Sex, Drugs, Ratt & Roll: My Life in Rock

by Stephen Pearcy

  Soon road life began to blur, and everything smelled like gasoline and lingerie and weed and shit. The Rolling Hilton felt like a nation unto itself, governed by a completely different set of rules than the outside world. But you had to be careful: Cops were out on the prowl, and a bus with enormous guitars airbrushed on the metal siding was an obvious target.

  One evening after a show, we were pulled to the side of the road. Schwartz was pushed out the door and made to go talk sense to the cop.

  “You boys were going a little fast,” he said. “Say, who you got on there, anyway?”

  “It’s the band Ratt,” Phil said.

  “Ratt? No kidding. One of those metal bands, right?” The officer stroked his chin, fascinated, and put his ticket book away. “Heck, I’d like to meet them, if you wouldn’t mind too much.”

  “Well, okay,” said Phil. “Give me one second.”

  He leaped back on the bus.

  “Guys. Wake up. Stow all your shit. The trooper wants to come on the bus. He wants to meet everyone.”

  Suddenly we were wide awake. We shoveled our weed and cocaine into their appropriate canisters and shoved them beneath our mattresses.

  “Officer!” cried Bobby. “So nice to meet you!”

  “Beer?” I asked, working up a good shit-eating grin.

  “No, no, thank you.” The officer laughed. “I’m on duty.”

  “Sir, I just had a great idea. How would you like a pass to the show tomorrow evening?” Robbin asked. “Come hang out with us backstage?”

  “Hell, you know, I’d like that!” said the cop. “I’ve never been backstage before.”

  “There may be a few nude chicks there,” I said jokingly. “Are you cool with it?”

  “I’m cool with it,” said the officer, crossing his arms over his stomach.

  “Would you let one sit on your lap?” asked Robbin. “Are you allowed to do that?”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” said the officer. He looked excited. “Yes, sir. You bet. If you’re off duty, you bet.”

  There was plenty of money coming in, but we flushed that down our nostrils, lungs, and livers as soon as possible. Enjoying one of the three P’s more than the others, there was lingerie as far as the eye could see.

  When spring rolled around, things started to change. Our album dropped, and the initial sales were encouraging. I was ready to make the slow and steady climb, but then, out of nowhere, Ozzy’s people got in contact with Marshall. Their opening act wasn’t working out—how would we like to come out on the road and open for the Prince of Darkness?

  “Holy SHIT!” I yelled. “You gotta be kidding me.”

  All of us were blown away. No matter who you were, if you listened to metal, or rock music in general, you had to understand that Ozzy was as good as it gets. We added a few more crew members to our entourage, took out another bus, and struck out in search of the big time.

  “We really appreciate you boys coming out on such short notice,” Ozzy said, when we arrived at the first gig.

  “We had to kind of pull out on Squier,” I admitted. “But it’s worth it, man. You’re . . . well, I mean . . . you’re Ozzy Osbourne.”

  “Rumors of my greatness have been wildly exaggerated,” Ozzy said. “Come along. Let’s start the drinking.”

  We toured with Ozzy in Canada, Europe, and the U.S., nonstop. Ozzy was a strong partier, but we did our best to hang right in there with him. One night, at the Mondrian, Bobby and Ozzy and I came stumbling down the hall after a forceful night of drinking. As we passed rooms, we came across several pairs of shoes that had been put out to be shined.

  “Watch,” said Ozzy. “I’m going to shit in those loafers.”

  He dropped his pants and laid a huge, stinking shit. It was the most rancid thing I’d ever smelled. Bobby and I collapsed, literally crying with laughter. I was shaking so hard, I felt like I was going to have a seizure. Ozzy was so into it. He woke his wife just to tell her. “Sharon, darling, I’ve just shit in a pair of shoes.” It was a proud moment for him.

  Opening up for Ozzy meant that suddenly, we were playing in giant houses, in front of enormous crowds. The sight of all those screaming maniacs inspired me, so I began to take a Kodak Disc 4000 camera out onstage with me each night.

  “Peoria,” I yelled into my microphone. “Smile!”

  I snapped off picture after picture of the roaring crowds, for no other reason than to have a memento, the stage pyrotechnics illuminating their screaming faces like the perfect flashbulb. These were some of the biggest groups of people I’d ever seen in my entire life, and there I was, stamping around in front of them. Who knew if I would ever play to a larger house? Out of the Cellar might sink like a stone. I wanted something to show to my grandkids besides the size-40 silk teddy that got left behind in our lighting guy’s room in the Highlander Inn in Madison, Wisconsin. When I had finished playing photographer, I whipped the cameras off stage right, toward a waiting Phil Schwartz. Sometimes he caught them. Other times they found the wall and smashed into a million pieces.

  “Boston!” I screamed. “Are you ready for some fucking RATT ’N’ ROLL?”

  The arena shook with the collected frenzy of fifteen thousand screams. Standing up in front of them, riding on currents of blinding light and the manic energy of raw guitar, I twisted my body through the swells and rushes of our songs, entering into the mindlessness of the moment, feeling my soul blossom with purest bliss. I was leading my troop into battle, each and every night. It was happening for us. Finally, it was happening.

  OUR TOUR WITH OZZY WAS WAY too short for me, lasting only a couple of months. Then Marshall got us a monthlong gig, opening for Blue Öyster Cult, one of my favorite bands growing up. Summer was fast approaching and we felt we’d done a rather good job of getting our name out there. We felt like a few weeks off might be in order, to relax and regroup.

  “Are you fucking joking?” Marshall said. “No way is Atlantic going to want to stop now. Your album’s just starting to climb.”

  It was true. By the time June 1984 rolled around, “Round and Round” was constantly being played on MTV, to the point that I was almost embarrassed (I do a few too many awkward high-kicks in that video to feel real good about it). The ensuing success of the single had propelled the album onto the charts. Many were the days in the back of that bus that we all huddled around the latest Billboard magazine, checking our chart position.

  Our success was so immediate, it was almost frightening. I had been prepared to put in years of steady, solid touring work in order to earn any kind of name recognition whatsoever. But after only a few months, Ratt was starting to become a household name.

  We got booked at an outdoor festival in Michigan, with a host of other rising metal bands: Mötley, Scorpions, Quiet Riot, and W.A.S.P., among others. Everyone pulled into town, parked our buses next to each other’s, and began to drink. Enormous thunderclouds began to gather; soon, it was storming, out of control. A sound tower was knocked over; the dirt parking lots were seas of mud. We pulled the Mötley boys onto our bus and broke out the standard: a little Jack, a little smoke, and maybe some pills.

  “No fucking way we’re playing today,” Nikki declared. We all sank back happily into the cushions of the Rolling Hilton.

  “I think it’s time for a trip to the doctor’s office,” I said. “Anyone like to join me?”

  “Oh God, yes,” my friends said gratefully, extending out their palms for a healthy serving of opiates. We proceeded to chomp prescription pain relievers for the next hour. Soon I had entered into a fugue-like state, where faces began to blur beautifully, and all voices came through a soggy, sexy ocean of sound.

  And then, wouldn’t you know it, the fucking sun came out.

  “Gentlemen! Chop chop! The gig’s a go. Sound check in five. Come on!”

  Somehow, I harnessed enough endorphins to get myself out onstage, and from there, my body had sufficient muscle memory to know what to do.

  The record kept climbing t
he charts. By July, we had scurried our way into the top thirty. Berle let us know that we weren’t going to open up too many more shows: Instead, we were about to start headlining them. Good news. Now we could shake the trim tree that much harder.

  What we had was just obscene. We were greedy with the trim. All you had to do was snap your fingers, and they were yours. If you wanted to get laid twice in a day, you got laid twice. If you needed more, then you took more. It was truly a numbers game, and at a twelve-thousand-person show, the numbers never once let us down.

  See, they were on the hunt for us, too. The audience didn’t just want to get fucked up and bang their heads: They wanted to meet the band. For dudes, the dream was to smoke a joint with us and talk about guitars; for chicks, it was to form some sort of romantic connection, get to know us in a way that few others could. Night after night, we granted a few lucky ones their wish. Usually, the chicks I ended up with weren’t true groupies, per se: I wasn’t overly fond of shady broads with loud mouths and loose lips. Instead, they tended to be sexy, down-home chicks, girls who lived regular lives in Memphis or Houston or Beaumont or Phoenix or Charlotte. When a big rock band came through town, it was like Halloween for them, their big chance to throw on their sluttiest costume. If the stars aligned perfectly, they might even get a chance to remove it.

  That was my job: to align the stars.

  Every night, before the show, I passed out thick stacks of backstage passes to my soldiers, Phil and Road Dog.

  “Go find me the best of the bunch,” I instructed.

  They slogged through the parking lot, sizing up the pack and slapping backstage passes into the back pockets of the prettiest, most pristine specimens. I liked blondes, brunettes—you name it, I licked it, and they knew this. Hot is hot, and as I learned across the years, it can come in any flavor. When the show was over, Phil would herd the thirty or so chattering ladies into one small holding room, where they’d mill around excitedly, waiting for me or Robbin or whoever else felt like popping their head in there.

  I’d stick my head in for two or three seconds, tops.

  “Let’s see . . . I’ll take . . . blue top . . . and red halter. Thanks! Have a good night, everyone.”

  Poor Phil would have to deal with the disgruntled castoffs. It wasn’t fair, I know. But that was how the cookie crumbled. None of this was fair.

  But it was the crew who, unbound by the normal standards of human decency, made the true magic happen. In San Antonio, Texas, our sound technicians produced two ample-bodied sisters who dreamed of putting on a show for the boys in the band.

  “Come aboard the Rolling Hilton,” they suggested. “We’d like to introduce you to Brutus.”

  Brutus was a six-foot-long, flesh-colored double-headed dildo, with a tip on each end the size of a grown man’s fist. The young ladies went right to work on Brutus, gyrating up and down, laughing, sucking on each other’s tits with couldn’t-give-a-shit nihilism worthy of a coming apocalypse.

  The freak show attracted much instant attention. A buzz grew. The parking lot was electric with zit-faced excitement. Random fuckers from all four directions swarmed the bus, opening acts and road crew, hustling up on the roof, prying open our pop-top, just to get a look. It was the show after the show.

  “I’ll do anything to get backstage.” It was a refrain that the crew guys heard every day, and it was music to their fucking ears. In a parking lot, true sluttiness knows no bounds. Once, I saw a gorgeous brunette sidle up to Paul, one of our riggers. Paul knew the drill. Being a reserved sort of fellow, he led her over to a Porta-Potty, so as to take care of business in private.

  Five minutes later the happy couple emerged.

  “How about those passes?” the brunette reminded him.

  “Sure,” said Paul, “only, it’s my buddy’s birthday, so maybe you could take care of him, too.”

  Thus another jaunt to the Porta-Potty. Ten minutes later, Paul’s friend emerged, looking faint. The brunette emerged seconds after him, looking smug.

  “She treat you all right?”

  “Holy shit,” his friend mumbled. “I’d say so.”

  “Okay. Here ya go,” said Paul, slapping a couple of passes into the brunette’s hand.

  We watched as the cutie took off running, elated. A hundred yards down the way, her boyfriend waited.

  “She take care of business?” Paul asked.

  “Oh yeah.”

  Soon the brunette reached her man and, waving the passes wildly, jumped into his arms. They were backstage bound. They hugged, triumphant, and then launched into a deep, soulful tongue kiss.

  “Yecch!” I cried, laughing. “What the fuck?”

  “I guess I leave a pleasant aftertaste,” Paul decided, leaning back happily.

  While we were getting ours, poor Phil wasn’t sleeping. He would lie awake all night, as we rumbled from Augusta to Savannah to Columbia to Raleigh, staring at the cheap shelving of the bed above him while we boozed and screamed and then slept like babies. Phil would work for hours in the morning, dead tired, organizing our luggage, tagging the equipment, trucking the instruments onstage for us, and then, inevitably, in the late afternoon, as the partying was beginning to gear up, Phil would fall asleep involuntarily on one of the seats. That was our cue to fuck with him.

  “Jesus, this is great. Watch this.” Mike, our carpenter, unzipped his own fly, tiptoed over to Schwartz, and laid his hairy testicles on Phil’s forehead, like a tiny hat.

  I almost died from laughter. “Get a camera, please, someone get a camera. . . .”

  Phil stirred, his mouth open, then quieted again. I snapped away on my Disc camera, nearly hysterical.

  Phil sputtered awake, apoplectic with rage. “You sons of bitches!” he shrieked, clawing at the air. “You dirty rotten . . . I ought to slam every one of you!”

  We laughed for days and days. The moral of the story was clear. Never fall asleep first on the bus.

  The months rolled on, and Atlantic showed no sign of taking their foot off the tour pedal. We bounced from arena to arena, the audiences only getting bigger. Money really started coming in, more than we could spend in one place. It was now time for the guys in the band to talk about getting accountants, people to manage our funds. Robbin and I needed them more than anybody else, as the other guys had their wives and girlfriends taking care of their shit.

  Our hotels started getting nicer. Small mobs would congregate in the lobby when we’d check in. Road Dog and Phil began to act as crowd control, beating back the swarms of women so the band could pass. Robbin and I looked at each other sometimes, unable to believe this was really happening.

  “King?” I said, noticing the model-hot blonde who was eye-fucking me with the deepest desire all over her face, a ripped Ratt T-shirt barely covering her gorgeous torso.

  “Yes, Felix?”

  “This could end any day, right?”

  He nodded. “Any day. You’re so right, brother. Let’s seize it while we got it.” He whispered into Road Dog’s ear, pointed toward the blonde and her equally smoking-hot friend. We would see them upstairs, immediately.

  ROAD DOG, CREW:

  When I went out with them, I was clean and sober. I still am clean and sober. That’s the only reason I got hired by Ratt. Those guys, Warren and Robbin and Stephen, they knew me from San Diego, and they knew that I was insane when I drank. I mean, it was not good. I’m not a nice person. It was not cool.

  But there wasn’t a moment when Stephen wouldn’t be smoking a joint, have one behind his ear, and one behind the other ear, and make sure he had enough to roll another one. I mean, that dude, he never quit smoking.

  Did he get excessive? Yeah, he got excessive when it came to partying. He could outdrink and outsmoke a lot of people. Guys like Dee Snider would just stand there and watch him, going, Oh, man. The opening acts would roll up, and Stephen would sneak up to me and say, “See if they have anything, man. See if they’re holding.” That was one of the terms you would always hear: �
�Is William around?” For William Holden.

  Summer melted into fall. The band began to feel the first signs of being fried. Night after night, we headed out onstage, looked around at each other and the crowd, and experienced the strange déjà vu that comes from playing the same set, with the same people, in the same environment, so many times in a row.

  “How many shows have we played?” I asked Blotzer, who always seemed to know.

  “Hmm, let me think,” said Bob. “A hundred and sixty or so?”

  It was enough to make your vision blur. Juan wore the same leather pants onstage every night. After the show, he would roll them off his dripping, sweaty body, and place them up on top of our luggage rack. One night, by accident, I touched them and recoiled in horror: They were stiff as a board.

  ROAD DOG:

  The crew usually gets more pussy than the band, if you can believe that. But it was always on the quantity, not quality basis. We were in Allentown, Pennsylvania, boring as hell, and I had grabbed these two wild-looking chicks—blond, sadistic. And they were into each other. So they’re going at it in the back of the bus, and the whole crew’s watching. And [road manager] Charlie Hernandez and I, we go get Stephen’s wireless microphone. We turn it on and give it to them to pleasure themselves with. Over the PA sound in there, you could hear this moaning and groaning.

  And then Stephen came in for sound check, and he was like, Oh my God. Nobody cleaned this?

  The nation was awash with Ratt fever. You could see it on their T-shirts. After shows, audiences would wait for us to leave the parking lot, then trail us in their cars. It was flattering, at first: convertibles zipping up alongside the bus, chicks flashing us their tits, their boyfriends waving and cheering us on. Then it got strange, or annoying, and when the cars simply wouldn’t give up, it became a menace to our safety.