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

by Stephen Pearcy

  Chicks and drugs and booze: It wasn’t a complicated formula, but frankly, that’s what made us happy. It was fun to share with the young rock dudes, too, kind of do for them what Dave and Eddie used to do for me. I’d take out Andy McCoy, from Hanoi Rocks; Mike Tramp, from White Lion; Tracii Guns, from L.A. Guns; and Steven Adler, from the up-and-coming Guns N’ Roses, all the time. I actually bought Tracii a guitar once—he didn’t have a guitar at the time, so I took him to Guitar Center and said, “Pick one.” Steven in particular was a really nice guy. He used to come over to my house in Laurel Canyon quite a bit. One day, he was looking all hopefully at the platinum record we’d gotten for Out of the Cellar.

  “I just want one of those,” he said wistfully. “I swear to God, my life will be complete if I just get one of those platinum albums.”

  “You got a tape?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Throw it in.”

  We listened for half an hour without saying much at all.

  “Steve?” I said, finally, when the cassette had clicked off. “You’re gonna be fucking huge. See that album? You’re going to have a wall of those.”

  There was always something strange to do in Los Angeles, a town where if you felt like it, you could use whatever fame you had like a tool. One evening Joe and I headed down to the Stock Exchange, a good club downtown. We’d landed the second-best table in the house for ourselves and our dates, when the air pressure in the room lowered, somehow. Immediately I understood: There was royalty afoot.

  Then I saw him.

  “Holy shit, Joe,” I whispered. “Don’t look over. That’s Michael fucking Jackson.”

  Joe looked over at the table, which was a few down from us. He squinted for a moment. “I actually know that guy.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, you know him?” I said.

  “When I was working at the limo company,” said Joe, “I used to drive for him every now and then.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “It’s true. Actually, I mostly used to drive Bubbles around.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “His chimp,” Joe clarified. “Bubbles was a trip. I used to have to take him downtown to this tailor, to get fittings. Michael liked to dress him up in little sailor suits. We’d always stop off and get him a carrot juice—that was his favorite drink. And you know those plastic clowns, that have sand in the bottom, that you punch, like a Weeble? Bubbles had to have one of those to smack around, or he just went fucking nuts.”

  “So introduce me to Michael,” I begged. “Please, Joe, I really want to meet him.”

  “I don’t want to do that,” said Joe. “He’s a private dude. Come on, Stephen.”

  “As a friend, I’m asking you this favor.”

  “Ah, hell,” Joe said. He lumbered down to Michael’s table, then pointed over toward me. I ran my hand over my date’s leg, mostly just because I could. She had an amazing thigh, perfectly formed.

  “He’ll see ya,” said Joe, sitting down heavily. “Don’t slobber all over him, okay?”

  Unsteady feet brought me over to the young idol. His hair was perfect and unmarked, bearing no sign of the recent Pepsi incident, when it had caught on fire during a commercial on a lot in Culver City.

  “Michael,” I said, reaching out my hand. “Stephen Pearcy. Giant, giant fan.”

  Michael looked only slightly uncomfortable. “Hi. It’s so nice to meet you.”

  “I won’t take up too much of your time,” I assured him. “I won’t even sit. Unless you want me to.”

  “No,” said Michael sweetly.

  “Would you like a beer? I’ll bill it to my table.”

  “I don’t drink,” said Michael. He smiled. He had a charming smile. “Thank you, though.”

  “Oh yeah! I read that somewhere. You don’t drink.” I just stood there, hovering over his table, gaping. “No drinking.”

  “Michael has enjoyed meeting you,” said a dude who was standing behind his table, wrists crossed, in traditional bodyguard fashion.

  “Oh!” I said. “Sure!” I backed away from the table, grinning hugely. “Hey, Michael, feel free to come over and sit with us later, if you feel like it!”

  “He’s good,” the bodyguard said.

  JOE ANTHONY:

  Sometimes I’d drive way up to Rancho Cucamonga, and pick up this little girl named Gail, who was ten years old. I used to pick her up and drive her out to Michael’s house in Encino. He also had a condo over in Westwood, over on Wilshire. And I’d drop this kid off. Then after the weekend was over, I’d pick her up and drive her home.

  Michael would call me in the car, and I used to think it was the girl’s mother. You know? “Hello? Let me speak to Gail.” I remember her saying to me, “Hey, Michael told me to tell you to roll up the partition and hang up the phone.” I’d hang up the phone and roll up the partition, and they’d talk on the phone for an hour. God only knew what the fuck they had to say to each other.

  It was a heady time. I’d drink four beers, turn on the radio, and hear the band. I’d snap it off, find a joint to smoke, turn on the television, and see myself there. There was no place to run. I tried to be a good guy and stay connected to my peer group, keep smiling, keep it social. It was so odd to be around so many people in the public eye, though, grinding their teeth with ego and coke and desire. Once you were famous, you were damned to stay that way. You started to mostly interact with people who shared the same condition.

  One evening I found myself at some club in Hollywood, trying to make conversation with Billy Idol.

  “Stephen, mate!” he screamed in my ear. “DO YOU HAPPEN TO HAVE ANY BLOW ON YOU?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  Billy’s eyes got big and excited. “Then let’s leave this fucking place and go to my flat and DO SOME!!”

  We sped to his apartment in a limo. We parked and Billy turned to me. “How about that blow, then, mate?”

  I handed him the packet.

  “Listen,” he instructed me, sliding the gram of cocaine into his shirt pocket, “don’t pay my wife any mind. She’s in a very shit mood.”

  His wife hovered in the doorway to greet us. She was tall and gorgeous.

  “So?” she snapped. “Where the fuck were you?”

  “With Stephen,” he said, pointing at me. “Say hello to Stephen.” He walked past both of us and noisily shut the bathroom door.

  “I’ve been waiting for you for FOUR HOURS!!” she called after him. You could hear Billy turn the bathroom fan on.

  Seething, his wife crossed her arms and turned to me. Her face was sour.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m no one,” I said vaguely. “I’m in a band.”

  “And how do you know my husband?” she asked.

  “We . . . ran into each other,” I said lamely. “At a club.”

  “Fucking musicians,” she said, stabbing her finger into my chest. “You fucking musicians. You have to fuck every twenty-one-year-old cunt in high heels that you meet, don’t you?”

  “Stephen.” It was Billy. Full of pep. “Shall we go?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Just in time.”

  His wife hung in the doorway, staring hatefully at both of us. She had her pose down just perfect, just absolutely beautiful, but her performance was wasted on Idol. He was way too geeked to recognize anything but his own pounding heartbeat.

  We drove back toward the club. Why the fuck we had to go to his house to do blow when we could have done blow with Vince and Gary Busey in the bathroom at the club was still a mystery to me. . . .

  “Hey, could I get the rest of that gram, man?”

  “Ah, mate,” said Idol, apologetically. “I did the whole thing.”

  Our driver stopped at a red light and we peered at the street signs.

  “But,” I said, confused, “we were only at your house for three minutes.”

  “Yes,” said Billy. We were both silent for a second. Then the light went g
reen, and the driver stomped on the gas pedal.

  THE GOOD, BAD, AND THE UGLY

  BIG JOHN, “ROCK OF LOVE,” RATT AND POISON SECURITY:

  By the time 1987 rolled around, the Sunset Strip was absolutely crazy. Fucking madness. You ever see that movie that Penelope Spheeris made? Decline of Western Civilization, Part II. Watch it, it tells the whole story. I was up on the Strip a lot in those days. I was still a fan at the time. One day, I watched Bobby Dall from Poison beat the shit out of this guy with a steel fucking pipe.

  They were still a relatively small band at the time. I think they had just changed their name from the Spectres to Poison. Anyway, some guy kept on covering up their flyers with his band’s shit. Finally Bobby caught him at it. He followed him in his car to a Quik Stop, and then he just fucking ambushed the guy. Beat him senseless with a steel fucking pipe. “Who the fuck are you to cover my band flyer?!” he kept screaming.

  I couldn’t tell you why Bobby had an industrial fucking vacuum cleaner pipe with him. But he certainly did. I’ll never forget that curvy plastic tubing flailing out behind him. It was brutal. Absolutely brutal.

  And someone goes to the guy afterward: “Hey, you just got your ass beat by a chick.”

  By the mid- to late ’80s, metal was no longer fringe music. This wasn’t the US Festival, when it had reached a point of mainstream understanding: It was the beginning of full-on oversaturation. Roving gangs of dudes in eyeliner jammed the Strip, strutting around in acid-washed jeans, leather jackets, and bandanas, pimping their bands from underneath umbrellas of back-combed hair. Riki Rachtman’s Cathouse was the club to go to if you wanted to see or be seen. I made periodic appearances there, making careful notes on the scene that seemed to have exploded out of control.

  Apart from Robbin, I never saw my bandmates in Los Angeles when we weren’t in the studio, recording. We spent so much time together on tour that I think we all felt relieved to take any break we could. Eddie Van Halen was still stopping by my house frequently to knock back his vodka in the mornings. (He actually got busted for drunk driving leaving my place on that bike one day. I don’t think he rode it anymore after that.)

  Often when I was on the road, my drummer from Mickey Ratt, John Turner, watched my place. He used to get a shock every now and then when Ed would knock on the door.

  “Eddie Van Halen’s at the door!” he said when he called me.

  “Let him in,” I said. “He just wants a drink.”

  My shopping had not evolved much since the days of living with Mrs. O’Neill. A typical trip to the store would net me two and a half cases of beer, several bottles of Merlot, a quart of vodka, and milk, for health. At least once a week we would have parties that left a massive footprint on my home: hundreds of beer cans crushed and thrown on the floor, cigarettes stubbed out on coffee tables, coke residue on every flat surface, half-smoked joints sprinkled in among the pizza boxes.

  The disorder didn’t sit well with me. Contrary to what the rock stereotype might be, I couldn’t stand to live in filth.

  “I’m having trouble keeping it together,” I confessed to Robbin. “We’re on the road so much, man.”

  “I know,” he agreed. “We have no idea how to be normal people.”

  I had always been immature, but when the whole world starts buying your album and inviting you to present at the Grammys, looking the other way when you show up trashed and slobbering, well, you truly lose all desire to grow up. Robbin was even less grounded than me. He had some house in the hills, where he kept his expensive guitar collection and all his weird impulse-buys, like new bicycles with the tags still on them, but mostly he felt happiest when he was bouncing from woman to woman, trading his love and affection for room and board and three hot meals a day. For a time, he lived over at Vicky Frontiere’s, whose mom owned the Rams. Her home was well known as a rocker crash pad. Tawny was always dating some famous guy, but she and Robbin still had love for each other, and some nights he stayed with her, too.

  “I think I get lonely living by myself,” he said.

  “Shit,” I admitted, “I do too. And I get weird.”

  “Weird?”

  “Dude,” I said, “I’ve gotten into this terrible habit of waking up, thinking I’m in some hotel, and just fucking spitting on the walls of my own goddamn bedroom. I feel like a crazy person. But I just can’t stop doing it.”

  “I’ll tell you what we need to do, Stephen,” said King, finally. “You and me need to take a walk somewhere. Doesn’t that sound healthy? Let’s go on a hike.”

  But Robbin and I never embarked on any hikes. The closest I got to getting out into nature or getting any exercise was lying on a deck chair poolside at the Sunset Marquis with a margarita in my hand. I loved the Marquis dearly and spent incredible amounts of money to stay there any time I could. And if it sounds insane to rent a bungalow in a luxury hotel for weeks at a time when you already own a house located about four miles away, let me just explain that by this point, Out of the Cellar had gone two times platinum, and Invasion was on the verge of selling more than a million, too. We had publishing revenues, merchandising deals, and a portion of the gate at every show. Money was pouring into our hands faster than any of us could spend it.

  The Sunset Marquis was where I felt most comfortable in those days. I ended up staying there so long, they gave me a bungalow instead of a room. It was like a hut, set off from the main building, and I brought my dogs there and really settled in. A cute lead singer from a very popular New Wave band came knocking on my door one day. A little too late, I figured out she was involved. But the deed was already done. Robbin saw me having so much fun, he decided to get a room of his own. He and I became like permanent fixtures there, the bull-goose lunatics of the insane asylum. Often Robbin walked around the halls fully nude in the middle of the day.

  “Cover yourself, sir!” a surprised clerk yelled.

  Robbin just looked down his belly, shocked to find he had no pants on.

  “Hey. Right, I’ll go do that.”

  He also enjoyed showing up at my bungalow, unannounced, and asking to use my bathroom.

  “Why?” I said, suspicious.

  “Boy, I sure do have to take a shit,” he admitted.

  “What’s wrong with your bathroom?”

  “I prefer yours,” he said, simply.

  Then he would push past me, smiling, take a shit with the door open, and walk out without flushing.

  He tried to fuck women he’d met half an hour earlier at the Marquis bar on the grass right outside my bungalow; he sniffed coke openly off the top of his fist in the hallways, launching into endless, rambling discussions with the guys who’d come to steam-clean the carpets. He was a force of life, a glammed-out Viking who could line-drive a fastball 350 feet to dead center field.

  ROAD DOG:

  Robbin was my hero, man. He would do certain sexual things, and he would call me on the phone and say, “You gotta come see what I just did.” I mean, he was proud of it. Used to walk around naked all time. Robbin pissed on the road manager on the bus once. We laughed until we were about to have a heart attack.

  Robbin was the nicest guy in rock and roll. The nicest guy. He and Stephen were best buds. They were partners in crime. But Robbin was always the one who ended up in the public eye getting caught.

  I mean, I start talking about Robbin, I end up wanting to cry.

  Robbin’s room at the Sunset Marquis was right beneath Rodney Dangerfield’s, another longtime guest. Dangerfield was on a hot streak, coming off his role in the movie Back to School, and he had more cocaine and eighteen-year-old girls coming in and out of his room than a Colombian drug lord. But he was still an old guy, kind of crusty. And geriatrics, as a rule, don’t generally take kindly to heavy metal blasting up at them at all hours of the night.

  “Turn down that fuckin’ rock music, punk!” the comic screamed, pounding on Robbin’s ceiling. “I said, turn it down or I’ll cut your balls off!”

  “Rodney, man
, come on down and party with me,” Robbin called up. “We’re having a great time in here!”

  “I got my own fuckin’ party going on, son,” Dangerfield yelled. “I got trim in here that would make you sick to your stomach. So for the love of God, turn that damn music down and let me enjoy myself, will ya?”

  They were both too likable to remain enemies, and soon grew to appreciate each other. In the mornings we would all commiserate over Bloody Marys by the pool.

  “Rodney,” said King, “man, I just want to apologize. I’m going to keep the noise to a minimum, from this day on.”

  “Well, all right,” said Dangerfield, his eyes popping and goggling as he turned his head to and fro, checking out the bikinis. “Finally, you’re coming around.”

  “How about coming out with us, Rodney?” Robbin said. “You know? Next time Stephen and I head to Long Beach Arena to catch Maiden, you come along, huh?”

  “Keep dreaming. I got business over here. I got chicks lined up waiting for me. Long Beach Arena. Come on.”

  We loved those old-school Catskill comics, and seemed to have a strange connection with them. Our alliance with Milton Berle was still going strong. Robbin and I were frequent guests at the Friars Club. Many were the nights that we sat in full rocker regalia and watched Phyllis Diller or Johnny Carson get ripped a new asshole in celebrity roasts.

  “Dude, this is so cool,” I said to Robbin, sucking back the free booze happily. “Old-school Hollywood. And Miltie’s the grand poobah, you know?”

  Robbin shook his head in mock regret. “ ‘Round and Round’ made that guy. Now, he never writes. Never calls.”

  Miltie loved the band. He was always telling us, “Keep comedy in your work. Keep things jovial.” One night, Milton took a moment to single us out in the crowd. “My nephew’s got a band, some of them are here tonight. Say hello, you rat bastards.”

  Robbin and I waved from our seats, honored.

  “They’re a really, really nice group of gay guys. I wish them well. Really do.”