Running With Monsters: A Memoir (15 page)

In October of that year, Paul Tollett launched the first Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. It was an ambitious project. It was a two-day event that featured five stages, all of it set up under the blazing desert sun. In that part of the world, not far where I had lived as a kid, the brutal summer lingers on well into November. Goldenvoice brought together a lot of acts. The headliners were Beck—who not many years before had been booed off the stage at the Viper Room—Rage Against the Machine, Morrissey, and Tool. The Bicycle Thief, Goldenvoice artists, were on the undercard along with the Chemical Brothers, Jurassic 5, Perry Farrell, Gil Scott-Heron, Ben Harper, Kool Keith, and a whole bunch of other bands, DJs, and hip-hoppers. The performers all carried some serious musical credibility … and, unfortunately, didn’t draw a huge crowd. At least not as large as we all would have expected. And although Goldenvoice had experience promoting shows, this was bigger and crazier than anything else they had done. It was great, but it was disorganized.

There were some electrifying performances that day. Beck, who had ditched his neo-folkie thing from his club days and left his leaf blower at home, presented himself as a born-again soulster who, despite looking like the whitest white boy in the whole white-boy world, managed to kick out some downright funky sounds with his band. Morrissey showed that he had some real connections to Southern California’s Hispanic community when hundreds of young Latino kids—most of them boys—crowded the stage for his set. Dressed in the typical Morrissey drag of stiff and cuffed Levi’s and white T-shirts, the kids also sported Morrissey’s short-back-and-sides pompadour haircut and mimicked their hero’s odd, arm-swinging dance moves. Perry Farrell led some kind of crazy conga line. Tool, of course, was heavy, and Rage Against the Machine pummeled the audience with its style of firebrand political rock. Josh and I turned in a good set, although Josh’s shoe-gazing stage presence still struck me as goofy. “Dude, you need to connect with the audience,” I’d tell him.

“But this is how I play,” he’d say.

I never even knew how tall the kid was because he’d curl into himself, head down and permanently hunched over his guitar.

“They have these stools for us to sit on,” I’d say at a gig.

“That’s cool, man. I’ll just sit on the stage floor,” he’d say with a shrug.

It was maddening to me. In a festival setting like Coachella, you need to command an audience’s attention. And you’re not going to do that if you refuse to even look at the crowd. The stage is not the same as your bedroom.

Coachella was a huge undertaking and it was disorganized. It had very little of the military precision that the festival features now. There were some problems with money. A lot of the bands agreed to be owed their performance fees. We were all friends, so it seemed uncool to blow that over money. But not everyone on the ticket took that attitude. Rage Against the Machine, which had fostered its image as a group of radical, fight-the-power communists, was adamant that they be paid. The money troubles led to the dissolution of the Goldenvoice label.

I was a free agent once again. The record had done well, though. It had gotten a lot of critical praise and sold steadily, but I needed distribution. Danny Goldberg of Artemis Records, a man who had managed Kurt Cobain, had listened to the record and he loved what he heard. I was at home when the call came. I let the answering machine take it. “Bob? This is Irene from Danny Goldberg’s office. Could you please get back to us?”

I listened to the message. The whole idea of the music business still seemed distasteful to me. The guys at Goldenvoice were friends, so it was low-key and I trusted them. Goldberg was a different sort of creature. He continued to call. Eventually, my resistance weakened and we finally talked. I was curious.

“Bob, you’ve been hard to reach.”

“I’m scared,” I told him truthfully.

“Look,” he said, “why don’t we sit down and talk? I really think we can do something with your record. I listened to it and I loved it.”

He “loved” it? Well, if there’s one way to get through to me, it’s via praise and flattery. I’m no different in that regard than most people. I thought to myself,
Well, what can it hurt to just meet with the guy to see what he has to say?

“Okay,” I said. “I can manage that.”

“Good, good,” he crooned through the phone. “Why don’t we meet at the Four Seasons hotel over on Doheny?”

“Sounds great.”

“Tuesday at eight o’clock?” he asked.

“I’ll see you then,” I said, and put down the phone.

I got ahold of Josh. “Look, man, we have a meeting with Danny Goldberg. All I’m asking is two things. Let me do the talking and please at least make eye contact with the guy and shake his hand. You know, be polite.”

“God, Bob, I know how to behave with people.”

The Four Seasons is the typical entertainment-biz place to eat and meet. Lots of greenery around that sets up a vibe that says although you’re smack in the middle of one of the busiest corridors of the city, you’re miles away from it all. The ground-floor lounge is casual in that kind of way that people with money have: elegant but low-key. Danny was already seated when Josh and I arrived. I introduced them and Josh shook his hand, made eye contact, and then folded into himself like always and stared at his menu while Danny and I talked.

“Bob, the record’s great, and I know we can package it and sell it.” He listed all the advantages Artemis could bring to the party and I sat and listened. It sounded good. I was polite and Danny didn’t have a trace of the hostility or distrust toward me that I had expected. In fact, he was very charming. We ate and talked and by the end of the meal, we had come to a deal. I felt good about it.

On the way home in the car, Josh was quiet. I could sense that something was up with him. “What?” I asked after the third mile had passed without his saying a word.

“You trust that guy?” he asked me.

“Yeah. This is a good deal. Why?”

“I don’t like him,” he said. “He seems slippery.”

“Well, you don’t know much about it, do you? That’s how all these guys are.”

“I still don’t trust him at all, man,” he said, and then went back to silence.

Well, he was a kid. What did I expect? He’d get over it, I thought. Besides, it was my band. But the seed of suspicion had been sown, or maybe it was just Josh growing up and coming into his own as a musician. We started to feud over trivial things, and I have never been good when it comes time to face criticism. These were my songs. I’d written them. I didn’t need outside input. Besides, the record sold steadily. I had obviously done something right, but I had also discovered through Paul Tollett that Danny Goldberg’s first reaction when he had heard I was back making music was “Bob Forrest? Are you fucking kidding me? Fuck that guy! I wouldn’t touch him in a million years. He’s trouble. Worthless.”

What changed his mind? Tollett told me it was all thanks to a Hollywood actress. Rosanna Arquette, another one of that crowd who loved the music scene and musicians—she had a long-term relationship with Toto keyboardist Steve Porcaro and was friends with a lot of music-biz people—knew about what had happened with Goldenvoice through her friendship with Paul and his partners. She liked the record and kept talking it up to Goldberg. She had been relentless, and eventually, Danny gave me a fair shot. Never underestimate the persuasive powers of a pretty woman.

But the constant arguments with Josh started to wear me down. My own words seemed to come back to haunt me.

I’ve made my bed now

I’m gonna lay in it

—“Hurt,” the Bicycle Thief

Another one of my bands had just taken its first step toward a premature end.

A
hard lesson I’ve learned over the years is that I don’t always work well with others. Ask anyone who’s ever worked with me. Especially in the music business. It’s a tough gig and it plays with your mind. It can also do strange things to your ego. From the time I was a kid, I always thought that I was right about everything. Maybe it sprang from being spoiled and indulged as a child. Maybe I was just a born egomaniac. The Bicycle Thief had blown up and was “on hiatus.” I broke up with Max. It was a repeat from the Thelonious Monster days: I was a difficult asshole. During my doper days, I could blame my behavior on an addict’s typical selfishness, but sober, I had to face facts and try to work at humility a little harder. However, in my defense, when I write songs based on my life and my view of the world, I put myself out there on display. If someone doesn’t like it, it’s as if they’ve said they don’t like me. It’s a painful thing when that happens—it stings—and I react poorly. I react way out of proportion. It doesn’t always lead to harmony or long-lasting musical partnerships, but as a songwriter, I’ve never really been anybody’s partner.

So, on the one hand, I didn’t have a band anymore and I was angry and frustrated. On the other hand, I had made a considerable amount of money from the Bicycle Thief and didn’t have the immediate need to get back to work as a dishwasher or a bike messenger, the two jobs that had kept me grounded before my second ride on the music business merry-go-round. So what did I do? I sat in my house and did nothing. I pouted. I watched a lot of television. I ordered take-out food. I stopped attending recovery groups. I shut down communication with my friends and hid from the world to an even greater degree than I had when I took the dishwasher job at Millie’s Cafe. I could see a pattern developing, but I didn’t do anything about it. I just stayed inside like I was Norma Desmond from the movie
Sunset Boulevard
. Anthony Kiedis came by to offer some blunt wisdom.

“I don’t know if I like this new Bob,” he said as he studied me like I was some new species of virus under his high-powered mental microscope.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, and tried to sound outraged even though I pretty much knew where he would go with this.

“You were a much better person when you were just a regular guy,” he said. That stunned me like a slap to the face. “You worked and you helped people. Now …” He looked around at the place I refused to leave.

He was right. I was aimless here and it didn’t serve me at all.

“What should I do?” I asked. I felt helpless. Lost.

“I don’t know, man, but you need to do something. You’re miserable like this. You have no purpose.”

He was right, but I didn’t want to believe him. I stayed home, but Anthony wouldn’t let it go. He kept after me for weeks. “Why don’t you go to MAP?” he said. MAP was the Musicians Assistance Program, a junkie collective where addicts helped other addicts. John Frusciante had gone there and it had helped him to clean up, something I would have thought impossible back in the early nineties, but now, when I’d run into him, he looked at the world through clear eyes. Oh, he was still John, but he wasn’t Junkie John anymore.

“What am I going to do there?” I asked.

“See if they need anybody to help out around there.”

It hit me:
That’s actually a really good idea. Anthony’s a really smart dude sometimes.

It had always made me feel good to help people. And kindness and a supportive hand offered to others are always good things to extend in this world, so I always tried—even when I was practically incapable—to assist where I could, although it could be a cruel and devastating thing when my advice was refused or ignored and something bad happened. Rob Ritter, a gander-necked wraith with a Tennessee waterfall of a rockabilly pompadour, was a great friend of mine who played bass for a time with Thelonious Monster under his stage name Rob Graves. He also was a serious and reckless fellow traveler on the drug path. While I didn’t set the best example in those years, I tried repeatedly to get him to cool the more destructive elements of his habit, but with little success. “Jesus, Bob. You’re not my fucking mother … and you’re probably the last person who should be giving me advice about dope, man,” he’d say with an annoyed look on his face. When he overdosed and died in 1990, it was a terrible blow. But I learned that while I could offer help and point people in the right direction, it didn’t always work. I also knew that some people were receptive to my advice and that I could help them. I just had to figure out a way to do that.

I went to MAP like Anthony suggested … and met one of the most significant people of the second act of my life. Buddy Arnold, the program’s director and founder, was a crusty, cantankerous old guy. He was also a kind and understanding one. MAP was strictly an outpatient thing, and Buddy and I hit it off right away. Like me, he was a musician and a guy who knew everybody. A former jazz sax player, Buddy was a shiny-skulled, smiling hipster who had worked with people like Tommy Dorsey, Buddy Rich, Stan Kenton, Tex Beneke, and Neal Hefti—the man who wrote the memorable theme music for TV’s
Batman
series. He knew everybody from that scene, from Billie Holiday to Stan Getz and every jazz-cat heavyweight in between. Buddy had derailed his own career with a nasty and debilitating narcotics habit and had done prison time as result of his addiction. We were very much alike. Although we were separated by wide gulfs of time, the cultural touchstones of our respective generations, and vastly different musical idioms, we were two sides of the same well-tossed coin. He became a father figure to me. Buddy was great. He didn’t preach to me. In fact, he didn’t really tell me much of anything. Mostly, he provided me little hints and glimpses of what a life without drugs could be. I admired the way he walked through life. He seemed to have few regrets and was completely comfortable with himself. He didn’t worry about being cool. He just kept on keeping on. I wanted what he had and I began to spend a lot of time with him. He recognized something in me too and took me under his wing. I slowly started to learn the ropes of recovery. Buddy was my mentor. He taught me how to run a group. He showed me how the industry works and how to negotiate its twists and turns. He could be tough. I went with him once to Pasadena Recovery Center to look for beds for some clients who needed inpatient care. Rehab places, like anything else in the world, hate a vacuum, and if there are empty beds, they lose money. Buddy was well aware of this, and he had also been around the block enough times to know how to play the game.

“I need some beds,” he said in his gravelly rasp.

The rehab center’s director blinked, gulped, and quoted him a rate.

Buddy exploded. “Are you crazy? That’s too much. There’s no way these folks can afford that.”

“Buddy,” he said, already defeated, “you know how this works.”

“You’re right. I do. You have empty beds and you’re not making a cent off them. I can fill them by tonight.” He wrote down a number on a piece of paper and slid it across the desk.

The director looked at it and took a beat. He sighed. “Buddy—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “Do we have a deal?”

There was no further point in discussion. Argument and resistance were futile. Buddy was a powerful life force. “Yes, Buddy, we have a deal. Bring your clients over.”

As we walked out into the sunshine, Buddy smiled at me. “And that’s how you do it.”

I had to admit, Buddy had style and could get things done. He was comical. He could be narcissistic. He had quirks. If there was a problem, he wasn’t shy about taking it straight to whoever was in charge. I saw this in action one day. Buddy had gotten word that one of his MAP clients, a famous female singer whom Buddy had sent to the Cri-Help program in North Hollywood, had gotten sexually involved with her counselor. This is considered strictly taboo for obvious reasons. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it can be a big deal when it does. Buddy flipped out. I went with him over to Cri-Help. He charged through the doors and made his way up the steps to the administrator’s office. The receptionist went into panic mode.

“Sir! Just where do you think you’re going?”

“I’m going to talk to Jack … your boss!” he rasped, and demanded to see the man who ran the facility.

“You can’t just barge in like that!”

“Watch me,” said Buddy. He had worked himself up into a towering rage. He stormed into Jack’s office, while I stood there confused.

Jack was startled when the door burst open and Buddy stormed in. He tried to calm Buddy down. “Buddy, what’s the problem?”

“I want to talk to that fucking counselor of yours
now
! He’s sleeping with one of my clients!” Buddy was red in the face and ejected a spray of spittle with the force of his words.

Jack said, “Okay, okay. He’s here now, but I think he’s with a client. Let’s go down the hall to his office and we can straighten everything out.”

Buddy was already out the door and stomped down the corridor. He turned to me. “You wait here.” I stood there like an idiot, still not exactly sure what was in play. The counselor’s client was asked to wait outside for a moment. She and I stood there and looked at one another as if to say, “Oh, my God!”

Buddy slammed the door, but the conversation was heated, so we could hear everything. Buddy repeated the same question over and over: “Are you fucking that girl?”

I could hear the answer from where I stood. It was a weak answer. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the counselor.

“Are you fucking that girl?” Buddy asked again. It was like his brain was stuck.

“Uh, I don’t really feel comfortable with this line of questioning,” the hapless counselor said.

Jack, the counselor’s boss, spoke up. “You need to answer the man’s question. If you’re having a sexual relationship with a MAP client, I need to know about it. Buddy and I both need to know about it.”

There was a pause and I heard the counselor answer. “No. We’re not. But we’re … friendly.”

Buddy’s voiced became high pitched and he said, “You stay away from that girl!” Then the door burst open and I followed Buddy back down the hall to the parking lot. “He’s fucking her,” he said with certainty.

Turns out, Buddy was right. Once it became impossible to deny, the counselor was fired from Cri-Help. The local recovery community can be a small one and I eventually heard the whole sad story. After the counselor spent nearly a year trying to save the famous female singer, she relapsed. Because she had plenty of other problems besides addiction, complete chaos entered into the unfortunate counselor’s life. Cops were called several times to break up their messy spats. He couldn’t find counseling work because everybody knew what had happened. He was ostracized within twelve-step circles. A poorly chosen affair had ruined the guy, and he knew it. It was over. He gave up. He capitulated and started using drugs with the famous female singer. They partied hard and he went through all the money he had left to support their habits. He lost everything. And when there wasn’t anything left to take from the poor sap, the famous female singer left him. Eventually, she pulled herself out of her addiction and got sober. The former counselor was left stigmatized here in Southern California. It was a hard, painful lesson for the both of them, but one that could have been avoided if they had only listened to Buddy, even if he did go a little bit nuts when he told the counselor to stop seeing the woman.

But I liked working with a teacher like Buddy. It struck me as very Zen. Through Buddy, I began to learn a trade. He taught me things that students in a chemical dependency school will never learn. Buddy’s tutelage amounted to a Ph.D. in the business of recovery, but I didn’t really know anything about the clinical side of things. It was all arcane stuff I learned from Buddy. He taught me the importance of building a team. A lot of rehab centers overlook this and it’s crucial to any program’s success. The standard approach to treatment for many places is monochrome. It operates from the top down. There’s an owner/operator who sets up a little corporation and everybody who works there is a reflection of what the owner wants them to be. They’re not allowed to be themselves. The owner is usually not involved in the day-to-day aspects of the place. Profit is often more important than a patient’s recovery. Buddy had a different view. “Bob,” he said, “we can’t all be the same.” Buddy believed that a successful program involved a staff of individuals, each with a distinct role to play. There needs to be an authority figure patients can put their trust in. There needs to be a motivational figure to prod addicts to take difficult steps when they don’t want to. And there needs to be a lovable fool whom substance abusers can relate to and confide in. It’s how the dynamic of a team should work, and that’s what Buddy taught me. I could never have learned that in a classroom. With Buddy’s guidance, I eventually worked my way up to the position of clinical director at MAP.

I knew I had chosen the right career path for myself. It was a career that had longevity. There are always going to be addicts and they’re always going to need help. But I wasn’t going to do it at MAP. Buddy was old and he was sick. I had seen myself as positioned to succeed him at MAP, but it became increasingly clear that wasn’t going to happen. As I was told one day by one of the organization’s directors, “Bob, you really don’t know shit about chemical dependency. You know about treatment, but you don’t know about addiction. You just know what Buddy told you. There’s a whole other side to it.” MAP was destined to become a very defined program once Buddy was gone and I wasn’t going to be part of it. How could I? I didn’t know anything about it. I couldn’t speak in a director’s meeting. All I knew how to do was to be me and how to put the right people together. The writing was on the wall.

In 2001, I enrolled in the chemical dependency counselor certification program at Glendale Community College. I started to come to an understanding of why my experiences with so many drug counselors had seemed so fruitless. A lot of people who enter the field are just … not very bright. I saw this in action one day when I made a comment during a lecture and used the phrase
ad infinitum
and inadvertently sidetracked the whole lesson when the phrase confused the class and the instructor had to stop and explain the term—which muddied up the class even more. I couldn’t see myself staying for two years to acquire my certification under those circumstances, so I looked into fast-tracking. Fortunately, Crescent College in nearby Huntington Park offered a course as part of its practical nursing program. It would only take seven months. It was a better choice, so I went for it and was certified by the state of California later in the year.