Beautiful woman, beautiful soul, beautiful spirit in my life when my life couldn’t appreciate her kind of beauty.
I met Jannina, who had an Ecuadorian mother and Mexican father, when she was nineteen and I was twenty-two. My career was still on stall. I was living off Wilshire Boulevard in mid-city L.A., where I hung out at the King King club at Sixth and La Brea. The Red Devils, a group I dug, often jammed there. Sometimes you might see Jimmie Vaughan performing. It was my kind of hipster scene.
One night I went in for drinks, met a dude named Tony, his sister Jannina, and Jannina’s friend Marina. We drank, danced, and brought the party back to our place. At first I was chatting up Marina, but couldn’t keep my eyes off Jannina. She was short—five foot three—with a tight, beautiful body; long, deep dark-brown hair; deep-set dark-brown eyes; a Roman nose; a perfect bubble butt; a small overbite that I found alluring; and an aura of sweetness that drew me to her. At the end of the evening, I asked for her number.
“I thought you liked Marina,” she said.
“I do, but I have a crush on you.”
She gave me her number; a few weeks later she gave me her love. We had much in common: We liked the same kind of music and we were believing Catholics, both from good families, both interested in a long-lasting relationship. Jannina had a good job selling makeup for Clinique at an upscale department store in Pasadena. Earlier in her life she had set her sights on going to the Olympics in gymnastics. A superb athlete, she came close, winning state and national championships. But at a critical point she lost on the balance beam and her dream of Olympic glory was dashed.
THE BIGGEST MUSICAL CHALLENGE I had was facing the truth: I had to upgrade the quality of the musicians I was playing with. Cory agreed. But deep down, I also knew that Cory, for all his talent, wasn’t really up to the task of the major-league music biz. At the same time, he agreed that we needed to recruit Robert DeLeo.
Robert was still on the musical scene, so it wasn’t hard to find him. When I did, I put it to him plainly: “Join our band.”
Robert was reluctant. “I don’t want to play with Britt.”
“I understand,” I said. “We’ll get a new guy on keyboards.”
“I don’t think we need keyboards,” said Robert. “And I know he’s your close buddy, but I also don’t think we need Cory.”
“You will tell Britt he’s out?”
“Yes,” Robert agreed, “if you tell Cory.”
Thus the seeds of STP were sown.
Cory was cool about it. He sensed it was coming. He had tears in his eyes, but realized our ambition was greater than his. Britt wasn’t as cool. He felt duped.
NO MATTER, ROBERT AND I WERE MOVING AHEAD. Eric Kretz, a superb musician, became our drummer. All we lacked was a killer lead guitarist. Robert had only briefly mentioned his brother Dean. He never promoted him. All he said was, “The best fuckin’ guitarist I know is my big brother.”
The trouble was that Dean, who had moved from Jersey to San Diego, was no longer playing. He was a super-successful businessman who had married his high school girlfriend and bought a beautiful home. When Robert and I joined forces, Dean helped us get gigs down in San Diego—that’s one of the reasons we got a reputation as a San Diego band—but he didn’t play with us. We’d all party at his house afterward. He was generous with his encouragement, but it took a long time to convince him to break out his guitar and jam.
Once he did, though, our lives were never the same. Our first jam with Dean was on a riff that became “Where the River Goes” on Core.
I wanna be big as a mountain
I wanna fly high as the sun
I wanna know what the rent’s like in heaven
I wanna know where the river goes
To us, Dean’s playing was big as a mountain and high as the sun. He pushed us up to a heavenly plane. Whatever had happened to him in the past—however he had become disillusioned or disheartened—the power of the music we made together pushed him out of retirement.
For months he was just our friend in San Diego, our bassist’s brother, a superhip guy who helped us book gigs. And then, with one jam, he became an integral part of the band. This was the late eighties, but Dean was essential seventies, a guitar worthy of Zeppelin. Musically, physically, spiritually, he was perfect for the part. Genetically engineered to be a guitar player, he was a gangly guy with thick, unruly hair, an oversize mouth, oversize lips, thundering chops. He was a skinny motherfucker, but he could play!
Beyond what might seem like a stereotype, he was a real person whose charisma drew everyone—including me—to his side. Jack Kerouac had his Dean Moriarty. I had my Dean DeLeo. His mantra was, “Everything in moderation, even moderation.” Like Keith Richards, he was a glorious rogue.
The DeLeos’ dad died young, and Dean became father to Robert: Even during his crazy high school days, Dean maintained a sense of responsibility. If I brought him the dark news of punk culture, he brought me the complete grammar of gunslingin’ guitarists, from Muddy Waters and Wes Montgomery to Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page.
Mighty Joe Young, May 7, 1990, at Club Lingerie, Hollywood, CA. From left to right: Robert DeLeo, Scott, Eric Kretz (drums), Corey Hickock (Photo by Bobby Levine)
JANNINA CASTENEDA WAS THERE FIRST. I fell for her, and then I fell for Mary Forsberg. Mary went away. Jannina stayed. Mary came back, only to go away again and then return. All the while, filled with guilt and passion, I tormented myself, making one ill-fated decision after another.
NOW I REINTRODUCE MARY FORSBERG—blessed Mary, mother of two beautiful children, the love of my early dreams, the woman who overwhelmed my heart and my head for much of my life.
It was the dawn of the nineties. I had just turned twenty-three. Eric Kretz, Dean and Robert DeLeo, and I had an unsigned band called Mighty Joe Young. I needed work and took a job as a driver for a modeling agency. Robert worked at a music store, right across the street from the agency. He’d come over with ideas for songs—chords, melodies, riffs. Words and stories started coming to me as well. “Plush.” “Creed.” “Wicked Garden.” We were doing live shows and had developed a strong following in San Diego as well as Hollywood. On any given night, we could draw two hundred people. For an unsigned band, that was good. We got gigs opening for Rollins Band, Ice T, and Soul Asylum.
I was a young man driving beautiful young models to their jobs in my old ’65 Chrysler Imperial Crown. My job paid eight dollars an hour, not so bad for those times. Before that, I was mainly being supported by my beautiful girlfriend Jannina. I never thought that driving models would lead to high drama. If you had asked me, I would have naïvely said, “It’s good work. They let me off when I have a gig or have to rehearse. I like these people. The girls are beautiful. They’re all my age or younger. But models being interested in me? No way. They have a lot more going on than me.”
It was a good summer. I was living with Dean in Highland Park, a funky part of L.A. It was a summer of barbecues and beer, a summer in a kicked-back Mexican neighborhood, a summer of possibilities. That same summer we learned that Mighty Joe Young was the name of a blues singer who was still working. His management asked us to drop the handle. Blues ethos required that we respect our fellow musician, so we began searching for another name.
It was also the summer of my shrine, a makeshift holy spot lit by candles and surrounded by tchotchkes. It was a summer of waiting for the muse to bless us with songs. In the center of the shrine I placed a can of STP oil treatment. It was there for comfort. As a kid, I had STP stickers on my bike. I loved the brand. I loved the way Richard Petty, a fantastic character, was rock-and-roll hell on wheels. He wore the STP logo. Those letters represented it all—rebelliousness, chance victory, going for broke. I saw it as serendipitous. I loved the clarity and directness of the label. Maybe it could work for us. If it was good enough for Richard Petty—who, after all, was the Keith Richards of car racing—then hell, it was good enough for us.
But what would it stand f
or?
Shirley Temple’s Pussy. The name was thrown around just for humor’s sake. We worried, though, that the all-American macho males who were consuming this new brand of alt rock might not get the sarcasm. So the long process of searching for a name continued.
The shrine I built to keep evil out.
I think it brought the evil in.
Meanwhile, models had to be driven. One day I was told to drive a girl called Mary. She was sixteen. She lived with a Vietnamese gay man, an agent with her agency. Mary was stunning, a San Diego surfer girl aglow with the light of a cloudless sky. Long flowing natural golden brown hair with streaks bleached by the California sun. Her beauty was otherworldly, almost painful. She carried a pain I couldn’t name. She was painfully shy, said hardly a word. Our pain collided, but silently. Pain wasn’t expressed, only sensed.
Mary and I worked for Nicole Bordeaux, owner of the modeling agency, a woman who reminded me of Cruella De Vil from 101 Dalmatians, except she wasn’t cruel. She was fabulous and flamboyant and protective of her girls. Her husband, David Bordeaux, had taken her name, a fact I found amusing. The modeling business moved on frenetic energy, the kind fueled by coke. It was all about free champagne and go-for-broke nightclubs. Nicole regarded me as just another would-be rocker in some unknown band. You could find thousands of us on every block of Hollywood or in the pages of LA Weekly. Yet Nicole was careful to select me as Mary’s driver.
“She isn’t one of my skyscraper models,” she said, referring to Mary. “She’s a young, delicate creature. She doesn’t have a driver’s license yet. Handle her with care. She’s our Kate Moss.”
When Mary walked in wearing a backpack, her appearance belied her beauty. She wore no makeup, simple jeans, a white T-shirt. Her lips were large and sensuous, her sculpted cheekbones high, her eyes a deep, rich brown. She was no taller than five foot eight. When Nicole introduced her to me, I thought I caught the shadow of a smile. I couldn’t be sure.
As she walked toward me, she didn’t say anything. As I drove her to her gig, the silence held steady. I wondered if she was shy or simply had little to say. I tried some easy conversation. She answered monosyllabically. I stopped trying.
“Wanna listen to the Beastie Boys or Nirvana?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said.
Paul’s Boutique sounded good, even on my shitty car stereo.
When I picked up Mary after her modeling session, she seemed glad to see me but didn’t say so. I slipped in a cassette of Nirvana’s Nevermind. This was 1991, and the record had started a tidal wave of things to come. The wave was glorious, but the tide brought destruction.
“Please make that louder,” she said.
I gladly complied. Mary was feeling what I was feeling—at least I thought so. We started getting closer. She was just getting out of a relationship, and I was in one with Jannina. I loved Jannina, but, having met Mary, realized that I was never in love with Jannina. What’s the difference? I could answer with a single word—obsession. I see love, like art, as an obsession. Maybe that’s an overly romantic view of human existence, but I’m an overly romantic human being. If love, like rock and roll, doesn’t consume me 24-7, it’s not love. It can be respect, appreciation, admiration, wonderment, it can be a world of glory and a lifetime of peace, but I can’t call it love. Love burns me and confuses me. Love’s a light that can’t be extinguished.
Mary had this light in her eyes; her eyes were filled with love. She also had darkness. She kept a book of her modeling photographs that I took home and studied. I placed it in a drawer. Jannina found the book and asked me about it. I fumbled and fidgeted. “It was in the car,” I said. “I brought it inside by mistake.” My lie was apparent. I was raised not to lie, so I’m not good at it. But love’s obsession broke down my moral code. Love’s obsession had me dreaming of Mary.
When I came to pick her up one morning, the front door to her apartment was open. “Come in,” she said. Fresh from a shower, she had a towel wrapped around her body. I sat on the bed, embarrassed. I wanted to kiss her, but didn’t.
Mary’s moods. Mary’s expressions. Mary saying to me, “Would you mind if I asked you to put on my makeup? I’m not too good at that.”
The long, hot summer passed and we still didn’t kiss. It was all looks and gestures, nothing but sensuous silence.
Putting on her makeup was the most sensuous moment I had ever experienced with her yet. Tenderly moving ruby red lipstick across her lips. Powdering her cheeks. Slowly applying eyeliner.
Wanting to kiss her.
Wanting to hold her.
Wanting to say something—and instead saying nothing.
Later I learned that Mary also wanted to say something. Later she said that she too wanted to kiss me and hold me. She said she was waiting for me to make my move. But no move was made that summer.
Me, just before STP was signed
WE FELL IN LOVE WITH THE STP LOGO and just needed a name to go with it. Stone Temple Pilots seemed to fit the bill. It sounded adventuresome; it sounded strange; it sounded like us. It was a blazing summer of beer and pot parties. Our band was beginning to catch the wave of alternative energy sweeping over the music business. Within a few months, STP, Tool, and Rage Against the Machine all got deals with major labels. Our deal came as a result of three shows. The first had us opening for Body Count, Ice T’s band, at the Palladium. The second saw us opening for the Rollins Band at the Whiskey. That was the gig where we had a few girls dress up in semi-bondage gear and blow bubbles. Mary was one of those girls. Our relationship, though, remained chaste.
The third gig was the most important—the Shamrock, a dive in Silver Lake. It was there the offer was made. Tom Carolan, an A&R exec at Atlantic, said, “You guys are great! How would you like to make a record for us?” We acted as though we had managers and advisors to contact. But of course we were going to make a record for Atlantic. We were shocked into a state of manic bliss. Atlantic was the ideal label. Founded by Ahmet Ertegun, it had started out as an indie and wound up signing Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Led Zeppelin, not to mention the Rolling Stones.
We pinched ourselves, realizing it was a combination of blind ambition and musical talent that put us on the treadmill to big-time success. We were ecstatic, but we were also dead serious about crafting and playing the kind of selfreflective rock that we respected. We weren’t going to do crap; and we weren’t going to be imitators. We thought we had an original voice, original stories, and an original sound. We wanted to get to the essential elements of what we were all about—the core of our music—so we called the record Core. We had merged our musical sensibilities and forged something new. Of course we had influences—the Stones, Pink Floyd, Metallica, the Beatles, Zep, and a dozen other bands. But the whole of STP turned out to be far greater than the sum of our parts; it turned out to be visceral—a little strange, sometimes lyrical, and always intense. We loved Core.
The critics hated it; the critics pulverized us; the critics loved pulverizing us. Today, I can talk about the critics’ murderous response to our work with a certain distance. Today, I don’t give a shit. But back then, I cared. I was a serious musician looking for serious critics to take us seriously. Robert, Eric, and especially Dean, who was superserious about rock history, felt the same. So when the writers dumped on us, it was a definite drag. I actually called Danny Goldberg, the president of Atlantic, to explain my plight and point. He said, “Don’t worry. I used to be the publicist for Zeppelin, and, for their first years, it was the same for them. Now look at how they’re viewed—as legends.”
Critical flop but commercial smash—that’s the story of Core. The record started selling, and, some eight million copies later, has never stopped. Neither did the critics stop criticizing. “Sex Type Thing,” a big hit single off the record, was characterized by some closed-minded morons as a date-rape song. Some actually said that we were promoting date rape. Because the song was written in the voice of the deranged character, there were c
ritics who presumed I was that character. That’s like saying that there’s no difference between a first-person character created by a writer and the writer himself. The assumption is ridiculous. I wanted to point out the craziness of that criticism, so before getting out onstage and performing “Sex Type Thing,” I smeared lipstick across my mouth and slipped on a dress.
It was a big moment. After MTV’s Spring Break, we flew across the pond for a couple of days of promotion and concerts. The drag version of “Sex Type Thing” became performance art. After a few bars of the song clicked in, we saw the openmouthed, wide-eyed looks from all the shirtless macho men in the crowd. But then, even though I’m not sure those guys got our irony, they started slam dancing, moshing, and crowd surfing—a big hint that we were beginning to make waves. We felt justified. Our message was getting across…AMEN!
Halloween night. As you can see, I’m the one who looks like Cheryl Tiegs.
1992. WE WERE TOURING AND “SEX TYPE THING” was out as a single. The tour consisted of us taking turns driving an RV while crisscrossing the country playing small clubs. Our first show was in Orange County with my Huntington Beach friends cheering me on. On my twenty-fourth birthday, we were in the middle of nowhere, so we camped out for the night. Robert made us tuna burgers, we got crazy drunk, and had a ball. The world was still young and fresh. We were still indestructible.
Sometimes at our concerts we got concerned at the number of skinheads in the crowd. I hated that. They weren’t who we wanted to perform for. Whatever energy we were exerting was not meant to stimulate them. “If you don’t want this vibe,” I’d say, “go to a Pantera concert.”
In New York, where we didn’t have much of a following, we played at a place called the Bank at Houston and Ludlow. A few years later I’d be scoring dope at that very corner. But for now, we were just trying to score with the music industry. Metal radio was playing us—“Sex Type Thing” was seen as a metal song—and that both bugged and pleased us. It bugged us because we didn’t see ourselves as metal. It pleased us because we were on the radio. And besides, the same thing was happening to Soundgarden and Nirvana. If they could be confused for heavy metal, why not STP?
Not Dead & Not For Sale Page 4
