by Drew Fortune
I don’t remember leaving the restaurant or getting on stage. I just remember mistaking the Warlocks dude for Joel, but that’s the only thing I remember about the gig. A few days later in Sacramento, somebody who was at the San Francisco gig, said, “Man, it was awesome! I haven’t seen you play fucked up like that in so long, and it made it super interesting.” Jesus, man. Sometime around 1997, I got drunk in Brussels, and when I went on stage, I remember thinking, “I don’t feel this at all. I don’t feel anything.” I was so drunk that I couldn’t feel the music.
Usually, the feeling of playing and getting it going with the gang is like creating my own wave and surfing it with my best friends. I smoke weed and get stoned before every show, and that wave is an unbelievably powerful, emotionally cleansing experience. I’m literally shaking when I get on stage, but when we start going, that anxiety melts away, and we ride the wave. This time I wasn’t feeling anything, and after the first song, some kid yelled really nasty, “You’re drunk!” That was it, and I hadn’t played drunk since the Independent show in San Francisco. I haven’t played drunk since that one either. I don’t feel music when I’m drunk, except for maybe something like, “Fight for Your Right to Party.”
I remember a bunch of us going to a dance club in Madrid after a show. Great music, and I drank a bunch. The next bar was a small punk club, and I continued to drink. A friend of mine from Amsterdam said that later that night I was on the speaker box singing every line and dancing like a madman to “Fight for Your Right to Party.” He said I didn’t miss a line, and I thought that was so fucking weird. I had surely heard it a billion times, but I had never tried to sing along to it. Through osmosis, we all know that song. I think there’s a ton of songs like that if you get drunk enough, you’ll know every line. I probably know all the words to every campy, Bon Jovi mega-hit. I could probably crush “Dead or Alive” right now if I wanted to.
We used to play with The Brian Jonestown Massacre all the time. That lady [director Ondi Timoner] didn’t really have a story, so she would get the Jonestown really whipped up about how nothing was happening for them while we were touring Europe. That led to them getting really jealous and angry, which ended up shaping the movie. She would trick us into doing shit, like going to the Jonestown house to shoot pictures when we had no idea the band wasn’t going to be there. She convinced us that by shooting in this fucked-up house, it would help the Jonestown’s career.
When she cut it together, it made us look like bad friends and icky people. She was constantly doing shit like that. Any time we were back in LA, which was rare, she would pack us all in a car and drive us out to the desert. On our day off, we had to drive four hours each way to the desert because Anton was out there shooting a video, and we had to be in it. We were constantly doing things that we didn’t understand were made to make us look bad later.
It was really ugly, and we didn’t get to be friends again with Jonestown for years after the documentary. We really couldn’t say, “Dude! We did this because Ondi told us it would help you!” It would have sounded like the fucking lamest thing ever. So, we broke up as friends. Believe the movie if you want…we don’t care anymore. Fuck off. Feelings were hurt on both sides, but we took Joel’s band on tour. Our families hang out with Anton and his family when we’re in Berlin. It’s like we’re finally adults and understand how everything went down. What a history we have—it’s all part of rock legend now.
Ondi has the only footage of the Dandy’s from back in the day, and she won’t even let us see it. That’s her M.O. It’s what she does to people. She did the same thing to Russell Brand in a documentary she made about him. I don’t think she feels confident enough to make something like a Tom Petty documentary, where there’s hope and brightness. I think she felt no one would have watched Dig! if there wasn’t constant ugliness and hatred. She’s a bottom feeder. We lost about half our audience after the doc came out, and Jonestown would get shit thrown at them on stage as the crowd tried to antagonize Anton. People wanted to see a fight, and it made their lives miserable.
“Not If You Were the Last Junkie On Earth” was actually written about my ex-girlfriend, not The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Ondi convinced them it was about Anton. When I got back from the first Dandy’s tour, my girlfriend had shot dope with the singer of my previous band. She showed up at my house looking like a drowned rat in the rain. She had a brown paper bag with her rig, some dope, and a king-size Snickers. She marched into my house and started chewing me out about what an asshole and weak man I was to break up with her. Then she shot up in my bathroom.
On a tour that I went on with the Jonestown, we had pulled over to get crap food at a mini-mart. I was on tour with them because I had been dumped by my girlfriend, and I was super depressed the whole time. There was a ton of drugs, and I was also staying really drunk, which made me more depressed. A bunch of the smack-heads from Jonestown, along with some of the people from the opening band decided to shoot up in the shitty mini-mart, somewhere in the Midwest.
I was so depressed that I went with them. They got out the needle, spoon, rubber tube, and smack. We were all piled into this disgusting bathroom stall, and I told them that I had never shot smack. I had smoked and snorted it but never shot. All it had ever made me do was lay on the sofa and vomit a lot, and I wasn’t a big fan of the drug. At that point, I felt like “fuck it”—I’d do anything because I was so fucking depressed and constantly hungover.
Some dude tied me off, slapped my vein, and drew up the dope in the syringe, when we heard the door to the bathroom slam open. The owner yelled, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing in there, but you better get the fuck out right now. I’m calling the cops.” I looked at that needle and my bulging vein. I undid the rubber tube and said, “Nope.” We got out of there, and only later did it occur to me that the owner of that mini-mart could easily have saved my life. He saved my future. That’s a really hard drug to come back from, and once you go down that road, it seems like you can’t stop. You either have to die or become the one out of a thousand junkies that actually get free. I can count the ones I know on one hand.
I’m so fucking glad I didn’t do it. I have enough fucking problems and garbage in my brain as a human being that I don’t need that shit. I’m pretty full of self-loathing already. I don’t need to go darker. I remember thinking that if I ever became successful, I’d come back and buy that mini-mart guy a car. That guy fucking saved my ass from a fate worse than death. Literally worse than death. I just found out that I love pills. I just got a Xanax prescription for my anxiety, but I have to make sure I don’t do more than one a week. When I worry that my world is crashing, that I can’t handle it, or that I’m going to fuck up the Dandy’s and ruin my family, I’ll do a quarter of a Xanax.
It’s called expansion, and it’s when your creative mind doesn’t have any real skills to create its own barriers. It’s what great artists are made of, but it’s what fatalistic, self-abusing idiots are made of too, unfortunately. It’s hard, because getting drunk is fun every single time for me. I’m not a mean or sad drunk. I’m a happy ass drunk. Like right now, I could start with the champagne, then move on to the whites and reds. Next thing you know, I want to invite people over. I’ll call a guy and get a big pile of blow and have the crazy, rock ’n’ roll scene again. I miss it, but then it’s 5:00 a.m., and I’m super suicidally depressed. It would spiral into two or three consecutive days, and it’s fucking gross.
It’s hard to not want to go there, so I just stay busy. Idle hands….
35
SEAN YSEULT
(White Zombie)
As bassist for White Zombie, Yseult infiltrated the boys club of metal and quickly shut up any detractors with her amazing presence, precision, and kick-ass work ethic. She reminisces about getting pranked by the dearly departed Dimebag Darrell and spotlights the importance of mental and physical wellness.
White Zombie toured with Pantera a lot, and those guys are like brothers to me, es
pecially Dimebag Darrell. He was always harassing me like a little sister, and he used to call me Junior, which became my nickname for all of Pantera. He was the best big brother you could have, and I was probably a couple years older than him! Not only was he the coolest guy in the world and my big bro, but he loved pulling pranks. Most bands, when you’re on tour together, reserve the last day of the show for the pranks. For us, touring with Danzig and the Ramones, it wasn’t easy to prank the bands I grew up worshipping. But we did it anyway. It’s tricky, because you don’t really want to fuck with Danzig. We covered the Ramones in silly string on stage, which was so silly and sophomoric. We definitely got the impression that Joey and Johnny were not into it.
Pranking was a daily affair for Dimebag, and the pranks were always amazingly creative, bizarre, and hilarious. He’d do something to the bus or walk onstage during our show like he was a janitor. You couldn’t stop him. He especially liked to mess with me. One night he gave one of his roadies a ten-dollar bill and told him to go to the bank to get ten dollars’ worth of pennies. I always wore these short and wide engineer boots with leggings. Halfway through our set, Darrell came out and poured all these pennies down my boots, during this intricate moment when I was standing still and doing some head spinning with my hair. I looked down, and he looked up smiling, pouring these pennies into my boots.
When he was done, it felt like it weighed a million pounds. I could barely move for the rest of the show. It was truly embarrassing, because it was in front of at least 10,000 people, and I’m known as someone that runs around onstage and puts on a show. The audience saw the whole thing, so they knew there was good reason that I couldn’t move. I got off stage, and Darrell was waiting for me. He said, “Junior, did ya feel a little weighed down out there?”
He’d also dare people to do anything, especially his roadies. I had lime-green hair at one point, and he said, “Junior, I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you cut off one of your locks.” I cut it off, made a hundred bucks, and they gave it to their bus driver, who braided it into his hair. He walked around for days with this long, lime-green lock of hair attached to his head.
The craziest gig for me was back in the late eighties on one of our first tours. We were setting up our own shows, sleeping in a van, or on people’s floors. We found these kids that wanted to set up a show. They had a really badass band called Doom Snake Cult, which is still one of the coolest band names ever. We drove out there and the two kids were like the stoner versions of Beavis and Butthead. They drove us out to Parumph, Nevada, in the middle of the desert. Our lodging was their trailer. They had set up the show outdoors, in a drainage ditch, where the locals go to shoot off their guns.
There we were in the desert with all these crazies who were hopped up on speed and shooting guns. To the guys’ credit, they had gotten some gear and rigged up a PA system. We were just surrounded by sand, in this long ditch, wondering who was going to show up. Including us, Doom Snake Cult, and a few of their friends, there might have been fifteen people at that show. Everyone besides us was on acid, and they made a bonfire in front of us while we were playing. When the acid really kicked in, the kids started picking up the flaming logs and throwing them at each other, while these guns were firing all around us.
Over the years, I’ve had numerous people come up to me saying they were at that gig. Well, if you were actually one of the five people, great. Otherwise, no…you weren’t. It was kind of like a weekend at Hunter Thompson’s, and later in life, when we were selling out arenas, I looked fondly back on that gig. Everything becomes routine when you start playing sports arenas. It’s all just concrete, with no real charm. You can’t just walk outside and go to a cool restaurant or bar. It was so much different being in the van and actually hanging with bands. I’m not knocking selling out arenas, but it was a much different adventure before that happened.
On the first day of our tour with the Ramones, I was so excited that I got ready early so I could watch them. We were somewhere in North Dakota, and I went running up the stairs of the arena to get to the side stage. It was pitch black, and one of my legs fell through a hole in the stage. Someone had built it incorrectly and left out a board. My leg went straight through the stage, and my other leg snapped backwards, tearing my knee up.
It took me about two years to recover from that because we never stopped touring. I had to play the same night it happened, and I could barely stand. The worst thing for me is not being able to put on a good show. I got through it, but I don’t remember how. I just wrapped it in an Ace bandage and went on. Somebody had called a “rock doctor” to bring me a couple painkillers, but it still hurt like hell. Throughout the tour, I kept seeing all these different doctors and getting larger leg braces. If you look up an old clip of us on David Letterman, I have a brace running from my ankle all the way up to my hip.
There’s a whole team of people depending on you, and this is how touring musicians and athletes get hooked on painkillers and drugs. So much money is lost if the show or tour is cancelled. God forbid you get sick, as the show must always go on. Luckily, I didn’t get hooked, because I’ve seen too much of that. We started out kind of straight-edge, and I have that mentality. I’ve never been dependent on drugs, but I had to take something. The rock doctors would show up, give me some Vicodin, and I’d take it. I don’t really know if rock docs exist anymore, but they did back then. I never had a prescription, but if they showed up, I’d take one. None of it was handled very well.
I finally got surgery on my knee, but then I didn’t have time to properly recover or go through physical therapy. I was right back on the road and was a mess for another couple of years. I’m still friends with Phil Anselmo from Pantera, and we talk about these old war stories all the time. He was in horrible pain for so long from performing, but he was the lead man, and the show had to go on. That’s how this shit happens. It wasn’t a surprise to hear about Tom Petty or Prince because I know about the road and the toll it takes on your body.
36
SAMMY HAGAR
(Van Halen)
Whatever your feelings on “Van Hagar,” the Red Rocker has been doing it longer and harder than most. He explains why you should never try a mic stand throw without practice and what it’s like to expose yourself to thousands of KISS fans at Madison Square Garden.
All of us rock stars are so fucking vain, especially when we’re on our way up in the business. We’re trying to become somebody and trying to be the coolest guy in the world, so that when shit goes wrong, it is really a bad feeling. Looking back, I’m able to laugh now, and I wish I could have handled both situations better. The first story was when I was in my first recording band, Montrose. It was my first time on a big stage, as I came from playing small clubs and backyard barbecues. When Montrose happened, it was a big jump for me. We made a record with Ted Templeman and toured the world.
We had a really good relationship with Bill Graham, and he gave us our first big shot. We played a couple clubs just to get our shit together, made a record, and then Bill puts us on at Winterland, opening for Humble Pie. I had a microphone stand that I had gold-plated with my advance money. I thought it was just the coolest thing in the world. I was a big fan of Rod Stewart, and I loved the way that he used to take his three-legged microphone stand, twirl it around, and throw it up in the air. I had never done that because I had never been on a big enough stage to try it. The ceiling where we used to rehearse wasn’t even tall enough for me to jump fully in the air, so I had literally never even experimented with microphone stand acrobatics.
At soundcheck, day of the Winterland show, I didn’t even practice my mic stand moves, but I knew I was going to do it during the show. We get on stage and, during the very first song, I flipped the fucking gold-plated mic stand into the air. The heavy end of it came right down on our bassist Bill Church’s head, and it fucking knocked him out cold. I’m talking unconscious, with blood rushing down his face. The stand broke the headstock of his Fender bass, the instr
ument that had been on all the Van Morrison records.
I couldn’t even sing because my voice was quaking so badly. We kept playing, but I was a stuttering wreck. Bill Graham was onstage with an icepack, icing down Church who was flat on his back. Graham was glaring at me with this look that said, “You goddamn fucking idiot.” It was so humiliating that I couldn’t have sex for six months after that. Honestly, it was one of those things where everybody was over it in no time, but not me. I was haunted. I’d be hanging out, lying in bed, walking down the street, or driving my car, and it would come back to me. I’d fucking cringe all over again.
Graham got Church all tightened up, got him another bass, and by the second song, Church was up and playing like nothing had happened. It wasn’t until the third song that my voice had settled down, and I could actually attempt something like singing. It was brutal, and I never threw my mic stand again. That was my punishment for trying to copy Rod Stewart.
My other story is from 1977, and I had my second solo record out. KISS was starting a tour, and it was their first headlining show in New York, their hometown. They sold out Madison Square Garden, and they asked me at the last minute to be the opening act for the ten-show, East Coast run. Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley were both fans of Montrose, and they liked my first solo record. I go on stage to open Madison Square Garden, but nobody knew who I was, or even that I was on the bill, because I was added last minute. I didn’t even have any fans yet anyway.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sammy Hagar!” The place immediately starts fucking booing. I was still green from Montrose, and I didn’t feel like I was anywhere near famous, so I just tried kicking as much ass as I could. During the third song, which was a Donovan-balled cover called, “Catch the Wind,” people started flipping me off and really losing their shit. I was looking out at the crowd, and I stopped the song. I yelled, “You fucking assholes! You didn’t even give me a chance. You started booing me before hearing the music. Fuck you!”