18 and Life on Skid Row

by Sebastian Bach

  I was like, “What?”

  Obviously, he knew this was my band before Skid Row. He thought it was hilarious that he could run up to me and report to me this piece of information. “Yes, that’s right! We saw your name, Kid Wikkid, in a magazine interview you did, and we thought, bloody hell! What a good name for our band! So we knicked it!! Ha ha ha ha haaaa!”

  I swallowed my pride and tried to brush it off my shoulder. This, certainly, did now have me feeling well-chuffed. I was much more interested in talking to Tom Araya of Slayer, someone I had immense respect for, than this drunken fool, who was only trying to piss me off anyway.

  “You know what, dude?” I told him. “That’s cool, man. You took my name, that I invented, when I was fifteen years old, that I saw in the subway when I was a kid. Okay, fine. All I ask is that you maybe mention that? Where you got the name? If you ever do an interview in a magazine? Is that fair?” I queried.

  “Bloody hell, Sebastian!! We could actually use some press!!!” By this time he had his arm around my shoulder, pulling my neck in close to his face. In my face, spitting as he talked. I was starting to fucking lose it. “I have a better idea!” he blathered. “Why don’t you punch me? Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaa,” this guy said.

  I looked at Tom Araya. I looked back at the guy. I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. He was actually asking me to punch him. I had tried the nice approach. So, fuck it. Give the people what they want, I always say.

  I remembered distinctly, from Shao Lin Kung Fu, Sifu Damien would tell me in training that the flat, front part of your forearm is the hardest area of the human body to strike somebody else with. With no nerve endings, the forearm is also one of the hardest bones in your body. If you wind up, and really want to fuck someone up, the forearm smash is the way to inflict serious damage without feeling any pain whatsoever yourself. Also very useful in close proximity, which this drunken Brit was definitely in. Perfect for this situation.

  I was just giving this dude what he wanted. You want me to punch you? Alright. Want to mock me in front of my friends and steal the name of my band? That’s your choice. But then I get to make my choice. And, with that, I folded my arm and planted my right elbow into the side of this dude’s cheek, knocking him completely unconscious. He crumpled into the ground, at Tom Araya’s feet. We stepped over the unconscious man and went to find some beers.

  I never read any interview with this dude about how he got the name Kid Wikkid. I never read any interview with this dude ever at all.

  We kept the party rolling. Lars showed up. The first thing I told him was, “Hey, listen. I don’t do blow anymore.” Which was true. I realized long ago that cocaine did not agree with me anymore. I saw a TV show once on cocaine and what it does to the body. When you first start doing it, it stimulates your serotonin levels. Makes you talk, babble, and engages you with others who are feeling the same way. But the more you do it, cocaine in fact depletes your serotonin level. That is the worst fucking feeling I can think of in the world. When you are trying to sleep, coming off blow, there is no worse way to feel. When it’s noon, you are staring at the ceiling, pleading with the Lord, “Please God, I promise to you I’ll never do this shit again if you just let me go to sleep. Please just let me go to sleep. Just this once, please, I promise I’ll stop.”

  Then you do it again.

  Well, I was tired of that feeling. I genuinely did not like the way cocaine made me feel anymore.

  I explained to Lars that I had stopped.

  “Hey, you know what, Sebastian? That’s a real nice story. But you wanna know what I think???”

  “What’s that, Lars?”

  “Maybe TONIGHT is a good night . . . to start it back up again!!!!!”

  And with that, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a gigantic bag of blow. It was on.

  Let’s get frozen.

  We kept partying backstage at Donington, drinking beers and doing blow. When it was time to go back to the hotel, Slayer invited me onto their bus with them. We were staying at the same hotel. Their manager was the guy who actually invited me on the bus. A man by the name of Rick Sales. A man who would be extremely important in my life and career in the years to come.

  We got on the bus, my teeth rattling from all the blow shooting through my veins. The soundman pulled out the oh-so-familiar silver Halliburton briefcase. Filled with either cash or drugs, or both, this was the ubiquitous fixture on many rock ’n’ roll tours throughout the 1970s and ’80s. Rolling down the highway, “Hey man, what you got in the briefcase???”

  “Oh, you don’t want to know, Baz.” Fuckin’ bullshit I don’t wanna know. “Crack that fucker open!” I was pretty sure I knew what was in there.

  He opened up the briefcase. Rick Sales shook his head no, no, no. I nodded my head and said yes, yes, yes. Inside the briefcase were sacks of blow. It was time to get into the scene.

  By the time we got to the hotel I couldn’t form a sentence. My last memory of this bus ride with Slayer was them all checking into the hotel, as I sat out in the front valet area under a tree, talking to myself. This was back in 1994. I don’t do that shit anymore. I count myself lucky at how I have abused my body, over the years, and am still here to tell the tale. Sitting under a tree talking to myself is not my optimum idea of a good time. Cocaine sucks.

  Don’t ever find yourself alone, talking to yourself, under a tree.

  The next time I saw Lars was at the Rainbow in Hollywood. Duff McKagan was there, back when he still had an intact liver. This was one of the nights we were out to do some damage.

  I had heard about, but had never actually seen, the legendary drug known as Quaaludes. Always in stories regaling the ’70s, there would be mention of this mysterious drug that I had never encountered or come in contact with in my time. I heard about it and wondered about it. This night at the Rainbow would be the one and only time I have ever seen, and tried, Quaaludes.

  After who knows how many hours drinking with Duff, we found ourselves somehow underneath the back corner table of the Rainbow, which has always been the best place in the world. Always open to serious rock ’n’ roll animals such as myself. The recent passing of Lemmy is just yet another marker of the end of an era. It is incredible how the Rainbow is still there today, surrounded by development, major hotels coming up all over the Sunset Strip. The Rainbow remains. This is where Joe DiMaggio got engaged to Marilyn Monroe, back when it was called the Grove. And this is the only place where Sebastian, Duff, and Lars did Quaaludes. Talk about Hollywood history.

  You would be surprised to see the underbelly of the Rainbow. I had never been, nor have I since been, underneath the tables in this fine establishment. But on this night, I found myself looking up from the floor to the underside of the table. All kinds of graffiti, autographs, and of course, chewing gum, stuck all over the place. Me and Duff did a couple of bumps under there, and then came back up top. Somehow we had Quaaludes. Fuck it, let’s do Quaaludes now! Finally!

  Who knows how or where we got them, but we put them into our mouths. They were big, hockey-puck-shaped pills. As the night went on the drug began to hit me. I became very, very, very, very, very relaxed. Very, very slow. As I was talking to Duff, I noticed the oddest thing. The shape of Duff’s mouth was changing. He was talking, but I couldn’t really understand what he was saying. He was mumbling. I looked down at my jacket. For some reason it was wet. I looked back up at Duff. He was drooling. And then I realized the same thing was happening to my face. I had lost control over the muscles in my mouth. My lips were slack-jawed. I was drooling all over myself.

  This is fucked up.

  As I look up, I see the laughing little heavy metal gnome known as Lars Ulrich dancing merrily around our table. He’s like a little leprechaun, doing a pixie dance.

  “Ha ha ha ha haAAAAAAAA!!!!! Hey, everybody! Line up! Come and MEET YOUR HEROES!!! It’s your dream come true!!”

  What the fuck was he talking about?

  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
.

  By this point, me and Duff are falling asleep on each other’s shoulders. Drooling on each other. Unable to speak. Drifting in and out of consciousness. Partying like rock stars at the Starwood in ’77, we think.

  Then we realize what Lars was up to. This little demon was talking to the fans. He had them lined up in front of our table.

  “Hey everybody! Come get your picture taken!!! With a real rock star!!! Come meet Skid Row!!! Guns N’ Roses!”

  “Heyyyyyyyy, mmmmmaaaaaannnnnn, that’ssssss nnnnot coooooooollll, mmmaaaaannnnn . . .” Click, click, click go the flashbulbs.

  Lars is charging fans five dollars each to come sit next to me and Duff. To get their pictures taken with us. We are too ’Luded out to protest. Attempting to stop this madness, we tell LLLLAAAAArrsssss to stop iitttttttt, through drool, in excruciating slow motion.

  Welcome to the Rainbow! I never did Quaaludes again.

  Never Had Nothing to Do

  1990–1991

  New Jersey

  I had never had money to do just whatever I wanted with. Nobody in my family, or nobody I knew for that matter, could live the way we were living now.

  One of the things I loved to do, when I was twenty-one years old, was drink beer. I drank a lot of beer in those days. When we were first off the road, I literally had nothing to do. Or, to be more specific, I didn’t know really what to do. I had never had nothing to do before. Everything I had done since I was eight years old in the church choir had led me up to this moment. I specifically asked myself, “What in the fuck am I supposed to do every day now?” When you are on the road, working and playing every night, your days are structured. Every moment is spoken for. Your time is maximized to the fullest. Coming off the road, however, was the exact opposite of that. I looked at the calendar, having nothing on the schedule at all, for the first time in my life. And, also for the first time, tons of money in the bank. What a neat combo. But totally foreign to me.

  I began to collect rock ’n’ roll memorabilia, movies, and bootleg VHS tapes, etcetera, with a vengeance. I amassed a large collection of unreleased concerts on VHS, mostly from Japan. It was legal to buy bootlegs in Tokyo that you could not find anywhere else in the world. We would go into the store called Airs Rock, and since they were bootlegging us as well, they would let us walk out with as many VHS tapes as we could carry. I would walk out of the store with five or six garbage bags full of unreleased concerts, promos, and television appearances by KISS, Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, Judas Priest et al., on VHS tape. Before the days of the Internet, this was an extreme novelty to my friends back in New Jersey. We would regularly have my friends over at night to drink and watch old Van Halen or KISS concerts on the big screen, cranked through the speakers like a PA. This was a great way to have fun with my friends and not have to deal with the public. Not such a great way to ingratiate myself to the neighbors. I ended up with the cops coming over numerous times. My landlord of the condo in Freehold sued me. In chambers, she testified that I acted like “an animal.” I told her lawyer, “It wasn’t an act.”

  Regardless of these messy details, the band was so big now that we each were able to buy our own gigantic houses in the New Jersey countryside. After looking for a couple of months, we found a beautiful secluded place in Lincroft, New Jersey, a sprawling property on Swimming River Road. Little did I realize in 1990 how the name of the street would be so prophetic, decades later.

  My house is situated on three and a half acres of pristine New Jersey real estate, in the woods. At the time of this writing, I don’t own the property. The house was destroyed in Hurricane Irene in 2011. My property abutted twenty-five acres or so of government land, so it’s literally as much woods as anyone could handle. It was always so great coming off the road and wandering the paths in the woods. Paths that I would cut myself, through running, or hiking on the trails with my children. I knew every single leaf. Every rock. Every tree. Nothing was a more soothing escape from the insanity of heavy metal rock ’n’ roll than walking around in the woods on my New Jersey property. I miss that greatly. When the house was destroyed, it was so overwhelming that it was hard to process. I thought it was interesting that the time I actually broke down was walking around on the trails in the woods in the back. That is where I felt the most sadness. Having the house destroyed was so painful I could barely process it. But walking around in my woods was where I dropped to my knees. And cried.

  My house also has a large basement, which Skid Row used to rehearse in, since the day I moved there. The material for the record Slave to the Grind was mostly written and worked on in my basement, and Rob Affuso’s garage. I wrote the music for the title track “Slave to the Grind” on my mini-cassette Dictaphone handheld recorder in Freehold, New Jersey. I had felt that, on our first album tour, we really didn’t have a great opening song for our set. Our opener, “Makin’ a Mess,” was a song I wrote on the first Skid Row album with Snake and Rachel. But I thought it was just not quite fast, or badass, enough to open the show with. I thought we needed a real mean, up-tempo rocker to grab people by the throat the minute we walked out onto that stage. “Slave to the Grind” became that song. Originally inspired as a sped-up version of Van Halen’s “Dead or Alive,” I hummed that riff into my microcassette recorder, walked into rehearsal the next day, and said, “Rachel. Snake. Scotti. Play this riff as a whole. In unison. Rob. Play this drumbeat.” Rat-a-tat-tat . . . I air-drummed Rob the drumbeat. Then, Rachel said, “It sounds like a grind.”

  “Slave to the Grind.”

  YEAH!!!

  Rachel and Snake worked more on the music that very night, and the classic Skid Row opening song was born. Written between the three of us. As the best songs on the record were.

  “In a Darkened Room,” to me, is the “best” Skid Row ballad. I don’t like to use the word best or better when describing music. It’s not sports. But this song hits me quite hard when I listen to it. It’s a song that I wrote with Snake in Tokyo, Japan, at the Roppongi Prince hotel. Snake had the music for the verse, but no melody. He had no music to go to after the verse. We wrote the bridge together. “Forgive me please, for I know not what I do”—that led to the chorus. After the record came out, Slash pulled me aside at his house and was perturbed at this particular song. I didn’t understand why. He explained to me that the guitar pattern in the chorus was his signature guitar pattern from the Guns N’ Roses classic “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” I did not realize this whatsoever. But when I listen back, I do indeed hear the similarities. Sorry, Slash. I had nothing to do with that part!

  The sound of our second record was very important to us. We wanted people to know us not just for our hit ballads, but for rock ’n’ roll. Michael Wagener and I drove around the back streets of New Jersey looking for the ultimate Marshall amplifier. We listened to bunches of different local bands and found one particular amplifier head, owned by a guy by the name of Dave Linsk. We went to his house one snowy afternoon and heard the amp that we eventually used on “Slave to the Grind.” There was also a new amp company out of Florida called Riviera, and we used some of their amps as well. It was Michael Wagener and myself who were most concerned with the production of this album. On all of these excursions to find and listen to different guitar amplifiers, it was always just us two. The metal heads inside the two of us wanted to beat “Live Wire” and “Balls to the Wall.” How ironic is it that as I am writing this I started my day today by putting on the TV and this video is the first thing I see. I still hear it all the time. The album still stands up.

  The opening track on the album is called “Monkey Business.” The song turned out to be incredible in the final result. But when I first heard it, I thought the main riff of the track sounded too much like the Guns N’ Roses song “Paradise City.” I got an idea for how “Monkey Business” could sound more unique and hummed Snake the new chords. We then hammered out together what eventually became the main riff of the song. Of course I didn’t get songwriting credit on this. Which ma
kes me bristle. Again. The song would’ve been completely different without my melodic input on that riff. It also would’ve been completely the same. As “Paradise City.”

  We worked on the songs in my basement. One day, Steven Adler came over to visit. We had planned for him to stay at my house for a couple of days. Until I came down the next morning, and opened the door of my main-floor bedroom bathroom. Steven was sitting on my toilet with a syringe in his arm. Blood was splattered all over the white walls. I told him that he had to get out of my house immediately, if not sooner. Some girl came and picked him up as I wiped his blood off of my bathroom walls.

  Much has been said about the sophomore slump, and how easy it is for an artist to come out with the big debut, only to not be able to come up with a sufficient follow-up. This precedent, combined with the financial pressure due to the horrific Underground contract, added an extra level of pressure to the recording sessions. Not to mention the fact that the first album was now well over $4 million in sales, which for any artist would be tough to beat.

  We decided to once again work with Michael Wagener in the producer’s chair. We would record the album down in Florida, and live in Fort Lauderdale for a couple of months. First, we had to come up with the material. This created a unique challenge. Although we were a hard-rocking band, our two big radio hits were both ballads. This pissed us off. In our young, piss-and-vinegar style, we made a conscious effort to make the album as hard as it could be. While playing in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1990, I was walking in the ocean. Two silly dudes were walking on the sand a couple yards away for me. They yelled out to me, “Iiiiiiiiiiii Reeeeeeeemember Yoooooooooo” in a mock sarcastic voice, and laughed. I understood where they were coming from. At that moment, in the “I Remember You” summer of 1990, Skid Row were an overexposed band. Our videos were oversaturating the public’s mind, and even my own. You could not get away from us. I could not get away from myself. I was as sick of me as the dudes mocking me on the beach were.