18 and Life on Skid Row

by Sebastian Bach

  On the way to the gig, I asked Duff, “Would you would be interested in collaborating on some music?”

  “Sure! When? Where?”

  And that was pretty much it! He brought in a song that ended up being called “Harmony” that I think turned out perfect. A great combination of tough riffs and melody, all at the same time. He introduced me to the guitar player Devin Bronson, who co-wrote “All My Friends Are Dead,” “Taking Back Tomorrow,” and lots more on the record. He ended up doing some gigs with us and is a great friend. I have Duff to thank for this collaboration.

  To make the album even more memorable, to me as a rock fan, the incomparable Steve Stevens from the Billy Idol Band came in on guitar, and wrote some songs as well. One song in particular, called “Push Away,” I think is very unique in both of our repertoires. We have done that song live a couple times, and got a great response. It’s quite haunting, as is the rest of the record. Lyrically, this album is quite dark, to the point where I refused the record company permission to put lyrics on the sleeve. It is very much a snapshot of a dark time in my life that hits me right between the eyes. Which is exactly what I want my music to do.

  In between these two albums, I released an all-live package called ABachalypse Now. I was originally approached to do a live DVD only, to which I said “sure,” as a commemorative collectible for the tour we had done in that period. Then halfway through the project, I was told the record company wanted it to come out on CD as well. So, I went in the studio and made the CD part perfect audio-wise. On the third DVD disc, there is a show from Graspop, which we left completely untouched in every way. It is very funny to watch, and is my favorite part of ABachalypse Now.

  I have been with the record label Frontiers for a couple years now. I miss the old days of record companies. Going to radio stations, playing the latest song, talking about recording it. These days, we put the video up on YouTube and that’s pretty much the extent of promotion. Different days for sure. But the cream always rises to the top. When we play the new songs live, they go over huge. Because we play with conviction. That’s what rock ’n’ roll is all about. We carry on.

  I’m so lucky to have managers Rick Sales and Ernie Gonzalez by my side. Navigating me through this crazy business. They help me with the Internet, being a book writer, an actor, musician—all of these things. I could not do it without these guys. Rick Sales and his whole team allow me to do what I do, and get the music out to the world.

  I am very lucky to have the legendary agent Troy Blakely on the team. Every since the passing of my friend Barbara Skydel, Troy has kept me busy working stages around the world. I am always on tour. I am always busy. I can’t do this without Troy Blakely and APA. I thank them very much for putting me to work!

  My longtime band and crew members are integral to my continued success in rock ’n’ roll. My drummer, Bobby Jarzombek, was the best man at my wedding, and has been behind the kit for ten years now. My tour manager, Dave Hart, is a great friend and gets us through the madness no matter what. Believe me, I could write a whole other book on the trials and tribulations just of being on tour in a rock ’n’ roll band. Dave also does sound for the band and makes following us a challenge for some bands. I’m happy to have him running the show. My guitar players, Brent Woods, Rob DeLuca, Jeff Kollman, Kevin Chown—I am so very lucky to play with these cats. Chris Miller and Bryan Laffin do monitors and save my ears so I can keep rocking into the next decade and beyond. Being on a bus with real friends is essential, and makes going on the road so much fun. The road is impossible if you hate the dudes you’re with. And I love the dudes I’m with. So that makes it easy.

  It was right around this time my album Kicking & Screaming was released. After the chart disappointment of Angel Down, I was elated when K&S debuted at number 72 on the Billboard chart. Of course this is not number one. But compared to my previous release, I was very excited to see the album come in at such a higher place.

  One night I went to Chateau Marmont with my friend Justin Murdock, of the Dole Pineapple dynasty. He’s been a friend since I met him with Axl, years ago. We have kept in touch somewhat over the years. He invited me to Chateau for dinner and cocktails. When I got there, he was seated at the table with a man by the name of Art Davis. Who has given us Billboard Live and The Vault, among many other LA establishments. He told me a story at dinner that night about how Janis Joplin gave him a blow job in the early ’70s, when he was in his early twenties. I was very impressed by this. We laughed and had a great time that night.

  I was hanging out at the Rainbow a lot. It felt like my home away from home. Ever since 1987, the Rainbow has been so nice to me. Always welcoming. Accommodating. Treating me incredibly. One night I went and there was Art Davis again. He was with his wife Cheryl. I had known Cheryl Rixon as a Penthouse Pet of the Year in the early ’80s. Even more than that, she was Creem magazine’s model with Judas Priest, in an iconic photo session with Rob Halford. She was on the back of Rob’s motorbike, in a bikini, being led by a leash. This created an indelible stamp on my mind. I couldn’t believe I was hanging out with the chick from Creem magazine.

  I mentioned to Art, like I did to anyone within earshot, “Hey! I am looking for a place to live in LA!” He said, “Hey! Maybe you could come live at our place!” I had absolutely no idea what they did for a living. I did not know that Art had started many clubs and restaurants in the LA area. Was completely unaware that Cheryl had her own line of jewelry stores called Royal Order, with eighty-something stores in Japan alone. For all I knew, I was going over to check out a room in the valley above a garage or something. I was out of Matt Sorum’s place, out of Betsy’s apartment, and using my frequent flyer miles to bounce around from hotel room to hotel room in the Southern California area. This was getting to be really, really old. I had been living out of a suitcase ever since the divorce. I used to dream of unpacking my suitcase and hanging up my clothes and leaving them there, like I used to do before the hurricane. I was tired. I was just looking to start anew in this place that I always wanted to be in. Art said, “Come on over!”

  I was late of course, looking for it. It was somewhere in Beverly Hills I had never been before. When I got there, I almost fell down. It was so incredibly beautiful.

  They opened the doors, and I was let inside a house the likes of which I had never seen before.

  Aaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

  Here were the rock ’n’ roll gods smiling upon me, yet again. Yes, this’ll do, is what I thought. But more than just a room to live in, I was getting a new family. I lived with Art and Cheryl for about two years. Got to know their sons Luke and Dylan to the point they felt like little brothers. We had so many great holidays, dinners, and fun together and we continue to do so. When my daughter Sebastiana would fly out from New Jersey, Cheryl and Art treated her like their own daughter. It meant so much to her and to me.

  When we go on tour in Australia, I am lucky enough to go to Cheryl’s mom’s house for family dinner. In Perth. On the other end of the planet. How lucky am I? I am so very proud to call Art and Cheryl, and their whole family, my great friends.

  October 6, 2012

  Lake Geneva, Wisconsin

  I am playing a corporate show tonight, somewhere outside of Chicago. I have been doing quite a few of these over the last couple of years. People these days seem to want to take my picture as much as hear me sing. I think it has to do with tagging me on their Facebook page or something. That sure is important to a whole lot of people. Corporate gigs are weird for any musician. It’s somewhat strange to play in front of a bunch of wealthy businessmen and their women, as opposed to throngs of sweaty, denim- and leather-clad rock ’n’ rollers. But the pay that you get from these gigs makes it, literally, an offer that many of us can’t refuse. Lots of musicians, from Elton John to Billy Joel to Paul McCartney, do these kinds of shows nowadays. “All You Need Is Love” . . . but love doesn’t pay the mortgage.

  I get to the beautiful resort and check into my ro
om. I have no idea where I am. I assume that I am at some resort outside of Chicago. Nothing more important than that. I go to sleep and wake up around 7:30 in the morning. I go out onto the balcony of my suite to smoke a joint, which always puts me right back to bed. As I go out onto the balcony, I shut the door behind me so the hotel room doesn’t soon reek of pot and I don’t get kicked out of the hotel, which happened to me once in Anchorage, Alaska. It’s no fun getting kicked out of the hotel in the snow in Alaska, not knowing where else to go. Not to mention it certainly did not make me very popular among the road crew and band members that day.

  As I puff the last remnants of my joint, it’s absolutely freezing outside. I’m wearing a leather jacket but no shoes or socks. My feet are bare. I am cold.

  To my surprise, the balcony door is locked. I cannot open it. I cannot get back into my hotel room. I am three stories high up in the air, not to mention being actually high myself. I am stranded out on the balcony of my hotel room with no way to get back inside the building. My feet are freezing. I am stoned and my teeth are chattering. This sucks. I want to go back to bed.

  I try repeatedly, with force, to open the sliding glass door and get back inside. The powerful marijuana kicks in and I become paranoid and start to freak out. What the fuck am I going to do? How am I going to get back inside? It’s fucking freezing out here.

  After realization sets in, I consider my choices. Let’s see. I could jump off the balcony and probably break my ankle. Or, I could try to climb onto the roof of the resort and see if I can find somebody on the other side of the building. Not wanting to break my ankle from the fall, I decide to try and get on the roof somehow.

  I place myself over the railing of my balcony and onto the gutters of the rain sewers below. I am adjacent to the hotel rooms next to me. I shimmy myself from hotel room to hotel room, hanging onto the balconies of each guest room. I am hanging on for dear life. It is very cold. I am trying to get to the building across from me. This is fucking crazy. I feel like Spider-Man. Did I mention, it’s cold?

  I hold on to the railings of each balcony one after the other, trying not to wake the guests within. I finally reach the other side of the hotel. The gutter drain that I am standing upon is placed precipitously over a courtyard that seems somehow familiar to me. I don’t know why.

  I finally reach the roof of the other side. I reach out as far as I can and pull myself up, with all my might. I straighten my arms out to hoist myself up onto the roof above. The roof is covered with gravel. It is sharp, and cuts into the bottom flesh of my freezing-cold feet. I walk across the rooftop, ignoring the pain of the gravel digging into my soles. I look up at the sky and I have to laugh at what in the hell is going on. I reach the end of the rooftop and look down into a crowd of stunned security guards below. One of them looks up, points out, and utters the familiar refrain, “Holy fuck, it’s Sebastian Bach! You fucking rock dude!” He starts to laugh.

  I stand in the cold, in bare feet, on the roof of the building, by myself, in the morning sun.

  “I’m locked out of my fucking room, brother!” The guards look up and know who I am, probably by my long-ass hair flailing about in the wind. They start to laugh, too.

  “What’s going on, man?”

  “I locked myself out of my room,” ha ha. Now, everybody starts to laugh.

  “I’ll meet you over there!” says the security guard.

  I walk across the hotel rooftop again and this time it hurts more. Because I know I’m alright. Because I don’t have to get there. I finally shimmy back down the roof to the eaves trough and get myself back over to my balcony. The security guard lets me in the room, and tells me that a bunch of hotel guests had called wondering why a long-haired man in a black leather jacket was hanging off the side of their third-story hotel balcony at 7:30 in the morning.

  Where I am looks strangely familiar. A certain palpability. Like the memories of a distant past. Still, can’t quite place it, though.

  The security guard makes sure I am secure, and after we share a laugh, we start to shoot the shit. “Well, that was quite the way to start the day.”

  “Hey man, how does it feel to be back?”

  “What?”

  Then it begins to dawn on me. I think to myself, Could it be?

  I go back out on the balcony. This time, making doubly sure not to close the door behind me. I look down into the courtyard below.

  I am staying in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Where we recorded the first Skid Row album. All those decades ago.

  It all starts to come back to me now. Incredibly, in this sprawling, mega-resort, with thousands of hotel rooms and separate buildings, my room is directly across from Royal Recorders. The exact studio where I sang every song on the first Skid Row album back in the summer of 1988. Before I was a “famous person.” I look from my hotel room balcony, in 2012, straight into the back window of the studio. Straight into another time. I remember this exact window. This was where Michael Wagener made his collection of all the Coca-Colas he drank during the session. By the end of the album, the window was completely blacked out by empty Coke cans, with the odd can of Budweiser thrown in by one of us for good measure. I remember the courtyard vividly, where we would play Frisbee or toss the football around between takes. Where we would have BBQs and get drunk. Where we would dream together of becoming rock stars. The courtyard is also where we had the “end of album” party, where the band and producer and engineers and management and crew all got shit hammered together and had a blast. The band Enuff Z’Nuff was at this party too. Doc and Scott had bought us bottles of Dom Perignon as a gift. I walked into the studio kitchen and saw Donnie Vie, the lead singer of Enuff Z’Nuff, popping open Skid Row’s champagne and guzzling our suds straight from the bottle. Enuff Z’Nuff of that, I thought. I walked Donnie out of the kitchen into this very courtyard and explained to him, in quite emphatic terms I’m sure, that he needed to stop guzzling my champagne, posthaste. I remember wanting to whoop his ass for doing this. But why spoil a good party? That kind of behavior would come later. The last time I gazed upon this courtyard, no strangers at all knew who in the fuck I was.

  I start to think about what had just happened to me. Cosmic, dude. How is it that my room is here, all these years later? How is it that for the first time in my life, I am locked out onto a third-floor balcony and cannot open the door to get back inside? How is it that I have no other option but to crawl and claw my way back over to this studio, pull myself on top, twenty-four years later, only to find myself standing in bare feet on the other side of the ceiling that echoed the sound of me singing “18 and Life”? With my hands raised to the sky, laughing my ass off? You really can’t make this up. This is some trippy shit.

  Or is it? As I look back upon my life, is this yet another case of my life and music being so closely parallel? From “Youth Gone Wild” in the studio, to “Kicking and Screaming” on the roof where it all began, it all seems to make perfect sense. Perfectly crazy. Perfectly impossible.

  Maybe there was something going on that night in the Bahamas . . . so many moons ago . . .

  Bach to the Future: Thank My Lucky Stars

  2015

  Studio City, California

  I am in love.

  What John Lennon said was indeed true. At the end of the day, at the end of your life, at the end of this book . . . love is all you need.

  After a lifetime of volume and craziness, I enjoy peace and quiet just as much now. I am almost fifty years old. Halfway through this wild ride. If I’m lucky.

  Thank God I met her.

  Thank God she saved my life.

  I am fortunate that my voice can still hit the high notes, even higher than I used to. I am very happy in the studio making records. Listening back to Give ’Em Hell, there is no doubt in my mind what I will be doing into my sixties, and hopefully beyond. Lord willing.

  If I make it that far.

  I thank Don Lawrence for teaching me the proper techniques I need to sing for a liv
ing. I thank Bon Jovi for introducing me to Don Lawrence at such a young age. It is undoubtedly the bel canto vocal style of scales that keeps my voice powerful and strong throughout the decades. I don’t just go up there and wing it. There is a process, a system, of getting my voice to do what it has to do. When I play live now, the music takes over. I rock as hard as I can. Our band gets better the more we play. I don’t feel any different now when I’m onstage than when I was in my twenties. But when I get off stage, my body is like, What the fuck are you doing, dude?

  The industry has changed so much since I started. These days it’s really important to have the VIP package. Everybody wants to meet the band. Get a picture for their Facebook profile. When I was a kid, we just went to the show, got fucked up, and then split. That was good enough for us. We could not have imagined meeting our rock ’n’ roll heroes. Nobody had ultra-HD cameras on their phones, at all times, ready to videotape you eating lunch, going to Home Depot, coming out of the bathroom. A couple of years ago at a Roky Erickson show, I had to smash some dude’s camera who was taking a picture of me taking a piss. This is extremely annoying. Sorry to the dude with the broken camera. Actually, I’m not.

  Now that the book is done, I will begin on my next record. I am so lucky to have a record deal. I don’t know what kind of sound this album will take. I would love to do an album that has the same feel as the ’70s albums I listen to constantly. The analog sound of those records is precious.

  I met my wife Suzanne about a year ago. And it’s safe to say that this year has been the best year of my life.

  How fortunate we are. To meet another human being that you’re beyond attracted to, that is your greatest friend, is truly the rarest thing of all. Nobody is perfect. Everybody has their faults. Certainly I do, dear reader. The relationship I have with the love of my life, my happy wife, is all I could ever ask for. For so many reasons. She accepts me for who I am. Good and bad. She doesn’t try to change me. I never understood that. Meeting somebody, and being attracted to them for certain qualities they have. Then becoming annoyed with those same exact qualities. It’s happened to me. The manic energy can be tough to live with and a challenge to deal with. But we complement each other in so many ways. We are very much Yin and Yang. We are inseparable. We cannot stand to be apart. I am now married again and living in a beautiful home in Southern California as I write this. I have a new family, with four beautiful boys, and our beautiful daughter, that I am proud to call my own.