In the years since, fans and others have let me know that this song has given them comfort through the times when they’ve lost someone close. The lyrics have been quoted at funerals, chiseled on gravestones, and published in obituaries. These are things I never intended but am gratified to hear about.
When we go into the studio to cut this record, for the first and only time I shun the big guitar sound I’ve become known for. I’ve been listening to a lot of European music that hasn’t been heard in the States and won’t be until all the synth/hair boys break out of Mother England. I’m inspired by it and approach Tao with more of a computer/sequencer attitude. Every musician will soon fall in love with the perfect rhythm of the computer. It’s not a human feel, but it is flawless, and all of us who have spent hours in the studio waiting for all the musicians to finally get it fucking right are reveling in the tight, instantaneous grooves of the electric drum machine and the keyboard sequencer. The truth is, the first sound we ever hear, in the womb, is our mother’s heartbeat, which is where I believe our love of the backbeat comes from.
Looking back, I actually don’t think all the perfect beats and the sequencers suited the spiritual theme of Tao, but it sure as shit is a modern sound, and I dig it. Mitchell Froom, who will eventually produce Elvis Costello and Crowded House’s self-titled ’80s album and record Paul McCartney, covers most of the heavy keyboard work on the album, and I play guitar and bass and, for the first time, write the drum machine programs. Live drummers are about to take a backseat to drum machines for a while on the pop charts, and they’re not happy about it.
Halfway through the sessions, Barbara (now eight months pregnant) and I find a house we love in Malibu: a sprawling ranch on three acres in exclusive Serra Retreat. One night I’m driving home from the Tao sessions to Toluca Lake, the next night I’m driving to Malibu. I haven’t had time to assimilate this relocation, and it’s almost like I don’t want to. After all the moves I’ve made in my life, I just want it to happen as seamlessly as possible. The act of “moving,” even to a nicer pad, is a reality I want to avoid, so I guess I pretend like it’s not really happening.
I think it’s a sign that I’m losing some sense of reality that I will barely acknowledge this big change in my lifestyle. But waiting on the kitchen table in the dim light, the first night I enter our new, multimillion-dollar home, is a pair of tiny baby booties and a way-too-small-to-be-for-a-living-human-being cotton jumpsuit. It’s an amazing moment. I walk into this new house like it’s no big deal, but my hands are shaking as I lift my unborn son’s jumpsuit up to the light.
And then Barbara’s water breaks.
We’re sitting in the family room when it happens. I leap up and run out of the room. B thinks I’ve gone to get some towels and my car keys, but I return with the video camera and start documenting the beginning of the birth of my son. She screams at me to “put the fucking camera down and help me get to the hospital!” I do, and at 7:28 a.m. the next morning—October 27, 1985—Liam James Springthorpe, aka Little Mr. Center of the Universe, is born. And my concept of myself, the world, and the reason I’m here will never be the same again. Thank God.
I’m so excited to show off my new-cute-performing-baby-seal-who-looks-just-like-me that we take the frigging 835-hour flight to the other side of the universe so my mum can ooh and ahh over him too, and so can all my other Aussie relatives. There’s been a slight shift in my sensibilities since the birth of our seal—sorry, our son… . I’m completely unaware of it at this point, but it presents itself to me when I have a quiet moment to myself in my old mum’s house while she and B are out showing off our boy to the neighborhood folks. I look around the old familiar living room and see all the platinum and gold albums, the awards, and the professional touched-up photos I’ve sent her over the past successful years. They are nailed, hung, placed, and framed everywhere, all over the house. It suddenly looks to me like the inside of a really gaudy Chinese brothel: garish, flashy, metallic, too bright. And on the small table by the fireplace is a single photo of my brother Mike. Just one. Clearly in a place of honor.
The lurid array of “prizes” that I’ve sent my old mum over the years seems sad. Like I’m trying too hard. All she needs from Mike is the one black-and-white photo. It is enough. He is enough. I know my brother has always been her favorite, and it’s okay. I love them both. But I also know that she expected me to shine. And I’ve tried to do just that for her. But suddenly I feel unexpectedly ashamed and embarrassed.
The awareness of my shifting view doesn’t happen right away, however. There’s a tour to complete, but I’m uncomfortable about leaving home this time and I miss our new baby all through these travels. We rent a private plane so I can go home at a moment’s notice. I’m done with the whole tour bus thing. “Celebrate Youth,” the first single off Tao, is the biggest hit I’ve ever had in Europe, and we go there on an extensive outdoor festival tour. The Europeans have, by far, the best outdoor concerts. Some attract 100,000, even 200,000 people. All that human energy is an undeniably powerful force, and it lifts me from the stage every time it’s directed at me. It’s that palpable. This feeling is part of the reason I love to perform. My extroverted seven-year-old self is here onstage with me, and he’s having a great freaking time, too.
Back home in the States, I perform at Live Aid, and it’s seen by another 300 gazillion people around the globe. Eric Clapton and I have the same booking agent—a sweet young Woody Allenish New Yorker named Bobby Brooks—and Eric, who’s also playing at Live Aid, wants to meet me. Swayed by my Mr. D, whose grip on me is starting to tighten (“He’ll only see what a dick you truly are”), as well as by my usual insecurities, I blow Eric Clapton off. Wait, did I mention I was clueless? I did? Several times, right? Okay.
I meet a young arty guy from San Francisco named David Fincher who wants to direct my next music video. He will later become a very successful Hollywood director of hits like Fight Club, Se7en, and Panic Room, but right now he’s a skinny, pasty-faced kid who looks like he’s barely seventeen. David says he has an idea for a sci-fi themed video for my new single “Bop ’til You Drop.” He adds that he is in possession of a fine, $3 plastic salad bowl which, when inverted and painted gray, will look like a multimillion-dollar space dome. He has some other pretty outrageous ideas, and I’m encouraged. But when I see what he shoots and edits for the videos of my singles from Tao—“Celebrate Youth,” “State of the Heart,” and “Dance This World Away” as well as “Bop ’til You Drop”—I am absolutely floored. They’re still the only videos of mine I can sit through, aside from the original one for “Jessie’s Girl,” which will always have a cheesy/cool appeal for me. David then shoots my next concert video, The Beat of the Live Drum, and again does stuff no one else is doing with music videos.
On the surface, it’s all good. I have another hit record and a new, cool pad, I’m newly married, and best of all, I have a new, cute, performing baby seal that everyone thinks looks just like me. The truth is that I am stone in love with this little boy, and this love is moving things inside me. But I’m about to be shaken like a rag doll in a Rottweiler’s mouth. I wake up one morning on the road and something is crawling inside me like a spider. I’ve been dodging him or ignoring him and pretending everything is peachy, but the Darkness is truly back to stay. Every nerve in me has been hit so hard and so many times over the past years that they’re all numb, and he knows it. I can no longer escape him. And he wants to go back to Japan.
This is my last tour of the ’80s, although I don’t know it at the time. The Darkness wants some fucking attention, dammit, and he’s telling me to dump my career so we can have some quality time together, he and I. I wake up on our last morning in Tokyo to the news that the Space Shuttle Challenger has exploded during liftoff and everyone on board is dead. This is another one of those Titanic moments, like the death of JFK, where we all have to reassess where we thought we were headed. Sure, we knew space travel was dangerous, but we always believed that �
��they” had a handle on it. I wake up to the fact that the world is in even deeper shit than I imagined and we are definitely not in control. It’s fitting that I chose the Space Shuttle image to describe the launching of my career, because that same career is about to meet a similar end—at least as far as the ’80s are concerned.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MY DEPRESSION
MALIBU
1986–1989
It’s a spectacular Malibu morning. Soft sunlight seeps through eucalyptus branches and splashes across the counterpane of our antique four-poster bed. I wake up in the master bedroom with its arched, old-barn-wood ceiling and look out onto the Spanish fountain in the enclosed courtyard just outside the bedroom’s elegant, hand-milled French doors. I rouse myself and head into the Malibu-tiled master bathroom complete with stained-glass window, but I refuse to look in the mirror and greet the dark bastard. I know he’s close by. I pee—some things never change no matter how big your house is—and walk down the hall past guest bedrooms, across a few steps, and down into the kitchen. It’s “old farmhouse” style, with a domed brick ceiling and a turreted skylight. Gleaming copper pots and pans hang from an old iron ceiling rack with antique farm animal cutouts around the rim. To the right is the dining room, with more French doors opening to a small cactus garden dominated by a twenty-five-foot saguaro. A hand-carved, sixteenth-century European dining table has ten authentic Queen Anne chairs at attention around it, and across the open kitchen counter is the large family room with an old dark-oak bar and a fireplace guarded by two stone angels.
I kiss B good morning, take the mug of steaming tea she hands me, and drop to my knees in supplication before our priceless little miracle, who’s sitting in his baby-walker. He smiles at me and hands me his soggy-Cheerio-encrusted Big Bird toy car. Something is pushing me this morning, making me restless. I tell my son he’s beautiful and take my tea out past the twenty-foot-ceilinged great room off to the left and through the antique carriage doors that serve as the formidable entrance to our labyrinthine Spanish-style home. I walk out into the sweet morning air. Ronnie comes bounding up the long, pepper-tree-lined driveway, having just put the latest passers-by in their place with a preemptory bark, and gives me a standing double high five against my crotch, making me spill half my tea. The gardeners are already hard at work here in the front of the house, so I make my way, tagged closely by my faithful hound, around the side, past the stables and the half-acre riding ring, to the beautifully laid out pool area.
But there are three of us walking, and I know it. I’ve felt this confrontation coming for a long time, and although I’m a little unsure of the course it will take, I know the drill. I begin to walk around the pool, but I am pacing more than strolling. I pass the waterfall, the tennis court, and the meditation gardens. It’s a secluded and peaceful place, and I’m looking for some relief from the growing unease and discomfort that is beginning to writhe like serpents in my gut. This is not how I imagined I would feel.
Sure, the Darkness has again become a regular visitor on the road and is hovering like a starving vulture over my career in general, but I’m home now. Safe with my family, for Chrissakes, and in the house of our dreams that I’ve worked so hard to secure. In an effort to calm what feels like the beginnings of a storm in my soul, I start to chronicle my accomplishments, because at this point I still believe I have every reason to be satisfied, content, and maybe even happy because of what I’ve achieved. Wasn’t this supposed to be the magic healing potion, all this really great stuff?
I make my mental list: I have enough gold and platinum albums from around the world to make really cool suits of armor for me, my family, and my whole road crew. I’ve played sold-out concerts in theaters, halls, arenas, and speedways. A Grammy Award and numerous Grammy nominations, American Music Awards, plus some European and Japanese rock and pop awards festoon my old mum’s house. I am famous (good for prompt restaurant reservations), and I’m so wealthy that I can’t even count how much money I have (although, looking back, I will wish I’d given it a shot). And to top it off, I married my true soul mate and we’ve given birth to a baby genius. What don’t I get about “things are going pretty fucking well”?
Since the morning, at this point more than twenty years ago, when the rope unraveled in the backyard shed and I fell to the hard concrete floor, I’ve always felt that this was the purpose I was saved for—to go forth (done that), be fruitful (that too), multiply (worked really hard at that), and reach for my dreams. Suddenly I’m not so sure. Is there a grander plan that I’m not aware of? Something that doesn’t involve riches, adulation, and fucking?
But the Darkness is pushing me, and I must face something here, even as I try to make light of it all. “You’re a pretty funny guy, huh? Well, I tell you what, pal—you can’t laugh or fuck your way out of this one.” And he’s right. Because I’ve tried. On the road, the high from the craziness only lasts so long now and dissipates as quickly as spit on a hot plate once it’s over. And with women, I’m starting to be the person I never wanted to be. I am becoming egotistical and controlling. Mean-spirited and abusive. The gap between the outward appearance of my fabulous-seeming life and my real inner life of self-doubts, insecurities, and guilt has gotten unreasonably wide. I can no longer reconcile the two. It seems to me that as my success and fame have grown, any self-love, confidence, or natural optimism I might have possessed has slid deeper into a pit, herded and whipped by the depression that I’ve never really shaken.
There are times when I have awakened in the middle of the night and seen him sitting there on the end of the bed, my Darkness. He whispers to me and fills my head with fears and doubts that I can’t shake, that keep me tossing and turning until the sun cracks the morning sky. Now as I pace around the pool, trying to take desperate inventory of all the awesome shit I’ve accomplished, my skin is crawling at the terrible awareness of this reality gap between where I appear to be—successful, happy, complete—and where I really am inside my head: no happier than before I started this journey. And the deeper implications of what kind of a bleak future I may be looking at if I can’t reconcile this dichotomy are beginning to dawn on me.
Where do I go from here? Where will my drive to win come from if I now know that winning, of itself, won’t heal me as I’d always believed it would? Ronnie sniffs the bushes, blissfully heedless of my growing recognition of this predicament. Mr. D sits in my fucking Jacuzzi smiling knowingly at me and smoking a big fat cigar. He knows I hate them. I begin to visibly sweat. My mind is racing. What have I been chasing this all for, then, if nothing’s really changed? Although I’ve attained most of the goals I set out to reach, I’m still miserable. Success has not changed me. It is not the panacea, and I am not a better person for it as I had hoped I might be. I certainly have not escaped the depression that has dogged me all my life, like I’d been pretending I had. I’ve changed everything around me that I can possibly change, but I am still the same. After all the mountain climbing, the battlements storming and victorious plundering, it’s still the same guy looking back at me from the bathroom mirror. I am not cured.
And I am finally made aware of the “myth of fame.” It may seem like an obvious revelation, but honestly, unless you’ve gone through it, you can’t imagine what kind of a mind-fuck it really is to truly understand that, in and of itself, fame is not ultimately transformative.
One thing’s for sure: I can’t just go on doing what I’ve been doing. Suicide has ceased to be an option for me now that I have a son, so the Darkness doesn’t even consider pushing me in that direction. He knows me well. Besides, I’m sure Mr. D is having way too much fun at my expense right now; why would he want it to end?
I try to turn to God, but I have no connection there, so I get no comfort and no answers. I grab the phone and call Tim Pierce, my guitar player and friend. Tim is a kindred if differently tortured soul, and in his search for his own answers he has turned to Jungian therapy. Tim and I talk regularly about our shit, a
nd when I call he suggests I go check out a man named Robert Stein, a therapist who Tim has been seeing for a while. I balk, remembering my previous encounters, first with the useless “draw-yourself-in-relation-to-sex” guy when I was seventeen, and then the idiot I saw a few years ago who had the winning advice, “Just keep screwing around and don’t tell her.” But I’m desperate. I read up on Jungian therapy and am attracted to its link to the spiritual side of our existence, something that’s totally missing in Freudianism. I ask myself, “Am I really insane enough to go see a shrink?” Then I realize that I’m probably not the guy to ask, but I definitely can’t go on in this miserable state. So I give this Stein guy a call.
By the late 1950s, Robert Stein was a young and successful doctor. Happily married, with a house in Beverly Hills, a couple of Mercedes-Benzes in the garage, and two young daughters, he seemed to have an enviable life. But, very much like me, he had deeper psychological issues that spoiled the fun. Incest issues from when he was a child had come back to haunt him. After witnessing some medical colleagues band together to hush up the accidental death of a patient, Stein soured on his profession. Between this experience and his personal struggle with the wounds of his childhood, he decided to close his thriving medical practice, let go of all of his possessions, and move his family to Zurich so he could become a Jungian therapist under the personal guidance of Carl Jung himself. Stein’s intention was to first treat himself and then help others. Ultimately, he will write a landmark book entitled Incest and Human Love.
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