One morning, as I sat at this humongous dining room table eating Cocoa Puffs, the absurdity of it really hit me: Jeremy Spencer dining at Saddam Hussein’s table, 6,500 miles from Boonville, Indiana, and quite an upgrade from that garage closet where I’d lived in San Diego. It was pretty surreal, especially when you think about all the death and destruction nearby.
Military shows were insane because troops needed an outlet for their pent-up emotions. Many of them used our music to get prepared to face the possibility of death on patrols and mine sweeps. Like most of our fans, they already knew the lyrics to our songs, and they were really into it. Though the officers tried to contain their enthusiasm, we always managed to get them fired up, sometimes to point of moshing.
You could tell the gratitude was genuine, especially when the troops, who were clearly missing a remnant of something that smacked of home, lined up to say, “Thanks for coming.” No matter your politics, just seeing what these men and women went through on a daily basis made us grateful for their tremendous sacrifice . . . not to mention for own cushy lives.
We finished up the Iraqi tour and flew to the UK to headline Hammerfest. DevilDriver wasn’t thrilled we were the headliners, because they’d been around much longer. However, the band at the top of the bill is the one with the most sales . . . and that was Death Punch by a wide margin.
Having been forced to be “on the wagon” while in Iraq, it was time to resume old habits. Always accommodating, someone brought a supply of cocaine—synthetic cocaine. God only knows what it was composed of. One night, after having done real blow and copious amounts of alcohol, I did an index-finger-size line of that synthetic shit. I spent the next two days wired and freaking out. Every time I tried to shut my eyes, they’d do a spastic flutter and spring wide open. Out of the next thirty-six hours, I managed a half hour of rest. I struggled through the show, but as soon as it ended, I found some real cocaine and booze and was up all night again.
Following that gig, we packed up and headed for the Download Festival. Download was great and much anticipated. Why wouldn’t it be when we got to play for ninety thousand people? That’s a nine followed by four zeros. Until you’ve stared out at a teeming throng that size, it’s hard to imagine the rush you get; the energy from the crowd hits you in waves so tangible, it feels like you could lean on them and they’d hold you up. The feeling was almost as good as coke—and definitely not as dangerous. That is, until thousands started climbing toward the stage . . . all at once!
Ivan, who can work a crowd like a heavy metal Houdini, invited the crowd up to “shake his hand” during our song “Dying Breed.” WTF was he thinking? In less than a minute, five thousand people came hurdling over the barrier. Like lemmings rushing to the sea, people were willing to risk being trampled to death just for the opportunity to . . . what? Oh, yeah: shake Ivan’s hand! It was terrifying. Security had to stop the show before people were crushed. We were told, “If you can stop the crowd from coming over the barricade, you can finish your set. If not, you’re done and you’ll never play here again!”
Ivan, always the puppet master, brought the crowd under control and we carried on. Up to that point, I thought the show had been flat. But there’s nothing like thousands of wild-ass people charging toward the stage to amp up everything and reinvigorate a performance. We finished strong.
After the show, I wanted to keep the energy flowing, so I started slamming drinks and snorted a couple lines of blow before doing some press interviews. I was talking a mile a minute but still managed to be coherent. However, toward the end, the booze overtook my motor skills and my speech started slurring. I botched an interview so badly that I insisted the dude delete it right on the spot. Fortunately, he complied.
Afterward, as I was approaching our dressing room, I saw Ivan and Zoltan stepping outside . . . to fight! So much for the bonding we’d managed in Iraq. This was definitely not the perfect end to a perfect day. Ivan was screaming in Zo’s face, and it was obvious Zoltan had finally reached a point of wanting to duke it out, employing some of his martial arts in a way that would not benefit anyone. It took quite an effort to separate them.
After that near fiasco, we went back to the hotel and I did cocaine all night, finishing off at least four bottles of wine on top of it. Having been awake all night, I was scheduled to fly back to the U.S. that afternoon. The van trip to the airport took hours. Fucked on no sleep and major chemicals, the trip was miserable. Listening to people bitch and complain about other people in the band only added to the discomfort. It was torturous. I tried to fake being asleep so I could disengage, but it was impossible to ignore. I couldn’t wait to get home to party and isolate before our next scheduled slog, the Mayhem Festival.
Shit really started going sideways within the band right before we left for the Mayhem tour. Tensions were naturally high, and some of us were unnaturally high. We’ve always had our fights, but then we’d make up. Band members get on each other’s nerves. It’s like being with your coworker twenty-four hours a day. But instead of going home at the end of the day, band members get to be in a bus—together—trekking across the fucking continent. Sound like fun? Pick three or four people who can irritate the fuck out of each other and go on an extended road trip. Dare ya.
Though I didn’t need any justification, band fights were an excuse for me to want to clock out and party, an opportunity to raise my endorphin level. However, booze is a depressant and blow is fucking deadly: it takes your life away—being high on that shit’s not really living. Far from it! I’d been doing as much of it as I could, as often as I could, and I knew something had to give. So for Mayhem I decided to swear off booze and only do cocaine, the perfect example of addict logic.
I began commandeering bags of cocaine every day. To make it last as long as possible, I just did key bumps—like nibbling on a cake, a little sliver at a time, before giving in and eating the whole fucking thing. As a result, I’d end up snorting all of it. And, since I didn’t have booze to come down with, I was up until ten A.M. or noon every day.
To try to get some rest, I took sleeping pills to come down, but they rarely worked. Stressed to the max and desperate for sleep, I finally ingested seven sleeping pills one night and passed out. When I awoke, I couldn’t move the left side of my face. I couldn’t even talk. Mom and my godmother, Mom’s cousin Deb, were coming to the show that day in St. Louis. It was 100-plus degrees with debilitating humidity, and I was facing a fucking drum solo that required coordination and endurance.
To add to the mayhem (pun intended), with paralysis face I could barely string two sentences together. Knowing Mom and cousin Deb expected to get together and talk after the show, I was up the proverbial shit creek without a paddle or a fucking canoe. I did my best acting, hoping to fake my way through a conversation. Though they had to notice my mush-mouth performance, they were kind enough not to say anything. Maybe it was my long-forgotten acting skills that got me through.
To insure that coke parties were well stocked, I started having blow FedExed out on tour, which was renamed the Cocaine Across America Tour. After completing the Mayhem dates, we did a show at the Sunken Gardens in San Antonio. To celebrate the end of that hapless junket, I scored the biggest amount of cocaine I’d ever seen. It was staggering. Impressed, I took pictures of it, but then I got scared and deleted them so they wouldn’t come back to haunt me.
Cocaine had gotten a serious hold on me, but I was beyond caring. Determined to do what the fuck I wanted, if anyone got in my way, they were deleted—permanently. That’s how fucked up my brain was: believing I was untouchable and so important that I didn’t need anyone. That included chicks, unless they had blow—and even then, only until it was gone. It was cocaine and booze that I wanted.
No matter how hot a chick was, I had to take Viagra to even have a chance of getting a boner. Cocaine is the most enigmatic drug ever. You get sexually cranked in your brain, but your equipment doesn’t respond the same because you’re numbed out—feel
ing paralyzed. To quote Jason, “You feel like Ron Jeremy from the neck up . . . and Christopher Reeve from the neck down!” Couldn’t have said it better myself. (To illustrate the point, I later arranged a photo session with the famed Hedgehog and some killer babes. I wore a fake Superman suit and sat in a wheelchair. No disrespect to Chris Reeves was intended. But it’s a powerful reminder of my “salad days” as a cocaine junkie.)
We had one final tour for the War Is the Answer cycle. This time we went out with Godsmack. At that point, I was doing mega-amounts of drugs. I was so fucked up and depressed I decided I’d had enough of being what I considered “trapped” in my relationship with Angel. In truth, the only trap was my own self-inflicted, unresolved issues. I was extremely resentful toward her for my inability to man up and get out of our unhealthy alliance. So I sent her an e-mail telling her to get out of my house. Yes . . . an e-mail. Mr. Keyboard Warrior! Anytime in the past I’d tried to have the conversation in person, she managed to talk me out of it. So I resorted to wimp mail.
However, there was a catch. Actually, two. First, my sister was staying at my house for the first time ever. She was helping develop a Broadway show with a composer and librettist who lived in Vegas. Second, after I fired off the e-mail, my sister called to say that Angel was pregnant. Gut-punched, I retorted with the worst reactionary shit I could think of and hung up before she could respond. I was so angry it never occurred to me that I’d taken it out on my sister, who had been innocently thrown into the middle of this disaster. (Though I felt terrible about it later, it was a blessing she was there instead of me, or God knows what I would have done, considering the raw state I was in.)
All I could think was: That fucking bitch got pregnant to keep me from ending it—tying herself to me with a kid. I was so into myself, I cared nothing about anyone’s feelings but my own. I was full of anger and resentment toward myself for staying in a relationship I should have had the guts to end years before. But at that moment, I blamed her and her irresponsibility. In my mind, all she had to do was take care of my house, not overspend my money, and not get fucking pregnant! Oh, yeah . . . and endure a fucked-up, angry, verbally abusive, insecure, self-centered, cheating musician asshole who thought birth control was a woman’s obligation.
Blindsided, I had to seriously regroup and figure out how to get out of this one. I was trying to live my thirty-year dream with a band that had major momentum. The last thing I wanted was to have a kid I’d never be around to see grow up, whose mother I didn’t want to be with. I was convinced that no one who chose this selfish life should impose that on a child.
Earlier that day, before receiving the devastating news, Jason and I had gone to a burger joint where the Godsmack tour had stopped, prior to our next show. The chick behind the counter was a cute blonde. After we were nearly finished eating, she came out to bus the tables and we started flirting with her. We invited her to come hang with us after she got off work.
“I’d really like to,” she said, “but I don’t have any clothes.”
Jason said, “Perfect, you won’t need any.”
She gave us her number and he texted her throughout the day to make sure she was still on board. Oh, and as the CEOs of Asshole, Inc., we mentioned how it was standard operating procedure for the groupie to supply the cocaine . . . a small price to pay for hangin’ with the celebs. She agreed, telling her boyfriend she was spending the night at her girlfriend’s. In anticipation, we both popped Viagra and waited for the “lucky” little waitress to serve us up some poon tang and powder.
What followed was an embarrassing orgy. Not only was I a third wheel, I was an embarrassment. Jason and the girl did the nasty at least three times—while I tried to get it up to no avail. In addition to being numbed by cocaine, I was deadened by antidepressants and blood-pressure meds. Viagra didn’t stand a chance against that onslaught of dick-numbing drugs.
After Angel’s news, I was going to need even more . . . of everything.
My plan to end our fucked-up association had taken a quick one-eighty. Now “with child,” Angel convinced me it was only right that she should come out on tour with me. I pledged to use that time to force myself to do the right thing and support her decision to keep the kid. It was tough for me to not wanna smash her, but I got through it. The second she left, though, I wasted no time in distracting myself by hunting for chicks.
The afternoon before a show, I introduced myself to this older chick and arranged to meet her later that night. After the show, I went to the bar at the venue and started pounding drinks with our security guard. Sure enough, the chick showed up and we started talking. In short order, I pulled her into the dressing room to start making out with her. I was drunk and I was ready for sex. She tried everything humanly possible, but I couldn’t perform. She’d have had more luck getting laid in a nursing home. All I could think was, My sex life is over.
In honor of my flaccid cock, I did more blow and drank all night, sinking into an even deeper depression. Following another sleepless night, I spent my day off contemplating my life and what a total mess it had become. What could make it better? Suicide, perhaps, but certainly not the addition of an innocent baby! After hours of contemplation, I reached the only sensible conclusion: this cannot fucking happen. I didn’t know how, but I was not going to be the absent father to a kid who deserved better.
When I got home from touring, I did my best not to destroy Angel, but that didn’t keep me from destroying myself. I did shitloads of cocaine and alcohol. Then, before I accidentally ODed, the universe intervened. A few nights after I returned, Angel ran into the bathroom. I heard her yell, “Oh, no!” From the scream that followed . . . I knew. Like an asshole Rocky mounting the steps at Philadelphia’s Museum of Art, I held my fist up and pumped the air! Forgetting what a loser I was, I felt vindicated.
“Are you okay?” I asked, with enough false sincerity to mask my hopefulness.
“I’m bleeding.”
(Yes!) “Oh, you’re just stressed.”
“No, it’s more than that.”
I continued to fake concern, but I was so fucking relieved I had to stop myself from jumping up and down. My justification for being a prick was that she hadn’t taken my feelings into consideration, and now she was being justly punished. I convinced myself that this was divine intervention. At the time, I saw an answered prayer. Now I see a fucked-up, delusional, selfish drug-addict piece of shit with no remorse.
Once that tie was broken, it didn’t take long for me to destroy Angel’s fucking life once and for all. I went out of my way to be as hurtful and disgusting as I could. What I was really doing was acting out my self-hatred. Disgusted for being a codependent drug-addict drunk who’d lost his way, someone had to pay, and that was the role she cast herself in. Call it situation ethics—or the rationalization of an addict.
My drug intake skyrocketed even more, as did my drinking. I was totally out of control. All of this shit was happening, and within the same week we decided to make a lineup change in the band that escalated my depression even further. Just to pile it on even more, it was time to start making a new album. Years before, when I was imagining the rock-star life, none of this turmoil was part of the fantasy. Yet that’s how I’d created it, or co-created it—for in shared “reality,” everyone gets what they believe they deserve, be it good or bad.
The topic of getting rid of Matt had been surfacing for months. I was always the guy trying to tell him, “Dude, just chill. You get equal pay and you don’t have to do shit except play bass. Just be cool, and everything will be fine.”
Personally, I found his sarcastic mouth entertaining. Together, we could annihilate anyone. But when it came to being professional in front of the media, he had no filter and seemed proud of it.
The reality was, there were lots of issues with him I could no longer defend. He acted with disdain toward people and his cynicism spilled over into interviews in ways that reflected negatively on the band. Not to say that everyone el
se was perfect, because our band has as many fucked-up personalities as Sybil. It’s a fucking band! (What do you call a rock band in three-piece suits? The Defendants!) Every band has issues, or at least any band that’s relevant. However, the Matt situation had reached a crisis point. The negatives finally outweighed the positives. He had to go.
Following a particularly embarrassing interview episode, Zo called and fired him. I’d gone out to dinner and a movie and had my phone turned off. Matt was blowing my phone up and I wasn’t answering, so he thought I was being a pussy, but I really was at a movie. He texted me and reamed me out and told me to lose his number, which really hurt because we’d been good friends. Still, I could only imagine how bad he felt. I’d always liked him and appreciated his acerbic personality. But I agreed with the rest of the band that it had reached the point of no return. It killed me to do it—haunting even my dreams for months afterward.
The dreaded time had come to start making the next Death Punch album. Never an easy process, but now, with the stress of the last few weeks, this was going to take all the strength and focus I could muster. I needed a break from partying anyway, so I thought I’d try to clean myself up so I could function enough to make a good record. Even being fucked up, I knew that if we didn’t make good records, our career would fizzle and die.
I started out strong. I’d been sober for six weeks and I was working out every day. But I resented feeling trapped. I verbally brutalized Angel daily, hoping she’d finally leave me, because I sure as hell was too lazy and insecure to leave her. The abuse was always verbal, never physical. But compared to the shit I dished out, a beating would have been welcomed. I vented everything I could on her. I hated the feeling I got from doing it, but I couldn’t stop myself. I relished the juice I got from the anger. And when that wasn’t enough, I started drinking again.
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