I had a great time up until the last few weeks of recording. I was just loving life and feeling so happy to be sober, to be making a record and to have these songs. But Beinhorn and I came to a relationship-ending moment of tension at the end of the recording process, when he wanted me to do ad-libs at the end of “Higher Ground.” I couldn’t tolerate his direction any longer. He was trying to squeeze something out of me that I wasn’t feeling, and we got in a fight and I knew that I was done with him.
We didn’t finish that record and say, “This is our best record ever,” but I didn’t feel bad about Mother’s Milk. I did feel bad about the album cover. Flea had come up with the title of the album as an homage to Loesha’s bodily fluids, which were sustaining their young daughter, Clara. (We can put to rest the rumors that “mother’s milk” was a slang reference to heroin.) We went back to our good friend Nels Israelson, who had done the photos on our second and third album covers. I had an old poster from the ’60s of Sly and the Family Stone where Sly was holding out his hand and his band was congregated in his palm, and I thought it would be great to be a little person held by a giant. Only in my vision, the giant would be a naked female, and we’d be held near her chest. I brought this concept to the band, and they weren’t 100 percent enthusiastic, but I was, so they agreed to humor me. Nels started to audition models for the cover, and because they were taking off their shirts, it had to be a closed set. Unfortunately, I showed up late and he had already decided on a girl. EMI planned to cover up her nipples with some lettering and a flower, but they were definitely part of the featured package. Then we found out that the model was uptight about the whole concept. I couldn’t understand why we couldn’t have found a model who was happy to have her tits on a cover.
I started to choose the photos of us that she’d be holding in her hands, and John despised every last photo of himself. He finally let me use one, and I think the cover came out great—it was like four Tom Sawyers being held by this giant naked lady.
The album cover was printed, and her nipples were contractually covered, but EMI printed up a couple hundred posters of her with her nipples exposed. These were for record stores and friends, whatever, and the poster-signing machinery went into action. This was a period in the life of the band when we were all still pigs and heathens, brash and obnoxiously sexual. I think it was Chad and Flea who wrote some stupid, sophomoric, perverted things on one of the posters, and lo and behold, the model caught wind of the poster and sued the piss out of us. She won fifty thousand dollars, which was a huge settlement back then.
Despite the cover tempest, EMI must have heard something in the grooves, because they gave us a budget to make two videos before the album was released. It was odd; we weren’t coming off a successful record. Uplift had sold about seventy thousand copies, maybe making its money back. But we were happy for the new level of interest and commitment, so we made the videos back to back to accompany the singles from the album. The first was for “Knock Me Down,” and Alex Winter played a Chaplinesque vagabond who’s paranoid and wanders around a house of horrors, shocked by the psychedelic, morbid images of dead rock stars on the walls. He comes to an all-white room where Flea, John, Chad, and I are rocking out and bouncing off the walls, playing the song.
We shot the “Higher Ground” video on one of the famous old SIR soundstages where the Three Stooges made their movies. We had a full makeup and art department and separate wardrobe people and a huge, huge stage, which was quite a departure. When we shot our “Catholic School Girls Rule” video, Dick Rude’s mom catered the shoot. But now we got to dance around and outdo one another jumping off things, so it was a fun video to shoot.
From “Knock Me Down”
I’m tired of being untouchable
I’m not above the love
I’m part of you and you’re part of me
Why did you go away?
Too late to tell you how I feel
I want you back but I get real
Can you hear my falling tears
Making rain where you lay
Finding what you’re looking for
Can end up being such a bore
I pray for you most every day
My love’s with you now fly away
If you see me getting mighty
If you see me getting high
Knock me down
I’m not bigger than life
It’s so lonely when you don’t even know yourself
That ending is lonely, sad, but true. Those are the feelings you feel when you’re out there and enough dark energy possesses you and you think, “Who the fuck am I? What happened to me?” I’m sure that was where Hillel ended up. He so clearly knew who he was and what he wanted early in his life, and he was a determined and hardworking, creative, life-loving guy. By the end, he forgot who he was, which I’ve seen happen to many people.
“Knock Me Down” was the first single off Mother’s Milk, and it actually got on the radio. Every now and then Lindy would tell us that a station had added the song, but that didn’t really compute. A few months later, on a weekend tour to Washington, D.C., Flea and John and I flagged down a cab in the middle of the nation’s capital. We got in and the driver looked at us and said, “Hey, aren’t you those guys? What is it, ‘Beat Me Up,’ ‘Slap Me Around,’ ‘Kick My Ass’? I love that song. You’re those guys, right?” That was the first time somebody other than the musical underground had arbitrarily become aware of us.
In September ’89, we started a yearlong cycle of touring behind Mother’s Milk. Another indication of our escalating level of success was our upgrade to a full-fledged tour bus. But we needed the room, because we had so many people on the road. We hired Tree to play horn, but he came up with this cockamamy notion to play an electric hybrid synthesizer that you blew into and produced several different horn sounds. Then we hired Kristin Vygard and Vicky Calhoun as backup singers. Kristin was a full-on character who had been a successful child actor. She was a five-foot-nothing redheaded freckled-faced madwoman who had been a jazz singer on the Hollywood scene. Vicky was a large black woman who had sung backup on “Knock Me Down” and been featured in that video. Besides the band, we had Chris Grayson, our soundman; Mark Johnson, our tour manager; and a new face in the organization, a roadie named Robbie Allen. When we got to England later in the tour, Robbie developed an alter ego, Robbie Rule, who opened our shows for us. With the help of Flea and John, Robbie developed a musical comedy act where he would go onstage and pretend to cut off his dick. It was a sleight-of-hand magic trick; he’d go out with a proper butcher knife that was sharp on one side and extremely dull on the other. Then he’d stretch his dick out, put the knife to it, and subtly turn the knife over so the dull side would be doing no damage to his private parts. Like Bob Forest, Robbie was a tortured musician working as a roadie, so we gave him his moment on the stage. It was a crazy play within a play, and Flea played comedy drums during the act. All the kids in the countryside of England had to endure this dick-slashing before we came on.
Since I was no longer chasing cocaine or alcohol, new entertainments had to be created. Something called The Job spiced up the tedium of being on the road. Since we were playing a lot of college dates, we’d routinely get fed meals at the venues, which consisted of reheated cafeteria food that had been topped with industrial-strength salad dressing. It was hard to tell if that mystery liquid was for garnishing your food or cleaning the floor.
The first job we created was in Canada, where we encountered a super-sized bowl of bacon bits on our dining table. We came up with the idea of collecting some money and challenging Mark Johnson with the job of eating that entire bowl. It turned out Johnson was capable of eating some shit, and he successfully completed his job.
My first job was to eat what appeared to be half a pound of butter brought to our table at a gig. I had three minutes to finish it off and $120 bucks to gain, but I got only halfway through before I had to quit. I thought I could mind-power the job, but my b
ody rejected that much butter. Eventually, Flea, John, Chad, and I realized it was silly to torture ourselves with these jobs when we could torture those around us. Besides, we weren’t as much in need of the money as the soundman or a backup singer or the roadie. One night we were backstage at some college in the middle of Pennsylvania, and our hosts brought us some inedible food. The girls had been bugging us for a job, so we took an empty wine carafe and started mixing up various salad dressings and condiments and wound up with a bottle full of green stuff that wouldn’t have been out of place in The Fifty Foot Bug That Ate St. Louis. Then we selected tiny Kristin, who needed the money, and we all chipped in $180 if she’d drink the entire carafe and keep it down for five minutes. She was such a firecracker times ten about everything that she not only accepted that job but offered to eat some various other foodstuffs if we threw in fifty bucks more. Accepted.
We didn’t want to leave Vicki out of this, so we raised some money and gave her the job of eating an entire huge metal container of butterballs. She agreed and sat down and ate that whole bucket like it was whipped cream. Then we all watched Kristin. I would have been projectile-vomiting at the smell of that sludge, but Kristin Zenned out, took the liter of goo, drank it, and then ate the bonus bogus food. Then I got out the old watch and sat with her as she began to sweat, cry, and turn fifteen different colors. But she made it to five minutes, and when that time was up, she calmly got up, turned around, and went into the toilet and it all came flying out of her. At the sound of Kristin’s first heave, Vicki lost it and ran to the bathroom, and like two dragsters side by side, they egged each other on. When they returned, the whole meal degenerated into a food fight until a stern matronly cleaning lady came back and chastised us and ordered us to clean up after ourselves, which we did very sheepishly.
The road food was execrable, but a few months into the tour, sex had been added to the menu. That was possible only because I had broken up with Ione in December. I had managed to stay sober by not ingesting drugs, so my body had pretty much healed from all that torturous activity, but my mind still wasn’t healthy enough to work out the problems that come up in a relationship. Neither of us adapted after I got sober. I had been the needy, groveling fuckup, and she had been the caretaker who, for whatever reason, loved me and nursed me back to health. When that changed, instead of us both finding a workable, healthier, more sustainable dynamic, we just didn’t. I didn’t have anybody in my life for whom I was willing to listen to “Dude, you’re sober now, but you’re acting like a fucking asshole. Work through your steps and take an inventory and see who you are and get better.” I was still the jealous, raging, controlling, selfish, bratty kid that I had been, only drug-free.
We became another typical fighting couple, and I knew that our relationship was doomed. There wasn’t anything horrible going on between us, but we weren’t making each other happy, and we weren’t giving ourselves completely to each other. We were fading and fighting, and I think we were both over it, but we were afraid to give each other up, because we were at times tighter than I’d ever been with anybody.
At the end, it was my house, and I said, rather crassly, “Please take your stuff and just get out of here.” She argued, “No, no, I don’t want to leave. I want to be here with you.” That happened over and over again, and on the tenth time, I did the big “Take your stuff and get the hell out of here.” She looked at me and said, “I think I will.” “Well, do it then. Just take your stuff and keep on walking, little lady,” I said. She left the house and never came back.
She moved back in with her mom, and I kept waiting for the pattern to play itself out, when she would come right back a day or so later, but she didn’t. I was desperate and lonely and confused, and I wondered why I had told her to leave when I really wanted her to stay. About three days later, I called her up and said, “Isn’t this where you come back to the house like all those other times?” She said, “No, no, no, in fact, nope. Actually, I’m never coming back again. I finally agree with you. It’s over.”
This was right before Christmas. Before I went home to Michigan, I bought Ione an art deco statuette and delivered it to her house. Her mom answered the door. “I’ve got this gift for Ione,” I said. And she said, “You’re going to have to leave it on the porch.” I thought, “Wow.” So I left her gift, and bummed out on the plane ride, and wrote a sad and lonely heartbreak song about it, which never became a full-fledged song, just something to sing to myself. I used to write song mantras to sing to myself and deal with whatever it was I was going through at the moment.
At my mom’s house, I was alone for the first Christmas in years. I realized it was over with Ione and that she already had somebody else in her life, so I’d better accept that this was all part of the beauty and the flow and it was time to move on to a new chapter of life and love and adventure. Even still, there was a lot of unfinished business from the relationship. It would take years and years and years before I was even able to understand and cop to all of my lying and insanity and emotional terrorism. I’m glad that I was ultimately able to express that to her and try to make amends for it.
When I got back from Michigan, the band played a big show at the Long Beach Arena, which was filmed for a documentary. In the middle of a backstage interview, the interviewer started asking me about Ione, and I told him we’d had a rough breakup. Just then, John peeked into the camera frame and said, “That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. Anthony’s a free man, and you know what that means: It’s time to fuck.” It was John’s way of bringing me out of my doldrums, and it was a tactic that we’d both use on the rest of the Mother’s Milk tour. I might still have had reservations about the easy availability of girls on the road, but they remained theoretical reservations. Sex was once again on the menu.
Once again, it was freely available. In Houston, we were coming off the stage on the way to the bus when I ran into another Marilyn Monroe look-alike. Unlike her New Orleans counterpart, this little Marilyn never broke character. She became my Houston girlfriend, and every time we’d play there, I’d wind up going back to her apartment and having sex, and she’d be in her own private Marilyn movie.
Not all of my road affairs were consummated. We were playing a college show in Kentucky, and I was backstage getting ready to go on when Robbie, our roadie, made a surprise visit to the dressing room.
“Swan, I thought you might like this girl. From what I can tell, this is what you’re into,” he said. I looked up and saw an absolute princess of a college student, with white skin and black hair. A princess who’d been handcuffed, her hands behind her back, with gaffer’s tape.
“Thank you, Robbie, now go away,” I said, and proceeded to provide this delightful young girl with explicit directions to my nearby motel for an aftershow rendezvous.
“Oh, no, I was just having fun. I just wanted to say hi,” she said in her adorable thick Kentucky accent. “I’m out there with my girlfriend, and I have a boyfriend at home.”
“Let’s at least hang out. I’m not saying anything has to happen,” I countered.
“I don’t know if that’s possible,” she said. “I’d like to be friends with you, but I don’t know if he would like that, and I’m loyal to him.”
I was looking at her thinking that I would die if I didn’t have this girl. There was no way I could continue to tour if I didn’t get to know her. She told me she lived with her mom and dad, and somehow I finagled her address out of her.
It was time to go onstage, and we played the show, and as soon as I got backstage, I searched out Robbie. “Where’s the girl?” I implored him.
“Brother, I’ve been looking for her for the past half hour. She’s disappeared,” he said.
There was no way I was going to let that girl disappear into the Kentucky night. I grabbed a pen and some paper and sat down and wrote her a poetic letter, and then I got some college kid to drive me to her house. It was around midnight, and I found the house and went around the back and started calling
her name, but there was no answer. I left the note, along with contact numbers for the next hotels we’d be at, in her mailbox.
A few days later, we were in Chicago, where I met a girl who looked like a ’70s starlet with her kinky chestnut-colored full head of hair. She was very free and easy and sweet and obviously sexually enthusiastic, so I took her back to the hotel. I was rooming with John, and I could tell just by kissing and touching this girl that she was one of those hypersensitive live wires who become super-intensified when you touch them anywhere. I told John that I needed to be alone with this girl, and he said that Chad happened to have an extra bed in his room and he was out drinking. John also happened to have an extra key, so I grabbed it and shifted over to Chad’s room.
We lay down on the extra bed and took off our shirts and were kissing and touching, and she was unusually responsive. It was all getting ready to go on when I heard what sounded like Clydesdales stomping down the hallway. Before I could react, the door flew open and it was Chad, except it didn’t look like Chad, something had come over him. He had some little heavy-metal tramp in tow, and he saw me and screamed, “What are you doing in here, you motherfucker? I’ll fucking tear your head off!”
“Whoa, Chad, come on, hey, whoa,” I said, but Chad was out of control. He charged me and I jumped over a bed and he followed, knocking over lamps, banging into walls, taking huge swings at me. I told the girl to grab her shirt, but Chad was still diving for me and I was still eluding him.
Scar Tissue Page 26
