A Stray Cat Struts (20 page)

I had met Julie McCullough at the end of 1992. True pal Jamie James was playing a gig at the Troubadour, and I walked down Doheny Drive to see him play. Jamie's girlfriend at the time was Kelly Coleman, daughter of the fantastic character actor Dabney Coleman. She was a gifted singer, and Jamie was backing her in a rock band playing her songs. I had known Jamie since the 1980s. He's the singer and front man of legendary band the Kingbees. He and I had a band in the late 1980s with Lee called the Rufnex. We played around LA during a hiatus taken by the Cats. He was there when TJ was born, and we've stayed best pals ever since. I believe we would have gotten a record deal. But Brian called me and wanted to get together, and the Stray Cats started to get busy again.

Kelly Coleman's band was good, and Jamie is a talented guitarist, writer, and singer. At the time, Julie was a regular on a TV show called
Drexell's Class
that Dabney was the star of. He had invited Julie to watch his daughter's gig, and Jamie had invited me. Harry Dean is a longtime friend of Dabney's; he was at the gig, too. I think he got up and sang with the band. We all went next door to Dan Tana's after the gig. Dan Tana's is a very famous restaurant that has been next door to the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard since the 1960s. Dabney, Harry, and a few others held court at a back table, and we were welcome. It was the first of a hundred nights that this gang of people would sit around Dan Tana's.

Julie is a very talented comedic actress and a full-on American 10. She was a Playboy Playmate and had been unceremoniously fired from a successful sitcom called
Growing Pains
after the star of the show was born again and thought he was making a statement. This was all before I met her.

If you believe in love at first sight, then that's what happened between Julie and me. She gave me a ride home and her phone number. We made a nonverbal, perfunctory agreement to go out once or twice to make sure. I had really only split from Britt about six months before. These types of things come along maybe a few times in your life, but there's no telling when it will happen. There was no rebound or quick fix attached to this one. We connected on every level. There was some interest in us as a couple from paparazzi types but on a much smaller level than with Britt. If we had played it up, it would have been more. Within a week or so, she would wind up living with us at Doheny Drive.

The Stray Cats were making what would be our last album at Virgin Studios in Beverly Hills with Jeff Baxter producing. Julie came to visit and helped me by watching TJ, who immediately loved her. I can admit to being very proud to have her show up at the studio and showing her off to the others with no real explanation. I know it's immature; it probably stems from some insecurity, but I have always been and still am that guy. Part of my charmed life has been that the few times I was really loved and in love, it was with women that could stop traffic and make the others jealous. I do enjoy it, too. It's part of the original rock-and-roll dream. It may seem shallow on the surface, but it is deep in my heart.

I wasn't ready for the commitment it was going to take with Julie. We were very close for a quite a few years. She traveled with me to Massapequa, and the whole family loved her. Everyone thought we would eventually get married. I can't exactly remember why we never did. She was totally cool, not driven by money in any way, and we were definitely in love. We broke up and got back together three times. She moved in and moved out. I had never gotten a divorce from Britt; it had something to do with insurance. I could've done it if I had wanted; it was some type of safety net to protect me from a commitment. I accept it as my mistake. I don't really believe in predetermined fate, but everything in life happens for a reason. Maybe I need to chalk the whole thing up to bad timing. For a drummer, it's not a good excuse, but it's honest.

At this point, I've developed a coping mechanism where I tend to better remember the positives and have trouble remembering the negatives when it comes to important life milestones. I tend to embrace it as a gift, but I understand that there is a little selective memory and cluelessness involved. I can't guarantee that the other people involved are as willing to understand this way of looking at it all. If I said that I have no regrets in life, it wouldn't be truthful. I've learned that it's how I accept and then deal with the regrets that have been the real test. Moving on is always the hard part. But somehow everybody does it. Better things do come along. I can easily go crazy from the what-ifs. So I've learned to remember the good stuff and be fuzzy on the bad. I stay in the exact now. It's the only way I stand a chance.

Julie and I had fun; she had a lot of friends, and she was very friendly with the people who lived in my apartment house. There were only a few flats in the building, and each of the tenants was a character. It was a real-life version of the TV show
Melrose Place
. Courtney and Natasha Wagner both lived there, and their dad, Hollywood legend and leading man Robert Wagner, came over sometimes. He was Hollywood royalty and a big presence. There was also a crazy tenant with a terminal disease who purposely clogged the old furnace and almost blew up the building. He had embezzled money from the homeowners' association. He was slowly going crazy from impending death and medication.

Julie and I went out and had a lot of friends and people stopping at my flat for coffee and just to hang out a lot. Julie booked the Roxbury Club on Friday nights with her friend Tia Carrere. We played there with the Cheap Dates every week for a year. It was the mid-1990s, and we went to the Gate, Hollywood Athletic Club, Tattoo in Beverly Hills, and Viper Room and always went to gigs at the Whisky and Roxy or drove out to the Palomino. I did my own gigs and did much smaller jobs than I had done in a while.

It was a good time, and by then I was used to life without either the Cats or Britt. TJ spent a couple of years back in London before his mom moved back to LA. I went back and forth a lot. It was all hard; the Cats didn't play at all and had quietly without fanfare broken up again. If I had been earning even a little with them, it would have made the whole thing easier. I did prove that I could lead a full life without them. I played with a lot of good musicians during this time.

Julie moved on and got married. We tried another time to get it together. We had a genuine, special time, but we couldn't close the deal. Sometimes a ship sails and it never comes back to port. I hold on to the positive memories of a certain era of my life that she was an important part of.

TJ was always a gifted drummer and played in the school orchestra; I helped them get extra equipment through the companies I worked with. I went to every school event and sports practice. I also took TJ everywhere I went. We made it work. He was comfortable in clubs, dressing rooms, and recording studios. At a session I was doing one time, the bass player on the date was trying to make small talk with him.

“Hey, little guy, do you know what this is? This is a bass,” the guy said.

“I know,” TJ answered matter-of-factly. “My friend is Bill Wyman. He plays bass in the Stones.”

The guy really didn't have an answer.

We called it “two guys together.” For as wacky as our lives seemed to the casual observer, I spent more time with my kid than anyone else I knew. During the five years that I coached Little League, there were a number of kids I had on my teams whose parents I rarely or never met. They were probably nice people but were so busy hustling in Beverly Hills or Century City that they had no time for their own kids. One misperception about rock and roll is that you're away on tour for months at a time and don't see your kids. The flip side is when you're home, you're really home. I know a lot of musicians who have tight relationships with their kids. Britt had moved back to LA and lived right there on Alta Loma Road, so TJ spent some nights and good quality time with her, too. This was extra helpful when I realized I wasn't going to make a million as a club owner and needed to go back on the road a little to keep us in our relative luxury.

I liked having the Sunset Boulevard address attached to the club and the whole concept of a clubhouse, but at the end of the day, you have to remember that regardless of where it's located, it is a business and needs to be looked after.

The Cat Club was a classic hole in the wall, a dive bar in the true sense of the term. It was located in a little row in the 8900 block of Sunset. Our neighbors were the famed Whisky a Go Go and Duke's Coffee Shop. Anyone who was around in LA at that time has probably been to all three. In the past, the same address had also been home to Sneaky Pete's, a bar and grill that was a hangout for the original Rat Pack. In the 1960s, it was the Galaxy, a folk-music-based coffeehouse and bar. All the history appealed to me but didn't help pay the rent. The club itself was long and thin with the bar on the side toward the back. It had a small upstairs that we used for guests, and there was a small office attached, where I spent thousands of hours sitting at the desk. I liked the base of operations that the club provided; I took any appointments there and let all my friends do the same. Over the years, I let countless people do interviews and photo shoots in the club and in the alleyway in the back.

When we first opened, the Cat Club was almost swanky. It had been a little restaurant and a computer store in the last two leases and needed a spruce-up. We managed to get a liquor license attached to the address; that in itself was a big accomplishment. I just made the place into what I thought the perfect dressing room should be: simply elegant but functional was the plan for the Cat Club. The place was the perfect size for a great party; the legal capacity was eighty-seven people. Black velvet couches and leopard-skin carpet was the theme. The industrial leopard-skin carpet handled at least ten years of dirty boots and spilled booze and still looked good in the dark. I made a deal with some local rock photographers I had worked with over the years to hang their framed works on the walls, and I played music from my own record collection. I borrowed a few ideas from some places I'd been in over the years, but I strongly believe that the Cat Club became the template for a certain type of rock-and-roll bar that has been copied many times since we first opened it. My personal favorite part of the whole place was the black-and-white awning in front that read in a classy, cursive font “The Cat Club 8911 On The Strip.” It was a landmark on Sunset for years and made it easy to give directions. We were forced to take it down in another example of corporate small-mindedness. The landlord wanted the whole strip of businesses in his building to be painted the same to make it easier for a big refinance he was doing on all his properties. He felt the sign and leopard-skin door made it too hodgepodge for his report to his bank. It was the turning point of my disillusionment. It broke my heart a little.

We almost accidently once had the whole concept franchised, and dozens of producers approached me about reality shows. For a few months, the whole place was wired for sound and live on camera over the Internet like a TV channel, and it was used for location filming many times. With a few of these ideas, we were ahead of the curve. I could have little charity events and use the place for showcases and record releases for any bands we liked or were friendly with. I never had that much juice in LA, but we could help out with the use of the place. The Cat Club was there for bands to play too loud and for bartenders to sling drinks, for another generation to live the dream, trying to make it in LA while trying to get laid along the way. I was the celebrity babysitter and punk rock patron for another watering hole, serving the would-be rock and rollers of a certain time period. I understood this. I just wanted to pay the rent and keep our little joint open as long as I could. This was my lot in club life, and I accepted it.

We were open for six months and struggling to keep it all going. At that point in time, the western end of Sunset Strip was the rock-and-roll side. The fancier, high-end nightclubs and hotels were farther east. One night we made a fateful decision to make a change and turn the place into a live-music venue. Over the past few weeks, I had been inviting true pals Bernard Fowler, Stevie Salas, and Carmine Rojas to sit in with me and do a bunch of cover songs for a bar tab and some fun. We just moved the couches out of the way, set the gear up right on the floor, invited friends to jam, and did live music once a week. All our friends turned up, and word of mouth spread; it turned into a successful night. Again, it wasn't the first all-star-type rock jam night ever, but come hell or high water, every Thursday night for the next fourteen years, there was a band with a couple of guys everybody knew on that homemade stage at midnight, slaughtering the FM classics. Since then, a lot of clubs have tried to capture that scene and that vibe. I know of a couple of places that had brief successful runs with a jam night, but the one at the Cat Club was special, maybe in the fact that I was playing myself in attempt to keep the business open. There was a certain honesty and necessary practicality to the whole thing.

After the first few times, the writing was on the wall about what to do with the club. It wasn't going to make it as a chic, snazzy rock-and-roll cocktail lounge like I had hoped. This is when, in the lingo of club land, the club tells you what to do with it. Steve and I went to Home Depot, bought plywood and nails, and along with longtime faithful bartender Kenny Merrill, we built a six-inch-high stage down one side of the room. We stapled the remnants of the leopard-skin carpet to the frame, and the infamous Cat Club stage was born. I brought a drum kit in and cobbled together a little PA from some small stage monitors we bought cheap with the sweetheart deal from Guitar Center, a few microphones I had in storage, and a couple of borrowed amps.

We slowly made the change to a live-music venue and hired band bookers with varying levels of success. We could only do door deals, but the bands that could draw some fans always made money. Any club owner will tell you that he or she will happily give the bands the door money if they bring the bodies. Bars want to sell booze; that's how you earn in this business, and you will do what it takes to get the people inside.