Dancing With Myself

by Billy Idol

  The video premiered on MTV, minus the barbed-wire ring and blood—which they had determined was not suitable for viewing—and it became an instant hit. At the time, MTV didn’t have that many videos to program and was in need of content twenty-four hours a day. So “White Wedding” was running at least once an hour, which was amazing exposure, considering their viewership was growing exponentially every day, as more and more people hooked up to cable. There I was, in America’s living rooms, and whatever residual radio airplay problems we had vanished as soon as the kids at home saw the video and began to call their local stations to request the song. As such, radio programmers overcame their fear that advertisers would be turned off by my punk-rock image. In fact, it was the beginning of radio opening up their playlists to many new artists as MTV began to gain influence. A new generation of listeners was emerging, hungry for new music.

  At this point, the MTV exposure led us to embark on our first club tour of the U.S. and Canada. The band and the roadies were on a single tour bus, so it was very crowded. I used to wait until everyone was asleep to lie down on one of the couches, as I didn’t care for the coffin-like bunks. Ace Penna, from my Sheridan Square days, was our road manager, and it was good to have a mate in that post. We rolled from one town to another, the bus becoming one with the road, the mind-numbing mileage stretching on and on, only to be relieved by the show, some drinks, and a bit of a hang with the fans before the crew loaded up and we were off again.

  It was cool to be able to meet these fans and hear what they thought of the new music. I was still one with them. At this point, there was an intimate, human element to the tour, one that fame and notoriety would later prevent. These fans enjoyed the new scene. They had either been too young for punk or had never had the opportunity to experience it, since the music never really conquered America. Most of them had never seen any of the main characters in the flesh. During the show I would watch the audience near the stage as their eyes shone in the dark, the light show playing on their faces, the slashing whites and sonic blues blasting through with the onward pulse and throb of the music.

  The band and the crew were rising to the occasion and taking their responsibilities seriously, but there were also lighter moments. One night on the bus, Steve Stevens was sitting at a table while in front of him the lighting tech and his assistant discussed the show. Steve mentioned that he wasn’t sure he liked the green light they used on him during “Shooting Stars.” The two technicians looked puzzled. “We don’t have any green gels,” they insisted. “But there’s a green light on me during the show,” said Steve. “Oh,” nodded the lighting guy. “You mean chartreuse!”

  RIDING THE MOMENTUM OF THE single and album later that fall, we traversed some of the U.S. and Canadian cities I had read about but never actually seen in person.

  In the shadow of the Capitol dome in Washington, D.C., we stayed at a flea-bitten hotel, where the rooms smelled like golden showers and prostitutes plied their trade openly outside the entrance.

  With its links to Britain, Canada already knew about me, and the single and album received immediate play. The fans there were excited to see an English punk. I played a town called Kamloops. The main street boasted a corral and railhead at one end, with a blanket-coated Indian tribesman who gave me a T-shirt that read FIRST KAMLOOPS AND THEN THE WORLD! They went nuts in Vancouver and Edmonton, where there were large punk-rock followings. In Calgary, a kid was dancing so crazily, he fell from the theater balcony and ended up bent backward on the PA stack. That must’ve hurt, though it was hard to tell whether he felt any pain. I spoke to the kid later at the hotel (where he miraculously showed up after the gig) and told him he should go to a hospital, but he refused. He wasn’t leaving, nor were the other two hundred fans who seemed to have come to the hotel with him. They had enjoyed the show’s high energy, and it was great they were so enthusiastic. It made me believe what I did mattered to people.

  Before leaving Canada, thinking that they still put codeine in cough syrup, one of the roadies and I drank a whole bottle each before realizing there was nothing we wanted in it. I ended up spending the following forty-eight hours from Winnipeg to Trenton, New Jersey, out of my mind, and not in a good way. It was like a bum acid trip. The lyrics describing this experience—“I’m on a bus on a psychedelic trip / Reading murder books and trying to stay hip”—ended up in “Eyes Without a Face.” To pass the time and ignore the effects of the cough syrup, I watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre over and over, which gave me an idea for a future music video director.

  The fact is, I had started chipping the H regularly again, so going on tour proved to be a bit of a nightmare, as I was often dope-sick on the road. Every now and then, Perri somehow managed to send me some methadone she’d gotten back home to the hotels we stayed in along the way. It helped to temporarily stave off the heebie-jeebies, but not for long.

  With my drug habit, I was gradually slipping into a way of life that one day would take more than it would give. I was a functioning drug addict, capable of playing the gigs, but I was losing sight of all that was important. My dreams now came in the form of an addiction that insisted, “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” I wasn’t addicted to any one drug, but to a constant cocktail. I functioned stoned or dope-sick; somehow my heart drove me on, but how far could sheer willpower take me?

  I kept trying to clean up, which I suppose is commendable. Downtime meant a chance to pick up the habit again, and in trying to be clean, I turned to alcohol to salve my hunger temporarily. I knew the pitfalls of what I was doing—by then, Perri and I had long been estranged from normal society. This world seemed quite welcoming and alluring. Its womblike atmosphere promoted an unrealistic air of well-being that permeated everything.

  I was a kid, like any kid, trying to see if there was some rationale in life I could hold on to and somehow get a sense of myself to buoy me up. I had convinced myself that this could only be attained by reaching into the dark and making sense of the movements in that indistinct place where light fades, blackness rules, and figures play in the mind. From that imagination came fierce wild animals, searing deserts, a young prince and his lady caught up in a deadly web they’ve woven around themselves.

  My princess waited for me in a tiny garret in New York while I stormed the barricades, a dope-sick punk-rock prince devoted to a kind of sensibility I thought was missing from this world, lusting for forbidden adventures and misadventures, needing to stare the world in the face before being finally undone and swept into the void.

  As Flash Gordon’s Ming the Merciless put it, “Pathetic Earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  REBEL YELL WITH A CAUSE

  New York City

  THE END OF THAT CLUB tour coincided with the close of 1982. The picture of life for me had altered considerably in the few years since I’d moved to the U.S. I was no longer an unknown quantity or some leftover from the punk era but a bona fide ’80s rock star with an EP, a hit album, and several big MTV videos under my belt. I was also a junkie and an alcoholic, but at that time none of that fazed me, as the forward momentum of my new life swallowed up any fears or cause for alarm. In fact, the last thing I thought about was my drug problem.

  We were back in New York to begin writing songs for a new album. With the advances I’d received for the first solo album, I had enough money to feed whatever desires I had, so I no longer had to worry about my dope sickness—we started taking dope every day, as we could now afford to buy our own. With that, I returned to living on it, maintaining when I had to with a small amount to stop from feeling bad, functioning in the daytime, taking a little more at night just to get high. Sheridan Square off Seventh Avenue offered easy access to subway stations, but now I was able to afford cabs, which made traveling around the city that much easier.

  First off, we decided to make a video of “Dancing with Myself,” which was still being
played like mad in the clubs and had now started to pick up radio airplay as well. We got in touch with a chap named Jeff Abelson, who told us he could get Coca-Cola to help with the financing. A number of ideas were considered, including designing a set as a gigantic pinball table, which would allow Coke to advertise their product and give us access to a bigger budget. In the end, these plans fell through, but so do many early video treatments, as you tend to brainstorm a million scenarios before coming up with the concept that will eventually appear on-screen.

  We approached Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist director Tobe Hooper, who agreed to do it, much to my surprise. It may have been the first time a feature director helmed a video for MTV. We met with Tobe in L.A. and came up with a sketch of break-dancing zombies, a mad sledgehammer-swinging killer dad, karate-kicking kids, and a woman tied up, which was supposed to be my Octobriana tattoo in bondage.

  I would be the protagonist, poised atop a futuristic tower being climbed by zombies attempting to pull me down. I would then destroy them by grabbing two electrodes, which charge my body. It was a simple idea, but there were censorship constraints being put on us by MTV, so the final result had to comply with their code or they wouldn’t play it. We had to hold back on some of the horror elements, and at times would only vaguely suggest the corruption in the world that had led to a mad sledgehammer-swinging dad killing a mother as the kids kung fu–kicked their way into the future.

  Tobe was cool, bringing his production team to the table and giving us access to his wardrobe and makeup artists. In keeping with the futuristic tone, they constructed a skeletal top that exposed my body but was unlike anything I had ever worn in my stage show. To cast our zombies, Perri and I headed down to Radio, a club beneath an archway where break-dancers met to show off their skills. We chose a few we thought were exceptional to appear as zombies in the video.

  Once again, we bleached my hair the night before the shoot. I nodded out while waiting for the bleach to take and woke up an hour or so later with most of my hair fried, leaving a tuft at the front stuck up just enough to prevent anyone from seeing just how short it really was. Tobe used a lot of refracted lights, the reflections concealing my bald scalp.

  The shoot went pretty smoothly. The break-dancers jerked in and out, contorting their bodies in their signature moves as they climbed to the top of the tower. Tobe’s special-effects people used a painted-glass shot to show the view looking down from my perspective, then combined the footage with shots of the break-dancers tumbling from a trampoline to get the effect of them falling into the vast depths when I zapped them from the tower. Another piece of glass was painted to show a huge billboard of my tattoo above me at the top of the tower in the ending shot. Octobriana, my tattooed love goddess, who appeared to be tied up during the video, was now free, the image showing her standing in as a female symbol of liberty for this dark world. Thank God Coca-Cola said no to the pinball idea, as I think this version was more in keeping with the dark style we first portrayed in “White Wedding.” It was a futuristic vamp, a take on a larger-than-life comic-book world.

  The “Dancing with Myself” video did really well on MTV and kept my album alive while we started to write songs for the next one. Having a well-known movie director work on it gave it a pedigree and backstory very few videos had at the time.

  After the video shoot we began meeting at a rehearsal studio below Fourteenth Street, working on ideas and songs for the new album. Walking across Sixth Avenue, I started to hear a tune in my head, like a series of notes running up the scale. I had always been interested in how classical composers created some of their best themes by moving directly up the musical scale, with one or two minor variations or strategic pauses before cascading back down the scale.

  I’ve always had a fascination with the titles of horror films. I had been reading a book about the genre’s history, with riveting concepts and titles such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I was particularly intrigued by the ’60s French nouvelle vague forerunner Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face), about a brilliant plastic surgeon who vows to restore the face of his daughter, who has been horribly disfigured in a car accident. This vow leads him to murder, as he sets out collecting the facial features of his victims, which he then grafts onto his daughter’s hideous countenance, attempting to restore her beauty. Her staring eyes remain the only thing visible.

  When I got to the studio, I told Steve Stevens about the tune I had in my head, though I didn’t have any chords. He showed me a revolving four-chord pattern he’d been working on that fit really well over the top of the tune. I started to use “Eyes Without a Face” as a possible title/lyric/chorus for the song. I began to write words that, in some disguised form, spoke about my life in New York and a relationship gone wrong, on the edge of disintegrating into madness. Perhaps I was reflecting on my own touring infidelities. In a way, those can leave you feeling soulless, especially if you’re already in a relationship that you value but are degrading by looking elsewhere for additional sexual kicks.

  The early ’80s were a time of sexual freedom, as AIDS had yet to fully impact the heterosexual world. In the ’50s, syphilis had been cured, and penicillin had wiped out gonorrhea. Only herpes remained as an STD scourge, so we were left in a fool’s paradise, believing that sex had no permanent consequences. The age of free love was in its last stages, and science was about to make us aware of the perils of this kind of behavior.

  Steve and I were now working closely together as a writing and creative team, continuing what we had started on our first album. Steve owned a small four-track recording machine, which allowed us to make demos of music soundscape ideas that we used to record melodies and lyrics that I came up with.

  Keith Forsey flew to New York to check on our progress. One of the songs he thought had potential, though still as yet unrealized, was a song Steve and I had begun working on called “Flesh for Fantasy.” It was initially an upbeat rock ’n’ roll song, a speedy, punk-rock number with a title I had thought of after seeing an old “portmanteau” film, Flesh and Fantasy, starring Edward G. Robinson and Barbara Stanwyck. I wasn’t yet convinced of its worth, as I didn’t feel it had a solid foundation. While the title spoke of something sexy, it proved an effort to put some soul into it. We soon devised a different, slower, syncopated groove in the verse and tried joining it with the punk-rock chorus and a new soulful beginning. It still wasn’t right, but at that point we were working on a number of different songs, so we put it aside to continue working on the others. Keith felt we had made sufficient progress with several songs, and as the winter was turning to spring, we began to talk about starting to record. Both Steve and I wanted to record the album in New York this time, so we began making arrangements to book time in the legendary Electric Lady Studios, a studio built by Jimi Hendrix in the heart of the Village on Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, less than two blocks from my apartment. We still needed a bit more time to work up material, so Keith went back to L.A. while we continued searching for new ideas.

  Perri and I began hanging out with Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood and his wife, Jo, in their Upper West Side brownstone. It was fun shooting the shit with Ronnie; I enjoyed the English camaraderie and his comfortable surroundings, unlike our tiny unfurnished Sheridan Square apartment. Jo was lovely, and it was cool for Perri and me to have an English couple with whom to socialize.

  One day, Ronnie invited us to a birthday party at the brownstone. I forget whether it was for him or one of the other Stones, but I soon found myself standing with and talking to Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Wood, noticing each had a bottle of booze in his hands. As the bottle moved toward their lips, I followed its path and saw it had a Confederate cavalry officer dressed in gray riding a horse on the label. Above this figure was the name REBEL YELL. I had been interested in the American Civil War ever since I’d visited Gettysburg when I was five.

  Gazing at the three guzzling Stones, I asked them if they had the bottle custom-made. “It’s a So
uthern mash bourbon,” they answered. “And it’s called ‘Rebel Yell’?” I asked. “Do you think you’d ever use that as a song title?” I tried to convince them it wasn’t quite as iconic for them as “Jumping Jack Flash” or “Gimme Shelter,” and they shook their heads and said they wouldn’t use it. “Great,” I said. “Because I might just use that title for a song, and maybe even call my next album that.” I’m sure they couldn’t have cared in the slightest, but up until that point, I’d had no idea what I wanted to name the album we were about to record. Here, right in front of me, in the public domain at the very mouths of the Stones, I had my answer. Thanks, lads. Now all I had to do was write the song.

  A day or so later, I sat down, cradling my trusty Epiphone guitar, and began pumping eighth notes in the chord of B. I decided to make “Rebel Yell” a cry of love instead of the battlefield, as I had no intention of singing about the Civil War. After all, ladies are the most powerful creatures in this world, and this would be an anthem to love between a man and a woman. I thought about Perri and started to sing:

  “Last night a little dancer came dancing to my door / Last night the little angel came pumping on my floor / She said, ‘C’mon baby you’ve got a license for love / And if it expires pray help from above’ / In the midnight hour she cries more more more / With a rebel yell, she cries more more more more more more!’ ”

  I went to rehearsal, and we came up with a verse-chorus-verse-chorus setup. Steve then produced a middle sixteen bars to go before his solo. In looking for an introduction, I suggested using this new middle piece. Once we fitted it all together, we had the bare bones of the song to show Keith Forsey when he returned to New York.

  At the time, the Stones were recording “Undercover of the Night,” from, I believe, a Mick Jagger song idea. I was invited to the Hit Factory in New York to watch as Mick laid down a couple of vocal tracks, with Keith chiming in occasionally. Jagger did all his classic stage moves, and it was a blast seeing him in action in the studio. The song had a dance-rock beat, and I observed as they tried to tighten up the groove to make it more club oriented. At the time in most dance clubs, the DJs kept careful track of the beats per minute, or BPM, of a song so that they could seamlessly mix different tracks together without the intensity of the beat ever letting up, interrupting the flow of the dancers. I could tell the number sped up or slowed down slightly as it went into the different sections, which was cool, except it probably wouldn’t flow in a club.