A Stray Cat Struts (25 page)

The police arrived, and a few of us were being taken to a local hospital and then to the police station for questioning over our part in the riot. On the way out, I slipped a plastic bag with my stash to Mike Peters and told him to hold it for me. I had a chipped tooth and was bruised, but nothing was broken. At the police station, I called a copper Barney Fife and compared their town to Mayberry after they were interrogating me and treating me like the bad guy. They didn't get the reference, which was good. We all drove back to London.

The other two guys flew back to Massapequa for Christmas. For some reason I can't remember, I stayed in London by myself. After a few days of sitting around, I started to get a little antsy. There was not much going on, and BBC television just showed the picture of the girl holding the balloon for fifteen hours a day. On top of it all, I was out of blow and a bit lonely. Not being a proper drug guy, I was never very good at getting the stuff, and no one was around to help this time. I called around a little, but it was Christmas, and even dealers take off for the holidays. I remembered giving the baggie to Mike. So I somehow got to one of the main stations, probably Victoria, got the right train, and made the right connections on British Rail to arrive in Rhyl, North Wales, on Christmas Eve 1980. I then asked around at the taxi stand and found a driver who knew Mike, who took me to his mom's house, where the family was having dinner. I managed this, I'm pretty sure, with no or very little money, wearing a T-shirt and leather jacket in the middle of a harsh winter.

Christmas in Wales—the whole extended family was there around the fireplace. It was a scene right out of a movie. They were understandably surprised when I turned up unannounced. Everyone greeted me and took me in as a member of the clan. They all knew Mike had been on tour with the Cats and were all proud of him and armed with questions for me. I had a few drinks with the folks; I seem to remember an elderly woman knitting by the fireplace, but I was trying to get Mike's attention.

He sensed this and took me to an upstairs bedroom where he had the baggie stashed in his sock drawer. Mike didn't use the stuff, so it was intact. I went to the bathroom, did a healthy whiff, and went back downstairs to Christmas in Wales. The whole gang was lovely, and I was more talkative now. The only slight wrinkle came when it was time to eat. I had gone back and forth a couple of times to the bathroom and had been steadily drinking wine and beer since I'd arrived. I was feeling just fine, but in that state, I didn't have an appetite and didn't want to appear rude or ungrateful. These people had just taken in an uninvited, rough-looking, 120-pound, frozen, greasy-haired, leather-jacketed New York stranger to their family holiday dinner. So when the Christmas goose arrived with all the trimmings, I had to keep pushing it around the plate to make it look like I had eaten it. It was real home cooking, and I'm sure it was amazing.

After dinner, Mike and a few others took me around their village, where I met all the locals at the pub and neighborhood disco that was a having a special do that night. Word spread fast, and in the pub there were quite a few people who wanted to meet me and say hello. The Cats were currently on TV and the radio, and it was a small town; Mike's band being on the tour was big news. One guy, who thought he was the town mod and tough guy, wanted to start some aggro with me, the visiting teddy boy celebrity. With the day I had just had, I couldn't even muster my usual vitriol for any comeback or response. The guy was so disappointed by my lack of interest that he wound up just walking away in the end in a kind of disgruntled defeat. The best way to win this fight turned out to be with pure indifference. I made it back to London the next day and carried on with life.

Mike's band changed their name to the Alarm and went on to have success. We always managed to stay in touch, as I have with a few true pals I still have from those early days in London. I saw the Alarm do their most famous show at a huge open-air concert at UCLA—I think it was televised on MTV. We lived in Stone Canyon at the time, which is close to UCLA, and the guys came over to my house after their big show. On a different occasion, Brian and I got onstage with them at the Palladium.

Sometime in the 1990s, Mike was diagnosed with cancer. The prognosis was not good, and I believe the doctors told him to get his affairs in order. He opted out of traditional treatment and got heavily involved with a self-healing method. I don't know all the ins and outs of it, but he continued to play gigs as a casting-out type of therapy and fought the cancer like an enemy within. He miraculously went into remission and stayed that way for ten years. We continued to stay in touch and would see each other's bands when we could.

Sometime in the early 2000s, he contacted me with an idea for a new band. After a few lineup and name changes, we've become the Jack Tars. The band is a loud, acoustic, traveling jukebox playing the hit songs from our respective bands. Each guy sings his own songs with accompaniment from the others. The gig is peppered with stories about the genesis of the songs and clever banter and brings some big onstage personalities. It makes for a good show and a fun night out.

It was during the early days of doing gigs with what would become the Jack Tars, with the overwhelming support of the others, I had the confidence to try to sing a few songs. I'm not a real singer, but I love singers and have always envied real singers. The natural ability to sing is a great gift. I've always been pretty good at playing the drums and can comfortably play anywhere, anytime, in front of anyone. Singing is another story, and I found it hard in the past. At Mike's insistence, I sang the Cats songs during the set. The audience accepted me doing my own songs, and it made sense to me right away. I earned the right to sing these songs a long time ago, and the fans excuse my lack of vocal expertise because they want to see one of the Cats do those songs. I like to compare it to Ringo doing a Beatles song. I tell the audience that I was the third-best singer in the Stray Cats. Now I can sing quite a few and have learned the most important thing is to pick the right songs. I'm not going to try to do Otis Redding or Elvis. I owe it to Mike for encouraging me to just do it.

True pal and original Sex Pistol Glen Matlock was very helpful on this front, too. We've known each other since the early days of the Cats in London. The first official bonding act of our new rhythm section was Glen offering to pay the dry cleaning bill that I incurred from an old drinking incident with him at the Venue in Victoria at some gig years before. I told him I appreciated it but that the jacket in question was lost long ago. Glen and I used to drink together, and now we don't drink together. Unbeknownst to me, he gave it up, independently, around the same time as I did. Everything else is the same. The love of rock and roll and the need to pay the bills win every time. Glen and I have driven in his car to and from gigs all over England. We had a blast stopping for cream teas and visiting historic monuments on the way to the shows. A Stray Cat and a Sex Pistol, stopping and making detours involving heavy map reading, for a cream tea lunch in an English country village? What has the world come to? Glen's hospitality and friendship over the years have helped me beyond words. Having a luxury suite waiting in a good part of leafy London is a great relief when trying to hustle up a rockabilly life. In a spooky small rock-and-roll world coincidence, Glen had a similar incident at the same club in Blackpool the year before our adventure there. It was through his encouragement that I decided to write this book in the first place. We've recently done a record with mutual true pal Earl Slick, confirming my sneaky suspicion that there are really only twenty-seven people in the world and they're just running around all over the place.

So back in the van, Mike had dropped this bomb, and we were all speechless. A bunch of old rockers were crying in a van at a motorway services truck stop. We drove to the next place in silence. The sound of everyone's thoughts was loud. Sometimes silence can be the perfect form of communication. Everyone knew what everyone else was thinking without the use of words. We were near the end of this run of dates, and Mike got through them. I went home and didn't hear from him for a while. I've since learned that he did a few rounds of chemotherapy and radiation then.

Mike has always been that “rock and roll can save your soul” kind of cat. No negativity is allowed to ride on him for free. This is real heavy stuff, but he's the type of guy that does beat this. He's also the type of guy that does something about it. When he told me he was going to start a charitable organization, I told him I'd always help, no matter what. Be careful of what you agree to in advance.

The new charity was to be called Love Hope Strength and would do rock-and-roll type events to raise money for cancer research. I figured I could handle that. The first event was a climb of the interior staircase of the Empire State Building on April 16, 2007. We were set to play a little gig on the observation deck on the eighty-sixth floor. I was born in New York City and walked past the Empire State Building a thousand times but had never been inside. I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone—do a good deed and do a little hometown tourism.

A few of us were on the stair-climb event, including longtime true pal Billy Duffy from the Cult. I've known Billy since 1981, when he had an after-school, pre-rock-star job with another true pal, Lloyd Johnson, at Johnson's Clothing on the Kings Road. Everybody shopped and hung out at Johnson's. BD has gone on to make a dozen great albums; I've seen his band play twenty times, and he's a current buddy whom I see all the time. We are charter members of Hike Club, a loose affiliation of idle musicians who stay marginally fit by hiking Franklin Canyon in Beverly Hills just about every day. He has known Mike almost as long as I have, confirming the twenty-seven-people theory. Other stair climbers included true pals—the excellent bassist and longtime neighbor Jimmy Ashhurst and the Pontiff, original Sex Pistol, and king over us all, Steve Jones. He's one of my best pals ever, and I continually blame him for just about everything I've ever done. He's the guitar player on
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols,
an album that is very important and influential to all of us. Along with Elvis Presley's
Sun Sessions
and
Gene Vincent Rocks! And the Blue Caps Roll,
it made up the three records that really shaped me as a musician and style-conscious cat. I got into rockabilly around the same time as I did punk rock, and that record was an influence. I feel honored to have both Steve and Glen as true pals.

Billy and I were in pretty good shape for the Empire State Building climb, and once we got into a rhythm, it was very doable and kind of cool to see the skeleton of the most famous building in New York City's skyline. I met LHS cofounder James Chippendale that day, and he and I were to become fast true pals. BD and I blew away the competition on the stair climb. He had a little burst at the end to pass me in a friendly race. There was a major storm that day in New York City, so we did the gig in the old gift shop on the eighty-sixth floor. This place is in a time warp out of the 1950s, complete with old souvenirs and original employees. We set up and played with producer Tony Visconti recording the whole thing. Later that night, we played a show in a club in the Village. My daughter, Madison, joined me on the first of our adventures together. No problem. Little did I know that this would turn out to be the easiest one we would do.

How could a drummer from Massapequa possibly conceive of hiking to the base camp of Mount Everest? Mike had planned the next event to symbolize conquering cancer by climbing the mountain and doing the highest concert ever performed. I had agreed to be on the team that was going to attempt this in October 2007. Team members were to include Mike; super-talented guitarist, singer, and songwriter Glenn Tilbrook from Squeeze, whom the Cats had done shows with in the 1980s; Cyril Curnin, singer; and Jamie West-Oram, guitarist from 1980s hit makers the Fixx. Cy is a spectacular classic English front man, and we would become close friends. The eclectic lineup was complemented by English whiz blues guitarist Nick Harper, whose mother had passed from cancer a year before.

When it comes to charitable endeavors, I'm best served by a small-picture, get-directly-involved type of approach. Some of these guys like Geldof—and, in this case, Mike—are able to look at a very big picture, but I don't have the head for it. LHS is easily researched, and they're doing a lot of big stuff. All these things we've done and they continue to do is readily available to see. I would like to think that I climbed a couple of mountains to help cure cancer, but I really did it because my true pal Mikey Boy Peters asked me to do it. I always say that I'm glad he didn't ask me to go deep-sea diving to find a cure. It may be the same mind-set that makes you part of the rhythm section. Drummers don't often write symphonies, but they will get their hands dirty and hang out with the crew.

I had no real concept of how hard this trip was going to be. I just did my daily hiking with my dog, Lucy the golden retriever, and tried not to think about it too much. When events are booked so far in advance, I tend to think the world will end before they arrive. So far, this hasn't happened, and we're all still here, but everyone has his or her process.

I flew on my own to Bangkok, stayed overnight at the airport hotel, and the next day flew to Kathmandu, Nepal. I was the only one coming from LA. Most of the thirty or so other people on this trek were from Dallas, where cofounder James Chippendale is from, or Denver, where former LHS director and fantastic woman Shannon Foley Henn is from. The rest were from England; I didn't know anyone until the UK contingent arrived.

This place was the first time I had ever seen the real third world, and I was unprepared for what I saw. There were open sewage and trash dumps everywhere, wild packs of dogs, and seemingly feral children in torn clothing roaming the potholed streets. People holding up traffic, leading farm animals around in an urban environment, crossing the streets in front of taxis beeping at them. No one seemed too stressed, but there was a general feeling of built-in despair, and the quest seemed to be about pure survival. I thought it made Tijuana look like Beverly Hills. We were in the one Western enclave of town where the embassies and government buildings were housed. We stayed in a nice hotel, aptly named Hotel Yak & Yeti. It was comparable to the older mid-level Holiday Inns.