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

by Stephen Pearcy

  I readied myself to speak, but then I breathed in, as an experiment, and it was the longest, smoothest, slowest, most sensual inhale of my life. As I let the breath go, an unshakable sense of rightness and clarity flooded my central nervous system. My head tingled, the base of my skull filling with light, and I closed my eyes. If I concentrated, I could actually feel the lids on my eyeballs, sleek and heavy on the orbs.

  We will talk later, I promised myself. We’ll figure this whole thing out.

  I settled deeper into the couch, in gentlemanly repose. I thought that would be my first and last trip on that shit. Little did I know.

  ARCADE PUT OUT ANOTHER ALBUM, IN 1994, A/2. The follow-up effort didn’t do quite as well. The Seattle sound was so prevalent around that time and so beloved, and metal and hard rock were pretty well played out. Not too many guys in our genre were finding much love. Even our hard-core fans were a bit bored after a solid decade of oversaturation. The critics had never really thought much of us even at the height of our popularity. Personally, I didn’t give that much of a shit: If I was making music, then I was pretty happy. Anyway, I always found chemical ways to pass the time.

  We toured with Arcade to promote the second album, hitting the smaller venues and continuing our strip-club world tour. I’d planned to be just as relentless as in our early days of Ratt: twenty shows in twenty days. But I knew it was time to adjust my expectations when we started to get booed by our own fans.

  “Play ‘Round and Round’!” they screamed. “Play it!”

  “We’re not Ratt,” I laughed from the stage.

  “ ‘Round and Round’!”

  I looked back to the guys in my band, shrugging. Fred launched into the opening beat, and we gave them the old hit.

  “That was pretty fucking brutal,” one of our roadies commiserated with me, postshow. “Sorry, dude.”

  “Nah,” I said, cracking a beer. “Hey, they bought the tickets, right?”

  I tried not to let any of it get me down. We were out, we were touring, we were making a little bit of money. So what if it was somewhat difficult to get out from underneath the shadow of my past? At least we were still in the game, right? I was firmly resolved to have a good time.

  FRED COURY:

  He was practically sober when we first did Arcade. What broke up that band was him leaping off the wagon. You can’t run a business unless you’re sober. Can’t be done.

  I used to watch his house sometimes: The back door was always loose, and the alarm would always go off, and the cops would show up. One time the cops came and split, and I went upstairs and found Stephen asleep in his bed. I pulled the sheets back and started to shake him. He looked dead. I gave him a full-on soccer field goal kick in the ribs! I’m surprised I didn’t break his ribs. Over and over, I kept kicking him so freaking hard. . . .

  Finally he woke up and kind of squinted at me. “What are you doing?”

  He’d taken some sleeping pills. Lumina, I think. But for a long time there, I really thought he’d died.

  A/2 soon disappeared from stores. For a moment, it may have bothered me, sure. But there’s always freedom in failure, if you look at it right.

  The kind of music that we’d made our living off of for so long was finally going out of style, and you just couldn’t ignore it. Some of us metal guys got tired of licking our wounds, though, and we started to vary the formula. I soon found out that I actually liked playing in different styles. I was asked to be part of an industrial band called Vertex with a Japanese drummer named Hiro Kuretani. Al Pitrelli, who had played with Alice Cooper and Savatage, joined us on guitar, along with Robbie Crane, who eventually would end up playing bass for Ratt.

  I went out and did my homework. I was kind of excited to explore a new, darker way of singing, expressing myself. I wouldn’t say we were a total success, but it was very different from anything I’d done before, and interesting for that. It wasn’t like I was looking for a hit or a top-ten single: Our band was about niche appeal, right from the very start, and we all knew it. Our self-titled Vertex was a thinking record, with songs like “Mother Mary” and “Fuck the World” weaving bleak, dystopian tales about society and life in general.

  I was furious up onstage, some nights. Ratt had been all about sex and partying; this new music was about cynicism and rage and the energy you could tap into by admitting your own slow burn. It was the ’90s, so I didn’t have to look far for reasons to complain. We’d been kings for ten years. Now we were picking up the pieces, part of a bleaker landscape. The old family was split up. Each of us was just trying to get by.

  JOE ANTHONY:

  After Ratt broke up, I still had to make a living, you know? So I went out on the road with other bands. Around 1994, I was out with Chicago, and we came through Little Rock. And wouldn’t you know it, Sweet, Sweet Connie came to my hotel room. Actually, she came to the tour manager’s hotel room first. We had adjoining rooms. She did her deal, and he knocked on my adjoining door. “Hey. Sweet Connie’s here. She wants to suck your dick.” I was like, great. And of course I said, I’ll get you backstage.

  But later on that day, the band took me aside and said, “Hey. We don’t want to see Sweet Connie backstage. Got it? We don’t want to see her anywhere.” They’d been through Little Rock a bunch of times before, and they knew the deal. None of the guys wanted anything to do with her.

  So it’s six o’clock, and I’m having dinner. Now, the people who do the catering are like family. They got their kids there helping. And off in the distance, I started to hear this fucking loud screaming, and shit getting thrown around.

  If you’ve ever been to a backstage gig, they’ve got all these curtains set up. The screaming keeps getting louder and louder, and finally, Connie breaks through this curtain. She comes flying in and runs right over to my table. “YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!” she yells. “You didn’t leave me any tickets at the fucking window!”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “I SUCKED YOUR COCK TODAY!”

  I’m looking around, all these old ladies and men, and these fucking kids are staring at me. It’s one of those times you want to shrink into an ant.

  Connie was something else, man. I mean, she used to walk into a venue and blow fifty or sixty guys without shedding a fucking sweat. It was fucking amazing.

  Sometimes it was tough, getting older and looking in the mirror every morning. I’d stare into the glass and see a different guy, someone different from the kid who’d come to L.A. in search of the Sunset Strip in January 1980, determined to battle his way to the top. I’d made it. I’d drowned in oceans of trim and adulation. What was the next move?

  I was boozing all the time, and it showed on my face, in the way that I moved. When I wasn’t able to distract myself with constant touring or by blaming the members of my old band—and them blaming me—my own self-destruction was harder to ignore. I needed activity, movement, so, without pause, I formed yet another ensemble, an alternative rock band named Vicious Delite, and created an independent label to promote and distribute us: Top Fuel Records.

  “Why bother?” a friend asked me, as we watched a boxy Puerto Rican chick work the pole at the Spearmint Rhino. “Why don’t you just let someone else worry about the technical stuff?”

  “I’ve been through so much shit with labels,” I explained, breathing in the sleazy, smoke-filled air of the strip bar. “This way, I’ll have artistic control and financial independence.”

  What I hadn’t counted on was the fact that I also had more responsibility. Adding to my surprise was the fact that the guys in Vicious Delite were even more into partying than I was. They were younger dudes, constantly on ten—getting fucked up, not sleeping for days, passing out in airports. We were out of control. (Most recently, Robby Karras died from his abuse. He was a great kid.) In attitude and sound, we were really a punk band. The bleak mood I’d been carrying around for some time seemed to fit the aesthetic perfectly. I didn’t talk much onstage, and rarely interacted with
the audience. I was just this gloomy character who wanted to yell, Fuck you, fuck this.

  I was on a mission to escape from myself. I always had to be moving, making deals. My castle house in San Diego was beautiful, but too impractical to serve as my only residence, so I bought another property in Studio City. Often I had friends stay there when I was gone. One evening, I came back to my pad to find a pretty large shindig going on.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked some drunk, sipping from one of my cocktail glasses.

  “The fucker who lives here is out of town!” he explained. “We’re gonna empty his liquor cabinet.”

  I joined in and tried to help the mission along. A beautiful dark-haired woman was standing with some rocker guy in a corner. She and I made eye contact, and an hour later, she approached me. We began to talk intimately. After a little while, she ended up giving me her number and asking me to call her.

  “What’s up with the other guy?” I asked.

  “That’s ending,” she assured me.

  Her name was Melissa, and soon we started hanging out. I liked her vibe: laid-back and reserved. She preferred staying in for the night to going out and partying. By this point in my life, I found that to be a relief. As I started to develop feelings for Melissa, I couldn’t help but realize how closed off I’d been for so many years, fucking any chick I felt like on the road, watching women bang double-headed dildos in the backs of tour buses. Suddenly all of that felt like nonsense.

  Within a few weeks of meeting each other, Melissa and I were spending all of our free time together. She worked late, but after she’d finished, she’d come over to my house and we’d stay up all night together, laughing, making love. Soon, we’d made the rocker plunge: We went out and got tattoos together. She got my name on her toe. I put her on my arm.

  Shit, I thought to myself. Looks like I’m falling for this one. . . .

  Melissa was much the same as the other girlfriends I’d had: She liked my rock thing, but at the same time, she wanted to be the most important thing in my life. And as for me, I pretended I told her everything, but of course, there were a few things I kept to myself. My pain pill addiction was starting to really gear up, and that was my business and mine alone. I gobbled down a handful or two of hydrocodones every day, drinking and smoking right along with them.

  The constant-snuggle thing went on for a few months between me and Melissa, then it cooled just a touch. I had two houses, so there was always room for me to hang out with other women; not to mention, I was in a band with a bunch of hard-partying younger guys. Temptation was always around. Even if I didn’t have the inclination to throw down like I’d done as a kid on the Rolling Hilton, I succumbed from time to time. Melissa and I would probably just sort of fade away, I reasoned. After all, that was what had happened with the rest of them. But one evening, she came to me, looking serious.

  “Hey,” she confessed. “I’m . . . I’m pregnant.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond. “Is it mine?”

  “Of course it’s yours!”

  I apologized, but still, we went to the hospital and took a test. Yes, the baby was mine, and immediately, I knew I had some thinking to do.

  I called my mother and told her the deal—that I’d gotten my girlfriend pregnant.

  “Well?” she said. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. . . . I don’t know if I’m ready to be a dad.”

  My mom was silent for a while. “Do you love this woman?” My mother knew best.

  “I think so,” I said. “I’m not sure, but I think, yes, I love her.”

  “Then you might consider giving it a go,” my mom said, after a moment. “You know, having a child is one of the most amazing things a human being can do.”

  I hung up the phone, realizing what I was about to tell Melissa, what I was about to commit to. I was nervous, but I was also almost forty years old. It was time to step up to the plate and, for once, be responsible.

  Melissa and I came together for a conference. I poured myself a big drink, then told her, somewhat tensely, that I was in.

  “I’m going to do this, okay?” I said. “I want to be a dad. I want to be with you.”

  “Oh my God!” Melissa cried. “That’s so exciting. Are . . . I mean, are we going to get married?”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” I said. “Let’s take this one step at a time. Look, I’m thinking you can move into the house in La Costa for a while. It’s a huge place and very peaceful. It’ll be the perfect spot for you to be pregnant.”

  Melissa frowned. “Will you live there with me?”

  “Sometimes,” I said evasively.

  “Sometimes?” said Melissa. She placed both hands atop the tiny bump on her stomach.

  “Melissa,” I said, “I’ll be there when I can.”

  I was rarely around, though. I shipped Melissa off to the castle and left her there well taken care of. Meanwhile, I stayed out on the road with Vicious Delite and drank through the days, working my way steadily through bottles of prescription pills, recording albums, writing endless lyrics and titles in spiral-bound notebooks with my Bic pen, sleeping the Lumina sleep of the dead.

  Her belly grew bigger and bigger. In my absence, her eyes turned darker and more withdrawn. And the months did pass.

  WELCOME

  HALF AN HOUR BEFORE my only child came into this world, I swayed back and forth in the hallway of Beverly Hills Hospital, drunk beyond repair, my stomach filled with bitter liquids and my pockets stuffed with several miniature bottles of liquor that I’d brought with me. I leaned up against the hospital wall, mumbling to myself, waiting impatiently for the nurses and orderlies to pass me by so I could unscrew the lid of a vodka and tip back the shot into my mouth. Underneath a bank of fluorescent lights, I took in the familiar beeps and groans of hospital life.

  I stared at the door of the room where they had Melissa, swallowing back a wave of nausea.

  “Hey,” I said, ducking my head into the room, unable to stand the suspense any longer. Melissa squirmed uncomfortably on a bed. “How are things going in here?”

  “Sir, as we told you, stay in the hall,” a nurse snapped at me. “We will tell you when you are needed.”

  “I have a right to see my child get born,” I demanded. “I want to be here for this birth.”

  “Stephen, you are totally lit,” Melissa said, sweating. “Leave us alone for now, okay?” Her face wrinkled in pain.

  “Of course,” I snapped. I tucked my shirt into my pants. “I want to help. . . .”

  “Sir, the best way you can help us is by letting us do our work,” the nurse said. “Outside, please. Now.”

  I retreated out to the hall. I rummaged through my pockets until I found a few oxycodones. Looking both directions first, I took a dose, dry-swallowed the pill. I looked back at the closed door of Melissa’s room, nervous to meet my baby.

  JEWEL PEARCY CAME BUSTING INTO MY world on July 25, 1996, a beautiful, black-haired blessing. From our first day together, she was aglow with soul and love and light.

  “Aren’t you the most lovely thing,” I cooed to her, holding her in my arms. “Aren’t you just the most unbelievable baby I’ve ever seen in my whole life. . . .”

  Melissa and I tried our best to be a legitimate couple. Having moved in together several months before Jewel’s birth, we were sharing the house in Studio City, changing diapers, warming bottles, getting up at night to be with our kid and make her happy. We were parents now. Adults. It was time to act like it.

  “Hey, Melissa, look at Jewel—don’t you think she looks like me a little bit? Like, around the eyes?”

  “Wow, she really does. . . .”

  Having a perfect little human around probably put me on my best behavior for at least a good two weeks. Then I was back to my old tricks, sucking on painkillers like they were Tic-Tacs, smoking powerful weed. It wasn’t even that I didn’t want to be sober at this point: It was more that getting high was so much
a part of my everyday life that I didn’t really see an alternative.

  I considered myself a decent dad with a buzz on, anyway. Maybe you wouldn’t want me to drive you to Orange County in the rain, but I could change a dirty diaper.

  I loved my new daughter so much, the job just kind of came naturally. Gazing into her eyes, holding her tiny perfect hands in my hands and marveling at each tiny digit—those moments were more filled with joy than any I’d experienced on a stage or a bus.

  I took Jewel everywhere with me, on trips to the mountains and to the beach, just the two of us, a bottle for baby and a cooler full of them for Daddy. I drove her down to San Diego to introduce her to my mom, and their meeting was joyful.

  “I finally did something right, huh, Mom?” I said.

  My mother gathered Jewel in her arms and closed her eyes in grandmotherly bliss. “I’ll say.”

  Before we left her house, though, my mother beckoned to me.

  “What’s up, Mom?”

  “Stephen, get it together,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  She looked at me pointedly. “You have someone to look out for now. So get it together.”

  It was easier said than done. The baton of booze and dope had been relayed hand to hand through the family history, right into my waiting grasp. I never got to know my old man, but I do know he liked to get a blur in his vision more often than not. As it turned out, so did I.

  After I woke up and saw to Jewel’s needs as best as I could, I generally felt justified in sneaking over to the bar around the corner for a drink or two before lunch. Sometimes the lunch part of it was optional; the beers never were. And man, once that buzz got some momentum under it, there was just no stopping it. I’d drive back to the house, leave the car running in the driveway, keys still in the ignition, motor on, door open. Sometimes I’d walk into the house and just fall on the floor. If the kid was sleeping, then I’d go to sleep, too, just exactly where I felt like it.