Around the same time, farther down the peninsula, in a Miami suburb called Miramar, a sixteen-year-old Johnny Depp was considering his future. Determined to be a rock star, he had just quit high school, and now worried that he had made a huge mistake.
Depp grew up in Kentucky watching his uncle play guitar with his gospel group: “These hillbillies, for lack of a better description, playing guitar right in front of me—that was where the bug came from.” When a young Depp was listening to Frampton Comes Alive, his older brother grabbed the needle off the record and turned him on to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks instead.
At age twelve, Depp talked his mom into buying him a Decca electric guitar for twenty-five dollars; he taught himself songs from a Mel Bay chord book that he had shoplifted by stuffing it down his pants. Depp locked himself in his bedroom and learned to play chords: soon he could hammer out Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” and Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4.”
With some other neighborhood kids, he started a band called Flame and played backyard parties: “This one guy had a bass, we knew a guy who had a PA system, it was ramshackle and great.” They even cobbled together a homemade lighting system. Depp knew he had found his calling in life.
“There’s a big change from thirteen to fifteen,” Depp noted. “You start out with super-innocent names, and then by the time you’re fifteen, you’re a guitarist in a band named Bitch.” He laughed. “Kind of ludicrous.” Depp never considered being lead singer: ironically, he didn’t want to be the guy that everybody looked at.
The band got popular enough to play local clubs—which is when Depp dropped out of school, reasoning that he was on the fast track to stardom. After two weeks, reality set in: he wasn’t ready to be an adult. He considered joining the marines, but instead, went back to his school to talk to his dean.
“Listen, I’ve realized that I’ve made a terrible mistake, and I’d like to come back and try again,” Depp told him.
The dean gazed at him, not unkindly, and said, “Johnny, you can do what you want, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea. You love your music—that’s the only thing you’ve ever applied yourself to. You should go out there and play.”
“He wasn’t nasty about it,” Depp remembered. “He was giving me what he felt to be very good advice. I wouldn’t say that this is right for everyone, certainly not, but in my case at that time, it was exactly the right thing for me. That was the proper medicine.”
After Bitch came Bad Boys (“very original,” Depp notes of the name) and then a new-wave group called the Kids, who became local superstars, opening for the Ramones, the Pretenders, Iggy Pop, and the Stray Cats.
In 1983, when Depp was twenty years old, the Kids packed up a U-Haul trailer and moved to Hollywood, intent on getting a record deal. On the way, they changed their name to Six Gun Method. They soon discovered that gigs were few and far between—and that L.A. clubs worked on a “pay-to-play” system, where you had to sell a certain number of tickets or make up the financial gap yourself (sometimes with confiscated musical instruments). “Suddenly,” Depp remembered, “we’re not big fish in a little pond. We’re like guppies and we’re nearly destitute.” They needed to eat, so they got day jobs.
Depp found a gig in phone sales. He tried to convince people to buy a gross of customized pens, with incentives such as a grandfather clock or a trip to Greece. “Oddly, that’s kind of my first experience with acting,” he said. “There was a whole spiel. You had the lines right in front of you.” On the phone, Depp called himself Edward Quartermain, a character on the soap opera General Hospital.
Despite working on commission, Depp would torpedo his own sales. “People only bought the pens because they wanted the grandfather clock,” he said. “When the supervisor wandered off, I’d say, ‘Listen, don’t buy these pens. The grandfather clock is made of corkboard. I’m a thief—we’re ripping you off.’ ”
On Melrose Avenue, Depp was filling out a job application at a video store when he ran into Nicolas Cage, who had already starred in Valley Girl. They knew each other through Depp’s first wife, Lori Anne Allison: Cage dated Allison during a break in her relationship with Depp before they got married (they got hitched when Depp was twenty, and divorced when he was twenty-two). Cage suggested that Depp meet with his agent: “Why don’t you try acting? I think you could do it.”
Motivated by the desire to pay rent and buy groceries, Depp auditioned for a horror movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street. For playing the role of Glen Lantz, he received the unthinkably large sum of $1,200 a week for eight weeks. He told the band they would take a short break, but when he came back after two months, everybody had gone their separate ways. The movie turned out to be a huge hit, launching a franchise with nine sequels and spin-offs. “I never wanted to be an actor,” Depp said. “It was a good way to make easy money, it seemed. I didn’t care what the movies were—if you’re going to pay me, fine. So I just kept going forward.”