by Dave Navarro
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FIRST EDITION
Designed by Bau-Da Design Lab, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Navarro, Dave.
Don’t try this at home / Dave Navarro and Neil Strauss.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-039368-8
EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062045270
Version 12212012
1. Navarro, Dave. 2. Rock musicians—United States—Biography. I. Strauss, Neil. II.
Title.
ML419.N28 A3 2001
787.87166'092—dc21
[B]
00-066478
04 05 06 07 08 /QW 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Footnotes
*A week prior to the dialogue that follows, Dave explained his relationship with the Red Hot Chili Peppers thusly:
I’m going to go over it from the beginning for you. Here’s essentially what happened:
When I left Jane’s Addiction in 1991, I went through a hard time because I was getting clean. I had been a heroin user. I put together a band with [Jane’s bassist] Eric Avery called Deconstruction. It was more of an artistic experiment than anything else. We didn’t have songs; some people viewed us as geniuses and others viewed us as fools. And, personally, I could see the rationale behind both points of view very clearly.
In the process of doing this record, I was asked to join the Chili Peppers. I turned them down. Around this time, Axl Rose called me up in the middle of the night and said, “Dude, I had a dream, and you and me were rocking on stage together.” He would call me every day and ask me to join his band, and I turned him down too. (The honest truth, though, is that I wanted to take the Guns N’ Roses job, but I was afraid of looking foolish and being judged a sellout.)
In the meantime, another kid, Jesse Tobias, joined the Peppers. I caught wind of it when my friend Arty brought me a copy of Rolling Stone and said, “Look at this guy, Dave, he just took your job.” The headline was ONE RED HOT MOTHER OF A PEPPER or something like that, and the guy seemed handsome. He was pictured sitting there with his guitar, leaning over and looking good. I was bummed when I saw it.
Arty looked at me and said, “You should have done this, Dave.”
I said, “You know what, I’m going to.”
He said, “What are you talking about?”
I answered, “I don’t know, but I’m going to be in that band.”
He said, “All right, whatever,” and kind of rolled his eyes.
Sure enough, a couple days later [Chili Peppers bassist] Flea called and asked me to jam with him. I had a sense of what was going on but I didn’t want to get too excited. Ultimately, they kicked Jesse Tobias out and I joined the band. To my knowledge, I never really signed anything with them or with Warner Bros, again either. So to make a long story short, I’m now in the Chili Peppers and I’m in there for four years.
I don’t really need to go into all the stuff that happened throughout this time, but let’s just say that it was a very different way of working creatively than it was with Jane’s Addiction and it made it very difficult for me as a new member. In my mind, making the album was a much longer, slower process than I was used to.
Despite this, we finally finished the record [One Hot Minute] and went on tour. Chad Smith became my best friend, and Anthony [Kiedis, singer] took time off toward the end of the tour. So Chad and I were sitting there going, “What the fuck, man, let’s just go make a record.” So we wrote and recorded an album in a month and a half, from note one to finished product.
Throughout the process of this album, I became excited about the idea of having so much control. I’d never been able to voice my feelings as a guitar player like that. I had spent twelve years with my mouth shut, having to express myself through the words of other people—occasionally words I didn’t believe in.
What ended up happening, I found out later, was that a band employee to whom I had spoken about my excitement over working by myself got off the phone with me and called the rest of the Peppers.
Ultimately, I got a call from Flea: “Dave, in order to continue to make music and work in a productive way, we feel like it would be better to do it with another guitar player.”
Initially, my reaction was pretty much understanding because I was leaning in that direction anyway. At that point I was relatively okay with it. I asked Flea, “Why? What happened?”
“Well, we all had a meeting.” Those were the first words that came out of his mouth. I was floored. If I had been at that meeting, I would have said, “You’re right, I have my own thing. Let’s be friends.”
But under these circumstances, I felt upset and humiliated. And when I asked what their reason was, Flea said, “You know, you’ve started doing drugs again. We’ve already lost one guitar player to a drug overdose, and Anthony’s had his struggles and is trying to live in a healthy way. And it’s not conducive to making music harmoniously.”
“So what you’re saying is that you’re jealous,” I replied. At the time, I really thought that was true. There was silence on the other end. I think it was Flea’s turn to be floored.
“So what you’re saying is that you’re jealous,” I replied. At the time, I really thought that was true. There was silence on the other end. I think it was Flea’s turn to be floored.
*A week later, Dave and Adria drive to Palm Springs. Adria is at the wheel of his car, it is raining, and Dave is scared shitless that at any moment they are going to get into an accident. He calls constantly from the road, panicking between bouts of backseat driving. (Some of the worrying can be attributed to the fact that he was run off the road a week earlier while driving down the hill from his house.) “Write this down,” Dave says. “It’s a great idea for a movie: a guy and girl are driving in a car and rapping. The girl is doing human beatbox. They human beatbox together and get in an accident. And they die.” Dave pauses, then adds, “Adria brought me to talk to her therapist yesterday.”
*It is important to mention, in the interest of preserving what little remains of Dave’s reputation, that no sexual contact of any kind took place between Dave, Bonnie, and/or Eve either before, during, or after this conversation. Dave simply showed them a picture taken of his private part that he posted on his website.