by Billy Idol
But work was not so far off. My British/European publicist, Sharon Chevin, soon arrived on the island and brought some journalists with her for interviews and pictures to promote the album’s international release. Some cool photos were taken in the golden-hour sun that effectively masked the physical effects of the last few months. That kicked off the imminent album release in a relaxed and beautiful setting. Eating properly and swimming every day had brought me back to a decent state of health.
Throughout my stay, though, I was coughing up thick, dark phlegm from my lungs, which showed me just how much I had been abusing myself over the past few years. The long, hot sunshine days blurred into drunken nights and passionate squabbling with Anita, followed by makeup sex in the sand dunes of the nude beaches or in the sea in full view of the public. My lungs slowly expelled the black mush that had been accumulating, and my mind and body started to realize that by hook or by crook, I had kicked heroin and was now ridding myself of the nasty coke-smoking habit.
I enjoyed being with my parents in Majorca, but I was in rock ’n’ roll mode and couldn’t completely turn off the reality that my album was about to be released, with the underlying anxieties and concerns about how it would be received. I knew I had to stay on my toes when dealing with the very sharp English music journalists. With them around, I could not afford to switch off my mind entirely, which would have been nice. But the compressed nature of time in rock ’n’ roll is such that things need to be done right at the moment of conception.
I went with my parents to a club for older people featuring guest musicians, and my mum asked me to sing a couple of songs. That meant being in front of an audience, and I had to be the Billy Idol that people expected. Though I was in Majorca as William Broad, even my parents at times still wanted me to manifest the onstage Billy Idol. This was jarring to me in the vacation setting. When I’m Billy Idol, I’m wired differently than William Broad. William Broad can quietly sit and read his history books, while Mr. Hyde shakes it onstage. It’s a dichotomy in my personality. It’s not that I’m putting on anything when I’m Billy Idol; I’m just reaching in and pulling out my extrovert self.
After that two-week break, I was in much better shape. I was off heroin and coke, but I was still drinking quite a bit. I had gone from the swings to the slide, but at least I had begun to try to get a hold of myself instead of being completely out of control and scaring all my friends and loved ones half to death.
By the time I returned to the States, Whiplash Smile, which I’d begun recording in June 1985, had been released; the LP on October 15, 1986, and the CD on December 10. This staggered release was how it was done in those early days of producing CDs, in part because record labels offered reduced royalties on CD sales, thievery under the guise of offsetting new production costs.
Within a week of my return, despite all good intentions following my stay in Majorca, I had become a belligerent drunk. In the past, I had OD’d on heroin and been hospitalized for going crazy on cocaine. Now liquor was my poison. I managed to function quite well, considering. I did do some blow, not quite the reformed lad I had hoped, but certainly a step in the right direction compared to my recent track record. The added bonus was that the booze fed my sex addiction. The orgiastic moments in between work were filled with casual sex, no strings attached, a young man’s dream come true.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE LUCK OF THE IRISH
Thirteenth Street, New York
I HAD TO LEAVE MY Barrow Street apartment because the lease was up, so on September 1, 1986, I moved into a place on Thirteenth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. With a change of scene, I began making an effort to clean up, seeing a psychotherapist to talk about my addictions—although I probably didn’t recognize them as such at the time. Today, I can see that I was completely caught up in a web of my own making, trying to find a way out.
The psychotherapist’s name was Dr. Trigg, and we got together a couple of times a week. He would talk to me about not taking drugs, in particular crack, and I told him—a pack-a-day tobacco smoker—that he shouldn’t smoke cigarettes. He was a nice man and tried his best to help me, and for a short time, he helped me keep my drug use in check.
After a few months in a fairly clear state, I realized just exactly how much I was missing Perri. Shortly before Christmas, we began talking to each other again. We both seemed to be in a better frame of mind and we were relieved that we still genuinely cared about each other, even after our long breakup of over nine months. Add to this the time I’d spent in L.A. working on King Death, and it seemed like we had been apart for longer. Brigid remembers coming to my apartment one December day and seeing champagne bottles everywhere. She found Perri and me there in bed together . . . reunited.
And so Perri moved back in with me, but things were still very rocky when it came to drugs. Though I had longed terribly for Perri while she was gone, I still had difficulty staying home and being faithful to her. I would sometimes stay in a midtown hotel to have various affairs on the side or just to get some space to myself. More than anything else, I wanted to carry on partying where I wasn’t being watched by anyone who really cared about me.
All around me, people were dying. I met a waitress from the club Area, and she spent a couple of days and nights with me, and when I next heard about her the following week, she was dead of a heroin overdose. But reality didn’t play a part in my thought process. I didn’t or couldn’t care about my own health or safety, as I inevitably gravitated toward people who operated under the same set of rules.
In late February 1987, I found myself on another coke-smoking binge, walking into a police anti-crack sting in Washington Square with another lady friend, Grace Hattersley. Everyone else in Manhattan had read in the newspaper that day that there would be a police operation in the park that night. The police only insisted on arresting one of us, and Grace kindly decided to take the fall for me. A true gift, since I could’ve been deported had it been me who was arrested. Nonetheless, it ended up on the front pages of all the New York papers.
Just prior to this incident, I had taken a meeting with my press agent, Howard Bloom, who was telling me we needed a major press event to help announce the tour, so when I saw him the day after the front-page exposure, I said to him, “Well, how’s that for press coverage?” and he responded in an exasperated tone, “I didn’t mean that kind of press.”
The story didn’t end there. Grace gave a press conference, mentioning that she was my girlfriend, which enraged Perri, who decided to call her own press conference to announce that she was my real girlfriend. The day after Grace’s media chat, Perri appeared at hers, opening up her shirt to display a leopard-print bra to the photographers as she exclaimed to the assembled press: “I’m Billy Idol’s girlfriend. I know something like this may split up some people, but we’ve been through a lot.” That settled it.
When I headlined Madison Square Garden later that year, I opened the show with an insider’s remark, “From Washington Square to Madison Square,” and the audience roared with laughter.
* * *
THE VIDEOS FOR “TO BE a Lover,” “Sweet Sixteen,” and “Don’t Need a Gun” kept the MTV audience transfixed, and the Whiplash Smile tour was booked for summer and fall. The album would go platinum, but despite our overt success, this thing that Bill, Steve, and I had started, that had been rolling along quite nicely, was now coming apart at the seams. As far as anybody outside the inner circle was concerned, it remained in full motion. I certainly wasn’t immune to ego and vanity at the time, and the drugs and alcohol were closing my mind to a lot of what was going on around me. I was living a fantasy that was real, but was losing my grip. It was life as only a rock star would know it, but it was twisted, and I was living it in public. I was a young man leaning into the wind of his aspirations with a kind of desperation that twisted the world into the view I had of it.
I knew once I got out on the road the reign of tyranny—my bad habits—would kick into ov
erdrive. At the start of the tour I began to snort coke, and then everything was ratcheted up a notch or two or three. Booze, coke, broads, and Mary Jane ruled. Beginning at the Spectrum in Philadelphia in April of 1987 and ending five months later in Sydney, the party rolled on and on in an overabundance of sound, fury, and wild energy.
In addition to Steve Stevens, my band for the tour included Kenny Aaronson on bass, Thommy Price on drums, and Susie Davis on keyboards. We had experimented with a lot of technology in the recording process, and the band was feeling the constraints of trying to reproduce everything live, as we had some keyboard-driven songs that had to be locked in with the synth. Everyone tried to make it work, but unfortunately the high-tech demands grated on the band. It was the early days of combining live and prerecorded shit. The techniques we used had to be babied into place, and it took forever to set up and make sure that everything was working properly. I was asking a great deal of everyone, and to their credit, both band and crew rose to the occasion.
The Whiplash Smile tour wasn’t as much fun or as carefree as the Rebel Yell tour, for many reasons. The dynamics of the relationships had changed. Everyone was a lot higher, and we were all partying our asses off. As the leader, I should have played to people’s strengths, not simply made them adhere to my ideas for the sake of it. A true leader should set people free, not make them feel trapped. But I was too high on drugs to realize that, let alone make it happen.
Despite the emerging tensions, the gigs somehow came off well to the outside world. But that old joie de vivre was harder to conjure up. Concert arenas all looked alike, and it was hard to reach the fans like we could in clubs or theaters, even though I encouraged the audience to pull up to the barrier at the front of the stage. We missed playing in smaller venues where the audiences were allowed more freedom, more connection. In these larger venues, the music had less dynamics, and sometimes it all became a blur in the big, cavernous spaces.
Still, one thing about Idol audiences—they go nuts no matter where they are. There were tons of girls with their cutest ’80s gear, highest fuck-me pumps, going crazy with their teased hair and short skirts. Some wild punks were still there, too. You couldn’t help but reach into that audience and take what you wanted. I was turning into a rock ’n’ roll monster, but I liked it, and basked in the greatest drug of all—adulation.
It was about midway through the tour and Mike Bone, the new head of Chrysalis Records, was looking for a way to make an immediate mark. He proposed doing a live version of “Mony Mony” to go with a collection of our remixes since 1980 compiled into one album that we would call Vital Idol. It was the closest thing to a dub album I could make, and up until that point, no one had done anything quite like it. Keith Forsey came to one of the shows and we recorded a live version of “Mony Mony.” We released it as a single because Mike felt our studio version didn’t receive the exposure it deserved when it came out in 1981.
The new live take was more guitar-oriented, and when the single was released it went to number one (knocking off another Tommy James song, teen mall queen Tiffany’s cover of “I Think We’re Alone Now”). Vital Idol also did well, breaking into the Top 20 on the Billboard chart. The luck of the Irish was still with me. Or was it?
“IT’S MY BAND!” SCREAMED STEVE Stevens in my face one night. The little Jewish kid from Far Rockaway is as strong as an ox, by the way. I’d discovered this when I tumbled with him during a momentary argument and he pinned me to the floor. Now, as the tensions of the tour finally boiled over, he was confronting me and being very belligerent. I shot back at him, “Your band? It’s my band!” Somehow, my drug- and paranoia-fueled ego got the best of me and we were having a full-on shouting match in front of the rest of the band, the traveling party, and the backstage workers.
Nothing more was said, but after the tour, Steve went off to pursue a solo career for Warner Bros. If Bill Aucoin had been around, I think he would have found a way to hold it together. As the tour progressed, I succeeded in driving Steve to the end of his tether, forgetting all he’d done for me. Sorry, Steve, you didn’t need your mate disappearing in front of you, but that’s exactly what happened.
PART III
LOS ANGELES
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
WE NEED A MIRACLE JOY, WE NEED A ROCK AND ROLL BOY
Astral Drive, Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles
BY THE END OF 1987, Perri and I had fully reconciled and had a new goal in place. We set out for California, moving into a house on Astral Drive, a side street in the Hollywood Hills, where Van Morrison supposedly lived in the late ’60s and got the inspiration for his classic album Astral Weeks. It was a time of change for me on multiple fronts. I had a new home in a new city and, once again, a new manager to help guide my career. Freddy DeMann had done a fine job under the trying circumstances created by Aucoin’s disappearance, but our partnership just never felt right. With the Whiplash Smile project having run its course, I finally had a chance to think about my management situation and decided to hire Tony Dimitriades.
Our new home on Astral Drive was right down the block from Tony D.’s house. I’d met Tony during Christmas 1986 while on a brief vacation in Hawaii. Perri and I were staying in a hotel in Maui, but everywhere we went, eager fans and curious holidaymakers recognized us. We wanted to go somewhere that was quieter, and John Diaz suggested we call his friend Tony, who was in Kauai. We ended up sharing a house on the beach with Tony. I got to know and like him.
Tony is an Englishman of Greek Cypriot descent. He had been a lawyer in the UK in the late ’60s and began managing artists in the early ’70s before moving to Los Angeles in 1976. Turned out it was a lot more exciting than practicing entertainment law and British constitutional law, although he did have some wild stories about litigating as the British Commonwealth began breaking apart.
When I got to know Tony, he was managing Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (“You Got Lucky” was one of the few songs I actually liked on early-’80s U.S. radio) as well as Yes and Stevie Nicks. I liked Tony the moment I met him and thought he was what I needed: a fellow Brit to guide me.
Relocating to L.A. was a deliberate move: Perri and I wanted to get away from the craziness of New York and give our relationship an honest chance. Steve Stevens had also moved west and had begun working on a solo album with a two-record deal at Warner Bros. Now “the man behind Billy Idol,” as the press dubbed Steve, was no longer there for me, which was frightening. At the same time, I was really trying to pull myself together and get back to square one, both personally and professionally. I knew it would take a while to rewire my brain.
Trying to cool out and settle down, Perri and I decided to have a baby together. About a month after we moved to L.A., Perri announced she was pregnant, which was very exciting. We began to make preparations for our new life, which represented a welcome change in my state of mind. The impending arrival of our child gave us a fresh focus as a couple. I began to work out to try to build my depleted body back up, hoping my brain would follow suit.
Perri was in seventh heaven during her pregnancy; we soon found out she would be having a boy. One morning, she woke up, turned to me, and said, “I just saw his face.” I believed it, too, as mother and child are so connected to one another. She would practice her yoga and take walks regularly. Perri decided she wanted a home birth, believing a drug-free delivery would be better for the baby. We went to Lamaze classes, where we learned breathing and birthing practices, and I was taught how to coach Perri through the delivery. Perri is pretty tough, and after a couple more classes at home, she seemed mentally prepared for the experience.
With “Mony Mony” at number one on the Billboard singles chart, I decided to celebrate. I bought myself a Harley-Davidson Wide Glide motorcycle, which I still own to this day. I also purchased some gym equipment and a treadmill, so I could work out at home and build up the physical strength to ride her. I’d always loved motorcycles, and would talk all the time to Derwood about his BSA Gold Star in
our Generation X days. But the Harley is a big American bike equally suited to the freeways as well as to the local streets, and that meant, at some point, I would take her on a road trip.
It was good for me to learn on something lighter and smaller—you don’t want to ruin a big bike by dropping her because of your inexperience. For a couple of months I learned to ride on a Kawasaki 454, which Keith Forsey gave me after he bought a Harley Softail. The Kawasaki was a very light bike, so if you dropped it, it wouldn’t sustain real damage. Even if it did, it was my learner cycle. As I was riding it one day, some biker pulled up next to me on a Harley and sneered, “Why don’t you get a real bike?” Moving to the Harley was the next step after doing a hill start and riding a few times on the freeway on the Kawasaki.
I taught myself how to ride the Harley in my neighborhood. Plenty of people I knew were riding in L.A., such as the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones and the Stray Cats’ Brian Setzer. At first, the bike was a way to get a buzz without needing chemicals. I was getting stronger working out, but I still felt a bit too small to ride her, which is why I tried to bulk up. In my enthusiasm I may have overdone the workout regimen, but you have to be able to pick up this 750-pound bike. If you can’t pick her up, you can’t ride her—Harley rules prevail in the motorbikin’ world!
Scooting around Hollywood on a bike gave me a real sense of freedom compared to being cooped up in a tiny New York apartment or living in a bubble behind the wheel of a car in Los Angeles. It was a blast to be out there in public on a motorcycle in the pre-helmet-law days. While I could still be seen and recognized by others using the road and the sidewalk, being on the bike made me feel one step ahead of the ever-attentive fans and paparazzi. I didn’t need security around me to guard against the crazed multitudes who knew me from MTV. I felt empowered and free, and what could be better than that?
