The main difference between group therapy and being in a band is that in group therapy everyone’s trying to help each other. There’s the therapist – who I guess would be like the manager in band terms, though heaven help you if Malcolm McLaren is guiding your recovery – and three or four other bods. The therapist would home in on you one by one and say, ‘It’s your turn to talk,’ the others would listen and then they’d chip in with their responses afterwards. That might sound stressful if you’ve not done it before, but in my experience there was never any aggro. At first it was a challenge to be in the hot seat, but it got easier the longer you were there, and it was good listening to other people talk about their issues as well. That definitely helped me to open up.
Once I’d got the idea of talking these things through, it didn’t make too much difference to me whether I was in a small group, one on one with the same therapist in his or her office, or standing up to speak at a 12-Step meeting. Each of the larger gatherings has its own character, and I know the map of different groups in LA like the back of my hand. It’s funny how some of their names seem to remind you of drinks – like Sundowners – and they have different atmospheres according to the people who run them. A few can get a bit competitive and starry, others are more nurturing.
Bread and Roses – the stag (which just means it’s men only, they don’t show blue movies) meeting on Brentwood – does ‘involuntary sharing’, which some people find a bit of an ordeal. They just point at you and you have to spill your guts, which is fine if you’re up for it, but if you’re not you can get so consumed with worry in your head about the moment your turn will come – ‘Everyone’s gonna be looking at me, and I’ll have to speak in front of them’ – that you don’t hear anything else that’s said. That is definitely an alcoholic trait, which obviously you will see a lot of in meetings.
It’s in the nature of the 12-Step programme that people bring a lot of baggage to it. And just because someone is trying to get sober doesn’t stop them being an arsehole; quite the reverse. Even setting aside all the acting out that goes on, if a person was an arsehole drinking, there’s a good chance they’ll be an arsehole sober as well. It takes years of peeling layers off the onion to get to the cleaner bulb, and while people are shedding the tears that are part of that process, you’re not necessarily going to see the best of them. This is the final house on the fucking block, after all – if you don’t get in, you’ve had it – so in terms of how people interact, you’ve got to expect the worst of the worst.
Don’t get me wrong, I know that nice people who’ve had tough lives come into the programme as well. But they aren’t the ones you tend to notice first. And the whole experience is far from the goody two-shoes scenario that words like ‘fellowship’ and ‘higher power’ might suggest to those on the outside. The 12-Step programme is not like the Scouts. You’re not volunteering because you want to be a good kid: you end up there because there’s nowhere else to go and you might, if you’re lucky, have found a last-chance saloon that will serve you something other than alcohol.
In the meantime, you get a lot of cunts coming in who are selfish and have their own manipulative agendas (I know, because I was one of them). When they first get sober, many people kind of go nuts, because the central focus of their lives – whether that’s booze or drugs doesn’t make too much difference – has suddenly gone. It’s almost like you’ve lost your job, and what the 12-Step programme gives you is something to fill the space that’s left behind. That’s what the steps and the rituals and the regularity are all about: finding a way to stop that inner void pulling you in. It’s not complicated, but it’s hard, and it’s not for everyone.
The first thing you’ve got to do is get into the groove of it, but then the novelty wears off and the monotony sets in. When everything starts to feel smooth and straightforward it’s probably the time you’re most in danger, because if you get too cocky, you’re fucked. The programme keeps you on your toes by pushing you in new directions. If you’d looked at who I was when I was living in New York (in the 8×10s of Heart era), the idea of me giving talks in hospitals and prisons would’ve seemed totally fucking ridiculous. I would never have had the balls – or the motivation – to do anything like that without the confidence I’ve got from standing up to speak in meetings.
I get asked to do this a lot to this day, and to my surprise I’ve turned into a pretty decent speaker. I was terrified at first, and sometimes even now I don’t want to fucking do it, but I found it easier to get up and speak in a 12-Step context than anywhere outside it. You know that at some level everyone there can relate to what you’re saying, so you don’t really feel like anything you can say could be ‘wrong’. I guess I’ve taken that no-holds-barred approach onto the radio with me in more recent times (it’s funny that a radio show has sponsors too, but not the same way an alcoholic does). One thing’s for sure, Jonesy’s Jukebox is one of the many good things in my life that could never have happened without the changes the programme has made in me.
The only thing going to meetings guarantees is that if you stick with it, you will stop drinking (or whatever). Sorting everything else out is up to you, but it’s amazing how many different aspects of your life it seems to help with. I’d got a bit of baggage with managers by that point, but when I was working with Andy Taylor and doing those two solo records with Danny Goldberg, a woman called Anita Camarata had come into the picture. She was helping Danny out, and it was good to start afresh with someone who’d only known me in sobriety. By the time I was emerging from that solo deal, she’d overcome some of my trust issues with management (you should never surrender all of them) and we’re still working together today.
In the early Nineties I got a little band together called Fantasy 7. It was me, this guy called Mark McCoy on vocals, and a couple of other geezers who weren’t quite Sly ’n’ Robbie on bass and drums. I liked Mark – he was cool. He was kind of a wannabe Iggy Pop on one level, but also clean and a veggie (which sadly didn’t stop him dying of cancer a while back). One of the main things was that we looked cool. I’d had enough of the Fabio look, so we all shaved our hair off to look like skinheads. It was funny, really, cos everyone else was doing that long-haired grunge thing, so no one knew if we were ahead of the times or behind them. Our music was back-to-basics punky rock ’n’ roll, and the whole thing was good fun. We’d play around town in LA and show up for gigs in a van. We also did a couple of nights in Buenos Aires, strangely enough, and there are some clips of us playing on an Argentinian TV show.
My next band, The Neurotic Outsiders, came a bit later – maybe 1994. We were another one of those strange hybrid punks and rockers supergroups, like Chequered Past, but with a lot more going for us, not least a lead guitarist who wasn’t only in it for his next fix. It all started when Matt Sorum, the drummer of Guns N’ Roses, wanted to do a benefit for some bloke who’d got sober but had cancer. We did the first show at the Viper Room and the line-up was me, Matt, Duff McKagan, and John Taylor from Duran Duran on bass (not to be confused with Andy who I’d worked with earlier. John is actually a really good rock bass player who plays with his fingers, which gives a much warmer sound than a pick).
We did a bunch of songs and my mate Ian Astbury got up and joined us. People really enjoyed the show, and it grew into a residency which went on for a while in 1994–95 and was kind of the place to be on a Monday night in LA (we’d chosen the day of the week well so there wasn’t too much competition). Loads of people I knew got up and did numbers with us – Iggy, Chrissie Hynde, Idol. One of our regular punters was Guy Oseary, who luckily for us ran Madonna’s label, Maverick. He loved the buzz of it all and to celebrate gave us a million dollars to make a record. It’s bizarre how much money was flying around at that time; nowadays we wouldn’t get a million pesetas. And Guy manages Madonna and U2 these days, so it’s not worked out too badly for him either.
We had a fun time making that record, and I think it could’ve done well if we’d all been around to give it a proper push. But there was talk of Guns N’ Roses getting back together, so Duff had to rehearse for that, and I had some reunion business of my own to attend to by then. I ended up squeezing a load of Neurotic Outsiders dates into a three-week break in the middle of the Sex Pistols’ Filthy Lucre world tour in 1996. I was knackered after that year, but it was a very good one for me financially, and set me up to the point where I was able to buy the house in Benedict Canyon where I still live today. I was forty by then, so it was about time I saw some proper dosh. If I’d had any back in the day it would’ve probably gone straight in my arm anyway, so I was all the more appreciative when it finally turned up and I was sober enough not to waste it.
We’d tried to get back together and do some shows earlier, but Lydon put the mockers on it for some reason. I’m not sure why John changed his mind when he did – maybe he needed a dollar, or his manager convinced him. Either way, at that time he was being looked after by a guy called Eric Gardner, who was somewhat sensible, so once things got moving all the arrangements came together pretty smoothly. John was quite controlling, but a lot more liberal than he is now.
When all the court cases were finally finished ten years before, the Sex Pistols as a business was split up into quarters, with the last one divided between Glen and Sid’s next of kin (just don’t mention who actually played bass on the album). At first that meant his mum, Anne Beverley, then when she died in 1996 it was left to her sister; then she died soon after and it was left to someone else. Then they died, and it went to one of the kids a long way down the family tree. Say what you like about that family, they don’t live very long, and Sid’s been much less of a problem in death than he was in life.
His mum was a complex character, but she was always cool with me and I got on well with her, as – usefully – did Anita. I even got Sid’s bass off Anne for a thousand dollars. She said, ‘Look, it’s been under my bed for seventeen years, I think someone should have it.’ I said I would and she asked what it was worth, so I told her a thousand bucks new – which was true. When she agreed to sell it to me I got a courier service over there to bring it back the next day, before she could change her mind. I think he only had two of the white ones. He left one in a cab and this is the other one – with the strap that says ‘Sid’. I haven’t flogged it yet, but I’ve been offered two hundred grand. Obviously that looks like a hefty profit on paper, but bear in mind I did play it a lot more than he did. When you look at it in that way, it was a fucking liberty I had to pay as much as a grand for it.
When it came to the reunion of the band’s living members, it was actually fine. OK, we’d all coated each other off a fair amount over the years – John and Glen hadn’t exactly held back in their books – and I think John still had a resentment about the way the band ended, but we decided to put all that aside and be polite. The only thing Glen had done that annoyed me was to claim he was the humble songwriter who wrote all the hits, but given the shoddy way he’d been treated after John and Malcolm edged him out of the band, I couldn’t really blame him for that.
One thing I would like to clear up is that I’m as certain as a man with as bad a memory as me can be that the story Lydon put in his book about me spunking up into Glen’s sandwich and tricking him into eating it is not true. I presume John just said that to cause shit between us, which was a shame, because the raw material of that story was actually a very sweet scene which was more like something from The Waltons. One time when Glen was staying over at Denmark Street, I was giving him advice on masturbational techniques before he went to sleep. It’s a service I like to provide – check in Glen’s book if you don’t believe me.
I was telling him how if you cut the top off an unsliced loaf (Mother’s Pride doesn’t work as well), scoop out some of the bread, and fill it up with warm water – room temperature, not boiling – then shag that, it actually feels quite like a cunt. It’s all part of the doing-something-to-your-cock-without-your-hand-actually-touching-it thing which has always been so important to me. You can get a similar effect with a pound of liver, but that way is more expensive and the meat goes off quick – it gets rigor mortis. I’m not saying that telling Glen this changed his life, any more than the sex tips I gave him in Brighton did, but if you wanted to know why John saw fit to twist the innocent memory of our friendly exchange of information into something dark and cruel, you’d probably have to ask him.
Anyway, back to the music. After all the shit that had gone on with Sid, it was weird to go back to Matlock on bass, but also a major relief. I think it laid a ghost to rest for Glen, too, and it was good to have the line-up that wrote the songs up onstage again. When the Sex Pistols played Finsbury Park in June 1996, many people there were too young to remember how few shows we did first time round – a load of those kids hadn’t even been born when we were playing the 100 Club and the Screen on the Green.
The shows we did from 1975 to 1978 were very rarely to crowds that actually wanted to see us. The S.P.O.T.S. gigs and maybe Brunel University near the end were among the few times I remember us being in front of big crowds who were excited to be in a room with us. Then we went to the States and it was back to square one with the angry cowboys. So 1996 was our time to get some appreciation from the punters. Plus we could play way better with Matlock than we ever could with Sid, so people who’d got into us later got a bit of a bonus.
As on any tour, there were a few horrible moments – like when we played in front of 100,000 people at Roskilde Festival in Denmark and a small crowd of cunts kept throwing cider bottles at us. We told them to stop because it was really dangerous but they didn’t, so we fucked off on the third song. There was another festival show where it was Cookie’s birthday and Rotten started celebrating three hours before the gig and was so hammered by the time we got onstage that it was a total disaster. But to be fair to him, it only happened once. He was pretty good about not drinking before the gigs, which was a relief, as he forgets all the words when he does.
The American dates were a great way of sticking it to all the people who went to the Winterland gig (or said they did) and thought we couldn’t pull off a big show. We started at Red Rocks in Colorado – that was a good one. Then there were three shows in LA – two at the Palladium and one at the Universal Amphitheatre. All the punk kids came out and did the mosh-pit thing and there were some good moments. The only real mistake we made was to let it go on too long. Japan and Australia were OK, but by the time we got to Brazil and Argentina, old tensions were starting to surface (and not in a creatively fulfilling way). Blow had entered the scene, and the whole mood turned dark and ugly. At the final show in Chile, we were every bit as fucking sick of each other as we had been when the band first split up.