Since I’m making my only money from acting, I throw my energy into it, but an actor’s life is filled with days, weeks, and months of waiting, so I continue to write songs and silently keep my radar aimed at the vast, open, and very empty field of incoming record deals.
My mum is now confident enough managing my father that she books a trip for the both of them. She wants to see her relatives in En- gland as well as visit me, so they hit the skies. My mother says later that all through Europe my poor dad—who I’m sure she dragged to every musty old castle in the vicinity—kept asking, “When are we going to see Rick?”
They finally arrive, and I unwittingly put them up in a motel whose regular clientele are hookers and their johns. The next day my mother tells me what an odd room they’re staying in. “Why would anyone put mirrors on the ceiling above the bed?” I move them to a Holiday Inn.
They stay for a few days, meet Diana’s family (my mum thinks Diana is her future daughter-in-law, and at this point I guess I believe that, too), see the tourist sights, hit Disneyland, and all too soon they’re ready to head back to Oz. Dad is sweet and seems quite adjusted to his life as a five-year-old, but I still see the tension on my mother’s face from constantly having to watch out for him. I kiss my dad good-bye at the airport. Even in his present state he is still my champion. I have always felt his warm, steady, unwavering love. It was the thing I clung to when my mother and I were at war in my teens, and it’s what I cling to even now. In his diminished capacity, without all of life’s distractions running through his tangled mind, his support is clearer and more focused than ever before. I feel it in a way I can’t truly articulate.
Since my manager Joe (whose office is under the car ramp to the roof parking for the studio, which speaks volumes about the competent hands I am in) owns Sound City, I suggest we make a record “on spec.” This means we’ll record a whole album’s worth of songs at the studio’s expense and then shop the finished product, giving us a better shot at a label deal. Joe, to my great surprise, agrees. Clearly, there is an upside to his inexperience as a manager, God bless him.
Tom Perry has just come off recording Boz Scaggs’s Silk Degrees album, which has yielded a few good hit singles and launched Boz into the musical stratosphere. Tom agrees to produce the spec record, and away we go again. I have written what I think is another strong batch of songs, and we assemble a band and start recording. Tom is also dating the recording studio manager, a bright and funny Englishwoman named Jemimah. One day, while we’re slaving away over a hot studio console, Jemimah brings a young girl who she’s just befriended into Studio A; she’s hired her to answer the phones over the summer holidays. This petite girl is wearing a white shirt, tight black jeans, and a loose-fitting man’s black tie. Looking very much like a French schoolgirl, she’s introduced to all of us, amid the collective sound of various musicians’ jaws hitting the floor, as Barbara Porter. She is so extremely hot that I say a brief “Hi” and turn back to the console to continue working while everyone else in the room tries to chat her up. Why should I risk certain rejection?
Despite my healthy young male desire to procreate, or at least go through the motions, and my pretty good success rate in that area, I’m still a complete dope when it comes to actually communicating with a woman. The reason I’ve been so fortunate in the sexual arena so far is that because I’m a musician, girls have generally approached me and struck up a conversation to convey their intent. This way my pathetically fragile ego hasn’t had to step out onto a limb and risk getting my hand slapped (again).
So I blow this girl off. She leaves. She is also only fifteen. I tell myself I’m not going to jail no matter how hot a girl is, and I think I do a pretty good job of convincing myself.
Lucky for me, I don’t have the final say in the matter.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SO LONG, CHICKENS; THANKS FOR THE EGGS
THE BURBS: GLENDALE, CALIFORNIA
1979
My fourth attempt to make a record that the fickle record-buying bastard public will buy is complete. Joe shops it and sets up a meeting with the one record label interested: Mercury. I go away on my final trip as a YMCA counselor, up to the Sacramento River, with a co-ed group of kids. My meeting with the label is on the day before the YMCA trip ends, so I’ll have to come back to LA early. The group of counselors is also co-ed. We’re camping out in the middle of nowhere and the night before I’m supposed to leave—at 4:00 the following morning to make my meeting with Mercury Records—I crawl into the sleeping bag of one of the female mentors and have at it. This late, late at night romp causes me to wake up waaaaaay past my planned departure time and I jump into the tiny motorboat they’ve arranged to take me back to Sacramento, still pulling on my pants and tying my shoes.
We hurry, attempting to make up for lost time, so of course we get lost. Really lost. Really, really lost. At one point, in the still pitch-black early morning, we see a set of red and green lights up ahead. Only at the last possible moment do we realize it’s a fairly good-sized ship. We get out of the way just in time as it barrels past us, almost swamping our little boat. I eventually make it back to LA (by car), but I have missed the meeting with the record label. And they don’t want to reschedule, either. I hear a loud report: I look down at the bullet hole in my foot and my still-smoking penis and realize I’ve done it again. Shit!
My old friend Milt Hammerman of Universal Studios’ contract-player division has his assistant call to tell me the contract-player program is cancelled and I am out of work. Mum calls to say the cancer has now spread to my dad’s lymph system. Diana’s pet rabbit calls to say it’s just dropped dead. I wait for the train to hit me but it doesn’t come. My old friend Mr. Darkness does, though.
Down I go.
“Nice one, dipshit. Home run,” I hear his mean susurration. I cry out of frustration, disappointment, and fear. I stop writing songs. I feel like it’s over. The meeting with Mercury that I’ve just blown was hard for Joe to land, because every record company now believes they have a handle on who I am, or was—an ex-teen-idol wannabe. The “Speak to the Sky” guy who had the cartoon show. I know I’ll go insane and the Darkness will completely take me over if I don’t keep myself busy, so I buy some modeling clay. I start sculpting figures of aliens, spaceships, even a sinking Titanic, and glue them to mirrors. I set up stalls at swap meets and try to convince people, who are really out looking for cheap T-shirts, to buy my crap instead. Diana takes five minutes one Sunday to whip up two dozen Raggedy Anns and Andys that she cuts out of my sculpting clay with a cookie-cutter and joins me at the next Pasadena Rose Bowl swap meet. Her cookie-cutter dolls sell out. I sell one mirror. I am really starting to wonder what it is exactly about my creative output that people are resisting in droves.
I spend the next year or so growing a beard and hanging with the chickens in the backyard. I am becoming somewhat domesticated. I start writing a few songs, but they are unfocused and one is even (God help me) a stab at disco. It’s difficult to get motivated, having had no real success for a long time and with no clear goal to reach for. I want my music to be heard, but there’s no record deal on the horizon, and singing my songs on a street corner with an upturned hat isn’t going to do much for me. If it weren’t about connection and the desire to excite people with something I’ve created, I’d just write the damn songs, demo them up, and stick them happily on a shelf in my music room.
Diana’s parents are Protestants and regular churchgoers, so I start attending their church with them, something I haven’t done since my mother forced me to go at gunpoint. After my first visit, we’re in line shaking hands with the minister who gave the service. He’s saying quick “Thank you for comings” and “God bless yous,” but when I reach him, he holds my gaze for a moment as though something has caught his attention. “You should think about entering the clergy,” he says out of absolutely nowhere. It shocks me because, although I’ve never been a devout Christian, the idea of devotion has always appeale
d to me. I’m so disheartened by the lack of progress with my music, I’ve actually been wondering if the priesthood might be a next-best option for me. I’ve long sought a deeper connection with this world and the people in it—something beyond the mindless “How you doin’ today?” And I accept that if we’re open to it, there is a spirit, Supreme Being, collective consciousness—whatever the name—that offers guidance and communion for us all. And I’ve told no one about these thoughts or about my possible plan to become a priest. How could this minister intuit them?
The minister’s comment and the implied knowledge behind it are my wake-up call. I don’t choose the priesthood, but I rise from my somnambulant existence and start the process, again, of turning my situation around. And it’s true that as miserable as it always made me each time I changed schools, it did endow me with a special resilience. A real-time experience of turning a situation around. There’s a great saying that has stayed with me through the years (and I’ve needed it): Every dark situation brings with it the seed of an equal or greater opportunity. The “seed” meaning, you have to work for it. It doesn’t come on a plate with garnishings. And the thing about hard-won lessons is that they’re surer to stay with us because of the cost of learning them.
My persistent (some would say “insane”) effort to become successful with my music is more than just not wanting to go back home a failure. It’s always been more. I truly feel that success will make me well. Will heal me. I feel this in my core. It’s the drug I need in order to finally be happy and to know that I’m okay. I need it. And I will have it!
I put together a band of musician friends who, like me, need to make some money. We start a weekly gig at a local restaurant/bar playing other bands’ hit songs. The girls haven’t been much in attendance through my “bearded chicken-man” period, but now that I have a guitar in my hands, they are back. I love the guitar. It gave me a voice as a young out-of-sync teenager, and I still feel that it’s my way out of the insecurity, insignificance, and general discomfort I feel in my own skin. And right at this moment, in a back room of the restaurant where we’re performing nightly, that skin is getting some much-needed attention.
During a set break, in a back room at the restaurant, Diana catches me with a female customer one night and is mortified (a) that I’m doing it, (b) that I’m doing it in public, and (c) that I don’t seem to care that she’s caught me. The truth is, although I love Diana, I’m increasingly feeling trapped and uninspired by the relationship. I think I’m trying to break up with her, but I keep flip-flopping on whether it would be the right thing to do or not. I also sense that I’m too much of a coward (shit, my dad was right) to take the initiative. I don’t want to lose the closeness I have with her family. Plus, I’m crazy about her dog. But I also find myself thinking now and then of that young girl (thankfully getting older by the minute) who’s now answering phones full-time at Joe’s studio. She of the Brigitte Bardot pout—Barbara Porter.
Playing the restaurant/bar gig begins to give me a germ of an idea. I’m also inspired by the new rash of LA clubs that seem to be opening up, and the press, attention, and followings that unknown bands like the Knack—soon to be famous for their monster hit, “My Sharona”—are garnering playing these clubs. It’s 1979 and I can smell the heady stink of the early stages of putrefaction emanating from the almost-corpse of disco. Thank God! And I feel like the all-powerful and roaring electric guitar is due for a rebirth. I start writing for real, with the thought of assembling a great band to play my music and start gigging around LA. Besides, we’ve just been fired from the highly prestigious restaurant/bar gig, so my nights are pretty much my own now.
I’m never higher than when I’m in the throes of a serious songwriting binge, and I’m on one now. While Diana is at work, I have all day to write, play with the dog, write, play with the dog, write, play with … well, you get it, right?
Each morning, while I’m waiting for Diana to leave, I get nervous like I’m meeting a clandestine lover. And she’s waiting, in my music room. My muse. We all have one. (A muse, I mean, not a clandestine lover). The spark of creativity that’s there to ignite the fires of creation. It’s fucking awesome, and when it happens with me I get warm and flushed and quickly adopt the thousand-yard stare … I am not here. I’m … there. It doesn’t happen every time; in fact, it doesn’t happen a lot of the time, but when it does, it’s a drug that I want to hit again and again.
When I’m really connected to writing, another mind enters the process, and that’s when things are revealed that I couldn’t possibly have come up with on my own. It’s that all-powerful spirit/Supreme Being/collective consciousness thing again. It gets behind me and propels me forward, and ideas manifest that normally would not, if I were, say, just sitting on the couch watching Dancing with the Stars. Songs also isolate and freeze a moment in time. I hear a song, whether it’s one I’ve written about a particular event, or someone else’s song that I have a connection with, and all the memories associated with hearing or writing it come rushing back. To me, the creation of music seems almost like magic. It’s the white rabbit that’s pulled from the top hat.
I call Jack White, the drummer from my aborted 1976 Wait for Night tour. He rounds up some players, and we meet at my manager Joe’s Sound City Studio (where Barbara is still answering phones—I ignore her, of course). I bring a couple of the new songs I’ve been writing and the other guitar player brings some of his. We rehearse all afternoon in Studio B. Jack keeps saying, “Hey, let’s play that ‘Jessie’ song again man, that’s cool.” The other guitar player tries to steer us back to his songs, but Jack won’t have it. I’m pleased with his reaction to my new music. We end the rehearsal and plan another one later next week.
I continue writing. I like the path the new songs are taking. It will be simple to play them in the clubs with just guitars, bass, and drums; the choruses are pretty catchy, so people might grab on to them faster; and they are concise—all under three minutes in length—so if one isn’t going over with the crowd, it’s okay folks, keep your seats, another one will be along shortly.
I’m revitalized with my new songs and also by what’s happening to the music scene in general. There’s a powered-by-punk shift away from the orchestrated dance music and ballads of the era. People are starting to get rowdy again. And the volume on the mystical electric guitar is slowly being turned up.
I go back to acting class to kick that into working order. Vincent Chase is still at it. He asks me if Diana and I are going to get married. “I guess,” I answer, half-resigned to the inevitable. Then I meet Jennifer of the Cartesian-philosophy-conversation-that-never-happened. We stay out all night and end up at her apartment and I know it’s over between Diana and me, finally. She and I begin the long, drawn-out finale to our relationship.
A dirty, scruffy, black-and-white bull-terrier-mix mutt is walking aimlessly around the Glendale library parking lot one morning, dodging cars and looking nervous. Diana, because she is a good woman, picks him up, puts him in her car, brings him home, and sticks him in the garage, for me. A last gift from her to the man she thought she’d marry. I name this dog Lethal Ron for reasons mentioned earlier.
My mum is writing to me, worried because the doctors are sticking my dad with needles and drawing his blood to try to find out why he isn’t getting nauseated or losing his hair from all the chemo he is enduring. It is a mystery to everyone, but she doesn’t want them prodding and poking him to discover the answer. I push thoughts of my dying father out of my mind, for now. I know he would understand.
Then Joe calls to say he has some label interest in me from RCA. What?
I am determined not to screw up this last chance. I look somewhere other than to God for my strength. We’re still not cool because of the way he’s treated my sweet old man. Instead, I look to my very powerful “positive thinking” path and begin a heavy-duty self-awareness program called Lifespring. Eighteen hours a day for five days, I and thirty-five other needy, desperat
e losers subject ourselves to all kinds of techniques designed to get past the protective bullshit we’ve constructed over the course of a lifetime and to target our vital inner core. Our days ping-pong between moments of self-revelation, brutal honesty, and heart-opening exercises. There is a spiritual leaning to the whole program, but it’s safely far away from any particular denomination, so I don’t feel alienated by it.
I rise from the week transformed, affirmed, and with a new best friend: Ernie. Unbeknownst to me, Ernie is gay and has developed a thing for Yours Cluelessly, though of course Mr. Guileless here doesn’t pick up on any of that. I find the balls to ask Barbara out on a date (lucky me, she’s just turned eighteen, so no jail time is required) and when she agrees (really?) we go to a movie and end up at my manager’s old house, where I’m living for a while, thanks to his benevolence.
Barbara is bright, sweet, funny … and burning hot. After a few beers, I make a move to get her into bed … she resists. I move, she resists. I move … okay, you get it. She tells me she’s only ever had sex once before and that I know who the guy is. “Oh, no! Is it Bill?” I think in alarm. I’ve only just started working with Bill Drescher, an in-house engineer at Sound City, planning the recording of the new album for RCA. I know he’s taken Barbara out a few times and has a giant crush on her, but I didn’t think he’d actually beaten me to the punch. This could put a serious crimp in matters, as Bill and I are looking at long hours together, locked up in a windowless studio, making the record. “Bill?” I sputter. “No,” she says, “it’s not Bill.” I relax, but only a little. I still have serious and truly lame, jealous, don’t-piss-on-my-lawn issues. Someone has been sleeping in my bed! And I haven’t even slept in it yet, though I am getting the feeling, as Barbara reveals more, that it is a distinct possibility tonight.
Late, Late at Night Page 19
