by Bob Forrest
The bright spot was that Bob Buziak, then the president of RCA Records, was in the audience. He was seen as something of a genius because he had taken a bunch of old rock-and-roll hits and packaged them together as the soundtrack for the movie Dirty Dancing. He saw Thelonious Monster play at Raji’s, a popular Hollywood club, and he approached me after the show.
“Bob, I love your songs, man,” he said as he shook my hand.
“Yeah? Thanks. What other songwriters do you like?” I asked as I tried to figure out if he was a real music fan or just some slick businessman.
“Oh, so many. I’m a huge songwriter fan. Off the top of my head, I guess I’d say I like Tom Petty, Neil Young, Tom Waits …”
Well, at least we spoke the same language.
“I’d love to sign you, Bob,” he said, but there was a slight hesitation in his voice.
“You’d like to sign me, but … ,” I said.
“I’m not interested in the band.”
I understood his reasons. He definitely didn’t want or need the trouble that a bunch of drug addicts would inevitably bring. He was a fan of songwriters. He had signed Lucinda Williams and Michael Penn. He liked things to be simple and easy with as little drama as possible. He offered me a deal and I signed immediately. I didn’t even think of the band. My ego told me that I was the rock star, not them. What else was I supposed to do? I had just come off Stormy Weather and that was a lot of work. After you write songs like that, you need to rest up and recharge and get your mind right for the next round. The only way I knew how to recharge involved lots and lots of drugs. But now that I was signed to a major label, I was under a microscope. There was a lot of money involved and I was expected to produce. Bob knew I was in no shape to flesh out a complete song, so he hooked me up with other songwriters and musicians in the hope that they might steer me toward that elusive Big Hit Record I seemed unable to write. There were some impressive people I was paired with. Al Kooper, who played with Dylan when he went electric; Pete Anderson, who had brought some dirty and authentic Bakersfield punch to Dwight Yoakam’s records; Stan Lynch, from Tom Petty’s band the Heartbreakers; Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar, a premier L.A. studio guitarist who had left a mighty footprint on the sound of every Los Angeles–based singer-songwriter from the early seventies. They were supposed to help me, but they shut down all my ideas.
“You can’t write a song about heroin, Bob!”
I can’t write a song about heroin? They say write what you know, and for the past several years, that had been what I knew best … along with alcohol and amphetamines. I was a doper. I was a doper before I started the band. It was who I was, I thought. Did people give Keith Richards shit when he wrote “Dead Flowers”?
Well, if I can’t write about heroin, maybe I can write about religion, I thought. Everybody can relate to that, right? The reaction was swift. “You can’t use Jesus’s name in a song title, Bob. Are you nuts? People get offended. People who buy records!”
I thought I’d write a love song. I tried to write one with Victoria Williams. I had always had a huge crush on her, but she was married to Peter Case. That pent-up emotion came out in our song. It was darkly beautiful. It was about a girl who committed suicide and the observations of a man who once loved her while he ate cake at her funeral. I played it for RCA … and they hated it. My manager Danny Heaps thought I was an idiot to even attempt to write something like that. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Bob?” he yelled at me. “You write a song about a girl who kills herself and you’re eating cake at her funeral? Who the fuck wants to hear something like that?” I started to become resentful. “If all the people I keep getting hooked up with are such great songwriters, why aren’t they writing hits for themselves?” I asked.
Maybe I just wasn’t paired with the right people. I went out to Nashville to work with country rocker Steve Earle, who had a reputation almost as wild as mine. He was high the whole time I was there and stayed holed up in a bunker he had on his property. He lived in this weird, ramshackle two-story house. It was like the capital of White Trash City, USA. There was a decrepit, aluminum-sided aboveground swimming pool in the backyard and a dug-out bunker area where his wife and kids weren’t allowed to go. It was a freaky scene and a huge waste of time. Maybe if I had been left to my own devices, I could have done something. I know I had songs in me.
Worse, I was so in awe of all these people and what they had done in the past that I listened to everything they said, no matter how ridiculous. Al Kooper is a great guy and a talented musician, but by the time I worked with him in 1988, he hadn’t written a hit since “This Diamond Ring” for Gary Lewis and the Playboys back in the midsixties. Flea, who was aware of my difficulties, said, “Don’t you see, man? You need to be back in that little room and to play with guys in your own band.”
He was referencing the little twin bungalows that sat at the southeast corner of Fountain and Gardner in the heart of Hollywood, where I had lived with the band in a pair of ramshackle cottages that first saw life in the 1930s but were now so weathered and had sheltered so many lives through the years that they stood as haggard and rickety as I was. It was a world away from the sterile Hollywood Hills environment that I’d used my record company advance to put myself in.
Fountain and Gardner was a real paradise for me. It was the last place I had felt creative, as we rehearsed in the second house’s front bedroom. I wrote “Sammy Hagar Weekend,” probably the band’s biggest hit, from our album Next Saturday Afternoon, there. It was creative and vibrant and cheap. The band members had paid $100 a month for the rehearsal space and I paid $215 for my rent. Keith Morris, front man of Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, had converted the garage of the other bungalow and called that home. It was a chaotic scene, but I could work there. The place was always packed with local musicians and people visiting from out of town. In the back, we had a garden with a patio just made for drinking. Billy Zoom, the splayed-legged, Gretsch-slinging guitarist from the band X, had earlier purchased a brand-new bread truck with his bandmates and then had gotten down to the serious business of converting the inside of the hulking machine to a rolling hideaway. When he finished his project, the results were outstanding. It had heat, comfortable couches, a television, and an upper loft area for sleeping. He was a craftsman, and when X had gotten tired of their machine, Thelonious Monster bought it and parked it in the garden just to have another area in which to relax and enjoy this little private world we had created.
It was like being in a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of faces, some that were well-known on the scene and others, like those of the groupie girls, that were more anonymous. It didn’t matter because everyone was always welcome. The guys from Sunset Strip metal band Ratt would drop by, and their hulking guitarist Robbin Crosby would stay with us for days. Alterna-funksters Fishbone were regulars too, as were the guys from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Hillel Slovak was always lurking around somewhere, as was his posthumous replacement, John Frusciante, who played with the Monster for a while.
I spent eighteen frenetic, fulfilling, and productive months in that little self-contained world, where I wrote, played music, and just did whatever the hell I wanted to do, whenever I wanted. And those times when we got wasted on the patio and passed around an old acoustic guitar allowed me to make up the songs that eventually led to a bidding war between RCA and Capitol to sign the band. “Leave me alone, leave me alone,” I wrote. “Leave me alone in my own backyard. I don’t need to be Bob Dylan, I’m Bob Dylan in my own backyard.”
“Those are the same chords you used for ‘Sammy Hagar Weekend,’ man,” said John Frusciante when I played it for him. It didn’t matter. I was having a ball and so was everyone around me. Anything was possible there. I would come home some nights to find Karl Mueller, the bass player for Soul Asylum, in my bed in the living room entertaining some girl he had just met, so I’d shuffle to the den, only to find Robbin Crosby shooting speed
balls in there. Oh well. There was nothing left to do but go back downstairs and out to the patio and get into whatever might be happening out there, or go next door and watch television with Keith Morris. I was never one to play the heavy and kick people out. Besides, I discovered fairly quickly that being buzzed at two thirty in the morning in a crazy environment was the perfect thing for writing down some useful material. That never happened in that whole dismal year at RCA. It was doomed from the start. I was not wired to work like that. With a band, songs come together organically, naturally. I started to believe that songs like “Sammy Hagar Weekend” were flukes. I didn’t think I could write like that anymore.
The drugs and alcohol didn’t help. It became obvious that with each week that passed, I cared less and less about writing good songs. I was too caught up in doing drugs and playing the part of a big shot. I was insufferable. And yet, I had the notion that the one thing I loved and the one thing in which I took pride—my songwriting—was being destroyed by my use of drugs. Writing was something that I cared about it and here I was tossing it away.
Danny and Nick, my managers, begged me to record just one good song. It could even be a cover song, but all the others would have to be written or cowritten by me so I could get the publishing rights. If I had just been able to take songs from everybody and do those, I might have been able to make a decent album. After a year of this, RCA gave up on my ever writing a big hit. But Bob Buziak still had faith in me. “We can sell Bob,” he’d say. “He’s an interesting character. He’s got dreadlocks. Let’s put him in an Armani suit and pick covers for him to do.” There was the idea to have me possibly contribute something for a movie soundtrack, and RCA decided that I would sing Jimmy Ruffin’s 1966 Motown hit “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.” Anthony Kiedis rapped over the outro. As soon as they brought in the female backup singers, I left the studio and went home. “If this song gets the plays we think it will, it’ll be huge. It can be the lead track on the album!” said the executives at RCA. The song was never released. I still don’t even know which movie they planned to ruin with this poorly conceived attempt to manufacture a hit. This felt like the lowest I could go. A few years earlier, major American newspapers had said I was Bob Dylan. Now I was Greg Brady from The Brady Bunch, singing somebody else’s song and wearing somebody else’s suit. It was just like the episode where record-industry slicksters with blow-dried hair and polyester shirts tried to shape him into a teen-pop star named Johnny Bravo. Was this what I had become?
Flea and Anthony and almost everyone else I knew pointed me toward rehab. “You have to go, man,” they said. “Look at yourself.” The thought terrified me. My identity was wrapped up in being wasted. It was who I was. It was what made me uniquely me. “Fuck you guys! You’re supposed to be my friends. You should be supportive! I never said shit when you guys were slamming dope.”
“Because we were addicts, Bob. Now it’s just you.”
Those words stung. True, we had all been addicts, but Flea had cleaned up right after we had all moved into the La Leyenda. Anthony had stuck with it longer, but he had managed to kick his habits recently. They hit even harder when, alone at night, I listened to those demos I had recorded for RCA. I couldn’t escape the horrifying fact that drugs and booze were ruining whatever skills I had as a songwriter. Worse, I had started to not care. I liked to pretend I was still having fun and that drugs somehow made me cool. Weren’t all rock stars supposed to be wasted? That my friends couldn’t handle the lifestyle just showed how much stronger I was than them. That’s what drugs do sometimes. They can convince a man that wrong is right and right is wrong. When he wakes up in the morning and is dope-sick and miserable, he doesn’t say, “This stuff is killing me.” No, he bangs up a shot, and as the sickness eases he tells himself that he’s never felt better in his life. Suddenly, he’s Superman.
And then I got the phone call. Professionally, I may have felt fucked up, but on the surface, everything else was seemingly great. I had a cool pad in Mount Washington just north of downtown. I slept a sound, dreamless sleep in the custom-made bed Christian Brando, Marlon’s kid, had built just for me. A preternaturally sexy Playboy model shared the mattress with me. It was almost perfect. Or at least it was until six o’clock that morning, when the phone on the nightstand let out a shriek and I bolted upright. The sun had yet to break the horizon but it was close enough to fill the room with that weird blue glow that isn’t day and isn’t night. The phone screamed again and Ms. Playboy let out an annoyed little moan and burrowed deeper under the covers. I grabbed the receiver. A call at this hour is never good. “Hello?” I said. It was more of a question than a greeting.
“Hey, Bob! What’s up?” said a cheery voice on the other end.
The voice was familiar, but my sleep-fogged brain couldn’t quite place it. “Who is this?” I asked.
“It’s me, man. Al Kooper. Have you heard the news?”
Oh, God. Somebody’s died, I thought. I hesitated. Did I really want to know? “No, dude. I’ve been asleep. It’s six o’clock in the fucking morning here.”
“Your boy got fired, man,” said Al.
“Huh?”
“Buziak’s out. Gone. Big investigation or something over there.”
“What the fuck does that even mean, Al?” I asked.
“It means you better figure out something fast,” Al replied. I said good-bye.
It was too early to call Bob at RCA, so I killed time as best I could. I drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and watched CNN, but the time still dragged. At nine o’clock, I called his office. The receptionist put me through right away. He picked up. “Are you okay?” were the first words out of my mouth.
“Yeah. I’m fine, but I guess you heard. I’m not going to be overseeing your record anymore. In fact, I’m not going to be around to protect you anymore. The drugs, Bob. The inability to write a hit. People around here don’t have confidence in you. You should probably call Danny and Nick right away,” he said.
“They can wait,” I said. “How are you?” I asked.
“Bob, when guys like me get fired, we get lots and lots of money. I’m fine. You need to call Danny and Nick now,” he said again.
“Hey, I don’t care if RCA drops me,” I said. “I have a firm three-album deal. They’ll owe me a lot of money if they do that.”
“Call Danny and Nick,” he said one more time. Click.
I can’t say I was surprised when RCA dropped me. I got some buyout money. What else was there to do but get the band together? I spent the money I had gotten from the buyout to purchase everyone new equipment and to make them feel comfortable with me again after I had left them high and dry when I signed with RCA. Thanks to the competitive nature of the music business, we got a deal with Capitol pretty quickly. They said all the right things: “You know why it didn’t work with RCA? That company doesn’t get you, man! You’re a rock band. RCA tried to make you into something you aren’t. We know how to do this. The budget will be tight, but you’ll be in a band again and you’ll be on the road three hundred nights a year and we’ll make sure you get on college radio.”
We signed and recorded Beautiful Mess. Of course, Capitol wanted a hit too, and that record didn’t have one single on it. Oh, it had some fine music and a lot of great guests, but no singles. And then came the never-ending bus tours. Eighty-nine shows in ninety-three days, two weeks off, and then start the whole thing over again. I’d hide in my hotel room and do drugs.
“Hey, where’s Bob? We need to hit the road!”
“He’s holed up in his room. Says he’s not coming out.”
“What? What the fuck’s wrong with that guy?”
“Says someone needs to call the label. He wants a bigger per diem. Says he won’t come out otherwise. Wants money now.”
I could hear an angry fist pound at the door. “Goddamn it, Bob! Let’s go!”
Something had to giv
e, and I suspected that would be me. It was 1992 and a trip to rehab was in my immediate future. I had been down that road before.
HAZELDEN
They always say that nuthin’s perfect … Trust me, I’m well aware of that.
—“Nuthin’s Perfect,” Thelonious Monster
In late January of 1989, under the low lights of a fancy Hollywood restaurant called Citrus, I sat with people I trusted and listened to their concerns. It wasn’t an intervention. At least it wasn’t in the traditional sense of how you might think of it. Everyone sitting at the table knew me well enough to realize that any ham-handed attempt to scare me sober wouldn’t work.
“You gotta do it, man. You need to straighten yourself out,” said Anthony, who had himself recently taken the cure.
“Anthony’s right,” said my girlfriend Marin.
Danny and Nick, businessmen to the bitter end, just asked me how my songwriting was going. I didn’t have a good answer to that. It wasn’t going at all. I played with my food while everybody else ate and talked at me. By the end of the meal, I felt like I really didn’t have a choice. I agreed to go to treatment. Time to lose my cherry. All drug addicts go through rehab, Bob, I told myself.
I knew I did a lot of drugs, but was I really as bad as they all seemed to think? By any measure, for a young guy, I did all right. I lived in a house in the Hollywood Hills, I had money in the bank, and I ate at the Musso and Frank Grill every day for breakfast. They knew me there. “Right this way, sir!” the ancient waiter in the red vest would say as he led me to one of the plush booths. “Shall I bring you the usual?”
“Yes,” I’d say, and add, “But yesterday the bacon wasn’t cooked enough. Can you make sure it’s right today?”
“Absolutely, sir! May I get you something from the bar?”
“Vodka and orange juice, man.”
“Excellent choice as always, sir!” he’d say, and smartly march to the bar and quickly return with my order in a tall, cold glass. And there I would sit, sipping my drink until the food arrived. My order was always the same: a couple of the joint’s famous flannel cakes—thin, golden pancakes of an uncommonly large diameter, topped with fresh creamery butter and genuine maple syrup—accompanied by a pillow of fluffy scrambled eggs the color of lemons accented with a sprig of fresh dill and a couple slices of crisp bacon.
