Back home in Los Angeles, after my failure as part of the Chili Peppers crew, I didn’t know who I was supposed to be or what I should do. Anthony and I had ditched the La Leyenda with back rent owed. He found new quarters and I stayed where I could, but we were okay with each other. In May of 1984 Flea and Anthony invited me to go along with them to see Van Halen play a three-night run at the San Diego Sports Arena, and I jumped at the chance. For one thing, it was a solid conformation that we were still friends after the debacle of my time on the road with them.
We drove down the 5 freeway from Los Angeles, a long, traffic-choked slog through the city and its outer suburbs that didn’t lighten up until we hit the coast and saw the vast shimmer of the Pacific Ocean to our right and the buff-colored hills of Camp Pendleton to our left. I sat in the backseat with a bottle of vodka, a bag of coke, and a couple balloons of heroin. It was a long time to be cooped up in a car, and I was wrecked before we reached Orange County. To amuse myself, I sang. I didn’t think Anthony and Flea could hear me, but they interrupted me midchorus.
“What song is that, dude?” Anthony asked.
“It’s just a song. It doesn’t have a name.”
“It’s good,” said Flea. “And you can actually carry a tune.”
It was a nice compliment and it felt good. In the back of my head, I had always thought about being in a band, but a singer? I hadn’t really entertained that notion on any kind of serious level—despite the brief stint in the downtown art-noise band a few years earlier. Through Anthony and Flea, I became acquainted with a guy named Pete Weiss. He was a drummer and he could be combative. We were about as different from each other as two guys could possibly be when it came to our dispositions, but in some ways, we were incredibly similar. Headstrong. My old friend Chris Hansen knew him from Los Angeles City College, where they had both attended classes, and now the two of them had cooked up the idea to start a band.
One night, Pete came by the pad and told me, “Chris and I started a group.”
“Great,” I said. “Chris is a good guitar player.”
“You’re going to be the singer.”
“What? You’ve never even heard me.”
“Chris says you were great in that band you guys used to have. Don’t worry about it. The worst that can happen is that you’ll fuck up.”
I was no stranger to that, so what did I have to lose? Besides, from the time I had posed with my little acoustic guitar and sang “Dang Me,” I had secretly wanted to be a rock star. Musicians fascinated me. I spent almost all my time with them, and music had long been my passion, but I had never pursued it with any kind of seriousness. I didn’t think I had the right look and knowing so many great musicians personally, it would be devastatingly embarrassing to fail in front of them. But after all the years I’d collected records, read rock magazines, and hung out in clubs, I thought I knew a thing or two about songwriting and stagecraft. Chris was convinced this project would work, based on our brief stint in our “art band.” I figured I possessed enough charisma to make a go of it, but I was also pretty sure that even if I bombed as a front man, I’d be switched over to guitar and I could hide behind an amp or turn my back to the audience. That was my Plan B. The second guitar player in the group was the late William “Bill” Stobaugh. Why he was a guitar player was a mystery since Bill could barely tune his instrument. Still, he was a completely weird, crazy, and artistic guy. Bill had an unusual background. He had been born in Bahrain, the son of a man who worked for an American oil company, but grew up in suburban Massachusetts. He had come to Los Angeles to attend school, where he received both bachelor’s and master’s degrees at CalArts. He was skilled as a filmmaker. Parts of his shot-on-film master’s thesis were used in the Disney movie Tron. He would eventually make film his career, doing a lot of rock videos, including “Higher Ground” for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He died in 1996 from complications that followed heart surgery. He was only forty-two. On bass we had a boom operator named Jon Huck and, for good measure, we had a third guitar played by K. K. Barrett, another film-world refugee who worked as an art director.
But back then, we all wanted to be a rock band. The Replacements were our inspiration, but once we started to rehearse, we found we couldn’t do anything but be ourselves. We tried to play some cover songs. It was a disaster.
“Hey, man, let’s try to play ‘American Woman,’ ” said Chris at our first rehearsal, and launched into the main riff. Pete fell in behind him and the rest of us tried to follow. It was a god-awful racket, and I couldn’t remember the lyrics even though I had heard the song forever on classic rock radio.
“Hold up, hold up,” said Chris as he called the jam to a halt. “This doesn’t work.” Everybody took a break to smoke cigarettes and crack open fresh beers.
“You know what sounded okay?” I asked as I poured some vodka into my brew. “When we were just fucking around with those chords before we tried to play an actual song. I think if you guys just start doing that, we can come up with some lyrics. At least it’d be our own thing. And I think we sounded pretty good.”
“It can’t be any worse than ‘American Woman,’ ” said Chris.
We started to jam and fell straight into a groove. It felt right. We definitely had something. We wrote four songs at that first rehearsal that sprang to life straight out of our riffs and jams. “Yes Yes No” and “Positive Train” were collaborative efforts with the whole band. Jon and Pete came up with something they called “Thelonious Monster” and Jon and I wrote “Life’s a Groove.” It was a productive first rehearsal. We also discussed what to call ourselves. My thought was to use the name the F.T.W. Experience—“F.T.W.,” of course, standing in for “Fuck the World” and “Experience” tacked on as a nod to the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Pete wanted to name the band after the song he and Jon wrote. Somebody noted, “If we call the band Thelonious Monster, we’ll have a theme song like the Monkees did.” It made sense, and I had to admit, it was a good name.
We rehearsed like that for four months, nearly every night, rough jams and hooky riffs crystallizing into actual songs. I had connections with the bookers at the various clubs where I DJ’ed, so getting gigs wasn’t a problem. Keeping them coherent was. I was usually drunk, high, or a combination of the two for our shows, and I know it bugged Pete. I’d rant from the stage about Reagan or religion or something I had seen in the newspaper earlier in the day as I’d introduce a song. Drunks and addicts almost always think they’re being witty and charming when, mostly, they’re just obnoxious.
“Fuck Ronald Reagan!” I shouted, while, in my peripheral vision, I could see Pete behind his drum kit roll his eyes and throw up his hands as if to say, “Not again with this shit!”
I wasn’t in the mood for his judgments. Not again. I could picture him after the show: “Goddamn it, Bob! Let’s just play the songs!” Yeah, well, fuck him. I didn’t have to take guff off of a drummer. I launched myself straight over the bass drum and through the cymbals and connected with him. We rolled around on the stage while we traded blows.
“Holy shit, you guys! Knock it off!” Chris yelled. I snapped out of it. “Oh, right. We’re at a gig. People paid to hear us.” Pete and I broke it up and we played our song. The shows were sloppy and chaotic and always threatened to fall apart at any moment, but they were also very punk rock. Cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and lots and lots of alcohol made me act foolish more than once. “You’re a fuckin’ mess, Forrest,” Pete said with barely concealed contempt. He was right. I was—but our audience dug the excitement.
Flea had come to a couple of shows and had a suggestion. “You guys need to make a demo record,” he said.
“We need a place to do it, man,” I told him.
“No problem. I have the hookup.”
He certainly did. He was pals with a guy named Spit Stix who had played drums in Fear when Flea was in that band. Stix worked as a recording engineer at a studio on La Brea, just north of Sunset Boulevard. It was a gray building called Rusk Sound Studios. A rather anonymous-sounding name, but the place was owned by Giorgio Moroder. He had won an Academy Award for his score to the movie Midnight Express in 1978 and had never looked back. His work in film and with disco and techno acts was legendary. But because he was in such demand, he was never at Rusk Sound Studios, so Stix let us sneak in at night and record. We were all proud of the results.
“Hey, Bob! Did you hear?” asked Chris one hazy afternoon.
“Huh?” I said as I followed a double rum and Coke with a big line of speed.
“Man, Brett Gurewitz from Bad Religion heard our demo!”
“And?”
“Jesus, Bob, try to focus. He loved it. You know he runs Epitaph Records. He wants to record us.”
“A record deal?” I said. “A real record deal?”
“Yes!”
This was impressive. Gurewitz came to meet us one night. “I’d really like to do a proper album with you guys,” he said. “I think Epitaph could really do something with an album.” We were all in. It may not have been the best deal in the history of recorded music, but it was the first major step for the Monster. Our deal gave us one hundred hours of studio time. With Brett as producer, we went to Westbeach Recorders in Los Angeles at ten every night, where we’d stay until six in the morning.
“Bob, try to stay sober. We’ve got work to do!” Chris or Pete would plead. I thought the drugs and the booze had worked well enough to get us to where we were, so why stop now? I may have been completely fucked up, but I showed up on time, contributed to the songs, and laid down my tracks. Baby … You’re Bummin’ My Life Out in a Supreme Fashion was released in 1986, and I was unprepared for the response it got. Not many months earlier, we’d decided to start a band. We weren’t seasoned songwriters or musicians, but now, with a growing reputation for unpredictability at our live shows and a new, professionally recorded album showcasing our act, the Los Angeles Times, the Herald-Examiner, and the New York Times all hailed the record as a rock-and-roll masterpiece and compared it to the Stones’ Exile on Main Street and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. What the fuck? How did that happen? It was a complete turnaround. Sixteen months earlier, I was just a failed roadie for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and now I was being called a genius in major American newspapers. It could have gone to anybody’s head, except for one important detail. Other than the fact that we had critical praise, nothing else had changed. I was still an unpaid aide-decamp for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which mostly meant that I hung out with them and offered suggestions, moral support, and the occasional critique. They never held my disastrous stint as a paid crew member against me, but they never put me back on the payroll either. I was broke.
I needed a job. Luckily, Jon Huck’s girlfriend Sosie Hublitz, who later became my second wife, was an art director in the movie business and she always looked out for us. She helped me get some jobs working as a production assistant. Robby Müller, a cinematographer, also helped us find work. I loaded furniture. I was a set dresser. You could always pick up some work on a rock video or a commercial for toothpaste or floor wax. In Los Angeles, there was always some kind of shoot happening. Jon Huck and Pete Weiss kept doing sound work. K. K. Barrett kept on with his production-design work. We were all wired into that film world. We felt like we were the coolest people in Hollywood. I may have been at the fringe of it all, but that business pays pretty well. I worked on a movie called The Boss’s Wife. One of the stars was Christopher Plummer. I probably made $10,000 just for moving furniture around. That went really far back then, although it could have gone farther if I didn’t spend nearly all of it on heroin and cocaine. But those film jobs allowed me to live and eat and be me, even if “being me” led to employment problems. Keeping any kind of job is difficult when you’re in a stupor.
The album didn’t help us get better gigs, either. Despite all the critical praise heaped upon Baby … You’re Bummin’ My Life Out in a Supreme Fashion, we found ourselves playing the same little clubs we’d been playing. When the record came out to such accolades, I was convinced it would change everything. Instead, nothing happened. We just floundered around. We made a second record, this time for Relativity Records. The company signed us solely on the praise we had gotten from the first. The deal we got wasn’t great, but we made enough to buy a van to take on tour. Next Saturday Afternoon is Flea’s favorite album of ours, and even today, I’m proud of those songs.
I wasn’t too worried. I had seen the same thing happen with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were my de facto business model. They had made their first record, gigged, and didn’t make much money. Then they made the second record and started to get booked in places like the Universal Amphitheatre. I figured we’d record the new album and it would make us popular enough to play places like the Hollywood Palladium. Next Saturday Afternoon came out in 1987, and we toured like crazy behind its release. It was grueling.
People think, “Oh, you’re on tour! That’s great! You get to go places, meet interesting people, and see the country!” You don’t get to do any of that. You show up and do a sound check, go to a bar, have some drinks, see a dressing room, get wasted, do a show, and then drive through the night to the next show, where the routine starts again. It’s not a “See America” sightseeing jaunt. It’s fucking work. And it’s brutal, mind-fucking work. K. K. and Jon quit under the strain.
“You can’t quit now!” I said.
K. K. said, “Dude, I have a real career back in Los Angeles. Tear-assin’ around the country in a van isn’t doing me a bit of good.”
“Jon? Come on, man. We wrote ‘Life’s a Groove’ together.”
“Bob, I can make good money back home. I don’t need this bullshit. Sorry, man.”
They were right. They had real careers. But Pete and I were full bore and wide open. We were all in. Chris was in just because he was a student then and could arrange his schedule to accommodate the band. It was all good to him. And he wasn’t a drunk or a doper. He earned a doctorate in linguistics and another one in architecture. He didn’t go out. He didn’t party. It was music or school with him. Chris saved his money. He didn’t spend one unnecessary dime. He even scrimped with his per diem money. But he managed to pay his way through school and eventually bought a house in France from the dough he made in the band.
We toured Next Saturday Afternoon, and I felt like a musical success. My ego was in full bloom. And it was time to go cut a third record. It was 1989. Pete and Chris were still on board and we had picked up Rob Graves to play bass and had Mike Martt and Dix Denney, who covered the vacated guitar posts. John Doe from X produced us. Looking back on it, Stormy Weather was a good title. It reflected the vibe, both inside and out. There was pressure with this one. Everyone expected us to have a hit and break nationally. Relativity Records had given us a real budget and we recorded at Existia Music Group, L.A., a real state-of-the-art facility. Welcome, my son, to the machine. I was absolutely as convinced as any drunken, drug-abusing songwriter could be that “Sammy Hagar Weekend,” a sincere homage to the life of the teenage hard-rock fan and a shout-out to the embodiment of the working-class rocker, Fontana, California’s hometown hero, Sammy Hagar, was destined to be a huge hit.
’Cause it’s a Sammy Hagar weekend
It’s a big man’s day
We got a Metallica T-shirt
Got a little tiny baby mustache
Got a jacked-up Camaro
We’re sitting in the parking lot at Anaheim Stadium
Drinking beer
Smoking some pot
Snorting coke
And then drive
Drive over 55, yeah!
I had been that kid at the stadium. I knew what it meant to be out on a weekend like that, and I knew there were kids all over the country who knew what it meant too. Pete and I did not see eye to eye on the song at all. He didn’t even want it on the record. “That’s just a joke song,” he sneered. “Save it for your solo record, man.”
My contempt for Pete grew. How dare he be so dismissive of my great song?
“This song will be the hit of the record. You watch. You don’t know,” I slurred back at him.
John Doe, our producer—who had always been a huge inspiration to me as a songwriter—told us, “These songs are fucking amazing! You don’t play ’em very well … but they’re really, really solid.” Once I heard that, there was no doubt in my mind that this would be the band’s shining moment and our big breakout. Then the record came out.
“Sammy Hagar Weekend” didn’t go national. It stayed regional. But it did get people excited. We sold out the Palace in Hollywood. Two thousand people at one shot. We sold out a similarly sized club—the Channel—in Boston. I felt like we had made an impression. “Oh, my God, we’re rolling! There’s no stopping us!” I’d tell everybody. But, in the end, the record didn’t hit the mark I thought it would. It didn’t hit the mark anybody thought it would. My management team of Danny Heaps and Nick Wechsler took steps to make the band break. They set up a showcase for record-industry executives at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. It was a tiny, tiny space with a stage not much bigger than a postage stamp, but it had history in that any number of well-respected, big-time musicians had done some very special shows there through the years.
“Now, Bob,” Danny said. “We need you to be sharp. Be on point. Be cohesive and … don’t be fucked up!”
“This is an important gig, Bob,” Nick said, chiming in.
I knew it. I could sense it. Here we were, primed for an eight o’clock show in front of forty different record company executives.
We blew it.
We were nervous. I had the brilliant idea to parody U2’s recent ZooTV tour, throughout which Bono and the lads commented on celebrity and media through the use of costumes, masks, and multiple large-screen televisions. They played stadiums. We were at McCabe’s. The microscopic stage cluttered with small-screen TVs just didn’t work. Worse, we were out of synch. Our shows had always been messy, but this one needed to be tight. It wasn’t. I showed up stone-cold sober and I couldn’t remember the last time I had done that. I tried my absolute best. Pete, who had just about reached the end of the line with me, didn’t give a fuck. It was another Thelonious Monster train wreck. Whatever game plan we had before we went onstage didn’t amount to anything. Everyone just did what they wanted to do. This was a crucial moment and even I realized that we had reached a point where we couldn’t be like this anymore. We needed organization. The poor performance we gave and the tepid response we drew devastated me. I knew we were good and I knew we could do better, but nobody but me seemed to want to put in the effort that night. We crashed and burned.
The bright spot was that Bob Buziak, then the president of RCA Records, was in the audience. He was seen as something of a genius because he had taken a bunch of old rock-and-roll hits and packaged them together as the soundtrack for the movie Dirty Dancing. He saw Thelonious Monster play at Raji’s, a popular Hollywood club, and he approached me after the show.
“Bob, I love your songs, man,” he said as he shook my hand.
“Yeah? Thanks. What other songwriters do you like?” I asked as I tried to figure out if he was a real music fan or just some slick businessman.
“Oh, so many. I’m a huge songwriter fan. Off the top of my head, I guess I’d say I like Tom Petty, Neil Young, Tom Waits …”
Well, at least we spoke the same language.
“I’d love to sign you, Bob,” he said, but there was a slight hesitation in his voice.
“You’d like to sign me, but …,” I said.
“I’m not interested in the band.”
I understood his reasons. He definitely didn’t want or need the trouble that a bunch of drug addicts would inevitably bring. He was a fan of songwriters. He had signed Lucinda Williams and Michael Penn. He liked things to be simple and easy with as little drama as possible. He offered me a deal and I signed immediately. I didn’t even think of the band. My ego told me that I was the rock star, not them. What else was I supposed to do? I had just come off Stormy Weather and that was a lot of work. After you write songs like that, you need to rest up and recharge and get your mind right for the next round. The only way I knew how to recharge involved lots and lots of drugs. But now that I was signed to a major label, I was under a microscope. There was a lot of money involved and I was expected to produce. Bob knew I was in no shape to flesh out a complete song, so he hooked me up with other songwriters and musicians in the hope that they might steer me toward that elusive Big Hit Record I seemed unable to write. There were some impressive people I was paired with. Al Kooper, who played with Dylan when he went electric; Pete Anderson, who had brought some dirty and authentic Bakersfield punch to Dwight Yoakam’s records; Stan Lynch, from Tom Petty’s band the Heartbreakers; Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar, a premier L.A. studio guitarist who had left a mighty footprint on the sound of every Los Angeles–based singer-songwriter from the early seventies. They were supposed to help me, but they shut down all my ideas.
“You can’t write a song about heroin, Bob!”
I can’t write a song about heroin? They say write what you know, and for the past several years, that had been what I knew best … along with alcohol and amphetamines. I was a doper. I was a doper before I started the band. It was who I was, I thought. Did people give Keith Richards shit when he wrote “Dead Flowers”?
Well, if I can’t write about heroin, maybe I can write about religion, I thought. Everybody can relate to that, right? The reaction was swift. “You can’t use Jesus’s name in a song title, Bob. Are you nuts? People get offended. People who buy records!”
I thought I’d write a love song. I tried to write one with Victoria Williams. I had always had a huge crush on her, but she was married to Peter Case. That pent-up emotion came out in our song. It was darkly beautiful. It was about a girl who committed suicide and the observations of a man who once loved her while he ate cake at her funeral. I played it for RCA … and they hated it. My manager Danny Heaps thought I was an idiot to even attempt to write something like that. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Bob?” he yelled at me. “You write a song about a girl who kills herself and you’re eating cake at her funeral? Who the fuck wants to hear something like that?” I started to become resentful. “If all the people I keep getting hooked up with are such great songwriters, why aren’t they writing hits for themselves?” I asked.
Maybe I just wasn’t paired with the right people. I went out to Nashville to work with country rocker Steve Earle, who had a reputation almost as wild as mine. He was high the whole time I was there and stayed holed up in a bunker he had on his property. He lived in this weird, ramshackle two-story house. It was like the capital of White Trash City, USA. There was a decrepit, aluminum-sided aboveground swimming pool in the backyard and a dug-out bunker area where his wife and kids weren’t allowed to go. It was a freaky scene and a huge waste of time. Maybe if I had been left to my own devices, I could have done something. I know I had songs in me.
Worse, I was so in awe of all these people and what they had done in the past that I listened to everything they said, no matter how ridiculous. Al Kooper is a great guy and a talented musician, but by the time I worked with him in 1988, he hadn’t written a hit since “This Diamond Ring” for Gary Lewis and the Playboys back in the midsixties. Flea, who was aware of my difficulties, said, “Don’t you see, man? You need to be back in that little room and to play with guys in your own band.”
He was referencing the little twin bungalows that sat at the southeast corner of Fountain and Gardner in the heart of Hollywood, where I had lived with the band in a pair of ramshackle cottages that first saw life in the 1930s but were now so weathered and had sheltered so many lives through the years that they stood as haggard and rickety as I was. It was a world away from the sterile Hollywood Hills environment that I’d used my record company advance to put myself in.
Fountain and Gardner was a real paradise for me. It was the last place I had felt creative, as we rehearsed in the second house’s front bedroom. I wrote “Sammy Hagar Weekend,” probably the band’s biggest hit, from our album Stormy Weather, there. It was creative and vibrant and cheap. The band members had paid $100 a month for the rehearsal space and I paid $215 for my rent. Keith Morris, front man of Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, had converted the garage of the other bungalow and called that home. It was a chaotic scene, but I could work there. The place was always packed with local musicians and people visiting from out of town. In the back, we had a garden with a patio just made for drinking. Billy Zoom, the splayed-legged, Gretsch-slinging guitarist from the band X, had earlier purchased a brand-new bread truck with his bandmates and then had gotten down to the serious business of converting the inside of the hulking machine to a rolling hideaway. When he finished his project, the results were outstanding. It had heat, comfortable couches, a television, and an upper loft area for sleeping. He was a craftsman, and when X had gotten tired of their machine, Thelonious Monster bought it and parked it in the garden just to have another area in which to relax and enjoy this little private world we had created.
It was like being in a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of faces, some that were well-known on the scene and others, like those of the groupie girls, that were more anonymous. It didn’t matter because everyone was always welcome. The guys from the Sunset Strip metal band Ratt would drop by, and their hulking guitarist Robbin Crosby would stay with us for days. Alterna-funksters Fishbone were regulars too, as were the guys from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Hillel Slovak was always lurking around somewhere, as was his posthumous replacement, John Frusciante, who played with the Monster for a while.
I spent eighteen frenetic, fulfilling, and productive months in that little self-contained world, where I wrote, played music, and just did whatever the hell I wanted to do, whenever I wanted. And those times when we got wasted on the patio and passed around an old acoustic guitar allowed me to make up the songs that eventually led to a bidding war between RCA and Capitol to sign the band. “Leave me alone, leave me alone,” I wrote. “Leave me alone in my own backyard. I don’t need to be Bob Dylan, I’m Bob Dylan in my own backyard.”
“Those are the same chords you used for ‘Sammy Hagar Weekend,’ man,” said John Frusciante when I played it for him. It didn’t matter. I was having a ball and so was everyone around me. Anything was possible there. I would come home some nights to find Karl Mueller, the bass player for Soul Asylum, in my bed in the living room entertaining some girl he had just met, so I’d shuffle to the den, only to find Robbin Crosby shooting speedballs in there. Oh well. There was nothing left to do but go back downstairs and out to the patio and get into whatever might be happening out there, or go next door and watch television with Keith Morris. I was never one to play the heavy and kick people out. Besides, I discovered fairly quickly that being buzzed at two thirty in the morning in a crazy environment was the perfect thing for writing down some useful material. That never happened in that whole dismal year at RCA. It was doomed from the start. I was not wired to work like that. With a band, songs come together organically, naturally. I started to believe that songs like “Sammy Hagar Weekend” were flukes. I didn’t think I could write like that anymore.
The drugs and alcohol didn’t help. It became obvious that with each week that passed, I cared less and less about writing good songs. I was too caught up in doing drugs and playing the part of a big shot. I was insufferable. And yet, I had the notion that the one thing I loved and the one thing in which I took pride—my songwriting—was being destroyed by my use of drugs. Writing was something that I cared about and here I was tossing it away.
Danny and Nick, my managers, begged me to record just one good song. It could even be a cover song, but all the others would have to be written or cowritten by me so I could get the publishing rights. If I had just been able to take songs from everybody and do those, I might have been able to make a decent album. After a year of this, RCA gave up on my ever writing a big hit. But Bob Buziak still had faith in me. “We can sell Bob,” he’d say. “He’s an interesting character. He’s got dreadlocks. Let’s put him in an Armani suit and pick covers for him to do.” There was the idea to have me possibly contribute something for a movie soundtrack, and RCA decided that I would sing Jimmy Ruffin’s 1966 Motown hit “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.” Anthony Kiedis rapped over the outro. As soon as they brought in the female backup singers, I left the studio and went home. “If this song gets the plays we think it will, it’ll be huge. It can be the lead track on the album!” said the executives at RCA. The song was never released. I still don’t even know which movie they planned to ruin with this poorly conceived attempt to manufacture a hit. This felt like the lowest I could go. A few years earlier, major American newspapers had said I was Bob Dylan. Now I was Greg Brady from The Brady Bunch, singing somebody else’s song and wearing somebody else’s suit. It was just like the episode where record-industry slicksters with blow-dried hair and polyester shirts tried to shape him into a teen-pop star named Johnny Bravo. Was this what I had become?
Flea and Anthony and almost everyone else I knew pointed me toward rehab. “You have to go, man,” they said. “Look at yourself.” The thought terrified me. My identity was wrapped up in being wasted. It was who I was. It was what made me uniquely me. “Fuck you guys! You’re supposed to be my friends. You should be supportive! I never said shit when you guys were slamming dope.”
“Because we were addicts, Bob. Now it’s just you.”
Those words stung. True, we had all been addicts, but Flea had cleaned up right after we had all moved into La Leyenda. Anthony had stuck with it longer, but he had managed to kick his habits recently. They hit even harder when, alone at night, I listened to those demos I had recorded for RCA. I couldn’t escape the horrifying fact that drugs and booze were ruining whatever skills I had as a songwriter. Worse, I had started to not care. I liked to pretend I was still having fun and that drugs somehow made me cool. Weren’t all rock stars supposed to be wasted? That my friends couldn’t handle the lifestyle just showed how much stronger I was than them. That’s what drugs do sometimes. They can convince a man that wrong is right and right is wrong. When he wakes up in the morning and is dope-sick and miserable, he doesn’t say, “This stuff is killing me.” No, he bangs up a shot, and as the sickness eases he tells himself that he’s never felt better in his life. Suddenly, he’s Superman.
And then I got the phone call. Professionally, I may have felt fucked up, but on the surface, everything else was seemingly great. I had a cool pad in Mount Washington just north of downtown. I slept a sound, dreamless sleep in the custom-made bed Christian Brando, Marlon’s kid, had built just for me. A preternaturally sexy Playboy model shared the mattress with me. It was almost perfect. Or at least it was until six o’clock that morning, when the phone on the nightstand let out a shriek and I bolted upright. The sun had yet to break the horizon but it was close enough to fill the room with that weird blue glow that isn’t day and isn’t night. The phone screamed again and Ms. Playboy let out an annoyed little moan and burrowed deeper under the covers. I grabbed the receiver. A call at this hour is never good. “Hello?” I said. It was more of a question than a greeting.
“Hey, Bob! What’s up?” said a cheery voice on the other end.
The voice was familiar, but my sleep-fogged brain couldn’t quite place it. “Who is this?” I asked.
“It’s me, man. Al Kooper. Have you heard the news?”
Oh, God. Somebody’s died, I thought. I hesitated. Did I really want to know? “No, dude. I’ve been asleep. It’s six o’clock in the fucking morning here.”
“Your boy got fired, man,” said Al.
“Huh?”
“Buziak’s out. Gone. Big investigation or something over there.”
“What the fuck does that even mean, Al?” I asked.
“It means you better figure out something fast,” Al replied. I said good-bye.
It was too early to call Bob at RCA, so I killed time as best I could. I drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and watched CNN, but the time still dragged. At nine o’clock, I called his office. The receptionist put me through right away. He picked up. “Are you okay?” were the first words out of my mouth.
“Yeah. I’m fine, but I guess you heard. I’m not going to be overseeing your record anymore. In fact, I’m not going to be around to protect you anymore. The drugs, Bob. The inability to write a hit. People around here don’t have confidence in you. You should probably call Danny and Nick right away,” he said.
“They can wait,” I said. “How are you?” I asked.
“Bob, when guys like me get fired, we get lots and lots of money. I’m fine. You need to call Danny and Nick now,” he said again.
“Hey, I don’t care if RCA drops me,” I said. “I have a firm three-album deal. They’ll owe me a lot of money if they do that.”
“Call Danny and Nick,” he said one more time. Click.
I can’t say I was surprised when RCA dropped me. I got some buyout money. What else was there to do but get the band together? I spent the money I had gotten from the buyout to purchase everyone new equipment and to make them feel comfortable with me again after I had left them high and dry when I signed with RCA. Thanks to the competitive nature of the music business, we got a deal with Capitol pretty quickly. They said all the right things: “You know why it didn’t work with RCA? That company doesn’t get you, man! You’re a rock band. RCA tried to make you into something you aren’t. We know how to do this. The budget will be tight, but you’ll be in a band again and you’ll be on the road three hundred nights a year and we’ll make sure you get on college radio.”
We signed and recorded Beautiful Mess. Of course, Capitol wanted a hit too, and that record didn’t have one single on it. Oh, it had some fine music and a lot of great guests, but no singles. And then came the never-ending bus tours. Eighty-nine shows in ninety-three days, two weeks off, and then start the whole thing over again. I’d hide in my hotel room and do drugs.
“Hey, where’s Bob? We need to hit the road!”
“He’s holed up in his room. Says he’s not coming out.”
“What? What the fuck’s wrong with that guy?”
“Says someone needs to call the label. He wants a bigger per diem. Says he won’t come out otherwise. Wants money now.”
I could hear an angry fist pound at the door. “Goddamn it, Bob! Let’s go!”
Something had to give, and I suspected that it would be me. It was 1992 and a trip to rehab was in my immediate future. I had been down that road before.