Running With Monsters: A Memoir (5 page)

I tried to find a role within the group as a sort of aide-de-camp. Why not? The Clash had Kosmo Vinyl. The Chili Peppers had me. I gave them ideas. I introduced them to Funkadelic’s music. Because of my input, there’s a cover of Hank Williams’s “Why Don’t You Love Me” on their first record. The album’s closer, “Grand Pappy Du Plenty,” was based on my suggestion that they do an avant-garde instrumental. But with Lindy in as manager, my official title was changed to road manager. I didn’t like that role at all. It basically meant I was a glorified gofer. If someone in the band needed water, it was my job to see that it arrived, but I was usually too busy chatting up people around the band and partying. I was barely competent as a road manager, and it bugged me that I had been demoted even though, deep down, I knew that the Chili Peppers could do better than someone like me. My actual day-to-day life hadn’t really changed. I still hung out with Flea and Anthony, but I still felt diminished.

Anthony partied almost as hard as I did, but he was on his way to rock stardom, so he was forgiven. He was the front man and had the luxury of being a hard-core intravenous drug abuser. Within the band’s structure, I was expected to work and get things done. I could barely make sure their equipment got onstage. My poor managerial skills spilled over into our life at La Leyenda. I couldn’t even get the rent paid on time.

I stumbled home one night and Anthony confronted me. “We had a visitor today.”

“Really? Who came by?”

“Some rep for the building’s owner. Says you haven’t given him any rent money. Dude, I gave you some dough a few weeks ago.”

“Don’t worry, man. I’ll take care of it,” I said.

The money I had—including Anthony’s—I had spent on drugs and liquor. I couldn’t cover the rent. I did have enough cash on hand to buy some cheap, made-in-China hand tools and a decent dead-bolt lock down at the local Home Depot. It was a temporary fix, and outside of the weekly calls and visits from the landlord, it seemed to work.

“Man, you’re supposed to be taking care of this stuff,” said Anthony.

“Hey, they can’t get in. We’re the only ones who have keys. I’ll give ’em some money as soon as I can.”

Anthony sighed.

It worked for nearly four months—until I came home one day and saw a red “pay or quit” notice tacked to the door.

“Did you see the sign?” asked Anthony, who had wised up and stopped me giving me rent money that he knew would not go to the landlord.

“I’ll handle it,” I said. The next morning, I woke to the sound of drills and hammers just in time to see a work crew remove the door and walk off with it.

“Okay, now what?” asked Anthony.

I grabbed some old bedsheets and tacked them to the door frame. “There you go,” I said. Anthony looked unsure. “What?” I said. “It’s not like we have anything anyone would want to steal.”

It was obvious the whole road manager thing wouldn’t work out when we went on the first tour. To the band’s credit, they gave me a shot, but I blew it. Hotel bookings, sound checks, equipment logistics—the tour was in a constant state of chaos because I was drunk and high all the time and not doing my job. I was a stumbling wreck who couldn’t get anything done. The band hired a guy named Ben Marks to replace me when we had barely gotten out of Los Angeles.

“Look, Bob,” said Anthony. “We’re bringing in this guy to be the road manager.”

“But I’m the road manager.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” said Anthony. “We need someone who’s professional.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do?”

I was demoted to roadie. I didn’t do any better in that position. Ever moved equipment? It’s hard work and it’s boring. After the show, when the band got to party, I was supposed to break down the stage and load the equipment for the next gig. Instead, I’d sneak off to get high or hang out in a bar. I knew it was starting to piss off Anthony.

I was dead weight. By the time we got to New York, I was fired. “Bob, you’re not doing anything,” said Anthony. “Why should we keep you on the payroll?” I didn’t have an answer for that. We were at the same hotel where the Replacements had rooms.
Chili Peppers fired me?
I thought.
Fuck it. I’ll just go to work for the Replacements.
I approached Paul Westerberg. He was a great guy, witty, funny—and he liked to drink as much as I did. We got into a serious drinking bout and bitched about life on the road, tours and hotels. I brought up the subject. “So, you know I’m not with the Chili Peppers crew anymore,” I said.

“That’s too bad, man,” he said. He sensed where I was going with this conversation and cut me off. “It’s a real shame … but you can’t come with us.”

He was right. It never would have worked. I was a terrible roadie. I was the worst drunk and drug addict out of that whole crew, and that included the musicians. When Paul Westerberg—a man who could consume absolutely superhuman amounts of alcohol—thinks you’re an out-of-control drunk, you’d better believe that you’ve made an impression.

And so I was cut loose in New York like some sad, drunken hobo. I told myself I didn’t really care, but the truth was that I was scared and a little resentful that my friends were on their way to rock music stardom and I wasn’t. I felt left behind. Within a year of being with the Chili Peppers, I had gone from band manager to road manager to roadie to fired. It was not a good career trajectory. With some money in my pockets, I drifted around Times Square for a week before I headed to Boston for an aimless seven days. I stayed drunk. Eventually, though, it was time to come home to L.A. I had no idea what waited just around the corner for me.

B
ack home in Los Angeles, after my failure as part of the Chili Peppers crew, I didn’t know who I was supposed to be or what I should do. Anthony and I had ditched the La Leyenda with back rent owed. He found new quarters and I stayed where I could, but we were okay with each other. In May of 1984 Flea and Anthony invited me to go along with them to see Van Halen play a three-night run at the San Diego Sports Arena, and I jumped at the chance. For one thing, it was a solid conformation that we were still friends after the debacle of my time on the road with them.

We drove down the 5 freeway from Los Angeles, a long, traffic-choked slog through the city and its outer suburbs that didn’t lighten up until we hit the coast and saw the vast shimmer of the Pacific Ocean to our right and the buff-colored hills of Camp Pendleton to our left. I sat in the backseat with a bottle of vodka, a bag of coke, and a couple balloons of heroin. It was a long time to be cooped up in a car, and I was wrecked before we reached Orange County. To amuse myself, I sang. I didn’t think Anthony and Flea could hear me, but they interrupted me midchorus.

“What song is that, dude?” Anthony asked.

“It’s just a song. It doesn’t have a name.”

“It’s good,” said Flea. “And you can actually carry a tune.”

It was a nice compliment and it felt good. In the back of my head, I had always thought about being in a band, but a singer? I hadn’t really entertained that notion on any kind of serious level—despite the brief stint in the downtown art-noise band a few years earlier. Through Anthony and Flea, I became acquainted with a guy named Pete Weiss. He was a drummer and he could be combative. We were about as different from each other as two guys could possibly be when it came to our dispositions, but in some ways, were incredibly similar. Headstrong. My old friend Chris Hansen knew him from Los Angeles City College, where they had both attended classes, and, now the two of them had cooked up the idea to start a band.

One night, Pete came by the pad and told me, “Chris and I started a group.”

“Great,” I said. “Chris is a good guitar player.”

“You’re going to be the singer.”

“What? You’ve never even heard me.”

“Chris says you were great in that band you guys used to have. Don’t worry about it. The worst that can happen is that you’ll fuck up.”

I was no stranger to that, so what did I have to lose? Besides, from the time I had posed with my little acoustic guitar and sang “Dang Me,” I had secretly wanted to be a rock star. Musicians fascinated me. I spent almost all my time with them, and music had long been my passion, but I had never pursued it with any kind of seriousness. I didn’t think I had the right look and knowing so many great musicians personally, it would be devastatingly embarrassing to fail in front of them. But after all the years I’d collected records, read rock magazines, and hung out in clubs, I thought I knew a thing or two about songwriting and stagecraft. Chris was convinced this project would work, based on our brief stint in our “art band.” I figured I possessed enough charisma to make a go of it, but I was also pretty sure that even if I bombed as a front man, I’d be switched over to guitar and I could hide behind an amp or turn my back to the audience. That was my Plan B. The second guitar player in the group was the late William “Bill” Stobaugh. Why he was a guitar player was a mystery since Bill could barely tune his instrument. Still, he was a completely weird, crazy, and artistic guy. Bill had an unusual background. He had been born in Bahrain, the son of a man who worked for an American oil company, but grew up in suburban Massachusetts. He had come to Los Angeles to attend school, where he received both bachelor’s and master’s degrees at CalArts. He was skilled as a filmmaker. Parts of his shot-on-film master’s thesis were used in the Disney movie
Tron
. He would eventually make film his career, doing a lot of rock videos, including “Higher Ground” for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He died in 1996 from complications that followed heart surgery. He was only forty-two. On bass we had a boom operator named Jon Huck and, for good measure, we had a third guitar played by K. K. Barrett, another film-world refugee who worked as an art director.

But back then, we all wanted to be a rock band. The Replacements were our inspiration, but once we started to rehearse, we found we couldn’t do anything but be ourselves. We tried to play some cover songs. It was a disaster.

“Hey, man, let’s try to play ‘American Woman,’ said Chris at our first rehearsal, and launched into the main riff. Pete fell in behind him and the rest of us tried to follow. It was a god-awful racket, and I couldn’t remember the lyrics even though I had heard the song forever on classic rock radio.

“Hold up, hold up,” said Chris as he called the jam to a halt. “This doesn’t work.” Everybody took a break to smoke cigarettes and crack open fresh beers.

“You know what sounded okay?” I asked as I poured some vodka into my brew. “When we were just fucking around with those chords before we tried to play an actual song. I think if you guys just start doing that, we can come up with some lyrics. At least it’d be our own thing. And I think we sounded pretty good.”

“It can’t be any worse than ‘American Woman,’ ” said Chris.

We started to jam and fell straight into a groove. It felt right. We definitely had something. We wrote four songs at that first rehearsal that sprang to life straight out of our riffs and jams. “Yes Yes No” and “Positive Train” were collaborative efforts with the whole band. Jon and Pete came up with something they called “Thelonious Monster” and Jon and I wrote “Life’s a Groove.” It was a productive first rehearsal. We also discussed what to call ourselves. My thought was to use the name the F.T.W. Experience—“F.T.W.,” of course, standing in for “Fuck the World” and “Experience” tacked on as a nod to the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Pete wanted to name the band after the song he and Jon wrote. Somebody noted, “If we call the band Thelonious Monster, we’ll have a theme song like the Monkees did.” It made sense, and I had to admit, it was a good name.

We rehearsed like that for four months, nearly every night, rough jams and hooky riffs crystallizing into actual songs. I had connections with the bookers at the various clubs where I DJ’ed, so getting gigs wasn’t a problem. Keeping them coherent was. I was usually drunk, high, or a combination of the two for our shows, and I know it bugged Pete. I’d rant from the stage about Reagan or religion or something I had seen in the newspaper earlier in the day as I’d introduce a song. Drunks and addicts almost always think they’re being witty and charming when, mostly, they’re just obnoxious.

“Fuck Ronald Reagan!” I shouted, while, in my peripheral vision, I could see Pete behind his drum kit roll his eyes and throw up his hands as if to say, “Not again with this shit!”

I wasn’t in the mood for his judgments. Not again. I could picture him after the show: “Goddamn it, Bob! Let’s just play the songs!” Yeah, well, fuck him. I didn’t have to take guff off of a drummer. I launched myself straight over the bass drum and through the cymbals and connected with him. We rolled around on the stage while we traded blows.

“Holy shit, you guys! Knock it off!” Chris yelled. I snapped out of it. “Oh, right. We’re at a gig. People paid to hear us.” Pete and I broke it up and we played our song. The shows were sloppy and chaotic and always threatened to fall apart at any moment, but they were also very punk rock. Cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and lots and lots of alcohol made me act foolish more than once. “You’re a fuckin’ mess, Forrest,” Pete said with barely concealed contempt. He was right. I was—but our audience dug the excitement.

Flea had come to a couple of shows and had a suggestion. “You guys need to make a demo record,” he said.

“We need a place to do it, man,” I told him.

“No problem. I have the hookup.”

He certainly did. He was pals with a guy named Spit Stix who had played drums in Fear when Flea was in that band. Stix worked as a recording engineer at a studio on La Brea, just north of Sunset Boulevard. It was a gray building called Rusk Sound Studios. A rather anonymous-sounding name, but the place was owned by Giorgio Moroder. He had won an Academy Award for his score to the movie
Midnight Express
in 1978 and had never looked back. His work in film and with disco and techno acts was legendary. But because he was in such demand, he was never at Rusk Sound Studios, so Stix let us sneak in at night and record. We were all proud of the results.

“Hey, Bob! Did you hear?” asked Chris one hazy afternoon.

“Huh?” I said as I followed a double rum and coke with a big line of speed.

“Man, Brett Gurewitz from Bad Religion heard our demo!”

“And?”

“Jesus, Bob, try to focus. He loved it. You know he runs Epitaph Records. He wants to record us.”

“A record deal?” I said. “A real record deal?”

“Yes!”

This was impressive. Gurewitz came to meet us one night. “I’d really like to do a proper album with you guys,” he said. “I think Epitaph could really do something with an album.” We were all in. It may not have been the best deal in the history of recorded music, but it was the first major step for the Monster. Our deal gave us one hundred hours of studio time. With Brett as producer, we went to Westbeach Recorders in Los Angeles at ten every night, where we’d stay until six in the morning.

“Bob, try to stay sober. We’ve got work to do!” Chris or Pete would plead. I thought the drugs and the booze had worked well enough to get us to where we were, so why stop now? I may have been completely fucked up, but I showed up on time, contributed to the songs, and laid down my tracks.
Baby … You’re Bummin’ My Life Out in a Supreme Fashion
was released in 1986, and I was unprepared for the response it got. Not many months earlier, we’d decided to start a band. We weren’t seasoned songwriters or musicians, but now, with a growing reputation for unpredictability at our live shows and a new, professionally recorded album showcasing our act, the
Los Angeles Times,
the
Herald-Examiner,
and the
New York Times
all hailed the record as a rock-and-roll masterpiece and compared it to the Stones’
Exile on Main Street
and Bob Dylan’s
Blonde on Blonde
. What the fuck? How did that happen? It was a complete turnaround. Sixteen months earlier, I was just a failed roadie for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and now I was being called a genius in major American newspapers. It could have gone to anybody’s head, except for one important detail. Other than the fact that we had critical praise, nothing else had changed. I was still an unpaid aide-de-camp for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which mostly meant that I hung out with them and offered suggestions, moral support, and the occasional critique. They never held my disastrous stint as a paid crew member against me, but they never put me back on the payroll either. I was broke.

I needed a job. Luckily, Jon Huck’s girlfriend Sosie Hublitz, who later became my second wife, was an art director in the movie business and she always looked out for us. She helped me get some jobs working as a production assistant. Robby Müller, a cinematographer, also helped us find work. I loaded furniture. I was a set dresser. You could always pick up some work on a rock video or a commercial for toothpaste or floor wax. In Los Angeles, there was always some kind of shoot happening. Jon Huck and Pete Weiss kept doing sound work. K. K. Barrett kept on with his production-design work. We were all wired into that film world. We felt like we were the coolest people in Hollywood. I may have been at the fringe of it all, but that business pays pretty well. I worked on a movie called
The Boss’s Wife
. One of the stars was Christopher Plummer. I probably made $10,000 just for moving furniture around. That went really far back then, although it could have gone farther if I didn’t spend nearly all of it on heroin and cocaine. But those film jobs allowed me to live and eat and be me, even if “being me” led to employment problems. Keeping any kind of job is difficult when you’re in a stupor.

The album didn’t help us get better gigs, either. Despite all the critical praise heaped upon
Baby … You’re Bummin’ My Life Out in a Supreme Fashion,
we found ourselves playing the same little clubs we’d been playing. When the record came out to such accolades, I was convinced it would change everything. Instead, nothing happened. We just foundered around. We made a second record, this time for Relativity Records. The company signed us solely on the praise we had gotten from the first. The deal we got wasn’t great, but we made enough to buy a van to take on tour.
Next Saturday Afternoon
is Flea’s favorite album of ours, and even today, I’m proud of those songs.

I wasn’t too worried. I had seen the same thing happen with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were my de facto business model. They had made their first record, gigged, and didn’t make much money. Then they made the second record and started to get booked in places like the Universal Amphitheatre. I figured we’d record the new album and it would make us popular enough to play places like the Hollywood Palladium.
Next Saturday Afternoon
came out in 1987, and we toured like crazy behind its release. It was grueling.

People think, “Oh, you’re on tour! That’s great! You get to go places, meet interesting people, and see the country!” You don’t get to do any of that. You show up and do a sound check, go to a bar, have some drinks, see a dressing room, get wasted, do a show, and then drive through the night to the next show, where the routine starts again. It’s not a “See America” sightseeing jaunt. It’s fucking work. And it’s brutal, mind-fucking work. K. K. and Jon quit under the strain.

“You can’t quit now!” I said.

K. K. said, “Dude, I have a real career back in Los Angeles. Tear-assin’ around the country in a van isn’t doing me a bit of good.”

“Jon? Come on, man. We wrote ‘Life’s a Groove’ together.”

“Bob, I can make good money back home. I don’t need this bullshit. Sorry, man.”