Scar Tissue (33 page)

When it came to clothes, his sensibilities were way different from ours, and I used to tease him about it all the time. He’d show up in ’80s-looking purple double-breasted suits, and I’d say, “Did you raid Arsenio’s closet for that?” He thankfully stopped teasing his hair when he joined the band, but instead of hanging out at a punk-rock dive like Small’s with Flea and me, he’d go to the Mötley Crüe bar and wear funny jeans with belts and cowboy boots and play pool and go after rock chicks. People would see him and report to me that he had his hair teased up higher than a girl’s, but the next day he’d come to rehearsal wearing a baseball cap. It wasn’t that he was a chameleon by nature, he just wouldn’t show off all his colors around us.

We found common ground in the music. Even there, his musical sensibility was different, but his energy and passion and the power he had for creating rhythm were unsurpassed. Just about every time we had a rehearsal or a show and he was practicing by himself, I’d rock the mike and sing along, and it always felt exciting and fresh, even when he was playing simple, basic “You’ve heard that beat before” beats. He wasn’t experimental or avant-garde, and he didn’t listen to a super-different variety of music, staying pretty much in the rock and pop genre, but what he did was fulfilling nonetheless. We’d never had a drummer who had a supercharged angst battery that never seemed to run low. I shudder to think that we ever would have made him feel unwelcome or unwanted by giving him the same tough-love, boot-camp-style introduction into the band that we gave John, but we did it because we cared about him, we wanted him to be close to us.

We had our new guys and started working. It was weird and difficult at first to develop songs, more so than ever before. Flea was showing up with parts, and John and Chad were trying to find themselves. Michael Beinhorn was throwing in another wrench. There were a lot of days when we had a lot of good ideas, but we didn’t know how to craft a song out of all this music that was coming up. It was a lot to expect to pick up where
Uplift Mofo Party Plan
had left off. I think John felt a big responsibility to follow in Hillel’s footsteps, though he wasn’t trying to replicate Hillel’s sound. He had a cleaner, more modern sound. We just needed new songs. When Cliff and Jack Sherman came into the band, we had already written a body of work. Now we had to write an album’s worth of new songs.

Slowly but surely, some pretty different-sounding grooves started to develop. The drums had a new über-intensity. Cliff was artistic and creative and intricate, Jack Irons was very much the metronome, but Chad was moving more air than had ever been moved by a drummer, so that was giving us a new vibe. I’d listen to the jams and go home and sit in the kitchen with piles and piles of papers. It never dawned on me that you could write a song with five sentences of lyrics and a chorus. I thought because Flea was busy and the drums were busy and these textures were complicated, I had to do the same thing. When I sat down to write, I wasn’t looking for one or two interesting ideas, I wanted a five-page poem to rap. I’d sit there for eight hours at a time, writing songs like “Good Time Boys” and “Subway to Venus” and “Johnny, Kick a Hole in the Sky,” where the lyrics go on and on and on. Even my tribute to Magic Johnson was constant wordology. Anything that was hard to say, I was happy to write it.

When it came time to record, we began butting heads with Michael Beinhorn. He had an agenda that, unlike Andy Gill’s, had more to do with sound. Michael had a lot of smarts and musical savvy in the studio, but he was also domineering. He wanted John to have a big, crunching, almost metal-sounding guitar tone, whereas before we always had some interesting acid-rock guitar tones, as well as a lot of slinky, sexy, funk guitar tones. John wasn’t into it at the time, so there was a lot of fighting between them over tone and guitar layering. It was not a good time for John; he was wrestling with a lot of different behaviors that were making him tense, and Beinhorn was pushy and manipulative. If it wasn’t for the Traci Lords porn tapes that were constantly on rotation in the lounge, I don’t know if John would have made it through the sessions.

We worked hard on all the songs, but Beinhorn put an extra amount of focus on our cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.” Flea had been playing that bass line for years, and John and Chad came up with monster parts for the song. Beinhorn went through hell and high water to get John to play the layered sound on that cut. For me, doing the vocals was totally daunting and frustrating and challenging. A song like that was not my forte, but Beinhorn was sure I could sing it, so he kept pushing and pushing me. I know it sounds like a bullshit whine, but when you’re in front of that damn vocal mike and you’re having a hard time, your insides start to hurt. It took me forever to get that song. But it was well worth it. When we got to the choruses, we called all our friends to come down and had a roomful of twenty-five people singing together. Half of them were competent singers, and the other half weren’t, but it didn’t matter, it still sounded surprisingly good.

I had a great time up until the last few weeks of recording. I was just loving life and feeling so happy to be sober, to be making a record and to have these songs. But Beinhorn and I came to a relationship-ending moment of tension at the end of the recording process, when he wanted me to do ad-libs at the end of “Higher Ground.” I couldn’t tolerate his direction any longer. He was trying to squeeze something out of me that I wasn’t feeling, and we got in a fight and I knew that I was done with him.

We didn’t finish that record and say, “This is our best record ever,” but I didn’t feel bad about
Mother’s Milk
. I did feel bad about the album cover. Flea had come up with the title of the album as an homage to Loesha’s bodily fluids, which were sustaining their young daughter, Clara. (We can put to rest the rumors that “mother’s milk” was a slang reference to heroin.) We went back to our good friend Nels Israelson, who had done the photos on our second and third album covers. I had an old poster from the ’60s of Sly and the Family Stone where Sly was holding out his hand and his band was congregated in his palm, and I thought it would be great to be a little person held by a giant. Only in my vision, the giant would be a naked female, and we’d be held near her chest. I brought this concept to the band, and they weren’t 100 percent enthusiastic, but I was, so they agreed to humor me. Nels started to audition models for the cover, and because they were taking off their shirts, it had to be a closed set. Unfortunately, I showed up late and he had already decided on a girl. EMI planned to cover up her nipples with some lettering and a flower, but they were definitely part of the featured package. Then we found out that the model was uptight about the whole concept. I couldn’t understand why we couldn’t have found a model who was happy to have her tits on a cover.

I started to choose the photos of us that she’d be holding in her hands, and John despised every last photo of himself. He finally let me use one, and I think the cover came out great—it was like four Tom Sawyers being held by this giant naked lady.

The album cover was printed, and her nipples were contractually covered, but EMI printed up a couple hundred posters of her with her nipples exposed. These were for record stores and friends, whatever, and the poster-signing machinery went into action. This was a period in the life of the band when we were all still pigs and heathens, brash and obnoxiously sexual. I think it was Chad and Flea who wrote some stupid, sophomoric, perverted things on one of the posters, and lo and behold, the model caught wind of the poster and sued the piss out of us. She won fifty thousand dollars, which was a huge settlement back then.

Despite the cover tempest, EMI must have heard something in the grooves, because they gave us a budget to make two videos before the album was released. It was odd; we weren’t coming off a successful record.
Uplift
had sold about seventy thousand copies, maybe making its money back. But we were happy for the new level of interest and commitment, so we made the videos back to back to accompany the singles from the album. The first was for “Knock Me Down,” and Alex Winter played a Chaplinesque vagabond who’s paranoid and wanders around a house of horrors, shocked by the psychedelic, morbid images of dead rock stars on the walls. He comes to an all-white room where Flea, John, Chad, and I are rocking out and bouncing off the walls, playing the song.

We shot the “Higher Ground” video on one of the famous old SIR soundstages where the Three Stooges made their movies. We had a full makeup and art department and separate wardrobe people and a huge, huge stage, which was quite a departure. When we shot our “Catholic School Girls Rule” video, Dick Rude’s mom catered the shoot. But now we got to dance around and outdo one another jumping off things, so it was a fun video to shoot.

From “Knock Me Down”

I’m tired of being untouchable

I’m not above the love

I’m part of you and you’re part of me

Why did you go away?

Too late to tell you how I feel

I want you back but I get real

Can you hear my falling tears

Making rain where you lay

Finding what you’re looking for

Can end up being such a bore

I pray for you most every day

My love’s with you now fly away

If you see me getting mighty

If you see me getting high

Knock me down

I’m not bigger than life

It’s so lonely when you don’t even know yourself

That ending is lonely, sad, but true. Those are the feelings you feel when you’re out there and enough dark energy possesses you and you think, “Who the fuck am I? What happened to me?” I’m sure that was where Hillel ended up. He so clearly knew who he was and what he wanted early in his life, and he was a determined and hardworking, creative, life-loving guy. By the end, he forgot who he was, which I’ve seen happen to many people.

“Knock Me Down” was the first single off
Mother’s Milk,
and it actually got on the radio. Every now and then Lindy would tell us that a station had added the song, but that didn’t really compute. A few months later, on a weekend tour to Washington, D.C., Flea and John and I flagged down a cab in the middle of the nation’s capital. We got in and the driver looked at us and said, “Hey, aren’t you those guys? What is it, ‘Beat Me Up,’ ‘Slap Me Around,’ ‘Kick My Ass’? I love that song. You’re those guys, right?” That was the first time somebody other than the musical underground had arbitrarily become aware of us.

In September ’89, we started a yearlong cycle of touring behind
Mother’s Milk
. Another indication of our escalating level of success was our upgrade to a full-fledged tour bus. But we needed the room, because we had so many people on the road. We hired Tree to play horn, but he came up with this cockamamy notion to play an electric hybrid synthesizer that you blew into and produced several different horn sounds. Then we hired Kristin Vygard and Vicky Calhoun as backup singers. Kristin was a full-on character who had been a successful child actor. She was a five-foot-nothing redheaded freckled-faced madwoman who had been a jazz singer on the Hollywood scene. Vicky was a large black woman who had sung backup on “Knock Me Down” and been featured in that video. Besides the band, we had Chris Grayson, our soundman; Mark Johnson, our tour manager; and a new face in the organization, a roadie named Robbie Allen. When we got to England later in the tour, Robbie developed an alter ego, Robbie Rule, who opened our shows for us. With the help of Flea and John, Robbie developed a musical comedy act where he would go onstage and pretend to cut off his dick. It was a sleight-of-hand magic trick; he’d go out with a proper butcher knife that was sharp on one side and extremely dull on the other. Then he’d stretch his dick out, put the knife to it, and subtly turn the knife over so the dull side would be doing no damage to his private parts. Like Bob Forest, Robbie was a tortured musician working as a roadie, so we gave him his moment on the stage. It was a crazy play within a play, and Flea played comedy drums during the act. All the kids in the countryside of England had to endure this dick-slashing before we came on.

Since I was no longer chasing cocaine or alcohol, new entertainments had to be created. Something called The Job spiced up the tedium of being on the road. Since we were playing a lot of college dates, we’d routinely get fed meals at the venues, which consisted of reheated cafeteria food that had been topped with industrial-strength salad dressing. It was hard to tell if that mystery liquid was for garnishing your food or cleaning the floor.

The first job we created was in Canada, where we encountered a super-sized bowl of bacon bits on our dining table. We came up with the idea of collecting some money and challenging Mark Johnson with the job of eating that entire bowl. It turned out Johnson was capable of eating some shit, and he successfully completed his job.

My first job was to eat what appeared to be half a pound of butter brought to our table at a gig. I had three minutes to finish it off and $120 bucks to gain, but I got only halfway through before I had to quit. I thought I could mind-power the job, but my body rejected that much butter. Eventually, Flea, John, Chad, and I realized it was silly to torture ourselves with these jobs when we could torture those around us. Besides, we weren’t as much in need of the money as the soundman or a backup singer or the roadie. One night we were backstage at some college in the middle of Pennsylvania, and our hosts brought us some inedible food. The girls had been bugging us for a job, so we took an empty wine carafe and started mixing up various salad dressings and condiments and wound up with a bottle full of green stuff that wouldn’t have been out of place in
The Fifty Foot Bug That Ate St. Louis
. Then we selected tiny Kristin, who needed the money, and we all chipped in $180 if she’d drink the entire carafe and keep it down for five minutes. She was such a firecracker times ten about everything that she not only accepted that job but offered to eat some various other foodstuffs if we threw in fifty bucks more. Accepted.