A lot of people in bands find it difficult to adjust when they get back from a long tour like the one we did in the summer of 2008. And on top of the usual dislocation, there was a nasty financial surprise waiting for us. We were supposedly going to earn a lot of money from that three-month stint – I’d been renting a place by Hyde Park in Knightsbridge and living high on the hog all summer in that expectation. Unfortunately, it turned out the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was actually full of shit.
Between the first of those shows and the last, the world’s leading economies went tits up, so what we thought we were going to come away with was very different to what we actually did. The bankers had fucked it all up for us; it turned out the only notes that mattered really were the ones that came in wads. Talk about the suits’ revenge! Luckily for me, I had a job to come home to.
OK, playing records on the radio for a couple of hours each day might not be everyone’s idea of hard graft, but it’s the closest I’ve ever come to a regular nine-to-five. At that point, anything I’d have been doing that didn’t involve Rotten would have been a joy. Faced with the choice of heading back out on the road with the Pistols or going to be hanged at Tyburn with a crowd throwing cabbages at me, I’d have gone for the cabbages every time. So the fact that I was able to do something I really enjoyed and somehow make a success of it was just a bonus.
It was one of those weird flukes, how Jonesy’s Jukebox came together. Because the station it started on – Indie 103.1FM – had only just gone on the air and they were trying to get something a bit different going, we were given an unusual amount of freedom. They’d started broadcasting at Christmas 2003, and I’d tuned in as a punter in the car and loved the fact that they played things like Buzzcocks and even the Sex Pistols, who you’d never hear on the radio at that time (or now, really, outside of my show), because for some reason we don’t qualify as classic rock. After that it was only a couple of weeks later that I got a call asking if I fancied doing a show for them. There’d not been any contact between us in the meantime, so I guess the whole thing was just meant to be.
At first, it was a total joke. I had no idea what to say and no clue what I was meant to be doing. I guess there was a certain charm in a man trying to keep afloat in a leaky bucket on the super-slick LA airwaves. I think part of the attraction to people was hearing this buffoon on the radio who was farting and burping and leaving long interludes of silence while playing whatever music he wanted. It took me a little while to get into my stride and work out how I wanted to present the whole thing, but right from the off there was a lot of goodwill coming my way.
I met David Bowie for the first time at an LA gig he did the night before my first show and told him I was going to be playing a lot of his records on the radio. He replied, ‘Good, cos nobody else fucking does,’ or words to that effect. So it obviously wasn’t just me who felt the parameters of Southern California radio were way too narrow. Even though the station had a small signal, people who cared about music really loved it, and it didn’t take me long to adapt to talking live on the air. I guess getting up to speak at 12-Step meetings had given me some good training in making full confessions in public, and in how to create the kind of atmosphere that brings out the best in people.
I never wanted to be one of those DJs who deliberately set out to make their guests uncomfortable. I might say shocking things sometimes, but I’m the opposite of a shock-jock. You get much more out of people if they’re relaxed. Because they know you’re not just out to make them look stupid, they’re much more likely to let their guard down and say something interesting instead of just going into their usual promotional routine. Also, from a personal point of view, it’s nice for me to be able to give something back – to the bands I’ve stolen stuff off, as well as the listeners.
No one else is playing ‘Virginia Plain’ on daytime radio in LA these days, that’s for sure. Maybe I’ve almost played it enough to pay Roxy Music back for that guitar tuner I nicked off them. There’ve been so many times when music has randomly reached out to me and made my life better – from hearing the Jimi Hendrix out of that Shepherd’s Bush window onwards – that I love the idea of doing that for other people. And the fact that I get to meet and jam with a lot of my heroes is just the frosting on the cake.
Once I started to build a reputation for doing something a bit special, I got all sorts of top people coming in. Burt Bacharach was really good, and Sly Stone totally out of his mind – which certainly added an extra dimension to us jamming together. Robert Plant was great as well. I got to jam with him, too, and he turned me on to someone I was never hip to before who he said was one of his favourites. It was a Fifties guy called Ral Donner who sounded a bit like Elvis, and I really like his stuff now. If you listen again to a few of the old Zeppelin tunes straight after Ral, you can hear that Planty’s nicked some of his licks.
Inevitably, there was the odd bad apple in the barrel. Brian Wilson was a complete cunt. Just because he’s supposedly a bit nuts, that’s no fucking excuse not to be a nice person. Jerry Lee Lewis didn’t go too well either. Obviously he’s known as a tricky customer but I’ve got total respect for his music – I love all his early shit. Unfortunately I made the mistake of opening up a can of worms by asking what it was like when he came to England (with that thirteen-year-old cousin he was married to). He turned on me a bit, but luckily he wasn’t armed.
Although one of the selling points of the show is that I’ll always say what’s on my mind, I’m not a total idiot when it comes to things I should and shouldn’t be saying. One of the only times I ever got a smack on the wrist was for harping on about that Xenu mob – the Scientologists – and saying their God who lives on another planet was a big herpe. I got called into the office for that and told, ‘Look, knock it on the head. There’s a lot of people in Hollywood who are into that and we don’t want to lose sponsors.’ So that was a no-no. Still, I did feel quite vindicated recently when I watched that documentary about them, Going Clear. That was hilarious.
What I was most proud of with Jonesy’s Jukebox was that it was my own thing – it stood or fell by my contribution, so I could really enjoy its success because I felt I’d earned it. That was very important for me and gave me a lot of self-esteem. Rotten even came on once and was positive and polite and respected the fact that it was my show, not his. That was a bit of a landmark for me, even though it was stressful having him in there.
The DJ-ing thing was another example of the 12-Step programme steering me down a good path. It made me more confident that if I just go with my instincts, creative shit happens, and I don’t need to be second-guessing myself and putting myself down so much. That’s the biggest thing I’ve learnt in sobriety: to let situations unfold. Worrying about every little detail always backfired on me, where being more relaxed helped me be more professional so I could really enjoy not letting people down. Five days a week for five years is the longest time I’ve ever done one thing, and I would probably have stuck at it for a lot longer if the station hadn’t folded.
That was a sad day, early in 2009, about four months after we got back from the tour. I felt bad afterwards because I knew the game was up, but no one had told Lemmy, who was scheduled to be my guest that day, so he turned up at the studio with his Jack and Coke in hand to find there was no station for him to appear on. It would be even sadder seeing Lem for the last time at his 70th birthday party, just before he died in late 2015. We’d had some good chit-chats over the forty years I’d known him, but it was almost like he wasn’t there any more by the end. All these people had turned up for the celebration, but he didn’t really know who anyone was.
The Grim Reaper’s been doing overtime over the past few years. When Malcolm McLaren died in 2010, that was a big one for me. They had a memorial service for him and I sent a letter to his son Joe who I used to share the bedroom with saying, ‘Where’s the money? I wanna look in the coffin cos that’s where the dough probably is.’ It got a big chuckle from all the punters when he read it out apparently, but I wasn’t making light of anything. I think Malcolm would’ve liked it, cos he always preferred the myth to the reality anyway, and I went on to say what a great impact he’d had on my life.
The one thing all humans have in common is that no one really knows what happens when you die. Everyone has their theory, but whatever you might think, you don’t fucking know – all that bullshit about being on the slab and walking towards the light, that’s just a chemical thing going off in your head. As a result, the ‘higher power’ part of the 12-Step programme is something a lot of people have a problem with. I know I did, at least until I realised that it doesn’t have to mean believing in a Father-Christmas-looking bloke up in a cloud, it’s just about realising that whatever God is, it ain’t you. If you don’t get the message that your selfish will is not the centre of the universe, you’re never gonna get anything sorted out.
That said, one of the lamest sayings they trot out at meetings is ‘God didn’t bring you this far to drop you down’. Tell that to the geezer who just got AIDS and died of cancer! When I ask myself why I’m still here when I probably shouldn’t be while a lot of people who didn’t deserve to die are long gone, the best answer I can come up with is to understand that the whole thing is beyond my comprehension. Or, to put it a bit more simply, ‘Shit happens, people.’ I’m sure those poor fuckers who were on the plane that got flown into the World Trade Center hadn’t done anything wrong. I personally can’t imagine some bearded geezer upstairs picking who goes and who doesn’t – ‘He’s all right … No, fuck him, he’s a cunt’ – but if you can, then knock yourself out.
Now I’m back on the radio five days a week again, it seems to be RIP someone or other more or less every day. I don’t mind all the fuss when it’s Lemmy or David Bowie. What I don’t like is when someone dies who’s been on a long down-slope, and then everyone gets on the pity pot and sentimentalises their addiction. Like my old mate Scott Weiland from Stone Temple Pilots, who I used to play ‘Bodies’ with. I went to a couple of meetings with him but he just didn’t grasp it and was never going to. That’s the reality. The big thing for me was that no one gave a shit about him the day before, but then as soon as he died, every radio station in LA was milking the fuck out of him.
I guess in a way that’s the beauty of life: you don’t know what’s coming, and just when you think you’ve got it sussed out, something happens to turn everything upside down. When I first moved to LA and no one gave a shit about punk, I didn’t know that Axl and Kurt Cobain loving the Sex Pistols and us getting back together was going to make it all such a big deal again in ten years’ time. I’d have been even more surprised to know it was going to be bigger still another twenty years on. These days every kid seems to have the T-shirt with the picture of Sid – it’s not even a fad any more, it’s become part of the culture. It feels like punk won’t go away now, but there’s no way of knowing.
At the time of writing, the whole Pistols thing is a bit of a mess. We should be running a tight machine and figuring out ways to make dough, but that’s not really what’s happening. We keep getting offered shows, but I’m not sure if the dosh is ever gonna be quite enough to get us back together. People say, ‘Well, The Rolling Stones are still doing it …’ but I don’t think they would be, on our money. Also, their business doesn’t have to be run in such a way as to keep two imaginary cunts in some East London council estate happy. I get that it’s good to be the real deal when you’re twenty, but when you get older, things change. The two imaginary cunts have probably sold their council flat and fucked off to Essex by now, anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should be doing mortgage adverts. You’ve got to keep the dream alive to a certain extent. That was one of Johnny’s better moments, when we got put in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2006 and he sent them a letter at the last minute refusing to appear and calling the whole ceremony ‘urine in wine’. Left to our own devices, the rest of us would probably have done the show, but in the long run what he did was best for the Pistols as an idea. Even though Anita would’ve liked more than 24 hours’ notice.
That’s the tricky part with John. If he was a total dick all the time, you could write him off, but every now and again he does something you have to commend him for just to keep us on our toes. The shame of it is that he doesn’t need to be so insecure. No one questions John’s contribution to the band. Everyone knows he was one of the greatest lead singers of all time, who put what we were about into words, an attitude and a vocal style. But still, he’s not the one who has to turn up at the opening of the new Hard Rock casino in Vegas to see one of his quotes put into someone else’s mouth. (They’d written, ‘The only notes that matter are the ones that come in wads,’ on the wall, which everyone knows was one of mine, and ascribed it to ‘Johnny Rotten’.)
It’s all so irrelevant anyway when you think about the endless fucking size of the universe. Here we are, these tiny little ants, self-importantly talking about why Wally got the sack from Swankers, but when the ants come into my house I get the spray out and murder about 20,000 of them. I’m like the Himmler of ants. In their world they’re probably arguing about who’s not done their ant chores, then I come along and press a button and they’re gone. This is just the kind of inspirational stuff you want to be reading in a last chapter, isn’t it? I don’t believe in sugar-coating things.
Even now I’ve been sober twenty-five years, I still wake up kind of miserable a lot of the time, but I don’t think you’re ever going to think, ‘Everything’s gonna be great from now on, because I’ve discovered the true meaning of me.’ I’m just happy not to be loaded. To that end, I do a lot of talks and sponsor a couple of other people as well, which I get a lot out of. Plus I still go to four or five meetings a week. I get there early and I thank the speaker afterwards. Gary Holton would be proud of me.
I’ve done a fair bit of making amends in recent years – you have to do the 12 steps in order and that’s the ninth. The person you’ve done wrong might not accept your apology, but if they want to just tell you to fuck off, obviously that’s their choice; it’s all about cleaning your side of the road.
My big thing was: ‘Oh fuck – am I gonna have to pay people back for all the stuff I nicked? Cos if so, I’m gonna be paying these cunts off for the rest of my life.’ Luckily, no one’s asked for the money yet. The guy from 10cc was a good example of how people normally respond. I got his number and rang him up to tell him, ‘Look, I’m sorry, but I nicked one of your guitars – what can I do to make it right?’ He just said, ‘Do you know what? Don’t worry about it. I appreciate the apology.’ And when I went to kip that night, I put my head down feeling a little bit more like a decent fucking person who’d cleaned up a bit of the wreckage of my past. Obviously things might be a bit more acrimonious with Ariel Bender, but fingers crossed, eh? Maybe I should have him on the show …
I do a bit of meditation too, these days, to help me focus. Russell Brand got me into Transcendental Meditation when I was the one-man orchestra on his TV show for a while. You’re meant to do it for twenty minutes on your own, morning and evening, but I can’t always manage that. I go to group meditation on Wednesday and Sunday nights, which I find a lot better, cos when there are a bunch of people I seem to get more energy from the group so I can get a bit deeper into the whole thing.
I like TM cos it’s one of the simplest forms of meditation. I’m not so good with counting beads and all that. With TM you just kind of sit there and let it happen; say your mantra every now and then; it’s not hard. You do come out feeling a lot calmer. Of course I might go to the David Lynch Institute to meditate and then some cunt would cut me up on the road on the drive home and I’d just start screaming at him – the geezer in Blue Velvet with the mask on his face will still come out. I’m not walking around on a fucking cloud like people think, but I guess that’s the same for everyone. Don’t knock over the maharishi’s pint or he’ll have you.
The main benefit of TM for me is that it makes me bit more aware of shit that’s going on; I can be a bit oblivious, left to my own devices. As I get older it’s important for me to try to be nicer to other people. Not being a cunt – that’s where my head’s at. I still have selfish, consuming Steve within me, but as I’ve got older I seem to have become a bit more considerate of others – my fellow fucking humans, if you wanna dignify them with that title. I’m not sure if that counts as taking a more spiritual path, but it’s as close as I’m gonna get to one.
My addictive impulses still show up out of the blue in unexpected ways, like the time a few years back when I had to have back surgery from doing too much spinning. It’s a workout they do in LA. Not something you would necessarily want people to know you’d got hooked on, but I don’t give a fuck. It’s too late now to be hiding anything. Basically, spinning is aerobics on a bike. How it works is you have a bunch of people on stationary bikes, pedalling really fast (not the kind of pedalling I’m usually talking about) and looking at an instructor who tells them what to do. She says get out of the seat and you stand up on the pedals, get down and you go back down. There’s usually loud music as well – not the kind I would normally listen to, either.
Anyway, I got so obsessive about this whole process that I did it six days a week for a fucking year. I even reached the point where I was the guy on the podium and everyone was looking to me for a lead. Look, Ma, top of the world.
I should say that I don’t blame people for laughing when they hear about this. I do see that it’s funny, and what made it even funnier was that obviously I never used to do stretches or warm-ups in any way at all. Until one day I suddenly realised, ‘Oh shit, I’ve fucked my back up.’ From then on, I went through hell for two years. I wanted to avoid surgery, so I went to every charlatan in town, which in LA is quite a lot of charlatans. Every cunt that was gonna fix it got my dollars, and it was just a waste of time. What I was suffering from was basically sciatica: every time you make the transition from sitting down to standing up, you reach a point you feel like you’re getting stabbed.
The pain was so bad I ended up just staying at home. I wanted to avoid taking painkillers on sobriety grounds, so I tried everything else instead: steroids, acupuncture, chiropractors, osteopaths, that energy thing – I did it all. Unfortunately, the problem was too serious to be fixed by hocus-pocus, so I ended up having to get epidurals all the time. My face was horribly bloated from all the steroids they put in me and finally I had this thing called nucleoplasty: an incision with heat at the end which they use to burn off the edge of your vertebrae. Ideally there’s no scar, but unfortunately my recovery from the operation went all wrong, so every time I walked anywhere it was like I was getting electric shocks in my nuts. This went on – up to a level where I was randomly keeling over in the street – for a couple more months before it finally cleared up. If I’d known what was going to happen I would never have got involved with the spinning in a million years, but you live and learn. Everyone has some kind of shit that happens to them.
My mum and I had never been close, but that last London trip was more or less the final straw as far as the pair of us were concerned. When she found out I was going to visit my real dad it was a bit of a thorn in her side, but we just about got over that. Then she came on one of the recordings of my radio show I was doing in London and it was funny as fuck – she was a bit like Alvin Stardust when he came on, in that she didn’t quite get the concept that it was going out live in LA while we were doing it. It was such a success that we were going to do it again on my birthday, the day after the Hammersmith show, but she didn’t show up. She just went missing – she wasn’t answering any calls, it was like she’d disappeared.
When I finally got in touch a day later she said she’d forgotten, but that wouldn’t really wash, because we’d sent a car and everything. After grilling her a bit it turned out that she’d got the hump because she hadn’t been invited to the gig. I hadn’t deliberately not invited her, it just never occurred to me that it was something she’d want to do. I thought it’d be way too crazy for someone of her age. Anyway, things got a bit heated on the phone, and we haven’t really spoken since. I realise this is the kind of misunderstanding that could probably be cleared up pretty quickly in a normal mother/son relationship, but I guess you reap what you sow.
I’ve almost given up on the idea of ever being involved in a normal relationship with a woman. I’ll get to a stage when I start really liking someone, and then I can’t have sex with them any more. That’s pretty much the size of it, and it’s a hurdle I can’t get over. I’ve been to Sex Anonymous and I’ve done a lot of therapy, but I’ve stopped now. I’m not putting those experiences down: they have helped, but once you realise that it’s all the same drive – drugs, booze, fags, sex, pies; water will always find its own level – there’s just nowhere else to go. I made a conscious decision to stop doing things that are gonna make me feel ashamed, and I feel a lot better for it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a monk. I still act out in various ways with birds who stroll into meetings. I’m sure they all gossip about me, ‘Here he comes, who’s he gonna latch onto now?’ But I kind of own it, because that’s who I am – a semi-retired sexual deviant who doesn’t really act out so much any more, but still gets those urges from time to time. I’ve done more pervy things in sobriety than I ever did when I was drinking and using. You don’t have the energy then.
In general I’m OK being single and getting a few birds over now and again, but there’s a cold, lonely side to it, too. I can just about manage to look after a dog these days. I had a great boxer called Winston for about six years. It was funny how I got him. A bird I knew had him first. I used to go over and see her at weekends and I really bonded with Winston. Then she found some other guy who had a Rottweiler. The Rottweiler and the boxer didn’t get along, so she gave me the dog. The idea of taking it on freaked me out at first: ‘I’m gonna have this dog now, this is gonna be my dog all the time’ felt like a lot of responsibility, but I actually handled it all right, and it went really well till he got a brain tumour and died when he was about ten. They seem pretty rife in that breed, the old tumours.
I was sad when Winston died, but the whole experience was definitely a step forward from the two bulldogs I got for a while when I was newly sober. I didn’t know what I was doing at the time so I shouldn’t really have got them, but I guess I was trying to give myself something else to focus on. They were brothers and my thinking was: ‘I’ll get two and they can keep each other company.’ But it was a fucking nightmare – they drove me insane because they were untrainable. I stuck it out for nine months, maybe a year, till I took them over to this bird’s house. She had a little poodle and they chewed it to bits. That was when I knew I couldn’t handle them, so I just took ’em back to the breeders.
You never know till you try, though, do you? I’ve got to give new things a go every now and again, because the most important thing for me is not to get too comfortable and complacent. Left to my own devices I’d probably just stay at home by myself, watching TV, eating cream pies and jerking off – living the dream! I’ve got an app called WaterMinder on my phone which reminds me to get up and have a drink of water every now and again, so I’m not going to die of thirst. But being in that solitary place is not good for me, and if I do it for too long I’ll most likely end up going the whole hog and relapsing.
That’s how the Instagrams started, when I was doing nothing and realised I need an outlet for some kind of creativity. I’d done a bit of acting on the TV show Californication and really enjoyed it. That came from a phone call from the man who created it, Tom Kapinos, and I was on it for two seasons. Acting is fun, and I love the ins and outs of the whole business. I learnt a lot but of course knowing I ain’t a pro they’d written a tour manager character who was basically me. They weren’t going to have me playing a priest. I actually asked Tom, ‘Have you ever had a scene where someone’s getting his arsehole licked – the ol’ tossing of the salad?’ He said no, so I got them to write that into it, and it was pretty funny. In a way, I wish I did more of that kind of work, and I probably could if I wasn’t so fucking lazy.
What I love about the Instagrams is I can do them all myself, so if anyone’s going to mess up, it’s going to be me. I’ve got all the stuff at home – I bought myself a light rig and I just set the iPhone camera rolling on a carbon fibre stand and then choose the best sixty seconds. Then I use an app for putting the music on, which is kind of like doing overdubs in the studio. I’ve got a pretty good collection of hats and wigs, and sometimes I’ll put on one of the devil masks which this gay guy who works in a leather shop makes for me. But if I need a special costume – like the blue make-up for the Dave Bobbins video – I’ll get someone in to help me. It’s fun and it makes people laugh; and besides, this is the fucking information age, and if you ain’t all over Twitter or Instagram you’re going to get left in the dust.
It’s hard to find the time to do Instagrams at the moment, because since I’ve been doing this book and then KLOS bought Jonesy’s Jukebox back, I’ve actually been pretty busy, which I feel better for. When the show was first on Indie 103.1 I could literally play whatever I wanted – reggae, Norman Wisdom, anything. But now I’m on KLOS, a much bigger station with maybe two to three million listeners, we have to keep it in the vague ballpark of rock. I thought that was gonna be a real fucking challenge for five days a week, but it’s working out OK for now. Luckily they give me plenty of leeway to sneak in a bit of Strawbs or Atomic Rooster here and there; I’ve got to change it a up a bit, otherwise what’s the point of having me on there?
It’s essentially the same show as it was when it started out: just my low, dulcet tones with some rock ’n’ roll. So on an average day at the moment I’ll maybe get up early to catch a Chelsea game on TV, or go for a hike in the canyons with Billy Duffy and Slim Jim Phantom, the drummer from the Stray Cats, and his dog the Great Bandini. Then I’ll run downtown on my motorbike to pick up some Jonesy’s Jukebox sample T-shirts, before doing the show at twelve bells. After that I might go and get some new headshots done. Oh yes, it’s all go here. This is Hollywood, baby.