CHAPTER 8

THE MAKEOVER

Get your ammunition, I’m ready for war. —“OUT FOR BLOOD” (WRITTEN BY LITA FORD)

AFTER NIKKI “MOVED OUT,” I STILL LIVED IN THE APARTMENT ON COLDWATER Canyon when the phone rang one day. “Hello, dah-ling.” Ah, there’s that voice, I thought. I was so happy to hear that sound again.

It was Glenn Tipton.

“What are you up to, my love?”

“I’m cooking spaghetti sauce. Pasta sauce.”

“Oh, sounds delicious. What do you put in it?”

I told him, as if he didn’t know. “Garlic, olive oil, tomato paste, tomato sauce. You know, Italian seasoning, onions. You’d love it, Glenn. My mother taught me how to make it.”

“Ah, your Italian mum,” he said.

“Yes, you remember things well. Next time you come to town you’ll have to meet her.”

“Come see me tonight. I’m at the Long Beach Arena.” He was in my hometown for Judas Priest’s Screaming for Vengeance tour.

Oh, really! “Okay. I’ll be there.”

When I showed up later at the concert, he told me I smelled like garlic, which I may have because I was in such a rush to see him I hadn’t showered before leaving for the show. He was only joking, but even so, it made me feel self-conscious. Still, the garlic didn’t ward him off. Before the show, he said, “Stay with me tonight.” I was thrilled. I left him alone for a little while so he could focus on the show. I went into the Judas Priest dressing room toward the end of the show and started to open a bottle of chilled white wine they had on ice. I was in there alone, fighting with a bottle opener trying to get the damn wine open, when Rob Halford walked into the dressing room and collapsed on a black leather sofa. I had watched him onstage and he looked so masculine with his black leather jacket covered in studs. The way he danced onstage was just awesome. He had worked so hard that when he came off the stage he was dripping with sweat! Looking for air. Now he slowly turned and looked at me. But Rob knew it was only me, the girl from the Runaways, the gal Glenn was with in Las Vegas, so he didn’t say a thing, but he needed his space. I realized I was opening what was probably his wine, so without saying a word, I shoved it back into the ice with the corkscrew still sticking out of the top and left the dressing room. I waited for Glenn outside.

After Glenn cleaned up, he led me out to a limo back near where the buses were parked. He opened the limo door for me. Inside, a guy was waiting for us with a small white jar filled with blow. Glenn handed me a straw and said, “Ladies first.” I’d never seen blow like this before—very refined stuff. I didn’t realize that you were supposed to just take a bit with the tip of the straw; if you snorted it too hard into the container, you’d vacuum up the entire supply. Well, I messed up, and just stuck the straw in and snorted. Oh shit. I choked on the powder and had to go to the bathroom ASAP. Glenn looked at me and said, “Pig.”

We both laughed. “Glenn, I don’t know how to use this thing!”

He said, “We have to cut you off,” and I said, “I know, I know!”

We went back inside, wandered around backstage for a while, and then went to a hotel around the corner where the band was staying. Glenn and I stayed up until about four A.M., then went to sleep. The next afternoon I snuck out, leaving Glenn a note on his pillow: “Good-bye, see you next time.”

I was stuck and needed a ride home. So I called my father! Dad never asked me what I was up to, or why I was up so late, or why I smelled like cigarettes. He just drove me home. I was beat and hungry.

AROUND THIS TIME I decided to stop by to see how John Alcock was holding up. As I pulled up to his house in the Firebird he said to me, in his thick British accent, “What the bloody hell are you doing driving around town with the name of Joan Jett’s hit single on the license plate of your car?” It read ILUVRNR, but I had no idea what John was talking about. I had been so focused on my own music and career that I hadn’t listened to the radio or had a clue what Joan was up to. By this time, of course, her song “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” was climbing the charts. Once I got up to speed, I had to laugh. I was glad to see that John Alcock was still chipper and still alive.

I also caught up with my old friend Toni. I had not seen her in a while and was shocked by how strung out she was. Toni was the one who always had drugs because of an accident she was in, but she had never taken them before. It was clear circumstances had changed.

She had no job. She was in trouble.

“Lita,” she said, crying. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself.”

“I do,” I told her.

“You do?” she sniffled.

“Yes. You’re going to go on tour with me.”

“And do what?”

“Be my tech,” I told her.

“But I don’t know how to be a tech.”

“That’s okay,” I told her. “I can teach you everything you need to know.”

I knew she could do it. She was always a go-getter—a fearless, mighty person. The funny thing was, when I first met Toni, I had thrown her out of the Runaways’ dressing room for giving drugs to the band members. Now here we were, five years later. She became my best friend. I cared about her very much. And just like that, we picked up where we left off, good friends and great partners in crime.

IN 1982, AFTER a year of working on the Out for Blood album—and with my new makeover now complete, featuring a leather G-string outfit and a handmade bustier that Neil Merryweather created for me—I was ready to show the world a female could shred on guitar. Denny Rosencrantz from Mercury Records, one of the same men who signed the Runaways, came to see us play and loved what he heard. He signed us almost immediately.

Awesome! My hard work and creativity had paid off.

Out for Blood, my first solo album, was released in May 1983. It was groundbreaking. A female had never fronted a three-piece hard-rock band before. Stores didn’t want to carry the album because the cover featured blood coming out of a guitar. Not to mention a picture of me without pants. Mercury had to switch the cover so Walmart and other places would carry it. I wonder if it had been a guy on the front cover whether it would have been any different. But the formula worked: a girl on guitar, singing lead vocals, and dressed like Barbarella. It got a lot of people’s attention. It was hard, fast rock and roll. The kind of music I always wanted to play in the Runaways.

Artie Ripp was our manager at the time. He sent us to stay in Oregon for a short while to keep us away from the evils of Hollywood— i.e., drinking and partying. Boy, he sure racked up the legal fees while negotiating a deal for us. At that time my total focus was on trying to get people to notice me as the only female guitarist in the band. I wanted credit where credit was due, damn it. In a three-piece band, the people had only one guitar player to look at: me, a female!

Management might have thought we’d write better songs in Oregon, but taking us out of our environment actually did more harm than good. It was sort of like being on Spring Break. We each chose our own bedrooms as soon as we arrived. “This one is mine,” I said as I climbed up a ladder into a hole in the wall. The guys found some rooms downstairs. Then we located the nearest liquor store, and finally we hit the local grocery store to get meat to barbecue.

Neil didn’t look the part or fit in with Dusty and me during live performances. He was too old, more like our father than a band member. So I ended up hiring Randy Rand to play bass. Randy was also older than us, but you never would have known it with his rock-and-roll attitude and long skinny body. Randy came to Oregon to rehearse and shoot the “Out for Blood” video. With Neil gone, we didn’t want Randy to get hassled about the bass lines not being played correctly in the video. I looked around and saw an actual ax hanging on the wall. I grabbed it and shoved it up against Randy’s chest and said, “Here, ‘play’ this.” He was so tall and skinny, and he had a great sense of humor so I knew he could pull it off. Somehow it fit right in: the video was set in a twisted hospital, the kind of place where the doctors would give patients a transfusion of blood drawn from my purple guitar. My favorite part of the video is the ending, when Randy takes his ax and smashes my guitar, sending a bunch of blood squirting out. I still think about that every time I play the song. The video had some other innovative camera tricks too. Now everyone uses five-ounce GoPro cameras, but the first time I had ever used a camera on the body of the guitar was for the “Out for Blood” video—it weighed about fifteen pounds! It was hanging from the bottom of the guitar and captured me playing the solo. We got some great close-up footage of me shredding.

As soon as we were done shooting the video, we dove into rehearsals to get Randy up to speed, then set off on tour. Going out on the road as a three-piece band was a blast. A tour bus picked us up at the Oregon house, and we made our way back down the West Coast toward Los Angeles. Along the way we played a few warm-up shows before hitting the Hollywood spotlight. I remember us sitting on the side of the road, Dusty tripping on mushrooms, waiting for another bus because ours broke down. Thank God. Days later, we finally made it back home to Los Angeles, and we were set to play the Whisky A Go Go. During sound check at the Whisky the night before the gig, a guy walked into the club holding two dozen roses. He was yelling out, “LITA! Who is LITA FORD?” As if he didn’t know! There couldn’t have been another person in the world who looked like I did standing there in studded leather and fishnet stockings. “LITA!” The bastard brought two dozen roses down to the stage area. I thought, Oh, wow, that’s so cool, who are these from! I hoped it was a “congratulations” or something nice. But I was wrong, it was a summons from a scum-fuck attorney. Apparently I owed him $40,000 in legal fees that he said I hadn’t paid. I had no idea I owed him, or any one else, that kind of money. I stood there with my mouth open. I tossed the flowers as the cowardly process server bolted for the door. This lawyer couldn’t have called my accountant? My manager? Sent me a bill? We would have resolved the issue. So wrong! Looking back now, what’s truly notable about the incident is how quickly I shook it off: by the time the man who had served me the papers had left the building, I had resumed my sound check. Mayhem was all in a day’s work back then.

SOON EVERY VENUE in LA wanted our band. We landed showcase gigs at Artie’s place. We’d do about three or four songs for each group that would come through. No one had much money, so anytime the labels stopped by they’d bring food. Dusty would run down to the pay phone to call the other guys and say, “Dude, you HAVE to get here NOW. There’s free food.” Dusty and I hung out a lot together, and this led to some great adventures. For example, Dusty had been in a disagreement with a dude over money he owed Dusty, but this guy didn’t want to pay him. He knew Dusty didn’t have a car back then, so he told him to come get the money in Riverside, just to fuck with him. Riverside was far: a good hour and a half toward the middle of nowhere. I felt bad for Dusty. This dick was holding his money, and he had no way to get there to pick it up. So I drove him. Dusty remembers us driving down the freeway with all the windows down, the heater on full blast, and the lights shut off—in the middle of the night. In my Firebird I always aimed for the triple digits on the speedometer. To this day Dusty says he’s never been in a car going that fast. I just wanted to get to Riverside to collect Dusty’s money. And we did.

Whenever we needed some good margaritas we’d go down to a place in Rosarita Beach, Mexico, just across the border. Lots of police and cameras and highway patrol officers were around because of drug trafficking and illegal immigration. Not a place to be fucking around. But did we care? “Fuck it! Let’s go!” I’d say. It was only a two-hour drive there, but it could take us a couple of days to get back. Good margaritas. They have a way of warping time. Once I stayed so long south of the border that I returned to find my pet tarantula, Damien, had died. I figured that if his forefathers could evolve to live in the barren desert, Damien could survive a few days at my place in the Oakwood Apartments, a chain of temporary-stay, furnished apartments frequented by rock and rollers. Turns out rock-and-roll crash pads are a uniquely unforgiving environment. I came back to the Oakwoods to find full rigor mortis had set in. The poor thing. I put Damien in the microwave to try to defibrillate him, but Toni and I watched horrified as his limbs dropped off. So much for my pet.

Often on our way home from Mexico, we’d stop by my parents’ place in Long Beach, where Mom would cook tons of food. I’d sleep if off, then eat until I got enough energy to go out for another week of gigs and rock out. Once, Dusty and Randy came over for a barbecue and Dusty wanted to impress my dad with his grilling skills. He didn’t let the charcoal heat up properly so the fire went out. He kept putting lighter fluid on the briquettes and totally fucked up the steaks in the process. My dad just looked at him and said, “Yeah, the fire wasn’t hot enough.” He was so polite and respectful about Dusty’s incompetence. My mom once prepared Dusty a huge roast to take back to his apartment. “I don’t think you’re cooking very much, so I made you this.” Dusty ate off it for about a week. My parents fed everybody. Friends, relatives, neighbors, it didn’t matter—they were always welcome.

ANYTIME THERE WAS no business going on, it got dangerous. Days off meant trouble! More specifically: a bunch of quaaludes, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and usually some cocaine. We’d party and rock as hard and as long as we could. Our drug dealer was a fellow named Little John, who we’d claim was our “manager” when Artie Ripp wasn’t around. All Little John ever did was try to get us to take the blow he was carrying on him. Someone had rented a floor’s worth of rooms in Vegas for us to celebrate his birthday. I was in the car with Toni, while Dusty and his friend were in another vehicle. Dusty and his friend were wasted and in no condition to be behind the wheel. I took one look at them and said, “Oh Jesus. Let me go check us in.” When I got back to the car, I could see some kind of fight was going on. Dusty and his friend must have exchanged words with a couple of working girls in the parking lot while they were waiting for me to get back. Evidently whatever they said to them really rubbed them the wrong way because the girls ended up kicking their asses. Yes, they literally got beat up. I walked over to Dusty and yelled, “You’re always so fucked up, you fuck everything up!”

Later Dusty lost his friend somehow and was wandering the halls looking for him, knocking on every door. He happened to knock on my and Toni’s door, and the next thing I knew Dusty was in my room and Toni was cleaning him up. They had ordered steak and Dom Perignon, the works. Great stuff. I had been crashed out on the bed, and when I woke up, I called Dusty an asshole so he got out of there. He must have found his friend again and headed home. It was a disaster. I have no idea how they got home in the condition they were in. We got blacklisted from that casino, needless to say.

AT THE RAINBOW ROOM you could buy cocaine from some of the waitresses. The restaurant had these tall menus that you’d put up—almost like a partition—and people would actually do blow right off the table. One time, we were eating there and a girl was trying to get into our booth. Dusty refused to let her in, and she started getting pissy. She threw her drink in his face and the entire table erupted in a fight. I grabbed her by the hair and tossed her onto the table; everyone was pushing and throwing people. We ended up getting booted from the establishment. There’s a shocker. Dusty jumped into his car and drove off. That night, he ended up getting into a wreck, rolling his car over on Deadman’s Curve about three times. His engine landed on the side of the road. A girl he didn’t even know talked to the cops for him and managed to get them to leave the scene, and she drove him home. He was lucky to be alive. Dusty’s days as a functional member of the band were numbered, however. One night he showed up late for a rehearsal that Edward Van Halen had dropped in on. I was pissed because I wanted to introduce the band to Edward, who was sitting in a chair with his back facing the door. Dusty didn’t even realize who it was at first when he finally waltzed in. Then Edward turned around. Suddenly Dusty realized why I was so pissed he was late. At that moment I made the decision to fire him. It was a really difficult thing to do, considering he was one of my best friends. But his partying was compromising his ability to meet his responsibilities as a band member. As much as I loved Dusty, I couldn’t let him derail my dreams.

I WAS OFF and running in the music world as the one-and-only guitar-playing rocker chick who could shred like I did. But people were still in denial about the female behind the guitar. Was there someone behind the curtain, maybe? I remember watching the looks on the audience’s faces when I would rip into a guitar solo. They would be stunned. Pure shock! It was a powerful feeling to know that I could do that to people. Then there were the assholes who wanted to fuck with me.

Out of all of them, the worst offender by far was the band Dokken. Their lead guitarist, George Lynch, came up to me at the Country Club in Reseda, California. I thought he was going to say something complimentary.

Instead, he looked at me from head to toe, and said in a snooty voice, like a ten-year-old, “So. . . . I guess you’re all . . . Joan Jetted out now.”

“Excuse me?” I answered. What?

“Girls don’t play guitar!” George declared.

To this day I still remember his ignorant words.

“You know, it’s assholes like you who make me work that much harder.”

George said nothing after that and scurried off and did his show. He seemed miserable the rest of the night.

At that same gig, my friend and tech Toni tore into him as well. She was rolling up our cables when someone said, “Hey, those are my cables!”

“No, these are mine. These are my cables,” Toni said. She always kept an eye on everything because we had had our gear sabotaged several times before.

Toni had no idea who this guy was, until he announced that he was George Lynch from Dokken.

“You wanna know why I know they’re ours?” She unscrewed the end of the guitar cable and showed them the writing in the cable that said “LF”—for Lita Ford. She had the cables specially made for me before we left for the tour and had written my initials with a black sharpie inside every cable. He walked away like some little boy who’d had his toy taken away. Toni said it was great to open that cord up and watch the look on his face.

It wasn’t just Dokken. Sometimes guys from other bands or their crew would pull a tube out of my amp after sound check or mess with my monitor settings. We wrote the settings on duct tape so we could easily reset the amp without taking too much time. We were constantly dealing with this kind of bullshit. Some bands didn’t want to be blown away by a girl, so they would try to screw me up any way they could. I guess they thought we didn’t know what we were doing, but we knew how to fix nearly every problem, especially with a good tech like Toni.

I always had the lighting director turn the spotlights down so I wasn’t blind. That way I could see if anything was coming at me and I could dodge it. At one show, a guy was standing directly in front of me, his chest pushed up against the stage. He didn’t know I was watching him. He had a can of beer. He shook it up hard so that it would explode all over me. As he held the can up toward my guitar ready to open the beer, I kicked him in the wrist as hard as I could. I wouldn’t be surprised if I broke his wrist; he was gone soon after that. Fucking prick. I don’t think he saw that one coming. The beer went flying backward away from me and over the top of the crowded room.

The girlfriends of boys who were digging me frightened me the most. Experience taught me to always be en garde, watching out to avoid being hit in the face with something tossed by a jealous girlfriend. I was worried a woman might want to bring my looks down a notch by throwing an ashtray or a broken beer bottle at me. I may sound paranoid, but I had to be prepared for that kind of shit. Even when your back was turned, you had to be aware of what was behind you. This is all shit that you have in the back of your mind when you’re onstage.

IN SEPTEMBER 1983, I went on a European tour with Ritchie Blackmore’s post–Deep Purple group, Rainbow. I really wanted to make this tour a major statement since I was going to be touring with Ritchie, my all-time favorite guitar hero. My band, crew, and Toni all came with me, of course. It was hard to leave Dusty behind because we all loved him, but we were lucky to find an outstanding replacement in the late Randy Castillo. I’ve always had the greatest drummers, but there was something completely unique and different about Randy. I discovered him at a local Hollywood nightclub called Madame Wong’s. Randy was a very handsome American Indian from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He seemingly had two or three girls in every town. I’d see him in the morning with a blonde, then at night he’d show up with a redhead. He talked a lot like Scooby-Doo, which Toni and I made fun of, even though we loved it. He was so funny and just a great spirit to have around.

During one of Randy’s first shows with us, I fucked up really bad. Randy almost quit. Of course it had to do with a guy.

I had been hanging out at a house in the middle of North Hollywood that was being leased by the Australian rock band Heaven. I had met the guitar player, Mick Cocks, and become one of the regulars at the Heaven House, which had become a major party spot. If I didn’t stay at the house with Mick, Mick would crash with me at the Oakwoods. Heaven was a great band and wicked fun. One night, just prior to the European tour with Rainbow, we were to play the Wiltern Theater in Beverly Hills. Mick had slept at my place the night before, which was a big mistake knowing that I had a very important show the next day. If you knew Mick, he was nothing but trouble, in a good way. He looked like a rock-and-roll Mel Gibson (the young version). As I started getting ready for the show, I hopped into the shower, and so did Mick. It was probably the longest shower I had ever taken in my life. He wouldn’t let me out. Although at the time I wasn’t complaining, it put me in a bad situation, because by the time I finally managed to get dressed I realized I was already late for one of our most important gigs. It was the Wiltern Theater, in our hometown with every record company executive sitting around waiting to see this novelty of an act. I knew I was fucked before we ever left the Oakwoods. I wasn’t going to make it, and now I had to battle LA rush-hour traffic. The worst in the history of mankind. I was going to have to face the demons that were waiting for me.

At the Wiltern, it was already past my set time; my manager was dealing with the angry promoters, and Toni was being harassed by everyone and anyone—including the other band, Ratt—because she was not only my tech but my close friend, so people figured they’d get an answer out of her. “Where’s Lita?” “Is she fucked up?” “Is she passed out somewhere? She must be.” People were angry because I had already missed my entire show, and Ratt was just about done. As I entered the backstage entrance all hell broke loose. Everyone swarmed around me all at once.

“Where were you? What are you doing?”

“Do you realize what time it is?”

“We’ve been waiting for you!”

“Do you know who’s here?”

No one asked me if I was all right. Except Toni.

In the distance, I could hear Stephen Pearcy saying “Good night” to the audience and then adding, “How come Lita’s not here? Did she get her period?” Once he said that I couldn’t hear anything else that anyone else was saying. His voice resonated through the building. All I could think of was putting my foot in his mouth.

How was I going to explain to everyone that between having sex in the shower and getting stuck in rush-hour traffic I had missed the entire concert? Not a very good way to start a tour. I didn’t think about what I was going to say when I arrived until I heard someone in the crowd backstage mention a car accident when I walked through the door. I thought to myself, I’ll just go along with that, since it’s not an unusual event in Los Angeles, so I said “Yeah, that’s what happened.” That sounds like a good excuse.

After the show, I walked into Stephen Pearcy’s dressing room and said, “You little motherfucker. I just got home from Mexico and you remind me of the stinkin’ worm at the bottom of the tequila bottle.” It didn’t seem to faze him, and he just shook it off.

After the smoke cleared at the Wiltern Theater that night, it turned out Randy, happily, did not quit the band, I had my words with Stephen Pearcy, and the promoters decided to keep me on the Rainbow tour after all.

OPENING FOR ONE of my idols was a dream come true. Toni and I cheered on Ritchie and Rainbow each night from the side stage. We sang along to every word in their set. I became great friends with Joe Lynn Turner, the lead singer of Rainbow. He was an outgoing, fun, happy-go-lucky dude. He was a ball of energy: always ready to go. I would help Joe with his stage moves, his performance clothes, his raps, his stage makeup. Ritchie had a woman with him the entire time during that tour, so as much as I wanted to, I really couldn’t get near him. Sometimes he would play a prank on me by taking over as my tech. I’d walk to the side of the stage to switch guitars, and there Ritchie was ready to hand me my guitar. I think it was his way of sharing a special moment with me, but I was onstage so all I could do was smile and laugh before I had to go back out and continue my show. I think it got on Ritchie’s nerves that I paid so much attention to Joe during the tour.

After hours was always an adventure. One evening in Denmark some of us from the tour went to a transvestite bar that had a lazy Susan with cocaine, weed, and heroin on it. That night we lost Randy Castillo. We had to leave the next morning at eight A.M. so most of us went home at a relatively decent hour, but Randy stayed out until his attentions turned to a young “lady.” Randy had to catch his own flight to the next city.

Randy Castillo used to wear parachute pants onstage because they were comfortable. He was playing a drum solo one night, and he had put his foot up on the floor tom to change the pitch. Those parachute pants don’t give at all, and so when he lifted his leg, his entire crotch area ripped open. We were all side stage and noticed that Randy’s manhood was exposed for the audience to see. The band is trying to tell him that his balls are hanging out all over the place, and meanwhile he’s looking at us like Yeah, look at me! Cool, huh? No, not cool! If you ever saw him play, you know how vigorously Randy Castillo threw himself into his craft.

On that tour we got the opportunity to head over to Stuttgart, Germany, to open for Black Sabbath. Sabbath was the first rock concert I’d seen, and they had influenced me ever so severely since I was a child. Lead guitarist Tony Iommi was the Riff Master. To me, he was a god. At least I thought so.

During the first gig, Iommi took a liking to me and asked if I’d meet him at the bar after the show. Of course I would. Awesome! I headed to the bar with Toni. Iommi was there with Sabbath’s lead singer, Ian Gillan, and bass player Geezer Butler. Toni and I sat down with these three guys, and I was drawn to Iommi right away. I thought he was nice, very funny, very drunk, with a thick Birmingham accent. He seemed so charming, confident, and handsome. I would later find out that looks are deceiving.

Toni chatted with Geezer Butler while I got to know Iommi. Geezer was a great guy, really fun and personable. Ian Gillan seemed to be in the wrong band, like he was an outsider and not happy with the way he was treated. At least this was the impression I got. As a Deep Purple fan, it was strange for me to see him in any other band, and I could imagine it was weird for him too.

Gillan didn’t say much, but for a singer of his stature, he sure smoked a lot of cigarettes. As we were talking, the cooks came out from the restaurant kitchen and asked Toni and I if we wanted to go back and meet the chefs. We went back there, and I figured they might want a photograph or an autograph. Instead, they brought out a huge chopping block. Toni and I thought they were going to offer some German sausage or choice cuts of meat. But then the chef came out from behind the passageway and dumped a mountain of cocaine on the chopping block. Toni and I looked at each other, shocked. They cut the coke into massive lines. Crazy huge. At this point, Toni didn’t do drugs, so I snorted a little bit of the coke for both us. We didn’t want to be rude, after all.

We really had some fun that night. Iommi asked me if I would head back to his hotel room with him. Of course I said, “Let’s go.” When we walked into the room, I could smell the leather coming from his closet. He always had the best clothes. I dug through his jackets and boots, admiring it all. Everything was first class. We talked about music and guitars, and he told me the story of getting his fingertips cut off when he worked a construction job before he joined Sabbath. He was pushing some tile through the tile cutter and it clipped off his fingertips. How horrible for a guitar player! Tony had special tips made out of soft plastic and leather so he could continue to play.

I found out the guitar he was playing when I first saw him in 1972 was not a Gibson SG after all. It was made by John Diggins, who used to work for the famous English luthier John Birch, before going on to found Jaydee Guitars. That same guy also made instruments for AC/DC’s Angus Young. They were one of a kind. It was cool to hear Tony’s stories. He asked me to stay the night with him, which I did. We fooled around a bit, but that’s as far as he was able to get because he was so high. He was impotent from his constant drug use, and he was very embarrassed. I felt bad for him and didn’t really know what to do. Eventually, I got him off. I left the next morning and went back to my hotel. We only did a few shows with Sabbath before I went back to the UK to finish the last few dates with Rainbow.

The record label would always fly me to the next city, but sometimes the rest of my crew wasn’t so lucky. On one particular stretch of the tour with Black Sabbath, they put the crew on a ferry-type boat to get them from Stockholm to Helsinki. Toni hates small spaces, so she ended up sleeping on the top deck of the boat. If she wasn’t in the bar drinking, she was on the top deck. It seemed to take them forever and when they finally made it to Helsinki, Toni knocked on my hotel room door and was in nasty shape.

“I need a bath, some food, and some sleep. Do you have a bathtub?”

“Uh, kinda.”

“What do you mean kinda?” she asked.

I showed her the dirty little basin in the bathroom that was about four inches deep. You basically poured the water over yourself with a hose.

“I don’t give a fuck!” she said.

She got in and used the body wash at the hotel, and in less than forty minutes she was covered in red bumps all over her skin. She was not happy, but I know she loved every minute of that tour—skin rash and all.

Before a gig at the Marquee Club in London, we had gone out for sushi and sake. Randy Rand had never had sushi or sake in his life, and by the time we got to the gig he and Randy Castillo were nicely buzzed. There were about three hundred shirtless guys in the audience and some of them were throwing darts at the Randys, who were terrified. I didn’t notice because they weren’t throwing them at me! But no matter where we were, we pulled it off. Our audience didn’t want to like us, but by the time we walked off the stage, they loved us.

During the last part of the tour, I noticed another intriguing side of Ritchie that I hadn’t seen when we spent time together during my Runaways days. For starters, he was really superstitious. He would never stay in a hotel room if the numbers added up to thirteen. He wouldn’t have anything to do with the number thirteen, in fact. He had to have his back to the wall in an open room so nothing could come up behind him. He was also into occult rituals, but not evil stuff. He called it “white magic” instead of “black magic.”

He liked to stay in Europe’s old castles. One night we stayed in Dalhousie Castle in Scotland. Toni and I had rented a car and we were going to drive there to hang out with Ritchie and the rest of the band. I got in to drive but realized that since we were in the UK, everything was on the opposite side, and I didn’t think I was going to be able to deal with the switch very well. I went to use the turn signal and turned on the windshield wipers. Toni said, “I’ll drive.” I was so impressed with the way she easily figured out where we were going. She didn’t make one wrong turn!

Ritchie held a séance that night, attempting to talk to any spirits that were lingering in the five-hundred-year-old castle. He claimed to be talking to people who had been kings and queens from the 1800s. It was a pretty heavy-duty thing to see. It frightened me, but Ritchie also had me riveted.

After a show one night in London, four or five of us were in one of my favorite hotels in England, the Swiss Cottage Hotel. We were all sitting around a beautiful old stone fireplace having pints of beer. Ritchie gave me a pen and paper and said, “Write something down, but don’t let me see it.”

“Like what? A word? A sentence?”

“One or two sentences.”

I thought for a moment about what I could write to make it really difficult. He turned his face away from me so he couldn’t see me writing. I wrote a silly quote my father would always say: Not knowing the situation of the consequences, I can’t rightly say.

I looked at his back and asked, “Now what?”

“Crumple up the paper and throw it in the fire.”

I did as he instructed and watched the paper burn. Ritchie turned back around to face me. He looked at me for a few moments in silence, and then he said, word for word, “Not knowing the situation of the consequences, I can’t rightly say.”

How did he know? I wasn’t even going to ask. I just went to my room, dumbfounded. He was really tuned in to much of the world around him, from the picture on the dashboard of my car the first time I visited him, to the spirits of kings and queens in castles. He was an amazing man. I loved him, and I knew he felt my heart. He was one of those rare people who actually deserve to be idolized.

The next day the entire band and all the crew had gone home after the tour except Toni and me. We were stuck in England because my passport had expired, so that meant a new passport photo. We were already so exhausted from being on tour, and you would think that after opening for Rainbow and Black Sabbath and spending one of those nights in my idol’s hotel room I would have been glowing. Instead I had cum in my hair and makeup running down my face as they snapped a shot of me for my passport. It should be in a coffee-table book, Classiest Passport Photos Ever Taken. Page one.

WHEN TONI AND I got back from the tour, we had a day off in New York City. We hopped in a cab and headed straight to a Laundromat. There was no fabric softener at the Laundromat, so everything came out with maximum static cling. On our way back to the hotel, Toni said, “Let’s go out for dinner.”

I agreed. We returned to the hotel and got changed.

We went to a fine Indian restaurant and had a lovely time reminiscing about our European tour. It had been a hell of an adventure. As we were walking out I noticed something hanging from Toni’s jeans.

“What’s that?” I asked her.

She turned to look at what I was pointing to.

“Oh my God! Those are my underwear!”

The panties had been there throughout dinner! We laughed so hard we cried. Even rock and rollers need fabric softener, boys and girls.

That same fall, after we got back from the tour with Rainbow, my parents and I spent Thanksgiving with Toni’s family at her mother’s house. When Toni and I were leaving, Toni’s mom gave us tons of leftovers because she was afraid we weren’t eating right. And of course we weren’t. Unless you call alcohol, cigarettes, and pills a square meal.

As we made our way back to Hollywood, we were driving down Santa Monica Boulevard when we stopped at a red light. A red Porsche Carrera pulled up next to us and the men inside rolled down their windows. We thought they were lost, and they thought we’d be impressed with their new Porsche. They were dressed in their best cheesy Hawaiian shirts. Toni and I were tired and grumpy that day, and we just wanted to get back to the hotel where we were staying—the Tropicana.

The guy in the passenger seat looked at us for way too long and then said, “Hel-looooo, baaaa-bbby!”

I got annoyed, and as I glared back at him, I reached into the backseat and felt around in the doggie bag Toni’s mother had given us. I wanted to find something to throw at this arrogant bastard. I got my hands on some corn on the cob and yelled to him, “Hey, baby this!,” as I threw the corn as hard as I could at his brand-new Porsche. It hit the side with such force it dented his door. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was a huge dent! But it shut him up.

I looked at Toni and said, “Oh shit! Floor it!”

Just then the light turned green and she hit the gas. Toni was driving a 1973 copper Pontiac Firebird with side pipes. She was a badass driver, and she knew what she was doing from all her days racing motorcycles. She was fearless. We were drag-racing down Santa Monica Boulevard with that yuppie. He chased us until we saw a hotel. I told Toni to pull over. I always felt safe at hotels. They were my home away from home. We turned into that hotel and the guys did too. They got out of their Porsche and started pouring beers on the roof of Toni’s car and calling us bitches.

“Yeah, well, you shouldn’t talk to a woman that way. Who do you think you are?” I shot back. I just wanted them to go away.

A security guard saw the commotion and asked Toni and me, “Are these guys bothering you?”

“Yes, they are,” we said, with puppy-dog eyes.

The security guard told them to leave immediately or go to jail. The guys left, and Toni and I gave each other a high five. They turned around and yelled “Bitches!” as they drove off. We were both so sick of how we had been treated by men lately that the episode felt like some small victory that day.