Sex, Drugs, Ratt & Roll: My Life in Rock

by Stephen Pearcy

  ROAD DOG:

  One of my duties was to patrol the hotel floor and make sure nobody without a pass got upstairs. One time, in Cleveland, I was walking around, and I found a naked girl in the stairwell. And I look at her, like, not really sure what to say.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m waiting for Stephen.”

  “You’re waiting for Stephen. Well, Stephen uses the elevator.”

  She figured with so many people crowding in front of the elevator downstairs, she might beat the odds by hanging in the stairwell. I just told her to get her clothes. Just, come on, please get out of here.

  I started to dream about returning to the soft and cushy confines of Ratt Mansion West. Los Angeles felt like a million miles away, and I began to miss everyone. I missed my mother, my brother, Victor Mamanna, and Mrs. O’Neill. I missed the Whisky and Bill Gazzarri and my Datsun B-210. How could my favorite town in the world possibly be surviving without me?

  One evening, homesick in Colorado, I was roaming around our hotel hallways with Gary, one of our guitar techs, late at night, looking for trouble. Outside of Blotzer’s room, passed out, moaning in drunken dementia, was a very unconscious rock chick groupie.

  “That’s so Bob,” I muttered, shaking my head. “He’ll get them all sloppy in order to get what he wants, but when she’s blotto, he’ll say, ‘I don’t like that slop in here.’ ”

  Gary returned to his room, seized two large pillows from his bed, and walked back to the drunken princess. There he placed the pillows on top of each other. Together, they formed a stack ten inches high. I eased her hips on top of the pillows, so her ass was sticking in the air.

  Gary took a condom out of his pocket, unwrapped it, and began easing it over his index and middle finger.

  “What are you up to, you freak?” I said.

  “I’m a bad person. And I need a hand with this.”

  “I think I’ll just sit here and watch and laugh about this later.”

  Gary eased Bobby’s cutie’s jeans down off her hips and rolled her green lacy underwear down her thighs. Her little starfish winked at us.

  Gary began to work the condom into her ass, plunging his fingers in slowly, until they’d reached the third knuckle. Trying hard not to laugh, he extracted his fingers with the deftness of a surgeon. A couple inches of rubber trailed from her, like a latex tail.

  “Good night, sweet girl.” We patted our friend on the back. “I hope you enjoyed your night with the Blotz.”

  We pulled her jeans back around her waist and left her there in the hallway, ass propped up in the air, with a surprise for her to discover later.

  ROAD DOG:

  They threw underwear up onstage constantly, and Stephen would pick the underwear up and smell the crotch of it. Well, this one night, man, I mean, it was a pretty good crowd, probably fifteen thousand or better, and he picks a pair of underwear up and smells it. I thought he was going to throw up. Whips that thing over to the side, and there was stuff inside the crotch of those panties that nobody could even describe.

  I want to say it was pus or something, man. Just . . . crusty. Gross looking.

  Stephen was awful careful about whiffing panties from then on.

  It was great fun. But after a while, I started thinking, is this all there is? Are these tales ever going to reach the tender ears of my own child? (And little would I know what the future would hold. Payback is a bitch.)

  Dizziness began to rule all of my waking hours. Each set sounded the same. My middle bunk, in the back, felt more and more prisonlike. We needed the tour to end. But the dates dragged on, with little or no respite in between. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. Would this party ever end?

  We had done two hundred shows in a single calendar year. By December, it was time to go home. We all knew it.

  “Marshall, we’re done, man,” I said. “Take us off the road.”

  “Ah, fine, I guess you’ve earned a break. Do the month, and then you can go home? Does that work for you?”

  “How many more shows?”

  “Just sixteen! You can handle that—right?”

  Fuck yeah, I could. I would rarely cancel a show. I played through the flu, sore throat, sprained ankles—it didn’t matter to me. My voice is what it is. I never claimed to be some operatic singer. I considered myself the party director who wrote and sang party songs, for those who wanted to Ratt ’n’ Roll.

  We staggered toward the finish line. I had memorized precisely how long Bobby’s drum solo was, knew Warren DeMartini’s favorite room service items. Our bus driver’s beard seemed to have grown six inches since February. It dragged over the steering wheel as we barreled from state to state.

  With six nights to go, I felt a strange itching in my armpit.

  “Christ,” I heard Robbin mutter. “What the hell’s biting me?”

  Blotzer had it, too. “Pearcy!” he yelled, clawing his crotch. “What did you do to me?”

  “Nothing!” I cried, leaping to my feet, bare-chested. A silk teddy dragged against my face, blinding me. “What the hell is happening to us?”

  “It’s obvious, dammit,” he yelled. “This bus has crabs.”

  Somehow, we dragged ourselves through the last batch of concerts. At our very last show, a fumigation tent was erected around the Rolling Hilton. Enormous billows of blue smoke surrounded the bus, as we watched gravely from the parking lot. It was the end of our first tour. We were going home.

  NO GUTS, NO GLORY: A FISTFUL OF PLATINUM

  WE HEADED TO MAUI for Christmas ’84, as a band and as a Ratt family. The mission: to decompress from a hectic year on the road.

  “We’ll work on material for our next album here,” Warren said. “Surf in the morning, write in the afternoon?”

  “With the peace and quiet we’ve got here? We’ll be done in two weeks,” I said.

  But the best-laid plans of men and Ratt often go awry. One morning Bobby’s drum tech happened to wander through a field. His heavy foot sank deep into a cow flop, but then he stopped short, noticing something. He parted the dry dung, revealing a small gathering of mushrooms, which he sniffed curiously, then inspected with a roadie’s eye. Psilocybin.

  The fields were full of shit-covered goodies. We collected them excitedly, our fingers filthy from our efforts, gagging from the stench. We washed them in the sea, and the Maui sun dried out our batch in a day’s time. Every morning thereafter, Robbin and I would roll out of our luxury bungalows and brew a potent mushroom tea. It was the foulest potion I’d ever smelled. I guzzled it down, nonetheless.

  “Now I’m gonna puke,” I warned Robbin.

  “Yes, puke,” he encouraged me. “That’s how you activate a trip. Then let’s hit the jungle. It’s time to communicate with sacred entities.”

  I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Aren’t we here to work on a new record?” At that time I had a steady girl, a beautiful blonde I had met at a Ratt video audition. Everybody had somebody with them—a wife, a girlfriend. I ended up sending mine back to L.A., as I was trying to get serious.

  But there was not much writing happening on Maui. Just tripping and watching things melt into fractals, or swimming in the aquamarine ocean waters, contemplating the beginning of time and our newfound success, trying to surf, digging into the hot sand with a beer or two, smoking good Hawaiian weed with the local bikini beauties.

  The world becomes a smaller place when you travel endlessly. We would run into Billy Squier, Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden . . . what, was everyone going to Maui for vacation in 1984?

  The nature vacation recharged me somewhat, energizing me to the point that I felt ready to hit the studio and do the next record, and go back on the road with a vengeance. That’s when we would take an unknown band, Bon Jovi, on the road, on the Invasion of Your Privacy tour. More on that later. It wasn’t until the Dancing Undercover tour, when we got back to Los Angeles, that I would find a house to buy. I uncovered one in Laurel Canyon, a gorgeous thre
e-level custom-designed party pad positioned on a steep and secluded lot, aptly titled the White House. Clearly, it had been designed by a bachelor architect with no regard for function. And I used it as just that. The girls, the rockers, my friends, musicians—the place was the ultimate party pad. And it came equipped with one very famous neighbor, just up the road. About half a mile uphill was Eddie Van Halen.

  “Welcome to the neighborhood,” Ed said, slapping me five, on one of my first days in the giant new home.

  “Dude, it’s so quiet up here,” I said. “I’m used to L.A. being dirty and crazy and smoggy and full of people. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get used to this.”

  “Yeah, you will,” Ed said. “You’ll get used to it real quick.”

  Eddie was living with his TV-star wife, Valerie Bertinelli, who I would occasionally see hanging out at 5150, his studio. She tried to keep him on a tight leash, but now that I was in the neighborhood, Eddie felt hopeful he had found an ally in depravity.

  “Stephen,” he said, my first week there, as I was still unpacking boxes. “I need a favor.”

  “Anything,” I said happily. If Eddie Van Halen asked you for a favor, you were going to give him a kidney.

  “Let me keep some vodka at your house. Valerie doesn’t like me drinking too much.”

  “Dude, of course. My freezer is your freezer.”

  “Cool,” he said. “I promise I won’t abuse the privilege.”

  Many were the mornings where I rolled out of bed around noon, wandered out onto the large back deck that jutted out from my master bedroom, and attempted to come to terms with the life of a new Laurel Canyon homeowner. It was a life where birds chirped and the air was crisp and cool. I loved it. And yet I missed the rabies-infested squirrels of my youth. Had they vanished forever?

  Then I’d hear the whrrrrr of an expensive moped heading down the hill, coming closer, and finally stopping in my driveway, and I’d know it was time for me to be a good neighbor.

  Eddie was always apologetic.

  “Aw, man. Thank you so much,” he said, pulling open my freezer door and removing a bottle of vodka. “Have one with me?”

  “Love to,” I said, finding glasses. “And listen, it’s no problem.”

  “It is, man. I feel like I’m imposing. Listen, Stephen, let me tell you what I want to do. Let me keep a bottle in your bushes, okay? That way, I won’t have to bother you, you know?”

  “Dude.” I laughed. “It’s not a bother, I told you. You don’t have to keep your shit in a hedge.”

  “But what if I come by,” said Ed, looking concerned, “and you’re not home?”

  Valerie wasn’t a bad person; she just had bitten off a little more than she could chew when she fell in love with the most famous rocker on the planet, who just so happened to have a taste for party that rivaled some of the best. Most rock wives just sort of looked the other way and rolled with the punches, but Valerie was too strong a presence, not to mention a star in her own right, to look the other way. So she tried tough love with Eddie, but that made them more like a little boy and his mom than an adult couple.

  I remember going out to dinner with them soon after moving into my new house. I brought along my girl, Britta, who had been in a couple of our Ratt videos.

  “Who’s your friend, Stephen?” Valerie asked icily, as we sat down for sushi on Ventura Boulevard.

  I nudged my dining companion gently. “Introduce yourself, babe.”

  “Hi,” she giggled, extending her hand, decorated by a fingerless lace glove: high fashion, at the time. “I’m Britta.”

  Valerie’s face and mouth formed the shape of a smile, though it was not what I’d call warm, exactly. “Should I assume you two met at some club?”

  “Steve and I met at one of his video shoots,” Britta said. She drew closer to me. I kissed her lightly on the lips.

  The topic sufficiently explored, we turned to our menus, except for Ed, who continued to stare wistfully at Britta.

  “Eddie?” asked Valerie expectantly.

  He broke his gaze. “Yeah, baby?”

  “What are you eating?”

  “I’m not hungry,” he mumbled. You couldn’t blame him for needing to look. Britta was a model and an aspiring actress. Gravity had touched nothing on her body. I don’t think Valerie liked any girl around Ed—let alone one of mine.

  After the tours, I would always reward myself with a car. After the Cellar tour, I was off and running to the Porsche dealership. The Datsun B-210 had served its purpose, and now it was time to put it out to pasture. I had always wanted a brand-new 944 Turbo, black.

  The guy at the dealership looked at me funny when I showed him the car I wanted.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “No,” I said. “I want that car right there.” And I paid—in cash—and drove out that day.

  And I continued that process every year after each tour, until I had a nice stable of Porsches. One time at the White House, Fred Coury, drummer of Cinderella, stayed with me for a while, and brought another black Porsche. We’d wake up and go, “Hey, what Porsche are we going to drive today?” They were all black. A tough decision.

  My new car drove so fast and so smooth, I felt like I was back on the drag strip.

  “Mom,” I said, “you dig driving fast, right?”

  “I try to go the speed limit, honey. It’s safer that way.”

  “Listen, stay right where you are. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.” I barreled down Highway 5 to San Diego, picked up my mom, and took her out for a spin in my new wheels.

  “It’s very lovely,” she admitted.

  “Want one?”

  “I have a very nice car of my own, honey, thank you.”

  She fought me tooth and nail, but in the end I would not be denied, and I managed to drag her into the closest dealership. We left in matching 944s, honking at each other, then flying off in opposite directions.

  I was in love with the little Porsche. In the first few weeks of owning it, I tooled around Los Angeles constantly, soaking up sun, testing out my new toy. I had a car phone, and the temptation to talk on it at all times was nearly irresistible.

  “King!” I yelled, my hair flying behind me, doing a hundred and forty on the freeway. “What are you doing? Come out with me, let me show you my new Porsche.”

  “Nah, man. I’m going over to Nikki’s. We’re going to hang out there for a while.”

  I got the message. Robbin had money now, too. He had never been overly interested in fancy houses, or expensive toys. Robbin was about the moment, diving into it, and testing his limits. He was all about excess and drugs.

  I couldn’t stop speeding around town, though. And I couldn’t keep my hands off that car phone. It was one of those shoebox phones that cost a fortune and weighed about ten pounds. “Chris! What’s new?”

  “Not too much, man. Welcome back.”

  Chris and I had pretty much washed the slate clean after the Mickey Ratt split. Now we were closer than ever. We had history together—and anyway, it was easy to be buddies when things were going so well for both of us. Rough Cutt had been picked up by Warner Brothers. In the spring of 1985, they were gearing up to record their first album under the supervision of Tom Allen, who’d produced one of Judas Priest’s best records, and they were also about to go on the road with Dio. I took my Porsche over to the Record Plant to hang out and watch them lay down tracks.

  “Sounds pretty great in there,” I said, when Chris came outside to smoke a cigarette.

  “Thanks, dude,” he exclaimed. “Hey, nice wheels.”

  “There’s a phone in there,” I said, “if you ever want to use it.”

  Walking around my vehicle, inspecting his reflection in the perfect finish, Chris said, “Remember back in San Diego, when you used to say, ‘We’ll be putting cocaine on our cereal instead of sugar’?”

  “Oh yeah.” I laughed. “Of course. That was dumb.”

  Chris looked at the Porsche, and at the Record Pla
nt behind him. He stubbed his cigarette out on the ground. “Well, brother, we ain’t that far off.”

  With the label pushing us, Ratt began to meet and write again. Atlantic wanted to get us back out on the road as soon as possible. It became a year-by-year process. Off the road; into the studio. On the road; back to the studio. If we had an album to flog by the time we were on tour, so much the better.

  “We’re gonna invade the houses of America.” Robbin laughed. “Housewives, too. Lock up your wives and daughters.”

  Beau Hill joined us again in the studio, and we recorded our second album, Invasion of Your Privacy. Our single “Lay It Down” led the way. The album wasn’t a major stylistic leap from Out of the Cellar, but it was a solid effort. It faithfully represented what we offered our fans: short, rowdy, blues-inspired metal tunes, presided over by our resident guitar genius and backed by an unrelenting rhythm section. I was excited for the day it would come out in stores.

  We began to gear up mentally for what would be another long journey out on the road. Robbin and I began to discuss who we wanted to take out there with us as an opening band. Openers were key. You wanted them to be different enough from your group so that you could get a crossover effect in the fan base, luring people to come see you who normally wouldn’t have bought the ticket. But you also needed them to be similar enough that your two musical flavors didn’t totally clash when you put them on the same bill.

  “I hear there’s this one group from Jersey that’s starting to break,” Robbin said. “Apparently they have a singer who all the chicks go nuts over.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Bon Jovi.”

  We gave their album a listen, and Robbin was right, it was perfect for us. . . . Little did we know, that little band from Jersey would be so hugely successful, even to this day. We had Marshall float the idea to Bon Jovi’s management. Tell your boys to come out on the Invasion tour. . . . Let us show you the world of the Rolling Hilton. . . .

  They agreed, and we all started to pack our bags. A few weeks before we were scheduled to go out, I heard from Vic that our old friend Joe Anthony was laid up in the hospital, with a punctured lung. I decided to drop in on him.