Drugs were everywhere in the eighties, and everybody I knew used them and loved them. Some were more devoted to the substances than others, but I didn’t know anyone who ever passed up a drug when it appeared. “Hey, you want one of these pills?” someone would say as they pulled out a plastic sandwich bag stuffed full of multicolored capsules.
“Uh, what are those?”
“I don’t know exactly. The red and yellow ones will slow you up and the brown and orange ones are some kind of speed.”
“Well, pass ’em over, man. Pass ’em over! Got a beer to wash these down with?”
There was a dividing line, though, and that was the needle. You’ll find, sometimes, that the most enthusiastic sniffer of medicinal powders will have a moment of horror and disgust when a party partner pulls out a rig.
“Hey, man, what the fuck is that?”
“It’s the best way to do it, dude.”
“Maybe you’d better take that action somewhere else. It’s not cool.”
But the thing is, it was cool. At least that’s how I saw it. When I encountered a junkie, I didn’t see some sad-sack, toothless loser with pallid skin and the inability to get through four hours without a fix. I saw a member of the Fraternal Order of Cool. The world heroin addicts occupied was closed off to me, and I was fascinated by it. There was a dividing line between drugs. Some users of cocaine and speed can get downright schoolmarmish when heroin enters the picture.
“Want to try some of this?”
“What is it?”
“Heroin.”
“Get the fuck out. Now.”
Heroin, like needles, was cool. Or so I thought in those days. I sensed that dope might be the key that could unlock all the doors that the secrets of art, poetry, and music hid behind. Charlie Parker had blown mad, furious harmonies under its sway. Keith Richards, the ultimate rock-and-roll outlaw, churned out thick, massive riffs with its influence. William Burroughs took its directives and conjured up dark, nightmarish worlds that I wanted to explore. The whole of the night-framed hip world grooved to its beat and pulse and created fucking art. Smack was their muse. My heroes had known its allure, felt its embrace, and I wanted what they had.
Despite my fascination and desire to explore the dark world of the poppy juice, I learned quickly that heroin wasn’t an easy score. The pill poppers, speed freaks, and drunks I knew just didn’t have access to junk. It wasn’t something they used and they didn’t have connections to that world. The junkies I knew all possessed some strange moralistic code that prevented them from introducing a novice to the habit.
“Hey, man, let me try some of that,” I’d say as casually as I could.
“You ever done this shit before?”
“No. But I’ve done everything else.”
“Sorry, kid. I’m not going to bust your cherry.”
“But I can pay. I have cash.”
“No.”
It was frustrating and a major hassle, but if you look hard enough for anything, and if you’re persistent enough, you’ll find it. So there I sat in an apartment deep inside the Hollywood wasteland. It was a hot night and the avenues and boulevards were crawling and thick with hustlers and twilight life forms. The room was dark and cool, a refuge from the dusty streets. I was twenty thousand leagues beneath a neon sea. Across from me, sitting like Buddha at a low table littered with bent and blackened spoons, misshapen candles spitting out what little life was left in them, needles, glittering squares of tinfoil, bright scraps of rubber that had once been balloons, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, and half-empty glasses, sat a guy named Top Jimmy. He was one of the coolest dudes I knew, an underground legend. I had met him at the Cathay de Grande where his band, the Rhythm Pigs, played every Monday night. A snaggletoothed, porcine throwback to an earlier era’s great, hard-living white bluesmen, his given name was James Paul Koncek, but he derived his blues handle from a counterman’s gig he had once held at a gritty little Mexican takeout joint called Top Taco over on La Brea across the street from A&M Records, where he handed out free tacos and burritos on the sly to struggling musicians and local down-and-outers.
Now here I was in Jimmy’s pad about to take my first taste of heroin. I had conned him and convinced him I was a regular user of the stuff. Not strung out, but well versed in the mysteries of the medicine. I was excited and maybe a little scared, without a clue about what to expect. This is it, I thought. This is your first step into something deep, Bob. I watched him perform the arcane voodoo ritual of shooting up. I was fascinated as he carefully measured out a dose into a bent spoon like some nineteenth-century backwoods apothecary, added some water, and then cooked it over the flame of one of those sputtering candles on the table. When he determined it was ready, he sucked up the solution into a syringe through a wadded-up piece of wet cotton. I watched him tie off his left arm with a cord, find a ripe and juicy vein, and slide the needle in. He pushed down the plunger. Silence.
Jimmy let the rush wash over him, then focused. “You sure you’ve done this before?” he asked suspiciously.
“Fuck yeah, man,” I lied, a little too eagerly.
“You got a point?” was his next question.
My naïveté showed. I was lost. A point? A point about what?
Before I could answer, Jimmy said, “Here,” and took my arm, tied me off, and gave me a shot from his own rig.
This was something. A window opened. A wave flooded in and I felt like I was sinking deeper into the underwater world of Jimmy’s pad. Street noises filtered in from a million miles away. I tamped down a slight flurry of panic and briefly felt nauseous, but that passed as I rode the wave and quickly found my sea legs.
I’d never felt so fucking great in all my life. This stuff was something I definitely needed to explore more deeply. I became part of a little clique of intravenous drug users. It was a small circle. Don Bolles from the Germs; Top Jimmy, of course; and a dealer named Earache. I lived at the La Leyenda Apartments, which rose like a dirty, skewed Spanish Art Deco iceberg from the concrete sea of Whitley Avenue. My habit began to grow from that first taste, although I ignored all the warning signs. Lori left me after one too many fuckups. I didn’t really care. My interests were becoming narrowed down to three things: dope, drink, and music.
One day, as I made my daily neighborhood rounds, I ran into Flea—the kid who had flipped my records while I DJ’ed—and his friend Anthony Kiedis. I knew Flea as the bass player from Fear, and I loved that band. I didn’t really know Anthony except from seeing him around at the clubs. “What’s going on, man?” I asked.
“We’re starting a new band,” said Flea.
“It’s a whole new thing,” said Anthony. “Punk and rap all mixed up together. Totally unique and new.” They called themselves the Red Hot Chili Peppers and they said they had a gig that night at a place called the Kit-Kat Club.
“You should come see the show, Bob,” said Flea.
I was always up for new music, so I went and was knocked out by what I heard. I’d had no idea how good they were. It was mind-boggling. They were right. What they had developed was completely different, a hybrid sound. It was energetic and crazy, and they had charisma. I could see they were onto something.
After the show, I caught up with them. “That was awesome! Where are you guys going now?”
“We need to find a place to stay,” said Anthony.
“Yeah, we’ve been couch surfing,” said Flea.
“I got you covered,” I told them. “My wife left. I have room. Come stay at my place.”
They moved in that night, although I don’t know if you could technically call it a move since they arrived with not much more than the clothes on their backs. They had been living as close to homeless as it’s possible to be without actually living in an alley. I was a little concerned about how they might react to my drug use and drinking, but I saw right away that they were full-on coke-shooting, up-all-night maniacs. This was a living arrangement that could work, I thought.
They had wildly different personalities. Flea was much more like me in those days. We were both a couple of dedicated music geeks. Anthony was too, but he was definitely his own man. He tended to be thoughtful and deep. Here was a kid who had some confidence, I thought. He saw himself as equal to anybody and everybody alive or dead. That kind of self-esteem is rare. Especially for a twenty-year-old kid. Flea and I didn’t possess that kind of self-confidence. I still don’t. I tried to understand it. What I think is that both Flea and I had somewhat traumatic childhoods. Anthony didn’t come to California until he was about thirteen. Up until then, he lived with his mom and stepdad in a very traditional, normal home. By the time he got out here and started living with his nontraditional, iconoclastic biological father, he had already developed his personality. It was set. It wasn’t going to change.
Anthony, as long as I’ve known him, has never felt the need to explain himself. He’s never cared what anybody thought of him. He knew who he was and if you didn’t like it, too bad. It didn’t affect him. It works both ways for him. If you cross him, you’re dead to him. I’ve had arguments with him, but he’s never felt I’ve betrayed him, so we’ve managed to stay cool with each other. But, I swear, I have never met anyone who had a better understanding of who he was than that guy. He’s self-contained and doesn’t need anyone but himself.
Flea and I were different and bonded over our shared musical heroes. All three of us would constantly spin records in our apartment, but Flea and I would take it to an obsessive level. Not long after they had moved in, Flea and I discovered we both loved bass player Jaco Pastorius.
“Wait! I got a bunch of his albums,” I said. I dove for one of my crates and started to pull out some of Pastorius’s solo stuff as well as his work with Weather Report. Flea started to paw through my records and came up with Ian Hunter’s All American Alien Boy album.
“Did you know he played on this?” he asked.
It wasn’t long before the floor was littered with record albums and old music magazines I had managed to dig out. We were having a ball listening to the music as we quizzed each other with Jaco Pastorius trivia. It was then that I noticed Anthony had come into the room. He looked at us like we were idiots. His arms were folded and a smirk was on his face. Okay, this deserved an explanation.
“What?” I asked as I threw up my hands.
“Why do you guys do that?” he sneered.
“Do what?” asked Flea.
“This fucking idolatry, man. It’s kind of sick, you know?”
“Wait,” I said. “You mean to tell me that you’ve never admired or idolized anyone in your entire life?”
Anthony didn’t even take time to think about his answer. “No. Never.” He gave a derisive snort and went out to buy cigarettes. But Anthony wasn’t immune to the appeal of rock idols. While we all enjoyed the degenerate, trashy, punk rock splendor of life at La Leyenda, he became obsessed with the song “Las Vegas” from Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel LP.
Every time I hit your crystal city
I know you’re gonna make a wreck out of me.
With doper’s logic, Anthony and I had become convinced that underneath the amphetamine whomp of guitars and the brittle vocal harmonies of the track, Gram was speaking to us directly, advising and watching over us as we took turns shooting up speed in our squalid little pad behind the flimsy door that read 305.
Flea, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly as big a fan of the early country-rock sounds as Anthony and I were, preferring instead the punk rock drive of Minor Threat and their song “Straight Edge.”
But I’ve got better things to do
Than sit around and fuck my head
Flea’s obsession with that song and its message should have clued Anthony and me in to what would follow. One afternoon, Flea just spilled it. “I’m moving out,” he said.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Back home with my mom. It’s too much here. The drugs and everything. It’s all you guys do,” he said as he looked around at the squalor, the empty bottles, the mess. His mind was made up, and there was no need for discussion. He walked out and left Anthony and me there to stare at each other in stunned silence. We decided to get high. It was weird. Flea still hung out with us, and he and Anthony were still focused on the Chili Peppers, but Flea was clean and sober.
Their band was already generating excitement on the club scene, and I spent so much time with them, it was hard for me to not think of myself as part of the group. In the meantime, though, I made sure that I held on to my DJ jobs. Those were perfect gigs for someone like me. In the shape I was in, about the one thing I could do with any sort of skill was play records. Still, I started to form the idea that I could manage the Chili Peppers. In my mind, I was the fifth member of the band. I thought I was more a part of the band than was the drummer, Jack Irons. In retrospect, it may not have been the greatest or most accurate assessment of the situation. Worse, my sights weren’t set that high with regard to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “You guys can be as big as the Cramps … or maybe even X!” went one of my managerial pep talks.
Anthony had bigger plans. For six months, he and I booked the band’s gigs. I’d go to the shows, hang out backstage, and feel like I was part of something. I was connected to the music in a way that my DJ jobs didn’t fulfill. I would constantly feed them ideas about music and introduce them to records by Bob Dylan and Hank Williams. Anthony may have had an innate understanding of show business and image—he was a handsome guy who knew how to be cool—but I knew about songs and songwriting, something neither he nor Flea had mastered yet.
One night, at one of their gigs, I noticed a twitchy, fast-talking guy who instantly reminded me of Paul Shaffer’s Artie Fufkin character from This Is Spinal Tap. He nosed around the band. I thought, Who the hell is this guy? I made a few inquiries and learned his name was Lindy Getz and he had credentials. Solid credentials. Getz had discovered Bachman-Turner Overdrive, the Ohio Players, and countless other big-league bands. Now he had his sights set on Anthony. “I want to manage you boys,” he said. My first thought was, This dude’s a fuckin’ tool. Why would Anthony even talk to a guy like that? I may have had some connections to get the band booked in the smaller clubs of L.A., but it was painfully obvious that, compared to someone like Lindy Getz, I lacked even the most basic skills and know-how for managing an act that was, by the week, becoming increasingly popular. I hung around and drank too much and did whatever drugs I could get my hands on. Getz was in as the band’s new manager and I was out.
I tried to find a role within the group as a sort of aide-decamp. Why not? The Clash had Kosmo Vinyl. The Chili Peppers had me. I gave them ideas. I introduced them to Funkadelic’s music. Because of my input, there’s a cover of Hank Williams’s “Why Don’t You Love Me” on their first record. The album’s closer, “Grand Pappy Du Plenty,” was based on my suggestion that they do an avant-garde instrumental. But with Lindy in as manager, my official title was changed to road manager. I didn’t like that role at all. It basically meant I was a glorified gofer. If someone in the band needed water, it was my job to see that it arrived, but I was usually too busy chatting up people around the band and partying. I was barely competent as a road manager, and it bugged me that I had been demoted even though, deep down, I knew that the Chili Peppers could do better than someone like me. My actual day-to-day life hadn’t really changed. I still hung out with Flea and Anthony, but I still felt diminished.
Anthony partied almost as hard as I did, but he was on his way to rock stardom, so he was forgiven. He was the front man and had the luxury of being a hard-core intravenous drug abuser. Within the band’s structure, I was expected to work and get things done. I could barely make sure their equipment got onstage. My poor managerial skills spilled over into our life at La Leyenda. I couldn’t even get the rent paid on time.
I stumbled home one night and Anthony confronted me. “We had a visitor today.”
“Really? Who came by?”
“Some rep for the building’s owner. Says you haven’t given him any rent money. Dude, I gave you some dough a few weeks ago.”
“Don’t worry, man. I’ll take care of it,” I said.
The money I had—including Anthony’s—I had spent on drugs and liquor. I couldn’t cover the rent. I did have enough cash on hand to buy some cheap, made-in-China hand tools and a decent dead-bolt lock down at the local Home Depot. It was a temporary fix, and outside of the weekly calls and visits from the landlord, it seemed to work.
“Man, you’re supposed to be taking care of this stuff,” said Anthony.
“Hey, they can’t get in. We’re the only ones who have keys. I’ll give ’em some money as soon as I can.”
It worked for nearly four months—until I came home one day and saw a red “pay or quit” notice tacked to the door.
“Did you see the sign?” asked Anthony, who had wised up and stopped me giving me rent money that he knew would not go to the landlord.
“I’ll handle it,” I said. The next morning, I woke to the sound of drills and hammers just in time to see a work crew remove the door and walk off with it.
“Okay, now what?” asked Anthony.
I grabbed some old bedsheets and tacked them to the door frame. “There you go,” I said. Anthony looked unsure. “What?” I said. “It’s not like we have anything anyone would want to steal.”
It was obvious the whole road manager thing wouldn’t work out when we went on the first tour. To the band’s credit, they gave me a shot, but I blew it. Hotel bookings, sound checks, equipment logistics—the tour was in a constant state of chaos because I was drunk and high all the time and not doing my job. I was a stumbling wreck who couldn’t get anything done. The band hired a guy named Ben Marks to replace me when we had barely gotten out of Los Angeles.
“Look, Bob,” said Anthony. “We’re bringing in this guy to be the road manager.”
“But I’m the road manager.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” said Anthony. “We need someone who’s professional.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do?”
I was demoted to roadie. I didn’t do any better in that position. Ever moved equipment? It’s hard work and it’s boring. After the show, when the band got to party, I was supposed to break down the stage and load the equipment for the next gig. Instead, I’d sneak off to get high or hang out in a bar. I knew it was starting to piss off Anthony.
I was dead weight. By the time we got to New York, I was fired. “Bob, you’re not doing anything,” said Anthony. “Why should we keep you on the payroll?” I didn’t have an answer for that. We were at the same hotel where the Replacements had rooms. Chili Peppers fired me? I thought. Fuck it. I’ll just go to work for the Replacements. I approached Paul Westerberg. He was a great guy, witty, funny—and he liked to drink as much as I did. We got into a serious drinking bout and bitched about life on the road, tours, and hotels. I brought up the subject. “So, you know I’m not with the Chili Peppers crew anymore,” I said.
“That’s too bad, man,” he said. He sensed where I was going with this conversation and cut me off. “It’s a real shame … but you can’t come with us.”
He was right. It never would have worked. I was a terrible roadie. I was the worst drunk and drug addict out of that whole crew, and that included the musicians. When Paul Westerberg—a man who could consume absolutely superhuman amounts of alcohol—thinks you’re an out-of-control drunk, you’d better believe that you’ve made an impression.
And so I was cut loose in New York like some sad, drunken hobo. I told myself I didn’t really care, but the truth was that I was scared and a little resentful that my friends were on their way to rock music stardom and I wasn’t. I felt left behind. Within a year of being with the Chili Peppers, I had gone from band manager to road manager to roadie to fired. It was not a good career trajectory. With some money in my pockets, I drifted around Times Square for a week before I headed to Boston for an aimless seven days. I stayed drunk. Eventually, though, it was time to come home to L.A. I had no idea what waited just around the corner for me.