Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind (21 page)

74

I’M IN A TRANSITIONAL PERIOD, SO I DON’T WANT TO KILL YOU

Three years later, Quentin Tarantino surveyed the state of the movie business in the nineties, when the realization sank in among studio executives that the rules for commercial success had been upended. “Basically, that whole Touchstone formula that was existing in the eighties, that couldn’t miss, is missing now. It doesn’t work,” he said gleefully. “The movies that are, like, sequels to the real big ones work because the audience has an investment in the franchise. But either the movies that used to be making $100 million are barely making $20 million or they’re not even making that. I think right now is the most exciting time in Hollywood since 1971. Because Hollywood is never more exciting than when you don’t know.”

Tarantino did as much as anyone to upend those expectations when his
Pulp Fiction
did over $100 million at the American box office, reviving John Travolta’s career and making the multiplexes safe for chronology-scrambling movies about foulmouthed gangsters making unlikely pop-culture references and groping toward a state of grace. (Unfortunately, that became a formula too.) In 1993, Tarantino was filming
Pulp Fiction;
the same year, sensing a tidal change in taste without really understanding it, Disney acquired Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s Miramax, the production company behind Tarantino.

Dazed and Confused,
Richard Linklater’s pitch-perfect comedy about the last day of school in a Texas town in 1976, didn’t do as much box office, but it laid out a new, looser way forward for movie comedies, and launched the careers of a large ensemble cast, including Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, and Milla Jovovich.

By 1993, River had been acting long enough—over a decade since he showed up at the
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
ranch—that he was a seasoned veteran. But he was young enough that he was in a good position to surf the wave of generational change washing through Hollywood. He was, for example, younger than Matthew McConaughey.

Bill Clinton won the 1992 presidential election and moved into the White House in 1993. Just forty-six, he represented a new generation: the first American president born after World War II. (River served as his opening act at an early-morning campaign rally in Florida, playing music for a crowd of thousands of voters.)

Nineteen ninety-three was also the year of the first web browser, and the debut of
Wired
magazine. Culture was rapidly decentralizing, both through technology and changing taste, but the transition provoked anxiety. When Nirvana hit the top of the charts in 1992 and made the cover of
Rolling Stone,
Kurt Cobain wore a handmade T-shirt to the cover shoot. Its message:
CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK
. It was a gesture born not just out of surprise that the band had catapulted from the cultural margins to the center, but out of dismay that the margins themselves had collapsed.

75

IF I HAD A HI-FI

The onetime dogfather of Gainesville was spending less and less time in Florida. After
The Thing Called Love
wrapped, he officially broke up with Solgot; they parted on amicable terms and she moved to San Francisco to work as a masseuse. While River and Mathis were smitten with each other, they didn’t have the easy hippie domesticity that he and Solgot had found. One friend commented later, “I don’t think their relationship would have lasted.”

Some fans started making pilgrimages to Gainesville specifically to seek out River. One group of young Japanese female tourists came into a bar where River was having a beer, said a woman who was working there, and “started crying and trying to touch him. It was a weird scenario and it really freaked him out.”

River considered leaving Florida, maybe giving away the Micanopy property to charity. He talked about moving to Boston, or Canada, or Athens, Georgia—he had spent time there playing music and hanging out with Michael Stipe. What kept him in Gainesville was Aleka’s Attic.

With enough time to recover from the shock of the Island rejection, River had thrown himself back into his music. Violist Tim Hankins and bassist Josh McKay were gone, having started a new group. River didn’t replace Hankins, but he recruited Sasa Raphael, a friend of Joaquin’s, to play bass. With Rain and drummer Josh Greenbaum, they all went into the Pro Media Recording Studio in Gainesville. River paid for the studio time, and for the services of Grammy-nominated recording engineer Mark Pinske (a Frank Zappa veteran).

The sessions, costing thousands of dollars a week, happened sporadically for over a year whenever River was in Gainesville, ultimately adding up to about three months in the studio. Before River had to start filming
Dark Blood,
he made a final monthlong push, wanting to complete enough material for an album.

“River was in charge of everything,” Pinske said. “Whatever River wanted, we did. He was a workhorse. He’d want to go, go, go, and sometimes we’d get past the point of no return.”

Recording would typically last from noon until 6
A.M.
the following day. After eighteen hours, River would collapse, sometimes falling asleep in his clothes, cradling his guitar. Heart made a daily appearance with health drinks and vegetarian platters, helping to keep everyone’s strength up for the marathon sessions.

River kept writing song after song—after he finished each one, he would declare, “It’s brilliant, brilliant.” If anyone offered him advice or suggestions, he would blow them off, saying he didn’t want to compromise the original idea. During the course of the sessions, he got a staggering ninety songs down on tape, but many of them were unpolished. River would quickly lose interest in fleshing out his material—he always had another song he wanted to get down.

“We were in overdrive,” Raphael said. River experimented with unusual sonic ideas, such as doing vocals through a long tube or recording windshield wipers in the parking lot and incorporating the rhythm into a song.

Studio owner Dave Smadbeck, who was also working on the sessions, advised River that he needed more focus, with no effect. “He was being so creative that it was just one raw piece after another,” he said. “He just had to get it out at any cost.”

John had come up from Costa Rica to visit the family. He tried to be at every session, but didn’t have the stamina for River’s relentless pace. One time, when River found his father asleep on the studio couch, he positioned a microphone near his mouth to record his snores. Turning on his video camera to capture the scene, he then “interviewed” John. He would ask his father various questions—and each time, in response, John would snore. River and Joaquin were both helpless with laughter; when John woke up, he thought it was funny, too, and watched the video over and over. Neither father nor son could fix the other’s problems, but they could take pleasure in each other’s company.

The tracks, compiled after River’s death and leaked under the title
Never
Odd or Even
(also sometimes called
Zoo
), showcased the strengths and weaknesses of Aleka’s Attic. On the positive side, the band was in sync; Sasa Raphael proved to be an inventive bassist; Rain Phoenix had a lovely, warm voice, and got most of the lead vocals. On the negative side, the tracks felt more like sketches than actual songs. Some of them were extremely short—“Scales & Fishnails” was just forty-eight seconds long—and would have benefited from choruses, bridges, and other fundamentals of songwriting. When River didn’t write a melody or a hook, the band either noodled pleasantly or settled into a languorous groove. In person, River’s charisma (even with his hair over his face) was sufficient to make up for these flaws, but without his physical presence, Aleka’s Attic was just another pretty good local band not ready to go nationwide.

The best song was “Note to a Friend.” “My days are heavy / Of the inside of your denial,” River and Rain harmonized, transforming surreal gloom into a pretty melody, while River did some open-chord strumming. Their voices blended and separated with the ease that came after years of playing together. It sounded lovely, but at seventy-two seconds, it also sounded like the introduction to an unwritten song.

River’s preferred mode of lyric writing was to string together evocative non sequiturs: “Let’s start with nothing,” “Backwards motion, all fall down,” “Don’t want to hear from your satellite.” He had grown fond of palindromes (phrases that have the same letters when read backward):
Never Odd or Even
was one, as were the song titles “Dog God” and “Senile Felines.” A palindrome promises the ability to reverse time: to return to your youth with the knowledge of how to survive it or to bring your childhood innocence into the present day. River could do those things in music, if nowhere else.

76

FIRST NIGHT AT THE VIPER ROOM

In Los Angeles, a building seems historic if it makes it ten years without being knocked down for a gas station, which made 8852 Sunset Boulevard the Stonehenge of L.A. drinking establishments. It dated back to Prohibition times, when it was a speakeasy partially owned by “Lucky” Luciano. (Since Luciano was the supreme boss of organized crime in the United States, the same could likely be said of many drinking establishments.)

In the 1940s, it was called the Melody Room, and was controlled by “Bugsy” Siegel, a childhood friend of Al Capone who became a bootlegger and hit man; he had come to Los Angeles to develop gambling syndicates, and palled around with movie stars and studio heads. He poured an enormous amount of mob money into building Las Vegas, specifically the Flamingo Hotel; in 1947, he was shot twice in the head.

The Melody Room hosted an array of cool musical acts, including Dizzy Gillespie, Esquivel, and Billy Ward and His Dominoes. Circa 1969, it was renamed Filthy McNasty’s, having been bought by two German brothers who legally renamed themselves Filthy McNasty and Wolfgang McNasty. Filthy was the showman, who cruised around town in his antique hearse or his stretch limo. One bartender remembered, “On nights when a hired band failed to show, Filthy climbed onstage with his all-girl band.” His big hit: “You’re Breakin’ My Heart, You Tear It Apart, So Fuck You.”

In 1974, the British glam-rock band the Sweet had a Sunset Strip photo session for the cover of their second album,
Desolation Boulevard
(featuring the immortal “Fox on the Run”). They took the picture just outside Filthy McNasty’s; the club’s sign can be seen in the upper-left-hand corner of the cover.

In the eighties, after the McNasty brothers sold out, the bar became an anonymous watering hole called the Central. “It was a dive,” said musician Morty Coyle. By 1993, the Sunset Strip had been rendered generally uncool by the lingering aroma of heavy metal and Aqua Net, but the Central was particularly low rent, with sawdust on the floor and a peanut vending machine mounted on the wall. “Anybody could get a gig there,” Coyle said. “Anybody. There was a great AA meeting at the Central during the day on Mondays. It was like therapy—at the point of the problem.”

The musician Chuck E. Weiss, an old drinking buddy of Tom Waits and the subject of Rickie Lee Jones’s 1979 hit single “Chuck E.’s in Love,” took up a weekly residency at the Central. He had been playing every Monday night for eleven years when one of the co-owners died. The remaining owner, Anthony Fox, didn’t want to run the business—he had another job, and the Central was piling up bills.

Weiss alerted Johnny Depp, who had been coming to his Monday-night shows with his pal Sal Jenco. Adam Duritz, lead singer of Counting Crows, explained what went down with Depp and Jenco: “When the Central was closing down, the idea of Chuck not having a place to play was just terrible to them. So in order to keep Chuck playing and have a place for all their friends to hang out, they started the Viper Room.”

Both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Frank Stallone (Sylvester’s brother) made bids on the property, but Depp won out. Essentially on a lark, he put down a reported $350,000 to acquire fifty-one percent of the club’s controlling company, making him CEO of “Safe in Heaven Dead.” Fox retained forty-nine percent and was named vice president, drawing a salary of $800 a week; Jenco became general manager (and had a share of Depp’s stake).

Depp renamed the club the Viper Room—a “viper” was 1920s drug slang for, depending on who you asked, a heroin user or a pot smoker. Depp explained the inspiration as “a group of musicians in the thirties who called themselves vipers. They were reefer heads and they helped start modern music.”

The new regime tore out all the Central’s decor (such as it was) and refurbished the club in basic black. It was a small space, holding about 250 patrons; the club was built into the side of a hill. The entrance was on the side street of Larrabee; after coming in, you could linger in the downstairs bar or head up the stairs to the main room, where there was a small stage and another bar. A VIP room was tucked behind one-way glass, and an exit led directly to Sunset Boulevard. One private booth was reserved for Depp and his agent, Tracy Jacobs, adorned with a sign reading
DON’T FUCK WITH IT.

Depp’s stated plan was to make the ambience cooler, but to maintain the Viper Room as a low-key joint where he and his friends could hang out. Like River, or Dan Aykroyd, who had opened the House of Blues on the other end of the Strip, Depp loved music—and now he had a place where he could jump onstage whenever he felt like it.

What Depp hadn’t counted on was that the very fact of his owning the club would alter its status—just as in quantum mechanics, you can’t observe a particle without changing its condition. “The place became a scene instantly when we opened it,” Depp complained. “I never had any idea it was going to do that. I really thought it was going to be just this cool little underground place. You can’t even see the place—there’s no sign on Sunset. It’s just a black building, and the only sign is on Larrabee: a tiny little sign, real subtle. And I figured it’d be low-key.”

Of course, if Depp had
really
wanted to keep everything low-key, he wouldn’t have booked Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The band—Gainesville’s most famous residents before River Phoenix—owed Depp a favor for his appearance in the video for “Into the Great White Open,” and so agreed to play a benefit on opening night. Well, all of them except drummer Stan Lynch, who had recently moved back to Florida and didn’t see why he should return to L.A. for a free show.

A pissed-off Petty directed the band’s management office, “Just tell Stan, ‘Never mind, Ringo’s going to do it.’ ” Within twenty-four hours, Lynch was back in town.

Depp was unaware of that drama until years later. When informed, he mused, “God, it would have been cool to see Ringo play.”

Weiss was astonished at how quickly attitudes had changed toward his old haunt: “People who had never walked into the Central felt very strongly about being there.” People who made it inside for the Viper Room’s opening night on August 14, 1993, included Quentin Tarantino, Julien Temple, Mary Stuart Masterson, Crispin Glover, and Tim Burton.

Part of the reason the Viper Room was immediately trendy was that although the Sunset Strip was arguably the heart of Los Angeles, by 1993 it was covered in arteriosclerotic heavy-metal plaque. The eighties had made the Strip synonymous with hair-metal bands. A few of them became internationally famous (Mötley Crüe, Poison), but most had nothing more to show for their time in L.A. than some herpes sores. In 1991, when rock fans moved on to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, big hair and screeching vocals were immediately out of date. The metal party was over and “alternative” was cool.

The most storied of the Sunset Strip’s rock temples was the Whisky a Go Go, right across the street from the Viper Room. “There used to be graffiti by Morrison and Hendrix on the dressing room’s ceiling panels,” punk-rock legend Henry Rollins said of the Whisky. “That’s pretty amazing.” The club opened in 1964 (there was an earlier outpost in Chicago), and with live music and dancing girls soon became the center of the L.A. rock scene. For a while, the house band was the Doors, who played dozens of shows until the night Jim Morrison blurted out “Mother, I wanna fuck you” at the climax of “The End.” Since then, it had hosted everyone from Van Halen to Guns N’ Roses.

On the corner of Sunset and Larrabee, sharing a physical building with the Viper Room, was a liquor store. Just down the street was Tower Records, which by 1993 had switched most of its stock from vinyl to CDs, and still provided employment opportunities for musicians who needed to pay the rent.

Close on the heels of the Tom Petty show came another impossibly hot ticket: country legend Johnny Cash had signed with Rick Rubin’s American Recordings label (which had just changed its name from Def American Recordings, holding a mock funeral to bury the “Def,” with Al Sharpton presiding). Cash did a solo acoustic gig on the Viper Room stage; the club was soon hailed as the hippest room in town.

The Viper Room was quickly turning into a giant VIP room, a place where on many nights the audience was more famous than the performers. The most exclusive spot within the Viper Room, unusually, was not the actual VIP room, but the club’s offices, where Depp could sometimes be found. When he got bored, he would watch the Viper Room entrance through a closed-circuit TV and instruct whoever was working the door on whether to admit particular individuals to the club or turn them away.

Many of the regulars were Friends of Johnny, including actor Vincent D’Onofrio, musician Evan Dando (of the Lemonheads), the band Thelonious Monster, and rock legend Iggy Pop. By most accounts, the people working at the Viper Room were warmhearted and generally not assholes—but you might never learn that if you didn’t already have some celebrity juice. The Wallflowers got a weekly gig at the Viper Room right after it opened; they didn’t even have a record contract at the time. Singer Jakob Dylan said, “We just walked in, brought Sal a tape, and for whatever reason, he gave us a chance to play.” It surely didn’t hurt that his father was Bob Dylan.

Some nights, a limousine would shuttle select personalities back and forth between the Viper Room and a hotel room at the Chateau Marmont, on the other end of the Strip. They could do some serious drug consumption off premises, and then move the party back to the Viper Room.

By the early nineties, the L.A. music world had migrated east, to the boho district of Silver Lake, home of hipsters and adult kickball games; folkie/rapper Beck exemplified the new scene, even before he had the surprise hit single “Loser.” While the Viper Room would attract rock stars looking for an intimate place to play—Lenny Kravitz and Stephen Stills both got onstage multiple times (not together)—it rarely booked musicians from the east side of town. But the club did get Beck to play—once.

George Drakoulias, a producer at American Recordings who got name-checked on the Beastie Boys’
Paul’s Boutique,
remembered the show as “a very bizarre night. He did some break dancing and things like that, and people didn’t know what to make of it. They just stared at him.” When Beck played a solo on an electric leaf blower, Depp personally pulled the plug on him.

“Johnny lost interest in the place really quick,” said one former employee. He mostly left the logistics of running the club to Jenco and dropped by when it entertained him. Sometimes at the end of the night, Depp would host a private party for his friends. Kate Moss might get behind the bar; Naomi Campbell might dance with security; Depp might have a long conversation with Chrissie Hynde about religion. On those nights, Depp had reduced the Viper Room to its essence: a party room for him and his celebrity pals.