I’d rather buy a motorbike than pay to clean up a hotel room.
On the last night of the tour, we played in Edinburgh, Scotland. I spent the day off before the gig at Edinburgh Castle, at the top of the city, with Clyde “The Spide” Duncan, Tommy Lee’s drum tech. Smoking black hash and drinking beer, we studied the medieval armor and weaponry. Soaked up the sights. The next night, we were onstage at the Edinburgh Playhouse and some guy in the front row wasn’t getting into our set, so I kicked him in the chest. He tried to sue us the next week. Scott McGhee was completely furious at me. Well, hey, at least I got him out of his seat.
I remember jamming with the Crüe at the end of their set. As I held Vince’s hand to the air, in the obligatory bow at the end of the set, Vince started shouting, “Hey, fuck you, Scotland! We’re going home!!! We’re getting the fuck out of here! Fuck you! Later!!! We are out!” Of course he wasn’t saying this into the mic. Just to us, holding our hands in the air. We were laughing. It was hilarious.
Next up for us? Our first headline UK tour. Then, back to the States to open up the full Aerosmith Pump tour.
We were getting a lot of practice.
Weird Dreams
I have a lot of weird dreams. One recurring dream I have is of heights. I dream that I am hoisted onto some impossibly high precipice. A skinny, rocky mountain type thing. There is room for only one person on top of the precipice. I climb up there. Why? I do not know. It’s always windy and sunny for some reason. I am high up in the clouds.
When I get to the top, I have to freeze. I lie on my back, clutching the sides of this rock, breath escaping my lungs in short gasps, as I stare into the sky above. Feeling the height of where I am at, in the pit of my stomach. If I move at all, I will fall off the edge. If I even turn my head, my weight will shift and I shall surely plummet to a certain death below. I spend the majority of my dream summoning up the courage to climb back down. Barely flinching, I keep my body low to the rock. So the wind doesn’t blow me off. I get to the ladder, or path, down. I look at how steep and far down it is. I am too frightened to move. I freeze at the top of the precipice.
I have this dream all the time.
8
BACH THIS WAY
1989–1990
The Bazmanian Devil
Aerosmith Pump Tour
USA
None of us could believe it. But it was true.
We were going to go on tour with our heroes.
The original bad boys from Boston.
The Toxic Twins.
Aerosmith!
Snake called me. We were both excited after talking to Scott McGhee. We were going to be paid $15,000, every single night, on the road with Aerosmith. This was a considerable nightly sum for a band in 1989, and a new level financially for us at the time. Over the course of the whole tour, combined with headline shows on nights off, the money would add up.
Our value had increased, due to our constant touring, and chart success. Especially now, with the new top-ten single “I Remember You” following hot on the heels of the top-five single “18 and Life.” We put asses in the seats. Especially the female kind, and that’s what Aerosmith liked about us.
As Joe Perry himself mentions in his biography Rocks, I was indeed enjoying our newfound success, much like the proverbial kid in a candy store. Nose candy, that is. Since we had money now, we did better drugs. We started to fly girls in and out of town that we barely knew. Bringing chicks on the bus from one city to the next, partying with them, and then leaving them at a truck stop. Shit like that.
I perfected the art of being able to tie up a girl anywhere our travels would take us. I would steal a towel from the hotel room. Take my lighter, and light the edge of the towel on fire, at six or seven equidistant points. Then rip the towel into six or seven makeshift “ties” to immobilize the most über-hot woman in each town who would come to see us play that night.
One such ravishing beauty was from Florida. I hauled a chair out onto the balcony of my hotel suite in South Beach. Overlooking the ocean, and in full view of the hotel balconies adjacent to us, I tied this achingly hot blonde girl, clad only in fishnets and high heels, to a chair on the balcony as the evening sun set. Naked, but for her black high heels, her ankles tied to the front legs of the chair. Her wrists tied to the back. I put a blindfold on her and left her out on the balcony. Shut the door and went inside to make myself a Jack and Coke. After a while, she started to get nervous. I heard her plead my name. Crying out into the ocean air, “Where am I? Where did you go?” She couldn’t see a thing. I was watching TV in my suite, getting drunk and high. After a while I went back out there and . . . we got it on, in full view of the apartment buildings across the street.
A couple of weeks later, in another state, I was stumbling around, wasted, on the tour bus after a gig. The sun was coming up as I looked down into the bottom bunk near the back of the bus. That same girl from Florida was now here, in another part of the country, completely naked, in the bottom bunk of the bus, only with a different band member. I had no idea she was even on tour with us. “Hey, I thought you were with me,” I thought to myself, butt-hurt for a second. They were both completely asleep in the bunk, in the nude, rolling down the highway. Maybe she was with me . . . but evidently, I guess she was with him too.
Rock it up!
Touring with Aerosmith was any musician’s dream come true. Listening to Steven Tyler sing every single night was a new level of appreciation for me, education-wise, as a vocalist and a performer. And, an inspiration as a person above all else. Aerosmith took us all to school. Steven’s voice soared to the heavens, with the dirty street grit that set the standard for guys like me. The way he moved onstage, so effortlessly, so uniquely cool. His costuming, stage banter, but above all else, his voice, always will be second to none other. For us to spend every night opening for the incomparable Aerosmith did wonders for my own performance, and Skid Row’s performance as a whole.
Although Aerosmith in 1989 were as sober as, or more than, Mötley Crüe were, they still loved sex. They loved chicks. They loved girls. They didn’t sing those lyrics just for fun. That was the way they felt in their hearts, and in their pants.
I was becoming known, in tomes of backstage lore, for my prowess in procuring the most succulent lesbians in each city to hang out with us whenever we could spare the time. The quality of women on the Aerosmith/Skid Row Pump Tour was phenomenal. All of the coolest of the cool, hot women, who had loved Aerosmith forever, were jammed up next to Skid Row Youth Gone Wild Teen Queens in lingerie, hip-hugger jeans, and high heels. Steven Tyler? There is a method to your madness.
I flew out a girl from Atlanta to hang out with the girl I had tied to the chair on the balcony in Miami. I had asked each of them if they “liked” other girls, and they each chirped back with an enthusiastic “Yes!” We were in Salt Lake City, Utah, a fascinating town to play. Inhabited heavily by Mormons. Ever since the Bon Jovi tour I have noticed that Salt Lake City can be markedly more crazy, and have a different sexual energy, than other cities. The pent-up feeling was almost palpable from the stage. The Mormons looked at rock shows as a chance to show up in pretty much next to nothing. Lingerie, heels, and not much more than that seemed to be the dress code for the nubile rock ’n’ roll chicks coming to our concerts in Salt Lake City.
The afternoon of the show, the two girls arrived at the Salt Lake airport and took the limo straight to my hotel room. The girl from Florida brought an eight ball of blow with her. This was pre-9/11, when we would bring cocaine or weed or whatever on the plane without thinking about it. Many was the plane flight I spent plopping down the dinner tray on the plane, only instead of peanuts and pretzels, we would chop out generous lines of fine Peruvian Flake. Freeze our faces off, at 30,000 feet.
“Excuse me, stewardess? Do you by any chance have a straw?”
It was a different time.
I was chilling on the couch, watching TV, when I had an idea.
“Hey! Let
’s take a shower!”
Before I knew it, I had one of the girls on her knees in the bathtub. She had the other girl up against the other wall. I was behind the one girl as she gave lip service to the one in front of her, against the shower wall. I apologize to the hotel guests who stayed next to us that day. You should probably have gotten your money back.
After we banged each other in the shower, we collapsed in a heap back in the suite. The girl from Florida chopped out a bunch of lines and they both started getting super high. I of course didn’t do any of this, as I was going to be singing in an hour or two, in front of 20,000 people.
One of my specialties on tour was to find two of the most insanely hot girls you had ever seen, who also wanted to make out with each other. Or more. Band members would run off the side of the stage, check out what was happening behind the scrim. A little private show, maybe a little motorboat action. I was really good at setting up this kind of scenario. Chicks dig singers.
One time I had two girls on the stage behind Joey Kramer, the drummer for Aerosmith. They were making out. I was spanking their asses, as they fondled each other’s tits. Joey turned around and couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
He was laughing and completely lost his concentration on the show. Steven Tyler ran up to him and slammed his mic stand down on the stage in front of Joey’s drum kit.
“Hey motherfucker!! Yo, Joey! What are you doing?” As much as Steven Tyler loved beautiful women, the show came first. Joey turned around and didn’t take his eyes off his lead singer for the rest of the night.
Sorry, Steven! You’re welcome, Joey.
I had bragged to one of the band members about my previous exploits that afternoon with the two girls. As the three of us went backstage to his room at the end of the show, there was a selection of sex toys laid out on a table. One of the dudes in the band was supremely stoked for me to bring back the two ladies for a little Avon-style merchandise demonstration. But the two girls were so high on coke, they could no longer speak. They had been doing it since the afternoon, and they were both now chewing their lips off. The band member was not impressed.
“Get them the fuck out of here.”
I guess we weren’t getting paid fifteen grand a night for a case of blue balls.
I got along really well with Tom Hamilton. I asked him for some tips on our show. What would he say to make our show better? He told me that I swore too much. Which was for sure true at the time.
“You guys like to spit a lot up there, don’t you?”
“I guess so.”
“You guys are like llamas up there.”
I didn’t spit anymore on the stage after that.
As I said, going on tour with Aerosmith was an education. In all sorts of ways.
Watch Out for the AeroCops
Aerosmith traveled on tour with two dudes that were given the title of AeroCops. The Toxic Twins sure had their hands full touring with us, wandering the backstage halls drunk as they were getting ready to go onstage sober. I was a whirling dervish. The Baz-Manian devil. Snorting, drinking, smoking, screaming, swearing, fucking anything I felt like. The AeroCops were extremely nice to us during the day, but once we got a couple in us, we were persona non grata around the ’Smiths. I smoked pot in our dressing room after the show, and the AeroCops burst into the room. The pot smoke was wafting through the air vents of the backstage area, blowing straight into Joe Perry and Steven Tyler’s room. We were ordered to stop smoking. So, I walked a couple hundred feet out to the tour bus and lit the joint back up. In bed.
Joe Perry also remarks in his excellent book Rocks that I personally wanted to get high with them. This is so completely true. Steve and Joe were the Toxic Twins. It seems crazy now, in this politically correct world of green smoothies and no smoking in bars. But in the 1970s, when I was a kid, and in the 1980s, rock bands partied, dude. People partied! Dentists partied. EVERYBODY PARTIED.
Aerosmith were the kings of partying. I had a reoccurring, vivid dream that seems like reality when I remember it today. While on tour with Aerosmith, I would dream that I was climbing under the rafters at one of the shows. In my dream, we were not playing an arena, but something along the lines of a high school gymnasium for some reason.
I crawl under the seats, over the hard metal load-bearing supports of the bleachers. Joe Perry is in the corner, under the bleachers. As I make my way over to him, I pull out a bag of weed and a brick of black hash and roll up a big joint. I smoke with Joe. In my dreams would be the only place we would smoke together.
I was only twenty-two at the time. Still extremely juvenile in my thought process. What I failed to realize was that Aerosmith had done the impossible. They had turned their lives, and careers, around. Put down the heroin, the substances, and made the most successful album of their career. Permanent Vacation was a landmark album, and the first one they had ever done sober. The album we were on tour supporting, Pump, had the hit single “Janie’s Got a Gun,” which was released not long after we had put out “18 and Life.” Those two videos dominated television sets in 1989. “Janie’s Got a Gun” was a whole new sound for Aerosmith. They had achieved a level of success and critical acclaim they had never achieved while shooting heroin.
The tour had reached epic, legendary party status by the time we got to Los Angeles. We played four nights at the fabulous LA Forum. Tonight, on this run with Aerosmith, was remarkable for two reasons.
This was the night I met Axl Rose. The man who would become my friend, tour companion, and partner in debauchery for decades to come.
Another gentleman who joined us in the festivities that evening, in Southern California, was none other than Mr. Diamond David Lee Roth himself.
Axl came into our dressing room for a specific purpose. He had been asked to jam on the song “Train Kept A-Rollin’ ” with Aerosmith, but he did not know the words. I knew the words, and agreed to write them out for Axl in my dressing room.
Axl came in our dressing room before Aerosmith went on. He was very nice, and we got along great. He told me later that everybody told him, Del James included, that he and I should be enemies, not the buddies, which we fast became. I don’t know what that says about me. But we have been friends for decades. Axl was cool to me from the very start. Tonight was the first night we met, and it would turn out to be an evening that would set standards for the many, many parties to come.
We wrote out the words. Lonn Friend, Wayne Isham, and Snake were in the room. After exchanging pleasantries, we smoked a joint or six and had some drinks. We went to the side of the stage and watched Aerosmith together from the monitor board. Axl danced around and we had a fun time watching our heroes only feet away from us. It came time for Axl to jam, and he went up there with his lyrics that we wrote out in hand. He rocked the LA Forum crowd hard.
Pretenders to Mah Throne
I had met David Lee Roth twice before. First in Phoenix, when I was in Madam X. Somehow we had got backstage on the Eat ’Em and Smile tour. I was quite impressed that Dave had a blowup swimming pool backstage, filled with suntan oil, for girls to wrestle in after the show. The room was all set up with stage lighting and a mammoth stereo, to create the proper hot-oil wrestle vibe.
Talk about backstage hospitality!
The second time I met David Lee was on the Bon Jovi tour. I remember the backstage area of the Forum being so crowded, it was next to impossible to walk around. To get from our opening band dressing room, to the end of the hallway, was a production in and of itself. Someone came back and asked me if I wanted to meet David Lee Roth. I was like, of course I want to meet David Lee Roth! As security ushered me into the packed hallways of the Bon Jovi/Skid Row LA Forum throng, up the stairs, to the legendary, ultra-exclusive VIP Forum Club, I couldn’t believe that David Lee Roth would be hanging out in such a packed environment. It took twenty minutes to get from our dressing room to the Forum Club, which was only up one flight of stairs. We got to the door of the club.
Where was David L
ee Roth?
My security guard opened the door. There, at the bar, was one person. Mr. Diamond David Lee Roth. In this giant, ornate, Old Hollywood–style room. The rest of the backstage was a complete madhouse. You couldn’t walk or breathe. Yet, inside of this giant room, which was completely empty except for the legendary David Lee Roth, was an oasis of peace and tranquility. Somehow, Dave had the entire LA Forum Club all to himself.
He summoned me in to say hi. I was blown away.
“Heyyyyy Baz!!! A toast to you!” As he raised up his glass. Bottoms up!
I used to go running! But the ice cubes kept popping out of my drink!
—David Lee Roth, Creem magazine, 1982
While all the peasants milled about the backstage halls, not unlike cattle, we were the two Rock ’n’ Roll Kings of LA, in our private castle.
Back to tonight. Aerosmith tour.
A knock on the dressing room door.
“Excuuuuuuse me!!! Is BAZ in here?? Where is BAZ???”
I turn around, and his head sticks into our quarters.
Oh my God!!! It’s Diamond David Lee Roth!! LOOK AT ALL THE PEOPLE HERE TONIGHT!!!
“Hey Dave!!!!!!! Come on in!!!! Sit down, man!” David Lee Roth sits down right next to me.
“Hey Dave!! You want to roll a joint?” I offer the salutory gesture.
“You know what, BAZ?? Why don’t you do the honors??!!!!”
And so commanded David Lee.
I did exactly that. As we sat backstage and smoked, Axl Rose came back to the dressing room. All of a sudden, Rick Rubin showed up. In our tiny dressing room, we had Rick Rubin, Axl Rose, and David Lee Roth. As the pot smoke billowed out into the hallway outside our dressing room, the outgunned AeroCops peeked in and just held their hand hands up, flailing their arms in surrender.
18 and Life on Skid Row Page 13
