Scar Tissue (20 page)

One day I got a glimpse of Gill’s notebook, and next to the song “Police Helicopter,” he’d written “Shit.” I was demolished that he had dismissed that as shit. “Police Helicopter” was a jewel in our crown. It embodied the spirit of who we were, which was this kinetic, stabbing, angular, shocking assault force of sound and energy. Reading his notes probably sealed the deal in our minds that “Okay, now we’re working with the enemy.” It became very much him against us, especially Flea and me. It became a real battle to make the record.

Andy’s thing was having a hit at all costs, but it was such a mistake to have an agenda. He should have just made us the best band that we were. We would come up with these really beautiful, rough, interesting sounds, and he’d go, “Oh, no, no, you could never get that sound on the radio.” We’d say, “And your point is what? We’re not making this to get on the radio.” He’d say, “Well, I am, I’m shooting to get something on the radio here.” Jack Sherman also wasn’t coming from the same place that Flea and I were. He was new in the band, and he was being far more cooperative with Andy, going for these clean, supposedly “radio-viable” sounds.

If the two bonded, it was because Andy saw Jack as a patsy he could control in the studio. We would argue all the time about the tone of Jack’s guitar. Andy was trying to soften it up, and we’d be outraged. “That’s weak and soft and lame and this song is punk rock and it’s got to be thrashing and hard,” we’d scream.

Part of the frustration we had with Jack was that he was a polished guitar player who really didn’t have a punk-rock pedigree. Plus he was so anal, so unlike Flea and me. One day Jack was getting ready to play in the studio, and I got there early. He had a little guitar cloth in his hand, gently cleaning the neck of his guitar. Then he went into his pristine doctor’s bag of stuff and pulled out what looked like air freshener, and he started deftly spraying this along the neck of the guitar.

“What the hell is that? What are you doing to your guitar?” I said.

“Oh, this is Fingerease. It helps your fingers glide up and down the neck easier,” he said. I was used to Hillel, who played so hard that his fingers would start to come apart. He knew he had a good night if his guitar was covered with blood. And here was this guy doing this gay spray job of mist onto his fretboard so his fingers could glide easily. I would razz him about that. “Do you have your Fingerease? Don’t leave home without the Fingerease.” He’d come back with “Oh, you probably don’t even know what a diminished seventh chord is.”

For the first couple of days in the studio, everything seemed fine. But I soon realized that Andy was going for a sound that wasn’t us. By the end of the sessions, Flea and I would literally stomp out of the studio into the control room, crawl over the console VU meters, and scream, “Fuck you! We hate you! This is shit!” Andy was completely calm the whole time. And Dave Jerden was like one of those dolls in the back of cars with the bouncing head, going, “We gotta listen to Andy. We gotta listen to Andy.”

We did some lighthearted stuff, too. We were in the middle of a heated argument with Andy one night in the studio when Flea said, “Let’s put this on hold. I’m going to take a big shiny shit.”

“Oh yeah, be sure and bring that back for me, then, won’t you,” Andy said drolly.

“Okay,” Flea said.

“I wouldn’t put it past you,” Andy said.

I followed Flea out of the room. All the way to the bathroom, we were saying, “Let’s really bring him the shit.”

So Flea defecated, and we put it in an empty pizza box that was in the studio, and we went running back down the hallway and delivered the shit pizza to Andy.

He just rolled his eyes and said, “How predictable.”

To this day, Flea points to that incident to demonstrate why we’re such a good band: because we brought shit to Andy Gill.

I do remember bursts of happiness during that period. The new songs like “Buckle Down,” “True Men,” “Mommy, Where’s Daddy,” and “Grand Pappy DuPlenty” all sounded exciting and great. But I was terribly disappointed when I heard the mixes of “Get Up and Jump,” “Out in L.A.,” “Green Heaven,” and “Police Helicopter.” All those songs sounded like they had gone through a sterilizing Goody Two-shoes machine. When we used to play them, they were so vicious-sounding, and now they sounded like bubblegum pop.

The tension affected Dave Jerden, and he was treated for a stomach ulcer and missed a week of work. Then Andy had to go to the hospital and have a cancerous testicle removed. While he was in the hospital, Flea and I tried to get Dave Jerden to remake the album, but he wasn’t having it.

The album was released, and it wasn’t something to celebrate. I felt like we had landed between two peaks, in the valley of compromise. I wasn’t ashamed of it, but it was nothing like our demo tape. Still, our take was “Okay, this is our record, and let’s keep marching on,” especially after I read the first review. I picked up
BAM,
a little Bay Area music magazine, and they simply assassinated the album. I was very hurt, but I realized that sometimes people got it, sometimes they didn’t. I couldn’t put too much stock in what writers had to say about our music. Then we got a rave review in one of the first issues of
Spin
magazine, so we had the yin and yang of record reviews. At any rate, we were being acknowledged by someplace other than the “L.A. Dee Dah” column.

Right before the record came, we posed for our first poster. We had done a photo session in our socks previously, and that went on to become infamous, but this was our first official promotional poster. Right before the session, I grabbed a Magic Marker and started drawing all over Flea’s chest and stomach and shoulders. It was just lines and squiggles and dots, but it looked great. We were into wearing unflattering hats then, but Cliff showed up, and he was the most outside dresser of all of us. He was wearing a huge mask with a hat over it and some kind of gloves so that you couldn’t see one inch of his skin. He looked like a cloth-covered robot. Then Flea put me in a headlock, and we shot the poster.

We would mug for the camera at all of our shoots. We had been born in an era when posing and posturing and pursing and pretty-boyness had taken over the landscape. It was all about trying to look as handsome as possible while making thin and empty music. And we were anti whatever was popular. So mugging and distorting our faces seemed like the natural response to all of these people trying to manicure themselves to perfection.

We also made our first video. Enigma/EMI came up with some money, and we hired Graham Wiffler, who had done films for this oddball San Francisco group called the Residents, which we loved. He designed a video for “True Men,” and we showed up and put in an eighteen-hour day doing things like sprouting up from under the stage through these sand holes, because some farmer was watering his cornfield. We completely gave up the body. If we’d had to dive onto a bed of nails ten times in a row, we would have done it. I remember waking up the next day and feeling a hundred years old. I loved the video, although it was still weird to look at something and see Jack Sherman instead of Hillel.

Probably a week after our record came out, unbeknownst to me, Flea got a call from Johnny Lydon, of Sex Pistols fame, to audition as the bass player for his new group, Public Image. Flea quietly went and did the audition, not unlike the time that he had auditioned for Fear when he was playing in What Is This. It went very well, and he was the first choice. Then he consulted with Hillel, like he had with me when he was approached by Fear. They listened to both groups, and Hillel asked Flea if he wanted to be a supporting member of Lydon’s trip or a creating member of something new. Flea made up his mind to stick with our band. Thank God for that, because I was a torn-up rag doll of a human being at that point. I’m sure Flea was constantly thinking, “Jesus Christ, I can’t rely on this freak. He’s dying out there, covered with track marks. Black and blue, up and down. Stealing cars, disappearing, going to jail. Just a fucking nutcase. How can I tolerate that?”

One time around then, we were supposed to be rehearsing, but I didn’t show up. Jack Sherman was raring to go, but Flea was sitting there with his bass on his lap and his head hanging down.

“C’mon, let’s do something,” Jack said.

“Shut up,” Flea growled.

“What’s wrong with you? Why are you so down? Why can’t we just get some work done?” Jack complained.

“If your friend could die at any minute, you’d be down, too,” Flea said.

I didn’t hear about that exchange until this year. That early on, as far as I remember, Flea never expressed anything even close to that to me. Whenever we would talk about it, it was never “I’m worried about you. I think you might have a problem, or you might be setting yourself up to die young.” It was always “I can’t do this. You left me hanging. I need someone I can rely on.” I assumed that he was more like Jack and didn’t consider himself a brother’s keeper, just a driven professional who needed a reliable partnership.

The album was released that summer, and to promote it, we were scheduled to go to New York and play the CMJ New Music Seminar, which was the most important venue for alternative acts to get themselves known. I almost didn’t make it to New York, not because of cocaine and heroin, but because I abused another drug—alcohol. I was home in Michigan for my annual summer visitation. I brought Jennifer, who showed up with her typical tricolored canary-yellow, pink-feathers-coming-out-of-her-head hairdo. When I introduced her to my family, they didn’t know what to make of her. She looked like a giant field of blossoming daffodils. And the first thing she did was march out to the peach field behind the house and build a tepee. I thought she was going to build a toy tepee, but she had this legitimate passion for Native American culture, so she spent all afternoon and well into the night out in the woods harvesting tepee poles. I don’t know if she had brought material with her, because she always had bags full of clothes and raw materials, but she wound up building a fifteen-foot-tall bona fide tepee that withstood the next harsh Michigan winter.

Before I left L.A., I was using more heroin than I wanted to. I started off with these rules that I’d do it once a week, because if you do it more than once a week, you’re in danger of getting strung out. Then it would be like “I’ll do it twice this week, but I won’t do it at all next week.” Day three comes up, and you’re like “I’m just going to put a day in between each time I use, because that way I can never get strung out.” Then it was like “If I do it two days in a row, and then don’t do it for two days, and then just do it one day, I won’t get strung out.” I was losing that battle.

Meanwhile, Jennifer was making great friends with my sisters. My mom didn’t know what to think of this pretty, crazy bird. Of course, like all moms, she didn’t realize that the craziest bird in the house was her own son. One night I was feeling ill because I had run out of the tiny amount of dope I had brought with me. I intuitively knew that I needed some medicine to take away the pain, so I left Jennifer at home with my mom and went to go meet my friend Nate, who was at a bar with a bunch of straight, sheltered midwesterners. They all dressed the same, they all drank the same, they all drove the same cars and had the same kind of jobs and lived in the same kind of houses. And they drank a lot. Alcohol was never my first or even second or third drug of choice. I drank regularly, I just never got the tolerance thing happening. But I was feeling sick and going with the flow of this bar scene in Grand Rapids, which was kooky and lame and without much spirit. So I started drinking beer out of what seemed like giant popcorn containers. I was matching bucket for bucket with everybody there, and we were getting drunk and this was working for me, taking the place of all that stuff I’d run out of. I thought I was fine, but I had no idea how high I was.

It was about a twenty-mile drive down a straight country road to get back to my mom’s house. I never wear a seat belt, even to this day, but when I was saying good-bye to Nate, as a joke, I made a big deal out of strapping on the belt. So I put the pedal to the metal on my mom’s Subaru station wagon, which probably put me between eighty and ninety miles an hour. I was getting really tired, and I’d start to nod off and then jerk up sharply. I did this a few times, and then I decided that I was just going to close my eyes for a second. There was so much booze in me that my lights went out.

I blacked out, and the car veered into the oncoming lane, jumped the edge of the road, and hit a bump, at which point I woke up and saw a huge clump of trees in front of me. “Trees? What the . . .” Boom—the car accordioned into an elm tree face-on, and the engine was now next to me in the driver’s seat, and the steering wheel had broken on impact with my face. I would have stayed there, unconscious and bleeding, for who knows how long if not for the fact that off in the distance, a person had heard the crash. By luck, that person was a paramedic who happened to have his ambulance in the driveway.

Within a matter of minutes, he had called some firemen, and they came and got the jaws of life and pried me out of the car. The paramedics were hovering over me, asking me who the president was. I answered each question perfectly, though I couldn’t understand why they were testing me for brain damage. I didn’t realize that my entire head had split wide open and I resembled a plate of spaghetti and meatballs.

I was rushed to the nearest hospital, and my poor mom was notified. She was home helping her husband, Steve, recover from his recent quadruple bypass surgery. But within minutes, my mother and my sister, Jenny, came marching into the operating room. They looked at me like a ghost. I asked if I could use the bathroom, and the nurses reluctantly let me. I went straight for the mirror, and looking back at me was the Elephant Man. My upper lip was so fat that it actually covered my nose. My nose looked like a bowl of cauliflower splayed across my whole face. My left eye was completely shut, but it looked like it had swallowed a pool ball before it closed. And there was blood everywhere. I instantly thought, “Oh my God, I will never look like a human being again.” I could see out of only one eye, but I saw enough to know that was the end of my face as I knew it.