The first time I’d gone to LA was after going back to San Francisco to produce The Avengers, that band who’d played with the Sex Pistols at the Winterland. I’d spent most of that time stoned out of my mind because the weed was so different to what I was used to in London, but by the time I moved on to LA to hang out there for a few days, my head was a bit clearer, and I managed to pull this bird who lived in a house with a pool in Beverly Glen. I thought it was a palace at the time, but in reality it was probably more of a shack.
The nights were very warm and she had a big old convertible – a 1960s Cadillac. One night we went to a drive-in movie and as we were driving down the San Bernardino freeway smoking a joint I was thinking, ‘This is fucking heaven!’ It stuck in my mind then that I was going to have to come and live there some day. And once I was back at home in my Nancy Spungen Love Palace in rainy, grey, miserable old London, I used to watch the TV show CHiPs, about a pair of motorbike cops in the California Highway Patrol (hence the title – clever, eh?), and think how much I’d prefer to be in LA – big fucking freeways, big billboards, big tits: I was sold.
By the time I finally made it there, which was probably some time in early 1983 (don’t ask me to be any more specific – it’s a miracle I can remember which decade it was), I didn’t have a pot to piss in. I was sleeping on people’s couches, but at least I was in a different place and it was sunny all the time. Then when some money came through after EMI signed Chequered Past (we wanted the cheque as well) things looked up a bit.
I decided around that time to try not to do dope any more. At the risk of sounding like an old hippie, I do feel like there was some kind of divine intervention involved in me making that choice. But there was a long way to go before I’d be able to fully put that good intention into practice. The coin hadn’t dropped yet that I should really get sober – the machinery was moving, but the system wasn’t fully operational.
The guy who got things rolling for me knew a fair bit about how that mechanism worked. It was Danny Sugerman, who’d managed what was left of The Doors after Jim Morrison died. (He later wrote the book that got turned into the Oliver Stone film, and another one about his life as a heroin addict.) One of the guys in Chequered Past knew Danny, who in turn knew a Dr Feelgood in this building in Century City who got me on a private methadone thing which took me off the hustle and saved me having to steal off people. While I was giving that a try, I ended up living out in the Valley for a few months with Nigel Harrison, who used to be in Blondie. Nigel’s quite a reserved guy – very business-orientated, but with a funny sense of humour too.
That was a weird period – the mid-1980s – when no one seemed to give a fuck about punk. Now it’s gone back to being a big deal again and it feels like it won’t ever go away, but then it just seemed like something that had happened but was now over.
I never thought twice about it at the time: I’d been in a band, it had ended quickly, and soon it would all be forgotten. That seemed to make sense to me. Even by the time I was doing my first solo record with the longhair, which was 1986–87, still no one gave a shit. It was only from the late Eighties onwards, when Megadeth, Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses all did their versions of Pistols songs that the whole thing started to come back into focus. Looking back, I think that period of time out of the spotlight probably did me a favour, as it meant I had to reinvent myself a bit rather than living off past glories.
Once I’d had enough of living with Nigel in the Valley, I moved into a couple of different houses with Michael Des Barres, his wife Pamela and their son Nick. I lived with them for a couple of years in the end. I was paying ’em rent and not doing so much dope, but making up for it by doing a lot of drinking and blow and shagging a lot of birds. Who wouldn’t want me as a lodger?
One of their places was right near a big punk hang-out on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was funny – I used to walk down there at night while they’d all be hanging about outside with their mohawks, and no one knew who I was. I’d slip away unnoticed. Which was what I had to do from the Des Barres house after I got back on the dope and nicked Pamela’s Beatles albums and her leather jacket to pay for some. I still feel bad about that now. I made amends with her and Michael years later and I think they’ve forgiven me, but it took them a while; they wanted nothing to do with me for years, and I can’t blame them.
It wasn’t just other people I was fucking over at that time. I wasn’t doing myself any favours either. Like the time I OD’ed in the sushi restaurant on the corner of La Cienega and Santa Monica boulevards. I was meeting the man in this sushi place and he was late – it’s like Lou Reed says, they always are – so I was knocking back the sakes. By the time he finally turns up, I’m drunk. I go into the bathroom to shoot up, and straight away I’m out cold. Next thing I know, I’m being pumped up with some of that adrenalin shit and the paramedics are giving me electric shocks to bring me back.
I’d sat on the seat of the khazi to shoot up and when the heroin hit my bloodstream I slid down so my foot went under the door. Luckily for me, some geezer’s come in to use the bathroom and seen it. If it hadn’t have been for my big plates of meat, I wouldn’t be here now. Imagine the ‘Sex Pistol Dead On Sushi Toilet’ headlines – I’d have been like a West Coast Elvis. That was the only time I remember fully OD’ing – and I do think it’s something even I would remember – but there were a few scenarios that came close. Not a lot, but a few. The worst part of the sushi one was I couldn’t wait to get loaded again the minute I got out of hospital.
‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ is one of the best songs ever written about what that feels like. I always loved The Velvet Underground, and there are a few of Lou’s solo records I really like, too: Berlin, Coney Island Baby, Rock n Roll Animal – nothing wrong with any of those. He’s a fantastic songwriter, but he was awful live, especially in the later years. It’s bizarre how catchy those tunes are, because he could barely carry a note. I think maybe he’s one of those guys who was as good as whoever he’d got around him. The reason Transformer turned out as well as it did was that Bowie and Mick Ronson were so involved. If Lou had done it all himself, it would’ve probably been a load of shit.
Anyway, Lou would’ve known even better than I do that you can’t make someone sober till they are good and fucking ready. By the time I made my first vaguely serious attempt – in 1985 – I had a horrible drug problem. Someone was kind enough to get me into a rehab in Tarzana. Well, it wasn’t a rehab so much as a detox place. It was fifty bucks for two weeks and what they were offering you for that money was a big room with a bunch of springy beds where they detox you with methadone.
It was me and a bunch of gang-bangers, basically. We were quite close to the bottom of the food chain in rehab terms, but I didn’t want to just go cold turkey, and this was the best I could hook myself up with at that stage. It was actually OK in a no-frills kind of way. You’re much better off in a place where everyone knows why they’re there than in some fancy gaff where the whole thing’s set up to fleece you for as much money as possible. I was on my uppers, so it was more a beggars-can’t-be-choosers situation. I was more or less homeless at that point because I’d pissed off everyone I knew by stealing from them.
The Good Samaritan who didn’t walk past on the other side was a woman called Linda I used to get high with. We’d do blow together and drive around LA doing wild shit, but at that stage she was newly sober, and I ran into her coming out of a 12-Step meeting at the place where the Guitar Centre used to be. I was in a pretty desperate state by that time – just walking around looking for something to steal. Linda saw I was in a bad way and said I could have a place to kip on her couch if I went to the 12-Step programme.
This was my first introduction to something it would take me five or six years to fully get my head around (and a further twenty-five years later, I’ve still got a way to go). I started to get into going to meetings and even put my hand up to speak at a couple. At one I ended up admitting that I needed somewhere to live and this geezer agreed to put me up at his place. Obviously he had his own motives – he was quite a nerdy kind of guy and maybe he thought having a Sex Pistol on his futon would make him look cool. Every home should have one; he should’ve let me stay there for free.
It worked out well for me, though, and I was grateful to him. I’d got a bit of humility by then and I was relieved not to have to be doing any of the shit I’d been doing to get dope. I didn’t mind kipping on this geezer’s couch. It was a safe place for me, and I ended up staying there for about a year.
His apartment was in Hollywood, around 3rd Street and Gardner, and there was a park there that I used to go running in. It was good for me to fly beneath the radar for a while, because my credit was not good in the music industry. It wasn’t just that there wasn’t much work about: people would actively cross the street to avoid me (I didn’t blame them – I’d probably have done the same if I could’ve). I had to find some other way to bring in a bit of cash that wouldn’t involve me getting in trouble with the law.
So I started giving plasma for fifty bucks a pop. I was going to a couple of meetings a day, shagging chicks that I met there, and getting on the bus to the Valley to give them my finest claret. There was probably all manner of shit going around in my bloodstream at the time, but I don’t even know if they tested it for contamination. They certainly didn’t use new needles – they just used to wash ’em, but I didn’t give a fuck. It was fifty bucks (in the form of a cheque that I could give the guy with the couch for rent) and I wasn’t nicking any more, which was all I cared about. OK, so I didn’t stop completely – I still pilfered a bit in sobriety. It was such a natural way for me to get things that it took me a long time to stop altogether.
It took me even longer to start putting the two puzzles together so I could understand the way the different addictions overlapped. I’d have to do a bunch of years of therapy as part of that process, and there were plenty of times when I wanted to bolt, but eventually I learnt not to. When I was going to those early meetings, though, I was really damaged goods. I didn’t have the first clue how to be a decent person. Everything was all about me, and I didn’t care who else I hurt. So these were just the first steps on a long road – a road with no fucking end.
At that point I had no idea how to conduct myself like a normal person, or how to react to emotion – that was my main problem. It wasn’t like I was a complete cunt to people, but if someone hurt my feelings, I wouldn’t deal with it the way a normal person would. I’d have to act out or run off – just find any way of not dealing with it. I’d been wearing that Cloak of Invisibility for so long it was like a second skin.
Getting the dope out of my system was just the start. When you’re in the very early stages of sobriety you tend to go a bit haywire emotionally, because you start experiencing a lot of feelings you’ve blocked out for a long time. Of course, all I wanted to do was fuck chicks, which was basically just another way of shutting out reality. But a big turning point for me came when someone played me at my own game, and for the first time in ages I was actually sober enough for something to matter to me.
The socialite girl I’d lived with for a while in New York (not the brass, the other one) came out to LA after the Chequered Past thing had happened. Her name was (and is) Nina Huang, and we’re still good friends. She’d got sober too at that point, and for a while we were almost living together. Of course I was still fucking other chicks left, right and centre, but one day I spoke to her 12-Step sponsor who for some reason thought it was a good idea to tell me that Nina had fucked—Well, I’d better not print the name cos it’d cause too much trouble even now. Let’s just say ‘a major A-list Hollywood film star’. Much as I had no right to take offence, given the amount of shit I’d been up to, this fucking devastated me.
It was the first time someone had really turned things round on me so I wasn’t the one doing the upsetting. This might be hard to believe, but I’d never given a thought to all the pain I was causing people before. Of course it wasn’t the first time I’d been fucked over, but in the old days I would’ve just drowned whatever I felt in booze or drugs or thieving. This time, because I was newly sober, I had no choice but to actually experience it. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, fuck me, this feels like shit.’ It was a painful lesson, but it was also a great lesson, as it was the gateway to me starting to turn things round in the way I treated other people.
I had to find a way through it – but I also had to stay sober in the process. I kind of had to go cold turkey on not feeling emotions; I literally didn’t eat or sleep for two weeks. That shit was a worse kick than methadone. But by the time I came out the other side, it had put me on the fast track to recovery. Well, when I say the fast track, me trying to find a way of treating other people a bit better was not going to be an overnight process. But at least my eyes were open now to the kind of shit I had to stop doing. The old ways had died hard, but my days of fucking my mates’ chicks and not caring were on their way to being behind me.
Almost like a reward for making my first tentative steps in a better direction, things started to look up on the work front as well. Even in my darkest days I never lost my confidence as a musician – people always seemed impressed by what I did and that was enough for me. As a person, it was a different matter. I definitely didn’t feel adequate, but then again, I never had done.
One of the first paying gigs that came through was to work with Andy Taylor of Duran Duran on his solo record. There was a lot of money in the record industry in the mid-Eighties, and Andy was hot then, so he got paid millions to do that record. Maybe not as many of those millions came to his co-writer as I would’ve liked, but I appreciated him giving me a chance when no one else would, so I was hardly going to kick the deal out of bed.
A few months earlier, I was a junkie who couldn’t get my shit together. Now I was slowly building myself a new life – being sober in the sun, shagging some beautiful women. I even got to move off that geezer’s couch. Andy Taylor had a few houses around LA, and one of them was just off Sunset Boulevard near the Hyatt Hotel – on King’s Road, funnily enough. He was living out in Malibu and only came into town once in a blue moon, so he was fine with me moving in.
Word seemed to get around town pretty quickly that I was doing an OK job for him, and it wasn’t long before I got offered a solo deal of my own. It was with a guy called Danny Goldberg who’d worked with Led Zep in the Seventies and would later be manager of Nirvana. He signed me to MCA to do Mercy – an album of mellow rock songs that sounded nothing like anything I’d done before. I guess it was my opportunity to do a soundtrack for the Poco manager look I used to wear up and down the other King’s Road, and even though it’s not the thing I’ve done that people ask me about the most, I was still proud to make a record while sober, and doing it was very meaningful to me.
I bought myself a GMC pickup truck with the first little bit of dough that came through. It was the first motor I’d bought properly since I’d been in America, and I’ve got a similar one now. Things were looking up.