Running With Monsters: A Memoir (6 page)

They were right. They had real careers. But Pete and I were full bore and wide open. We were all in. Chris was in just because he was a student then and could arrange his schedule to accommodate the band. It was all good to him. And he wasn’t a drunk or a doper. He earned a doctorate in linguistics and another one in architecture. He didn’t go out. He didn’t party. It was music or school with him. Chris saved his money. He didn’t spend one unnecessary dime. He even scrimped with his per diem money. But he managed to pay his way through school and eventually bought a house in France from the dough he made in the band.

We toured
Next Saturday Afternoon,
and I felt like a musical success. My ego was in full bloom. And it was time to go cut a third record. It was 1989. Pete and Chris were still on board and we had picked up Rob Graves to play bass and had Mike Martt and Dix Denney, who covered the vacated guitar posts. John Doe from X produced us. Looking back on it,
Stormy Weather
was a good title. It reflected the vibe, both inside and out. There was pressure with this one. Everyone expected us to have a hit and break nationally. Relativity Records had given us a real budget and we recorded at Existia Music Group, L.A., a real state-of-the-art facility. Welcome, my son, to the machine. I was absolutely as convinced as any drunken, drug-abusing songwriter could be that “Sammy Hagar Weekend,” a sincere homage to the life of the teenage hard-rock fan and a shout-out to the embodiment of the working-class rocker, Fontana, California’s hometown hero, Sammy Hagar, was destined to be a huge hit.

’Cause it’s a Sammy Hagar weekend

It’s a big man’s day

We got a Metallica T-shirt

Got a little tiny baby mustache

Got a jacked-up Camaro

We’re sitting in the parking lot at Anaheim Stadium

Drinking beer

Smoking some pot

Snorting coke

And then drive

Drive over 55, yeah!

I had been that kid at the stadium. I knew what it meant to be out on a weekend like that, and I knew there were kids all over the country who knew what it meant too. Pete and I did not see eye to eye on the song at all. He didn’t even want it on the record. “That’s just a joke song,” he sneered. “Save it for your solo record, man.”

My contempt for Pete grew. How dare he be so dismissive of my great song?

“This song will be the hit off the record. You watch. You don’t know,” I slurred back at him.

John Doe, our producer—who had always been a huge inspiration to me as a songwriter—told us, “These songs are fucking amazing! You don’t play ’em very well … but they’re really, really solid.” Once I heard that, there was no doubt in my mind that this would be the band’s shining moment and our big breakout. Then the record came out.

“Sammy Hagar Weekend” didn’t go national. It stayed regional. But it did get people excited. We sold out the Palace in Hollywood. Two thousand people at one shot. We sold out a similarly sized club—the Channel—in Boston. I felt like we had made an impression. “Oh, my God, we’re rolling! There’s no stopping us!” I’d tell everybody. But, in the end, the record didn’t hit the mark I thought it would. It didn’t hit the mark anybody thought it would. My management team of Danny Heaps and Nick Wechsler took steps to make the band break. They set up a showcase for record-industry executives at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. It was a tiny, tiny space with a stage not much bigger than a postage stamp, but it had history in that any number of well-respected, big-time musicians had done some very special shows there through the years.

“Now, Bob,” Danny said. “We need you to be sharp. Be on point. Be cohesive and … don’t be fucked up!”

“This is an important gig, Bob,” Nick said, chiming in.

I knew it. I could sense it. Here we were, primed for an eight o’clock show in front of forty different record company executives.

We blew it.

We were nervous. I had the brilliant idea to parody U2’s recent ZooTV tour, throughout which Bono and the lads commented on celebrity and media through the use of costumes, masks, and multiple large-screen televisions. They played stadiums. We were at McCabe’s. The microscopic stage cluttered with small-screen TVs just didn’t work. Worse, we were out of synch. Our shows had always been messy, but this one needed to be tight. It wasn’t. I showed up stone-cold sober and I couldn’t remember the last time I had done that. I tried my absolute best. Pete, who had just about reached the end of the line with me, didn’t give a fuck. It was another Thelonious Monster train wreck. Whatever game plan we had before we went onstage didn’t amount to anything. Everyone just did what they wanted to do. This was a crucial moment and even I realized that we had reached a point where we couldn’t be like this anymore. We needed organization. The poor performance we gave and the tepid response we drew devastated me. I knew we were good and I knew we could do better, but nobody but me seemed to want to put in the effort that night. We crashed and burned.

The bright spot was that Bob Buziak, then the president of RCA Records, was in the audience. He was seen as something of a genius because he had taken a bunch of old rock-and-roll hits and packaged them together as the soundtrack for the movie
Dirty Dancing
. He saw Thelonious Monster play at Raji’s, a popular Hollywood club, and he approached me after the show.

“Bob, I love your songs, man,” he said as he shook my hand.

“Yeah? Thanks. What other songwriters do you like?” I asked as I tried to figure out if he was a real music fan or just some slick businessman.

“Oh, so many. I’m a huge songwriter fan. Off the top of my head, I guess I’d say I like Tom Petty, Neil Young, Tom Waits …”

Well, at least we spoke the same language.

“I’d love to sign you, Bob,” he said, but there was a slight hesitation in his voice.

“You’d like to sign me, but … ,” I said.

“I’m not interested in the band.”

I understood his reasons. He definitely didn’t want or need the trouble that a bunch of drug addicts would inevitably bring. He was a fan of songwriters. He had signed Lucinda Williams and Michael Penn. He liked things to be simple and easy with as little drama as possible. He offered me a deal and I signed immediately. I didn’t even think of the band. My ego told me that I was the rock star, not them. What else was I supposed to do? I had just come off
Stormy Weather
and that was a lot of work. After you write songs like that, you need to rest up and recharge and get your mind right for the next round. The only way I knew how to recharge involved lots and lots of drugs. But now that I was signed to a major label, I was under a microscope. There was a lot of money involved and I was expected to produce. Bob knew I was in no shape to flesh out a complete song, so he hooked me up with other songwriters and musicians in the hope that they might steer me toward that elusive Big Hit Record I seemed unable to write. There were some impressive people I was paired with. Al Kooper, who played with Dylan when he went electric; Pete Anderson, who had brought some dirty and authentic Bakersfield punch to Dwight Yoakam’s records; Stan Lynch, from Tom Petty’s band the Heartbreakers; Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar, a premier L.A. studio guitarist who had left a mighty footprint on the sound of every Los Angeles–based singer-songwriter from the early seventies. They were supposed to help me, but they shut down all my ideas.

“You can’t write a song about heroin, Bob!”

I can’t write a song about heroin? They say write what you know, and for the past several years, that had been what I knew best … along with alcohol and amphetamines. I was a doper. I was a doper before I started the band. It was who I was, I thought. Did people give Keith Richards shit when he wrote “Dead Flowers”?

Well, if I can’t write about heroin, maybe I can write about religion, I thought. Everybody can relate to that, right? The reaction was swift. “You can’t use Jesus’s name in a song title, Bob. Are you nuts? People get offended. People who buy records!”

I thought I’d write a love song. I tried to write one with Victoria Williams. I had always had a huge crush on her, but she was married to Peter Case. That pent-up emotion came out in our song. It was darkly beautiful. It was about a girl who committed suicide and the observations of a man who once loved her while he ate cake at her funeral. I played it for RCA … and they hated it. My manager Danny Heaps thought I was an idiot to even attempt to write something like that. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Bob?” he yelled at me. “You write a song about a girl who kills herself and you’re eating cake at her funeral? Who the fuck wants to hear something like that?” I started to become resentful. “If all the people I keep getting hooked up with are such great songwriters, why aren’t they writing hits for themselves?” I asked.

Maybe I just wasn’t paired with the right people. I went out to Nashville to work with country rocker Steve Earle, who had a reputation almost as wild as mine. He was high the whole time I was there and stayed holed up in a bunker he had on his property. He lived in this weird, ramshackle two-story house. It was like the capital of White Trash City, USA. There was a decrepit, aluminum-sided aboveground swimming pool in the backyard and a dug-out bunker area where his wife and kids weren’t allowed to go. It was a freaky scene and a huge waste of time. Maybe if I had been left to my own devices, I could have done something. I know I had songs in me.

Worse, I was so in awe of all these people and what they had done in the past that I listened to everything they said, no matter how ridiculous. Al Kooper is a great guy and a talented musician, but by the time I worked with him in 1988, he hadn’t written a hit since “This Diamond Ring” for Gary Lewis and the Playboys back in the midsixties. Flea, who was aware of my difficulties, said, “Don’t you see, man? You need to be back in that little room and to play with guys in your own band.”

He was referencing the little twin bungalows that sat at the southeast corner of Fountain and Gardner in the heart of Hollywood, where I had lived with the band in a pair of ramshackle cottages that first saw life in the 1930s but were now so weathered and had sheltered so many lives through the years that they stood as haggard and rickety as I was. It was a world away from the sterile Hollywood Hills environment that I’d used my record company advance to put myself in.

Fountain and Gardner was a real paradise for me. It was the last place I had felt creative, as we rehearsed in the second house’s front bedroom. I wrote “Sammy Hagar Weekend,” probably the band’s biggest hit, from our album
Next Saturday Afternoon,
there. It was creative and vibrant and cheap. The band members had paid $100 a month for the rehearsal space and I paid $215 for my rent. Keith Morris, front man of Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, had converted the garage of the other bungalow and called that home. It was a chaotic scene, but I could work there. The place was always packed with local musicians and people visiting from out of town. In the back, we had a garden with a patio just made for drinking. Billy Zoom, the splayed-legged, Gretsch-slinging guitarist from the band X, had earlier purchased a brand-new bread truck with his bandmates and then had gotten down to the serious business of converting the inside of the hulking machine to a rolling hideaway. When he finished his project, the results were outstanding. It had heat, comfortable couches, a television, and an upper loft area for sleeping. He was a craftsman, and when X had gotten tired of their machine, Thelonious Monster bought it and parked it in the garden just to have another area in which to relax and enjoy this little private world we had created.

It was like being in a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of faces, some that were well-known on the scene and others, like those of the groupie girls, that were more anonymous. It didn’t matter because everyone was always welcome. The guys from Sunset Strip metal band Ratt would drop by, and their hulking guitarist Robbin Crosby would stay with us for days. Alterna-funksters Fishbone were regulars too, as were the guys from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Hillel Slovak was always lurking around somewhere, as was his posthumous replacement, John Frusciante, who played with the Monster for a while.

I spent eighteen frenetic, fulfilling, and productive months in that little self-contained world, where I wrote, played music, and just did whatever the hell I wanted to do, whenever I wanted. And those times when we got wasted on the patio and passed around an old acoustic guitar allowed me to make up the songs that eventually led to a bidding war between RCA and Capitol to sign the band. “Leave me alone, leave me alone,” I wrote. “Leave me alone in my own backyard. I don’t need to be Bob Dylan, I’m Bob Dylan in my own backyard.”

“Those are the same chords you used for ‘Sammy Hagar Weekend,’ man,” said John Frusciante when I played it for him. It didn’t matter. I was having a ball and so was everyone around me. Anything was possible there. I would come home some nights to find Karl Mueller, the bass player for Soul Asylum, in my bed in the living room entertaining some girl he had just met, so I’d shuffle to the den, only to find Robbin Crosby shooting speedballs in there. Oh well. There was nothing left to do but go back downstairs and out to the patio and get into whatever might be happening out there, or go next door and watch television with Keith Morris. I was never one to play the heavy and kick people out. Besides, I discovered fairly quickly that being buzzed at two thirty in the morning in a crazy environment was the perfect thing for writing down some useful material. That never happened in that whole dismal year at RCA. It was doomed from the start. I was not wired to work like that. With a band, songs come together organically, naturally. I started to believe that songs like “Sammy Hagar Weekend” were flukes. I didn’t think I could write like that anymore.

The drugs and alcohol didn’t help. It became obvious that with each week that passed, I cared less and less about writing good songs. I was too caught up in doing drugs and playing the part of a big shot. I was insufferable. And yet, I had the notion that the one thing I loved and the one thing in which I took pride—my songwriting—was being destroyed by my use of drugs. Writing was something that I cared about it and here I was tossing it away.