Scar Tissue (24 page)

George also had a stuffed-animal collection. Where there wasn’t furniture, per se, in the house, there were life-size stuffed animals everywhere, some very old. I guess he had been a collector, and his fans and friends and family constantly added pieces, so we were in the middle of this big circus of stuffed animals.

After about a week of living with George, we moved into our house on the golf course. Then it was time to start making demos in a studio in downtown Detroit that was owned by a guy called Navarro, who was a colorful but nefarious old-school pimp/drug dealer/studio owner. He was an older gentleman, with the lowest, grumbliest, deepest Isaac Hayes/Barry White voice. You couldn’t understand a lot of what he said, but you sure could understand what he meant. When he walked into the room, no matter who was there—girls, the crew, George—he was the man to respect.

So we started doing the demos. And we also started doing the coke, which was everywhere. We’d order the Popeye’s chicken, and we’d order the cocaine. And if you could eat the chicken before you got too high on the coke, you’d have dinner. If not, you didn’t care about dinner. Unlike us, George never acted like a weirdo when he was high on coke. You wouldn’t know whether he was on a ton of coke or not; he just had a really strong constitution.

I’d get all tweaked out and try to finish these songs that I had started, and sometimes it would work and sometimes I’d go in circles, coming up with these complex word combinations. So I was writing, and George was listening to these Hollywood kids playing eccentric hard-core funk music, and loving every minute of it. I’d show him some lyrics and ask his opinion, and he’d go, “Wow, that’s some outside shit. I love it. Go write another one, we need another verse.”

At one point during preproduction, Flea, who had been listening to a lot of Meters, suggested that we do a cover of their song “Africa.” George thought about it and said, “What if you did the song ‘Africa’ but had Anthony do a rewrite so it’s no longer ‘Africa,’ but it’s your ‘Africa,’ which is Hollywood?” So I did the rewrite, and George later fashioned one of his incredible vocal arrangements behind it. I think he even sang one or two of the lines in that song.

“Freaky Styley” was another interesting George innovation. That was originally an instrumental overture to lead into another piece, but George was so into that swelling, riding groove that he was adamant it had to be its own song, even if the vocal was simple chanting. When we recorded that music, we were all in the control room, listening to that groove, which is still one of the best pieces of music that we ever wrote. George just started chanting, “Fuck ’em, just to see the look on their face. Fuck ’em, just to see the look on their face.” We all joined in, and it was a spontaneous bit of musical combustion. The other vocal in that song, “Say it out loud, I’m Freaky Styley and I’m proud,” was one of those born-in-the-moment colloquialisms. At that time we called everything that was cool “Freaky Styley.” A dance, a girl, a drumbeat, anything. When this whole process was finished and we were sitting around the kitchen table going, “What should we call this album?,” Cliff looked up and said, “Why don’t we just call it what we call everything else?
Freaky Styley.
”

After a little while in Navarro’s studio, we finalized the arrangements, and I had some new lyrics ready to go. George had a unique style of producing. It wasn’t a lot of super-refined high-tuning, reacting to every kick-drum pattern. It was more from-the-heart producing. George was a master at hearing backup vocal parts, especially for esoteric parts of the song, where you wouldn’t normally hear vocals. If you listen to the Funkadelic records or the Parliament records, the vocal arrangements within the body of music are masterpieces unto themselves. So he started hearing that stuff in our songs, and we were open to anything. If he said, “I want to do a five-person vocal at this part in the song,” we jumped for joy.

We shifted over to United Sound and started recording the basic tracks. We always put down a scratch vocal, because that was the era when you’d record a scratch and then try to beat it. We didn’t have comping vocals, where you’d sing a song twenty times and cut and paste the best syllables. George put me in the middle of the room, not off in some other room, so I felt like a part of the band, which was a wise thing to do, since everyone had always said, “Oh, the Chili Peppers are great live, but you’ll never capture their zany onstage chemistry in the studio.”

During the recording process, we started getting an unusual visitor. His name was Louie, and he was a pale and bald Middle Easterner. Turned out he was George’s personal coke-delivery guy. After a few visits, it was clear that George was into this guy for a lot of money, but George was unflappable. Louie began showing up with a couple of henchmen, and he’d say, in his slow thick accent, “George, I’m real serious, man, you’re going to have to make good before I can give you anything else. I’m running a business here.”

George would go, “Louie, look around. Do you think I’m strapped for cash? In this business, you get paid when you get paid. When I get paid, you’re the first motherfucker who gets paid after me.”

Louie would look pained. “George, I’ve heard that before. I didn’t bring these guys for show, and if they have to hurt somebody . . .”

George never blinked an eye, because he had a plan. He knew Louie was fascinated by the music business, so he intuited that making Louie a part of the whole process would ensure a steady flow of coke. Finally, George promised Louie that he could make his vocal debut on the album.

I was thinking, “Okay, I trust George, I know that everything’s happening for a reason here, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let this motherfucker on my record. This shit is sacred.” George told me, “Don’t worry, everyone will be happy. He’ll be on the record, and you will not mind.” George was right. At the very beginning of “Yertle the Turtle,” you hear a weird, out-of-context voice come in and say, “Look at the turtle go, bro,” and then the song goes into a syncopated funk beat. That was Louie’s debut, and that was what made him happy enough not to hurt somebody. The longer the sessions went on, the more regularly he would show up with the blow, because he was wanting his fifteen minutes in the damn spotlight.

Right before it was time for me to go in and do the final vocals, I decided I wasn’t going to do any cocaine for two weeks, which is like deciding to be celibate when you’re living in a brothel. My decision had nothing to do with sobriety, because even though I was twenty-three, I was still an emotionally troubled youth. I just didn’t want to get back to Hollywood and go, “What happened? I had my chance making a record with George Clinton, and I fucked up.” The two-week period was the time that was allotted for my vocals. I guess I realized it was harder to sing when you’ve got coke dripping down the back of your throat.

One of the reasons I was so concerned about my vocals was that during the preproduction process, Flea started to play a Sly Stone song, “If You Want Me to Stay,” on the bass. Hillel and Cliff got into it, and we decided to cover that song, which was daunting to me, because I can sing anything I write, but another man’s tune is always a challenge—let alone one by Sly Stone, one of the most original vocalists in terms of phrasing.

George must have sensed my uneasiness. “You have this in the bag, don’t even worry about it. I know what you’re capable of,” he reassured me. Then he invited me to his house for the weekend to work on the song. First I decided to visit my mom for a few days, and I took the tape of the song with me and practiced it over and over again. On the way back from Grand Rapids, I stopped at George’s house. We talked about the song and we practiced it, then we took these long strolls through his property. I didn’t even see it, but he was quietly schooling me. We’d be talking about anything under the sun, and he was subconsciously building my confidence and steering me toward getting comfortable and creating magic in the studio. I think he realized that Hillel was a tremendously talented guitar player, Flea knew exactly what he was doing on bass, and Cliff was an ace drummer, but I was this guy with a lyrical ability who wasn’t so sure of his voice.

Early in the morning, we’d go out fishing in his pond. His whole demeanor changed when he fished. He was no longer the rabble-rousing toastmaster of the funk universe, but more of an introspective, quirky man who had some vast experience. Fishing was his meditation. And he didn’t care what we caught, he was eating it. Bluegills, sunfish, catfish, whatever that lake was spitting out was going in the frying pan. We’d catch them and bring them back, and his wife would cook them for breakfast.

By the time I left his place, I felt good about the song. George mentored me even during the recording process. He had a mike set up inside his booth, and he’d send up shout-outs or sing along. We’d be out there recording the basic tracks and hear this great voice coming through the little transistorized speaker. When we set up the vocal booth and it was just me doing my vocals, George came into the studio, put on headphones, and sang and danced along with me while I was singing. He was like a big brother to me, thoughtful, totally sensitive, and understanding of the colorful and zany place where we were coming from. I wanted never to let him down.

We finished the record, and in our minds, it so far surpassed anything we thought we could have done that we were thinking we were on the road to enormity. Some EMI execs made a trip out to Detroit to hear some of the material. We played them a few tracks, and instead of them going, “You guys are going to be huge,” they said nothing. I’m dancing and singing along, going nuts, and they’re like “Well, we’ll see what we can do with this.” Of course, we’re talking about a record company that did not have an inkling of the awareness necessary to take something different and original and recognize its worth and introduce it to the world. They were looking for another band like Roxette.

We went back to L.A. feeling absolutely accomplished and more experienced, and then everyone jumped back into his madness. By this time, Jennifer’s mother had moved from Cahuenga to an apartment complex in Pasadena. Right next door to that was an abandoned building, so Jennifer and I started squatting there. The hot and cold water still worked, and we ran an extension cord into the building so we could listen to music, and we set up a bed and some candles.

That’s when I really started getting into heroin sex. I realized that if you were in love with somebody and you were sexually inspired to begin with, being high on heroin could amplify the experience tenfold, because you could have sex all night and not be able to come but still be interested. I remember having these marathon sex encounters with Jennifer on that bed, thinking, “Life doesn’t get any better than this. I’m in a band, I’ve got a couple of dollars in my pocket. I’ve got a beautiful, sweet, hot, sexy, crazy little girlfriend, a roof over my head, and some dope.”

Those feelings would disappear, and the next day I’d be off on a run. Jennifer would do her best to deal with my insanity, as she was slowly working on her own. Around the time I got back from Detroit, I intensified my relationship with a girl named Kim Jones. My friend Bob Forest had this monstrous crush on Kim, but she had jilted him (he promptly wrote a song about her with the chorus “Why don’t you blow me and the rest of the band?”). He was still obsessed with her, and he used to take me to her apartment in Echo Park, and we’d knock on her door to see if she was around.

Bob would recite her many virtues—she was brilliant and beautiful, she studied in China, she wrote for the
L.A. Weekly,
she was from Tennessee, plus she was a lesbian, because she had left Bob for this really hot girl. Turns out she wasn’t a lesbian, but all of her other virtues were true. As soon as I met her, I knew we’d be best friends. We were both Scorpios, and there was never any sexual tension between us.

In some ways, Kim was a female equivalent to Hillel, because there was no crime you could commit that she would not forgive you for, no heinous act of selfish behavior that she would not try to find the good side of you behind. Of course, she was also a complete mess. Intelligent but dizzy, a drug addict, codependent, an enabler and a caretaker, just a beautiful, warm kindred spirit to me. I started to become closer and closer to Kim, because she was a source of love and comfort and friendship and companionship and like-mindedness without any of the difficulties of a girlfriend. I never lost my sexual attraction to Jennifer; the longer I was with her, the better the sex got, but I was not a great boyfriend. If I said I’d be home in an hour, I might stroll in three days later. Today, if someone did that to me, I’d have a heart attack, but when you’re a kid, you don’t know any better.

Kim didn’t care if I left for three days at a time, so there was no downside to hanging out with her. It was never like “You motherfucker, you looked at that girl, you didn’t come home, you spent all the money.” Kim
expected
me to spend all the money, look at all the other girls, and disappear. One time I went over to Kim’s house, and she wasn’t there. In a fit of desperation, I grabbed her toaster oven and traded it for a bag of dope. When she got home, she was unfazed. “That’s okay, we’ll get another one.”

Before long, I moved in with Kim, and our daily mission became getting high. She was getting some cash inflow—disability checks because her dad had died, checks from the
L.A. Weekly,
or checks from her mom at home in Tennessee. We’d cash them and meet some French guy or some Russian guy on a corner in Hollywood and buy the heroin, and if we had any money left over, we’d score some coke. Soon we both had a habit. Hillel was also using, and he had a crazy girlfriend named Maggie who was a friend of Kim’s, so we’d have a lot of small drug parties.

From time to time the band would go on tours to San Francisco. We were still young enough and not so damaged that we could play well, even though we had these drug habits. In September 1985 we played two shows with Run-DMC, one in San Francisco and one in L.A. The L.A. show was at the Palladium, and besides opening for Oingo Boingo, it was our biggest show to date. Sold out. Of course, the night before the show, I went on a drug binge, so I showed up for the gig hammered on coke and heroin. The band was furious at me, but somehow I managed to pull it together and made it onstage. That show was notable for two things. About halfway through the show, George Clinton came rocking onto the stage, and he and I started doing a full, funky ballroom dance to our jams. He injected a fat dose of color and love and energy and meaning into that show.