Between my first solo album coming out in 1987 and the second one, Fire and Gasoline, a couple of years later: that was when The Wolfman was really off and running. I was slim then, and in good shape, plus I had the long hair and looked like Fabio, so I could get laid at any time. Yes, I went to meetings and shagged chicks I met there, but you didn’t have to be an addict for me to shag you – I was all about equal opportunities.
Part of it was that doing dope for six or seven years kind of damps that part of you down and you don’t worry about sex so much. So, as the effects of the heroin wore off and the old safety valves of booze and drugs closed down, all the pressure started to push in one direction. I was so horny that I was just going to 12-Step meetings looking for pussy, which isn’t really a good idea in recovery terms. Once at the big Friday meeting on Rodeo Drive, a porn star called Ginger, who was highly rated by Adult Video News’ list of the top 50 porn stars of all time, sucked me off in the toilets. What can I say? It was a romantic time.
You can only do that for so long before the realisation hits you that it’s all the same thing. The nature of the addiction might be different, but whether the only thing you’re thinking about is where your next fix is coming from or fucking chicks at 12-Step meetings doesn’t really make too much difference – you’re still behaving in the same obsessive way. I guess the truth was that I hadn’t really hit rock bottom. Well, I’d hit a few rock bottoms, but not the right one.
I’d tried the 12-Step programme specifically related to narcotics but I couldn’t connect with it. They just seemed like a bunch of cunts, topping each other’s stories to glorify their pasts. The full-on junkie mentality is a different thing to the regular alcoholic’s, that’s for sure. I realise this might seem like a bit of a stretch, given that I did have a massive problem with heroin, but even now after years of various kinds of therapy I still think of myself as an alcoholic who ended up taking heroin, rather than as a junkie. I don’t think I was one of those people who, when they get sober for a bit, everyone knows will go back to dope again. It was more like a form of escapism for me, from the emptiness I felt after the band ended.
The thing I could never escape was the effect alcohol had on me when I put it in my system, and alcoholism was definitely the road I would’ve gone down if heroin hadn’t offered me the kind of short cut that a fan of instant gratification like myself was never going to be able to pass up. You might wonder, what’s the difference between flying first class or economy when the destination is the same? The funny thing is, it’s only people who’ve always flown economy who ask that question.
Once both of the crutches I used to rely on were gone, I started to lean on the sex thing more and more. The mentality of LA is very much about looking good at the best of times, and the more I got into playing the part of being the rocker guy on his bike, the more my natural-born Englishman’s resistance to gyms and the pursuit of the body beautiful (my own, that is – I’d always been happy to pursue other people’s) started to get worn down. Ridiculous as this will seem, given how hard I was trying to stay sober, I even went through a phase where I was doing steroids to get buff.
I only did a couple of cycles – I didn’t go crazy with them – and the results were amazing. They work really quickly, and I can see why people get hooked on that hit of how much better they make you look, but instant gratification has always been my downfall. I definitely wouldn’t recommend steroids to anyone trying to get clean. You don’t really get high from them, but they do alter your head a bit, if only by making you angry and full of testosterone, which I’ve never exactly lacked. I’m not saying steroids were 100 per cent the cause of my second relapse, but I guess the fact that I carried on doing something I knew wasn’t appropriate to sobriety shows you where my head was at.
I did look good in the Fabio phase, though. It will be hard for anyone who knows me now to accept this, but I was quite vain in those days – the peacock had grown its feathers back, and he didn’t care who he showed them to. I don’t know how exactly you measure it, but in that phase of short-term sobriety between the two relapses, I would say, technically I was probably a sex addict. If I couldn’t pull a rock chick in the clubs on the Strip, I would cruise around in my truck till I found a woman who was ready, willing and able. To show you how dependent I was on pussy, one time I was cruising over in the Valley early in the morning when I started seeing things – I’d see fucking mail boxes in the distance and fixate that they were chicks. The worst part of it was, I was sober as a judge at the time. An old-school non-drinking judge at that, not one of those pisshead ones.
Meeting Axl Rose was another unlikely landmark on my long road to sobriety. I was on my bike outside the Rainbow on a Friday night – trying to get laid as usual – and Axl just walked up to me. He had a big leather coat on and a military cap and he was fucking goo-goo-eyed about talking to me, which was a nice ego boost. It was all new to him then, and he just wanted to hang out. It must have been at the time when things were starting to take off for Guns N’ Roses, because there weren’t loads of people around him trying to get his autograph, but I knew who he was.
A lot of those dudes from the hair metal and thrash metal bands would say they were into punk when really they were into metal. But while Slash and the other Guns N’ Roses guys came from more rock backgrounds, Duff and Axl were real punk fans. We talked for an hour or so that night, and a few times after. I really liked Guns N’ Roses – they were a real band with a classic rock sound, not like the Poisons of this world. And Axl was cool. He ending up singing on the version of ‘Did You No Wrong’ that was on Fire and Gasoline. Axl does a verse, I do a verse, and Ian Astbury of The Cult does a verse – like bringing three generations together.
All of a sudden, after we’d been in the wilderness for almost a decade, there was a lot of love coming to the Sex Pistols from a bunch of new bands. Mötley Crüe and Megadeth did versions of ‘Anarchy in the UK’, and Anthrax did ‘God Save the Queen’. It made sense because that was where their music was coming from. I didn’t care too much for thrash metal, to be honest, but it was a nice feeling to get a bit of kudos, cos there hadn’t been too much of that flying around for a while. I guess you can hear me getting my confidence back in how much more of a balls-out rock ’n’ roll record my second solo album is than the one before it. I know Fire and Gasoline is not to everyone’s taste but some of the cognoscenti revere it as the Rosetta Stone of biker metal. No really, they do.
There’s no VIP room in the 12-Step programme, much as some people would like there to be. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, gay or straight, black or white – nobody’s special. You’ve all got one thing in common, which is the gene that gives you a fucking issue with alcoholism – obsession of the mind, allergy of the body, whatever you want to call it. And it would take one more relapse for me finally to commit myself fully to doing something about it. As relapses go, it wasn’t spectacular. I didn’t finally touch the bottom of the pool and then swim towards the oxygen with all the strength I had left. It was more a kind of ‘I’m done’ feeling – ‘I can’t be doing this any more so what do I have to do to stop?’
I was lucky that by the time the coin finally dropped after five or six years of dicking around, I was much more established than I had been at the start of the process. I wasn’t fucking homeless and kipping on a sofa any more, I had a decent apartment to live in and enough money from my two record deals to pay for some proper treatment. It was funny that the day in 1990 when I took the pledge and meant it for good – 28th October – was the same date Never Mind the Bollocks … had come out thirteen years before. But I didn’t pick that day for its historical significance. The time had just finally come for me to really get stuck in.
If all the people who flirted with the 12-Step programme actually stuck with it, those meetings would be like sell-out shows at the Staples Center. With my tiny attention span and history of fucking off when the going got tough, no one would’ve picked me out as one of the happy few the programme would work for. I don’t know why that happened for me and not for so many others. I can’t answer that question. It wasn’t just that I was fortunate. I was lucky to even be alive.
In LA – at least among the people I knocked about with, it was different in the gay community – AIDS only seemed to become a big issue around the late Eighties/early Nineties. That was when it really felt like a problem. Prior to that, catching herpes seemed to be the biggest worry. Condoms just weren’t on the agenda, and obviously, with the number of people I’d rumped without them, I was terrified by the idea that you could get AIDS though fucking. To be honest, I think some of those risks have been blown out of proportion when it comes to straight people, so as not to seem discriminatory, but anything involving blood and/or putting cocks in arses is definitely not a good idea. So I’ve had more than my nine lives there, given the amount of deviant shit I’ve done over the years.
I dodged a few bullets in injecting heroin, too. The key thing there was, I never lowered myself to use those shooting galleries they had then, which basically meant a dirty old bucket with a bunch of used needles in it and people would just bang in there to get a fix straight away. Even if I was sick and desperate for dope, I never did that; it just never seemed right to me. I always had my own needle, even though it did sometimes feel like taking your own cue to the snooker hall. Thank God I kept on doing that, because a bunch of people I knew are brown bread from going the other way.
The only one I didn’t get away with was that first fix back in London all those years before, which I’m sure is what gave me hepatitis C, even though they say you can get it from snorting through a straw – all you need is a little blood particle on the end of it from someone else’s fucking nasal membranes. The other big way of getting infected was through blood transfusions at hospitals. A load of completely innocent people picked it up that way.
The strange thing about that disease is nothing really happens to tell you you’ve got it, other than finding yourself napping a lot. I don’t know if I used to do that prior to getting hepatitis C, but it seems as though I’ve been napping all my life. You can live with it for years without even knowing, but it will be affecting your immune system and the level of symptoms depends on how healthy you are in general. It’s all about cleaning your liver, so if you’re still knocking back booze and smoking and shooting up all day, that’s obviously not going to help. If you keep overloading your liver you’ll eventually get cirrhosis, at which point you will either need a transplant or get cancer.
Thank God I never reached that stage, but if I hadn’t sobered up, it would’ve got a lot worse than it did. It all comes down to the numbers of something called your Viral Load, which wouldn’t be a bad name for a metal band. Mine was something like ten million, whatever the fuck that means. It was high, but not critically high. I think what saved me from anything worse was the fact that the span of time I was on dope was relatively short – from ’79 to ’85, and then five years of on–off sobriety with two short relapses of a couple of weeks each, before I finally made it really official.
I’ve been sober twenty-five years now, but it’s never over. It’s not like you ever get to the end of the 12 steps and think, ‘OK, let’s party!’ It’s just a way of thinking you have to stay inside until the day you die.