He looked up at me, his eyes bright. “Thanks. I built it myself. . . .”
As it turned out, Eddie Van Halen was friendly and completely easy to talk to, as long as you knew something about guitars, because that was the only thing that guy thought was worth talking about.
“I’m way into Vox amps these days. . . .”
“You like Vox 30s?” I asked.
“Vox 30s are the best. I got two swivel-beetle Vox cabs,” Eddie said, a touch of longing in his voice, “but only one Vox head. It’s killing me.”
“Hey,” I said, excited, “I have an extra Vox head! I could loan it to you!”
“Say what?” he cried. “Let me buy that thing off you!”
We were speaking the same language, and it was beautiful. Ed and I hung together for almost an hour, and when it was time to part ways and let him get ready for the show, we exchanged phone numbers.
“Give me a call anytime, man,” Ed said. “And you better stick around to watch the show.”
I’m in, I thought. I’m fucking in.
I was on goddamn cloud nine. Couldn’t get any happier. Or at least that’s what I thought, until the show started. There was no opening act, and the crowd was surprisingly tiny—there couldn’t have been more than thirty people in the whole place, the band included. But I shit you not, these guys played like they were at the Forum. I had been to many, many rock concerts in my life by this point, maybe upward of a hundred. But I had absolutely never witnessed a group generate so much raw energy, so instantaneously, and without the support of a large audience.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” Dave screamed, “WE’RE VAN . . . HALEN!”
Dave was strutting around like the biggest cock on the walk. Ed was slamming his body against the cabinets, shredding that handmade guitar to fucking bits. They were badass, in a word, and as I watched them there, my jaw literally dropped open. I had to admit to myself that, as good as I felt Mickey Ratt was starting to be, we got a long way to go.
But these guys sure made the journey look like a hell of a lot of fun.
MONKEY ON OUR BACKS
ONE STRANGE THING ABOUT remembering the good old days is that if I think about them long enough, it makes me want to do some drugs.
Getting clean is a trip. No doubt about it. I love being able to get up in the morning and not feel like I have to get right to work on demolishing a twelve-pack. Not that I’m totally squeaky or anything like that, mind you. In fact, Chris Hager’s mad at me right now. He volunteered to be my AA dude—my sponsor, if you will—because he’s been sober for fifteen years, or something insane like that, and wants me to get there, too.
“You don’t want to start backsliding.” That’s his mantra. “I know you don’t want that.”
Hmm, I don’t know: A little backsliding sounds kinda good. When rock dudes get sober, watch out—they’re always on the hunt for you to get sober, too. Sometimes it feels kind of ironic. Especially when you stop to consider all the TVs you hurled off balconies together. All the liquor you poured on each other’s hair.
I mean, I’m not talking about buying a fucking balloon of heroin here. Just, you know, a joint or something. Maybe a five-dollar watermelon-flavored medicinal-marijuana lollipop, to help me soak up the basic stupid enjoyment of life. There’s no rule against that, is there? Or maybe there is. AA is full of them. I’ve been to my share of joyless, washed-out AA meetings in the past couple of years. Jesus, I don’t want to sound ungrateful or anything, but there’s really no worse way to kill a morning than smoking half a pack of cigarettes, drinking eighteen cups of coffee, and listening to some dudes with fading tattoos talk about how they learned to walk the straight and narrow.
Rehab was more my speed. More private. The truth is, I’d go back to rehab in a heartbeat if I didn’t have to pay so damn much for it. I slept like a baby in rehab. And therapy tickled the hell out of me. I kept getting this weird confessional high.
My therapist, Dr. Roberts, was an absolute master at getting me to spill my guts.
“What shall we talk about today, Stephen?”
I grinned. “Ah, you can’t fool me,” I said. “You just want to hear about trim. Am I right?”
“With all due respect, Stephen, I think you’re way off base there. . . .”
“Well, I’ll give you something, just to tide you over. Once I had this adventure with Ron Jeremy. Do you know who that is? The porn dude? His nickname is the Hedgehog?”
Dr. Roberts gave me a too-casual shrug.
“Ha! You do know who I’m talking about! You just won’t admit it because you don’t want me to laugh at you for whacking off. Listen, I won’t laugh at you, man, for whacking off every night. You’re cool. You’re my therapist.”
“Just go on, Stephen,” sighed my therapist.
“Well, Ron was always around the rock scene in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It made sense: Porn chicks loved rock dudes, and rock dudes loved the porn chicks right back. Savannah and I dated for a while—remember her? But it was a weird time. We both loved getting high so much that after a while, all we would do was get so blasted neither of us would remember to fuck the other one. Our romance went nowhere. My buddy Joe Anthony and I used to spend days locked up in her hotel room with her and her buddies doing everything, but forgetting to get to the point.”
Dr. Roberts scribbled something in his notebook.
“Now, one thing about Ron Jeremy, he always loved to be the life of the party. He was always fun to be around, just didn’t give a shit about anything. I’m like that myself.
“So anyway, Ron and I got to be friends. One night, we saw each other out at a club. He had three chicks on his arm. ‘Pearcy,’ he said, ‘let’s blow this scene. Let’s get a motel room with my chicks.’ And I was kind of like a wind-up doll in those days when it came to trim: You just put it in front of me, and I followed. So Phil Schwartz, my concierge, drove—whether in a limo or one of my Porsches, Phil was at the wheel. We followed Ron to his destination, Pornification.”
“Right,” said Dr. Roberts.
“Now, I had been hitting the bottle pretty hard, but I had also been eating some pain pills, because I had a toothache that was really acting up. Nothing a few OxyContins couldn’t fix. Like usual when I indulged too hard on the opiates, I sort of felt like I was floating on air, and at the same time, like I might puke up a lung.”
“Mmm,” said my therapist.
“It’s not a real good state to fuck in,” I said. “That’s the only reason that I bring it up. By the time Ron and I made it back to his hotel room in the Valley, I’d pretty much decided I’d rather just watch.”
“You were too inebriated to take part?”
“Yeah. But also, by the late ’80s, man, I’d had so much sex, I just wasn’t that greedy for it anymore,” I said. “When you get to a certain point, it all sort of starts to blend together, if you can dig that.”
The look on my therapist’s face told me he had no idea what I was talking about.
“You find yourself wanting something else,” I explained. “You want to fall in love. You want to be with one chick. And a couple of years later, wouldn’t you know it, that’s precisely what happened to me. That’s when I met the mother of my kid. But I’ll save that story for another time. . . .”
“Let’s talk about that now,” Dr. Roberts said.
“No,” I said. “I want to finish telling you about Ron and this hotel room. Ron started plowing one of the babes while I just sat on the other bed and watched. ‘Hope you don’t mind,’ he said. I’m all, ‘Dude, are you kidding? This is like watching a live porno. Go for it.’ He was all sweaty and hairy, and his chick had these tits that were so fake it looked like if you grabbed them you could feel the plastic wrinkling under her skin. It was awesome.”
“Why did you want to watch?”
“Because it was cool. Because it was weird, and really gross. I’m into that kind of thing. After about ten minutes, one of the other girls goes, ‘I’m bored.
I’m going to go take a bath,’ and she got up to go to the bathroom. Ron took one look at me and said, ‘Pearcy, what do you need, a written invitation?’ So I followed her in.”
“I thought you didn’t feel like having sex,” my therapist pointed out.
“I didn’t,” I said. “But I went in there, and this chick was already in the bath. The whole room was all warm and humid, which made me feel even sicker. The light was yellow and bright, and my head started to pound, so I closed the toilet lid and sat on top of it. This chick was soaping herself all over with that little bar of free soap. She was kind of hot, but like most porn chicks, she had some major flaws.”
You could hear birds chirp outside Dr. Roberts’s window.
“That’s when I really started to feel sick. I don’t know what I’d eaten that night, probably a hamburger, or half a fried chicken. My gut was churning. This chick gave me this weird look and said, ‘You’re in a band, right?’
“ ‘Sure am,’ I said. ‘Ever hear of the Stones?’
“She looked confused. ‘Which one are you?’
“ ‘Ringo,’ I said. ‘Why are you taking a bath?’
“She thought about it, then said, ‘I wanted to get clean.’
“Then she invited me to get in the water with her, but I was feeling so sick right then I wouldn’t have been able to get into a spa pool, much less a tiny bathtub in some hotel room in the Valley. But I stumbled to my feet, unhooked my belt, and asked for some head.”
“And she agreed?” asked Dr. Roberts.
“You just don’t get it, do you, man?” I said. “In the ’80s, if you were in a rock band, when you asked for a hummer, you got a hummer.”
Dr. Roberts nodded and wrote something down on his pad. Maybe it was motherfucker.
“So I had my pants unbuckled, and I was standing there, getting serviced, trying not to catch a head rush. Then my legs started trembling. There wasn’t much muscle control left there. But this chick was talented at what she did, and she worked me to the point of no return. I pulled out of her mouth and did my duty all over her chest.
“ ‘YOU DIRTY SON OF A BITCH,’ she yelled. ‘WHY IN THE HELL DID YOU JUST SPLATTER ME?’
“I was like, Huh?
“ ‘But I thought you did porn . . . ’ I mumbled.
“ ‘I WAS TAKING A BATH!’ she screeched furiously. ‘I WAS TRYING TO GET CLEAN!!’
“ ‘Clean from fucking what??’ ” I yelled. It was the craziest thing I’d ever heard. Suddenly I felt faint, staggered backward. I told Ron, ‘See ya. We’re gone!’ Who knows why we drove out there in the first place?”
Dr. Roberts stared at me for a long time. “Then what happened?”
“That’s about it,” I said. “It was one of my more normal nights.”
SOMEWHERE AROUND MID-1978, MICKEY RATT BEGAN to really catch on down in San Diego. We graduated from the backyard birthday parties and the keggers and started playing real clubs, like El Cajon’s Straight Ahead Sound, using first-class equipment and playing songs that rippled with our own raw, vital energy. Sometimes Robbin’s band, Phenomenon, split a bill with us; other times we played alongside a group called Teaser, featuring a talented local guitarist named Jake E. Lee. No matter who we played with, we slayed. We were on a serious roll, riding the crest of local-star popularity. And I was digging it.
“I just get the feeling that Mickey Ratt is starting to outgrow this town, man,” I said to Chris one day.
“What are you talking about?” he asked. “We haven’t even played the fairgrounds.”
“But we will,” I said. “And once we do, where will we go then?”
“The Civic,” said Chris. “And then the Roxy. Dude, how many chicks do you think we’ll pull if we do the Roxy?”
“I don’t know, Chris,” I said. “But I’ll be honest with you: I’m starting to believe that getting laid is just not enough anymore.”
“What are you trying to say here? You don’t appreciate our groupies anymore? You don’t like the idea of playing the fairgrounds?”
“Look, I want to play the fairgrounds, okay? But we sound great. I’d put us up against anybody.” My voice was rising in excitement. “Given the right break, we could rule a lot more than San Diego. We could dominate the world, man!”
“All right,” Chris said. “All right, man. Calm down. I believe you. Let’s do it.”
But calming down was not an option for me. When an idea hatched in my head, it ruled me. An excited little voice that came from inside my brain stubbornly refused to shut up. You guys can MAKE it, it said. You have something special. Before I went to sleep every night, I dreamed about the road to the top, in full color and meticulous detail. I was seeing us as Led Zeppelin, Blue Öyster Cult, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper. I wasn’t conceited, I was convinced. And sure, I might have been a tad delusional: Mickey Ratt was still basically a good garage band at this point. But without that irrational belief in myself and our mission, I’d probably still be down in the Canyon, strumming on an acoustic. It was go big or go home.
Tina, in order to satisfactorily fulfill her responsibilities as girlfriend of up-and-coming rock dude, was forced to listen to a few superstar monologues too.
“I don’t know how I’m going to make it happen, exactly,” I told her, caressing her perfect little body, “but you better believe it, I will make it happen.”
“I believe in you, baby,” she said. “You’ll do it. I know you will.”
“You love me, huh?” I asked, grinning.
“Yes, I do, a little,” she admitted.
“So when are we going to do it?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“You know what,” I said, tapping her on the thigh playfully.
Sex when you’re young, and completely in love, it’s like this whole other animal, a completely different enterprise. I remember watching Tina’s eyes light up when we moved up and down together for the first time, joining, holding hands, kissing lightly. It was enough to make you believe in some kind of order to the universe—that you had been somehow destined to meet this beautiful girl at the intermission at some show, stoned out of your mind, ears still humming from the guitarist’s riffs. It was enough to make you believe that now you were together, there’d be no need for anyone else.
Just as I was sure that Tina and I were the perfect couple, I was similarly convinced that Mickey Ratt was destined to “make it.” And though I still didn’t have a very precise understanding of what had to be done in order to make that dream a reality, I made sure to keep calling the only guy I knew who was clearly on the path: Eddie Van Halen.
“Hey, man, I don’t know if you remember me—I’m Stephen Pearcy. We met backstage at the Whisky a while ago?”
“Sure, dude. You were the one with that Vox head, right?”
“Right, yeah! Are you still interested in checking it out?”
“Definitely. Come on up to my house in Pasadena. We’ll hang out.”
We made plans, and he gave me his address. Later that week, I ran into Robbin in a record store down by the boardwalk.
“What’s going on, Stephen?”
“Not much, dude,” I said casually, picking my way through the latest in Zeppelin bootlegs. “Just, you know, heading over to Eddie Van Halen’s house tomorrow.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Just going up there to Eddie’s to hang out,” I repeated, smiling. “You want to come along?”
“Uh, yes?”
We tooled up to Pasadena together in Robbin’s van.
“So are you going to tell me how the hell you met Eddie Van Halen?” Robbin asked, eyeing me as he drove.
I told Robbin the story of how I’d met him.
The drive seemed to take forever. I kept turning around in my seat to make sure my Vox amp was still in the back of the van.
“Dude, I wonder what an up-and-coming rock star’s house looks like,” I said. “It’s probably pretty fucking wild.”
When we
arrived at the Pasadena address, all we found was a small, modest house, clean and tastefully decorated. Inside was Eddie, sitting on a small cot in a tiny bedroom about the size of a washroom. An unplugged electric guitar was strapped over his shoulder, and he played it constantly as he talked.
“What up, guys?”
“Do you . . . live with your parents?”
“Totally,” Eddie said. “Me and Alex like the rent here.”
I relaxed. Maybe I didn’t have that far to go, after all.
Robbin and Eddie got along instantly, which was no surprise, as there wasn’t a man alive who Robbin couldn’t befriend in a heartbeat. The three of us just sat around talking about gear for hours on end. The floor of Eddie’s tiny bedroom was absolutely strewn with guitar parts.
“So, are you building these guitars yourself?” Robbin said.
“Sure. I get guitar parts at Charvel. They throw a lot of parts away, so they give them to me cheap.”
Ed loved the amp I’d brought him, but that was nothing compared to Robbin, whose eyes absolutely started goggling when he saw the Flying V guitar that Ed had been working on.
“You gotta let me buy that off you,” Robbin said. “Please.”
“Sure,” Ed said, shrugging. “That one needs a little work, but if you’re serious about buying it, I could fix it up for you soon.”
It was just the coolest afternoon. We hung out for a few hours, then Robbin and I decided to split.
“Totally good guy, huh?” I said, as we were driving back.
“Absolutely,” Robbin agreed. “I wish he lived down in San Diego, so we could jam together.”
“Or we lived up there,” I said, pointedly.
San Diego was fun. It was probably the most beautiful place on earth. But I was starting to get really itchy. When I had needed a place to heal, my mom and Jim had given me a space to do it in. Finally, though, I was fully recovered, and I wanted more.
“I’m thinking of taking the plunge,” I told Chris. “Making the move up north.”
“Why, man?” he asked.
“Why do you think? For the good of the band, man,” I said. “How the hell are we going to get signed down here?”
Sex, Drugs, Ratt & Roll: My Life in Rock Page 6
