But on the whole, and especially back then, this permanent adolescence serves me well on the path I’ve chosen, so I’m at peace with it. Only down the line, as I take on more adult responsibilities and find them harder to shoulder, do I realize how ill suited it leaves me for some of life’s roles that I desire most.
CHAPTER TEN
THE AMERICANIZATION OF RICKY
SAN FERNANDO VALLEY
1978
The Hollywood party scene I now find myself in, courtesy of my new actor friends and associates, is the usual drug-taking, drinking, sexual free-for-all that we’ve come to know and envy after everybody but me has written their autobiography. But honestly, I’m sure the parties are no different than the ones everyone else is going to. It’s just that these are actors and musicians, so most people assume that they have the advantage of getting all the “good stuff.” It ain’t necessarily so. There is no rhyme or reason to these parties, and I meet all the other wannabes who are swimming at or near the bottom. A few, like Michael Biehn, Shaun Cassidy, and the Hudson Brothers, will have their own successes later on.
I am also pretty naïve about the strengths and effects of the drugs I’ve been taking on and off. At another of the endless Hollywood parties that seem to be going on all night and every night, a friend gives me some psychedelic mushrooms. I take them home and put them in the freezer as he suggests. A few nights later I decide to give them a whirl. I chop a good-sized piece off one of them, swallow it, and wait for the fireworks … nothing. So, thinking they must be a little weaker than windowpane—the chemical version I’m used to—I cut up and ingest more of the magic mushrooms. And wait. Nothing. So I call my friend, and he suggests drinking some hot tea to thaw them out in my stomach since I’d been dumb enough to eat them straight from the freezer. So I drink tea. And wait … Nothing. I eat some more of the ’shrooms and drink more tea. Dammit, nothing. “Fuck this,” I say to myself, and I do a hit of the windowpane I have in a drawer and settle down to watch TV. Ten minutes later it all kicks in.
I think I’m underwater and the ferns in the corner of the room are really seaweed. I begin to back myself off the couch and up the wall, feeling increasingly uncomfortable and disoriented. Everything is turning freaky. An ad for a pot roast on the TV looks like a raw, bloody, severed human thigh. I am most certainly losing it. I get up and walk to the kitchen. It’s even worse. The linoleum is rolling and buckling like ocean waves. I manage to dial the guy who gave me the mushrooms and croak out, “I’m too high. Help me.” He says he’ll be right over but to take some Valium. It will bring me down.
My hands are shaking uncontrollably as I pour out a handful of Valium and swallow them. I drink water but it tastes like liquid iron and chemicals. I pace and moan and it seems like forever ’til there’s a knock at the door and my friend enters. He looks cartoonish, like a gnome. His nose is too big and his eyes are tiny steel black balls set deep in his head. He grins and it looks like a threat. We go outside and walk around the block. It’s Christmas, and the lighted decorations run the length and breadth of Hollywood Boulevard. I am stunned. It looks to me like there’s a fortune in jewels hanging from the sky. I’ve never seen anything so astonishingly beautiful and glittering in my life. We make it back to my apartment finally, and I am off hallucinogens for life.
Acting class is getting interesting, and of course there are lots of really pretty people. Though I am officially with Diana, I am still running amok whenever I can with some of the other girls in class and at the “actor” parties we all go to. Richard Chamberlain, who is a past and current student of Vincent Chase, occasionally hosts some of these. Richard comes to class sometimes to “work out.”
He’s friends with Elton (here we go again), and at Richard’s parties I regularly play a couple of the newest songs I’ve written, on his piano, before Elton gets up and sings some of his new stuff. Am I actually opening for Elton John? This is around the Captain Fantastic period, so it’s a high point in his career. (His album, I mean, not me opening for him.) His group and entourage are all good English folks, but I stay clear of the bathrooms when there are young, pretty-boys around. I do make my way there, though, when I find a girl who is game, and more than once the door opens and I am busted en flagrante with my jeans at knee level and the plucky girl sitting up legs astride me on the bathroom counter top, breathing heavily. Have to remember to lock the damn door.
Despite these apparently self-assured moves in and out of party bathrooms, I still don’t have much self-worth or confidence, mainly because of the lack of success with my music. If just “having sex” could have been a career option for me, I would have been much happier at this point in my life. As it is, sex offers only a momentary reprieve from my severe lack of self-esteem and my severe lack of a career. I am determined to change that, so I take up martial arts.
I choose the only martial arts dojo in walking distance (I still don’t own a car and in fact haven’t even learned to drive). Shotokan is a hard, external version of karate that focuses on strong stances, balance, and power punches and kicks. The sensei, a tough Japanese master, teaches me to guard my ribs in a fight by punching me hard enough to crack one. I get the same treatment from the black belts at the dojo that I used to get as a neophyte musician in my first bands. They give us white belts a bunch of good-natured shit. I’m a diligent student, and as I progress through the ranks up to black belt, I begin to tap into the internal strength I’ve been seeking—so much so that I start doing things I would have avoided before, like purposely crossing a street to walk past a gang of loudmouths near Hollywood High School or walking down the darkest street I can find at night. It also improves my confidence at the Vincent Chase Workshop and I start to take acting seriously.
I also make another choice here: I change my accent to mid-Atlantic American. At last Diana can understand what I’m saying. My decision is driven mainly by the idea that when I start auditioning for acting roles, I want the American accent to be natural and not something I have to think about. But I know there is a deeper, slightly darker reason as well: I’m shedding all vestiges of myself as an Australian, because I’m still haunted by the experience as a twelve-year-old returning native son, of looking out at the Melbourne wharf and seeing all those Aussie bumpkins lining the docks as we anchored. I don’t fully realize this at the time, but I know now it is in there. Even with the new accent, I’m still uncomfortable with who I am. It’s a slightly schizoid thing that I’m now talking with an American accent but still thinking in my old accent. I dream in it too. I try not to focus too much on what this might say about other mental tricks that I may be playing on myself.
Joe Gottfried is the owner of Sound City, a recording studio that isn’t doing much business right now but will gradually and steadily become one of the hottest rooms in town through the coming decades as Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Santana, Foreigner—and much later Nirvana and Queens of the Stone Age—commit their hard-earned cash to cutting audio masterpieces there.
Joe is a good-hearted guy who loves the whole entertainment business but doesn’t really know a thing about managing a music career. He says he wants to sign me. I look at the very expensive Neve recording consoles in studios A and B, picture myself cutting some tunes for free, because my manager owns the place … and sign on the dotted line. I am more or less back in the music business.
But as Mr. Darkness likes to point out in his inimitable fashion, “Things can’t always be bright and shiny,” so of course Cleo, our family dog, takes this opportunity to kick the canine bucket. I write her a song called “Fare Thee Ever Well,” which I later rewrite under even darker circumstances. And my old mum calls three weeks later to tell me that Norman James, our sweet struggling man, has developed colon cancer.
I catch a plane home to be with my family. Five or so years after his first death and despite the addition of cancer, my dad is doing pretty well. Mum is, too, although I can see she has serious “caretaker’s stress syndrom
e.” She feels guilty for resenting having to care for a husband she loves. She gets fed up with his repetitive questions, his constant forgetfulness, and his childlike pigheadedness. She yells at him, then reproaches herself even more harshly. It’s a no-win situation for her, and now she has to begin to chart the unknown course of his cancer treatments. It’s in the early stages, so there is hope that something can be done to arrest it.
We are all brokenhearted at the loss of our old girl Cleo, Dad included. We bury her, in her basket, at the back of the yard, under the shade of the tree she loved to rest beneath during the hot summer days. I realize again that I prefer the company of dogs. They are truly good, unconditionally loving beings, and they have never abandoned me, even though I have abandoned them. I do feel guilty for leaving Cleo while I journeyed to another land, as I had done to my best furry pal Elvis so many years before. And now, suddenly, there is a possible end point to my sweet old dad’s life. I know I made the choices I did because it was my path, but it doesn’t make missing precious years with the ones who truly matter any easier.
My parents are happy (relieved?) that I finally have a new manager. I don’t tell them I think he might be a little green. But I am feeling positive. Any move forward is a good move, and I must get back, despite the fact that my father has cancer. He understands. They both do. I think I do, too.
I jump on the next flight back to the States, where Joe has a surprise for me. We’re meeting with a small label named Chelsea Records in two days, and they want to hear my songs. Again, I pull my demos together.
Wes Farrell is famous to me for having co-written the song “Boys” on the Beatles’ first album. He is a suave, handsome, white-toothed American entrepreneur, and his new label Chelsea is looking for talent. He likes the songs he hears, we sign a deal right then and there, and just like that I’m back in the music biz. Wait for Night is the title I come up with because it sounds vaguely like the name of an old ’40s movie. Being an “actor” now, I’m into that sort of shit. People and relationships at the acting class are great fodder for songs, and I feel this is my best writing so far.
I’ve found an amazing engineer named Mark Smith who will make the record with me, and in another brush with Elton John and the people attached to him, Nigel Olsson and Dee Murray, Elton’s drummer and bassist since the beginning of his career, have just left the band and want to cut the new songs with me. I think this is a frigging great idea. I’ve met Nigel at a couple of parties and we’ve gotten along well. We cut the whole album at Sound City as a three-piece band. They also sing background vocals on the songs, and, truly, it sounds amazing. I am over the moon. It’s also the very first time I’ve triple-tracked electric guitar parts. The songs sound huge! Again I think the ballads are my best songs on the album.
I pose for an appropriately movie-esque photo for the front cover (although I’m getting sick of putting my face on every record I make), Chelsea prints up copies, and Wes cleans off an area of wall space in his office in anticipation of the first gold record we will get. I can almost see the shiny record on the wall, and I like that visual.
I meet Susan George, the hot English actress who played opposite Dustin Hoffman in the Sam Peckinpah film Straw Dogs, in Wes’s office and she says she thinks the album is really good, so I jump in the sack with her. It doesn’t occur to me ’til later that maybe Wes had designs on Susan, too, and maybe banging the record company owner’s prospective “shag” isn’t the best way to endear myself to him. It’s hard to stay straight on my career path, when I keep shooting myself in the foot with my dick.
When the album is finished, I put another band together, Nigel and Dee being a little too expensive as a touring band for me at this time. The drummer I choose is a fresh-faced hard hitter from Detroit named Jack White. We can’t know it then, but he will remain the drummer in all my bands for the next thirty years. We have similar issues with women and get into more than one bloody fight on the road over who has the seeding rights to which girl at any given time. It’s a good, solid band, except for the bass player, who keeps falling asleep at rehearsals and leaving early to meet a friend. I don’t know it at the time, but he’s a heroin addict. Eventually we replace him with Robbie Levin, a really fine player but an even better entrepreneur. While I’m paying Robbie $100 a week to rehearse, he’s making $50,000 a month selling T-shirts and will eventually make millions through an expanded clothing line and a vacation resort in Idaho—but he’ll retain the unquenchable desire to be a musician: it never, ever leaves your soul, no matter how much money you make doing something else.
Chelsea releases Wait for Night. It gets great reviews, the single “Take a Hand” hits the charts, the band gets a pretty serious string of gigs, we start touring, and then … Goddammit!!! Wes Farrell divorces his wife. His wife happens to be Frank Sinatra’s youngest daughter, Tina. I think Frank calls in his loan, because Chelsea Records folds like a house of Las Vegas playing cards. Wait for Night is DOA.
Am I in the wrong business? Is this a sign that I should have kept to the “electrician” backup plan like my mum wanted? Or—and this is where my insatiable drive kicks in—am I being tested to see how bad I want it?
Well, I want it. Bad.
I’m very career-driven and impatient for success. But that impatience doesn’t make the success come any sooner, and it flows into other areas of my life where it doesn’t belong. I make spur-of-the-moment bad decisions that leave me feeling even worse, not better.
My band and I happen to be in Portland, Oregon, the moment the call comes through that Chelsea is out of business and all my blood, sweat, and tears have been for nothing (again). Portland happens to be the home of “The Flying Garter Girls” (FGG for short), a group of women led by a twenty-five-year-old groupie who recruits young, hot girls and schools them in the very fine art of satisfying the many bands that come through the area. I head to the hotel bar to give my band the bad news about Chelsea, and the Flying Garter Girls are there, gossiping about a new band they’ve just serviced (well, honestly, I don’t think they serviced the whole band: Queen). I’m angry and dispirited. I should be calling home to reach out to Diana—a good woman who supports me with her whole heart and would probably talk me down off the ledge. Instead, I decide to drown my sorrows in the instant gratification and temporary high of the FGGs.
I would say at this point that I am as driven sexually as I am career-driven, even though my music career has stalled once more. However, I’m not the only one in my life who is driven, because who should climb into my hotel bed with me as I am shaft-deep in one of the Flying Garter Girls? Yes, it’s Mr. Darkness, and he hisses ominously that I’m now zero-for-three in the record business. “Starting to get a bit of a rep as a loser, mate.”
But I do go home and begin to regroup and rebuild. It’s in my nature now: to keep going, to never give up. I have another phrase in my head, no doubt inspired by all the goal-attainment books I’ve read: There is more than one way in. Maybe I’ve been going about this all wrong. So Diana and I decide to rent a small theater and put on a one-act play starring … us. If no one will hire us, then we’ll bloody well hire ourselves. We begin rehearsals and start looking for a cheap theater.
A few weeks later, an envelope drops into my mail slot. It’s a check from a music residual collecting agency made payable to me, for $3.50 … no, wait … $35.—No, wait … $350. NO, WAIT! It’s $3,500!!! There is no way this money is mine, so I call up the agency and, judging from the sound of her voice, an older lady answers. I tell her my name and that I think they must have mailed this check to me by mistake. She answers, “Honey, just cash the check.” So I do.
The play we choose is a short one-act called Lunchtime by Leonard Melfi. We invite every casting person on the face of the planet to the crappy room-turned-into-a-theater that we’ve found up an alleyway off Fairfax Avenue. It runs for a week, and all sixteen of our friends show up. But no casting people. Not a fucking one—even though they all said they would. No one,
that is, except for a wonderful man named Milt Hammerman, who is head of the contract players division at Universal. I guess he likes what he sees, because he signs me to a contract deal at Universal Studios. Diana is thrilled for me but hurts for herself, and this is why I never date another actress or musician. Careers tend to advance at different speeds, and it’s a huge pressure when a couple’s careers move out of step.
I start guest starring in Universal’s big ’70s TV shows. Battlestar Galactica, The Rockford Files, The Incredible Hulk, Wonder Woman, Turnabout, The Eddie Capra Mysteries, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Nancy Drew Mysteries—the list goes on and on. Well, not really. That’s pretty much it.
Diana, who is a much more accomplished actor than I am, is waiting tables at a local restaurant. She also narrowly escapes being raped one night, and after a transvestite is shot to death outside the apartment building we’re both living in, we sagely decide it’s time to boogie to the ’burbs. I swallow my doubts about living full-time with a girlfriend, and Diana, her sweet dog Sasha, and I move out to the slightly smoggier but slightly safer area of Glendale, California, where we rent a minister’s two-bedroom house. We get some chickens (I leave their heads fully attached to their bodies this time), paint and decorate, and generally become quite the little suburbanites.
Late, Late at Night Page 18
