We started playing live around the tristate area and attracted the attention of the record labels in New York City. We did a showcase at SIR Studios where Tom Zutaut came down, along with some other industry execs. It was nerve-racking to say the least.
I tried to say “Hello” to Tom Zutaut. I was nervous, because he was the guy who discovered Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses. Being a fan of those bands, I was wanting to be this guy’s friend.
“How are you doing???” I said over the microphone.
He talked to his friend, then turned to me and said the immortal words, “Just shut up and sing.” I will never forget that. What an arrogant person!
I was nineteen years old. He would see me later in life, after we had sold millions of records, on the side stage of Guns N’ Roses concerts. I had opened these shows, and now he would come over and try and be a cool guy. But I could never forget what a dick he was to me that day. He stayed a couple of minutes, and then split. He passed on signing the band.
Eventually Atlantic Records came on the scene. Jason Flom came to a lot of early shows, and turned us on to Doug Morris, who turned us on to the legendary Ahmet Ertegun. The man responsible for starting Atlantic Records, along with his brother Nesuhi, Ahmet had signed Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, and Buffalo Springfield, to name a few. Maybe you’ve heard of them.
We played the Cat Club in New York City and Jason brought Ahmet. He also showed up at one of our shows in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in a helicopter, with twelve hot women flying with him to see the show. After the show at dinner he regaled us with stories of Keith Richards wiping coke off his face at Mick Jagger’s wedding to Bianca.
At the Cat Club, Jason came up to me after the show. He said, “Hey Sebastian, Ahmet’s here. I want you to go up to him and shoot the shit with him!” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This was the guy who signed The Rolling Stones. What was the scene?
I didn’t know what he meant, but I went up to Ahmet and started talking to him. He started telling me some off-color jokes and I laughed. I guess this did something for the band. I went back to hang out with Jason, who was laughing, telling me “we did great.” Atlantic Records signed us not too long after that show.
Maria came down to New Jersey with our son Paris shortly after he was born. They lived at Jon Bon Jovi’s house for a couple weeks. It was extremely nice of him and Dorothea to open up their home to us in that way.
One day, Jon even brought me into his closet and gave me some of his stage clothes. He literally gave me the shirt off his back. Pretty heady stuff for a nineteen-year-old aspiring rock star! Of course, Jon would be heavily recompensed, many times over, for “helping out” our band. But he gave us a shot like very few other bands ever got in their career. Neither one of us ever expected us to actually make it.
Bon Jovi Tour, 1989
Tour Bus
Toilet
This was an exciting day for me.
For years, I had collected magazines such as Metal Edge. I loved it because it was so thick, I could spend literally weeks reading it. There is a lady named Gerri Miller who loved heavy metal so much, her love of the music and the bands exploded off the magazine pages. I remember buying the very first issue across the street from my dad’s studio in 1983. I read every single issue front to back that came out after that.
It was exciting for me, and the band, to start to be featured in these magazines. After our first photo session with Mark Weiss, they printed a full-page pinup of me in Metal Edge magazine next to the band’s very first article. I couldn’t believe it. Here we were, next to our heroes . . . and I have my own pinup in a national magazine. It certainly felt like we were “on our way.”
Rachel and Snake lived very different than I lived when I met the guys. We shared a common vision of creating high-quality, high-energy rock ’n’ roll and stopping at nothing to make our band succeed. We were all at the top of our game in our chosen field at the time. I liked the songs, and I dug the way they looked, and we got along great. In the beginning.
But these guys were indeed living a different life than I had been living. Both Rachel and Snake still lived with their parents when I met them. I had left home at the age of twelve, lived with a prostitute, already rented and moved from my own apartment two or three times. I had actually done the whole find a place, pay the bills and the rent kind of thing. I was also about five years younger than the guys in the band.
I had known and hung out with real punk rockers in Toronto. People like Steve Leckie of the Viletones, Teenage Head, and Carole Pope of Rough Trade. Metal stars like Anvil and Slayer. The punk rockers I knew did speed and coke. They lived on the streets of Toronto, went to some of the same rock clubs I went to, got in fights, went to jail, and were generally not nice people. I hung out with these people growing up in Toronto. We were very different people as far as our life experiences had been up to that point. My girl was pregnant with our first child. That child would depend on me. That child would be my responsibility.
To me, at the time, rock ’n’ roll was a real lifestyle. Living on “Skid Row,” for me, was actually living on Skid Row. I would always cringe in interviews when Snake or Rachel would explain how they thought of the name. “Well, we were cruising down the Garden State Parkway in my parents’ car,” they would say, “and we thought, Skid Row! What a great name.” Gee, isn’t that cute.
Rock ’n’ roll to me was always about being authentic. I probably took that whole belief way too far. I believed that rockers had to live the lyrics we sang in our songs. If the band was called “Skid Row,” then the members should know what Skid Row is actually like.
Our parents were all very gracious helping their sons achieve their dreams. We practiced in Rachel’s garage, and this is where the first Skid Row album was born. We had space heaters and drank coffee to keep warm. We practiced every day, and it was a lot of fun thinking nothing about anything else except for music. All we concentrated on was Skid Row, 24/7. This is what separated us from other bands. Our attention to the music. To the songs.
My personality started to rub some people the wrong way. I guess me really coming from Toronto’s version of Skid Row to the suburbs’ version of Skid Row perturbed some people in some way. I was not trying to make anybody upset. I was not trying to do anything bad. All I have ever tried to do was be good. A good front man. A good singer.
I spent a lot of time wondering what in the hell it was that I was doing wrong.
Courtesy of Mark Weiss.
I remember the very first day Bon Jovi came to our rehearsal in Toms River. It freaked me out.
We were jamming in the garage. I looked through the little windows of the garage door. There was a red Ferrari. Snake said, “Jon’s coming today.”
He came in and watched us rehearse, offering input into the songs and such. I couldn’t believe it when at the end of rehearsal he asked Snake for ten bucks for gas to fill up his Ferrari so he could get home. We all laughed.
We continued to butt heads creatively. Sometimes this led to us bonding unexpectedly. We were in Rachel’s basement with him playing some of his old songs. I heard a riff that I thought was very cool, sort of a Peter Gunn meets Batman kind of feeling. Rachel said, “You like that?” and looked at me. “Yeah, I really love that.” The song was called “Piece of Me.”
I thought it would make a great song. Decades before Britney Spears’s tour of the same name, it became our third single and video, and one of our big hits. The song was even cited as an influence to “Enter Sandman” by Metallica in Kerrang! magazine’s review of the “Black” album. Lars played the song live with Axl Rose and me years before the Black album, at the Rip magazine party in Los Angeles.
One big example of my influence and direction on the first album is the song “I Remember You.” Rachel and Snake first played me the verse of the song at rehearsal, almost as a joke. They were laughing, saying, “This is definitely not going to go on the record!” I couldn’t believe my ears. I though
t the song was beautiful. I knew that I could sing it straight from the heart. I loved the melody of “I Remember You,” and the words. I knew I could write some incredible screams into the melody line because the emotion of the music was right there.
When I have that feeling, I just go with it.
Rachel thought the song was too soft and not in play with our image of Skid Row, super-duper tough guys. I ignored him and kept telling everybody about the song.
One day Doc McGhee came to our rehearsal in the garage. We ran through the set as usual. At the end of the set, I said, “Hey Doc. You have got to hear this song ‘I Remember You.’ You got to hear it, man!!! It’s great.”
Rachel shook his head and explained how the song was not a good fit on the record. We were punk. This was a ballad.
I said “Please, let’s just play it for Doc.” As we went into the first verse, “Woke up to the sound of pouring rain . . .” and built up into the chorus, I looked over at Doc. He was looking at me and laughing. After the song ended, I said, “Rachel does not want the song on the record.” Doc burst into laughter. “That’s funny. Because this song will be on the record.”
It became our biggest single. “I Remember You” became 1990’s “Prom Song of the Year” in USA Today, and has since been covered by Carrie Underwood, Zoe Kravitz, Corey Taylor, Disturbed, among others. The song has lasted the test of time.
It’s an absolutely beautiful track, and I am honored, to this day, to sing it onstage.
5
PRETTY BAD BOYS
1987
New Jersey
People talk about bands. And their image. Whether they are “bad boys,” or “pretty boys,” or whatever. In this book I talk about touring with Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Mötley Crüe, Pantera, Guns N’ Roses, Nine Inch Nails, Soundgarden, and more. Surprise, surprise: no matter what you think of their image, or their music, guess what? Bon Jovi partied as hard as, or harder than, the rest of these bands. I know it’s crazy. But it’s true.
A couple of our early club shows in Skid Row were played at a place in New Jersey called the Raritan Manor. For one of the shows, Bon Jovi wanted to come and jam with us, as a mini warm-up for the upcoming New Jersey tour. Snake, for some reason, decided to tell them, “No.” I can’t remember why now, and I didn’t understand then. I thought it would be really cool to have these big arena rock stars come up and jam with us at a little club. I think the reason why was Snake did not want Bon Jovi to overshadow our show. Jon was super pissed. I remember him yelling at Snake. Gives you a good insight to how close these guys were. We were very lucky to have a band as huge as Bon Jovi helping us out. Even to the point of us telling them to go away. But as we would learn later, you get what you pay for.
Finally, Snake said, “Fine. You guys come jam with us.” I thought it was pretty crazy, a kid coming from Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, allowing Bon Jovi to share the stage with us at our show. In NEW JERSEY, no less.
Before the concert, we got ready in a hotel room across the street from the gig. Richie Sambora and I were just getting to know each other. I thought he was a hilarious dude. He loved to party, pretty much all of the time. Just like most of us did. I certainly did.
I was sitting on the bed in the hotel room. Richie had his shirt off. He was looking in the mirror, blow-drying his hair. I noticed that his body did not look much like the airbrushed version I saw in Metal Edge, or Faces, or Circus magazine. I could not help but notice that Richie had a gut hanging over his belt buckle that I had not seen before in any of the MTV videos. Being nineteen years old, I thought nothing whatsoever of saying to him, “Hey dude, what the hell is that?? Hanging over your belt buckle? What’s up with that belly, man?” At the time, I was rail-thin and as androgynous as David Bowie, the Thin White Duke. I was like a human praying mantis, I was so skinny. But when you are nineteen years old that is easy. I didn’t understand how the great Rock God did not have rock-hard abs of steel.
He looked at me with a giant grin on his face. “What, that?” He motioned to his expando-gut. He then said, and I’ll never forget these words, “I’ll just get an eight ball of blow and I’ll look great!” He laughed that big Italian rock ’n’ roll laugh of his.
I had done cocaine at this point, but not tons of it. The first time I ever did it was in Crazy Sue’s bathroom, with a local music journalist. I was fifteen or sixteen when he gave me my first line of blow. I had done it a couple of times after that, such as with Mötley Crüe at Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven. To be honest, cocaine was a bit beyond my budget, at that point. But things were about to change.
I don’t think I knew what an “eight ball” was. In any case I asked the dude, “What do you mean?”
He explained to me, “I’ll just get a couple of eight balls of coke, do that for a couple of days, and this’ll be gone!!” He was serious. This is where I first learned of cocaine’s dietary properties. Not that I needed to lose any weight. But I did like the way it smelled.
This was 1987 in New Jersey, USA.
Fast-forward a couple of months, to the Bon Jovi New Jersey tour. Doing blow here and there, but not too much because it could freeze your voice. But sometimes it didn’t. Not very good for a singer. You could never tell what it was going to do. Same went for sex. Sometimes, I would do coke and freeze up and not be interested in sex. But then other times I would do it and have the most intense, hot, sweaty, craziest, longest sex sessions imaginable. But that was the exception to the norm.
Bon Jovi/Skid Row Tour 1989: Young, Dumb, and Fulla Cum
January 26, 1989
Dallas, Texas
The Bon Jovi New Jersey tour, in 1989, was the first time I ever played in an arena. Stepping on that huge stage, at that very first show, in Dallas, at Reunion Arena, was one of the most intense feelings of my life. We went up there in front of 15,000 or so people, and I was completely terrified. Just the same way I felt at Lakefield College School the first time I went onstage, when I tried to hide in the cafeteria kitchen. That band had to grab me by the scruff of my neck and literally throw me onstage behind the mic. Tonight was the exact same feeling . . . and I reacted the exact same way.
Again, I just grabbed the microphone, shut my eyes, and sang. It wasn’t until near the end of the set that I allowed one of my eyes to crack open even partially. It was that scary to me. It was like I was somebody else. Finally, the moment I’d been dreaming of my whole life thus far had become reality.
The whole tour was definitely a learning experience. We were playing every single night, on the biggest stages across America. We got better and better as the tour went on. Living together on the “Moonglow” tour bus, we all learned quick what an extreme challenge it was to get one’s self to go to sleep driving down the road at 70 miles an hour. Our solution was to get drunk and pass out in the bunk. Over time, it would become necessary to wear earplugs, a sleeping mask, and eventually take sleeping pills as well, to knock myself out on a tour bus. I’ve been touring so long that I even need earplugs and a sleeping mask when I am at home. Every time I go to sleep. My whole adult life has been spent trying to learn how to adapt to different environments, sometimes nightly, for months at a time.
We learned so much from Bon Jovi. Stagecraft. How to work the crowd. There’s nothing like playing every single night to become good at, well, playing every single night. Bon Jovi were an incredible band to watch, and learn from.
Our first single, “Youth Gone Wild,” came out and went straight to Number One on the Dial MTV music video countdown program, which was broadcast daily across the USA. All of our first seven videos, in a row, went to number one on Dial MTV. It was such an awesome show, and a magical time to be in a rock band. And to be a rock fan. Kids would race home from school and call up 1-800-DialMTV and vote for their favorite video. Then the show would air at 5 or 6 o’clock, and the whole country would tune in and watch. “Youth Gone Wild” hit the right chord . . . with the actual youth gone wild. The world over.
When it was time
for our second single, “18 and Life,” we decided to shoot the video in Los Angeles, again with Wayne Isham and Curt Marvis at the helm. The day of the “18 and Life” video shoot, we were staying at the infamous Hyatt House on the Sunset Strip, where Led Zeppelin had ridden their motorcycles down the hallway, or something like that. Maria had come out to visit. I rented a white Corvette, and zoomed around and across Southern California. It was glorious. My dad came down and loved the car. We were playing at the LA Forum for four nights with Bon Jovi. He saw the white Corvette, jumped in the driver’s seat, and bellowed at me, “Give me the keys, dude!” We proceeded to speed up and down Laurel Canyon Boulevard with the top down. Living the California dream, with his son playing the LA Forum, thumbing his nose at the cognoscenti who had denied him artistic success in his native USA. Made him move to Canada. I could feel his triumphant attitude in the way he was driving. “Fuck you, America!” he seemed to say.
We shot my sequence for the “18 and Life” video in a studio in downtown LA. Maria came down. There was a workroom upstairs. With a mattress. Lying in the middle the floor. We were in love. It was springtime.
We looked at each other, as I shut the door. We took our clothes off and lay down on the floor. She got on top of me. Or I got on top of her. Or vice versa. Or all of the above. There was a knock at the door.
“Sebastian! It’s time for your scene!” I was like, “Wow.” We finished our business, and I zipped up my pants. I walked down the stairs, sat on a stool, and commenced to sing the “18 and Life” video that we have all been watching on TV for decades. I remember being wet from my waist down to my knees, sitting there singing the song. No wonder the video turned out so good.
18 and Life on Skid Row Page 8
