In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran

by John Taylor

  I saw being diagnosed as an alcoholic as similar to being diagnosed as a diabetic. The bad news is, you’ve got this disease; but the good news is that you can treat it. Just follow these instructions: Stay close to a lot of other recovering alcoholics, meet up with them a few times each week, don’t take the first drink, and everything will be OK.

  I got that.

  I came out of rehab on December 15, 1994.

  Browsing through the magazine rack at Tucson Airport, I noticed a cover story on Michael Douglas in Vanity Fair. “Michael’s Full Disclosure: Michael Douglas Confronts Addiction, Sex and Kirk’s Legacy.”

  Turns out Michael is an alumnus of the same rehab center as me. And here he is talking freely about it in the pages of Vanity Fair.

  Maybe I could have a career and stay sober.

  That was a revolutionary concept. The NME had done a thorough job on me, programming me to believe I had to be wasted to do what I did well, but here was Michael Douglas saying something entirely different. Just because I had given up drinking and drugging didn’t mean I couldn’t have a public career in the entertainment business. Maybe the best was still to come. Maybe it could be even better.

  • • •

  Being back in LA ten days before Christmas was a shock after thirty days of meditation, group therapy, and life classes. It was like hitting a crowded freeway filled with speeding cars after going out for a drive on a Sunday afternoon on an English country lane.

  I hadn’t gone to rehab with the intention of making my marriage work. I had already written it off. I imagined the gap between Amanda and me to be too great and our problems insurmountable. I was too used to wanting an easy way of dealing with things, and if they couldn’t be dealt with easily, then I wouldn’t deal with them at all.

  So my marriage to Amanda never got the benefit of my sobriety, although our separation did. I moved into a one-room loft space in Venice Beach, next to a Gold’s Gym. I chose that neighborhood because I had no history there, not having thrown up on any of the sidewalks or left anyone’s house at dawn.

  68 A Fine Bromance

  You could put me on a desert island and I would form a band. I just can’t help myself; “TONIGHT, AT THE PALM, IT’S JT AND FRIDAY.”

  Ultimately, if I have time on my hands, I’m always going to get together with other musicians and start playing. It’s still my preferred method of communication.

  Spending more and more time in Los Angeles, I become close to Steve Jones, the “Guitar Hero” of the Sex Pistols, the man responsible for the fountain of four-letter words on daytime TV that started a revolution in the United Kingdom in 1976.

  Steve is really something else. He is as close as England has produced to a Chuck Berry or a Jerry Lee—100 percent rock and roll—and he’s a comedian to boot. Max Wall, Jerry Lewis, underwear over the head, that sort of thing. Steve had been in Andy Taylor’s first band out of Duran, but that was a long time ago now. Working with Steve is almost all laughter. Which comes as a surprise to people who don’t know him. He puts on quite a tough-guy bravura.

  Steve has been living in LA for years and he is clean too. And he loves to play his guitar.

  One day, Matt Sorum, the drummer from Guns N’ Roses, called both Steve and me and said, “You guys wanna play a few songs at this fund-raiser I am organizing for Cubby Selby at the Viper Room next Monday? Three songs, maybe four?”

  Why the hell not.

  Matt brought Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan along. The four of us together were an unusual combo, but we jelled. We played a couple of Sex Pistols songs and Bowie’s “Suffragette City.”

  It was great. The audience loved it, we loved it.

  Afterward, Sal, who ran the Viper Room on behalf of owner Johnny Depp, said, “You guys should come back, do Mondays.”

  Another residency.

  We needed a name. I remembered that Guardian article about the NME in the seventies. Matt and Duff didn’t like “Boy,” though, they thought it was too precious, so we named the band Neurotic Outsiders. Then, each Monday we were all in town together, we would hit the stage at midnight, usually opening with “Planet Earth,” which I would sing, then blazing into “Bodies” from Never Mind the Bollocks. Duff would sing “New Rose,” the Damned song that Guns N’ Roses had recorded, and we would invite guests to join us onstage to add further to the chaos; Iggy Pop, Billy Idol, Brian Setzer, Simon, whoever was in town.

  We even went on the road, to New York and Boston, along with Slash and Billy Idol. Those shows were some of the most exciting I have ever participated in. We started getting really good.

  I had never been into playing cover versions, but where I was at, right now, it was fun and easy to follow Steve’s driving eighth notes, playing the songs I had loved when I was a teenager.

  Then Guy Oseary, who ran Madonna’s record label, offered us a deal, and it got a little serious.

  Instead of releasing the live album we had recorded at the Viper Room (to be titled The Story of My Life), we chose to write all new songs. Jerry Harrison from the Talking Heads was drafted in to produce. I was happy with one song Steve and I wrote together, an introspective ballad, “Better Way.”

  Set up the mission, unfurl the flag

  It’s time to lay roots down, take my head out of the bag

  Make me a baby, take me a wife

  With these things, maybe I’ll be all right

  There’s a better way, I know there’s a better way

  When I need it, and I need it for sure every day

  “Better Way” was a testament to our sober lives, and it was not the song I would have envisaged writing with the coauthor of “Pretty Vacant.”

  But the Neurotics had been conceived as an antidote to the day job, not to become the day job. When it became a career, it lost its mojo, but along the way I learned a lot about having fun with a musical instrument in my hand. It was an important part of my re-education.

  Eighteen months into a sober life, I met Gela Nash, designer and co-founder of Juicy Couture.

  69 Gela

  Gela with a hard G. Born in Corning, New York, daughter of Sara and “Steady” Ed Jacobson, whose family moved every two to three years, to wherever Ed’s business acumen was required. The opportunity this provided for constant reinvention is how Gela developed her eccentric sense of style and fierce independence. She told me to say that!

  After graduation from Pittsburgh’s prestigious Carnegie Mellon University (where Andy Warhol had held up the art department in the fifties), Gela moved to New York and got a job on Broadway, dancing her way through Zoot Suit with Edward James Olmos.

  California had a strong allure for her.

  We met at a party in the Hollywood Hills, at the house of producer Mimi Polk and her husband, Richard Gitlin. Gela and I exchanged glances across the room.

  “Who is that gorgeous woman?” I asked my friend Nancy, just as Gela was asking her friend Tracy, “Who is he?”

  “He is married to her,” said the friend, indicating across the room to Amanda, who was also present, although we had been separated for some time now and had not arrived together.

  Before I left the party, Gela and I were formally introduced. I got a frisson of excitement on touching her hand. She was quite exquisite. I wanted to see her again. On the way out I chattered excitedly to my mate Cassian about her, who could not believe we had not met before.

  “Oh my God,” he said, “you two are perfect for each other,” and proceeded to give me the Gela Nash story as far as he knew it.

  By the time I met G, she had been married once and given birth to two amazing kids, Travis and Zoe. And Juicy Couture was already, like, a phenomenon. When I mentioned to female friends that Gela and I were dating, they would swoon, “Oh, I luuuurve my Juicy,” as if it was the Beatles. I would witness the California phenomenon that was Juicy replicating itself around the world.

  A few days after that party, Nancy called to invite me to another party—this one at Gela’s house.
I would be the last to leave.

  Our second date lasted seven days, by the end of which we’d become inseparable.

  “Don’t ever stop going to parties,” I tell my single, midlife friends.

  Gela was not like any woman I had ever met before. I fell deeply in love with her. And she with me.

  And I really loved her for her complete lack of a musical education. It would not matter what song was on the radio; if I asked her what it was, she would pause for a few seconds before replying, “Genesis?”

  Bizarre for someone like me, who is such a music guy, but somehow this reassured me we were together for the right reasons.

  Gela is the queen of the musical malaprop. Third Eye Blind becomes Three Blind Mice; the composer of “Mood Indigo,” Duke Elliot.

  She once said to Sony CEO Don Ienner; “Now Donny, I understand you work with Bruce Springfield?”

  Strange looks all around.

  “Sorry, Rick Springsteen?”

  I loved her even more for that.

  So you can imagine Gela had little idea about Duran Duran. Back then, one of our songs could have come on the radio and she would have thought that was Genesis too.

  She’s a fan now though.

  I fell hard for Gela, and I liked the idea of “blending” our families. Atlanta would become the youngest of three, Travis the eldest, and Zoe now the older sister. So now we are five, and a new quintet is born. My only wish is someone had handed me a self-help book along the lines of What to Expect When You’re Blending, but I’m not sure it exists.

  Pulling it off takes more stamina and tenacity than getting a hit record. I always thought blend was such a gentle word, evoking images of banana smoothies and health. I forgot that at the bottom there are those shredding blades cutting everything to pieces. It can be difficult.

  In Gela’s and my family, I found something that was now more important than writing another hit song, and I figured I could not do both. If I was going to lay down some new roots and make this family work, I had to stop traveling for a while.

  After a year or two more of commuting back to Duran’s London HQ, I began to tire of it and made the massive decision to leave the band.

  I called Nick, then Simon, and finally Warren.

  They were scary calls to make, filled with existential fear. Would I disappear after leaving, would I cease to be? Would I never again get a return call from anyone in the music business? My entire adult life I had been “John from Duran Duran.” Who would I be now?

  I would be John.

  I would be Dad.

  I would devote myself to the Nash-Taylor family.

  I started doing the PTA meetings and coaching Little League soccer.

  The Neurotic Outsiders experience had given me confidence to start writing songs for myself and singing. I got my own band together, and we went up and down the California coast playing live. I spent weeks mastering how to play “Rio” and sing it at the same time.

  Once, I sat outside a Venice Beach art gallery and gave an impromptu acoustic performance. Fans sat on the sidewalk; none of them could believe what I was doing.

  I had read an interview with Dave Grohl, who said he formed Foo Fighters after Nirvana split because he wanted to know what he was capable of. I felt the same. The lines between Duran and me had become so blurred that I didn’t know what I was capable of alone.

  I stripped away all the artifice, the lights, and the projections, even the PA system, to see if I could connect with people on the most basic level. Well, I’m still John from Duran Duran, aren’t I? Always will be. There can be no rewriting of that history. But it felt honest and real. Authentic.

  I went off on a tour around the States with my band, playing to audiences that were not on the scale of Duran Duran, and that’s putting it mildly. I remember playing a club in Miami during a terrifying storm, to eight people.

  You were there? Wow.

  Eight people.

  That’s when you find out if you are the real thing or not. If you’ve got it in the blood. Anyone can walk out onstage in front of thirty thousand people who all have the records and know all the words and are having a good time. But if you can walk onstage in front of eight and enjoy yourself, then maybe you’ve got something. I realized I could have a crappy gig in front of thousands but an amazing time in front of a few.

  The size of the crowd didn’t matter, because so much of performing is actually an inside job. I learned to approach every gig as the most important gig I will ever play.

  Which it is.

  It’s a fantastic formula.

  70 A Different Kind of Profound

  In 1998, Mom died.

  Mom’s death was one of the first times I truly appreciated the gift of sobriety. I was able to be present for her last days, really be there in mind and body, for her, for myself, and for my dad.

  Up until Mom’s passing, the most important moment in my life had been the birth of Atlanta, the one time I had seen the awakening into life of another human being. But seeing Mom die, actually expire before my eyes, that was a different kind of profound.

  The doctors had been increasing the morphine supply to ease her pain, and she had not been conscious enough to acknowledge Dad or me for hours. Dad was confused; he had not seen this moment coming, not at all. Mom’s illness had lasted only a few weeks, thankfully, and although she had been in and out of Selly Oak Hospital several times, Dad saw no reason why she wouldn’t be out and back home again soon.

  Poor man, sitting there on the edge of her bed, imploring the doctor, “There must be something you can do?”

  But as the words come out of his mouth I see Mom’s eyes filling up with blood, and that, I know, is the end.

  “Dad,” I say as gently as I can, “it’s over. She’s gone.”

  “Oh dear, oh no. Oh dear, dear me.”

  He took a deep breath.

  At that moment, he was the saddest man in the world.

  I had a fantasy as a kid, awful to admit, especially now, that I wanted Mom to go first, because I fancied having Dad to myself, even if it was only for a short while. I was looking forward to getting to know him better, finding out more about who he was, and I imagined that would only be possible with Mom out of the picture.

  I always thought that Dad was in possession of some extraordinary male lore, some secrets of higher purpose that he had somehow forgotten to pass on to me, or that he had been too busy or self-involved to remember, and that I had to get out of him, one way or another, before he died.

  Mom was always such a talker, always so busy and in our faces, cooking, ironing, doing, that I just couldn’t get to Dad, nor he to me.

  At least, that was how it seemed.

  Mom gave so much of herself to me. She gave up work and her community of friends when she set up house with Dad and moved to the suburbs. After she gave birth, she devoted herself to raising me. But there was something of the hungry ghost, the little girl lost, in Mom, something that was a little needy, wanting for something.

  Behind the noise and constant chatter, there was always a quiet sadness. I don’t think she had any idea what it was. Mom had lain in her mother’s womb with an identical twin who had died at birth. I think Mom was still grieving that loss right up to her own death. How lucky are we of the therapy generation, oversharers perhaps, but at least it’s not considered “bad form” anymore to want to discuss your most personal problems with others.

  Both Mom and Dad would take all their issues with them to the grave.

  Mom instilled in me a remarkable desire for recognition, and she never even knew it. She did it almost by telepathy. She certainly could not have articulated it in English.

  She was a simple person living in complex times. Mom on sex and birth control: “Be careful you don’t get compromised” (her only words to me on the subject). And on plastic surgery: “Don’t go under the surgeon’s knife unless it’s life or death” (not worth much in Los Angeles).

  Almost painfully shy
, she could not bear to be the subject of attention. And she valued niceness above almost all else. My mother had not a bad bone in her body; it just was not in her nature.

  She was not unhappy with her lot, and had there been any lack in her life with Jack, in later years she found great compensation in being my mom. She took pleasure in being the biggest Duran Duran fan, an experience that took her way beyond any ambition she might have ever allowed for herself.

  She was the humblest of Harts.

  Dad would never fully recover from the loss of Jean. His life would go on for another ten years or so in an increasing vortex of isolation. He was not the same man he had been with her alive. He had never developed much in the way of social skills and most certainly was not a joiner, having always relied on Mom to get him by, to be the social grease for them both.

  He would have canceled Christmas if it had been up to him; not that he was a miser, he just didn’t like the fuss. He was a workaholic and could cope in the world of working men, but he was now long-retired and all he had wanted was to be able to spend his remaining days in the company of two: Jack and his Jean.

  His world would start to shrink the moment she passed away.

  I got some of that father/son bonding time I had hoped for as a boy, but it was not quite what I had in mind. Our first joint project was making the arrangements for her funeral.

  If Mom’s death had happened ten years earlier, I would not have been able to be there for him. I would not have been able to get my head around all that pain. Instead, I would have escaped into a bottle and a gram. I was far too self-absorbed in the eighties to have been able to cope as a man and a son, and to have been there for them.

  But in 1998, with a few years of clarity and consistency of feeling under my belt, I was exactly where I needed to be, where the universe wanted me. Dad had earned that, at least. I could be a strong son for him, be there for his needs. I was so glad not to have been on tour, glad not to be having to record Top of the Pops that week. I needed to be at my dad’s side. I could feel only great gratitude at having reached such a state of mind.