I came up with these horrible and deceptive ways of getting high on coke. By then my hair was so long and matted that I’d slide syringes up into the undercarriage of my hairdo and consent to a full-body pat-down. I’d previously hidden the coke in a cereal box in the kitchen, so I’d rush downstairs and shoot up before Jennifer or her sister or her mom came in. I can’t imagine the emotional terrorism that I inflicted on these people. I was lost in that addiction. And it was going to get a lot worse before it got any better.
I didn’t have any idea how dependent on heroin I was becoming. It seemed like there was an endless supply. All these weird-ass dealers were popping up all over Hollywood. You had the Russian dealer who lived in a shitty apartment with his Russian wife and spoke hardly any English but had a nonstop supply of China White. You had the white-trash mullet-wearing Hollywood dealer on the corner of Sunset Boulevard. You had five or six different Frenchmen, from my old friend Fabrice to Dominique to François, and then five other people they knew.
If I was copping from Fab, I could go over to his house with fifty bucks and get a bindle that would last me a day—probably a tenth of a gram. But if I had to go to the Russian guy, who was a shyster, I’d give him fifty bucks and it would be good for one poke. Of course, I didn’t go there with fifty bucks, I went with twenty-two, begging for the fifty-dollar bindle and offering to leave my shoes. Russians don’t appreciate a negotiation, but that didn’t stop me from hounding and begging and bickering and sleazing. I would sit there and wear that bitch out, make him feel the misery before I would.
The other French guys were pompous, arrogant, heartless dealers. Not a lot of fronting going on there. They were all dope fiends, too, so they knew what it was to need a little something to get well, but if you weren’t a girl and you didn’t have a lot of money, good luck. So I had to work every angle imaginable. I wasn’t beneath showing up with a copy of our first record.
“I don’t know if you’ve seen this record here, but this is my band. That’s me there. I’ve got a manager who’s holding a couple thousand dollars of mine right now. I’m going to reach him later. I don’t know if you feel like coming to the show that we’re having next week. Of course, you and your girlfriend would be welcome to attend.” Any scam, any lie, any bullshit tactic whatsoever. It was a humiliating, god-awful place in which to find myself.
Somehow I was maintaining and still writing music and showing up to rehearsal more often than not. But without me really knowing it, my life was starting to leave me. I became broom-handle thin. Then the cops busted the old Fabster, which kiboshed his business. He went from dealing and being to able to inhale monster lines of smack, to having no smack, no cash flow, no customers, and a huge habit. Next thing I knew, Fab had aligned himself with a young Mexican guy. I called him Johnny Devil, because he was, quite obviously, the devil incarnate on Planet Earth—charming enough for you to want to hang out with him, and clever and conniving enough for you to see other faces that weren’t his. But I liked him. He never burned me, and he was fair and generous and kind in his evil, devilish ways.
My habit was getting worse, and my money was diminishing rapidly, so I had to do the pawnshop thing. Every day I woke up as late as possible, because I knew I was about to get sick. I’d ask Jennifer for twenty dollars. There would be no twenty dollars.
“Do we have anything that we can sell?” I’d plead.
“We’ve sold everything.”
“Can we sell this picture? Can we sell the fire extinguisher? Can we sell this rug? Is there an old radio that no one uses around the house?”
I kept going down to the pawnshop with anything I could find to get twenty or thirty bucks. Then I’d go meet the man, whether it was the Russian, the Frenchman, or the white-trash guy; I’d cop the stuff and go to a little hill at Argyle and Franklin, overlooking the freeway, throw the dope into a spoon, hit it with water, and shoot up immediately. The minute that shit hit me, it was like pouring water on a withered sponge. I’d go from being sick and miserable and weak and devoid of life to frisky and conversational. As soon as I shot the dope, up came the leg of pork, and I’d want to have sex with Jennifer right away. But she’d be mad at me for this ordeal of getting and buying and selling and pawning and copping.
One day I woke up, and the cupboards were literally bare. I borrowed Jennifer’s sister’s bike. I had no intention of pawning it; I was just desperate to get something. I didn’t have the time to take the conventional street route to downtown, where the Devil lived, so I hopped on this one-speed beach cruiser, rode it out of the apartment grounds, up the on-ramp to the Hollywood Freeway, into the right lane of traffic, and peddled my way from Hollywood to downtown Los Angeles.
I finally got to Johnny Devil’s, but his cash was low, and he was down on his flow. First we tried melting some Tuinals in a spoon and shooting that, but the minute the powder inside the capsules hit the water, it foamed up. We tried to get the foam into the syringe just to get some relief, but it wasn’t working.
“You and I are going to find something,” he promised, and we jumped into his car and drove out to the San Bernardino Valley. We stopped in a neighborhood that looked like it could have been uprooted from the poorest section of Tijuana. The whole area was brimming with one-story shacks in dirt yards. On each plot there were fires burning in oil barrels. There were no windows or doors on the houses. It was like being in Beirut during wartime.
Johnny pulled up to the curb and got out of the car. “You wait here. Don’t move,” he said, and disappeared into this labyrinth of streets and houses. I was so weak that I couldn’t move if I wanted to. I sat there certain somebody was going to walk up and fill me full of twenty-twos and take the car and leave. Finally, the Devil reappeared out of a shadow, far away from where he entered. He was walking that purposeful walk. He got back in the car.
“Did you get it? Did you get it? Did you get it?”
He shot me an agitated look. “Just chill. Everything’s going to be okay. Don’t ask me nothing.” He was obviously in a bad mood. For all I knew, he went in there and killed a family for that shit, he was acting so weird. But as soon as we got out of the neighborhood, he pulled a huge baseball-sized object out of his coat. It was pure Black Tar heroin. He twisted off a Bazooka gum–sized piece of the stuff and handed it to me and pocketed the rest.
“Uh, are you going to keep all of that? That’s a lot. Maybe I can hold on to some of that,” I schemed.
“That’s how much I need,” he said. We drove to some girl’s house in Hollywood, and he proceeded to melt that fucking baseball down, shot after shot, until most of it was gone, all the while never once passing out or OD’ing or even becoming incoherent. He just settled into his demonic wellness. A few days later, he disappeared, and I never saw him or heard about him again.
Despite all my drug use, the writing for the second album was going well. I would watch Hillel and Flea play together, and I’d realize that music was an act of telepathy, that if you were standing next to your soul mate with a guitar in your hand and he with a bass, you could know what the other guy was thinking and communicate that through playing. Hillel had definitely grown as a guitar player in his time away from us. He started off as a Kiss-influenced player with some progressive rock thrown in. Then he experimented with the early Red Hot Chili Peppers, and now he’d come back with a weird, sultry element to his style. It wasn’t all syncopated manic funk, there was something smooth and fluid in his style also.
While we were in the EMI rehearsal space on Sunset, we got a call that the legendary impresario Malcolm McLaren wanted to talk to us. McLaren was the mystery man who had created the Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow. Now he was looking for the Next Big Thing, and if we were lucky, the Starmaker would sprinkle his dust on us. He came to a rehearsal with a few cronies, and we played him a couple of our crazy-assed, complicated songs—fast and chaotic and dense and layered, with no rhyme or reason but a lot of feeling and a lot of funk.
He clearly wasn’t i
mpressed. “All right, then, can we have a chat somewhere, mates?”
We walked to a tiny meeting room adjacent to the rehearsal space. Someone started passing around a spliff the size of a Havana cigar.
“Okay, all that stuff you’re playing, that’s great, but it makes no sense. No one’s going to care about that type of music. What I’m envisioning . . .”
He started throwing out words like “cacophony” and “epiphany,” and we were getting higher and higher, going, “What does he mean by a cacophony of sounds?”
At last he got to the point. By way of demonstration, he took out some pictures of surfers who were wearing hot pink punk-rock colors.
“I want to take this band and simplify all of the music. Turn it into old fifties rock and roll, simple as can be, bass, rote notes, guitar, simple riffs, basic beats. And I want to make Anthony the star, the front man, so there’s no confusion. The public can get their head around looking at one central character, and the rest of you will be in the background playing the most simple rock and roll known to man.”
He paused to get our reaction, and I looked over at Flea.
Flea had passed out.
I guess Malcolm could tell that his message hadn’t been well received. I was kind of flattered that he thought I had the potential to be this front man, but everything else he said disavowed everything that we held near and dear to our hearts. It was like the Wizard of Oz had spoken, and what he said was too ludicrous to take seriously.
Now it was time for us to make our second record. EMI asked us who we wanted to produce it. Without hesitating, we said, “George Clinton,” because after our first record, people came up to us and said, “You must be students of the P Funk,” which was George’s legendary funk group. We were latecomers to the Parliament/Funkadelic experience, and didn’t know as much about George as we should have or later would, but we knew that if James Brown was considered the Godfather, then George was the Great God-Uncle of Funk.
So EMI got George on the phone, and we said, “George, we’re the Red Hot Chili Peppers, we’re from Hollywood, California, we’re really hard-rocking motherfuckers, and we think you should produce our record.” We sent him our record and our demo tape, and he liked them, and after Flea and Lindy went out to Detroit to meet him, he agreed to produce us. To this day, when people ask me how we got George Clinton, I tell them that we asked him on the phone, but Flea always says, “Twenty-five grand,” which was the amount of money that EMI agreed to pay him. I don’t believe he did it just for the money. I think he also saw something special and beautiful and remarkable about these four kids who were attempting to keep the spirit of hard-core funk music alive, not in a pretentious or a copycat way but by helping to invent a new genre of funk.
We went to Detroit with about 70 percent of the songs finished. We had “Jungle Man,” my ode to Flea, this half-man, half-beast born in the belly of the volcano in Australia and coming to the world and using his thumb as the conductor of thunder on the bass. “American Ghost Dance,” “Catholic School Girls Rule,” and “Battleship” (whose chorus, “blow job park,” was inspired by Cliff’s true-life adventures fending off blow-job entreaties at Mulholland rest stops while he practiced his vocal lessons). “Nevermind” and “Sex Rap” were songs that we had on our original demo, and “30 Dirty Birds” was an old Hillel camp song. George’s vision was that we would hang out in Detroit with him for about a month before we went into the studio, so there was always room to write more songs.
We would record in George’s studio, called United Sound, which was a two-story brick building in the middle of the barren wasteland that inner-city Detroit had become in the mid-’80s. Sometime in the ’70s, George had taken over the studio from Motown, and that was where he recorded all those classic Parliament/Funkadelic albums. It was a great studio, with big old analog boards, a beautiful drum room, and separate horn rooms.
First the plan was to move into George’s house for about a week, until we rented a house for the band. (We found a house on Wabeek Lake, which was in the most affluent of all suburbs. So it was this whole triangle of opposites, staying with George in the country, rehearsing downtown, where the land couldn’t have cost more than ten cents a square foot, and living with rich whiteys on a golf course.) George lived in a contemporary country house on fifty acres in a place called Brooklyn, which was about an hour outside of Detroit. Even though it wasn’t the most attractive countryside around (you could hear the nearby Michigan 500 auto races from his property), it was his sanctuary. There were a fishing pond and nice hills, and his house was graced with the presence of George’s beautiful wife. She was totally sweet and maternal, not the Vixen of the Funk Superfreak you might think George would be hooked up with, but instead an “Oh God, wish this was my mom” type of woman.
Hillel and I shared a room, Cliff and Flea did the same, Lindy got his own room, and George and his wife were in their master bedroom. The idea was to stay out of the city to get the ball rolling, because we didn’t want the sessions to become drug-derailed right away. But as soon as I got there, I felt like I had a horrible case of food poisoning. I started throwing up, my skin turned a strange color, and I couldn’t eat. I had no idea what was wrong with me, but Flea said, “You’re fucking dope sick.” I was so clueless that I didn’t even realize I was going through a proper heroin withdrawal.
For some stupid reason, we sent out for five hundred dollars’ worth of coke, and Lindy and Hillel and Flea and George and I hoofed it all up. That made me feel great for about a half an hour. Then it was back to no sleep and dope sickness. After a few days, it subsided, and we set up shop in George’s living room. Drums, guitars, bass, amps—we started playing and getting to know George.
To know George is to love him. He’s a huge man with huge hair, but there’s this other thing about him that’s the size of an elephant—his aura. George is a guy who loves to tell stories, and he’s not ashamed to admit to all kinds of weird and kooky and questionable behavior. We became the campfire kids listening to the grand master of psychedelic funk experience. “George, tell us another story about Sly Stone,” and he would be off and running. Besides being a great raconteur, George was teaching us the importance of being regular. He would walk around the house with a bottle of prune juice, going, “You all know how old I am. You know how I can go all day and all night. It’s because of this, it’s because I’m regular.”
George also had a stuffed-animal collection. Where there wasn’t furniture, per se, in the house, there were life-size stuffed animals everywhere, some very old. I guess he had been a collector, and his fans and friends and family constantly added pieces, so we were in the middle of this big circus of stuffed animals.
After about a week of living with George, we moved into our house on the golf course. Then it was time to start making demos in a studio in downtown Detroit that was owned by a guy called Navarro, who was a colorful but nefarious old-school pimp/drug dealer/studio owner. He was an older gentleman, with the lowest, grumbliest, deepest Isaac Hayes/Barry White voice. You couldn’t understand a lot of what he said, but you sure could understand what he meant. When he walked into the room, no matter who was there—girls, the crew, George—he was the man to respect.
So we started doing the demos. And we also started doing the coke, which was everywhere. We’d order the Popeye’s chicken, and we’d order the cocaine. And if you could eat the chicken before you got too high on the coke, you’d have dinner. If not, you didn’t care about dinner. Unlike us, George never acted like a weirdo when he was high on coke. You wouldn’t know whether he was on a ton of coke or not; he just had a really strong constitution.
I’d get all tweaked out and try to finish these songs that I had started, and sometimes it would work and sometimes I’d go in circles, coming up with these complex word combinations. So I was writing, and George was listening to these Hollywood kids playing eccentric hard-core funk music, and loving every minute of it. I’d show him some lyrics and ask his
opinion, and he’d go, “Wow, that’s some outside shit. I love it. Go write another one, we need another verse.”
At one point during preproduction, Flea, who had been listening to a lot of Meters, suggested that we do a cover of their song “Africa.” George thought about it and said, “What if you did the song ‘Africa’ but had Anthony do a rewrite so it’s no longer ‘Africa,’ but it’s your ‘Africa,’ which is Hollywood?” So I did the rewrite, and George later fashioned one of his incredible vocal arrangements behind it. I think he even sang one or two of the lines in that song.
“Freaky Styley” was another interesting George innovation. That was originally an instrumental overture to lead into another piece, but George was so into that swelling, riding groove that he was adamant it had to be its own song, even if the vocal was simple chanting. When we recorded that music, we were all in the control room, listening to that groove, which is still one of the best pieces of music that we ever wrote. George just started chanting, “Fuck ’em, just to see the look on their face. Fuck ’em, just to see the look on their face.” We all joined in, and it was a spontaneous bit of musical combustion. The other vocal in that song, “Say it out loud, I’m Freaky Styley and I’m proud,” was one of those born-in-the-moment colloquialisms. At that time we called everything that was cool “Freaky Styley.” A dance, a girl, a drumbeat, anything. When this whole process was finished and we were sitting around the kitchen table going, “What should we call this album?,” Cliff looked up and said, “Why don’t we just call it what we call everything else? Freaky Styley.”
After a little while in Navarro’s studio, we finalized the arrangements, and I had some new lyrics ready to go. George had a unique style of producing. It wasn’t a lot of super-refined high-tuning, reacting to every kick-drum pattern. It was more from-the-heart producing. George was a master at hearing backup vocal parts, especially for esoteric parts of the song, where you wouldn’t normally hear vocals. If you listen to the Funkadelic records or the Parliament records, the vocal arrangements within the body of music are masterpieces unto themselves. So he started hearing that stuff in our songs, and we were open to anything. If he said, “I want to do a five-person vocal at this part in the song,” we jumped for joy.
Scar Tissue Page 18
