by Dave Navarro
DAVE: I would have liked to have been able to have a conversation with the band and say, “Look, what are you guys feeling? Here’s how I’m feeling. I’m on the fence.” Either way I would have liked the same outcome, but (a) I would like to have been friends and (b) I would like to have been respected enough to be involved in the decision making.
ADAM: Absolutely.
DAVE: I don’t want to be in a situation where every time I hear the Chili Peppers or think about them, I’m fucking pissed instead of thinking, “Oh, those were fun times.”
ADAM: I totally understand that. But looking at it from their insecure point of view, they’ve got a guy that’s a big star …
DAVE: Even if that’s true, it doesn’t mean I brought it on. I can understand their point of view—
ADAM: Well, “brought it on” is the wrong way of putting it, then.
DAVE: I honestly resent the implication that I caused it.
ADAM: Oh, I don’t think you caused it—
DAVE: But that’s the same thing as bringing it on, don’t you think?
ADAM: Do you think your solo thing figured in it at all?
DAVE: Maybe, because I am playing on one record with their drummer, and I’m going on tour with their bass player with Jane’s. But you know why I made the record? Because the band took time off and I needed something to do.
ADAM: I understand that. I’m not saying you did anything wrong at all.
DAVE: That’s why I did it. I said to Chad, “Let’s fucking play something.”
ADAM: Maybe what I mean by bringing it on, Dave, is that you do that by being a talented, strong player.
DAVE: That’s not bringing it on; that’s what they wanted from me.
ADAM: What I meant was that your talent and prestige and direction in the music gave these guys a problem that they couldn’t deal with consciously. It happens all the time that bands split up because of ego, and because one guy overshadows another guy and there’s a fight for the spotlight. That’s never happened before with Perry Farrell.
DAVE: I would never attempt to overshadow anybody anyway—
ADAM: I know you’re not trying to do that.
DAVE: I know he [Perry] is just like the raddest, that’s why I’m with him. He’s the greatest writer. I never questioned him. Even when I was just doing the band, I was like, “I’ve never seen a better showman or frontman—”
ADAM: You know, I remember that mansion party where Jane’s played and Anthony had that exchange with you in the dressing room where he said, ‘You’re in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame now” or something. Basically, he gave it up to you. Do you remember that?
DAVE: Yeah, I do remember that. I remember feeling really emotional about it.
ADAM: I was really impressed that Kiedis seemed to have some humility and was complimenting you on something he was genuinely impressed by. I think this also points to why it’s smart that you’re doing your own thing too. I think it all points to that in a way …
DAVE: Points to that?
ADAM: That you’re someone who has enough going on to do it on your own. And maybe you didn’t bring it on yourself, but you were prepared for it when it happened, at least artistically speaking. So I understand what you’re saying.
DAVE: Do you really?
ADAM: Yes.
part III THE GREAT STEVE VAI DEBATE: “SPEAK ONLY FOR YOURSELF”
JASON [a record-label employee]: I went to see Les Paul, Slash, Stephen Stills, Steve Vai, and a bunch of other guitarists at the House of Blues last night. It was pretty good, but have you ever seen Steve Vai play before? I don’t understand it.
DAVE: How’s that?
JASON: It’s the way he plays. It’s empty. There’s nothing behind it. He takes any kind of magic there is in music for you and me, and just …
DAVE: Who’s saying it’s got to make sense to you?
JASON: What I’m saying is that, to him, a guitar is just a piece of wood and six strings. He could just as easily be a carpenter.
DAVE: What do you mean? He’s doing what he wants to do; he’s playing music. It’s his craft, it’s joyful. You may not like the way he plays, but you can’t say there’s nothing behind it.
JASON: Let me put it this way: What Steve Vai plays is not what I seek to get out of music, so I have no interest in it.
DAVE: Okay, that’s fair enough; you have no interest in his music. But I’m a guitarist too, and someone may not get the way I express myself.
JASON: But the way he plays the guitar, there’s no human element. It doesn’t connect in any way.
DAVE: It doesn’t connect with you. Seriously, dude, think about it. I don’t know how you can say that, because that’s really arrogant. Isn’t it? Honestly, I don’t like him either. I can’t stand listening to him play guitar.
JASON: So what’s wrong with what I’m saying?
DAVE: You have to add “to me” before that sentence. Because I’ll bet you a million dollars there’s a listener out there who loves Steve Vai and buys a record and freaks out.
JASON: But they love it for exactly the reasons I don’t like it.
DAVE: How do you know what they love it for? Who are you to say what somebody you don’t know loves something for? Seriously.
JASON: Yeah, you can bust me every time. But it is possible to listen to something and say, “I may not like that, but I can understand why somebody would like that.”
DAVE: But you know what? I can’t see why somebody in China likes Chinese music. I don’t belong to that culture, I have no idea what it’s all about, it’s not attractive to me.
JASON: But you can see there’s something there, like the high-pitched voices and the way they hold their hands, and there are so many subtleties that you might not understand but you can recognize.
DAVE: There might be a piece of music or a band I would see that with, but not across the board for some type of music. For Steve Vai, though, a concert is how he entertains. And when he comes up with the shit he’s coming up with, that’s his art.
JASON: All right, let’s just say I was disappointed that to him a guitar is just six strings and a piece of wood.
DAVE: Did he say that?
JASON: No, but he played that way.
DAVE: How can you say that?!
JASON: Am I pissing you off or are you just playing devil’s advocate?
DAVE: No, I’m just saying that …
JASON: Because you’re relating this to yourself, and thinking that people have said that about you before or they might say it about your solo album.
DAVE: No, just … that’s a problem that I’m having with a lot of people. This essentially is the morality issue I have in my mind: One man’s perception is not another man’s reality. I’m with you, I don’t like his playing. It leaves me empty.
JASON: Okay. Then let me correct myself: “To me, it seems like to him it’s six strings …”
DAVE: Seems like, that’s the whole point. For him it might not seem that way.
JASON: What if I said, “Listen, man, I love that guy, the way he connects with the guitar, he’s fucking amazing”? My perception could be wrong; he may think he’s a shitty guitar player. But you wouldn’t have busted me on it because I said something positive.
DAVE: Because negativity breeds something more than just an opinion. Negativity breeds arrogance, whereas the positive and complimentary, they tend to be …
JASON: Naïveté.
DAVE: I don’t think it’s naïveté. At the root of it is loving and respect, which this world needs more of. If loving, complimentary actions happen as a result of naïveté and as a result of mistaken perceptions, so what? I don’t think that hurts the world and the human race. And I think that’s something we need to look out for with people.
JASON: I was joking when I said naïveté, but I see your point. I guess I just didn’t like the way he played that night.
part I HOW TO GET OFF DRUGS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING
It begi
ns like every other month.
“I need some heroin,” Navarro says as he holds his lighter under a spoon, watching a white chunk of cocaine dissolve into a small puddle of boiling water.
But it promises to have a different ending.
“I’m going to clean up,” he adds, casually.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m going to a place where they clean out your blood in like six hours. They keep you there for just two days.”
“Then what?”
“Then I go home.”
It sounds too easy. “How do you keep yourself from using drugs afterward?”
“We’ll see what happens. I just want to get off the needle.”
This is the first time Navarro has ever expressed a desire to clean up, the first time he has admitted that there is something he needs that he can’t do for himself.
Whenever the opportunity has arisen in the past, his friends have told him they’d like to see him drug-free. But Navarro’s usual response has been one calculated simply to absolve their guilt: to let them know that they’ve done their part and now no longer have to feel guilty about not saying anything. He is going to decide for himself when enough is enough.
“The fact that you feel guilty,” Dave told Adam Schneider one night, “implies that you have power over what I do. You’ve got to wipe that out of your head. Don’t guilt yourself out over something that’s actually an egotistical way of thinking.” Dave paused, reflecting on the logic of his comment. “Not to be mean about it, but that’s a good way to rid yourself of the guilt.”
Then there was the time Perry Farrell called and said that he felt responsible for Dave’s addiction because Dave was somehow emulating him. Perry explained that he had a dream in which he saw coke spirits who told him to phone.
So what has led Dave to, all of a sudden, decide that the time has come to clean himself up?
“Because it’s been almost half a year and I want to start showing up on time to work on my record,” he replies. (He has just made a deal this month to release a solo album.)
“It doesn’t make sense to have worked this hard to fuck it up,” Dave continues. “As long as I can get clean and strong, I’ll be okay. I don’t care about being high. I don’t have a bad life. I’m not a depressed guy. I just want to be able to perform well—and look good doing it.”
The doorbell rings and, as if on cue, his drug dealer, Mary, arrives with coke, heroin, and another present—a small metal torch designed for cooking up drugs. Compared to Dave’s other dealers—mostly unshaven, friendless males—Mary always looks like she could have other prospects. She is tall, beautiful, and seems intelligent, though she talks so seldom that it’s hard to tell. What happened?
“It’s a lot more fun to not find something in L.A. than to not find something in South Dakota,” Dave offers.
Dave tells her about his plan to clean up, and she doesn’t seem disappointed at the prospect of losing a customer. She is actually supportive.
“They have this thing called rapid detox,” Dave explains the process. “They put you under and in six hours they artificially induce withdrawal by pumping your body full of a certain kind of hormone and a drug called Narcon. It detaches the opiates from your body’s receptors and makes the body reject everything that’s impure. So if someone uses heroin, it wouldn’t take effect because the receptors are blocked. It’s pretty gnarly. I keep asking myself if I’m ready to put my body through worse punishment than shooting coke all day long.”
Dave has already met with one doctor for a physical and needs to get in touch with another for post-treatment care. “I’m trying not to do heroin,” he tells his dealer. “I’ve only done two shots of it in the past two days, which is phenomenal for me. And I’m not sick, like I expected to be. They want me to be off coke for five days before the heroin detox, but if I went off coke, I’d be at death’s door. It’s hard for me to kill the cycle of waking up, calling you, and shooting up. I want to spend a couple days at a place where I can’t.”
The longer Dave talks, the less convincing he sounds. “In no way am I suggesting that I’ll be clean and pure forever,” he finally says. “I’ll be an addict for the rest of my life.”
He constantly checks a new security camera he installed to patrol the front of his house, a sign of either the paranoia that stems from too much coke or the obsessive nature that led to the addiction in the first place. In addition, a trip to the Spy Tech Agency has resulted in hidden cameras in every room—VCRs and clocks with concealed lenses, positioned more for documentation than actual security.
Moments after Mary leaves, a small, somewhat chunky girl appears on the security monitor. Dave lets her in. She has dyed metallic auburn hair and is wearing all black, except for the fur trim of her jacket. She calls herself Hope and is attractive, but only because she is making an extreme effort to look that way. Her breasts are pushed up so that they peek over the top of her lacy dress like two thumbs pressed together.
She first talked to Dave when her friend—who she says is a stripper and Dave says is a prostitute—was living temporarily at the house of a speed freak named Taylor. The stripper/prostitute gave her a phone number and said it was Taylor’s, but it turned out to be Dave’s. And since Dave could charm his way into anyone’s pants, heart, or pocketbook …
“Me and my friend called Dave’s house and asked if Taylor was there,” Hope explains.
“I don’t even know anyone named Taylor,” Dave says. “She must have gotten my number from another hooker.”
“Anyway, Dave kept talking and asking for my phone number. I said, ‘You could be a psychopath murderer.’ And he told me, ‘I’m not a murderer because my mom was murdered.’ I thought he was fucking with me because my mom died. She committed suicide two years ago. I thought he knew me and was being an asshole. He gave us the address of his website. But we didn’t know who he was yet. Two days later, we went on the site and saw who it was. So we sent him a poem.”
“I deleted it,” Dave says. “I hate poems.”
“He kept deleting them,” Hope sighs. “So I called him.”
Hope says she moved to Los Angeles to get into porn films. But she just filmed a couple and quit.
“She was probably a prostitute,” Dave whispers when she goes to the bathroom, “judging by all the madams she knows.”
We gather around the television on the lower floor of Dave’s two-story house, and Dave puts in a documentary-in-progress about Jane’s Addiction’s Relapse tour that he is coproducing. She watches it while he sits at the computer, loading images into his website. The final scene is a beautifully filmed shot of Dave leaning over Perry Farrell and joining mouths with him in a passionate French kiss.
“I should be using this video instead,” Hope says as she watches it.
“What’s the video you normally use?” I ask, wondering if she is alluding to what I think she is alluding to.
“Some Red Hot Chili Peppers video.”
“And when you say use …”
“Yeah, you know what I mean,” she says, blushing.
Now on the prowl, Hope turns to Dave: “You don’t have a girlfriend, do you?”
“Why?”
“I can’t imagine you spending all that time on the computer,” she replies. “I’d throw it out the window.”
She probably made this comment to regain the power she lost by confessing to Dave that she was attracted to him, but instead she only succeeded in pushing a button—the exact same one Tori had pressed in July.
“Well, I don’t think I’d want you as my girlfriend,” Dave responds.
“Why?”
“I don’t think I’d want a girlfriend who did films.”
“Why? I did bondage films. All girl-girl.”
“When I say that, I’m not putting down films. I’m not emotionally strong enough to separate sex on film from reality. I don’t trust anybody.”
“Neither do I,” Hope says, trying
to cut her losses and return to common ground.
“After my mother and aunt were murdered, I realized that anybody is capable of anything.”
“So what happened with your mother?” Hope asks, crossing her pale, pudgy legs on the floor. “Who found her?”
“My dad,” Dave says. “I was supposed to stay with her that night but at the last minute I went to my dad’s. If I had been there, he would have killed me too.” He pauses. “It was so hard on us. She was a model when she was young, on The Price Is Right and in a bunch of commercials. She also did set design for commercials when I was a teen. I would cry when they came on. So eventually I turned to drugs and music. That’s when I seriously got into music. Those were the two things that made me not feel it. Whenever I had a good time, I’d beat myself up for it, which is so unfair to do to yourself.”
“I can’t figure out which is worse,” Hope says, her eyes reddening, “for a parent to be murdered or for a parent to commit suicide. I don’t just feel angry, I blame myself. I hate my mother for what she did and the pain she caused, and that she didn’t leave me a note. She lied to me. She had problems like this for most of her life. She called me and kept saying she was going to kill herself and how she was going to do it. I broke down and said, You can’t keep doing this to me.’ And she promised she wouldn’t, unless she was really seriously considering it. So she flat-out lied to me. I found receipts from where she had bought a gun. She’d been very carefully planning it for a long time. And she flat-out lied to me.”
“I feel guilty because before the guy killed my mother, he broke into my house at gunpoint and held me up, and he made me promise not to tell anybody,” Dave says. “And I didn’t. And a week later he killed my mother, so I’ve always felt like I could have prevented it. He was free for ten years. They caught him on America’s Most Wanted. I remember hearing her name on television, and then watching a dramatization of it with an actor playing me. I had to actually sit there and face him in court last year. I had to take the stand as a witness, and to the left of me were pictures from the scene on a fucking board that they didn’t even cover up. I had to ask for them to be covered.”