“What did you think?” She smiled. “You’d write a note like that and I’d throw it away?”
The next thing I knew, she was inviting me over for dinner. Soon I began regularly hanging out with her and her son, Jake. I can’t say that it was a typical dating scenario, because it was a strange time for her—she was gun-shy from everything that had happened to her—but we started going to movies and museums, and I gave her driving lessons in my ’67 convertible matte-black Camaro. We’d drive around and listen to music and kiss and whatnot, but she wasn’t exactly letting me all the way in her door, so to speak. And I don’t mean just vaginally. This went on for weeks, and it became the most wonderful, nonsexual relationship I’d ever had. I adored her, and every day I’d wake up and write her a little poem and fax it to her.
Our relationship was progressing, she was showing me a little more love and affection, emotionally and physically, and then suddenly, it all came to an inexplicable halt. I had made a bit of an ass of myself when she told me that she was going to the Academy Awards. I suggested we go together, and at first she agreed, then she called back to tell me she was going with her friend Daniel Day-Lewis. I felt slighted, not so much because she was hanging out with someone else, but because it wasn’t me, and I wanted to be with her so much at that point.
Even after that incident, she never gave me any indication that she was anything other than absolutely enamored with the time we were spending together. Whenever our time together came to an end, I looked in her eyes, and she was as happy as a blossoming flower. I was excited and probably a little heavy-handed and overbearing, but she had a soothing and subtle way of bringing me back down to a more reasonable state of mind. She was calm and laid-back and not buying into the heaviness of my approach. It was good, we were finding a balance.
One day I called and left a message on her answering machine, then went off. When I came back, there was a response on my machine.
“Hey, Anthony, this is Sinéad. I’m moving out of Los Angeles tomorrow, and I don’t want you to call me or come by before I leave. Good-bye.”
I was shattered. It had gone overnight from “Can’t wait to see you again” to “Don’t call and don’t come by.” I didn’t know who to turn to, so I called up John. He was irate that she could treat me like that, and he suggested that I write about it and we’d get together later that night and create a song. It had been raining for two days straight when I sat down at my dining room table, put Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower” on continual rotation for inspiration, and started writing some lyrics about what had just happened to me.
From “I Could Have Lied”
I could have lied, I’m such a fool
My eyes could never never never keep their cool
Showed her and I told her how
She struck me but I’m fucked up now
But now she’s gone, yes she’s gone away
A soulful song that would not stay
You see she hides ’cause she is scared
But I don’t care, I won’t be spared
I drove over to John’s house around midnight. He was like a mad scientist, empathizing with me, but absolutely possessed with the idea of finishing this song. So we worked and worked and stayed up all night, listening to that pouring rain. We finally finished the song at five in the morning and, cassette in hand, rushed out to drive through this rainstorm of rainstorms, straight to Sinéad’s house. It was her last night there, and I didn’t knock, I just bundled up the tape and shoved it through her mail slot. She left town the next day. The years went by, and our record came out, and life moved on. There were tragedies and triumphs and successes and failures and people died and people had babies and I always wondered what it would be like if I ever saw that girl again.
Years and years later, I was at the Universal Amphitheatre for some stupid MTV awards show where Flea and I were presenting with Tony Bennett, of all people. After the show, I was in the back parking lot, hanging out and schmoozing, when a limousine pulled up. I looked in and saw Sinéad and Peter Gabriel in the car. I walked over, and she poked her head out of the window, and we both said hi, and then nothing came out of me and she gave me a really fake smile. There was nothing to say. I can’t even remember if I asked her whether she had gotten the tape. The whole encounter was the most horrible, awkward, poisonous, communicationless exchange. Maybe she did me a favor in the end. Who needs that kind of trouble?
We really expanded our musical palette with this album. One day John approached me with some interesting music that was very melodic and in a unique time signature. John hummed a verse and a chorus, and the emotion of the chords he was playing seemed to correspond to my breakup with Carmen. Even in the heat of our turbulent battles, I never considered her an evil person or hated her. I just saw her as a girl who never got a chance to grow up and deal with all her pain. I wasn’t hurt by our breakup, I was relieved; I wanted her to feel the same and find her way in life.
At the same time, I began to question myself and wonder if I was stuck in repeating my father’s pattern of hopping from flower to flower, the girl-of-the-day thing. I certainly didn’t want to end up like Blackie, because as exciting and temporarily fulfilling as this constant influx of interesting and beautiful girls can be, at the end of the day, that shit is lonely and you’re left with nothing. The lyrics reflect both those points of view.
From “Breaking the Girl”
Raised by my dad, girl of the day
He was my man, that was the way
She was the girl, left alone
Feeling the need to make me her home
I don’t know what, when, or why
The twilight of love had arrived
Twisting and turning, your feelings are burning
You’re breaking the girl
She meant you no harm
Think you’re so clever but now you must sever
You’re breaking the girl
He loves no one else
Recording the song was tremendous fun, because there was this big industrial bridge, so we went out and got all these scraps of metal, and the four of us donned protective eye gear and smashed the shit out of the metal with hammers and sticks and came up with a beautiful orchestration of scrap-metal percussion.
When we started figuring out which songs would ultimately make it to the recording stage, it turned out that the delay with Epic and Mo’s last-minute stepping up to the plate had enabled us to write almost two albums’ worth of new material. Working with Rick had changed the way we thought about songwriting. In the past, we were coming from a groove place, as opposed to a song place, which was where Rick’s heart lay. This album would become the best of both of those worlds. We never tipped over to the conventional notion of songwriting, which would have mitigated against our stirring the pot of Africa. But you need to get into jamming to do that, so taking Rick’s advice and focusing on song crafting were hugely important. Yet we never turned our back on being a funk band, based in grooves and improvised jams.
One of those jams would lead to the breakout song on the album. I was off on one side of the rehearsal studio, working on lyrics, while the band was jamming as a trio. Sometimes they’d be serious intellectual craftsmen, trying to intertwine their minds and come up with specific parts, but other times they’d rock out in a very joyful manner. On one of those latter days, Flea started playing this insane bass line, and Chad cracked up and played along. I was so struck by Flea’s bass part, which covered the whole length of the instrument’s neck, that I jumped up and marched over to the mike, my notebook in tow. I always had fragments of song ideas or even specific isolated phrases in mind. I took the mike and belted out, “Give it away, give it away, give it away, give it away now.”
That line had come from a series of conversations I’d had years earlier with Nina Hagen. Nina was a wise soul, and she realized how young and inexperienced I was then, so she was always passing on gems to me, not in a preachy way, just by se
izing on opportunities. I was going through her closet one day, looking at all her crazy clothes, when I came upon a valuable exotic jacket. “This is really cool,” I said.
“Take it. You can have it,” she said.
“Whoa, I can’t take this. This is the nicest jacket you have in there,” I said.
“That’s why I gave it to you,” she explained. “It’s always important to give things away; it creates good energy. If you have a closet full of clothes, and you try to keep them all, your life will get very small. But if you have a full closet and someone sees something they like, if you give it to them, the world is a better place.”
I had come from such a school of hard knocks that my philosophy was you don’t give things away, you take whatever you want. It was such an epiphany that someone would want to give me her favorite thing. That stuck with me forever. Every time I’d be thinking, “I have to keep,” I’d remember, “No, you gotta give away instead.” When I started going regularly to meetings, one of the principles I learned was that the way to maintain your own sobriety is to give it to another suffering alcoholic. Every time you empty your vessel of that energy, fresh new energy comes flooding in.
I was busting out on that mike, going, “Give it away, give it away,” and Flea was flying down the length of his bass, and Chad was laughing hysterically, and John was searching for his spot on the canvas to put his guitar part, and we just didn’t stop. We all came away from the jam convinced we had the makings of a great song.
Rick’s emphasis on the mechanics of songwriting led to a tradition that we still use to this day, called “face-offs.” Let’s say we’re working on a song, and we have the verse and the chorus, but we need a bridge, and there’s no piece of music we have that works there. John and Flea will unplug their guitars, run up to each other in the rehearsal space, and get in each other’s faces. Then one of them will go into the parking lot, and the other will go out into a hallway, and they’ll each have five minutes to come up with an idea. They’ll both come back, and we’ll all listen fairly and objectively and decide which part serves the song best. We’ve never had a major disagreement with one of the guys holding out for his idea. Face-offs are a fantastic tool for developing a part, because they’re spontaneous and creative. The idea appears competitive on the surface, but it’s all playful and very much in the spirit of serving the song rather than an individual. By the time that part gets put through the process of Chad doing his thing to it, and either John or Flea putting his part to it, we all own that little piece of music equally.
After that long, long period of rehearsal and songwriting and incubating ideas, we were ready to record the album. Rick suggested that we consider recording in an unorthodox setting. He turned up this amazing, huge, empty, historically landmarked Mediterranean haunted mansion a stone’s throw from where we all lived. Then he hired some guys from Canada to come down and set up a studio in the rambling house. There was a beautiful wood-paneled library in the house that connected by a window to the giant Mediterranean living room, which worked out great for us, because they built the control room in the library and set up the drums and the guitars in the huge living room, putting the bass amps and the guitar amps in separate rooms to get all the sounds just so. As we walked around the house, we spontaneously decided to live there for the duration of the recording, so we all chose our bedrooms in different wings of the house.
John had his own stairway that went up to one single room, which was quite modest. That was where he would dwell in his own soup of weirdness for months on end, painting and recording and reading and listening to music. Flea’s little daughter, Clara, had done some nice drawings for him on the wall of his bedroom. I was on the far and opposite side of the house, with a lot more space, and I’d end up recording all of my vocals from my bedroom. We set up a microphone with a cord that wound through the house and down into the control studio, and I’d stand at the window that overlooked a hill and the moon, and sing. Flea went all the way up to the third floor and occupied a room that was tiled as if it were a steam room. Chad bowed out. We had heard that the property was haunted by a woman who was murdered there in the ’30s, and that didn’t set well with him, so he opted to ride his motorcycle home each night.
We hired Brendan O’Brian to engineer the record, which was a coup, because he was the best engineer around. He’d go on to produce many, many important multiplatinum albums. Brendan was a whiz at getting the right drum sounds; plus, he was a great musician in his own right. He wound up playing on the album and was a big part of both the sound of that album and creating a fun-loving atmosphere every day.
We decided to document the recording process, so we hired Gavin Bowden, whom we had met in England when Flea and I went on our trip to Europe before our first record. Gavin had emigrated to America, and ironically, he wound up marrying Flea’s sister. One of the requirements for the cameraman of the film was that he be completely invisible during this process, and Gavin was just the guy to do that, because he was mild-mannered and English. He could blend in, and he was someone you felt comfortable performing around. He was a one-man band, crawling on the floor, hunched over backward, working his ass off to document everything from the basic tracks to the control room to me singing up in my bedroom. He also interviewed all of us and put together a nice piece that was released as Funky Monks.
Soon we realized that we needed someone to answer the phone, because we’d be trying to record, and the phone kept ringing off the hook. We also needed someone to get us whatever we needed, as soon as we needed it, so we wound up hiring a kid named Louis Mathieu who used to work for our friends Bob and Pete with Thelonious Monster. Louie came over at a moment’s notice and assumed his duties, and that would be the beginning of a long road with him. He went from secretary to drum tech to assistant road manager to caretaker/personal assistant to John and ultimately tour manager.
So we moved into the house and made the record. Flea and John and I stayed in the house for over thirty days without even leaving to go to a restaurant. While we were cloistered, there were rumors that John had an experience with a succubus up in his room, but in reality, we were getting nocturnal visits from a more tangible entity. We all knew this girl who worked on Melrose Avenue and was a supporter of the band. While we were in the house, she’d come over and visit. At night it was just the three of us, there was no security in the house at all. And like in some weird scene out of a movie set in a castle in the countryside of England, this very young, very self-assured girl would come and spend time with each of us, one by one. She was getting sexed in every room she visited, but it wasn’t purely sexual; she’d hang out and talk and spend time with each of us.
She’d visit me, then Flea, and then John last, because they were better friends. It was nice to put in a full day’s work on the album and then have this girl come and be so loving and so unaffected by the experience of having three different men in one night. It didn’t seem that she was engaging in this activity because she had low self-esteem or she just wanted to fuck. At that point, John had become a much different person sexually, not at all interested in abusing resources that were available to him because of his status, so I don’t think he would have done it if he thought it was causing her any pain or discomfort. It all worked out for everybody. It was nice and cozy and warm, and we even had a name for her visits, depending on the day of the week. If it was a Wednesday and we were feeling randy, someone would say, “Hey, isn’t it wacky Wednesday?” Or “By George, this is freaky Friday. Get her on the phone.”
Being confined to the house was good for me, because I had a lot of lyrics to finish during the basic recording process, and there were few distractions. But then it was time for me to step up to the plate and do my vocals. I still wasn’t comfortable singing. I was comfortable making noise with my mouth, I was comfortable writing songs and knowing in my head how they were supposed to be sung, but the actual execution seemed like this out-of-control animal that sometimes I could rein in
and find a way to tame, and sometimes I couldn’t. One of the reasons I set up my room so far away from everyone was so I didn’t have to feel the eyes on me, I could be by myself when I was recording.
My level of discomfort depended on the song. I remember going up to sing “Under the Bridge” and just feeling “Oh my God, I can’t believe I have to sing this.” But Brendan made it as comfortable as humanly possible. I would be all serious and on edge and insecure, trying to let the spirits flow through me, and I had Brendan on the other end of the headphones busting jokes, laughing at me, laughing at himself, laughing about the song. He was remarkable, the perfect voice to have in your ear, reminding you not to take yourself too seriously and also knowing that you would get it when you got it. He’d say things like “I’ve heard you sing it, I know it’s there, we’ll find it. Don’t worry about it, take your time.”
Even still, three days before it was my turn to be the focus of recording, my lower back flew the coop. I’m sure it was all emotional, but my formerly broken back went kablooey, and Flea turned me on to an old Chinese acupuncturist named Zion. He not only fixed my back, he gave me a new exercise regimen—swimming—that I’d stick with up to the present day.
I don’t want to give the impression that we were monks the whole time we recorded. We’d often invite friends up to the house and have these elaborate dinner parties. One of the people who was around then was the actor River Phoenix. I met River through Ione, who’d done a film with him. John and River had jammed at a party that we all attended, and they got close. I don’t want to go off on River’s trip, because his family is excruciatingly sensitive about it, but since I’d known him, he had drunk heavily and used cocaine heavily, and it was no secret to me or anybody who knew him that he was quite out of control with this stuff and it would be just a matter of time before bad things started to add up. River was around a lot during the writing and recording of our album. He was a big supporter of our band, and I even wrote a whole verse about him in “Give It Away”: “There’s a river, born to be a giver, keep you warm, won’t let you shiver/His heart is never going to wither, come on everybody, time to deliver.”
Scar Tissue Page 29
