by Bob Forrest
It was a difficult time for me, but I had my girlfriend, Max Smith. She’s probably the most significant woman in my life other than the mothers of my children. I had been on the radio call-in show Loveline one night. She told me after we had been dating for a while that she first became of aware me when she heard me on that show. I was fucked up, for sure, but I was also funny, open, and vulnerable. She listened in and turned to her brother and said, “I’m going to marry that guy someday.” We didn’t get married, but we had a long and happy relationship. She was thirteen when she heard that show. She was always very supportive. I had met Max a few years before when she was nineteen and I was thirty-two. It was instant infatuation. She was a pretty, wild girl and could match me bad habit for bad habit. But she found that the party-hard life wasn’t what she wanted for herself and she cleaned up. I wasn’t ready for that, and she seemed to understand. While she maintained her sobriety, I did my best to stay loaded. Through it all, she stood by my side, even when I’d engage in some questionable behavior. There was a famous rock chick who fronted a well-known band who had a taste for the narcotics. But as her fame and profile increased, sometimes it was easier for her to have me do the dirty work. She’d give me cash to go make a score and off I’d go to take a generous “finder’s fee” in product for myself, or, as I did more than once, use all that I had bought myself. It wasn’t like she couldn’t afford it.
“Bob, where’s the stuff?”
I’d stammer some lame excuse and add, “But you know I’m good for it.”
“You’re such an asshole,” she’d say with barely concealed contempt. “Now, if I give you some money, will you please go and get me a little something?”
“No problem,” I’d say.
“Okay, and no fuckups this time, right?”
“No, no, it’ll all be cool,” I’d say, unsure as to whether I’d run yet another hustle.
But after my bust, and my subsequent release from the clutches of the penal system, Max was there for me. She helped me along in my sobriety and she understood what I was going through. She had a great deal of empathy and seemed to know what I needed even when I didn’t. She gently prodded me forward. With her encouragement, I started to give some thought to music again. Music came back into my life, but in a strange sort of way.
I still played guitar, but not professionally. I’d play Dylan and Neil Young songs at home, but with no goal or purpose other than to entertain myself and Max.
“You really should start to play out again, Bob,” she said one night.
“I don’t know …” I trailed off, unsure if anyone other than my girlfriend would want to hear what I had to sing.
“Bob, you’re a musician. You can’t keep hiding from the world.”
“I’d need songs.”
“Well, write them. You’re just looking for excuses to not do this.”
“I’d have to start a band or get someone to jam with,” I said. “It’s how I work best.”
“I think I know somebody,” said Max. “He’s really good.”
That was a surprise. It was more of a surprise when I met the musician she had talked about. Josh Klinghoffer was a gangly fifteen-year-old kid in Chuck Taylor high-top sneakers. He lived around the corner from her. He was a friend of Max’s brother. I thought, What the fuck is this? He’s just a kid. Josh didn’t help himself either with his demeanor. He was so quiet and shy, he could barely look me in the eye when we talked. Even when he played music, on either the drums or the guitar, he kept his head down and his spindly teenage arms and legs tucked in tight. I thought at first that maybe this kid was autistic or something. But, no, he was just a diffident youngster who had a lot of talent. We started to have little jam sessions and we played a couple of covers gigs. I began to write again and Josh and I would record demos on a little four-track tape machine I had. All the bitterness and frustration of the previous years began to pour out of me, even if I only had three songs at that point. It felt good to write again, but I still had reservations about getting back into the game. I was a messenger now. A workingman. My music days were behind me. It was probably best not to set my sights too high.
One afternoon, after I had run all over town, my thirty-five-year-old bones feeling the strain as I delivered my packages—there’s a reason they’re called “delivery boys”—I saw a car parked in the lot where the Goldenvoice offices were. A guy I knew, Paul Tollett, the president of the concert promotion outfit, now known for the famous annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, was about to get into it. I had known him from my days on the music scene and I had a decent relationship with him, unlike with so many others. At least I was pretty sure I had never burned him. I was beat and thought I’d take a rest and say hello. Who knew? Maybe I could get a job with Goldenvoice delivering messages. I thought that might be cool.
“Hey, man!” I said with a smile.
It took Paul a moment to recognize me. “Bob?”
“That’s me. How are you, man?”
“Good to see you. Let’s go back inside and talk in my office. It’s noisy out here.”
The rush-hour hum and hiss of the traffic as it funneled through the artificial canyons of urban Hollywood made conversation difficult. I was glad to go inside, where the climate was controlled and cool, and I was even happier to take a few minutes to sit down in a comfortable office chair and take off a load. Paul sat across from me, his arms propped on his desk as he leaned forward. “So what’s up with Bob Forrest these days?” he asked.
“This is it, man. Workin’.”
“Working? Doing what?”
“Delivering messages and packages. You need anybody like that? It’d be cool to work for you guys.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“No.”
I gave him the rundown of my recent past and watched his expression. “So you’re not doing music anymore?”
“A little. Keeping things small.”
“Writing?”
“I mean, I wrote a few things and I’m jamming with this kid Josh a little, but it’s all pretty low-key right now.”
“Bob, you can’t just be delivering packages. You’re a songwriter, man. You got a demo?”
“I’ll bring you one.”
I felt damaged and afraid. I cleared my throat and shuffled my feet and we set up another meeting, for which I brought the demo. Paul listened to what I had delivered. He had a thoughtful look on his face. “You know, I’m giving some thought to starting a record label, Bob, but I’ll need artists. You’d be perfect for what I want to do. A good fit.”
I thought it was cool that he didn’t hold my reputation for fuckups against me, but I was worried about my finances.
“I don’t know, man. A full-time music thing would leave me broke. I’ve got nothing left. A few bucks in a checking account is it.”
“I’ll put you under contract, Bob. Get some money for you. It’d be better than delivering messages all day, wouldn’t it? One of my investors heard that song ‘Hurt.’ You know what he said?”
“No.”
“He said, ‘This song is exactly how I feel about things.’ He also said, and I agree, that this is music that needs to be heard.” I had a record deal.
Well, what was there to lose? I went home and felt pretty good. I was going to make another record. Back in business. This could work. On the other hand, I could work my ass off and have absolutely nothing to show for it. I had been down that road before.
I decided to call the band—Josh and I with an assist from Kevin Fitzgerald, who was from a group called the Geraldine Fibbers—the Bicycle Thief. The name came from Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 movie about a man on a search for the stolen bike he needs to earn a living. De Sica’s style also conveyed something of what I hoped to achieve: a gritty, unflinching realism that came out of my own experiences and feelings. Josh and I jammed and rehearsed and I began to put the songs together. Max was out one day when the phone rang.
“Hello?”
<
br /> “Is Max there?”
“No. She’ll be back later.”
“Can I leave a message? It’s Jill.”
“Sure. Let me get a pencil.”
Jill left her message and I wrote it down carefully on a piece of paper that I placed neatly next to the phone. Then it struck me: “I have a song here.” It’s weird how it works, but that incident captured how I felt as I made the journey from Old Bob to Newer Bob. In the old days, I might not have answered the phone at all. If I did, and the call wasn’t for me, I’d likely have forgotten about it. Drug addiction breeds a special kind of selfishness. Since I’d cleaned up, I was gradually remembering how to be respectful and courteous. Pencil still in hand, I scribbled down some lyrics under the note “Max, Jill Called.”
The telephone is ringing
But it’s not for me
Gotta remember to
Write a note Max Jill called
Gotta learn to be considerate
Our sound was spare and raw. Acoustic-driven. Unplugged. John Frusciante, who had by now gotten clean too, came by and would add guitar parts. Songs took shape and it all began to fall into place. Paul Tollett loved what he heard. He was now in the record business and I felt good that I was the reason the Goldenvoice label came into existence. I had what I thought was a great collection of songs. They were real and they took an unflinching look at my life. “The Cereal Song” was one that was special to me. It summed up everything: drugs, addiction, and where I was at. Over the song’s simple chordal structure punctuated with electric-guitar harmonics and jagged little fills, I sang about my love for heroin and cocaine.
But it wasn’t rock-and-roll decadence anymore. It was regret and redemption. It was working regular, anonymous jobs and being out of the loop. It was dental problems. But I didn’t want to be saccharine about it. I wanted to be truthful. My teeth, from years of neglect and drug abuse, were a mess. It’s an occupational hazard. Ask Keith Richards and Shane Mac-Gowan. When I smiled, it was a horror show. And worse, I couldn’t eat much more than mushy, half-liquid gruel. It was a drag, but it inspired a stanza about what drugs had given me in return for all the years of devotion I had given them:
Just some teeth I can’t chew
My favorite cereal with
Bleak, but truthful. The song crystallized every pain and regret I felt about what I had done to myself and what I had seen happen to my friends. Where had it gotten me? I had an answer for that:
Thirty-five years old now
I wash dishes in a restaurant
An angular solo by John Frusciante fleshed out the sound of “The Cereal Song” and we had something that was, I thought, one of the best things I’d ever written. This album was my masterpiece, and it was released by Goldenvoice in 1999. The record got mostly positive reviews.
In October of that year, Paul Tollett launched the first Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. It was an ambitious project. It was a two-day event that featured five stages, all of it set up under the blazing desert sun. In that part of the world, not far from where I had lived as a kid, the brutal summer lingers on well into November. Goldenvoice brought together a lot of acts. The headliners were Beck—who not many years before had been booed off the stage at the Viper Room—Rage Against the Machine, Morrissey, and Tool. The Bicycle Thief, Goldenvoice artists, were on the undercard along with the Chemical Brothers, Jurassic 5, Perry Farrell, Gil Scott-Heron, Ben Harper, Kool Keith, and a whole bunch of other bands, DJs, and hip-hoppers. The performers all carried some serious musical credibility … and, unfortunately, didn’t draw a huge crowd. At least not as large as we all would have expected. And although Goldenvoice had experience promoting shows, this was bigger and crazier than anything else they had done. It was great, but it was disorganized.
There were some electrifying performances that day. Beck, who had ditched his neo-folkie thing from his club days and left his leaf blower at home, presented himself as a born-again soulster who, despite looking like the whitest white boy in the whole white-boy world, managed to kick out some downright funky sounds with his band. Morrissey showed that he had some real connections to Southern California’s Hispanic community when hundreds of young Latino kids—most of them boys—crowded the stage for his set. Dressed in the typical Morrissey drag of stiff and cuffed Levi’s and white T-shirts, the kids also sported Morrissey’s short-back-and-sides pompadour haircut and mimicked their hero’s odd, arm-swinging dance moves. Perry Farrell led some kind of crazy conga line. Tool, of course, was heavy, and Rage Against the Machine pummeled the audience with its style of firebrand political rock. Josh and I turned in a good set, although Josh’s shoe-gazing stage presence still struck me as goofy. “Dude, you need to connect with the audience,” I’d tell him.
“But this is how I play,” he’d say.
I never even knew how tall the kid was because he’d curl into himself, head down and permanently hunched over his guitar.
“They have these stools for us to sit on,” I’d say at a gig.
“That’s cool, man. I’ll just sit on the stage floor,” he’d say with a shrug.
It was maddening to me. In a festival setting like Coachella, you need to command an audience’s attention. And you’re not going to do that if you refuse to even look at the crowd. The stage is not the same as your bedroom.
Coachella was a huge undertaking. It had very little of the military precision that the festival features now. There were some problems with money. A lot of the bands agreed to be owed their performance fees. We were all friends, so it seemed uncool to blow that over money. But not everyone on the ticket took that attitude. Rage Against the Machine, which had fostered its image as a group of radical, fight-the-power communists, was adamant that they be paid. The money troubles led to the dissolution of the Goldenvoice label.
I was a free agent once again. The record had done well, though. It had gotten a lot of critical praise and sold steadily, but I needed distribution. Danny Goldberg of Artemis Records, a man who had managed Kurt Cobain, had listened to the record and he loved what he heard. I was at home when the call came. I let the answering machine take it. “Bob? This is Irene from Danny Goldberg’s office. Could you please get back to us?”
I listened to the message. The whole idea of the music business still seemed distasteful to me. The guys at Goldenvoice were friends, so it was low-key and I trusted them. Goldberg was a different sort of creature. He continued to call. Eventually, my resistance weakened and we finally talked. I was curious.
“Bob, you’ve been hard to reach.”
“I’m scared,” I told him truthfully.
“Look,” he said, “why don’t we sit down and talk? I really think we can do something with your record. I listened to it and I loved it.”
He “loved” it? Well, if there’s one way to get through to me, it’s via praise and flattery. I’m no different in that regard than most people. I thought to myself, Well, what can it hurt to just meet with the guy to see what he has to say?
“Okay,” I said. “I can manage that.”
“Good, good,” he crooned through the phone. “Why don’t we meet at the Four Seasons hotel over on Doheny?”
“Sounds great.”
“Tuesday at eight o’clock?” he asked.
“I’ll see you then,” I said, and put down the phone.
I got ahold of Josh. “Look, man, we have a meeting with Danny Goldberg. All I’m asking is two things. Let me do the talking and please at least make eye contact with the guy and shake his hand. You know, be polite.”
“God, Bob, I know how to behave with people.”
The Four Seasons is the typical entertainment-biz place to eat and meet. Lots of greenery around that sets up a vibe that says although you’re smack in the middle of one of the busiest corridors of the city, you’re miles away from it all. The ground-floor lounge is casual in that kind of way that people with money have: elegant but low-key. Danny was already seated when Josh and I arrived. I introd
uced them and Josh shook his hand, made eye contact, and then folded into himself like always and stared at his menu while Danny and I talked.
“Bob, the record’s great, and I know we can package it and sell it.” He listed all the advantages Artemis could bring to the party and I sat and listened. It sounded good. I was polite and Danny didn’t have a trace of the hostility or distrust toward me that I had expected. In fact, he was very charming. We ate and talked and by the end of the meal, we had come to a deal. I felt good about it.
On the way home in the car, Josh was quiet. I could sense that something was up with him. “What?” I asked after the third mile had passed without his saying a word.
“You trust that guy?” he asked me.
“Yeah. This is a good deal. Why?”
“I don’t like him,” he said. “He seems slippery.”
“Well, you don’t know much about it, do you? That’s how all these guys are.”
“I still don’t trust him at all, man,” he said, and then went back to silence.
Well, he was a kid. What did I expect? He’d get over it, I thought. Besides, it was my band. But the seed of suspicion had been sown, or maybe it was just Josh growing up and coming into his own as a musician. We started to feud over trivial things, and I have never been good when it comes time to face criticism. These were my songs. I’d written them. I didn’t need outside input. Besides, the record sold steadily. I had obviously done something right, but I had also discovered through Paul Tollett that Danny Goldberg’s first reaction when he had heard I was back making music was “Bob Forrest? Are you fucking kidding me? Fuck that guy! I wouldn’t touch him in a million years. He’s trouble. Worthless.”
