18 and Life on Skid Row

by Sebastian Bach

  Many times people have told me, “Hey, I thought it was you standing there. But when I heard you talk, then I knew it was you.” I’ll never get used to it.

  I’ll tell you another time that my voice definitely had a life of its own.

  I am sitting here writing this at Le Montrose Suite Hotel in West Hollywood, California. I have some very vivid memories of staying at this place.

  One time, I was staying on the ground floor of the building. In the corner room. Right on Hammond Street. I had the balcony suite, leading right out onto the sidewalk. Encased with bamboo and other lovely floral fauna, it was but a mere jump down a step or two to get onto my balcony from the street above. This was one of these nights.

  My driver that day came into Le Montrose to have a great time. We were standing out on my balcony when we heard two girls walk down the street in front of us. They could not see us through the bamboo, and because we were down a couple of feet from the actual street itself. It was more like we were at ankle level. Or crotch level, to be more exact.

  My driver and myself kept on smoking and drinking. Watching the girls walk down the street. All of a sudden, one of the girls exclaimed to the other, “I will never find true love!” We looked at each other and thought, this was funny. She kind of shouted it. Without missing a beat, I said something along the lines of, “Say it isn’t so! Don’t despair, fair maiden! True love SHALL prevail!”

  As soon as I said that, the girls, who were halfway down the street by now, stopped. They looked at each other. Slowly, they turned around, and started walking back up the street. From where they came. Towards us, standing on our balcony. We looked at each other and said, “What the fuck?” I turned and looked at the girls again. When they got closer, they said, “Sebastian . . . is that you?” I had never met these girls in my life. They kept saying it again and again. “Sebastian, is that you? It sounds like you, Sebastian.” I didn’t understand. So I said, “Yeah, it’s me.” They came up to the balcony, where they could see me standing there. “We knew it was you by the sound of your speaking voice!” This was different than being at Home Depot. I said, “Right on! Cool!” In my drunken state, I motioned for the girls to jump down a couple steps. Into my room. Into my lair.

  We talked about how crazy it was that they knew who I was by the sound of a couple of words spoken half a block away. We laughed and got into some drinks. As the night went on, we laughed a little more and had a couple more drinks. My driver had had enough and bid us good night. Which left me alone in a hotel room with these two girls, who I had met only an hour or so before.

  One of the girls went back out onto the balcony.

  She comes into the bedroom and . . . you know the rest.

  When we are done, she stands up, rearranges her clothes, and goes out onto the balcony to rejoin her friend. I say good night and goodbye, as they hop back up onto the street above. And walk back down the street, strangers in the night. Where they were going in the first place. Before she uttered the words, “I’ll never find true love.” Well, maybe not true love. But she certainly found something resembling love on the way home that night. Just chalk it up to another thing that never would have happened, if I didn’t have this voice!

  Pantera

  1985

  The first time I ever heard of the band Pantera was in Madam X. We were playing Cardi’s in Fort Worth, Texas. Or was it Savvy’s? This was a club in which, yes, there was a chain-link fence separating the band from the crowd.

  Godzilla came backstage. Excited as could be. “Oh my God! You’re not gonna believe this!! Pantera is here!!”

  Who the fuck is Pantera?

  He then went on to explain to me how Pantera was one of the tightest, most hardworking, successful, and well-liked bands on the circuit we were on currently. Southern United States. Texas, Louisiana, etcetera. We were booked by the same agency, American Artists. We played the same clubs. I was seventeen years old, headlining shows in Texas. Tonight, Pantera is in front of the chain-link fence, watching the band.

  1991

  Coming off our first record, recording Slave to the Grind, we were out to rock ’n’ roll as hard as we knew how. After the touring we had done in the last three years, most recently around the world with Guns N’ Roses, we were now ready to headline arenas ourselves. This meant we wanted to take a real heavy band out with us as openers on the tour. Pantera would be that band.

  I was over at Scotti’s, the guitar player’s house, writing songs one day.

  “Hey Baz. You gotta check out this band. They’re unbelievable.” I was curious.

  He dropped the needle on Cowboys from Hell. Immediately, I was stunned.

  This was a completely new sound. Much as the world was not expecting Appetite for Destruction years earlier, none of us could foresee a ZZ Top meets Slayer meets Van Halen meets Rollins Band approach that these Texas wildmen hit us all with. I picked up the cover and realized that this was the same band Pantera that I had met back in Madam X at Savvy’s. Wow, good for them, I thought. They were the best at what they set out to do.

  Right then and there, I decided that I wanted Pantera to open the Slave to the Grind tour. I asked the other guys, and since Pantera were on ATCO, a subsidiary of Skid Row’s label, Atlantic, we worked it out to go on tour together. We met Vinnie Paul at Starplex in Dallas on the Guns N’ Roses tour. We told him we would love for his band to open the tour, kicking off in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve 1991–92. After discussing our business proposition with Mr. Paul, he then left our backstage area, and proceeded to fall asleep in his own vomit in the parking lot of the Dallas Starplex.

  This was gonna be one hell of a tour.

  1992

  I simply had never met anybody in my life that partied as hard as Pantera. Guns N’ Roses liked to have a grand old time, but in a different sort of way. GNR were more high class. Models. High-priced drugs. Cocaine. Caviar. Expensive cars, presidential hotel suites, the MGM Grand plane on call. Bon Jovi liked to party their asses off as well, but would aim to be sober, together, during the show. We would do shots of ginseng before we went onstage with the guys in Bon Jovi. Whereas Pantera would line up forty shots of Crown Royal and Coke before they went out to perform. Going on the road with Pantera was like being on tour with Mike Tyson. An incredibly talented fighter. Who would think nothing of biting your ear off.

  Pantera redefined heavy metal in the 1990s. When grunge came around, they defiantly thrust their middle finger in the face of everything popular, while continuing to make the heaviest metal albums imaginable. We spent months together on the road, taking them on their first arena tour of the United States and Canada. These were magical times. When the tour started, Pantera were all but unknown to the mainstream of North America. Their album Cowboys from Hell had been out for a while, but had yet to go Gold. They were out to support the Vulgar Display of Power record, which would be released about a month into Tour Grind. In Rex Brown’s book, roadie Guy Sykes is quoted as saying, “We came out on stage and blew Skid Row away every single night.” Well, that’s not exactly accurate. If the question is “Which is a heavier band?” obviously Pantera would win that contest against pretty much any band in the world. You can’t compare Mötley Crüe to Slayer. It’s a different style.

  Guy Sykes and Rex Brown miss the point. It was the side of Pantera that allowed them to tour with Skid Row, that helped the band to achieve their first dose of mainstream popularity. Any Pantera fan, or even any member of Pantera, will tell you that Vulgar Display of Power is the commercial and creative apex of the band. This album achieved its initial success with Skid Row fans. Every night we played to packed houses across North America. Guy Sykes should thank Skid Row.

  The night Pantera found out the first-week position for Vulgar on the Billboard chart, we were in Vancouver, British Columbia, playing the PNE Coliseum. Tommy Lee was backstage that night. Pantera was shaving his head. For the first time since the late ’70s, the drummer for glam metal titans Mötley Crüe would
have short hair. Phil Anselmo and Pantera would do the honors. It is a significant moment in metal. The passing of the bald torch. Tommy, all excited, came out of their backstage room with a mohawk. It was crazy.

  Phil Anselmo was hilarious that night. When he found out they debuted at number 44 on the Top 200, he freaked out. It was a very high chart position for such a brutal album.

  “Hey BIERK!” That was Pantera’s name for me. They always called me by my real last name. They said calling me Sebastian Bach was just too much, for some reason. My dad absolutely loved that about the band. “Hey Bierk!!” Dad would hear through the concert halls. “Who is calling you that?!?!?!” Dad was the biggest Pantera fan of them all.

  “Here’s the deal. You seen the latest Billboard chart???? Okay then. I need roast beef every night. Bing cherry sauce. More booze. More weed. I need a couch, curtain, and a disco ball. What have you.” We both started to laugh. He was very funny. Whereas the rest of the guys in Skid Row would not ride the bus with me anymore, Phil was the one who would jump on the bus and party with me going to the next town. We are the exact same age. I think that had something to do with how good we got along.

  I must admit that following Pantera some nights onstage was a gigantic bummer. When they got going into their unique, heavy groove, they were like a machine. Add this to the internal band fighting starting to happen in Skid Row, and some nights ended up being not so much fun. They were together in every way. Whether we knew it at the time or not, we were in the initial stages of falling apart.

  This tour was nothing like those with Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, or Mötley Crüe. This was a more extreme environment. We continued to be serious drinkers. There was lots of cocaine around as well. I should say that I never once ever saw Snake or Rachel or Scotti do cocaine. But there was lots around, with the extreme metal fans that were coming to this particular tour.

  One line in particular stands out. I had already begun to realize that, in fact, cocaine sucks. I truly hate cocaine today. The way it makes you feel is awful. Hanging out with people that are doing it, when you are not, is excruciating. They chew their lips. Eat their face. They stink. The cocaine sweats are so horrible to endure. Coke farts are the most lethal and deadly of their kind in the world.

  Beware the Satanic Death Metal Telemarketer

  We were playing Pine Knob Music Theatre in Detroit. That day, one of my old telemarketer friends from the Madam X days was wandering around backstage. This guy was a serious death metal fan. Long black hair. Sunken eyes. And a necklace of a pentagram dangling below his Satanic face. He looked evil. And that day he brought some evil with him. In his pocket.

  It was a hot, sweaty summertime rock concert. Outdoors. Humid. In the thick of the Detroit summer. We did our usual high-octane set, and I ran off the stage shirtless, dripping in sweat. There was the Satanic Death Metal Telemarketer waiting for me. With a line of blow chopped out literally the size of my forearm. Well, at least it looked like blow. Could have been speed. Could have been Ajax. At that sweaty moment in time, I didn’t really give a shit. It was one continuous line of what I thought was coke, from one end of the bench to the other. Sports teams would use this surface to lace up their skates, put on shin guards, etcetera. We were utilizing this service for rock ’n’ roll means.

  Huffing and puffing from the two-hour show, my heart was beating as quick as it could go anyhow. From adrenaline. From music. From the sheer aerobics of running around on the stage and screaming. My heart could not possibly take what it was about to.

  I bent over with a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill and started vacuuming up the line with my nose. I don’t think I was ever really a cocaine addict. But I did like the way it smelled.

  I got to the end of the line in more ways than one. The blow hit me. Maybe it was cut with speed. I didn’t even bother to ask. I couldn’t, because I was now blacking out. All I knew was that my blood was rushing to my heart and everything was starting to slow down. I backed up and hit the wall. And then slumped to my knees. Before I knew it, I was on my back on the floor of the dressing room. Clutching my chest. Fearing for my life.

  Time started to slow down. I started to see things in a vignette. The center of my vision was lit, but the perimeter darkened out. Surely this cannot be a good sign. Then, the Satanic Black Metal Death Telemarketer leaned into my face, and started to laugh. More like a guffaw. In slow motion.

  “Ha . . . ha . . . ha ha ha haaaaaaaa!!!!!!!”

  The pentagram dangling from his neck weaved back and forth in front of my eyes. The laughter coming from the evil telemarketer . . . was like a distorted . . . slow . . . monstrous sound. Laughing, at my impending death, surely.

  It was at this moment Phil Anselmo came backstage to say hi. Lying on the floor, I could not speak. I could not breathe. He asked me some sort of question and I tried to tell him I needed help. I can’t remember much after that.

  About a week later, the whole band had to take physicals, for our upcoming tour of Japan. This was required for insurance purposes. The doctor told me.

  “Hey, you realize you have a heart murmur, right?”

  “What are you talking about?” He told me that my heart had an irregular pattern. This was the first time in my life any doctor had ever told me such a thing.

  I knew exactly what line of cocaine caused that to occur.

  It took about five years of going to the doctors, to have him tell me that my heart had returned to normal. The murmur took that long to correct itself. Thank God I am here to tell you it did. The moral of the story? Cocaine sucks!

  I tell this to you, dear reader: that shit is horrible. What an awful drug to do. It doesn’t even make you feel good after doing it for a while. I think if you’re going to party, all you really need is weed and wine. Anything else turns you into a Satanic Death Metal Telemarketer. Let this be a cautionary tale.

  I began to feel alienated from the rest of my band on my own bus. Usually it was me, Big Val Bichekas, sometimes with Phil from the opening band. One night we were on our way to the hotel in Philadelphia when our driver got a call on his cell phone, which were a brand-new thing at the time.

  “Oh my God, we can’t go to the hotel. Everybody’s been kicked out.”

  “What the fuck?”

  Apparently Dave the Snake and Dimebag had done acid together. Upon checking into the hotel, Dime pulled out a knife and proceeded to slice up the couch in the foyer of the building. Resulting in both bands and crew being forced to seek out new lodgings that night.

  What the Fuck’s a Shortfall?

  At the end of the Tour Grind, we all had a meeting at the McGhees’ office at 240 Central Park South in Manhattan. We were totally stoked to be home; now it was time to wallow in the riches of our latest world tour. Surely we were all rich beyond our wildest dreams, and would be able to live the rock-star life to the fullest, after all of this success. Instead, that day we all learned a brand-new word.

  That word was shortfall.

  It turned out that instead of each receiving a giant check, each one of us would receive a bill for the year-long Slave to the Grind tour. How could this possibly be, dear reader? We were just as confused as you are.

  As Scott McGhee dunked his Nerf basketball through a hoop affixed to the back of the office door, it was explained to us that our pyro was one of the reasons for this new word we had just learned: shortfall.

  “You guys want to be like KISS?? Well, each time you blow up one of those bombs, it’s three G’s.” Not the Verizon Wireless kind.

  This was also the day we learned the difference between net and gross. How it was possible for us to sell out a 6,000-seat arena and not make any money. Management and accountants, received commission off the gross of the tour. Meaning that if we blew up too many bombs, drank too much booze backstage, all of that fun stuff would be paid for after we paid the management and accountants. We would pay to play if we didn’t watch the budget. We thought we had people watching the budget for us. Once again, we foun
d out that we really had no one watching out for us. Not even ourselves.

  12

  JUST JOKIN’:

  END OF THE ROW

  Mid-1990s

  Westchester, New York, USA

  Ace was always my favorite.

  Out of all the members of KISS, I gravitated toward Ace. The Spaceman. Maybe he had a gravitational pull. From the Planet Jendell, there was something so cool about him. I think of the cover of Love Gun. The painting, arms folded, an orbital, all-knowing, all-seeing, alien smile upon his face. Willing and nubile young denizens sprawled amongst his silver stacked heels. His guitar solos touched me so very deeply. On his solo record there is a song called “What’s On Your Mind?”

  I can’t express the words to tell you about the feelings I got locked up inside

  If only you would give me a reason why you’re so uptight

  What’s on your mind?

  There is a lead guitar section that he plays along to these words, on the outro of the song, that is so beautiful to me. Ace Frehley’s solo album quite literally kicks the shit out of all the other KISS solo albums. I just bought all of them on Pono and the quality of the songwriting, production, playing, and energy makes it quite evident how talented Ace is.