by Drew Fortune
I hadn’t slept in so long and had been partying, so I was basically crazy at this point. He sang a song I had never heard called, “The Vanishing Act,” which, to this day, makes me weepy. When he finished this beautiful song, I turned to him and said, “Lou, that was amazing. But, you have something on your sweater.” He looked down, and I flicked his nose with my finger. It’s that thing you would do to a little kid—fake them out and flick their nose. I have no idea why I did it, and I flicked his nose kinda hard.
He’s just starting at me, the way an ancient turtle would look when bitten by a mosquito. Finally, he said, “Please…don’t ever do that again.” I said, “Sure…yeah, no problem,” and walked away from him. Then it hit me: What the fuck had I just done? I walked up to Laurie, who is super sweet, and asked, “Do you think Lou is pissed at me?” She laughed and said, “What, the nose thing? All the best uncles do that!” I sat back down next to Lou, and these four Tuvan throat singers by the name of Chirgilchin come in to perform for Lou and Laurie.
It was these crazy, super psychedelic, guttural sounds, and I was getting insanely sleepy. I kept pinching myself to stay awake, thinking how rude it would be if I fell asleep. I look over at Lou, and he’s sound asleep, snoring really loudly. I took that as a cue, so I fucking nodded off. After we woke up, I got to do Tai Chi with Lou and his Tai Chi teacher Master Ren. The rest of the festival was pure insanity. I befriended a homeless, indigenous Australian guy on the street. I think he might have been on crystal meth, and I brought him to the Opera House to meet Lou and Laurie, just another sign that I was losing my mind.
Lou and Jodorowsky are the two artists that have had the most influence on me and meeting them both in the same month just felt ordained. That year was a huge turning point, as three of my close friends had passed away. I was touring all the time, too, and hadn’t grieved properly. It was all coming out during that Australia trip. I’d be talking to someone, and the next moment I’d burst into tears.
After the first King Khan & BBQ Show performance at the Opera House, I was wasted and brought all this Chinese food back to the venue. I dressed our tour manager up as a woman, in a wig and dress, and sent him out into the audience with all this food to serve people. We broke all the rules of the Opera House the first night because you can’t bring food into the venue or bring people on stage. At one point, we invited all the Chinese women in the audience on stage. I had a rubber snake that I was throwing at the audience. I approached Lou and Laurie in the audience and brought them a tray of food after it had been poached by the audience already. Laurie was polite and ate some broccoli.
The second night was insane as well, and afterwards, me and BBQ broke up. The following morning, I had to go back and pick up some gear. Laurie saw me outside and sensed that I was in a weird place. I told her that the band had broken up and everything that was happening. Laurie told me to meet her back at the exact spot in three hours, as she had to go do a performance. I followed, and she did a whole concert for dogs, in this open space outside the Opera House. It was the most surreal thing I had ever seen. The dogs were in the first few rows, and she was talking to the dogs the whole show. She’d ask, “Which one of you dogs is afraid of thunder?” Then the dogs would start barking, and it was like they were carrying on a conversation.
It brought me back to a really beautiful place, and when I tried to go meet Laurie back at the Opera House, the security guards wouldn’t let me in. They said, “You’re that artist who brought all the food into the place and threw snakes. We have specific instructions not to let you back into the festival.” I was about to cry again, and I yelled, “You can’t kick Jimi Hendrix out of Woodstock!” (a line I had stolen from the late, great Jay Reatard). They didn’t find it amusing and shut the doors on me.
I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I was just pacing outside the Opera House. I started having this existential crisis, thinking, “What am I doing here? I’m a total wastoid.” My tour manager called, and he yelled, “What the fuck are you still doing there?” I said, “I’m waiting for Laurie Anderson!” Apparently, they had been calling my tour manager all day, telling him that I wasn’t allowed on the premises. They didn’t want to call the cops, but they were giving him grief. Finally, Laurie’s manger appeared and said, “Hey, King Khan! Come inside, Laurie’s waiting for you.”
When I finally got to her, I started bawling like a baby. She was very comforting, like a mother. I told her how I was banned from the festival, so Laurie and Lou became my babysitters for the rest of the festival. They’d say, “Who do you want to go see?” I’d sniffle and say, “The Blind Boys of Alabama,” and off we’d go. If I wandered away from them, I’d immediately see the security guards get nervous and ready to swarm, so I literally had to stay with them as my guardians.
When I came home from Australia, I was unrecognizable to my family. I had a blond mohawk and black nail polish, rambling about how I was gonna quit music and join a Buddhist monastery. Shortly after, I was properly diagnosed as being bipolar and found the solace of medication. I’ve been relatively stable ever since, and I’ve noticed that the medication doesn’t harm my creativity. That was the thing that I was most worried about. I thought that psychiatric meds would wipe out my personality. It hasn’t at all, and I feel very lucky. I’ve had many friends enter mental hospitals and never return. I gotta thank my wife Lil and my two daughters Saba Lou and Amabelle whose support and love has made me an even better man than ever before.
25
DAVE KING
(Flogging Molly)
Kings of the drunken sing-along, Celtic punks Flogging Molly got their name from their early days playing beer-soaked dive Molly Malone’s in LA. Front man Dave King has embarrassed himself plenty on stage, reflecting on a Spinal Tap-level calamity opening for Iron Maiden. No raccoons were harmed in the writing of this chapter.
This one still cracks me up. We were playing a show in Vancouver, at this beautiful venue right on the bay. We had this lighting technician at the time called Ned Sneed, who is an absolute fucking genius. He was having a nap on the couch backstage before the show, and from above him, out of the Styrofoam roofing, a raccoon dropped down right on his chest. Ned screamed and there was a brief scuffle before he was able to trap the raccoon in the bathroom. Bridget [Regan] walked into the dressing room, and there was this huge hole in the ceiling, and Ned was scratched up. She looked around and said, “What the fuck happened here?” We had to wait for animal control to come pick up the little guy.
We all thought it was hilarious, but I don’t think Ned found it as funny. When we finally got on stage, during our second song, one of the guys from the first band was hanging off to the side of the stage, watching us. He accidentally tripped a switch which brought the front-of-house screen down. I think they used it to project football games or something on this massive screen, and it suddenly lowered down on us in the middle of the song. The guy who hit the switch didn’t know how to fix it, so we were just hidden behind this screen. We stopped, laughed, and started playing “Folsom Prison Blues” until it got sorted out.
This next story is just one I thought was really cool. It was in Belgium, and we were doing this big festival with loads of stages. Just as we were about to go on stage, Black Sabbath was just finishing up. We were waiting in the wings, and someone from the band said, “Do we know ‘Paranoid?’’ We all agreed that yeah, we could probably figure it out. We walked out to 40,000 people, Bridget played the opening notes on her fiddle, and we launched into it. We fucking opened with it, and the crowd had no idea what was going on. It was brilliant. It was priceless. I used to know Ozzy pretty well, so I figured I could get away with it. It was just fun and games, and when we broke into our own songs, the crowd went mental.
The most embarrassing show was from when I was in my first band, Fastway, with “Fast” Eddie Clarke of Motorhead. I was a young kid, and we were on tour with Iron Maiden in Canada. We were already feeling the pressure, and a local radio station ha
d asked if they could introduce us. We said sure, and one of their people came on stage dressed up as a huge bear, which was the station’s mascot. One of the female DJs came out, leading the bear by the hand. This was back in the old days when you still used guitar cables, and the woman announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, all the way from the UK and Ireland…Fastway!”
Eddie Clarke started out the set, and he ran to the front of the stage just as the DJ and the bear were running off the stage. The bear couldn’t see the guitar cable and tripped, falling flat on his bear face. There were absolute crickets in the audience. We thought the bear was dead, and our guitar tech was scrambling to get the fucking guitar plugged back in, so we could start the show. They had to drag the bear off the stage, and it was such a sorry spectacle. That was the how the show started, and it got worse.
At the time, Iron Maiden was using linoleum stage flooring, which covered the stage in a huge, checkered design. Somebody hadn’t taped it down properly in one spot, and as I was running across the stage, I hit that spot. I was nineteen and not very graceful to begin with, and I tripped over that fucking linoleum and slid across the stage on my face. Suddenly, 20,000 people start laughing at me. They’re all solemn and silent for the fucking bear, but not me.
I picked myself up off the floor and figured I had to do something really spectacular to win the crowd back. I had learned the microphone windmill from my hero Roger Daltrey, so I figured a big, microphone swing would look pretty cool. What I hadn’t learned from Daltrey was that he tapes the microphone and cable together with gaffer tape, so it doesn’t go flying out into the crowd. I started swinging it, and the fucking microphone flew right out at the audience. I’m just standing there holding the cable with no microphone, and we didn’t have an immediate backup.
That was even more humiliating than my stage slide, and I was just dying inside. We limped off stage, and Eddie was fucking furious with me. He was just furious about the whole night, and he was cursing at me, “I’m gonna send you back on the fucking dole where I found ya!” We got on our bus, and he suddenly ran at me. There was a wooden cupholder on the bus, and as I ducked to get out of the way, Eddie whacked his fucking head on it. It knocked him out for about two minutes.
That was our dynamic, as I was a young kid, and he was an experienced musician from his days in Motorhead. Our drummer was Jerry Shirley from Humble Pie, who had tons of experience. I learned so much from them, and one time I made the mistake of putting the Spinal Tap movie on in the bus. I said, “I’ve got this great video—you guys have to watch it.” They did not think the movie was funny at all. They turned it off, and couldn’t look at it. I’m breaking my shit laughing, and they were cringing in pain. It was too real for them, and I don’t think they understood that it was a mockumentary. What’s great about that film is that it’s true. Even to this day, I still get lost backstage occasionally!
Now we have a guy who comes and gets us when it’s time to play, but in the early days, it was completely possible to get lost backstage in big venues. One time we were touring with AC/DC, and this happened during our first show with them. We were at a sushi restaurant the night before the show, and Fast Eddie got a little tipsy. He went to slam his hand on the table, and he accidentally smashed his hand right into a glass sake bowl. He was a bloody mess, and the next day he was in serious pain. The roadies had to gaffer tape the pick to his hand.
He thought he had ruined the tour, but you never heard a word of complaint out of Eddie that whole tour. He was such a great rock ’n’ roll character, and I miss him dearly. We had a lot of good times, and it was a terrible shock when he passed. I didn’t even know he was sick.
26
MIKE SHINODA
(Linkin Park)
Lead singer Chester Bennington’s suicide in 2018 helped inspire a wake-up call about mental health in music that hopefully will inspire future generations to not forsake their health for art. In this chapter, bandmate Mike Shinoda celebrates the legacy of his friend.
One time on a day off in Japan, sometime in 2005, I was sightseeing with my wife and production manager, Jim. We went to this amazing temple, and I was trying to be incognito. I’m half-Caucasian and half-Japanese, and I didn’t really feel like being recognized. We were just trying to have a chill afternoon. We came around the corner, and there was a group of about a hundred school kids. I’m ducking under my hood and trying to get around them without being seen, but the kids all ran up to us with cameras.
I’m thinking, “OK, we’ll stop for a minute and do some pictures.” The kids run up to me, hand me their cameras, and start posing with Jim. We didn’t know what the hell was going on, but I shot pictures of a couple dozen girls hanging all over him. My wife was laughing hysterically, and as they were wrapping it up, I asked one of the girls, “Who is that guy that you’re taking pictures with?” She exclaimed giddily, “Bruce Willis!” That was a nice ego-check.
There aren’t a lot of big Linkin Park party stories. We never got super rowdy, but here’s one of a handful, and once again, it involves Jim. It was the start of a tour early on in the band, sometime around 2003. We had a bunch of new crew members that had joined the team, and we were in Reading, Pennsylvania, getting ready to kick off the tour. We had done a soundcheck/dress rehearsal, and it was starting to snow really heavily.
The band was all back at the hotel, and Jim had rounded up the entire crew for a big speech. He told everyone, “Listen up. I know the kinds of tours you’ve all been on, but this isn’t gonna be that kind of tour. These are family guys and very chill and clean. There will be no drugs or alcohol, and I don’t want to see anyone drinking and smoking around the areas where the band might be. Please be respectful, and keep that stuff away from the band.” Jim did his big speech, and I think he went so far as to say that if he caught anyone not adhering to the requests, they would be kicked off the tour.
As the weather got worse, we got snowed in and had to cancel the first tour date. The whole band and crew were stuck at the hotel, and I was chilling in my room. I got a call from our bass player Dave, who said, “Mike, you gotta get down to the bar right now.” I asked why, and he said, “Just get down here now.” I was kinda worried something was wrong, so I came down and the entire crew was in the bar. Dave, Chester [Bennington], and our videographer, Mark, are shit-faced.
I walked up to them and said, “Wow, you guys are going pretty hard. What are you drinking?” Dave yells, “Rainbow! We’re on yellow, so you’ve gotta catch up.” The bartender keeps serving up rounds of drinks for everybody, with these different colorful concoctions, and he’s taking shots with the band and crew. Pretty quickly, the bartender was passed out on a bar stool, and Chester started tending bar. Jim looks like an idiot because the whole crew was now drunk with half the band after his big speech.
By the end of the night, we had thrown the keg out the window. We had started an epic snowball fight inside the hotel. A couple elevators were packed with a few rooms worth of furniture. I recall there was also a fire extinguisher fight. It ended with someone from the crew “acquiring” the hotel’s security camera footage. I think there may have been animals in the bar by the end of the night too. It’s not too crazy in terms of rock band debauchery, but it was wild for us, and one of maybe five wild nights in our career. It rarely happened, but when it did, it was really fun.
With Chester and I, it was really an opposites attract kind of thing. We were so different. He had such a rough childhood, and he ran with a really crazy crowd. I was a good student, and my mom was a court reporter. My dad worked as an Aerospace engineer who worked on space shuttles. As trite as it sounds, we first bonded over music, with our first loves being N.W.A. and Ministry. We obsessed over Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, and Jane’s Addiction.
Chester would walk into a room and radiate energy, and I always loved that about him. Anywhere we went, he would make things more exciting with his energy and volume. I was always slower to make a judgement call on something. I’ll go t
o a movie, and it might be a day or two before I know my feelings on it. Chester was always zero to ten on everything. I could take him to any show or movie, and he would love it or hate it. There was no in-between. We’d make fun of each other for it, and I always loved that about him.
This is my first tour since Chester’s death, promoting my first solo album. I did something that everyone on my team thought was nuts. I knew I wanted to add a multi-instrumentalist on stage, someone who could play all the instruments I play on the record. I also wanted a live drummer. I found the two guys that I wanted to bring on tour, with one being in London and the other in Israel. We couldn’t get them visas in time to rehearse, and our first show was in Hong Kong.
Management was worried about what we would do, and we ended up rehearsing via videos and emails. For two weeks, I’d give them five pages of notes, and they’d send me iPhone videos, where they’d lean their phones against a wall, filming themselves playing. They’d send me that in a dropbox or text, and I’d send them back my notes. The day before the show, we finally all met in person in Hong Kong.
We had never seen each other in person, let alone played together. It could have been a fucking train wreck. We rehearsed for about four hours, and it totally rocked. It was a huge risk because after a few days, the wheels could have totally fallen off if we didn’t like each other or couldn’t vibe musically. The guys are awesome, the shows are incredible, and we’re having a great time.