The Dirt (13 page)

Whenever we weren’t performing, we’d make the circuit—the Whisky, the Roxy, and the Troubadour—nailing posters four at a time on each wall and lamppost. If every other band had one poster on a wall, we had to have four: That was Nikki’s rule.

I was eighteen and too young to get in most places, so I’d use Nikki’s birth certificate, which said Frank Feranna. Everyone at the door knew who I was from Rock Candy, but they let me in anyway. When the clubs began to close, we’d go to the Rainbow. The place was set up like a circle, with the coolest rockers and richest deviants sitting at the center tables. Guys had to be twenty-one to come into the club, but girls could be eighteen. The guys would sit at their regular spots and the girls would walk around the ring until they were called over to someone’s empty chair. They would keep circling, like dick buzzards, until you filled your table with them.

Afterward, everyone would spill out into the parking lot: Randy Rhoads, Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist, would be hanging upside down from a tree screaming while junkies tried to score dope and everyone else tried to scam on girls. Soon, with Robbin Crosby and Stephen Pearcy from Ratt (who were only playing Judas Priest covers at the time), we started calling ourselves the Gladiators, and giving each other titles like Field Marshal and King.

One night, Nikki and I met strawberry blond identical twins who were in the Doublemint gum commercials and went back to their house. Afterward, we still couldn’t tell which girl was which, so we’d have to wait each night at the Rainbow until they came up to us and said hi, because we didn’t want to walk up and grab the wrong girl.

Even though we couldn’t afford coke, we could always sniff it out. We’d find someone who was holding and throw them into Tommy’s Chevy van, which became our party truck. After the Rainbow each night, we’d walk to Santa Monica Boulevard, where all the young rockers and actors who never made it were pimping themselves. We’d scrounge up enough money to buy an egg burrito from Noggles. Then we’d bite the end off and stick our dicks into the warm meat to cover up the smell of pussy so that our girlfriends didn’t know we were fucking anything stupid or drunk enough to get into Tommy’s van.

I didn’t know what to think of Mick. He was crazy. He’d sit across the club from me scribbling on a piece of paper. Then he’d bring it over and it would say something like, “I’m going to kill you.” His face was all scruffy and unshaven, and he used to bite Tommy’s nipple all the time. All Tommy would do was weakly swat him away and say, “Cut it out, that chafes.”

Through his day job at the Starwood, Nikki somehow managed to talk his boss into letting us play our first shows there: two sets on Friday and Saturday opening up for Y&T. And even onstage, we acted more like a gang than a band.

Mick was jittery because we’d never run through a complete show in rehearsal before. We didn’t even know what our set list would be until Nikki taped a sloppy, handwritten sheet of paper onto the stage floor at the last minute. During our first song, “Take Me to the Top,” people were yelling “fuck you!” and flipping us the bird. Then one meathead, in a black AC/DC shirt, hocked a loogey that landed on my white leather pants. Without even thinking, I leapt off the stage midphrase and put him in a headlock and started pummeling him. I looked back, and Nikki had his white Thunderbird bass over his head. He swung it forward like a circus strength-game mallet and cracked it over some guy’s shoulder blade. If there was a bell on the guy’s head, it would have gone through the roof.

We were so loose that I couldn’t tell where one song ended and the next began. But we looked good and fought even better. By the end of the second set that night, we had converted most of our enemies into fans. They told their friends, and even more people came to see us the next night. When Y&T came out for their second set on Saturday, half the room had emptied. The next time we performed with Y&T, we would be the headliners.

One of our first big fans was David Lee Roth. Just a year before, when Van Halen played the Long Beach arena, I was in the parking lot bootlegging concert T-shirts. Now, Roth was introducing my band. Though we all knew it was not because he loved the music but because he liked picking up the girls who came to see us, we were flattered. We were an unsigned, nothing band: He was a rock star.

After our first show at the Troubadour, David came up to me. “Vince,” he said. “Do you know anything about the music business?”

“Yeah, you get gigs and play music,” I answered.

“No,” he said. “That’s not whatcha do. Meet me tomorrow at Canter’s Deli on Fairfax at three P.M.”

The next day, David pulled up in his big Mercedes-Benz with the skull and crossbones painted on. He sat me down and launched into a monologue on the rock business: He named hustlers to avoid, scams to watch out for, and contract clauses to eliminate.

“Don’t go with a small distribution company,” he said between mustard-dripping bites of pastrami. “You have to have your records in Tahiti. If they’re not in Tahiti, they aren’t anywhere else.”

And he went on: “Don’t just sign with any manager. Don’t take a deal only for the money. You have to watch where the money goes, and how it comes back.”

Everything he had learned in the past seven years he shared with me out of the sheer goodness of his alcohol-addled heart. I had no idea what he was talking about, because I didn’t know anything about the business. I proved that the very next day, when I turned around and made one of the stupidest business mistakes of my career. I signed a ten-year management deal with a construction worker who knew even less about the industry than I did.

I met him after Mick’s chauffeur and burrito-getter, Stick, started bringing his sister to rehearsal, where we were recording the songs that would become our first single, “Stick to Your Guns” and “Toast of the Town.” She looked exactly like Stick, except she had only one tooth and a weird contraption that looked like a snake wrapped around her hair. She was so ugly that even Tommy wouldn’t sleep with her. Her husband was a suspicious-looking, rail-thin construction-company owner with a brain the size of Barney Fife’s but a heart bigger than a stripper’s tit. His name was Allan Coffman, he was from Grass Valley in northern California, and for some reason he wanted to get into the rock scene. He looked like a psychotic yuppie, with eyes always darting around the room as if he were expecting something to leap out of the shadows and attack him. When he got drunk, he’d start obsessively searching bushes we passed to make sure no one was hiding in them. It wasn’t until years later that we discovered he had served as an M.P. in Vietnam.

When Stick brought him by rehearsal, he’d probably never seen a rock band before. And we’d never seen a manager. He said he wanted to invest in us, and gave us fifty dollars—the first money we ever made as a band; we signed a management deal with him on the spot. Establishing a pattern we would repeat throughout our career, within minutes we had spent the entire wad on a pile of cocaine and snorted it in one long line that snaked around the table

Coffman backed us because he thought it would be cheap. A punk band may have been cheap. But we weren’t: We had him buy a snakeskin jacket and black pants for Tommy, a new leather jacket for Mick, and, for Nikki, a six-hundred-dollar pair of boots. Back then, if we wanted anything that had a price tag in the three digits, we had to steal it.

Coffman thought he’d train us in Grass Valley and let us work out the kinks in our live shows. We slept in his guest trailer and hitchhiked into the town, a redneck paradise with only one road: Main Street. Despite the shitkicker nature of the place, we weren’t deterred from wearing stiletto heels, hair spray, red-painted fingernails, hot-pink pants, and makeup. In full costume, we descended on the bars, trying to score speed from truckers and pick up on anyone’s girlfriend. On our first night out, a Hell’s Angel walked into the bar and stopped in front of a biker with an Angels’ tattoo on his arm.

“You don’t deserve to be a Hell’s Angel anymore,” he said calmly. Then he clicked out his stiletto blade and cut the guy’s tattoo off on the spot.

One of the gigs Coffman scored for us was at a place called the Tommyknocker, which had a big sign outside announcing: “Hollywood Costume Night.” We walked in and saw a dozen cowboys with their girlfriends handcuffed to them. Everybody was confused: They thought they looked Hollywood and had no idea what planet we had come from; we thought we were Hollywood and had no idea what planet they had come from.

We played “Stick to Your Guns” and “Live Wire,” but they just stared at us, still bewildered. So we decided to speak their language and ripped into “Jailhouse Rock” and “Hound Dog,” which they went crazy for. We played “Hound Dog” five times that night, then escaped through the back door before we got killed.

That night, someone told us about a party in town. We walked in and it was full of hot chicks we had never seen before. After about fifteen minutes, Tommy nudged me and said, “These aren’t chicks, dude.” We looked around and realized that we were surrounded by freaky country bumpkin drag queens, who were probably wearing their wives’ and girlfriends’ clothes. I asked a big blond next to me if he had any coke, and he sold me a bag for twenty dollars. I went into the bathroom to shoot up and almost killed myself. It was baby powder, and I was pissed.

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When the drag queen wouldn’t give me my money back, I pulled his wig off, spun him around, and hit him in the face. Blood leaked over his lipstick, dribbling down his chin. All of a sudden, a dozen redneck transvestites descended on us, flailing and kicking with their high heels before throwing us into the street, a torn and bleeding lump of Hollywood trash.

The next day, Coffman arranged our first radio interview. We showed up at the studio with fat lips, bruises, and black eyes. And we were scared shitless: We had never done a radio interview before. They asked us where we were from, and we looked at each other, speechless. Then Mick said Mars.

After more nightmares that Coffman called training, we migrated back south to Los Angeles, playing concerts and putting posters on every telephone pole we saw. They dropped me off at Lovey’s, and within a minute I was in the bathtub shooting up with her while she blathered on about how Allan Coffman was going to wear us out and how we should let her manage us with her dad’s money. She was driving me out of my mind, especially since I had started sleeping with a much nicer, cuter, and saner surfer girl who lived down the street. Lovey and I ended up partying until dawn at the house of a guy who was an heir to U.S. Steel but was living in a squalid one-bedroom house because his family had cut him off.