by Billy Idol
Knowing the tricks we had used to enable a song to be machined into a groove, I caught a glimpse of the band lined up behind the control desk. “Have you ever tried locking the drums up and triggering a pulse to drive the rhythm of the music and get that machinelike groove?” I asked. I wish I had a camera to catch the look of disgust that came over their faces one at a time as they peered up from the control desk, a look they might have given upon sniffing a particularly foul odor. I laughed and said, “Just an idea from the people at Idol,” and realized I’d better shut up, as they knew what they wanted.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A CHANGE IN PACE OF FANTASY AND TASTE
Electric Lady Studios, Greenwich Village, New York City
THE HOT, PULSING HUMIDITY OF New York bore down, and the droplets of water falling on one’s head from the millions of air conditioners felt like the beginning of a rainfall that never came. Nothing could stop the relentless flow of hot air that whirled about the city streets as I made my way to Electric Lady Studios and into the dark and cool of the chilled rooms that sent a shiver through my body as I adjusted to the lower temperature. I moved along a snaking corridor that fed into the studio, where the lads had set up the drums and backline equipment, ready for us to start laying down some of the tracks. The carpeted, soundproof floors and ceilings betrayed no echo of my footfalls as I passed along the curved passageway and pushed myself into the bright glare of the control room.
Founded by Jimi Hendrix in 1970, Electric Lady was an oddball for its time. Instead of following the usual studio model—a big, impersonal box—it was a psychedelic den, with curved walls, groovy multihued lights, and sci-fi erotica murals to aid the creative flow. Hendrix had died barely three weeks after its opening party, but the list of greats who then recorded albums there included Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and John Lennon. Would what we were about to lay down have the same kind of resonance? We had yet to find out. The purple carpeting and psychedelic wall murals that echoed the ’60s seemed a little dated in 1983, but at the same time, we wanted to record there, not just drink in the ambience. Somehow, we would have to leave our impression in these hallowed halls, just as so many others had over the years.
Keith arrived from L.A. and we began to work up the songs to ready them for recording. We began by cutting “(Do Not) Stand in the Shadows,” with a drummer who had been working with us, but after a while, it was like pulling teeth to get what we wanted. After that, the drums lay silent, and we tracked everything to Keith’s patterns using a Linn drum machine that had decent rock sounds. We used both the Linn and a Roland 808 that had a much softer sound and was a favorite of a great many R&B acts. Keith’s drum patterns were very distinctive and usually ended up as the hook in the song. Keith always thought song first when he came up with his parts. Other drummers were too busy worrying about what their friends would say about their performance to give us the relentless pace we were looking for. A drum machine had no ego and no friends to impress, and Keith could work it like a master. We were not playing just one style of music but a mixture of soul, rock, R&B, and punk, so a drummer needed to be versed in all of these styles, making it expedient to use the drum machine. Although the drum machine was soulless, Keith had worked with it long enough to know how to infuse it with the passion we needed to lay down the new tracks.
When it came time to do “Flesh for Fantasy,” we recorded a version that still had a punk chorus, but we dropped that pretty fast and went back to the drawing board, deciding in favor of the final arrangement you hear on the record. Thank God for that, because it was now a silky smooth soul song with a dynamic chorus that let the title act as a cry of sexual need rather than a punky put-down. I sang the song while clutching Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novella Venus in Furs, the very one that gave the Velvet Underground song its name.
“There’s a change in pace of fantasy and taste / Do you like good music / Do you like to dance.” I wrote the lyric as if it were a sexual advert someone had placed in a newspaper or magazine. “Hanging out for a body shop at night / Ain’t it strange what we do to feel alright.”
It is strange what mental and chemical processes our minds and bodies go through that send us searching deep into the night for sexual satisfaction. Some people took my advert literally. Mainly, it’s a sexy song that spoke to the audiences of the time, who were in the process of discovering their own sexualities.
When it came time to record “Rebel Yell,” we had no idea how to end it, so we just left a massive groove section to play out at the end. After doing most of the other tracking, the song was musically complete. Keith placed me in the middle of the studio with a handheld mic and let me vamp away over the drop-down ending. I had no idea what I was going to say or what tune I was going to invent. But believe it or not, on the first pass, the words “I walked the world for you, babe / A thousand miles for you / Who’ll dry your tears of pain, babe / A million times for you” just came out. Basically, I just riffed and jammed the whole ending on the recording. I later perfected the performance with a better microphone, my standard Neumann 48.
We proceeded to lay down “Daytime Drama,” “Blue Highway,” and “The Dead Next Door” in short order, as we already had decent demos with the words and arrangements pretty much all there.
I SPEND SO MUCH TIME / BELIEVING ALL THE LIES / TO KEEP THE DREAM ALIVE / NOW IT MAKES ME SAD / IT MAKES ME MAD AT TRUTH / FOR LOVING WHAT WAS YOU / EYES WITHOUT A FACE / GOT NO HUMAN GRACE / EYES WITHOUT A FACE.
I used to tell people “Eyes Without a Face” was a murder song. I wonder if I was aware that it was my hijinks and gradual infidelity that were killing Perri’s and my love story. Certainly I was beginning to drift into a strange world where you usually don’t touch the ground and the only way to find human comfort is with a fresh someone for the night in a strange town on a strange continent. It’s possible I was predicting our eventual dissolution, even though our love hadn’t begun to fade. But the ten-month-long Rebel Yell tour was soon to begin, and that, coupled with the drug consumption and nonstop sex, would be enough to erode anybody’s relationship.
NOW I CLOSE MY EYES / AND I WONDER WHY / I DON’T DESPISE / NOW ALL I CAN DO / IS LOVE WHAT WAS ONCE / SO ALIVE AND NEW / BUT IT’S GONE FROM YOUR EYES / I’D BETTER REALIZE.
The recording of “Eyes Without a Face” went well. Steve came up with a blistering guitar riff for the middle of the song that added a whole other dimension, rendering it more than just a ballad. I improvised a rapping part to go over the top. Rap was everywhere in New York at the time, in all the discos and clubs, so it made sense after my croon to start talking streetwise over Steve’s supersonic barrage of sound. I thought to myself, This album is getting really exciting. I wanted a deep bass groove like those Sly and Robbie reggae records I loved, but it was difficult to get that. We tried quite a few bass players before we found a guy who played for the Broadway musical Dreamgirls, a Cuban bass player named Sal Cuevas, who really got what I was looking for. That must have been one of the heaviest bass sounds on any ’80s record. We had a terrible time trying to convince the person cutting the vinyl record to make the bass loud enough, because the deep grooves that accommodate bass notes on a record—if too loud—can flip the needle off the record entirely.
We still didn’t have the full complement of songs for the album, so I came up with “Catch My Fall” as an idea. It was a simple croon that mostly just described how I struggled with life’s successes and failures, much like anyone else in the world, but it made a nice addition to the album. We threw on a Mars Williams sax solo as a change of pace from the guitar solos on every other track.
One of the last songs we came up with was “Crank Call,” which I was still singing the night before we delivered the album in November. We partied a great deal during the making of the album, but only after the day’s work was complete. I was taking just enough heroin to maintain in the studio; then, later at night, when I got home, I would do a bigger line to get high. A Russian guy named
Ivan used to turn up at the studio with his foxy girlfriend and tons of blow, but I wasn’t so into that, even though it was nice to snort a couple of lines and have a cocktail after finishing up the session. Coke was handy if you did a quaalude and wanted to stay awake to party, but it wasn’t my drug of choice at the time.
I was busy getting the album cover ready with a couple of photo shoots. One had me standing on a pile of Rebel Yell bottles. Afterward, the photographers’ lovely female assistant and I started to drink from them. About halfway through, we both got the worst hangover of all time. When I got home, it took two lines of heroin to rid me of the feeling. How the fuck did the Stones guzzle that stuff? They must have cast-iron livers! Jesus! I was basically a vodka and tequila man. When you’re on heroin, you don’t drink or want much of anything else. It’s only when you stop doing smack that you start boozing or taking other drugs to try to get over the withdrawal.
At the eleventh hour of finishing the album, we knew we needed a real drummer. As good as the Linn was, it still sounded a bit too unreal at times, especially for the uptempo songs. All the parts were there; they just had to be copied and played by someone. That someone ended up being Thommy Price, who had been playing for Joan Jett and Patty Smyth. He really copped the feeling of the songs, and it was incredible fun watching him blast through “Rebel Yell,” giving it the thunder you can still hear on it today. He tracked most of the album and then joined the band for the upcoming tour.
We almost missed our release date when the guy designing the album cover started to bullshit me about problems with the shot I had chosen, telling me a blemish in the background on the mock-up would look all right once it was blown up. I knew if it was enlarged, the blemish would only look worse, so I refused to let the album release without the alterations that I felt were important. The record label was threatening to put it out as it was because there was no time before the release date to fix it. I went to the studio where we were now doing the final mixes, and when nobody was around, I took the master tapes and held the album hostage until my wishes regarding the cover were addressed. I left the masters with my heroin dealer for safekeeping to really give them the shits. That got them listening, especially when I said I would bootleg the entire album first rather than let them put out the cover as it was. In the end, I got my way. Sometimes you’ve just got to go to the wall or people, if you let them, will walk all over you.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
EVERYBODY MUST GET ROLLING STONED
New York, Tristate Area
WE STARTED TOURING AS SOON as the album was finished, playing mainly clubs. Rebel Yell arrived in stores in November 1983, just in time for the holiday season. We supported A Flock of Seagulls at Rutgers University one night—I don’t think they expected us to be as good as we were, since most people from England had pretty much dismissed us. They didn’t know what I was up to in the U.S., or that I had an American following.
I was still relatively new to the States, but the audience felt they were getting a real show with authentic punk attitude. What I was doing now suited the young ladies in the audience, but the guys dug it too, because there were so many girls at my gigs. And, in my own way, I was still a rebel. We were ending our set with “Rebel Yell,” then coming back with “Mony Mony.” We were a tough act to follow! It was great playing “Blue Highway” and “Flesh for Fantasy,” too. The new album was a lot more fun to perform live, and more solid in its intent. We also did “Hot in the City,” “White Wedding,” Generation X’s “Untouchables,” and “Dancing with Myself.”
A Flock of Seagulls didn’t really have many recognizable songs other than “I Ran,” so we pretty much blew them off the stage, leaving the audience shagged out and exhausted by the time they came on. We were also using many of the same ideas as them: the low, rumbling bass, the spaced-out guitar effects. Steve Stevens simply wiped the floor with most guitarists he came up against, and Thommy Price rocked the house on drums, with the Canadian Steve Webster, who had also played on the album, most notably on “Flesh for Fantasy,” on bass. We also had Judi Dozier on keyboards, which was cool because the girls loved seeing a chick playing with us wild guys.
It was a great gig, with the early-’80s fans digging on the new decade and loving it. They weren’t jaded like most rock critics. This wasn’t the boring pedestrian rock of yesteryear. No, this was fired-up rock to grab you by the loins and drag you into a decade that had hope and excess running side by side, where the corruption of the ’70s was forgotten in a brand-new world.
We also played a nationally televised live show for MTV on New Year’s Eve ’83 with the Stray Cats and, via satellite from Wembley, England, the Police. We performed several of the new songs, giving them an incredible launch, letting viewers see how exciting an Idol show could be. It proved we were much more than just a video band and really fueled interest, with the attendance at our club dates swelling.
But during this whole period, I was still a junkie, trying to kick it and straighten out enough so I could go on tour and promote my album. I was struggling, but not admitting it to myself. The sum of my efforts to clean myself up would amount to replacing the heroin with booze and, later, cocaine, which today I realize was a disaster for me. Still, I was young, and didn’t sit there and mull over the possible negative effects of my actions. I had too much to think about with this new venture to consider a possible downside to my addictions. The party was too good to leave, so while I continued down the crooked path, those around me were left to deal with the different facets of my personality that started turning up when I had a bad reaction to doing too much liquor and blow in addition to smack.
I would go into a rage if somebody set me off. I only see this now in retrospect. At the time, I thought the tantrums were funny, once they were over, as they wouldn’t last long. But my hair-trigger temper would become a problem because I wasn’t in control. I was completely unpredictable with what I would say or do, and whatever it was, I couldn’t remember afterward. One of my video producers, T’Boo Dalton, would later give the ugliest of my many drug-fueled personalities a name: “Zool.”
“Rebel Yell,” the first single from the album, was about to be released and we didn’t have a video, so we decided to make a live performance video to showcase the new band and album. We chose to hire the American director Jeff Stein, who shot the Who documentary The Kids Are Alright. I loved the documentary and liked that Jeff was a film director with experience but was used to shooting rock ’n’ roll bands. When we got together to plan the video, it was at the end of the first three weeks of shows, and I don’t think I had slept much due to the dope sickness. It was taking a while to set up and I had fallen asleep in a chair for a bit when Jeff innocently woke me to ask about something, and I flew off the handle and in a flash had him up against a wall.
When you are strung out, you have a tremendous amount of pent-up, nasty energy, and if it gets channeled via the wrong emotions, the results can be noxious. A person can become dangerous even if he is not usually violent. On this particular occasion, even though I am not a violent person by nature, being awakened so unceremoniously by Jeff pissed me off, and I lost it. I realized quite soon that I had overreacted and that Jeff had no ill intentions. I quickly calmed down, apologized, and proposed I go home and sleep, then come back the following day refreshed, ready to work.
It was the holiday season, so all the equipment houses were closed and we had nowhere to shoot the video. Somehow, Jeff and his crew managed to secure the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey. They bused kids out of New York City to the theater. Of course, they loaded the buses with wine and beer, which nowadays you could not do. At the theater, everyone was very merry. Jeff put the hot-looking girls with the big tits up front. We had a mosh pit—Jeff’s cameraman had the footprint of a Doc Martens boot in his cheek for a week.
Even though the video was a triumph, it was a hair-raising experience. About an hour before the “Rebel Yell” world premiere, MTV called, demanding
removal of a shot of a kid in the front row holding a Budweiser can. So Jeff got the master tape and had to find a shot to slug in, just one more shot of hot-looking girls with big tits. They ran it over to MTV ten minutes before the world premiere. If they hadn’t, there would have been nearly five minutes of black. That’s what it was like in those days.
Jeff Stein is a great guy who didn’t take my blow-up personally, and instead produced an incredible video with one day’s notice. . . . But Zool had struck and would strike again.
THE COVER OF ROLLING STONE magazine, especially in those days, was the ultimate recognition of credibility for an artist and his music. So, when informed by my publicists, Howard Bloom and Ellen Golden, that they wanted to do an interview with me for a possible cover, I was excited. However, that enthusiasm became tempered with increasing paranoia, especially when I learned the magazine had a reputation of being antagonistic toward MTV and those artists—like me—who were heavily promoted on the network. This was of particular concern for my press reps. When I heard that the article about me would be called “A Date with Billy Idol,” it sounded like something out of a teenybopper magazine and only added to my fears about how I would be portrayed.
