It's So Easy: And Other Lies (7 page)

“I’m here to offer you a welcome call,” Sickie continued. And I was thinking,
How do I get out of this?

Chuck Biscuits, the drummer from D.O.A., Black Flag, and the Circle Jerks (and later Danzig and Social Distortion) called me, too. He’d been my favorite drummer since I was a kid. He and the guitar player from M.I.A. had me come down to Long Beach so the three of us could play together.

Fuck, I’m playing with Chuck Biscuits!

But I soon learned that what they were doing wasn’t anything special. I wasn’t going to join a band with Chuck Biscuits just to play with Chuck Biscuits, even though I idolized him. Just as I wasn’t going to be in a band with Slash and Steven just to do it—it was all too comfortable.

CHAPTER SIX

Early in high school, I embraced the exciting new punk-rock scene that had recently hit Seattle. Together with my friend Andy, I started going to shows and slam-dancing among the other scruffy kids in basements, garages, and nearly derelict downtown buildings. Andy and I practiced our instruments, listened to albums that got passed around the scene, and tried to put together bands. In the daylight hours, I would take the bus anywhere and everywhere that I had to be for band practices or various jobs I held. But the buses stopped running at midnight—and it being Seattle and all, it was always raining and usually cold. There had to be a better way to get home than trudging along on foot for miles.

Andy and I had heard of a simple and easy way to trip the ignition on pre-1964 VW Bugs. It was typical of the stuff middle-school boys talked about and dreamed about. One night Andy and I decided to put that knowledge to the test. It was 2 a.m., and we were stuck without a ride home at a punk-rock party deep in the Ballard section of town. It was raining. Andy and I got only about ten blocks into our seven-mile walk when we came across a 1963 Bug.

Hmm, what do you say we, um,
borrow
this Bug and drive ourselves the rest of the way home?

It all seemed innocent enough at first. We clumsily broke in a window with one of our boots. The hot-wiring trick worked. But once we got the car started, we realized that neither one of us knew how to drive a car, let alone one with a clutch. We found out that first gear can indeed get you from point A to point B, seven miles away, albeit slowly.

Andy and I had a dangerous new piece of information: we no longer had to wait until we were sixteen years old to have access to a car. We began to hone our tactics and skills as car thieves—even studying ways to hot-wire exotic cars like Peugeots and Audis. As time went on, we held on to certain cars for a week or more, parking them in rich neighborhoods where the police would be less likely to look for a stolen vehicle. On top of this, things we found inside these cars would on occasion lead us into further criminal activities. One time we found a large set of keys that had an address attached to them, written on a piece of tape. The address turned out to be a large coin-op laundromat, and the keys were to the lockboxes of each machine. By that point our exploits began to garner attention from older, savvier criminals.

I knew my mom would be disappointed to learn about all of this, and I didn’t want to let her down. In fact, if anything, I wanted to take up the slack in the house and make things easier for her. But I was trying to figure out manhood—and I had a lot of anger.

Still, when the newspaper began to run stories about things we were involved in, I began to see a dire fate for myself—jail or worse. It was time to get out. Besides, my music career was beginning to get more serious.

There was an older kid in my neighborhood who was way ahead of the rest of us when it came to punk rock. His name was Chris Crass and he already had a Mohawk and skinny jeans. In 1978, no one in Seattle had seen fashion or attitude like that yet. One day Chris came up to me at school and told me that he had heard I could play bass. I nodded in the affirmative, totally tongue-tied and nervous.

“I’m starting a band called the Thankless Dogs, and I need a bass player and a drummer,” he said.

The person I spent by far the most time playing music with was Andy. He played drums.

“I know a drummer!” I blurted.

Chris wrote down an address and told me to show up for a trial rehearsal the next day.

I quickly called Andy. We were both really excited and nervous. A band! A real band! The rehearsal spot was in the industrial outskirts south of downtown, near the current site of Safeco Field.

I’ll plead ignorance on the details of how Andy and I got our gear down there for that first rehearsal. We were only fourteen and a momentous opportunity like this didn’t present itself every day; a car may have been borrowed.

When we got there, an older dude with a leather jacket and droopy eyelids answered the door. Up to then I had never met anyone who was actually high on heroin, but I was certain that I just had then and there. His name was Stan and he seemed pretty affable—and also a little amused to see two stubble-free teens coming to audition to be the rhythm section.

What Chris hadn’t told me—or I was too nervous to hear the day before—was that the other guitar player and main singer was Seattle punk legend Mike Refuzor. I had seen Refuzor flyers up around town and instantly recognized him when he said hello as we walked into the room. To me, this was like meeting someone from Led Zeppelin. The loft space where we rehearsed was also where Mike and a few other people lived. I got a crash-course on how to act cool in a situation that was completely beyond the scope of my experience.

Andy and I got the gig, and as the weeks progressed the thing that struck me most about Mike Refuzor was his ability to write great songs with real choruses. He made songwriting seem effortless.

All of the guys in the band were in their early twenties, and from where I stood they were not only much older and wiser but also seemed to have lived hard and interesting lives. Mike turned out to be a great mentor; he took an interest in what I thought and would brag to his friends about me and Andy. The key thing for me was that nobody in that circle was critical of me. It became a comfortable place to hang out and make mistakes in front of other people.

Back at my mom’s house at night, I was busy writing my first song. I was nervous and had nothing at all to gauge my little opus against. No, I would have to play it in front of my newfound friends to see if this song was any good or not. The nurturing atmosphere of that first band made me feel safe sharing my first ever attempt at songwriting, a song called “The Fake.” And it was well received! In fact it ended up being released as a single—though by then we had changed the name of the band to the Vains.

The punk scene in Seattle was all about creating something out of nothing. There was only one bar that booked punk bands, the Gorilla Room. Aside from that, bands had no choice but to do it themselves. Bands rented VFW halls and Oddfellows lodges or played in the basements of communal houses. The houses weren’t squats, they were just places a bunch of punks would rent together. They all had names: Boot Boy House, Fag House, Cleveland. You could go hang out at the houses anytime you wanted.

People didn’t take themselves too seriously in the scene, either. There was a weird sense of humor. And being musically different was rewarded. It didn’t matter whether a band’s playing was any good; if they were striving to do something original, people would go check them out. It made for interesting and sometimes cool music. A band couldn’t just look good and expect people to go to their show.

In the summer of 1979, I played my first real concert, with the Vains. Because we were all underage, together with two other bands we rented a community center attached to a public park. The week before the show Andy and I stole about twenty plastic milk crates from the back of a grocery store and somehow nailed plywood onto them. Now we had a stage for the gig. That alone was pretty damn exciting for a fifteen-year-old kid.
Our own stage.
Man, now we could play
anywhere
!

I’ll never forget the buildup to the gig. I borrowed a pair of pointy black Beatle boots for that very first gig, and wore yellow corduroy pants that someone tapered in for me and a black-and-white, button-front bowling shirt that I’d found at the Salvation Army—this was well before there were “vintage” clothing stores.

There were only 80 or 100 people at the show, but the feeling that I was entering a place that I was destined for was overwhelming. When we finally went on stage—standing on our plywood-covered milk crates—I was
very
aware of everyone staring at me and Chris Crass and Andy … then everything stopped … and then sped up … and stopped again. I was trying to get a handle on what was going on, and that too, just stopped. Everything became a blur … a whirl of emotion and confusion and triumph. I don’t remember why, but I kicked a guy in the head in the front row. The blur of it all started to feel like warm water washing over me. The noise was all-enveloping and comfortable. I could forget about the fact that I had cystic acne on my face and that I was a confused and unfocused teen. I could forget about my awkward childhood and fractured relationship with my dad and all the rest.

Afterward, I didn’t remember playing a gig so much as experiencing a feeling. A moment of perfection. Suddenly all I wanted to do was play music. Day and night. But not everyone wanted to rehearse, or at least not as much as I did, so I tried to stay in multiple bands so I always had people to play with. I started practicing multiple instruments, too, so I could fill any position a band had open.

Guitar, drums, bass, whatever, I’ll join!

I remember meeting Kim Warnick of the Fastbacks one afternoon in 1979 when I was fifteen. She was about five years older than I was, but she knew a friend of mine and gave the two of us a lift home from school one day.

When she dropped us off we all played some music together. I played bass. She mentioned that her band needed a drummer—their drummer, Kurt Bloch, was a much better guitar player than drummer.

“I play drums, too,” I said.

So Kurt switched to his guitar and I joined on drums. From that point on, I was in and out of bands nonstop.

CHAPTER SEVEN

For those first few years in Los Angeles I lived beneath the poverty level. I always maintained a working phone line; I had a car, but no car insurance; of course I didn’t have health insurance.

When you are making minimum wage, a lot of things can be hard to fit into the budget. My body was forced to realize that it would get only one meal a day. At least while I was working at the Black Angus, that meal was a good one—the daily staff meal.

We couldn’t just grab anything we wanted. The owners usually allotted each of us a piece of chicken plus some rice and vegetables. As one of the prep chefs, I did have free rein to prepare the allotted ingredients as I wished. A bunch of my coworkers were from Mexico and Central America, and they taught me how to spice up the simple meal. Under their tutelage, I developed a go-to dish. Sometimes we would eat it every day for weeks on end.

PREP CHEF POLLO

—Skin and rinse chicken breasts, and arrange on broiling pan.

—Depending on thickness of the breasts, grill for approximately five minutes per side under the broiler. During final thirty seconds of broiling on each side, brush on a thick layer of teriyaki sauce.

—In a mixing bowl, toss together diced avocado, julienned jalapeño peppers, and cubed pineapple.

—Cook wild rice together with an ample amount of bread crumbs. This thickens up the rice and adds more gusto and calories to the meal.

—Place chicken breasts on rice and spoon spicy fruit salsa liberally over the top.

To this day, I love to make that dish for family and friends—though now I usually grill the chicken on the barbecue.