That was it! We would make another Destroyer.
The problem was that the stuff we were writing was no better than the songs on Unmasked. In fact, it was probably worse. We’d lost the plot. My songs were nothing to write home about; Gene’s were no better. But then Bob entered the picture, and he floated the idea of a concept album—which really came out of left field. Gene quickly bought into it and came up with a generic, vague, typical concept: it was about a kid who was the chosen one. Bill got behind the idea, too. It would be our attempt to woo the critics.
“Let’s put out an album that makes a statement,” he told us. “One that shows everybody how talented you are.” Trying to show people how talented and bright you are is the best way to make an idiot of yourself, and we ended up doing that with flying colors.
Looking back, we wanted peer acceptance and critical approval and lost sight of the fact that none of that had mattered to us in the beginning. The people who so vehemently disliked us were more tied up in their own issues than in what kind of music we were making. The fact that the dislike and distaste was so pronounced, almost obsessive, throughout our career should have been a clue that it had little to do with us. If people wanted to waste their time wringing their hands over how much they hated my band, that was pathetic; what may have been more pathetic was that we tried to overcome it by pandering to those people. But we were clueless and decided to try to elevate ourselves, to separate ourselves from where we had started. We assured ourselves that we would impress a lot of people. Finally, we would make an album that garnered critical acclaim—our masterpiece.
Gene, Eric, and I moved to Toronto in March 1981 to work on the album—Bob wanted to do it on his home turf. We didn’t know at first, but his drug habit was now dictating his choice of location.
Ace didn’t even travel to Toronto. It’s all well and good for him to say in retrospect that he didn’t like the musical direction the band was taking, but the fact is that even if we had been doing exactly what he wanted to do musically, he was too wasted to play. He didn’t need an excuse to drink; he was a drunk. He was bombed all the time.
KISSTERIA in full swing, on a private yacht with the Penthouse Pet of the Year. Australia, 1980.
As work trudged on, Bob’s substance problems became so acute he didn’t show up, either. I had always been aware that Bob had a drug problem, but he had managed it in the past. Now his 24/7 cocaine use had taken on epic proportions. The captain abandoned ship. He was supposed to serve as the visionary behind the concept, and all we were getting were notes sent to the studio by messenger after Bob listened to cassettes we sent to his home.
Eventually we got so far behind in the production that Gene and I started working simultaneously in two separate studios, both of us sending tapes to Bob and getting back notes, doing the whole thing piecemeal. We had virtually no idea what the other guy was doing, and we couldn’t reach Bob on the phone. His wife relayed messages because Bob was too fucked up to get to the phone.
Poor Eric—this wonderful guy who thought he had joined a hard rock band—was suddenly playing gibberish with a fox costume in his closet. He was completely thrown by this band that had lost its way and was stumbling along a ridiculous path. He wasn’t comfortable making explicit objections at that point, but he did express bewilderment and discomfort. “You know, this isn’t what I was expecting,” he said. But he was never in a position to draw a line in the sand. He must have had serious doubts, though. He kept playing us a new band called Metallica—he was into stuff like speed metal and thrash way before we were.
The songs we recorded had no teeth. We were gumming the music at that point. We had forsaken everything we loved and embraced. We were intoxicated with fame and success. We were no longer the band everyone loved—and clearly we didn’t love that band anymore either. How else to explain the way we veered away from what we did? For a band like ours to be doing something like Music from “The Elder” truly reeked of the little Stonehenge coming down on the stage during This Is Spinal Tap. If only we had realized.
For the cover, we intended to use my hand instead of a model’s hand. But the day before the photo shoot, I slammed my finger in a window and had a purple nail that had to be retouched. This should have been an omen.
When we were finally finished in September, we went back to New York. If I played the tape for anyone at my apartment, I insisted on silence—as if I was exposing them to brilliance—and they had to sit through the entire thing straight through. We also had a listening party for the record company, with the same insistence that they listen to it in a manner befitting its artistic merit. The reaction at the end of the listening session was like the audience when they heard “Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers. Mouths wide open. I already knew somehow that it wasn’t because the sheer greatness of the album had taken their breath away.
The record label hated the album. It was originally sequenced in a way that vaguely told a story. But that meant you didn’t get to anything that resembled a rock song for quite a while. So they made us change the order. As if it wasn’t already bad enough, they basically did the equivalent of tearing all the pages out of a book, throwing them up in the air, and then binding them together again.
In preparation for the launch, we also changed our image to accommodate how we now chose to look offstage. We didn’t want to have long hair anymore. I had razor-cut hair, a bandana around my head—I still needed to hide my ear—and a necklace that looked like I got it from Chiquita Banana. Gene had a little braided ponytail hanging over his shoulder. Ace was still in the photos even though he had in essence left the band. We were delusional. We had drunk the poisoned Kool-Aid, so to speak.
I went into a record store down on 8th Street in the Village the day the album came out in November 1981 and saw a poster for it. I had a panic attack. I looked at the poster and it hit me like a sledgehammer.
What the hell have we done?
38.
For the first time in the history of the band, we didn’t do a tour following the release of the album. In fact, two full years would pass between the end of the 1980 Australian tour and the next time we played live, in late December 1982.
I grew a beard.
I spent the bulk of my time one-on-one with a number of women, either ones I knew around New York or ones I flew in from elsewhere. I didn’t attend big social events; I just laid low in a series of relationships with multiple women.
A swimsuit model I was seeing at the time said to me, “You’ll never be happy because you’re so tough on people and so judgmental.”
She was right—at the time I didn’t realize just how right. That was how I functioned, how I controlled the world around me. Everything had its place. I controlled my environment, but I didn’t really live in it. Now, I’m not crying in my beer, because hanging around with beautiful women was like spending my days and nights at Disneyland, no matter what my motivation was. And it certainly beat the alternative way people dealt with similar feelings of emptiness—like filling it with drugs, surrounding themselves with people who constantly told them how great they were, or winding up blue on the bathroom floor.
The allure of buying fancy things was wearing off. I realized while the band was idle that it wasn’t about what I could buy with the money. It was about what I didn’t have to do—simply put, money gives you the ability to stop worrying about money. It provides a level of freedom, but it doesn’t change you. At the end of the day you’re still the same good guy or the same prick you’ve always been. Or in my case, the same scared little kid.
With my dad at the Record Plant studio in 1980. With a long time off from touring, I decided to go incognito.
One afternoon I asked Kenny Ortega, the choreographer we had used on the Dynasty tour, to drop by. I handed him a suitcase and told him, “Take whatever you want.”
I sold my collection of vintage guitars—the entire batch—to a dealer for $50,000. They no longer meant anything to me. Luckily, my l
ife turned out alright, and the decision doesn’t haunt me—because that collection is worth about $2.5 million today.
The racks of clothing and other possessions had become oppressive. Whatever I thought they were satiating, they were not. Ultimately, the stuff became not just clutter, but a looming reminder of my inability to make things right.
But I needed to try something else to address the fundamental unease inside me. Then, during a visit to my therapist, Dr. Hilsen, he said, “I found a guy for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I found somebody who I think can do reconstructive surgery on your ear.”
He had read an article about a Dr. Frederic Rueckert and then tracked him down. The surgeon worked at a hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire, home of Dartmouth University.
I was excited. I wanted two ears.
I flew up to Hanover to meet the doctor. Fred Rueckert was a warm, grandfatherly figure who exuded confidence and security, reinforced by all his experience. We hit it off immediately. He explained that the first part of the process would be to remove pieces of cartilage from my rib cage and carve them into the framework of an ear. Then the frame would be implanted and covered with a series of skin grafts. All in all, it would involve about five surgical procedures, taking skin and additional cartilage from my good left ear.
Nobody my age had ever had the surgery. They typically used this new technique on kids. But given the fact that I had such a tangible symbol and cause of so much pain, why wouldn’t I try to change it? Suddenly, I had hope. I hoped having two ears and erasing that constant reminder of my childhood would help me feel more complete on the inside. I wanted to move on.
The first thing they needed to do was cut out the sections of my rib. Before the surgery Dr. Rueckert warned me, “You’re going to be a little sore.”
You sometimes hear people talk about being aware of things even in a state of anesthesia. I guess it can be a terrifying experience. I was aware of everything during my first surgery—as they cut my chest open, I could hear what they were saying even though I couldn’t open my eyes. I heard the doctor take out the piece of cartilage, heard him carving it, and then heard him say, “That looks good.” A nurse agreed with him.
The next day I had searing pain if I tried to move even slightly. “A little sore”? It felt as if somebody had put a sword through me.
First ear surgery in 1982 at Hitchcock Clinic in Hanover, New Hampshire.
The healing process after the skin grafts didn’t go so well. Circulation didn’t develop in certain areas, and I had to stay in the hospital for a few weeks as they monitored and worked to correct the problems to avoid the skin dying from lack of blood supply. My parents and niece were there with me in New Hampshire. Gene came, too. He was going through a period of being very afraid to fly, so I gave him a lot of credit for visiting and really appreciated it.
After the first procedure, although it wasn’t standard, I opted for a local anesthetic for the rest of the surgeries. So after each subsequent revision surgery, I could walk from the hospital to the Hanover Inn—a cozy old hotel right on the green in the middle of town. I took painkillers and watched TV and slept. It was all part of something very personal, so being alone felt good to me. I enjoyed doing it on my own—and anyway, I didn’t know any other way to do it. There was nobody I would have felt comfortable asking, “Will you go with me?”
By the time I left Hanover and went back to New York, I was still in bandages and dressings that needed to be changed daily. Normally, a doctor would handle that, but I ended up doing it myself—and I actually enjoyed it because it gave me a sense of participating in the process. It was hard to look at, but it connected me that much more to my own development and—I hoped—improvement. I also was sleeping with protective plastic over my ear that was held in place by a thick leather head-and-chin strap. I had to wear it for months after each surgery.
I always tried to express to Dr. Rueckert the life-changing role he was playing for me. It seemed to catch him off-guard when I brought it up. He told me that for the most part, he heard from patients only when things didn’t go well. He was a humble man who helped countless children avoid the experience and turmoil and endlessly compounded problems I faced as a kid. He helped give me a new lease on life; I gave him a Rolex watch when he retired. I could never figure out a way to truly show him how much he meant to me.
Finally healed, I cut my hair short and started hanging out at an Upper West Side watering hole called Café Central. I decided to take a break from spending time in music circles. Café Central was more of an actors’ hangout, a bar with tables, and people spent entire nights table-hopping. Regulars included Christopher Reeves, Peter Weller, Raul Julia, and Al Pacino, and Bruce Willis was a bartender for a time.
If musicians bored me with talk of gear and guitars, I soon found out that most of the actors I met wanted to talk about only themselves. They seemed to endure listening to their peers only so they would get a turn to talk—about themselves. Still, I welcomed the change of scenery for a while. I started going to the theater almost every week. I had a ticket broker and I’d call and say, “What have you got for tonight?”
I found it interesting that so many people in New York—myself included—talked about the culture of the city but never actually experienced it. Here was an opportunity to do it. I went to see whatever was playing—from the big-production British musicals like Miss Saigon, Cats, and Les Miserables, to more serious plays like American Buffalo, Waiting for Godot, and Death of a Salesman.
I took some acting classes, too. I sat in on Lee Strasberg’s classes once or twice. At one class, a woman got up to do a scene in front of him and broke down crying before she started the scene.
This is nuts.
I thought you acted from joy, not torment.
Strasberg’s wife Anna took a liking to me, and I went to a few parties at their house. I came away with the impression that none of these people wanted to be happy because they feared it might compromise their acting ability. They had to be brooding and miserable, and hence everyone in the room seemed to be under his or her own personal dark cloud. I felt as if I should have taken an umbrella.
This is not for me.
One night when I was out at a restaurant having dinner, the actress Donna Dixon and a model friend of hers walked in. Donna was staggeringly attractive—so much so that it was intimidating. So much so that I went for the woman who turned out to be her roommate. Donna was just too beautiful. But after I had seen her friend a few times, I admitted to myself and to her that I was actually interested in Donna. And somehow it worked—I started seeing Donna. I loved having such a gorgeous girlfriend. As superficial as it may have been, she was beautiful in a way that made me happy.
With hindsight, I can see that dating her was clearly another example of my trying to eradicate my own imperfections by being with someone seemingly perfect. Anyone who could date a woman who looked like that must be special. But at the time, I was very taken with her. When she entered a room, the room came to a halt. And I was with her!
Donna had landed her first big role, starring opposite Tom Hanks in the TV show Bosom Buddies. She shuttled back and forth to L.A. for that, and we continued to see each other.
During this time, Ace announced he wanted to quit the band. I drove up to his house in Westchester and spent the day with him. We went to the mall, drove around, talked. “Don’t leave,” I told him. “Stay in the band.”
“I need to go,” he said.
I found out years later that he didn’t remember I had been there. Many pages of Ace’s past are now blank. That’s how blasted he was. He was living in a constant state of blackout.
Bill worked out a deal to let Ace leave but have him make promotional appearances for the next album, which we planned to make in Los Angeles. In some ways I was glad Ace finally left—we couldn’t go anywhere with him the way he was. Everybody around the band seemed to be suffering from the same disease. It’s one
thing to be useless; it’s another to be a detriment.
Bill had gone from sharing office space with Howard Marks Advertising to first having one floor and then two floors of a building on Madison Avenue plus a Los Angeles office. He had people developing film projects and dozens more people on the payroll—I had no idea what they all did. He had a huge luxury apartment near St. Patrick’s Cathedral that he’d spent a fortune decorating but that he rented rather than owned.
He was now making such bad decisions that I often followed up on meetings he had on our behalf. “What did he agree to?” I’d ask. Then I’d have to nullify things.
It was clearly the drugs. Eventually his drug habit became so all-encompassing that he could no longer go to the office. He was home freebasing, holed up with a pipe.
When things change incrementally, sometimes you don’t realize how far you’ve gotten from where you started. That’s basically what happened with Bill. When I looked at him, he still appeared to be the person I knew; when he was lucid, he still sounded like the person I knew. But he wasn’t that person anymore, even if it took me a long time to recognize that fact. Bill had gone from being our visionary mentor, our manager, a father figure, a fifth member of the band, to being a delusional, drugged-out whack job. It was so bad that heart-to-heart talks I had with him went nowhere except to confirm the worst.
“What are you doing?” I’d ask him. “You’re spending all your money.”
“I don’t care,” he’d reply. “I made it once and I can make it again.”
It was a reckless attitude. And it mirrored Ace and Peter—they all took things for granted.
Watching all these guys go down the tubes with drugs or booze, seeing their demise, I realized that it’s all a question of what people do with the freedom that success affords. There were times when Gene wanted to have company in his stance of “We don’t drink or take drugs.” But that wasn’t my stance. I had nothing against drinking, and I had smoked pot when I was younger. But when I saw what the Casablanca office turned into, what Bill turned into, or what Ace and Peter turned into, I didn’t think that transformation was just the luck of the draw. They made their own destinies.
Face the Music: A Life Exposed Page 23
