“Fill that shit up . . . fill it up . . . perfect!” Robbin said on our first morning together. He held up a tall glass of vodka. “Mike? You take yours neat?”
Reach for the Sky was messy, and it took way too fucking long to make. I always liked the way we sounded when we punched things out. It represented what I thought of as our sound more faithfully: At our best, we were brash and loud and imperfect and fun to listen to.
But the dominant style of the time had begun to lean toward overproduced, multitracked guitar and synth heroics. We followed right along. I missed Beau, who had been full of ideas, organized, and active, a sixth member of the band for whom perfectionism was no burden. Mike was more laid-back, and I got the impression he wasn’t overly concerned with how the album ultimately turned out, either. One day, I came in to do a vocal scratch for one of our tunes. He watched me from behind the glass.
“Okay,” called Mike, when I’d finished. “How do you like it?”
“What do you mean?” I spoke into the microphone. “I just sang it. How did you like it?”
He shrugged agreeably. “Sounds great! Ready for the next one?”
I was confused. This wasn’t how I’d done it with Beau. I’d bounced ideas off our producer, and he’d given me his opinion, and we’d gone on from there. This wasn’t the way to make a good album. You couldn’t just take the first thing you did and lock it in.
“You know what I’m considering?” Juan told me on one of our breaks. “Doing the bass on keys.”
“But why?”
“A million reasons,” he said, smiling brilliantly. “Crisper sound, truer notes, more control . . . need I say more?”
“But every note? Won’t that take a ridiculous amount of time?”
“Who’s in a rush?”
None of us were, exactly. What was the hurry? The fan base couldn’t get enough of us, right? So Juan was granted his strange wish, and he put his guitar away. But the recording studio cost an ungodly amount of cash every day that we were in it. And the more we fucked around, boozing, arguing, and generally being children, the more money we burned through, and the more we really started to resent one another.
By then, I had bought a new house in La Costa, in San Diego. It was just me, alone in this big old house with my two dogs. I’d call the studio to see what was going on—and to my dismay, nothing was going on for months. By then, I was working alone on music. I would rarely write lyrics with the band—how could I write lyrics in a room full of people I had grown apart from? I preferred hiding out, grabbing the demos, and doing my own thing—and the band always gave me shit for it.
“Can you come on time, Stephen? I mean, truly, is it that hard for you to do?”
“Bob, this is rock and roll, if you hadn’t noticed, not a Boy Scout meeting. I’ll show up when I show up, all right?”
It was a painful time. Nerves really frayed. Animosity was brewing between us, and it showed in the music. We sent the tapes into Atlantic. Doug Morris sent them right back.
“This is absolute shit,” he said. He was livid. “What are you doing in there? We can’t sell this, not in a million years.”
Stone was yanked immediately, and Atlantic brought Beau Hill back to save the day. Together we managed to whip the album into shape. “Way Cool Jr.” and “I Want a Woman” were our singles—and the funny thing was, despite the kicking and screaming and stomping of our feet that we went through to create them, they’re some of my favorite Ratt songs. Juan’s bass did sound good when he played it on keys. And for all of his fucking pouting and finger-pointing, Bobby played the drums as well as he ever did. They were impossible to get along with at times, but I was surrounded by an all-star cast of musicians, and I could never ignore it. As the decade had progressed, competition had surged. Each member of Ratt had responded by getting stronger at his craft, not weaker.
Except for Robbin. It was on Reach for the Sky that we all started to notice a difference in his playing. He could still make the guitar do what he wanted, and he was never going to lose that gift he had for melody, and for writing songs. But he was spending long hours locked in the recording studio bathroom during our sessions. You never saw him sober. He was always drunk or wasted, and when that’s your life, your focus is generally not on improving as a musician.
One evening, soon after we’d finished recording Reach for the Sky, Robbin and I were slated to present at an award show. I showed up early at his house with a limo and a model chick, ready to catch a decent buzz and then head out on the town to make the scene.
When I showed up, he answered the door, buck naked, pupils dilated, and back hunched.
“Come on,” I said, laughing. “Get your clothes on, man. I got my date in the limo—is your old lady ready to go?”
He didn’t even appear to recognize me. A hostile expression crossed his face, and he just shook his head angrily. When I reminded him about the fact that we were presenting, he told me to fuck off. Then he took a swing at me. I ducked under it, completely unable to believe it was even happening.
“Fuck!” I yelled. “Wow, I’m gone, man! You’re crazy.”
I went back to the limo, totally in shock. We’d never even had words before.
We went out on tour and played up and down the whole East Coast: D.C., Virginia Beach, Philly, Boston, Hartford. We came into New York City and landed at the plushest hotels.
We crisscrossed the country and the world, occasionally returning to L.A. to let the guys see their kids and wives, and to let me practice my drinking. Though my castle palace was a solid, quiet place to stay, I continued to enjoy going to hotels in my own hometown, if only for the perverse thrill of feeling like a paying guest in my own life.
JOE ANTHONY:
You know the Century Plaza Hotel, over there on Avenue of the Stars? It’s one of those five-stars. All suit and tie, snooty. Presidents, leaders of other countries, when they come to Los Angeles, they always stay there. One night, Stephen and I are cruising around with some chicks, and he wants to get a hotel. So he gets a hotel room THERE.
One thing leads to another and you’ve got me and Stephen and these fucking chicks in Stephen’s room. I think one of the girls set him off: “All you rock stars, aren’t you famous for throwing shit out of hotel room windows?”
He got up, grabbed a TV: “You mean like this?” And chucked the TV off the fucking balcony.
And next thing you know he’s throwing all kinds of shit out of the twentieth floor: a chair, a desk. I was like, “Come on, dude! You can’t be doing that. You might kill somebody!” Thank God it was all landing on a roof, lower down, on an adjacent building. They caught wind of it of course, and he got a hell of a bill.
Why would a person want to do that? Because he can.
The months passed and we made another album, Detonator. We recorded it in a small studio right on Melrose. Desmond Child, the famous songwriter, was called in to work with us. He’d written “Dude Looks Like a Lady” for Steven Tyler. The label hoped he’d work similar magic for us. We barely noticed he was there.
Robbin was falling apart. He was frustrated and often sobbed. His fingers were swollen and he moved slowly, clumsily. For the first time you could notice the beginnings of a belly swelling over his belt.
“I can’t play, man. I can’t fucking play.”
“What do you mean, man? That sounded pretty good—”
“The fuck it did!” yelled Robbin. “Everyone’s always lying to me, and I swear, I’m so sick of it. I’m over it, man! You guys know I suck, so why not just say so?”
He had never been an angry guy before. Now he could snap into a rage at the drop of a hat. In seconds, the outburst would turn to shame, and he’d be apologizing, breaking down in tears. It was scary. The real Robbin was in there somewhere, but he was buried underneath a lot of layers. King didn’t even make it through the recording of the album. He went off to rehab for the first time instead.
“I gotta do it, sorry,” he mumbled. “You guys can
see I’m starting to lose my fucking mind. . . .”
We were all supportive. “Dude, it’s the best thing for you. We’ll see you on the outside. Clean.”
“Can you wait for me?” he asked, embarrassed. “To finish the album?”
How could I have told him no? That would have been heartless. A guy inside needs something to hope for, to motivate him.
“Sure,” I said. “Not a problem.”
Needless to say, we didn’t wait. Warren came into the studio, and in a matter of days, he’d recorded all of Robbin’s parts, easy as that. As much as it killed me.
JOE ANTHONY:
That’s one of the best albums they ever did, and it got no fucking recognition whatsoever.
The record company wasn’t behind them. Things were starting to change. After the album was done, we had a record-listening party. Stephen gave me a pocketful of cash and I organized the whole thing and got strippers and lesbians—turned the whole studio into a model shoot. It was just fucking insane. Jon Bon Jovi was there, and C. C. DeVille, and David Lee Roth, and Eddie Van Halen, and all these motherfuckers. Everyone just hung out and partied and got fucking crazy.
But Stephen was the only guy from the band to show up at the party. To me, that was kind of a sign, you know?
Robbin came back into town, looking sober-ish. The light was back in his eyes for a while there. The label started talking promo. They wanted us to make a half-hour video featuring some of our best songs.
“We got a budget?”
“Sure, $250,000. You can make it happen for that, right?”
We spent that in preproduction just building ornate sets. A life-size replica of a plane was built, with painstaking attention to detail and craftsmanship; it seemed important at the time. Half-naked women crawled all over the set, dressed in futuristic stripper costumes. We may have employed half the strippers in Los Angeles County. Someone decided it would be a good idea to bring in Little Richard to narrate and act as a host for us. He showed up all in white, eyes gleaming, with a couple of bodyguards holding his suitcase for him.
“I been around for a long time, gentlemen. I’m your man. You want to know something, just ask.”
We gathered around him in the dressing room like kids around Santa Claus.
“Tell us about the old days, Richard. . . .”
“So much to tell. A lot of heartbreak. A lot of triumph. Elvis Presley learned everything from me. He was my baby. Loved him, I cried when he passed. Jimi Hendrix, too. He slept on my floor for a time. Oo-wee. Such a loss, a crying shame.”
“What else? Did Pat Boone really steal your song?”
“Pat Boone? I think about him every night before I go to sleep. Pat Boone stole from me, boys. He took my ‘Tutti Frutti’ and he turned it upside down. He made millions on a song I wrote and recorded. I got him back, though. The very next year I wrote ‘Long Tall Sally.’ It was too fast for the white boy to sing! Oo-WEE!”
Robbin didn’t stay clean long. He’d disappear for lunch and come back four hours later. One day Phil and I discovered Robbin’s dope stash and his used needles in a corner of the bathroom, on the floor. He’d covered them up with tissue paper.
The budget spiraled out of control, and the label threatened to stop paying the bills unless we reined it in. We only spent more. On the brink of some kind of collapse, we managed to convince the director to front us the rest of the cash. He wanted to finish this thing, and so did I. We were working with an intergalactic comical sci-fi Flash Gordon type of concept, and my clothes were somewhere along the lines of Clockwork Orange Gutter Space Boy.
Every day, Phil and I looked for Robbin’s stash, thinking we could hide it from him temporarily and in the process get the video made. One day, during the second week, we found a big Clint Eastwood–size pistol in his bag, and that scared me.
“Someone’s hiding my dope,” Robbin confided to me.
“That’s terrible,” I said. “Who do you think it is?”
“I don’t know,” said Robbin. “Hey, Stephen?”
“Yeah?”
“You didn’t take the dope, did you?”
“No,” I said. “No way.”
“What about my gun?”
“What gun?”
“I had a gun. Someone took it, man. Unless I’m just really losing it. . . . Fuck, man, I can’t remember where I’m putting things. . . .”
We finished the video, spending nearly half a million bucks on it in the process. I took home the hottest chick on the set and made her kind of a girlfriend. Her name was Wendy, and she was tall, blond, beautiful, the standard deal. She and I commenced playing house. One day, a call came in from a casting agent at 20th Century Fox.
“We’d love for you to come in and audition for us,” she told me. “We’ve got an Andrew Dice Clay movie in the works. The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. It’s going to be a great, great film.”
“Why me?” I said, suspicious. “I’m not really an actor.”
“The role is for a rock singer,” she said.
I went in, read for it, did a good job. I started planning for a second career. Then the bastards gave the role to Vince Neil. (In retrospect, I’m pretty glad I didn’t get it, because the movie flopped.)
I was restless. At every opportunity, I sought distraction. Thank God I had drag racing, my first love. I sponsored a funny car for a couple of races with Dale Pulde, owner and driver. I could always count on the drag races to relieve me from this rock-and-roll headache nightmare success story. Every chance I got, I went racing.
I’d had the Penthouse girls, the Playmates, but when the porn star Savannah was making her rounds, I sat up and paid attention; she’d been with Slash, Pauly Shore, and Gregg Allman. I guess she figured it was my turn.
JOE ANTHONY:
Stephen had this on-again, off-again thing with a chick named Wendy, but he never wanted to put all his eggs in one basket, so he would hang out with Savannah. They’d have a good time. And of course she was just crazy. Just out of her mind. Hot as fuck, but insane.
She’d take me and Stephen out to eat. We’d always go out for sushi. She’d recently done a spread for Hustler, and brought a bunch of magazines. She’d sit at the table with you and open up the centerfold, and there’s her fucking pussy, staring you right in the face.
To my surprise, our relationship was basically asexual. Savannah was looking for someone to get fucked up with, not get pounded by. I considered for a moment, then decided I fit that bill, too. We’d drink all night and chow pills. At the time, Joe was seeing her hot friend, and we’d take over hotel bars, drink places out until they told us to leave. When it came time to go to bed, instead of getting it on, both of us would just pass out. I stuck around until she started to do heroin. Then I was gone. It was unfortunate what happened to her. Hollywood eats you up and spits you out.
DUKE VALENTI, SECURITY:
I went down to Miami with Ratt to warm up for the Detonator tour. The idea was to practice, get everybody in tune, give the engineer an idea of what to do. We go down there for three fucking days and all we did was argue. Nobody showed up for sound check. Nobody wanted to do anything. The tour manager was pulling his fucking hair out.
The real problem with Ratt was Stephen and Bobby Blotzer did not get along. At all. They hated each other, and I never found out why. If I had to guess, I’d say it had to do with money, because Bobby was not credited as a writer, so he got a much smaller share of the publishing. And also, you got to remember one thing: Who gets all the trim in the band? Singer and lead guitar player, right? Fuck. Why doesn’t the drummer ever get the hot one?
Interviews were an issue, too. I’d take Stephen to do an interview at a radio station. Not the band, mind you: Stephen. You know, the rest of the guys might like to be interviewed sometimes, too. Everyone does. But they always wanted Stephen. And that became a problem.
The Detonator tour was our first taste of tour life on the downhill slide. We were met with crowds that were increasin
gly indifferent. Our agent had booked us our usual twelve-to-fifteen-thousand–seat venues, but to our surprise, we were bringing in only half that many.
“I hate fucking playing to empty seats,” Bobby snapped, steamed, after a show. “It’s goddamn embarrassing.”
We hit Europe and met with a little bit of relief there: smaller venues and more enthusiastic crowds, folks who either hadn’t figured out or didn’t care that metal was dying. We bounced from Paris to Bonn, Bremen to Hamburg, Karlsdorf to Munich, Frankfurt to Nottingham, York to Newcastle, Manchester to Birmingham, and finally on to London, our pockets full of crumpled francs and marks, all of which we pushed across the bar.
Then we were on to Japan. They’d never let us down, and I hoped they weren’t about to start now. But in Tokyo, things finally came to a head with Robbin. At one of our biggest shows of the tour, he played a couple of songs with a completely out-of-tune guitar. He sounded horrible, like a teenager in a garage band, but he paid no attention. Even if it could have been his guitar tech handing him an out-of-tune guitar. Still, he was so gone, he couldn’t even hear the difference.
We finished the tour with him, one last blast in Osaka: sumo, sushi, noodles, pussy. But that was it. He was in another universe. He couldn’t get smack out there, so he would drink all the minibars dry. Managers started booking him rooms without minibars, but he would just check out and book another room. When we came back to the States to finish our tour, Robbin went straight back into rehab. We hired Michael Schenker from Scorpions to fill his shoes. We also hired a keyboard player—so far off the Ratt sound. That was a sign something was really wrong. We were losing our sound, our image, and our desire. If we had only gotten off the road and taken breaks years before, who knows? But it was too late. So off we went.
DUKE VALENTI:
One time after a show, Pearcy had two girls in his room with him at the hotel. They were only about eighteen or so, and I got a call from Stephen. He says, Duke, we gotta talk. One of these girls’ father is downstairs.
Sex, Drugs, Ratt & Roll: My Life in Rock Page 22