would typically practice five nights a week, with rehearsals lasting as long as three hours. They started playing shows in Tacoma and Seattle with the ultimate goal of getting a record deal. They got to the point where they were playing weekly gigs. At some time during this period, they became friends with a guy named Steve Frost, who would regularly come to their rehearsals. Frost had recently received money from an inheritance, and he gave Diamond Lie two thousand dollars to record a demo.
The band went into London Bridge Studios and recorded a four-song demo. “It came out really great. I was excited by it. We had the guitar player from a band called Perennial, Schuyler Duryee came out, and he kind of produced it for us, along with Rick and Raj Parashar,” Nesbitt recalled. “Perennial was a big deal. They had a song on [Seattle radio station KISW] that was in the [station’s] top ten. That was really probably my very first experience at being in a recording studio.”