Running With Monsters: A Memoir

by Bob Forrest

  “What song is that, dude?” Anthony asked.

  “It’s just a song. It doesn’t have a name.”

  “It’s good,” said Flea. “And you can actually carry a tune.”

  It was a nice compliment and it felt good. In the back of my head, I had always thought about being in a band, but a singer? I hadn’t really entertained that notion on any kind of serious level—despite the brief stint in the downtown art-noise band a few years earlier. Through Anthony and Flea, I became acquainted with a guy named Pete Weiss. He was a drummer and he could be combative. We were about as different from each other as two guys could possibly be when it came to our dispositions, but in some ways, were incredibly similar. Headstrong. My old friend Chris Hansen knew him from Los Angeles City College, where they had both attended classes, and, now the two of them had cooked up the idea to start a band.

  One night, Pete came by the pad and told me, “Chris and I started a group.”

  “Great,” I said. “Chris is a good guitar player.”

  “You’re going to be the singer.”

  “What? You’ve never even heard me.”

  “Chris says you were great in that band you guys used to have. Don’t worry about it. The worst that can happen is that you’ll fuck up.”

  I was no stranger to that, so what did I have to lose? Besides, from the time I had posed with my little acoustic guitar and sang “Dang Me,” I had secretly wanted to be a rock star. Musicians fascinated me. I spent almost all my time with them, and music had long been my passion, but I had never pursued it with any kind of seriousness. I didn’t think I had the right look and knowing so many great musicians personally, it would be devastatingly embarrassing to fail in front of them. But after all the years I’d collected records, read rock magazines, and hung out in clubs, I thought I knew a thing or two about songwriting and stagecraft. Chris was convinced this project would work, based on our brief stint in our “art band.” I figured I possessed enough charisma to make a go of it, but I was also pretty sure that even if I bombed as a front man, I’d be switched over to guitar and I could hide behind an amp or turn my back to the audience. That was my Plan B. The second guitar player in the group was the late William “Bill” Stobaugh. Why he was a guitar player was a mystery since Bill could barely tune his instrument. Still, he was a completely weird, crazy, and artistic guy. Bill had an unusual background. He had been born in Bahrain, the son of a man who worked for an American oil company, but grew up in suburban Massachusetts. He had come to Los Angeles to attend school, where he received both bachelor’s and master’s degrees at CalArts. He was skilled as a filmmaker. Parts of his shot-on-film master’s thesis were used in the Disney movie Tron. He would eventually make film his career, doing a lot of rock videos, including “Higher Ground” for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He died in 1996 from complications that followed heart surgery. He was only forty-two. On bass we had a boom operator named Jon Huck and, for good measure, we had a third guitar played by K. K. Barrett, another film-world refugee who worked as an art director.

  But back then, we all wanted to be a rock band. The Replacements were our inspiration, but once we started to rehearse, we found we couldn’t do anything but be ourselves. We tried to play some cover songs. It was a disaster.

  “Hey, man, let’s try to play ‘American Woman,’ said Chris at our first rehearsal, and launched into the main riff. Pete fell in behind him and the rest of us tried to follow. It was a god-awful racket, and I couldn’t remember the lyrics even though I had heard the song forever on classic rock radio.

  “Hold up, hold up,” said Chris as he called the jam to a halt. “This doesn’t work.” Everybody took a break to smoke cigarettes and crack open fresh beers.

  “You know what sounded okay?” I asked as I poured some vodka into my brew. “When we were just fucking around with those chords before we tried to play an actual song. I think if you guys just start doing that, we can come up with some lyrics. At least it’d be our own thing. And I think we sounded pretty good.”

  “It can’t be any worse than ‘American Woman,’ ” said Chris.

  We started to jam and fell straight into a groove. It felt right. We definitely had something. We wrote four songs at that first rehearsal that sprang to life straight out of our riffs and jams. “Yes Yes No” and “Positive Train” were collaborative efforts with the whole band. Jon and Pete came up with something they called “Thelonious Monster” and Jon and I wrote “Life’s a Groove.” It was a productive first rehearsal. We also discussed what to call ourselves. My thought was to use the name the F.T.W. Experience—“F.T.W.,” of course, standing in for “Fuck the World” and “Experience” tacked on as a nod to the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Pete wanted to name the band after the song he and Jon wrote. Somebody noted, “If we call the band Thelonious Monster, we’ll have a theme song like the Monkees did.” It made sense, and I had to admit, it was a good name.

  We rehearsed like that for four months, nearly every night, rough jams and hooky riffs crystallizing into actual songs. I had connections with the bookers at the various clubs where I DJ’ed, so getting gigs wasn’t a problem. Keeping them coherent was. I was usually drunk, high, or a combination of the two for our shows, and I know it bugged Pete. I’d rant from the stage about Reagan or religion or something I had seen in the newspaper earlier in the day as I’d introduce a song. Drunks and addicts almost always think they’re being witty and charming when, mostly, they’re just obnoxious.

  “Fuck Ronald Reagan!” I shouted, while, in my peripheral vision, I could see Pete behind his drum kit roll his eyes and throw up his hands as if to say, “Not again with this shit!”

  I wasn’t in the mood for his judgments. Not again. I could picture him after the show: “Goddamn it, Bob! Let’s just play the songs!” Yeah, well, fuck him. I didn’t have to take guff off of a drummer. I launched myself straight over the bass drum and through the cymbals and connected with him. We rolled around on the stage while we traded blows.

  “Holy shit, you guys! Knock it off!” Chris yelled. I snapped out of it. “Oh, right. We’re at a gig. People paid to hear us.” Pete and I broke it up and we played our song. The shows were sloppy and chaotic and always threatened to fall apart at any moment, but they were also very punk rock. Cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and lots and lots of alcohol made me act foolish more than once. “You’re a fuckin’ mess, Forrest,” Pete said with barely concealed contempt. He was right. I was—but our audience dug the excitement.

  Flea had come to a couple of shows and had a suggestion. “You guys need to make a demo record,” he said.

  “We need a place to do it, man,” I told him.

  “No problem. I have the hookup.”

  He certainly did. He was pals with a guy named Spit Stix who had played drums in Fear when Flea was in that band. Stix worked as a recording engineer at a studio on La Brea, just north of Sunset Boulevard. It was a gray building called Rusk Sound Studios. A rather anonymous-sounding name, but the place was owned by Giorgio Moroder. He had won an Academy Award for his score to the movie Midnight Express in 1978 and had never looked back. His work in film and with disco and techno acts was legendary. But because he was in such demand, he was never at Rusk Sound Studios, so Stix let us sneak in at night and record. We were all proud of the results.

  “Hey, Bob! Did you hear?” asked Chris one hazy afternoon.

  “Huh?” I said as I followed a double rum and coke with a big line of speed.

  “Man, Brett Gurewitz from Bad Religion heard our demo!”

  “And?”

  “Jesus, Bob, try to focus. He loved it. You know he runs Epitaph Records. He wants to record us.”

  “A record deal?” I said. “A real record deal?”

  “Yes!”

  This was impressive. Gurewitz came to meet us one night. “I’d really like to do a proper album with you guys,” he said. “I thi
nk Epitaph could really do something with an album.” We were all in. It may not have been the best deal in the history of recorded music, but it was the first major step for the Monster. Our deal gave us one hundred hours of studio time. With Brett as producer, we went to Westbeach Recorders in Los Angeles at ten every night, where we’d stay until six in the morning.

  “Bob, try to stay sober. We’ve got work to do!” Chris or Pete would plead. I thought the drugs and the booze had worked well enough to get us to where we were, so why stop now? I may have been completely fucked up, but I showed up on time, contributed to the songs, and laid down my tracks. Baby … You’re Bummin’ My Life Out in a Supreme Fashion was released in 1986, and I was unprepared for the response it got. Not many months earlier, we’d decided to start a band. We weren’t seasoned songwriters or musicians, but now, with a growing reputation for unpredictability at our live shows and a new, professionally recorded album showcasing our act, the Los Angeles Times, the Herald-Examiner, and the New York Times all hailed the record as a rock-and-roll masterpiece and compared it to the Stones’ Exile on Main Street and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. What the fuck? How did that happen? It was a complete turnaround. Sixteen months earlier, I was just a failed roadie for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and now I was being called a genius in major American newspapers. It could have gone to anybody’s head, except for one important detail. Other than the fact that we had critical praise, nothing else had changed. I was still an unpaid aide-de-camp for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which mostly meant that I hung out with them and offered suggestions, moral support, and the occasional critique. They never held my disastrous stint as a paid crew member against me, but they never put me back on the payroll either. I was broke.

  I needed a job. Luckily, Jon Huck’s girlfriend Sosie Hublitz, who later became my second wife, was an art director in the movie business and she always looked out for us. She helped me get some jobs working as a production assistant. Robby Müller, a cinematographer, also helped us find work. I loaded furniture. I was a set dresser. You could always pick up some work on a rock video or a commercial for toothpaste or floor wax. In Los Angeles, there was always some kind of shoot happening. Jon Huck and Pete Weiss kept doing sound work. K. K. Barrett kept on with his production-design work. We were all wired into that film world. We felt like we were the coolest people in Hollywood. I may have been at the fringe of it all, but that business pays pretty well. I worked on a movie called The Boss’s Wife. One of the stars was Christopher Plummer. I probably made $10,000 just for moving furniture around. That went really far back then, although it could have gone farther if I didn’t spend nearly all of it on heroin and cocaine. But those film jobs allowed me to live and eat and be me, even if “being me” led to employment problems. Keeping any kind of job is difficult when you’re in a stupor.

  The album didn’t help us get better gigs, either. Despite all the critical praise heaped upon Baby … You’re Bummin’ My Life Out in a Supreme Fashion, we found ourselves playing the same little clubs we’d been playing. When the record came out to such accolades, I was convinced it would change everything. Instead, nothing happened. We just foundered around. We made a second record, this time for Relativity Records. The company signed us solely on the praise we had gotten from the first. The deal we got wasn’t great, but we made enough to buy a van to take on tour. Next Saturday Afternoon is Flea’s favorite album of ours, and even today, I’m proud of those songs.

  I wasn’t too worried. I had seen the same thing happen with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were my de facto business model. They had made their first record, gigged, and didn’t make much money. Then they made the second record and started to get booked in places like the Universal Amphitheatre. I figured we’d record the new album and it would make us popular enough to play places like the Hollywood Palladium. Next Saturday Afternoon came out in 1987, and we toured like crazy behind its release. It was grueling.

  People think, “Oh, you’re on tour! That’s great! You get to go places, meet interesting people, and see the country!” You don’t get to do any of that. You show up and do a sound check, go to a bar, have some drinks, see a dressing room, get wasted, do a show, and then drive through the night to the next show, where the routine starts again. It’s not a “See America” sightseeing jaunt. It’s fucking work. And it’s brutal, mind-fucking work. K. K. and Jon quit under the strain.

  “You can’t quit now!” I said.

  K. K. said, “Dude, I have a real career back in Los Angeles. Tear-assin’ around the country in a van isn’t doing me a bit of good.”

  “Jon? Come on, man. We wrote ‘Life’s a Groove’ together.”

  “Bob, I can make good money back home. I don’t need this bullshit. Sorry, man.”

  They were right. They had real careers. But Pete and I were full bore and wide open. We were all in. Chris was in just because he was a student then and could arrange his schedule to accommodate the band. It was all good to him. And he wasn’t a drunk or a doper. He earned a doctorate in linguistics and another one in architecture. He didn’t go out. He didn’t party. It was music or school with him. Chris saved his money. He didn’t spend one unnecessary dime. He even scrimped with his per diem money. But he managed to pay his way through school and eventually bought a house in France from the dough he made in the band.

  We toured Next Saturday Afternoon, and I felt like a musical success. My ego was in full bloom. And it was time to go cut a third record. It was 1989. Pete and Chris were still on board and we had picked up Rob Graves to play bass and had Mike Martt and Dix Denney, who covered the vacated guitar posts. John Doe from X produced us. Looking back on it, Stormy Weather was a good title. It reflected the vibe, both inside and out. There was pressure with this one. Everyone expected us to have a hit and break nationally. Relativity Records had given us a real budget and we recorded at Existia Music Group, L.A., a real state-of-the-art facility. Welcome, my son, to the machine. I was absolutely as convinced as any drunken, drug-abusing songwriter could be that “Sammy Hagar Weekend,” a sincere homage to the life of the teenage hard-rock fan and a shout-out to the embodiment of the working-class rocker, Fontana, California’s hometown hero, Sammy Hagar, was destined to be a huge hit.

  ’Cause it’s a Sammy Hagar weekend

  It’s a big man’s day

  We got a Metallica T-shirt

  Got a little tiny baby mustache

  Got a jacked-up Camaro

  We’re sitting in the parking lot at Anaheim Stadium

  Drinking beer

  Smoking some pot

  Snorting coke

  And then drive

  Drive over 55, yeah!

  I had been that kid at the stadium. I knew what it meant to be out on a weekend like that, and I knew there were kids all over the country who knew what it meant too. Pete and I did not see eye to eye on the song at all. He didn’t even want it on the record. “That’s just a joke song,” he sneered. “Save it for your solo record, man.”

  My contempt for Pete grew. How dare he be so dismissive of my great song?

  “This song will be the hit off the record. You watch. You don’t know,” I slurred back at him.

  John Doe, our producer—who had always been a huge inspiration to me as a songwriter—told us, “These songs are fucking amazing! You don’t play ’em very well … but they’re really, really solid.” Once I heard that, there was no doubt in my mind that this would be the band’s shining moment and our big breakout. Then the record came out.

  “Sammy Hagar Weekend” didn’t go national. It stayed regional. But it did get people excited. We sold out the Palace in Hollywood. Two thousand people at one shot. We sold out a similarly sized club—the Channel—in Boston. I felt like we had made an impression. “Oh, my God, we’re rolling! There’s no stopping us!” I’d tell everybody. But, in the end, the record didn’t hit the mark I thought it would. It didn’t hit the ma
rk anybody thought it would. My management team of Danny Heaps and Nick Wechsler took steps to make the band break. They set up a showcase for record-industry executives at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. It was a tiny, tiny space with a stage not much bigger than a postage stamp, but it had history in that any number of well-respected, big-time musicians had done some very special shows there through the years.

  “Now, Bob,” Danny said. “We need you to be sharp. Be on point. Be cohesive and … don’t be fucked up!”

  “This is an important gig, Bob,” Nick said, chiming in.

  I knew it. I could sense it. Here we were, primed for an eight o’clock show in front of forty different record company executives.

  We blew it.

  We were nervous. I had the brilliant idea to parody U2’s recent ZooTV tour, throughout which Bono and the lads commented on celebrity and media through the use of costumes, masks, and multiple large-screen televisions. They played stadiums. We were at McCabe’s. The microscopic stage cluttered with small-screen TVs just didn’t work. Worse, we were out of synch. Our shows had always been messy, but this one needed to be tight. It wasn’t. I showed up stone-cold sober and I couldn’t remember the last time I had done that. I tried my absolute best. Pete, who had just about reached the end of the line with me, didn’t give a fuck. It was another Thelonious Monster train wreck. Whatever game plan we had before we went onstage didn’t amount to anything. Everyone just did what they wanted to do. This was a crucial moment and even I realized that we had reached a point where we couldn’t be like this anymore. We needed organization. The poor performance we gave and the tepid response we drew devastated me. I knew we were good and I knew we could do better, but nobody but me seemed to want to put in the effort that night. We crashed and burned.