Scar Tissue (43 page)

We didn’t see much of Kurt, who was very reclusive. I spent some time with him backstage before his second show. He was high on pills, which somehow never affected his performance, and he was quiet and withdrawn. But he had such mad style, wearing the best combination of colors and sweaters and mismatched stuff.

Nirvana just killed both nights. They played a lot of new songs that would turn up on
In Utero,
and then they all switched instruments and went into some ’70s pop songs like “Seasons in the Sun.” During one of the two shows, Kurt took this insane guitar solo that lasted ten minutes. He took off his guitar and started playing it while it was on the ground, and then he bashed it into his amp. He wound up in the audience playing the destroyed guitar. When he went back onstage and the crowd started fighting over the guitar, Courtney came flying out of the wings, dove into the audience, and beat up a few Brazilian kids to take possession of the guitar.

She climbed back onstage and proudly held up the mangled guitar, strutting around and milking every minute. She finally went offstage, and somehow Louie, our crew member, wound up with the neck of that guitar, which he still has to this day.

We flew back home, happy to have shared those experiences with Nirvana. Everybody loved that band. Meanwhile, the
Blood Sugar
album was still rolling along. I still wasn’t used to any of the extra public awareness. I remember going to a party for Lisa Marie Presley in an airplane hangar in Santa Monica around this time. I went to the bathroom to take a piss, and this normal-looking businessman in a suit walked up to the urinal next to me, looked over, and recognized me.

“Oh my God, you’re that guy,” he said, and started howling a version of “Under the Bridge.”

Another time I was riding my mountain bike by my house, and a random car drove by, and I heard “Under the Bridge” blaring out the window. I realized that our music was now in the public domain and no longer some underground phenomenon. Which made me a bit more shy and reclusive. Ironically, Flea and I had spent most of our lives craving attention and trying to create a spectacle, doing outlandish things to be seen and heard and felt. One time back at Fairfax High, we found out that the corner of Westwood and Wilshire Boulevard was the busiest intersection in the world. So we drank a bit and split a quaalude and went down to that corner, shimmied up a pole, and climbed onto an enormous billboard that looked down on that busy intersection. We stripped naked and danced around, swinging our dicks for every passerby to see. It felt like the whole world was watching, and that felt good, a memorable moment when we could be exhibitionists and performers and daredevils and junior lawbreakers, all at the same time. Now we were on those billboards instead of dancing naked in front of them. So I didn’t feel the compulsion to fight for attention or brag about how amazing our music was anymore.

Now it was time to create more of it. Flea and I had both started to write, and we were looking forward to bonding with Arik and exploring his mind and musical talents. After we finished touring, Arik rented a nice apartment close to my house. But every time I tried to get together to work with him, he wasn’t available. I wound up going over to his house and dropping off some lyrics and a half-baked tape because he didn’t seem comfortable getting out the guitar at that moment, but again, there was no response. No callback, no “I’ve got some ideas.” It wasn’t long after that we decided he might not be the writing partner we were looking for.

That was when we got the most god-awful idea, which was to advertise and audition guitar players. We thought we could audition every guitar player in the world and find the most perfect, talented, soulful, and fun player around, but it doesn’t work that way. It’s like finding a wife, you have to hope she crosses your path. We put an ad in the
L.A. Weekly
and held auditions. It was a circus, and it went nowhere. Some people could play, but some kids came by hoping to meet the band. Around that time, I had seen a band called Mother Tongue at the Club Lingerie, and I liked their guitar player, a kid named Jesse Tobias. I told Flea about him, and we decided to bring him in. We jammed, and it was very raw and energetic. He definitely had the most exciting chemistry of anyone we had played with, but Flea was mildly concerned that he might not have the technical range required to play our music. In the end, we hired him, and he quit his band, and we began to play and write music.

After a couple of weeks, something wasn’t right. We jammed and jammed with Jesse, but no one was satisfied, particularly Flea. I was still holding out hope that it could work when Chad came to me and said, “I have a feeling that Dave Navarro is ready to play with us.” Dave had always been our first choice after John left. We had approached him early on, but he’d been too busy with his side project after Jane’s Addiction broke up. Lately, Chad had been hanging around with him, and he was sure Dave would love to come over. It was the ideal situation, because when Dave was in Jane’s Addiction, they had virtually invented a sound and shared a spirit of music that was unique and enormously emotional and was the voice of L.A. for a long time. It was passionate, original art coming from all the right places, with all the right insanity and love.

So we fired Jesse and hired Dave. Navarro had the best line. He told us, “I heard a rumor out on the street that the reason you fired Jesse was ’cause he was too cute and was stealing some of the female attention away from you. And then you hire me. What does that say for me?” He had the most sardonic sense of humor. When he first joined the band, he made up guitar picks that listed each guitarist we’d ever had in the band. After his name, there was a question mark.

With Dave in the band, it was inevitable that our sound would change. He had a different style of playing than anyone we’d had before, but he was very competent and quick to learn our songs. He didn’t carry with him the mysterious essence of funk, but we weren’t stressed about that; we were prepared to explore other territory. I couldn’t have predicted his incredible kindness. He was a very sensitive, tender, there-for-you person right off the bat, which was wonderful in combination with his sardonic wit.

Despite all this, we got off to a strange beginning, because not everyone adjusted right away to our dynamic. John had been a true anomaly when it came to that. He made it even easier than Hillel, in some ways, to create music, even though I’d known Hillel for years. I just figured that was how all guitar players were, that you showed them your lyrics and sang a little bit, and the next thing you knew, you had a song. That didn’t happen right off the bat with Dave. I remember going over to Dave’s house, and he and I wanted to learn a Beatles song together, and it was a much slower, more difficult process than in the past.

We all liked Dave, but unbeknownst to me, he was feeling like an outsider. I don’t think he knew how open we were to making him an equal partner. He had been through a lot of battles with Perry Farrell in Jane’s Addiction, and their writing styles were independent, so he wasn’t used to our collaborative style. It wasn’t until years later that he told me he was concerned he would get fired any minute.

At the end of October 1993, I decided to take a short trip to New York to both celebrate my birthday and accompany my good friend Guy Oseary of Maverick Records to all the festivities surrounding Fashion Week. Guy was hot on the trail of Kate Moss, and I had no aversion to hanging out with him and going to runway shows. We stayed at the Royalton and got in late from a Halloween party. A few hours into my sleep, the phone started ringing off the hook. I picked up the receiver, and it was my dad. He was in a frenzied state, babbling, “Did you hear what happened? River’s dead.” I was half awake at the time, so it took a few seconds for me to process the information. After I did, I called him right back, and he told me that River Phoenix had died the previous night outside a club in L.A. of a drug overdose. Once again, I felt an unbelievable sense of loss. I called up Flea, who had accompanied River in the ambulance from the Viper Room to the hospital, and we both sobbed for quite some time. River wasn’t my best friend, but he was a completely enchanted spirit of a human, living every day in a very free way.

It was my birthday, but I didn’t feel like celebrating. I spent some of the day with my friend Acacia, who had been the girlfriend of both Flea and Joaquin, River’s brother. I went to her apartment in Chinatown, and we lay in her bunk bed together, sobbing. I was feeling gutted and hollowed out. I made my way back to the Royalton, and Guy O forced me to let him take me out for a birthday dinner. As is Guy O’s wont, we went to the trendy, goofy restaurant of the moment. We ate and played some pool, and then Guy dragged me to a place called the Soul Kitchen. There was a great DJ that night, and at one point I got up and tried to dance my blues away.

When I got back to our table, there was a cluster of humans around Guy, including two hot, model-looking girls who were doing the typical things young model girls do, drinking alcohol and smoking Marlboros. I couldn’t take my eyes off one of them, this glowing pixie with a butch haircut, especially when she started making out with her girlfriend. I could tell that they weren’t
girlfriend
girlfriends, they were just kissing for entertainment purposes. We didn’t have much of an exchange that night, but she did tell me she would be in the Calvin Klein show the next day.

By now my crosshairs were fixed on this girl. I’d been touched by something about her, and it wasn’t simply a random biological reaction to a gorgeous girl I wanted to sleep with. There was a more metaphysical feeling about her and our possibilities. I told Guy O about my attraction, and he pooh-poohed it, telling me to keep my options open. Then we went to the Klein show the next day, and there was that hot blonde’s picture on the cover of the daily
W
newspaper for the fashion show. All at once Guy O took a lot more interest in her. We watched her walk, and I was smitten by Cupid’s arrow. I have an overwhelming tendency to get ahead of myself in these matters, so if I see a girl I like, even if I’ve never talked to her, I’ll sit there and look at her and go, “I could marry that girl. She looks like she’d be a good mom and a good sex partner.” I was convinced that the young Jaime Rishar would be thinking the same way, and she’d be my girl.

That night we all met at Indochine, a trendy downtown restaurant, but the interaction was nothing like I had imagined. She was sitting there with a table full of hens, quacking away, all models, all drinking way too much, smoking way too much, and taking what they do way too seriously. I showed up with Guy O, expecting her to make herself perfectly available to me, but she was being aloof, intentionally distant and intentionally shitfaced. I was patient and tolerant. Christy Turlington started talking to Jaime and filling her head with negative information about me: “Stay away from that guy, he’s a womanizer, he’s a slut, he’ll love you and leave you, blah blah blah.”

I started to lose some of my interest in Jaime, thinking she was too young and too wrapped up in the nonsense of her micro-community. But something in me wasn’t going to give up all the way, and at a certain point I could see that she needed to go home and be in bed. So I put her in a cab, and she asked me to go home with her, so I went and we slept together that night but nothing happened because she was too full of booze to start our romance off. The next night we had an out-of-control, over-the-top sexual encounter. She rocked me in a way I hadn’t thought was possible by a person of her age—seventeen. There was some very adult behavior taking place, and I remember going, “Wow! What fucking porno has this girl been watching?”

I went back to L.A., and we were on the phone every night. The first night we were talking, she said, “I have a small problem. I’m seeing this guy, and I have to let him know that it’s over between us.” Turned out he was a trust-fund baby whose dad was a Wall Street gazillionaire. She said the other problem was that her parents had gotten wind of our relationship, and they weren’t having any of it.

Her dad started leaving threatening messages on my answering machine, especially after her jilted boyfriend told him that I had AIDS. But Jaime was undaunted, and we started plotting and scheming to get her out to L.A. for a visit. I called her dad and convinced him that 1) I didn’t have AIDS, and 2) I wasn’t an ogre. I also sweet-talked her mom, and they let her come out for a visit.

I don’t remember too much about her first trip, other than going to pick her up and watching her walk out of her hotel room, wearing some go-go boots. I thought, “Whoa, this is definitely where I want to be.” We had a lot of fun and were at ease with each other right away. That Christmas we made the obligatory trip to Michigan, and she bonded with my mom right away. To this day, they speak to each other every day. Then we flew to Pennsylvania, and I met her parents. I was nervous, but it was actually pretty mellow. I got along with her mom right away; she was sweet and loving, the classic mom. I didn’t have any real problems with Dad. It turned out that he was the true music lover in the household. He had these stacks and stacks of doo-wop stuff and R&B 45s, and he would start playing them, and Jaime and he would sing along and do dances in the kitchen.

In January 1994, I was five and a half years sober, with no intention or desire to ever take drugs again. Then I went to a Beverly Hills dentist to have a wisdom tooth removed. I had been to see many doctors and many dentists during that five and a half years, and I had this canned speech that I gave them: “I’m allergic to narcotics. Whatever you have to do to me, you’ll have to do with local anesthetics or some non-narcotic substance.”

The dentist thought he could do the operation with a local, so I got in the chair and got jacked up on Novocain. He started to extract the tooth, but in the middle of the process, he told me it was so badly impacted that he’d have to cut it out of my mouth. In order to do that, he’d have to put me under. I’d already been in the chair for an hour, so I agreed. So he stuck an IV in my arm and shot me up with liquid Valium. That stuff ran up my arm, up my throat, and into my head, and a golden cloud of euphoria came over me. It was the first time I’d felt that loaded in five and a half years. It felt so good, and I was so under the influence, that I was no longer me, I was now the stoned, under-the-influence guy.