by Drew Fortune
Because the skill of hip-hop isn’t centered around the instrumentation, hip-hop artists don’t require as much equipment. Sometimes the people responsible for presenting hip-hop shows, or the promoters who don’t respect hip-hop, can be lazy. The sound man might be a rock guy who has been working at the same club for years, and a rapper comes up and says, “I’m just gonna rap over this CD.” A lot of times, the sound guy doesn’t respect that. I’ve had run-ins with sound guys who don’t look at hip-hop as music. I think that with a rock show, there’s the potential for a lot more things to go wrong. There’s so many pieces that make up a rock show. There’s a lot of hip-hop acts that use instruments at this point in history. What’s great about traditional hip-hop—the two turntables and a microphone—is that the rapper can go a cappella if the record skips, and that’s part of the skill of hip-hop.
Sound guys and venue owners not respecting hip-hop is an all-too-familiar occurrence. I had a big blowout with a sound guy on my birthday in 2015. It was at a classic Boston club called The Middle East. I was talking to the sound man during my set, trying to get the levels right. The sound guy did something I consider highly disrespectful. He got on the microphone so everyone in the room could hear and challenged the notes I was giving him. I wasn’t asking for his feedback. This was not a democracy. If anything, he should have relayed a message to my tour manager. I spoke to him and told him that he needed to get the shit right.
The guy came onstage and started trying to argue with me about the sound during the show. Later, I learned the guy had been at the club for thirty years. He thought he had the right to say, “Who’s this fucking punk challenging me in my club?” I got on the mic and said, “The show is over until this guy is removed from the building.” I left and went into the dressing room. The venue owner came backstage three minutes later, saying, “I apologize for that. I’ve made him go home.” Once he said the guy had gone home, I immediately got back on stage, and the show continued. The next day, the sound guy got on Twitter and challenged me to an MMA bout. He wrote some shit challenging me to get in the Octagon for a fight. I clowned him on Twitter all day, and that was the last I heard from Mr. Sound Man.
6
DAVE NAVARRO
(Jane’s Addiction/Red Hot Chili Peppers)
Before becoming a reality TV gadfly, Dave Navarro was alternative excess personified. From his early years as guitarist in Jane’s Addiction and Porno for Pyros, through a short stint in Red Hot Chili Peppers, Navarro was the elegantly wasted, darkly sexual pin-up for the doom generation, with a penchant for heroin syringe art.
You’ll have to forgive me, because my memory of the drug days is a little blurry. Back in 1997, Jane’s Addiction was on tour, and we were playing the KROQ Almost Acoustic Christmas show. It was at the Universal Amphitheater, and it was the height of my drug addiction. I was shooting up heroin and cocaine on a daily basis. I’ve done tons of tours completely sober since, but back then, I was really, really deep in it. That entire tour, I was pretty out of my mind. I was somehow able not fall down on stage, but before or after, or sometimes during, I was shooting. I was legitimately the member who couldn’t be found. Nobody knew where I was. I would shoot a ton of coke, then do the heroin to come down. Or, I would speedball, so I had an option. [Laughs]
I could be really up or down. The thing about shooting cocaine is there’s a big rush and then it wears off relatively quickly, so you end up shooting a lot. With the speedball, one shot will get you through a couple hours easily. There were many times during the 1997 tour where I had five or six syringes set up and ready to go off the side of the stage. In between songs, I would reapply. It was no secret to the band members, but I don’t think the audience was aware. I’d wait for Perry [Farrell] to talk to the audience, or a change in the production, to duck behind the guitar tech and gear station to fix. I’d only get a few minutes, and I hate to say it, but I got really good at doing it quickly.
Anyway, back to the Acoustic Christmas show. For shows like that, there’s a number of different artists playing, which is usually somewhere around ten bands. Fiona Apple was playing, and she was breaking as a huge act. It was the height of Fiona mania. I was a fan, and I also had this distant crush on her. I had never met her, but I was really psyched to be playing the same bill with her. I got to the venue early for sound check, and with multiple bands on the bill, you sound check and then wait around all day. What’s a junkie gonna do all day long but shoot coke and heroin? The process of shooting up involves inserting the needle into the vein, and pulling back a little bit on the plunger to make sure you’ve hit the vein. A little blood rushes into the syringe, and then you know you’re good. If you miss the vein, you’re gonna run into problems and really injure yourself.
I developed a system where I would extract blood without anything in the syringe. I’d spike the vein, and pull out a syringe full of blood, which led to loads of fun over the years. [Laughs] In the midst of my insanity, I thought it would be a very romantic gesture to go into Fiona Apple’s dressing room, and write a message on her wall in my own blood. In my deranged head, I viewed it as sending her a message with the blood that pumps through my heart to her. It was my life blood that I was symbolically sharing. I thought we would relate on multiple levels because we’re both passionate musicians and artists. In my head, it was a grand, romantic statement that she would find very touching.
She hadn’t arrived at the venue yet, so I snuck into her dressing room and began to extract blood out of my arm. With the syringe, you can aim it and basically paint with it. You can write words, and it was a technique that I had perfected over the years. There was no innuendo or poetry in the message I wrote her. It just read, “Dear Fiona, I hope you have a great time tonight. Love Dave.” That was it. It wasn’t too over the top. In my coke-addled brain, it was a very subtle, kind, romantic gesture. I saw us riding off into the sunset, with this gesture being the basis for our romance. As it turned out, the management and staff at the Universal Amphitheater didn’t see it that way.
The next thing I know, my manager comes into my dressing room, asking, “Did you go into Fiona Apple’s dressing room?” I said, “Yeah!” I was proud of it. I continued, “Of course I did! I left her a little message, wishing her luck on the gig.” I tried explaining that there was no better way to express my sincerity to her than with the blood that runs through my veins. About five minutes later, I was in a meeting with staff and management. I’m not sure if her management was involved or if she even saw the message, because an hour later, a team of crime scene cleanup people in hazmat suits began disinfecting her room. Instead of thinking that I was in some kind of trouble or that I made a horrible mistake, I was gutted that my loving gesture had been evaporated from the planet. In my drugged-out state, I couldn’t comprehend that a message written in syringe blood—from someone she had never met—might have been frightening. Had someone come into my dressing room and written a message in blood to me, I would have thought it was incredible. That’s how sick I was.
Around that same time, I was hanging out at Marilyn Manson’s house a lot. I would shoot up in his bathroom, and I would do the same thing. I would spray the bathroom mirror with blood. He was so freaked out by it that he called his housekeepers and assistants to clean it off. I remember thinking that this guy was the king of scary-rock-horror goths. Why is he so freaked out by a little blood? His reaction was so funny that, naturally, I did it again. [Laughs] This time around, I thought, “C’mon Mr. Scary! You can’t handle a little blood?” I really painted his mirror that time, and he did not appreciate it. My thinking was that if the first two times didn’t go over well, the third time would work. After the third time, I began to realize: people don’t dig this.
It wasn’t until years later, when I met my future wife Carmen Electra, that someone finally liked my syringe art. We were in a hotel room, and I sprayed a heart on the bathroom ceiling. She thought it was the most beautiful, touching gesture in the world. So, the whol
e thing ended up with a happy ending. The whole thing was just organic art to me. These stories weren’t embarrassing to me at the time because of the state I was in. When I got clean and reflected, I couldn’t believe I had fucking done it. I got sober somewhere in the early 2000s, but it’s an ongoing process. I’ve definitely struggled with it, but for the most part, I’ve kept it together. I have a very happy and productive life and feel blessed to have been forgiven for my behavior. It’s certainly not a version of myself that I ever want to revisit. The moral of the story is to make sure you only spray blood for the person you’re going to marry.
7
SHIRLEY MANSON
(Garbage)
A stylistic and empowerment icon for over two decades, Shirley Manson will always be the coolest woman in the room, even if she’s not always the most coordinated performer. It was also really charming to hear her say, “Poo” in her Scottish accent.
I feel that every time I step on stage, something embarrassing, or deeply shameful, is bound to occur. This story has stayed with me and is burned deeply into my memory bank. Garbage had just played our biggest gig ever, at Wembley in London, the night before. It was a huge success, and my idol, Chrissie Hynde, was there. It was my rock ’n’ roll fantasy, when everything came together perfectly—my career was skyrocketing, and we were number one all over the place. I felt like Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard. It was fucking mental! After the gig, we got on the bus and woke up the following day in Bingen, Germany. We were late to the gig, so we didn’t have a sound check or get to see the stage. We were immediately rushed to the backstage facilities, which consisted of a few ropes, tarps, and a makeshift tent for the gents in the band. They put me in a small caravan that was missing its back wheels, so it was at a slanted angle. Every time I tried to move about, I fell. We were still so pumped from playing Wembley that we didn’t really care.
The guys ran up these little steps to get on stage with great excitement, and everything seemed to be going just great. I come on stage a little after the band because they have to get their instruments on. When I finally ran out—to my abject horror—I realized we were playing this tiny stage that overlooked the ruins of a small castle. There was a little pit in front of the stage, which was basically a little grassy knoll, with a smattering of German adults and a handful of children. They were all munching on picnics and had thermoses. It was still daylight, as it takes forever for the sun to go down in Germany at that time of year. There was something so funny about the way the guys bounded on stage, as if we were playing Madison Square Garden, to play to about thirty—maximum—picnicking German families.
We opened with the song, “Temptation Waits,” and I just got the giggles. I literally couldn’t fucking stop. I couldn’t sing a single word. I laughed for the duration of the whole fucking song. It was so awful and embarrassing, but I just couldn’t get myself together.
After the show, I came off stage and immediately needed to poo. There were no backstage facilities, so I had no idea what to do. I ended up squatting and pooping in a cup in my broken caravan. Afterward, I stood there holding the damn cup and couldn’t find anywhere to throw it. I poked my head out of the caravan and decided that the only thing to do was throw it over a wall that led to a dead drop into the countryside. On the way to the wall with my poo cup, I bumped into our tour manager, who was coming to collect my in-ear monitor. I was hiding the cup behind my back and acting all shifty. I managed to get the poo over the wall, and I went back to my cursed caravan. It was an incredible juxtaposition between the greatest gig of our career to one of the most humbling, and saddest.
I’m not a person who gets embarrassed, but here’s one where everyone was embarrassed for me. We were playing the KROQ Weenie Roast show in 2016, which is a big summer festival. We hadn’t played in a while, and I was really focused on trying to remember lyrics and cues. In the throes of all this, I failed to realize that we were set up on a circular, revolving platform. There was a step down to the stage proper and then the audience in front of me. I was singing “Special,” and I took a step onto the lip of the revolving platform, and I stumbled down onto the stage, falling off the stage into the crowd. There was a girl in the front row, and I can remember her face as I was falling into her, which was a shrieking mask of horror.
I fucked myself up pretty bad, but I didn’t miss a beat. You can watch the video on YouTube. I kept right on singing and didn’t lose my place. I’ve been doing this for thirty years, and that was my first fall on stage. Everybody was completely mortified. Our social media feeds were flooded with messages saying, “Don’t feel too embarrassed, Shirley!” Up until that point, I hadn’t really felt embarrassed. If I was more proper, I might have burned with more shame. I’m just glad I didn’t break my fucking neck.
One time I lost my wedding ring. I’d been married for two weeks, and we were playing a show in New Zealand. Someone in the audience grabbed my hand, and I noticed my ring was missing. I was freaked and sang an entire song without my wedding ring. Right after the song ended, I screamed into the mic, “Whoever’s got my fucking wedding ring better give it back right the fuck now!” Slowly, this very shaky hand reached out to the stage from the audience with the ring. I don’t think it was intentional, just opportunism. I can’t blame anyone for that. I’m not sure these are the kinds of stories you were looking for. I’m sure you wanted something much more outrageous, where I sucked a man off on stage and spat his cum all over the audience. Sorry to disappoint.
8
THE ACT OF PERFORMANCE
A short essay by Andrew W.K.
I was pretty confused when I couldn’t get a single crazy, embarrassing, or fucked-up gig out of W.K. He kept insisting that he couldn’t remember any, and I didn’t realize until later that he can be notoriously cryptic in interviews. Regardless, here’s a chapter about always striving to be a better performer, with W.K. in full motivational mode.
As a performer, almost every show seems like the worst for me. Conversely, almost every show feels like the best in a strange way. An unfortunate aspect of my experience as a performer is that it’s very rare, in a beautiful way, to feel that a show went perfect. I never complete an experience on stage and feel that there’s nothing that I could have done better. Learning to accept that feeling is a big rite of passage, as you have to learn and accept that perfection is not what performance is about. It’s not about me feeling like I had a perfect show. Sometimes the shows I think are the worst from my perspective will be the best for someone in the band or for an audience member.
If I ask what made it so special for them, usually it was something that was completely out of my control. That’s what makes performing such a mysterious and elusive craft. There’s only so much ability I have, for better or worse, to control what goes on once I hit the stage. My mindset now is that I’m not allowed to have a bad show. A truly consummate, professional performer—and I don’t know if I’ll ever get there in this lifetime—has no bad shows. A great performer, and a real mature performer of any age, only has great or amazing shows. There should never be that feeling that anything they have done could have been improved in any way, and that’s a great show. An amazing show is when everything goes wrong, and they still put on a great show.
That’s something I aspire to, which is to never crack and to never give in to emotions like frustration. The performer should never let themselves stand in the way of the show. My feeling, nine times out of ten, is pure sadness after a show. It’s not sadness as a rational emotion but sadness as a physical emotion. The feeling has all the trappings, surroundings, and textures of sadness, without that core interior truth that would justify true sadness. I feel sad for no reason after most of the shows, and I’m trying to accept that feeling as a physical reaction, which is the recovery of endocrine and serotonin levels balancing back out.
On this current tour, there have been a few shows where I felt amazing afterward. That was so rare in the past. I finally felt like I couldn’t have
done any better and didn’t have that sadness. On the other hand, those are shows that fans could have felt were the worst. It’s baffling, in a very humbling way. There are also people who just don’t understand what I’m trying to do. I encounter that at festivals, when people just pass by and stop to check us out. The music is what empowers me with that energy, that aggressive, “party-starting” mentality. I’ve played shows early on, for four or five people who definitely didn’t like what I was doing, probably for good reason. But, there’s maybe one person that did like it, and that would lead to another opportunity.
Most people truly do not like what I do. At this point, anyone that shows up after this many years, there’s an understanding that they really want to be there. They do connect with it, and that’s hugely meaningful to me. I feel like it’s a special team of people who found each other, or found this feeling, that we’re all interested in and able to conjure up together. That feeling has become more precious to me. It’s so easy to become disconnected these days. Those pinpoints of connection, those bright yet very fragile lights of understanding, go a long way.
9
ZAKK WYLDE
(Ozzy Osbourne/Black Label Society)
(Bobbi Bush: If you’re reading this, please get in touch. I really want to know what Zakk was like in high school and how bad the fallout was from your party. #epic)
Before the craziness of Ozzy and Black Label, I was in a high school band called Stonehenge, back in Jackson, New Jersey. We were all about seventeen, and we went to school with a girl named Bobbi Bush, whose family was moving. We’d mostly play keg or basement parties, but this Bobbi Bush gig was legendary. Her house was already sold, and her parents had left for the weekend. She invited all her friends from school, but half the town showed up to trash the place. All the furniture was gone, so we set up in the living room. The house was still livable, with maybe the dining room set and beds intact, but they were on their way out, with the new owners set to take over within a week. I have no idea what the parents were thinking, going off to the Poconos and leaving their daughter in an empty house that was begging to be annihilated by Jersey metalheads.