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

by Stephen Pearcy

  Robbin was the same old lovable giant, but he was a little less reliable, onstage and off. Before every show, you could see him puking at the side of the stage. He was pretty into heroin—by now, he was no longer smoking, he was slamming it—and we all knew it, even though we tried to pretend that it was still at the fun-and-games stage. Once in a while he’d fuck up onstage, and we’d pretend it was no big thing. Warren had already sort of begun to rule up there, as far as the guitars were concerned. So hey, no biggie, right?

  But shit just got progressively stranger. We came through L.A. to do the Forum, stayed for a couple of nights, and on our way out, Robbin came to me with a confession.

  “Fuck. I just got a threatening phone call from O. J. Simpson.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “He says if I don’t stop seeing Tawny, he’ll cut my hands off.”

  I frowned. “That’s crazy.” I said.

  “It’s not good.”

  “I didn’t know you were still seeing Tawny,” I said.

  “Oh, once in a while,” Robbin admitted. He held up his hands and we both looked at them. They were nice hands.

  “I guess I also didn’t know O. J. was seeing Tawny,” I said, after a moment.

  “Well, he’s married. But he keeps Tawny on the side. He got her an apartment in West L.A. that he visits a couple of times a week.”

  “And were you just at this apartment?”

  Robbin nodded.

  “I probably wouldn’t do that anymore,” I said.

  “I know this sounds really stupid,” Robbin said, “but I always kept Tawny in my heart. She was my first love. You don’t just forget that.”

  “Yes, you do,” I said gently. “When an NFL running back threatens to cut your hands off, you do.”

  Our lives felt surreal: sometimes repetitive, sometimes exceptional, always inebriated, often irritating. Every morning, I would wake up, begin to drink, smoke a fat joint, then wait for reality to come at me in waves. In Boston, we played the Garden. Returning to the bus, we discovered that Robbin’s metallic Halliburton suitcase had been stolen.

  “My fucking dope was in there, man! This is out of control!” He was so furious that anyone would fuck with his drugs.

  He started stomping around and smacking the walls of the bus.

  “Someone got a serious score, all right, huh, King?” Bob said.

  “Man, I will seriously fuck with the guy who took my shit! I’m not standing for this shit at all right now!”

  “Hey! Chill out, man! King, stop!” I yelled. “Stop it! It could have been worse, right? I mean, did you actually lose anything else?”

  Robbin stared at me. “Just ten grand cash, that’s all, and my fucking gun. That’s all, dude.”

  “Oh,” I said quietly. I didn’t know he carried a gun.

  We never caught the guy. It wasn’t like Robbin could file a police report. Not even our DEA freak could help with that one.

  I was having a good time, but I wasn’t what you’d call happy. The unceasing sameness of the road turned the everyday into the banal and the banal into a bizarre maze. You look at one thousand coffeemakers in one thousand hotel rooms, and after a while, they begin to seem deeply linked.

  MONKEY ON OUR BACKS

  JOE ANTHONY:

  Dunno if you remember when you were a little kid, but my mom had a little recipe box. It was alphabetized—a file box, but it was smaller. I had one that was from A to Z, and I had a Polaroid of each chick that we hung out with. I’d put down her name and her phone number, and we’d rate them. The next time we were in that city, I’d call them up. Have them come down. Guaranteed to have a good time.

  Man, I used to have so many fucking great pictures. But I had a girlfriend many years ago, and the fuckin’ bitch went through my shit. Found all this personal shit I had up in a shoebox and got pissed off and threw all the shit out. Same thing happened to Stephen. He had these itineraries with women, how they looked, color of their eyes, their hair. And one night, he and I were out in Hollywood somewhere. We used to go to a place every Thursday night called the Spice Club. It was on Hollywood and La Brea. Every Thursday night, Sam Kinison would show up, and Billy Idol. Everywhere you looked, there was fucking rock guys. They did an all-star jam every Thursday night.

  Anyway, Stephen was sharing his place with this chick on an on-again off-again basis. I drove him home, and he called me on my way home. He told me on the floor of his pad, there must have been like one thousand pictures and itineraries that she found while he was out. She got pissed off and laid it all out on the floor, so when he walked in, it hit him right in the face.

  IN THE END, THERE WERE JUST too many of them. Girls who were fly-outs. Girls from the in-store signing with great tits. Girls who just wanted to fuck, despite being married or having boyfriends—and we didn’t want to know about it. Girls who smiled too long. Girls who smoked Menthol Virginia Slims. Girls from the South who used clever homespun sayings. Girls who played guitar. They all had one thing in common: They were so freaking hot.

  There was just one problem. By late ’87, our shtick had started to feel like a joke even to the guys who were doing it. When we got onstage to perform the official mating anthems of Reagan’s America, puffing our feathers out like peacocks, raising V-shaped guitars to the sky, choking on a toxic cloud of stage fog, even we kind of knew the door was closing.

  Me and Bobby really started to give each other shit around this time. He and the guys liked to have their fun with coke, and hey, more power to them. But when it’s four in the morning and someone’s blasting “Ruby Tuesday” for the fifth fucking time in a row, singing along in his rowdy drummer’s voice, it can begin to get on your nerves.

  Blotzer was a nation unto himself. Everybody liked him for the first ten seconds that they met him, then rapidly changed their minds when he said something shitty. Blotz liked stand-up arcade games, like Asteroids and Zaxxon, pumping his quarters into them at any opportunity. He loved Trans Ams and the loud sounds they made. He drooled over speedboats, taking the money earned from his first publishing royalties and buying a sixty-thousand-dollar model that he named Ramboat: First Blotz.

  “Stephen! Fuck, man, let’s bury the hatchet. Okay? Get back here. Do a line with me.”

  He bellowed through a megaphone backstage and on the bus. He golfed at every opportunity. His solo, which involved a six-pack of Budweiser being slowly lowered from the ceiling while he beat the shit out of the skins at every conceivable angle, was always an issue. Blotz thought the Bud was hilarious. The rest of us, who had to watch it go down night after night, weren’t so sure.

  “Come on, Stephen. Stop being so high and mighty. Do you really need sleep? I mean, seriously, how many hours does a man need to sleep? Come on back here and do a line with me, okay?”

  Blotzer stood out from many of his contemporaries for the fact that—though he drank steadily and enjoyed his blow in a recreational kind of way—he was never an addict. Blotz was too controlling, too conniving to let some substance run his show. He was clearheaded, brash. Even intelligent. He would not, however, under most circumstances, ever be mistaken for a very generous guy.

  “Cocaine is fun but it’s useless,” said Blotz, his nose white, teeth chattering in the Freon of the late-night bus air-conditioning. “I basically only do it so I can drink more.” And drink more he did.

  At the next night’s show, Bobby was looking rough. He was hungover, sweating, his face haggard and green. He kept trying to get my attention.

  “Stephen!” he screamed. “NO SOLO!”

  Bobby’s drum solo was his moment in the sun. When he was in the mood, he lived for it. And as corny as I found the slowly lowering Bud, it was often my favorite part of the show, too, because at that point I could always smoke a joint or have a few drinks, and then come out refreshed for the second half of the concert.

  “Stephen! Dammit!” he repeated. “NO SOLO!”

  YEAH, SOLO. I nodded happily and danced across t
he stage, feeling the vibe of the night. YEAH, SOLO!

  “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” I screamed into the microphone, “BOBBY BLOTZER ON DRUMS!”

  “You fucking homo. I’m going to cut your fingers off after this show, Stephen. . . .”

  Poor Bob, having to sweat it out in front of fifteen thousand people while we filed off stage right and enjoyed a couple of fresh Jack and Cokes and a nice fat spliff. Robbin and I would smoke anytime, anyplace on that stage. And I swear, my buzz never felt sweeter than when my drummer was experiencing a gut-punching hangover.

  Ratt was a family—five brothers and Marshall, our shyster cousin. We loved each other, at least as much as five selfish guys can love one another. Success will get you through a lot of years with minimal friction. But now the friendship wasn’t really there anymore. All for one and one for all? Hardly. We’d come together as mercenaries, and that’s how we began to treat each other.

  Robbin was with us, but at the same time he wasn’t. Increasingly, he was distant, and you rarely saw him sober. Sometimes, it affected his playing, and I found myself wanting to say something about it. You know, not exactly like “Hey, don’t ever do that stuff again.” More like “Dude, why are you in so much pain?” But I was usually pretty messed up myself. Wisdom and caring didn’t exactly flow freely from my heart.

  It was a fucked-up time, rotten in many ways. I drove over to Nikki’s house one afternoon when we were in L.A., just to say hello. I felt a little weirded out when some other guy wearing no shirt answered his door.

  “Hey,” I said, confused. “Where’s Nikki?”

  “Who the fuck are you?” he said.

  “I’m a friend of Nikki’s. Who the fuck are you?”

  “Nikki’s out of town right now. Can I help you?”

  “Hold up, baby,” came a voice. “Let me handle this.”

  The dude shot me a dirty look and retreated into the house, and then Vanity came out, hands on her hips. She was supposed to be Nikki’s girlfriend at the time. We stared at each other without speaking. I got the picture pretty quick and took off.

  But what the fuck was I going to say, you know?

  Girls come into the picture already thinking you’re a cheat just because you’re in a band. But some of us are pretty straight up and don’t bullshit around out there—like Juan. Now this cat was real devoted and faithful to his girl. Some chick would zero in on him and go, “I’m taking that fucker down!” And he’d sit and talk for hours with her. At two in the morning, we’d see her down in the hotel bar, all disappointed.

  “What happened? Weren’t you just with Juan?”

  “That guy just talked my ear off for hours! About his horse, his kid, his guitars. I just wanted to get laid!”

  “Not a problem, come right this way,” Joe or Robbin or I would tell her. “We’ll take care of business right away.”

  But that could come back and bite you sometimes. Some woman I’d slept with on the road several times got in touch with me to let me know I was the father of her unborn child.

  “What do I do?” I asked my lawyer.

  “Just let me talk to her,” she said. “I think I can make this go away.”

  The chick just wanted ten grand, in the end, and I had my lawyer give it to her in cash. We’d gotten off cheap and we both knew it. She didn’t want my kid, or me—she just wanted my money.

  Greed was the vice of the day, pride a close second. Sex rained down on my head, with so many blow jobs that I couldn’t decide if they were sexual anymore or just something wet on a specific part of my body. At night I often dreamed of intense rainstorms, and a feeling of joy and relief would flood through me. But invariably, when I awoke, the relentless sun would be shining in my face.

  Robbin met a hot chick from Texas named Laurie Carr at an in-store signing, and he began courting her. Soon they were dating. She came to Los Angeles and within a few weeks had become a Playboy Playmate. A couple of months later, Robbin married her. I was happy for my brother, but selfishly, I couldn’t help but feel all the more alone. All the guys in my band were hitched now: I was the last man standing.

  Playgirl magazine approached me and asked me to be in their July issue. Only a drunk or an idiot would have agreed. Luckily, I was both.

  “I ain’t getting naked,” I told them. As if that made all the difference in the world. “No cock shots.”

  “Of course not,” their managing editor assured me. “We’ll put you in a nice little black thong. You’ll look like a Chippendale. Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Yes,” I said, confused. “No. I don’t know.”

  “David Lee Roth will be on the cover,” he assured me. “It’ll be very rocking.”

  The shoot was casual. Kind of trippy. I stumbled in high on a codeine pain reliever and a female photographer hustled me in front of her camera, then kept on trying to get me to show her my package.

  “Just pull it down. It’ll only take a second. Then we’re done.”

  “No way,” I said, stepping in front of her backdrop. “The only way I would maybe consider it is if you promise to come back to my place and party.”

  “I’m married,” she said apologetically, snapping off a few quick shots in a businesslike manner.

  “Thong stays on,” I said.

  One night, en route to a party in Malibu, Joe crashed my Porsche. We spun around four times in the middle of the street and rolled up onto the curb, with all four tires flat. A normal person would have gotten down and kissed the pavement, thanked his lucky stars just to be alive. Somehow, I didn’t feel blessed.

  The following week, I dragged myself into the dealership to have the car detailed and repaired. They gave it back to me fourteen days later, with one problem: It wouldn’t quit making this odd clicking noise.

  “We’re so sorry, sir,” the manager said. “We’ll work on that for you.”

  “Nah, forget it,” I said. “I’ll take a new one.”

  “A new one?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That 930 Turbo looks good. You got it in black?”

  “Of course, sir. That’s our newest model, so, as you might imagine, the price is a bit high at the moment—”

  “How high?” I laughed.

  “Thirty-five thousand dollars.”

  “You know what? That’s perfect. I’ll have my accountant send over the money right now.”

  It was powerful and strange to be able to walk into the Beverly Hills Porsche dealership and leave with a brand-new car, just because I felt like it, and not even feel the extraction from my bank account. It made me want to smash up this car, too. My own internal dysfunction was getting harder and harder to ignore: an odd clicking noise.

  I pushed back the creeping feeling with pot, Valium, and late-night TV. In early 1988, Joe and I embarked on our Jägermeister phase. Jäger worked off a potent recipe in those days, and their black alcohol obliterated both memory and conscience. Joe and I knew a chick who worked for the company, who would often bring us their boxed set, which included a massive bottle and six free stemmed glasses. In no time at all, I had hundreds of stemmed Jäger glasses in my kitchen. They all sat there silently, eyeing me, just begging to be smashed to bits.

  My three-tiered home felt increasingly useless. Occasionally when I left town, I let a cute young girl from the neighborhood have the run of the place. We didn’t have a romantic thing going on between us. I just liked the way she moved.

  “I have a confession to make,” she said. “I . . . well, I had a boy over while you were gone.”

  “That’s okay.” I laughed. “As long as you didn’t, like, have sex in my bed.”

  “Oh.” She was silent for a moment. “We did have sex in your bed.”

  “Oh,” I said. I considered the news for a moment. “Well, that sucks.”

  “And actually, it wasn’t a boy. It was Dennis Quaid.”

  “Dennis Quaid?” I whispered. “But . . . why?”

  “He’s so gorgeous. I just couldn’t say no. You’re not mad, ar
e you?”

  I needed a change of scenery. I leased a fully furnished corporate-style apartment, smack-dab in the center of glamorous North Hollywood. What the apartment complex lacked in soul, it made up for in blandness. Beige was everywhere you looked: on the walls, on the towels, on the sheets.

  For a week or so, I felt steadier. I purchased a tub of multivitamins from a health-food store in the strip mall around the corner, and in the mornings when I drank my first beer, I sniffed them curiously. One morning, I dared to swallow one. It turned my pee a vibrant shade of yellow. That’s when I knew that they were making a valuable difference.

  I was headed back on the road to normalcy, maybe, or at least something approaching peace, but then the dreaded call came from up above:

  “Time to cut another album, fellas! You up for it?”

  Simply put, that was the last thing that any member of the band Ratt wanted to do. We’d recently split with Marshall, arguing—surprise, surprise—over money. (Is there anything else a band and their manager would argue about?) We’d taken on new representation, Allen Kovac. We needed rest, and we needed perspective. We did not need to be forced back into the studio to make a washed-out, shitty album, created by five dudes who were starting to feel jumpy at the sight of one another.

  But Atlantic stayed on our ass. We might not have been their most talented musicians, but we’d always been able to deliver the platinum hits. The monster was hungry again. It needed to be fed.

  Hoping to push us in a new direction, the label axed Beau Hill as our producer, and they brought in Mike Stone instead, who had enjoyed major success in the studio with Queen, Journey, the Rolling Stones, and Asia, among others. He was meant to provide contrast to our band’s bad habits. Too bad he was already precisely on our level.