Wild Boy

by Andy Taylor

  LIFE in America was a whole new learning curve for Tracey and me, and we soon found ourselves mixing with lots of the so-called Hollywood A-list. For my twenty-fifth birthday we’d organized a huge party in a giant transparent marquee at the back of our house in Malibu. With Danny Goldberg’s help I was in the process of negotiating a very generous solo deal with a major record label, so regardless of Duran’s attempts to play legal hopscotch, money wasn’t going to be a problem for us in the immediate future. I’ve always believed that if you are good enough it comes to you, and you don’t need to run around like a headless chicken chasing hits, doing dodgy promo tours or any of that “where are they now” stuff.

  Since it was my twenty-fifth, we decided to really push the boat out and spent around £50,000 on the party. We invited everyone we could think of, including stars like Michael J. Fox, John McEnroe, and Tatum O’Neal. One of the reasons we spent so much was because my new management team were keen to use the party to help launch me as a solo artist—and in all there were about five hundred people on the guest list (of which I probably knew only about half!). When the day of the party arrived the heavens opened and there was torrential rain, which caused large stretches of the Pacific Coast Highway to be blocked by mudslides. As I watched the weather get worse I became increasingly concerned that some of the guests would be stranded, unable to get through the mud, so I phoned up the local sheriff’s office for advice.

  “No worry, Andy, we’ll escort your guests to the party,” they said.

  What a town, I thought—only in LA!

  It was one of the best parties I’ve ever been to. I remember standing there at the end of the evening with Tony Thompson and thinking how much fun it had all been. I had actually enjoyed being at a party again. After that, bumping into the famous and curious became a regular occurrence, and there are some people you meet who still leave you starstruck. For example, I was out on the town with Michael Des Barres one evening when he organized a surprise.

  “Come with me,” he said. “We’re going to see Jack because I know you’ve always wanted to meet him.”

  “Jack who, Michael?”

  “Jack fuckin’ Nicholson, dude, who do ya think I meant, the Ripper? Ha ha . . .” Michael has an infectious way of laughing at himself.

  “Excellent.”

  “That’s right, he’s in town tonight,” said Michael, grinning broadly.

  He took me to the Roxy, which was ironically the place where I had fled to when the cops had busted our crew at the Hyatt all those years earlier. We went to the upstairs lounge, which was deserted, apart from Jack Nicholson sitting alone at the bar with his shades on.

  “Hey, Mikey,” he said in that familiar drawl, the corner of his mouth turning up in a smile.

  “Hey, Jack. This is Andy.”

  Michael knew I was a big fan of Jack’s films, so it was a lovely gesture on his behalf. We only stayed for one drink together, but it was enough. I was happy to meet someone whom I admired so much without having to take things any further than that. It’s usually the best way—trust me.

  Like Jagger, Jack was the same person in private as he was in public. He had a special veneer around him, which I also experienced a few years later when I met Arnold Schwarzenegger. I worked on the musical score for Arnie’s film Commando, and recorded the title song for the end of the movie. We were introduced so that we could watch the final edit together. He came in with a big cigar and greeted me like an old friend in his booming Austrian accent.

  “Hi, Andy, how are you doing?”

  We sat down and watched the credits roll together.

  “Oh yeah. I like it, I like it,” he said in his deep, sincere voice, and nodded.

  It was enjoyable rubbing shoulders with Hollywood’s finest, because I had the chance to play a creative part in their work. I also discovered that despite the conservative nature of life in LA, not everyone always conformed to the rules. I went to one party which the boys from Mötley Crüe attended, and they seemed to be intent on having as wild a time as possible, including sexually—and they didn’t seem to give a toss who watched.

  It was on the day of the Super Bowl at the home of a very Bohemian record-industry figure. After George Martin, he was without doubt one of the greatest British record producers, and he and I knew each other well. His home was palatial. It had a great big pool with fountains that flowed down into another pool on a lower level. At the party, waiters walked around holding up trays of delicacies. The whole thing was like a scene from a movie. Mötley Crüe were quite enamored with the whole Duran Duran scene, because although they were heavy rockers they wore makeup and they were quite into the glam scene. I knew Tommy Lee, who was a really nice kid, through Tony Thompson. Tommy was a lively character, very vivacious and easy to talk to; he was also a brilliant drummer and he really held the band together, so we had a kind of mutual respect for each other. This was before the whole Pamela Anderson saga, but even then he was famous for having the biggest appendage in town—and it was at the party that I discovered this unsavory fact. He was in the hot tub with some of the other Mötley Crüe guys and a more-than-willing group of girls. One could say that they were all hard at it (and I don’t mean that they were beating the drums). It was like a vivid porno movie except it wasn’t on a TV screen; it was going on live in front of anyone who cared to walk up to the top pool. Duran Duran had hardly been a bunch of prudes sexually, particularly during our Rum Runner days, but I’ve never been the sort of guy who wants to get naked in a hot tub with a bunch of other guys, and I must admit I found it all a bit intimidating (anybody would with their todgers out next to Tommy!).

  But hey, they’re Mötley Crüe, I thought. Aren’t they supposed to do that? I didn’t know it at the time, but some of them were heavily into heroin; and this was the eighties, so things could still be very decadent compared to today.

  Of course, being sober didn’t always ensure you kept totally out of trouble, as my newly reformed friend Steve Jones soon found out. Steve had been through the music industry mangle himself during his time in the Sex Pistols. Michael and Don had told me that Jonesy had been going through a tough time. He had problems with booze and drugs, and in addition his immigration status in the US was unclear. He’d started attending AA, and by the time I arrived in LA I knew he was out on a limb. I was anxious to make a record that could be understood as a guitar record for my first solo album, so who better to work with than a guitarist like Steve Jones? The Pistols had been famous for Johnny Rotten and his lyrics, but in my mind Jones and his guitar had also been priceless. Steve was down on his luck and I had just signed a $2 million contract, so I knew he’d appreciate the chance to work on something that had a chance of being a commercial success, and he loved his money. He was off booze and drugs; therefore, I guessed his head needed something to focus on while his body recovered. I thought this was the full circle from the Chic guys to the Pistols.

  Steve agreed and soon we were having a lot of writing sessions together. I can remember meeting him at Tramps in LA one evening when he turned up grinning from ear to ear and flicking a coin in the air.

  “Look, Taylor, I’ve got my one-month coin,” he said. He explained that it was a gift from AA to mark his first month sober. “You know, you should come to AA, too,” he said.

  “Thanks, but I haven’t had a drink for a while myself and I think I’m doing okay,” I explained. We sat together drinking cranberry juice. Steve was a right old charmer, but being teetotal didn’t prevent him from chatting up the ladies as they went past, and he was never short of female company.

  I loaned Steve £50,000 against my record advance. We did a lot of good work in the studio together, then a few weeks later I got a phone call from one of my bodyguards. He told me Steve had gone out and bought a Harley Davidson with some of the money, and had been arrested by the cops for speeding on Sunset Strip in Hollywood.

  “We have Mr. Jones here and we are holding him while we clarify his immigration status.
We believe he has no license to ride and he has no insurance,” the police had told our office.

  I called my lawyer, Robert Shapiro (who later successfully defended O. J. Simpson), who resolved the matter, and Jonesey was back at the studio by teatime. It was a funny episode that, booze or no booze, proved that you could take the boy out of the Sex Pistols but you couldn’t take the Sex Pistol out of the boy. Steve, who wore his hair very long at this point in time, had gone out and splashed $10,000 on the biggest Harley he could find, then deliberately burned up and down Sunset with his great mane of hair blowing behind him. I was Steve’s way of saying, Am I tamed after a month and a bit sober? Bollocks! The one thing you could say for sure about Jonesy was that he always had a great attitude. He’s still a bit of a cunt!

  I managed to stay comparatively sober in LA. As I said previously, I quit booze altogether for several months in LA and it did me a world of good because I’d definitely been drinking too much. But slowly I started to drink again from time to time, although in a much calmer way (at least at first!). Over the years my drinking has gone back to being pretty epic on occasions, but it never became as destructive as it had been previously. I’m not going to pretend I’ve never since dabbled in other substances either, but I no longer take cocaine. I’ve learned a lot of lessons the hard way but I’m not going to sit back and preach about drugs—you can read this book and make up your own mind. What I will say is that I can’t recall any occasion on which it affected my performance on stage. I once did a gig opening up for the Psychedelic Furs which turned into a bit of a fracas, but it was nothing to do with booze. It was because my set overran and the Furs’ roadies turned on the lights while I was still onstage, and it led to a heated exchange with my own crew.

  My solo album sold well (about 300,000 copies) and it made number one on the MTV chart. I also worked with many serious musicians in the States, but the one person who really stands out in my mind as being the funniest person to be around is Rod Stewart. My decision to be teetotal lasted until I started hanging out with Rod—and then we went into the studio, which soon felt as if it had become Rod and Andy’s 6 p.m. Drinking Club. “We never close,” was our motto.

  I’d first met Rod a few years earlier when I was in a pub with Simon, and we’d gotten to chatting about songwriting (how bloody boring). Rod was a childhood hero of mine, someone whose voice I really loved, and I very much admired his songs from both the Faces and his solo career. Rod had been intrigued by the fact that we’d written all our own songs, and he’d become very inquisitive after he’d gotten a few beers down his neck. After I parted from Duran Duran we eventually shared the same management, so we agreed to meet up one night. We arranged to have dinner and talk about what we might be able to do together musically. He then asked who would be accompanying me.

  “Just me,” I replied.

  “What, with no birds?” he replied in his wonderfully gravelly voice.

  “Well, no. Tracey’s back in England for a while, and I haven’t got a reserve booked,” I joked.

  “What, no birds, no?” he repeated, disappointed. Rod had been divorced from Alana Hamilton for only a couple of years, and he was clearly still in the mood to enjoy his newfound freedom.

  “No, we’ll just sit and talk,” I insisted.

  When we met, I discovered that Rod could drink like a fish—or at least that was the impression he liked to give.

  “We’ll have one of them, and then afterward we’ll have one of these,” he said, eyeing up the drinks menu. Pretty soon the cocktails were having the desired effect, and I was beginning to feel a wee bit light-headed. What I didn’t know at the time was that Rod was secretly tipping his own drinks into a plant pot, crafty old fox, or he’d wait for me to go to the toilet and then order the waiter to take only his own glass away.

  “Come on, son, drink up,” he’d say when I got back from taking a leak.

  Then he’d act a bit drunk and lull me into a false sense of security about the fact that I was feeling so sozzled myself. He told me some hilarious anecdotes about the Faces in the seventies, all very funny stuff, and how Woody’s departure was all Jagger’s fault and he “nicked Woody even though he promised me he wouldn’t.” Anyhow, before I knew it I was pretty drunk. The next morning he phoned me up, and bugger me, he gave me total recall of the evening. How can he remember all this if he drank the same amount as me? I thought.

  “You know that you were throwing ice at a bird’s cleavage in the restaurant?” he asked.

  “Was I—did I hit the spot?”

  “Yeah, in more ways than one, and when we got back to Spunk Towers [his affectionate term for his residence] you drank a bottle of Lillet and scratched my records.”

  “Sorry about the records, chap, shall we go and have a drink?”

  “No, Andy, I am going to the suntan parlor this morning.”

  “Bollocks to that, I am going back to bed.”

  I later realized that he doesn’t actually drink it all, which a member of his staff later confirmed to me. So is that how he survives? I inquired. The sly bastard, I thought (but in a good way!).

  “You didn’t fall for that one, did you, Andy—did you really?” Randy Philips, our manager, just laughed. “You English, where do you put it?”

  I said, “Practice, my little Californian friend, years of practice.”

  But there were plenty of times when Rod did knock it back, and we agreed to make an album together on the understanding that it would involve drinking plenty of his favorite cocktail, which was called a mudslide (there’s even a song about it). This consisted of vodka and a mixture of liqueurs that included Bailey’s and ice, all mixed together in a blender. It had been Rod’s favorite party drink ever since he’d been served it on one of his birthdays. It’s very drinkable and it absolutely hammers you. I agreed that the mudslides sounded like a great idea, but on our first afternoon I wanted to sit and rehearse together first, to see if we could get any decent tunes going. We decided that we’d go to a rehearsal studio that was well away from the main bustle of Hollywood, so that it didn’t attract any attention. The last thing we wanted was to be surrounded by music biz big shots at one of the better known venues.

  “I’ll leave you to book the rehearsal room,” I said.

  When I got there Rod had chosen this tatty little place right at the back of a valley across the road from a strip club. I noticed that inside the studio everyone addressed Rod as Mr. Stewart, whereas I was referred to as plain old Andy. I later found out that Rod had a man who went around beforehand telling everybody what to call him. Naturally, I’d assumed we would get straight down to work, but Rod had other ideas.

  “I’ve got this bag of crisps here,” he said. “Shall we go and have some beer to go with the crisps?” That was the best excuse to go for a drink I had heard for ages—these crisps need some beer!

  I discovered that Rod, not unlike myself, always had an excuse to go for a drink, so before I knew it we were across the road, standing at the bar in this seedy little strip club, surrounded by afternoon perverts.

  “Hey, it’s you guys! Awesome—How ya doing?” squealed the barmaid, who clearly hadn’t been expecting Rod Stewart to pop in for a lunchtime pint with a former member of Duran Duran and a bag of crisps.

  “No, shhh. Nobody is meant to recognize us,” said Rod, winking conspiratorially.

  Quite how Rod thought he would manage to remain incognito was beyond me, because with his shaggy blond hair, extended nasal features, and $10,000 suits, he’s possibly one of the most recognizable people on the planet. Because he is always beautifully attired, his impeccable dress sense just made him look even more out of place in our sleazy surroundings. But we drank a few beers (to go with the crisps) at the bar, while the strippers performed elsewhere in the club, before we eventually staggered back to the studio.

  Amazingly, Rod’s warm-up technique of going to the bar seemed to have worked a treat, and that afternoon we wrote three cool songs, and it was only o
ur first day. All three made the album we were recording (if you’re interested, the tracks were called “Dynamite,” “Lethal Dose of Love,” and “The Wild Horse”). I remember thinking, Well, whatever we did—it all worked out!

  After that, Rod and I shared a host of alcoholic antics and I had a seriously good time with him. I can’t remember us ever having a cross word, despite getting into some compromising situations. We shared a similar sense of humor. Rod was very impressed when I told him about the time I had sabotaged the toilets at the Carlyle Hotel by drawing rude pictures on the toilet paper rolls for the next guests to see when they unfurled them.

  “That’s funny because I used to do that, too,” said Rod. “I was staying in the Presidential Suite there once and I discovered that the Queen was due to stay there next, so I drew a big picture of a cock and bollocks on the bog roll!”

  It was typical of Rod’s sense of mischief, and I can only hope Her Majesty didn’t get too much of a shock when she came to sit on the throne! Because of the drinking antics, sometimes things would really go too far, so much so that we eventually got banned from Cherokee Studios in Hollywood because of all the mayhem we caused. I was awoken by a telephone call from our management one morning after a particularly heavy session.

  “Can you remember what you did with Rod last night?” they asked.

  “Er, no—not exactly. Did I lose him somewhere?” I said, struggling to recall anything through my throbbing head.

  “You got thrown out of the recording studio and you are banned from going there again.”

  “Why?” I gasped.

  “Because at one point you were pissing in a bucket.”

  “A bucket of what?”

  “The bucket that holds the wastepaper basket and which is supposed to serve as a bin.”