The thought of being onstage completely sober was terrifying at first – I remember thinking, ‘I’m never going to be able to do a gig without at least a pint inside me.’ So I started various two-bob bands with other people who were sober, just to give it a try. The first one was called Dano and Jones: as the name suggests, it was just me and this guy Rick Dano. When I was maybe sixty days sober, we put this little band together to play at a venue which was called Central at the time but then turned into the Viper Room.
It was just traditional rock ’n’ roll, but people loved it, and the adulation of everyone kissing my arse when it was over – and getting laid afterwards – was very helpful. From then on, it just got easier and easier. The idea that you play better when you’re high was always a load of bollocks – maybe you sound better to yourself, but that’s because you’re high and your judgement is not to be trusted. If you really want to know what you sound like, try listening to yourself when you’re sober.
Now that I think of it, the first person to give me a leg-up back into writing and recording again in sobriety wasn’t Andy Taylor. Iggy Pop was a much more appropriate mentor. When it came to getting your shit together and getting back on your feet, he’d been there and done that.
The Stooges had been a huge deal to me when I was doing my diet-pill guitar crash course back in Denmark Street in 1975, and I’d been really pissed off to miss the famous gig Iggy did at the Scala in King’s Cross with the Flamin’ Groovies a few years before, so I certainly wasn’t going to miss the chance to play with him ten years later.
I’d first met Iggy when I was still with The Professionals. I can’t remember how it came about, but we hung out in New York a couple of times. Then later on he came out to LA for a while and we wrote together for about a month. From those demos I ended up with I think four co-writes on what became his Blah Blah Blah album. Iggy was great in just the way you’d imagine – came up with really good lyrics and was just fun to be around. I remember thinking, ‘Why couldn’t writing with Rotten have been like this?’
OK, so Matlock had beaten me to the punch by playing with Iggy Pop already (on Soldier) but there was no way he could compete with the Sammy Hagar look I was working by the time me and Iggy played ‘Cold Metal’ from his next album, Instinct, on Letterman in 1988. The funny thing about that is, lots of the people commenting on YouTube don’t think it’s me, cos they can’t handle my big hair.
I shouldn’t have made myself as conspicuous as I did in my Fabio phase, really, because as aliens go, I was totally illegal. I shouldn’t have even been in America, and I didn’t have a green card for about ten years. That’s why I couldn’t go to Switzerland to play on the actual recording of Blah Blah Blah – if I had done, I wouldn’t have been able to come back. It wasn’t just the old English convictions that were hindering me; me and Cookie had got drunk in the King’s Head in LA one day and I got done for nicking a sweater. It was only a misdemeanour, but it didn’t help when I was trying to get legal. I suppose I was lucky not to be deported. As well as ruining my life, to be chucked out of the country for crimes against knitwear would’ve been embarrassing.
The Cloak of Invisibility saw me through a few more illegal years in LA. I ended up having to go back to London in the early Nineties to get a working visa, and at that point I managed to get into that system where you have to go back to England every year to renew it. It was a fucking pain in the arse, especially as England was the last place I wanted to be at that time, but I kept at it and eventually the green card was mine. For me a big part of the process of getting sober was getting myself on the grid so I actually left a footprint on the world like a normal fucking human being, instead of just drifting from one disgraceful action to the next. The Cloak had to go – I guess that was what it came down to.
The first step was to get a regular address of my own. I’d been down in the flatlands for my first few years in LA, but as soon as I was earning enough to cover the rent, I moved up to the canyons. It was a big leap for me – going up into the hills. I found the atmosphere of the trees and the quiet a little weird at first. Apart from anything else, it was the furthest out into the country I’d lived since I was in Banstead Hall. And not only did the Manson murders happen just round the corner, there was always the danger of waking up to find Joni Mitchell playing her acoustic guitar at the end of your bed, which I would probably have found scarier than the Manson thing, to be honest.
I rented two different places for about four years each before I got the dough together to buy somewhere. In the meantime, it wasn’t just a passport and a driving licence and a credit card I had to sort out, there was the little matter of learning to read and write properly. I was in my thirties now, and knowing I was still not properly literate was a source of constant insecurity and embarrassment to me. Before I was sober I’d had so many other things to be embarrassed about that this one had kind of gone on the back burner, but now was the time. So I hired this Asian bird to teach me. She helped me a lot – she came over for maybe an hour twice a week for about six months, and once I got into it I found the learning much easier than I’d expected. She was a good teacher, which helped, and a great girl too. I think she wanted a portion at the end but I didn’t bother because she was too sweet.
It made me feel a lot better to be able to do some of the things that normal people do, but there are limits. To this day, everything that needs dealing with goes through my management office, and if something turns up at home that I have to sign I go into a panic. I still can’t really deal with bills and shit like that. It just freaks me the fuck out. It’s not just that I don’t want to deal with it – I don’t even want to see it. That’s why I don’t think I could ever have held down a normal job. It’s not that I think I’m above such things, I just can’t be bothered.
Even while I was trying to buckle down to the discipline of sobriety, the freedom of those first few years in LA was great. It was a world away from being in some dingy basement in London picking your blackheads; in LA you could get someone else to pick them for you. And I loved the fact that you could ride motorbikes without having to wear a helmet. That was how me and Mickey Rourke ended up reviving the whole Harley-Davidson thing. There’s no ego involved in me saying that – it’s just the truth. When we started riding them no one else was doing it except the real greasers.
From driving round London fetching the samples for Malcolm and Vivienne’s rocker clothes in the Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die days, to helping bring back the Harley in LA, where it all began – it’s a nice kind of circle. Seeing Mickey Rourke for the first time was a funny one. I had a Harley and he had one too, but we hadn’t met. I bumped into him at some cafe one night. He wasn’t too popular at that time and neither was I. We looked at each other and kind of checked each other out, the same way two not-Brutus-shirt-wearing skinheads might’ve done on Shepherd’s Bush Market twenty years before, and it wasn’t long before we started hanging out as part of a little team.
Mickey Rourke might seem a funny person to start hanging out with when you’re newly sober, as he’s not really a 12-Step type of guy, but even though I knew he liked to party, I never saw him fucked up around the bikes. Mickey had built this coffee shop in the heart of Beverly Hills called Nicky and Joey’s. A few of us used to hang out there and it became a big thing more or less overnight – all of a sudden, there were fifty of us. We weren’t real bikers, just posers on the weekend.
The big thing to do was meet at the coffee shop on a Friday night to pose around a bit on all the bikes, then drive to this club called Vertigo, a hipster place downtown. We’d take Olympic Boulevard all the way, go in there and stroll around like we owned the place. If things went well and a bird or two was impressed maybe there’d be a bit of suction in the alley afterwards. Then at about one o’clock we’d all go our separate ways. The big bike ride was five miles and that was it. I don’t think any of these cunts had more than 500 miles on their clocks, me included.
I always loved motorbikes. I had one in England when I was about sixteen – got it out of the shop on HP and don’t think I ever made one payment. It wasn’t just a moped, I think it was a Honda 650cc; 450cc at the least. I was nobody’s idea of a good credit risk, but I suppose they didn’t care so long as they got the sale and then it became someone else’s problem. Either way, I rode this thing till it broke down and then just left it where it stopped. I had no idea what I was doing.
Switching to a Harley once I got to America wasn’t a betrayal of my skinhead roots. It was just horses for courses. I see these kids in LA now trying to re-enact the mod thing on their scooters; there’s a whole little scene, but it doesn’t really work if you’ve got to wear a helmet. For me, mod wasn’t about wearing helmets – the cool part was, everyone could see you. I still hate helmets but I’ve got quite a collection now and I don’t mind wearing ’em because I’ve seen some of the scary shit that’s happened to people who didn’t have them on. I still don’t wear the full face – I prefer the open face. A geezer is putting horns on one for me right now.
I had a couple of quite bad motorbike accidents. In 1986, when I was in the early stages of sobriety, Linda, who got me started on that course, co-signed for me to get a Harley-Davidson Sportster. That was when Nina was still around. She was on the back, I’d had a couple of pints (well, I did say it was the early stages of sobriety), and neither of us were wearing helmets. I was nowhere near drunk, but I didn’t know the LA roads that well yet.
As we were getting ready to come off Sunset up at Crescent Heights, I turned round to say something to Nina. The next thing I knew there was a car in front of us stopping to turn illegally and we rear-ended it. Nina was all right on the back of the bike, but I went flying into the fucking bushes and broke my wrist. My arm was pushed right up under me and I had to have stitches; there were also a few concerns about the break. It was to my strumming hand. Guitarists don’t want wrist injuries, but luckily the hospital straightened the arm out OK, so I made a 100 per cent recovery.
Cut to a year or so later, and I’m riding home from Justine Bateman’s house up at the top of Laurel Canyon and Mulholland. She was a big soap actress at the time and there were eight of us on bikes – all these actor kids, being tough guys and giving it the big ’un. I think the former teen idol Leif Garrett was there, too, for some reason. We were coming down the Canyon when these birds came up the other side in a car only way over the centre line so they smacked right into me. My bike rolled over with me and Nina still on it – bosh! I broke the same wrist and had to have a load more stitches. Again, I was lucky there was no permanent damage, or at least nothing to rob my guitar-playing of the subtlety for which it is globally renowned.
As shit as they were at the time, I actually appreciate having had those crashes, because they made me so aware of the dangers. I feel bad for motorcyclists who don’t know the ropes. When I see people now who’ve just got on their bikes for the first time and they can barely take their feet off the ground, I think, ‘Oh, you poor fuckers – you’re going to get a wallop, it’s just a matter of time.’ I’m so grateful – my wallops could’ve been so much worse. Over time you pick up experience so you see things before they happen, which you need to nowadays, with so many car and van drivers too busy checking their texts to pay attention to the road.
There was definitely a motorbike element to one of my favourite stories from this time. One day I got a phone call from Bob Dylan. ‘Hey, Steve,’ he said, however he talks. ‘Can you put a band together?’ It didn’t come completely out of the blue. There’d been a kind of courtship phase when he saw me around town a couple of times and he’d come running over and hug me. ‘Hey, Steve,’ he’d say. It was funny because Dylan’s usually notorious for coating everyone off, and people couldn’t believe he was giving me all this attention. I’m not sure if it was because he was into bikes too or maybe he was a secret Professionals fan, but either way, we did a session one night in March 1987, at the famous Studio 3 in Sunset Sound on Sunset Boulevard (where Jim Morrison had all that fun in the booth), and it was the weirdest experience.
When Bob asked me, I thought, ‘OK, let’s see what we can rustle up.’ Paul Simonon was hanging out in LA at the time. The Clash were done and he was out here riding motorbikes and messing about with a band called Havana 3a.m. (The singer was a geezer I knew, who’s dead now.) Anyway, I’d loved Simonon from the beginning – we’d always got on, and there are some good pictures of us riding motorbikes together trying to look like James Dean. So he was in. Then there was Pat Benatar’s drummer Myron Grombacher – which is a pretty cool name, I’m sure you’ll agree – and maybe a keyboard guy I can’t remember.
We got there in the morning and set up all the gear. Then Bob arrived and put his lyrics on the piano in a big pile. He’s standing there with his acoustic, me and the band are sitting waiting, and he starts kind of mumbling his way through the chords – ‘C, uh D, uh G.’ He just wanted us to play and see if anything started cooking, basically like a jam band. Now, I know this works for some people, but I’d never made music that way before. I’d usually go into the studio knowing exactly what I was doing and then we’d build the track up piece by piece. So there was a bit of a clash of cultures. He must’ve started about twenty different songs then he’d cut them off just as we were getting going. They got one track out of it for the album Down In The Groove and that was a cover of ‘Sally Sue Brown’. It was a good job I’d not spent my whole life waiting for a Bob Dylan co-write to come along, because that never materialised.
What did happen was that Mickey Rourke turned up at the studio with a big gang of our biker mates. I was facing the glass window of the control room and Dylan was facing me with his back to the entrance. While he’s talking away to me, I notice Mickey and about thirty of these other biker geezers come swaggering in. Then Bob turns round to see them all and does a massive double-take. I wish someone had been filming it, cos his face was a picture. I wouldn’t say he was intimidated, but it wasn’t long before he made his excuses and left.
The way music seemed to be bringing me out of the darkness in those years was just like when I was a kid and hearing Jimi Hendrix or Roxy Music gave me a bit of hope. Working with Roy Orbison was one of the best ones. That happened around 1987–88 as well. I’d signed to Danny Goldberg’s label by then, as well as to him as a manager, and he was also representing Roy, who was trying to do an album at the time. Danny thought it was a good idea to put the two of us together, so I rode my motorbike out to Malibu to meet the big O a couple of times, and we started writing this song on a cassette.
‘The Chains of Love’, I think it was called, but it wasn’t a bondage thing as Roy was no more into that shit than I was. It was coming out pretty good, and it only needed a few more lyrics from him and it would’ve been done, but unfortunately he died before we could finish it. Of course his wife couldn’t find the cassette, and then the house got burned down. So maybe there’s a cassette somewhere with me and him singing on it, and maybe there isn’t.
Roy was a sweetheart – very soft and kind in his manner, one of those blokes you feel would’ve never lost their temper – and we got along great. He had the demeanour of a real Southern gentleman, and he was definitely the nicest of all the original rock ’n’ roll giants I’ve met. It was such a shame when he died. I remember we were working on the song downstairs in his house and he was sneaking fags, going, ‘Don’t tell my missus.’ You just don’t get that from Jerry Lee Lewis.
I’d been two and a half years clean the first time I went out of the programme (the respectable way of saying ‘got back on the gear’) for a month before coming straight back in. Then I managed another three years before the same thing happened again. In the periods when I relapsed, I didn’t socialise with anyone. It wasn’t like I was falling out of the Viper Room into the gutter; people probably thought, ‘Oh fuck, he’s relapsed,’ because I would just disappear. No one ever saw me high, because by then I was embarrassed to be seen not sober. I just kind of slunk away and kept myself totally isolated till I could get myself together enough to climb back on the wagon. I guess that was a sign I’d taken some of it on board.
The reason I kept hitting that wall was that I never worked any of the 12 steps. If you don’t do any steps, eventually you’ll end up getting loaded again, and that’s what I did. For that first five and a half years or so I was just dicking around, really. I was going to meetings, picking up useful bits and pieces in my thick head, but only really paying lip service because it was a safe place and I liked the attention I got from the birds.