Death Punch'd

by Jeremy Spencer

  True to form, we ran into some groupie chicks. I started flirting with this hot blonde—who really got my interest when she said she had Ecstasy. Since I was already buzzed, the thought of adding a synthetic drug with an amphetamine-like, hallucinogenic kick was irresistible. I wasn’t even taken aback when she said she’d sell me some. Jason and I both made a purchase. We popped them and headed for her place. I got in her car, and Jason followed in his truck. On the way, I was telling her all the shit I was going to do to her, and she was totally receptive. As soon as we got to her house, Jason decided to bail and drove back to Zo’s.

  As I stripped down for our big XXX-fest, Angel started blowing up my phone.

  “Who keeps calling?” the chick asked.

  “It’s no one,” I said—powering my phone off.

  Distracted and hammered, I went right to work on her, but it soon became apparent I was too fucked up to get it up. The next thing I knew . . . it was morning. For a moment I couldn’t remember where I was or how I’d gotten there. Disoriented, I panicked, knowing I needed to get back to Zo’s to write and work on the record. Plus I knew he’d be pissed since I hadn’t even bothered to tell him what was up.

  I stumbled out of bed and tried to put on my clothes, which wasn’t easy since I could barely keep my balance. I finally gave up and dropped to the floor.

  “What are you doing?” the girl asked, sounding really perturbed. It was obvious she wasn’t pleased about the previous night’s subpar performance, so I figured a ride to Zo’s wasn’t in the offing.

  “Trying to find my fucking socks!”

  She said her cat probably had snagged them and hid them somewhere.

  I put on the one sock I could find, said, “Thanks for nothing,” and walked to a nearby gas station to wait for a cab. When I powered my phone back on, Angel had left tons of messages, and before I could hear any of them, it rang again.

  “Where’ve you been? I’ve been calling you all night.”

  “Yeah, I can see that,” I said. I then lied and told her Jason and I got hammered and passed out at one of his friends’ homes. I’m sure she could tell I was bullshitting, but she wasn’t going to let that stand in the way of her moving in with me. Nothing about this move made sense, but it was an indication of just how unhealthy our relationship was . . . and what a monumental fuck-up I’d become. I got on a plane for LA the next day.

  I’d hired Bobby to fly out and help me move her belongings to Vegas. Together we loaded the U-Haul and headed for Sin City. On the way, I ran over a tire in the middle of the interstate and destroyed the U-Haul. Luckily, I had insurance that covered all damages. That accident was symbolic of where we were in our lives: unable to dodge destructive obstacles and damaging everything in sight.

  The time had come for Ivan to start recording vocals, so I agreed he could hang at my house. The plan was to take him to Kevin’s studio and stay there with him, helping massage his ideas and trying to keep him focused. Of course, since we were both drunks, it wasn’t long before we were polluting ourselves and the sessions. After a long day in the studio, we’d buy bottles of vodka and guzzle them into the wee morning hours, jamming music and having a blast.

  Just so we’re clear, Ivan is a walking catastrophe (and I mean that in a loving way). He was constantly fucking something up in my house. He spilled a whole glass of vodka and tonic into my laptop. We’re talking a sticky fucking syrupy mess in the computer, through the keyboard and all over the keys.

  Another time, I woke up to find an interesting “gift” on my dining room table. I lived in a brand-new community in Vegas; there was an empty model home next door. It was a show home, furnished and pimp. You’ve heard of Newton’s cradle or, as I prefer to call it, Newton’s balls? It’s this cool little device with metal balls suspended from wires that swing back and forth, demonstrating three physical laws of motion. When I stumbled downstairs for a much-needed cup of coffee, the gizmo—named for the English physicist’s family jewels—was sitting in the middle of my dining room table.

  “Where’d this come from?” I asked, leery of the answer.

  Ivan, who had just awakened, rubbed his eyes and mumbled, “Got you a gift.”

  “Really . . . ? When’d’ja find time to do that? We didn’t go to bed till three A.M.”

  “Well, I sorta found it . . . in the house next door. Like it?”

  He thought I deserved a gift for letting him stay with me, so he broke into the house next door and “appropriated” it. It was so Ivan. He could’ve gone to jail for stealing something that was maybe worth fifty dollars max, but he wanted to get me a gift . . . and so he did.

  Before returning to Denver, he recorded half the songs on the album. He needed a break; we all did. I hit the Strip to party. This night would end up being a pivotal one in my life. I’d followed the oh-so-familiar path of every alcoholic and drug addict. So the next step was a natural progression.

  We were at the Hard Rock when someone offered the root of all evil: cocaine! I’d dabbled with it years ago, but due to the cost, my usage was short-lived. Now, however, I could afford to get into it big time. There was always someone wanting to get close to the camp, and supplying drugs usually worked. I was more than happy to accept the offer.

  We went into the toilet stall. Using my trunk key, I snorted a key bump in each nostril, and then we returned to the club for more drinking. I wasn’t where I wanted to be mentally, so I went back to the john and did a few more bumps. We decided to take the party to my house. “Never Enough” wasn’t just a hit song, it was my mantra. We did cocaine on the way, and once we got there, we jammed music and did more. I didn’t really feel the full effect of the blow, so I wasn’t super high. That night, I actually fell right to sleep. When I woke up the next day, I called Jason and told him I did blow and that it didn’t really do anything for me.

  “You got off easy,” he said. “Don’t do it again, it’ll ruin your drinking.” It wasn’t long before I understood what he meant.

  We were getting close to finishing the record. I was talking to my old friend Joe Smith back in Indiana, telling him about our current project. He said Shinedown had a big hit with their cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man.”

  “Dude, you guys should record your cover of ‘Bad Company,’” which we’d been playing on tour. “It will go over huge in the Midwest.”

  “Fuck! You’re right.”

  I mentioned the idea to Ivan, and he was into it. Zoltan was hesitant, but once he heard Ivan’s vocal, he agreed. Including it on the album never occurred to us, but we agreed it would make an interesting bonus track. (Not only did it become a single, it recently became our first platinum—digital download—single, and remains one of our most popular sing-alongs at every show.)

  By now I thought the album was fucking solid, especially because I knew we had the singles we needed. Without radio success today, it’s impossible to have much of a career. My thinking had always been: you’re only as strong as your radio hits. The first record proved that no matter how cool we thought the songs were, without radio hits, our sales would have stalled at about two hundred thousand. That’s why the label had insisted we go back in to write songs that would work on radio, because other than “The Bleeding,” we had nothing that would have gotten any airplay.

  Make no mistake: this is a brutal game. Bands that say they don’t write songs for the radio are bands that don’t plan to sell records. Those who play heavy just to be heavy, or add weird time signatures just to be technical, or play super fast just to be fast, have decided not to compete. And staying current and having a career with longevity means staying competitive. I love to be criticized by those who think otherwise, because they aren’t competition.

  Snarks, Internet trolls, and losers are the first to criticize success of any kind. “It’s not heavy enough.” “They sold out to radio!” “It’s not technical enough . . . blah, blah.” It’s easy to be technical and confuse people; anyone can do that. But try writing a son
g that connects with a million people, and then fucking get back to me. At the end of the day, it’s about the song. Can people relate to the story, can they hum the fucking thing or even dance to it? Those are questions answered only by sales. If you want a career, that’s the game. Don’t wanna play? It’s your choice. Either way, there’s one indisputable truth: the song always wins every time, no matter what trends are popular. Good songs will find an audience. Why does Bon Jovi still have hits when hair-metal rock died in ’91? Because he has fucking songs! End of sermon.

  Once I knew we had the songs, a sense of relief descended over me. I couldn’t wait to release War Is the Answer!

  Immediately after finishing the album, Death Punch was off to Japan and Australia. Before we left, Jason reminded me, “Convert some money into yen at the airport. US dollars are worthless in Japan.” I assumed he’d shared that information with everyone, but apparently not. We’d barely settled in at the hotel when Ivan knocked on Jason’s door.

  “Hey, man, can I borrow some yen? I’ll pay you right back. I forgot to get any.” Jason obliged. Ironically, when it was time to eat, Jason couldn’t afford to pay for his own dinner because he’d lent too many yen to Ivan. Of course, he never got repaid. Now, whenever someone asks to borrow money, the stock answer is, “Sorry, man, no have yen.”

  Tokyo had an interesting vibe. It wasn’t at all what I expected. It was like New York with a superinjection of neon. We’d heard all these stories about how attentive Japanese chicks were, and we were anxious to confirm them. So the very first night, I pulled this chick back to my room. We got drunk and ended up in the sack. She kept saying, “Please, no hurt pussy. No hurt pussy.” I wanted to laugh, but she was so serious. Finally, I tried to ease her mind: “You don’t have anything to worry, I’m not packin’.” It was meant as a joke, but from the look on her face, I’m not sure it translated.

  Before we left for our return flight to the States, we did some shopping. I tried to buy Angel a geisha robe, but there was a torrential downpour. Soaked to the skin, we rushed back to the hotel empty-handed. No sooner had we gotten on the elevator than there was a giant earthquake. It rattled the fucking hotel for a full minute. We found out later it registered 8.5, and fortunately was centered off the coast. None of us was hurt, nor was the hotel, which, like most of the buildings in Japan, was built to withstand a major earthquake. It was a hell of an end to a memorable trip.

  Next up: Australia. We flew on some obscure airline that served us weird pastry filled with spaghetti and sauce. It was like a Chef Boyardee calzone but tasted worse. The seats were torturous and the whole experience cost us way more than we made, especially since we played in a bar that only held about three hundred people.

  After the show in Brisbane, the party was on. We scored some coke from someone in the bar, and I did a huge line off the toilet seat in the john. Drunk, high, and horny, I ended up following some married chick into the bathroom and making out with her . . . while her husband was right outside. This is how people get killed; from the looks of him, he would have been happy to oblige. Luckily, he was too drunk to notice. And I was too high to care. Cocaine did nothing to improve my judgment.

  We also played shows in Melbourne and Sydney, but I have little memory of either—though I remember enjoying cocaine at every venue.

  When I got back home from the Asian tour, I was hanging with my friend Josh, whom I’d invited to stay at my house. As always, we got drunk and were jamming tunes. We’d managed to consume a case and a half of beer topped off with Patrón. While goofing around, I stepped on his foot, tripped, and broke my little toe. I couldn’t put on a shoe for a week, let alone walk, and the next tour was only two weeks away. There was no way I could practice with the band.

  We had a big photo shoot with Revolver magazine, and I was still hobbled. I didn’t want to tell Zo because I didn’t want to introduce panic right before the tour. Plus, I knew he’d lambaste me for being drunk and injuring myself. Wanting to avoid the Wrath of Dad, I hid it from him.

  Right before the tour, we held our record-release party at a club called Wasted Space at the Hard Rock in Vegas. The day before the party, I was finally able to put on a shoe. It hurt like hell, but the timing worked out.

  I flew in my friend Jarred from Indiana. And my dad flew in from Seattle. When we picked him up at the airport, I was still hungover and shaky from the night before. With the release party looming, I was on edge. As usual, Angel was driving me crazy. Because I felt like shit, I had her drive. But I couldn’t stop verbally abusing her for not going fast enough, for not passing the car ahead . . . for anything and everything. Obviously, Dad was picking up on my negative vibe.

  I found out later that Angel had asked him to speak to me. She was worried that I was “out of control.” He told her that she needed to stop enabling me and take care of herself. He actually told her it would be better if she packed her things and left before her self-respect was completely gone.

  “But Jeremy’s such a good person. He has a great heart. I know I can help him.”

  “I think I’m aware of Jeremy’s good heart. But as far as being able to help him . . . no one can do that but Jeremy.” The truth was he partially blamed her for enabling me to start drinking again.

  After the show I left Dad in the hotel room and went back down to the club. I did a shitload of cocaine, key bump after key bump in the toilet stall, even snorting lines off the toilet-paper dispenser. The cocaine thing had quickly become my new obsession, allowing me to drink all night and still socialize. Of course I overdid it, and it wasn’t until the sun was coming up that I decided to call it a night.

  There was no way I could go back to the room my where Dad was sleeping. I hung out with a few die-hard fans for a few more hours. Then I rounded up everyone and headed back to my house. I was still trying to come down off the blow, so I made Jarred drive. Dealing with depression, guilt, and paranoia wasn’t my idea of the best way to end a party, but this was nothing compared to what was to come. The coke era was just getting cranked up.

  The Shock and Raw tour was the name chosen to support War Is the Answer. To ensure having more chicks at our shows, we did a promotion where the first hundred ladies got in free. Our management/label put us up to it, saying Limp Bizkit had successfully done something similar back in the day. We went along with it and got fucking sued by some asshole for sexual discrimination. This dude was pissed because he didn’t get in free. No one could believe that this bogus claim would hold up in court, but it did. It costs us plenty to settle the suit.

  You wouldn’t believe the shit people try in hopes of extracting cash from the machine. We’ve been fortunate to make money playing music, but we’re far from rich. We make a great living by most people’s standards, but we’re also in the highest tax bracket. By the time people who do next to nothing take their cut and the government takes half, there’s not that much left. And believe me, frivolous lawsuits are the last thing we need.

  Shock and Raw was going well, but some of us weren’t in very good shape. I was certainly struggling physically. It didn’t help that I was drinking and doing cocaine whenever I could get my hands on some. Unable to sleep, I was staying up all night, quickly becoming a hungover zombie. I had to take naps before we played just to have enough energy to get through the set.

  I ran into a girl at a show in Baltimore whom I’d chatted with on MySpace a year or so earlier. I was drunk and we were making out. Little did I know her sister was taking pictures of us. When we were leaving Baltimore, she texted me and said she was planning to come see me in another town on tour. I explained that I had a girlfriend at home, but that the relationship wasn’t going well. I was totally upfront with her about my situation. She seemed cool with it.

  The next morning I got a call from Angel, who was crying and yelling into my ear. “Some girl called our home phone and said she has pictures of you two kissing. They’re posted on her MySpace page.”

  I felt blindsided, but I was too
hungover to try to patch that one up. Apparently, when I signed up for home phone service, I’d neglected to make the number unlisted. I don’t know how this psycho chick got my real last name, but she did and she called Angel, who begged me to get the pictures taken down. I hit up the chick and pleaded with her to take them down. Instead she posted on her page, “I just played someone.”

  I said, “Look, I was honest with you about my situation. You said you were cool with it.”

  She laughed. “You’re so naïve.”

  I don’t get why she went out of her way to fuck me over, but the damage was done.

  I called the phone company, insisting that I’d requested my number to be unlisted. They told me it was unlisted only for print, but not if someone called information. Man, I was pissed and let them have it. “I don’t want God to be able to fucking reach me, so whatever it takes to make my number unlisted, make it happen now!”

  Knowing how many risky situations I’d put myself in, I was lucky that was the first time things went south. But it was definitely the start of me not trusting chicks I met at shows.

  We brought in a lighting guy to help bump up our show. This dude was a cool cat named Brandon Webster. He was part of the Webster’s dictionary family. He’d worked for Megadeth and for Static-X, winning awards for his lighting designs and light shows. He made no bones about the fact that he liked to party. Partiers like other partiers, and he and I bonded right away.

  Our first gig together, we went barhopping after the show. We walked into a bar and the bartender says, “Sorry, guys, we’re closing.”

  Neither Brandon nor I is the type to really take no for an answer. Brandon said, “Listen, we need six shots of Jâger. I don’t know what you’re prepared to sell them for, but I’ll give you three hundred dollars.” Of course, the bartender was happy to oblige. I thought that was pretty impressive. I was always looking for fun people to party with, and now I had a new one.