Scar Tissue (16 page)

As political as these lyrics seemed to be, I never once considered the Red Hot Chili Peppers a sociopolitical outfit like, say, the Dead Kennedys. I just felt that we were there to create beauty, induce joy, and make people laugh, and if the lyrics happened to include political or social commentary, then so be it. But it was never our responsibility to go out and be the U2 of our generation.

Even though we were a band now, Flea would still go off to rehearse with Fear, and Hillel and Jack would go off to rehearse with What Is This, and there was never any conflict about any of that. We saw playing our songs as a fun thing to do, not as a career move. None of these guys was thinking of quitting their day jobs to do the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and I was fine with that. I was just happy to be planning for our next show, because each one was monumental to me. I couldn’t sleep the night before. I’d lie there in bed and think about the performance. And if I did fall asleep, I’d instantly start dreaming about the show. When I got up, the first thing on my mind was “It’s show night! There’s a show tonight!” and the whole day would revolve around the buildup to the gig.

Soon after Flea and Hillel and I moved in together, Hillel fell in love with a new lady. When Hillel fell in love, he disappeared. He’s your best friend, he’s with you day and night, he falls in love, see you next year. So Flea and I were out running around to clubs, and we’d always wind up at the Zero, which had moved from Cahuenga to a great new location at Wilcox and Hollywood Boulevard. One particular night, Flea and I acquired a small quantity of China White and a quaalude. We did the drugs, and it was a unique combination. They let us into the Zero, and I started feeling really good and really confident. It was early in the evening, and not many people were in the club, but this redhead with alabaster skin and blue eyes kept walking back and forth in front of me. She was wearing an old pair of overalls with no shirt underneath, so her tits were visible from most angles. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and I stumbled right up to her with the assurance of those chemicals racing through my brain and said, “Hi!” And she said, “Hi” and started rubbing on me like a cat in heat. We immediately walked over to the stairs and made our way toward the roof, but we never even got that far.

She unsnapped her clothes, and they dropped to the floor, and we started making out. I didn’t even know her name, but I knew she wanted to fuck, so I was all ready to launch into that when she turned around, took my dick, and went straight to the ass. It wasn’t a porno situation, she was being very gentle about it, but that was where she wanted it. We were enjoying this for a few minutes when this huge moron of a bouncer came marching up the stairs and flipped out. I think she later told me that he was overreacting because he liked her and she never gave him the time of day, but whatever the reason, he threw us off the stairs.

She suggested we go to her house, which was two blocks away. By then she had told me her name was Germaine and that she lived in an old seven-story apartment building. When we got in the elevator, instead of going to her apartment, we went straight up to the roof, where we had sex all night long. I was still high on the heroin, so all this time I wasn’t able to come. When the sun began to come up, she sat down on top of the archaic elevator machinery, and we started having another round of intercourse. I was going and going and got another rhythm up and the sun started shining and she started screaming and just then somebody hit the elevator button and electricity started arcing across this old machinery and gears started engaging and motors rumbled and I finally came. It was a dramatic ending to a surreal night. I said good night to her and ran through the dawn all the way home, convinced that life was good. And even though that asshole bouncer tried to eighty-six me from the club, the owner, John Pochna, set him straight and I spent many enjoyable nights there in the future, as I did with Germaine.

A couple of months after our band started performing, we decided to make a demo tape of our songs. We got Spit Stix, the drummer from Fear, to be our recording engineer, and we rented out three hours of time at a hole-in-the-wall recording studio on Hollywood Boulevard. To give you an idea of the level of professionalism we’re talking about here, the entire budget came to three hundred dollars, which included the studio time, the engineer, and the tape. For some reason, I was the only one with money that week, so I gladly gave it up for the cause.

Those demo sessions were by far the most productive and inspired recording that we’ve ever done. In the last twenty years, we’ve never once hit a moment when there was as much magic and oneness happening. We were in the zone. Everything was recorded in one take, and everything was perfect. We finished our six songs so fast that we had enough time left to record the a cappella ditties, something we hadn’t planned on doing.

We walked out of there with a master tape and a few small cassette dubs. When we got home and listened to the music, we were in awe. People had always said that we were a live act that could never translate to record, but now we had the proof—that was bullshit. Flea and I took the cassettes, wrote our names on the plastic boxes, and began to hit the pavement to try and get bookings. We weren’t even thinking of getting a record deal. For me, this whole process was a two-part thing. You wrote and practiced the songs, and then you played shows. And we wanted to play bigger and bigger shows.

We also wanted to spread Chili Pepperdom to New York. About a week after we made that tape, our friend Pete Weiss offered to take us there. Pete was a native Los Angelean who had met Flea on the movie set of
Suburbia,
a film about the punk-rock scene in L.A. that Flea had acted in. Pete was a boom-mike operator and a musician and an all-around Renaissance man who was about a year and half older than we were. He had a basement apartment in Hollywood that became a clubhouse for us. He also had a beautiful classic old American car that we’d drive down to the beach or cruise around in, smoking pot and chasing girls.

Pete worked for the screenwriter Paul Schrader, who was moving to New York and had enlisted Pete to drive a huge Ryder truck packed with his belongings to his new Fifth Avenue pad. Flea and I jumped on the chance to go to New York. We had our secret weapon, our cassette, and we had visions of playing it for people in New York. When they heard its brilliance, doors were going to open, seas were going to part, and people would be dancing in the streets. There was no doubt in our minds that we’d be booked into every club in New York.

Our good friend Fab also climbed aboard for the journey, which was great for me, because somewhere out in the California desert, he came to me on the sly and told me that he had a small quantity of heroin. So we sniffed that China White and got really high. Except for a few run-ins with some crazy-assed truckers, the drive was pretty uneventful. Pete dropped us off in SoHo and then headed back up Fifth Avenue to unload Paul’s stuff. Flea and I had the tape burning a hole in our pocket, but we also had the business of survival at hand. We didn’t have a place to stay, but Fab knew two models who lived on Broome Street, so we went by their building. “I’m going to stay with these two models, but I can’t exactly bring you guys,” he said.

“Okay, but how about if we go in and maybe wash up or something?” I suggested.

We went up to their place and completely moved in. For four days these beautiful models were constantly kicking Flea and me out of their beds and bedrooms. We were leeches.

We set about the business of playing our demo tape for different club people. Of course, we had no contacts or tactics. We’d go to a club and ask for the manager. They’d point out his office, and we’d go back there, pop in our cassette tape, and do a wild dance to our own music, trying to sell ourselves. Only problem was, nobody was buying it. We got the warmest reception from this cigar-smoking Italian stallion who ran the Peppermint Lounge. He gave us a few minutes. Most people showed us the door and said, “Get the fuck out of here with your cassette tape.” After a few rejections, I could tell that this wasn’t the way to go about getting booked into a club.

So Flea and I spent a day sightseeing. We went up to Central Park and sat down on a bench, put our tape in the boom box, and blasted our music. We wanted someone to know that we had made this fucking tape. We got a lot of scornful looks from people who thought we were obnoxious to play such loud music, but amazingly, every kid who came within earshot completely rocked out to it. That was interesting. When we got back to L.A., we wrote a song called “Baby Appeal,” and that became a staple of our early act.

Shortly after we got back from New York, Hillel moved out to live with his girlfriend. Rent was due, and Flea and I had about two hundred bucks each. We had the option of scraping together enough money to pay another month’s rent, or going out and buying some high-quality leather jackets, the absolutely de rigueur possession of every self-respecting punk. So we headed to Melrose Avenue, which was becoming a center for cool vintage clothing. There was a guy from New York named Danny who had recently opened up a small shop with a bunch of great vintage James Dean leather jackets.

Flea and I picked out the perfect leathers, but when we went to buy them, Danny’s prices were astronomical, at least a hundred dollars more than what we each had.

“Listen, I’ve got a hundred and fifty, and my friend here has a hundred and seventy, so why don’t you just give us the jackets for that?” I suggested.

“Are you crazy? Get out of my shop,” he yelled.

But having seen these jackets, we couldn’t conceive of not owning them, so I came up with the idea of picketing the store. We made up some signs that said
UNFAIR BUSINESS PRACTICES. DANNY IS A GREEDY MONSTER
. I figured he’d be amused by the lengths we’d go to get these jackets. We started marching around in front of his store with our signs, and Danny came running out.

“What the fuck are you little punks doing? Get out of here before I break these signs over your head,” he screamed.

I thought I detected a modicum of amusement in his voice, so I came up with another plan. We would stage a hunger strike in front of his store until he agreed to sell us our jackets. We went back and plunked down on the sidewalk.

Danny ran out to confront us. “What now?”

“It’s a hunger strike. We’re not moving or eating or drinking until you give us those jackets,” I said.

“Jesus Christ, you guys. How much money do you have?” he said.

We finally had him. He took us inside and tried to steer us to some lower-priced leathers, but we held out and gave him all our money for the two fine jackets.

Later that same day, we were parading down Hollywood Boulevard in our brand-new vintage jackets, not realizing the irony that we were in the hottest punk-funk band in L.A. with no place to live and no money, when this kooky mop-topped, bespectacled, bookwormy-looking punker in a funny jacket came up to us. “Hey, you guys are in the Red Hot Chili Peppers,” he said. He had met Flea one night when he was a DJ at a club and spinning a Defunkt record. Flea had vaulted over into his booth and turned the record over, because he thought this guy was playing the wrong side.

His name was Bob Forrest, and besides the occasional DJ job, he also ran the Sunday Club, which was one of the hottest live venues around. Bob asked us what was up, and we told him our woeful tale of new jackets but no home.

“That’s so crazy. A half an hour ago my wife left me for good,” he said. “If you guys want, you can crash at my place.”

Forrest lived on the third floor of a classic apartment building called La Leyenda, which had seen better times, especially before the influx of punk rockers. He had a one-bedroom apartment filled to the brim with tons of books and records. Flea set up shop in the living room, and I took over the breakfast nook.

Bob had gone to college for a few years before he dropped out. He was working at a bookstore when we met him, probably for minimum wage, but his job became a great source of income for us because they bought used books. Flea and I would go out and heist books from personal collections or libraries. A stack of books meant ten dollars, and ten dollars meant we could buy drugs and shoot them and get high. We’d usually buy coke, which was a bad drug to be doing when you didn’t have a lot of money, because the minute it’s gone, you want more. But we’d get it and run back to Bob’s house and dump it into a martini glass, put in the right amount of water, and stick our syringes in there and shoot the liquefied coke. We’d do that a couple of times until it was gone, then we’d bum out and feel raw and violated and run down to the Zero to drink off the pain, find a girl to take away the pain, or find more coke.

That summer we made a reliable speed connection, a Middle Eastern guy who ran a rehearsal studio. So we started shooting speed, which is a lot different than shooting coke. Cocaine is a clean ultra-euphoric too-good-to-be-true feeling that lasts for about three minutes. Your ears ring and your jaw opens up and for those three minutes you feel totally at one with the universe. Speed is a lot dirtier and less euphoric and a bit more physical. Every inch of your skin starts to tingle and turns into chicken skin.

We started going on these three-man speed binges and we’d stay up for days on end, playing cribbage. We even started a band together, the La Leyenda Tweakers. Unfortunately, we decided to perform outside of our apartment, and we did a show so stoned on speed that we resembled three mental patients. The
L.A. Weekly
gave us our first bad review. We knew that we were wreaking havoc with our bodies, but we were so delusional that we thought that if we just ate watermelon, it would cleanse both our bodies and our souls of this heinous chemical torture that we were incapable of stopping. We’d buy the watermelons in vast quantities and go back to the house and cut up each one into three parts. Once we’d finished the watermelon, we’d march up to the roof of La Leyenda and have the ceremonial throw-offs of these big watermelon rinds and watch them explode in the parking lot below. That would be the end of a vicious speed run. Then we’d go and try to get some sleep before we woke up and started the cycle all over again.