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

by Stephen Pearcy

  “Joe.”

  “Stephen, man. Hey, thanks for coming to see me.”

  “Joe, when I was fifteen, I lived in one of these hospitals for a year. I know how it feels to shit into a bedpan, okay?”

  “I just have a punctured lung,” Joe said. “I still shit like a regular person.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “How’d it happen, by the way?”

  “Stunting,” he said. “I was out on this movie that’s coming out next year, Legal Eagles. Robert Redford’s in it. So’s Debra Winger. I was jumping out of some moving car, and I fell wrong. Now I don’t know if I’ll get work anymore. Coordinators don’t want to hire you once you’re hurt bad—you reinjure yourself, and they’re liable.”

  “Listen, Joe, what are you doing when you get out of this spot?”

  “Driving a limo, probably,” Joe said glumly. “I’ve been doing it off and on for the past couple of years in between stunt gigs. It’s not the worst job, I guess.”

  “Well, look,” I said. “Forget all that. We need extra security on our new tour. How about you consider coming out on the road with us?”

  “Seriously?” said Joe. “Man, you don’t have to ask me twice. You just got the newest member of your team.”

  We were ready to set sail. March of 1985, Ratt and Bon Jovi kicked off the Invasion tour. From the very beginning, it was larger than the Out of the Cellar tour. Bigger stages, bigger production values, multiple nights in arenas, and consistently sold-out shows of fifteen thousand people or more. Every single night, it was lighters flickering and fists pumping the air, and the girls were everywhere. We could do no wrong. Soaked with sweat and swept up in the energy and the momentum, we felt like Zeppelin or Aerosmith up there. Of course, we weren’t—but I’ll tell you, in 1985, it sure felt like we were close.

  ROAD DOG:

  During the Invasion of Your Privacy tour, the women were absolutely nuts for Stephen. There were many times when fifty women were lined up in the hotel lobby to see him. Stephen was the kind of guy who’d come in, look at them, take his pick, and make me move the rest of them out. “Make sure they hit the elevator.” It was funny, because we still shared rooms in those days, and if you drew the short straw and had to be his roommate, you were screwed. Stephen wouldn’t let anybody in the room until he was done. You were left standing outside.

  He had his favorite strip clubs, like Shotgun Willie’s, in Denver, that was a five-stage strip club, but truthfully, he didn’t need a strip club. He had whatever he wanted, when he wanted it. It was like a remote control for him: He’d just point and click.

  In New York City, at the height of Invasion of Your Privacy, Ratt was on top of the world. We were staying at the Helmsley Palace. I’ll never forget it, because their beds were so comfortable . . . you couldn’t even sit on the bed, because you’d just want to go to sleep. So me and Stephen go out one night. We get a limo and head over to the Limelight. At that time, it was the big rock-star hangout. They had VIP rooms where Billy Idol and Steve Stevens and quite a few other rock stars were hanging. It was an area nobody could even get to.

  Well, Stephen’s severely trashed. And Stephen, when he gets trashed, he don’t really tell you a whole lot. He just kind of says, “We’re leaving.” Or, “We’re leaving. Bring that chick.” He never bothered to explain much. So we left and came back to the hotel. And I’m sitting in the room and there’s an earthquake. New York has an earthquake. The place is rumbling and shaking. It must have woken Stephen up, because right away, I got a call on the phone. “Where the fuck is my little black bag?” I asked, “What little black bag?” He says, “The one I had with me tonight!” So I call the limo company, and thank God, they had it. Stephen had thirty thousand dollars cash in there, just in case he ran into something he wanted to buy.

  The Limelight was the best. The booze was flowing. Just waterfalls of vodka, splashing in my face. I tried to pay, but the bartenders just laughed at me. “Round and Round” took on a new, more literal meaning.

  I had a little fame now, for whatever that was worth, but it was manageable, and fun. People recognized me as someone out of the ordinary, but you could tell most of them didn’t know my name. In other words, I looked the part of what they wanted a rock star to be—long hair, glammed-out, generally drunk, hand on someone’s tit—but the question was . . . which rocker was I? Nikki? Paul Stanley? The guy from Judas Priest?

  It was kind of perfect. Kept me mildly normal, but still got me in behind the velvet rope.

  In the Limelight, you could always count on some actual famous people being there. I loved watching them. They reminded me of animals in the zoo, eyes darting all over the place. One evening I saw Simon Le Bon, of Duran Duran, and I almost spilled my drink all over myself in my excitement.

  “Simon!” I said, approaching him. “Hey, I’m Stephen. Enormous fan.”

  “Thanks so much,” he mumbled. Simon Le Bon didn’t look too interested in talking, but I ventured on.

  “I’m in a band, Ratt.” No reaction. “Hey, I would just love to get a picture with you, man—what do you say?” There was a professional photographer bouncing around the room with a Nikon on a neck strap, asking the famous people if they’d like to get their pictures taken with the other members of their strange club.

  “Nah, that’s okay,” he said.

  “Hey.” I laughed. “I promise it won’t hurt. It’ll just take a second.”

  “What are you, deaf? I said no.”

  Simon Le Bon had always been someone who I’d looked up to, fashion-wise. I was into Duran Duran’s sense of theater, too: their willingness to embrace kitsch while still maintaining a great amount of musical integrity. When they were running on all cylinders, they were one of the most complete, impressive pop groups of the 1980s.

  But now their singer was being a dick.

  I shuffled away and approached the photographer. He whispered in my ear, “When I give you the sign, run up to Simon.” I jumped next to him, placed my arm around him, and said cheese.

  “What the hell is—”

  SNAP!

  Thanks, Le Bon! You were my hero and always will be, you crusty fuck!

  Weirdness begets weirdness. That goes double when you’re partying in New York. The city is dark and full of roaches, and freaks who wish to stay on beat must booze heavily. I sucked down a gin and tonic, jammed into the Limelight bathroom, sequestered myself in a stall, and gobbled a Seconal.

  An hour later, the midnight chimes were striking, and I was vibrating at a high frequency. I was approached by a woman and her twelve-year-old daughter.

  “Pardon me,” the woman said pleasantly. “Do you have a moment?”

  “Sure,” I said, extending my hand. “I’m Stephen.” At this point, I was blitzed enough to be anyone she wanted. I kept that to myself.

  “I’m Jaid Barrymore.” She motioned to her kid—a cute, chubby, brown-haired girl. “This is my daughter, Drew. She’d love to meet you.”

  I squinted, confused. “Hey there, Drew.”

  “Hi, Stephen.” She smiled in this charming way.

  Then it hit me: This was the girl from E.T.

  Jaid backed away a couple of feet, and me and Drew chatted for a little bit.

  “What’s a kid like you doing up this late?” I said.

  She snorted. “I stay up till three every night. This is nothing.”

  “Have you ever been to a nightclub like this before?”

  She laughed again. “Stephen! I go to clubs all the time. Don’t you know anything?”

  She was kind of a charming kid. Really adult. I realized how drunk I was and pushed my glass away from me. “Oh, sorry.”

  “What are you sorry about?” She giggled. “I love drinking.”

  “Oh,” I said. I love drinking, too. Hmm . . . can I say that?

  She looked around the room. “The Limelight is really awesome. But Studio 54 is even better.”

  “Can you get me in sometime?” I joked.

  “Of
course,” Drew said, serious. She snapped her fingers. “Simple as that.”

  I laughed, and then she did, too. She was a pretty cool little person, even then.

  “Drew would love a picture with you, Stephen,” her mom said.

  I brightened. “Rad! I would love one with her, too.”

  We got the photographer’s attention, and he snapped off a couple of mementos. Jaid laid her head in my lap, so she wouldn’t be visible in the picture.

  Life kept accelerating. Our visibility was spiraling out of control. Fans swarmed the hotels before shows, falling victim to rock mania. We checked into our rooms in Little Rock, Arkansas, and pushed past the seas of manic, grabbing hands. Finally we made our way upstairs. Unlocking the door to my room, I sighed, relaxing onto the bed: alone at last.

  “Stephen?” The curtains parted.

  “What the fuck!” I screamed. “Who are you?”

  “I’m so sorry,” said the young woman, tiptoeing out, shamefaced, from behind the curtain. She held a Sharpie marker in her hand. “I just . . . really wanted to meet you.”

  “This is breaking and entering! I could have you arrested!”

  “Please don’t. I’ll leave right now.” Shyly, she extended the marker toward me. “But first, could you sign my tits?”

  It was a lapse of all sense and judgment, and we were the beneficiaries. Backstage at the Little Rock show, Sweet, Sweet Connie Hamzy herself waltzed in, the most famous rock groupie of all time. She wasn’t bad-looking, but then again, she didn’t look exactly fresh, either. Her eyes scanned the room restlessly until they found Robbin. When she saw King, her entire face lit up.

  “You might be the handsomest guy I’ve ever seen in person,” she said, smiling. “I’ve already done the crew—honey, let me show you what I do.”

  Robbin had a few in him, so he just shrugged and let her unbuckle his pants.

  I sat there, about ten feet away, watching with a mixture of horror and fascination. Soon Robbin’s expression began to change, from casual drunk, to amused horndog, to enraptured monster. . . .

  “She’s a freak!” he whispered, laughing. Connie was going to town on him. She put a lot into her work, moving with such speed and fervor that Robbin nearly lost his footing several times.

  Finally she swallowed him down. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she gestured to me. “Now you.”

  “Nooo!” I said, laughing my ass off. “What you just did to my friend right there, that was as close as you’re going to get to me.”

  But she kept after me. You don’t become the world’s most famous rock groupie by giving up easy. In the end, she hounded me so relentlessly that finally I was forced to bring her off to the side for a little talking-to.

  “Connie,” I said. “You don’t want what I have.”

  “Oh,” she said seductively. “I wouldn’t be too sure about that. What is it?”

  “Diarrhea dick,” I said chummily.

  That shut her up.

  There was sex fever in the air. Joe Anthony, quickly finding his tour legs, learned the tricks of the trade from Phil and Road Dog. Soon he was in there with the best of them, slapping out passes like high fives.

  “The band would like to have you as their special guest,” said Joe, flashing his trust-me, I’m-from-Tulsa smile. “And if they don’t pick you, then I’d be happy to fill right in.”

  But we hardly needed our team to recruit. Other guys, caught up in the hysteria of the parking lot, would do it for us. One afternoon, having driven through the night from Pensacola to our next gig in Fort Lauderdale, we passed on getting a day room at a hotel. Instead we just pulled into the parking lot at the arena, to try to catch an hour or so of rest there.

  “Excuse me?” A knocking came at the door, gentle but insistent. “Pardon me?”

  Joe answered it. It was a skinny guy and a voluptuous, beautiful woman wearing an off-the-shoulder blouse, a miniskirt, and a pair of boots. “What’s up? The band’s sleeping, man. No visitors.”

  “Sherry here would really like to come on board for a little while,” explained the guy.

  Joe looked her over carefully. She was drop-dead gorgeous. Only a fool would have refused.

  “Well,” he said, “what’d you have in mind?”

  “I want to do a little show for the guys in the band.”

  “She’s a really wild girl,” added the guy. “Isn’t that right, honey? Aren’t you a wild one?”

  She smiled, nodding, her chest bouncing up and down.

  “Well, all right,” Joe said. “She can come on up for a while. You gotta stay outside, though.”

  The guy nodded. “Absolutely. I have no problem with that. I’ll be right here.”

  “Who the fuck are you, anyway?”

  “Her husband,” said the guy. “Huge fan of the band.”

  The lewdness, the moral oddity. After a while, it all went to your head. How could it not? Halcion, Valium, Darvocet, and Percocets took the edge off. The boys liked krell, but I was studying at pharmaceutical college. We all had our interests.

  Ratt hopped from arena to arena. Then we went to Japan. We were already being treated like royalty in our own country, but what we experienced over there was another thing altogether. Truly, it was like being a Beatle. Those fans were so dedicated, so intense, and ultimately, so completely insane. They came bearing homemade gifts and trinkets and stuffed animals and dolls in our likeness and unique watercolor portraits, all pushed into our arms by crying black-haired beauties. Most impressive of all, we seemed to have been assigned separate groupies for each member of the band.

  “Dude, how is this possible?” said Joe. “I got groupies for me. How do they even know who the hell I am?”

  They were incredibly organized. Zlozower, our favorite rock photographer, came along to snap off some pictures. Like Joe, he had his own clutch of adoring fans.

  “I don’t know what kind of groupie would choose the goddamn photographer,” he growled, “but I’m not complaining.”

  Mr. Udo, Japan’s legendary rock promoter, treated us like we were stars there. The tiny man walked around town like he owned it. Three passions ruled his heart equally: women, rock and roll, and sumo wrestling.

  “You come see sumo,” he demanded, on one of our first nights in town. “Man cannot know Japan until he sees sumo.”

  He arranged for us to attend a spirited match, where massive behemoths wearing colored thongs tangled like enormous, pissed-off walruses. From our vantage point, the flabby spectacle was kind of unnerving.

  “Bobby,” I whispered, “look—that guy’s even fatter than you are!”

  “Suck it,” said Bob calmly, sipping his beer.

  JOE ANTHONY, SECURITY:

  Before the AIDS thing broke out, Udo used to take us to these bathhouses. It’s like a massage parlor, and you go in, strip down, you have like four chicks on you who are nude, and you’re in a Jacuzzi, and they wash you down with their pussies. . . . It blew my mind. They’d put their pussy on your fucking leg, a chick on each leg, and roll all over your legs and all over your body, your head and everything, washing your body with their pussies. Then they’d sit you on this little stool that’s got a hole in it for your balls to drop down and they’d fucking massage you and put baby oil on, fuck you and suck you and put you in a pretzel position. . . . It was just fucking incredible, especially for a kid like me.

  They’d whip you around, crack your back, crack your neck, the next thing you know your legs are over your . . . she’s got your balls in her mouth, one’s tonguing your butt . . . bringing you drinks and sushi . . . just crazy.

  The Japanese women were very quiet. Very shy. Until you got them behind closed doors. Then they were fucking animals.

  As musicians, we were holding our own. But as friends to one another, the seams were starting to show. Our constant touring and the grind we put ourselves through to make our name was beginning to take effect. Robbin was our peacemaker, the man who you could count on to exte
nd an olive branch. The rest of us took our turns being crusty, irritable fucks.

  Bobby, Juan, and Warren were all married. They had family responsibilities to worry about. After a few months of constant partying and sleeping on a tour bus, your bandmates probably start to look less and less appealing, compared to some vision of your wife in your comfortable bed at home. I got that.

  I never tried to be an asshole, but the truth was, I was one once in a while. I was obsessed with getting my quota. Occasionally I could be a loud drunk. But then, I was nothing compared to Bobby, who lived to scream and yell and be stupid, or snap his fingers in restaurants at the waitstaff.

  “Hey! Come on!” yelled Blotzer, in restaurants across the land. “Hey, how about some service over here?”

  Robbin developed a saying: “He who dines with the Blotz is a fool.” You just can’t insult the service and send your food back three times in the course of one meal, generally acting like a loud, self-important jerk, without some member of the waitstaff taking that burger you keep sending back and hocking a gob of mucus in between the lettuce and the meat. I mean, that’s what I would have done.

  Bobby and I had different blind spots. When we saw the other guy acting like a total asshole, we never hesitated to call him out on it, but when we did the same idiotic shit ourselves, neither would cop to it. We started to bicker pretty bad around the Invasion tour, and never did manage to turn it all the way around.

  The tour wound down without major incident. We found ourselves back in Los Angeles, with more money than we knew what to do with and increasing notoriety within the rock business. It wasn’t uncommon for me to withdraw a thousand dollars a day from the bank and then try to figure out a way to piss through it. Limo adventures were always a fun way to waste money.

  Life looked good from the back of a white stretch limo, arms wrapped around two gorgeous blondes with dangling earrings and cocktail dresses riding up their thighs. Our limo drivers understood the rules of the game, too: They knew if Robbin was going out to pick up Nikki, they’d have some heroin and blow and whatever booze they wanted on hand. For me, you had to stock the limo with a gram of blow, because chicks always wanted it, and booze, and a bag of weed. And well, if you got a couple of pills, you might as well bring them, too.