“What do you want to call it?”
“The Diceman Cometh.”
“Great title. You certainly came up with it quickly.”
“No, Sandy. I’ve had it picked out for years.”
• • •
Amazing things were happening. Arfa booked me in Town Hall in New York. Half the borough of Brooklyn came to see me. Just for the hell of it, I had my buddy Robert Santa and his band back me up on the Elvis and Travolta stuff. We had become friends about seven years earlier at an audition for an Elvis off-Broadway show. They helped me fire up my passion. Felt even better when Hot Tub Johnny came along with Club Soda Kenny, whose real name is Kenny Feder, a gold shield detective who, at six foot five, is all muscle and a martial artist. I liked having an entourage—not so much for the protection, since I’m pretty good at protecting myself. I liked them for the Brooklyn that they brought with them. They brought the streets. If I’m not street, I’m not shit.
When the Santa Brothers opened for me with “That’s All Right,” I was feeling all the crazy energy of being a kid and wanting to make it—except this time me and my boys were onstage at Town Hall, where the night before there were ballet dancers and the next night there would be opera singers. But that night Elvis was rocking out and I was fucking up Mother Goose and they were falling out in the aisles, laughing so hard that they were pissing their panties.
I did stop for a moment and realize that after this, nothing would be the same. At age thirty-one my dream was actually coming true. I always wanted to be more than a club comic. I wanted to show the world that a comic could be as big as a rock star—and play the places that a rock star played. I wanted to show the world that, more than a comic, I was an actor playing the part of the funniest guy on the planet. I wanted to use my platform as a comic to become an actor and make movies, not as a bit player but as the main player, the driving force.
At age thirty-one, those goals were being attained. It was the end of one struggle. It was a clear victory, and it felt great.
DICEMANIA!
THE RODNEY SPECIAL was huge for me. But my performance was abbreviated, and I was sharing the bill with other comics. The Diceman Cometh would be my first solo shot, the moment I would take command.
I trained for it like I was Rocky taking on Apollo Creed.
I hit the gym with a vengeance. I went on a low-carb, high-protein diet, like I was a professional athlete. I tightened up my material at the Comedy Store, and then I ran the streets of Hollywood late at night, blasting my workout music through my Walkman.
The day of the special Johnny, Trini, and I slid into the back of a limo, left Brooklyn as snow fell, and headed down to Philly. Was I nervous? Fuck yeah. The driver knew it, Johnny knew it, Trini knew it. To relax me and make me laugh, Trini started singing. Every fucking song on the radio. All the fucking way to Philly. Amazing. She knew the lyrics to every goddamn song. She was like a human jukebox. And she put her heart and soul into every one. Plus she had pipes. It was like I had a private two-and-a-half-hour concert.
By the time I went out onstage for a quick walk-through rehearsal, my jitters were gone, replaced by a jolt of excitement. I stared at the unbelievable set—a pair of giant dice with my name in huge red letters. It felt surreal, and it felt so right.
Afterward we grabbed a quick bite and then we went to the hotel and I got dressed. I’d had a leather motorcycle jacket custom-made for the occasion by Jeff Hamilton, the guy who designed George Michael’s jacket in a video I saw. I shrugged into my jacket, popped a cig into the corner of my mouth, and walked over to the mirror. I nodded at Dice staring back at me and headed out.
Back at the theater, I took a moment for myself in the dressing room. I had agreed to shoot two full shows and pick the best one. I took a deep breath, told myself to concentrate on just this one show. One at a time. Then I lowered my head, closed my eyes, and whispered a little prayer, my preshow ritual, something I’d done before every show to that point and have ever since. Then I got up and opened the dressing room door.
My family came in first, followed by my team, then the director, then Trini, and then Sandy Gallin, wearing a wide smile. He’d flown in from California. He sat down next to my mom and dad, and the three of them started schmoozing about the Brooklyn background they all had in common. Sandy realized that for all his power, I wasn’t gonna make a move without Dad. It was important to me that he treat my father with great respect—and he did. Sandy was also learning how to handle me.
“Dice,” he said, “do you like good news before or after a show?”
“Before,” I said. “I wanna hear good news the minute it happens.”
“Okay. Three-picture deal. Twentieth Century Fox. Two theatrical features and a theatrical release of a concert film on the order of Eddie Murphy’s Raw.”
“You gotta be kidding.”
“Barry Diller, head of the studio, signed off on it an hour ago.”
First thing I did was turn to my parents and ask, “Do you hear what this man is saying? A major Hollywood studio is banking on me for three major pictures.”
Dad smiled and said, “I think you better concentrate on going out there and destroying this crowd.”
Which was just what I did. With the Allman Brothers song “Whipping Post” blasting through the speakers, I hit the stage. I lifted my collar and pumped my fist, and the crowd erupted, chanting, “Dice! Dice! Dice!” I slapped hands in the front row, pumped my fist again, lit a smoke, and started in.
I hit hard with the nursery rhymes, which, because of my appearance on the Rodney special, were already well-known. A lot of the fans had ’em memorized, like the way fans memorize hit songs. They recited them along with me and had a ball. For this show, I also made up some new ones.
“Stick these in your pocket,” I told the crowd before launching into the fresh limericks.
“Little Jack Horner sat in the corner eating a pizza pie. He shit pepperoni, blew his friend Tony, wiped his mouth on his tie.”
The crowd went nuts. With every poem, they were standing, screaming, yelling, and pumping their fists.
“Mary had a little lamb she kept in her backyard. When she took her panties off, his wooly dick got hard.
“Georgy Porgy pudding and pie, jerked off in his girlfriend’s eye. When her eye was dry and shut, Georgy fucked that one-eyed slut.
“Hickory dickory dock, some chick was sucking my cock, the clock struck two, I dropped my goo, I dumped the bitch on the next block.”
From there I thought it was time to go back to the beginning of the Diceman’s days on planet Earth.
“I’ve had pressure my whole life,” I said. “You know what they do the second you’re born? They throw you in a nursery with thirty or forty kids you never seen before in your life. So I’m laying there, bored out of my mind. I ask this one kid, I say, ‘Johnny, you got a light for me?’ The kid’s taking a dump in his diapers, drooling all over himself. That’s when I knew that kid’s got no fuckin’ class. I put on my leather jacket, ring for a little service. This big blond nurse comes in and shoves a plastic nipple in my mouth. I look at her and say, ‘Sweetheart, who you teasin’? Pick up the dress. We’re gonna mow the lawn tonight.’ ” The crowd went nuts.
When it was over, I knew that this was the show of my life. I headed back to the dressing room, where I’d have an hour or so to rest before the second show.
“Great show,” said Sandy. “But do the second show even faster. I think it’d be a good idea to pick up the pace.”
Without losing a beat, I turned to him said, “Look, Sandy, you are one of the greatest managers ever. As far as Hollywood goes, you’re in the history books. I respect that. But don’t ever tell me what to do onstage. Because on that stage, I’m king. And as king, I gotta say that the first show was perfect. That second show can’t be any better. The first show is what’s going on HBO. This second show is just for fun.”
Sandy had the good sense not to argue. He soon saw that, go
od as the second show was, it couldn’t compare to the first.
The show was set to air at midnight on New Year’s Eve. A few hours before it was to be broadcast, I had a gig at the Beacon Theatre with a viewing party afterward being thrown by HBO. What a way to ring in 1989!
The Originals—Mom, Dad, my sister, and me—plus Trini were in a cab from the Beacon on our way to the party. Dad reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a check. He kept staring at it.
“What is that?” I asked.
“The money for the Beacon show. Thirty thousand. You made thirty thousand for an hour’s work.”
“Ain’t that beautiful, Dad?”
“Sure it’s beautiful. It’s just hard for me to wrap my head around the numbers. Do you know how many years of process serving I had to do to make that kind of money?”
“Don’t even think about it, Dad, ’cause you’ll never have to do a day of process serving again.”
HBO had set up a wall of televisions in a restaurant so a hundred of us could all watch. The anticipation for The Diceman Cometh was tremendous. I was too excited to eat anything. New year, new career, new star shooting across the sky. Watching myself, I felt like I was kicking the doors down in every home in America that had HBO.
Next day I didn’t wake up till one P.M. With the great Beacon show and the HBO special under my belt, I’d never felt better. And then I got a call from a “friend.”
“You read the New York Times?” he asked.
“I’m more of a Daily News kinda guy,” I said.
“Well, get the Times this morning.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
I ran down to the newsstand on the corner and picked up the paper. And right there, in a five-word description of The Diceman Cometh, I read, “The Demise of Western Civilization.”
I was half amused, half amazed that the Times took me so fuckin’ seriously. But I wasn’t upset. I was actually glad for the attention. Let the press write whatever the hell they wanna write. I work for the fans, not the press. All the press could do was bring me more fans. I didn’t see then—and remained blind for months to come—the power of the press to fuck me up.
• • •
A few weeks later—in between gigs at four-thousand-seat arenas—I was back in Hollywood on my way to the Comedy Store, just to drop in and let ’em know that I hadn’t forgotten my L.A. roots. I was driving down Sunset when I stopped at the light at Vine Street. I heard a honk and looked over. Who’d pulled up beside me? Sam Kinison.
Sitting next to Sam was a hot chick with her huge boobs spilling out of her tank top.
“Dice!” Kinison screamed at the top his lungs. “Fuckin’ Dice! I’ve heard all the good shit about you. Welcome to show business, baby!”
“Thanks, Sam.”
And then he peeled off, him and his honey heading out into the night.
Living on both coasts, I’d been in and out of L.A. so much that I hadn’t hung out with Sam in a while. But we were still pals, even though his career had taken off long before mine. Sam wasn’t looking at me like a competitor at that moment. He was looking at me like a brother. In my naïve way, I presumed that was always gonna be the case.
Gallin had hooked me up with David Geffen. I was soon going to be making my first comedy album for Geffen Records, the same label that did Aerosmith and Guns N’ Roses. The producer was set to be Rick Rubin, the guy I met back at Greenblatt’s Deli, who I’d since learned was a genius in the studio and one of the hottest guys in music. I was also talking to Dennis Arfa about my upcoming tour. He carefully explained to me about the building blocks of a career.
“Look, baby,” he said, “you start with a five-hundred-seater. You move to a thousand-seater. You slowly develop these markets and then move into the bigger venues.”
“I know you’re a genius, Dennis,” I said, “but I don’t think you’re thinking right. You got to use your imagination. You got to imagine what it was like when the Colonel spotted Elvis. No one like Elvis had ever existed before. The old rules didn’t apply. Same with me. I don’t think we gotta worry about building blocks. I think we need to be bolder about the bookings. The demand is already there.”
“All right, Dice,” said Dennis. “I’ll do it your way. I’ll test it out with a thirty-five-hundred-seat theater. How about the Celebrity in Phoenix?”
I knew Dennis was challenging me with a tough one, because Arizona isn’t New York, L.A., or Chicago, where my brand of humor had proven so popular. At the same time, I was sticking to my guns. I believed that even in Arizona I was catching on like crazy.
“I’ll take the challenge,” I told Dennis. “Book the Celebrity and see how the sales go.”
A week later Dennis called.
“Were we able to sell out the Celebrity?” I asked.
“For the first night.”
“What do you mean the first night?”
“Sales were so strong they added two others—all sellouts.”
The result was an eighteen-city tour with major venues in every market.
“It’s still not big enough,” I told Dennis.
“How big are you talkin’, Dice?”
“Madison Square Garden big.”
FLEEBIN’ DABBLE
THINGS WERE POPPIN’ off fast and furiously. I was bouncing between both coasts. I was staying close to Hollywood, the place where my manager Sandy Gallin and my agent Dennis Arfa were planning my worldwide takeover. And I was staying close to Brooklyn, where my parents gave me the love and support that kept me grounded. In Hollywood, Trini and I moved into an apartment at Hawthorne and Fuller. In Brooklyn, I got my own apartment a block down from my mom and dad on Nostrand Avenue. I had all the bases covered.
My instincts about playing the Garden turned out to be doubly right. It wasn’t just a one-night sellout. It was two. No comic had ever done this before. Leading up to that was a multicity tour that started in Providence in November 1989 and culminated in those two nights in New York in February 1990. I was modestly calling it the Dice Rules tour.
• • •
All this mega-success and these mega-plans had me feeling out of my depth. That’s why I went to see the one man in the world who could settle me down: my dad. I went to the office of the Royal Process Agency at 16 Court Street.
I told Dad that I wanted him to manage me full time and that he didn’t need to do the process serving any longer. His days of nine-to-five were over. I even had the name picked out for the new company: Fleebin’ Dabble. It doesn’t mean anything. It just sounded funny to me. I was over the moon to be able to do this for Dad and have him on my side even more. At first he tried to keep the business in the family, offering it to his brother-in-law, Ernie. But for some reason, that didn’t work out. So Dad just padlocked Royal Process and, on the same floor in the same building, opened up an office with FLEEBIN’ DABBLE PRODUCTIONS written on the door.
I’ve heard it said that most highly creative, highly crazy entertainers like me are unmanageable. I basically agree. But if there was anyone who could keep me from going off the deep end, it was my dad—the steady, always-cool, always-loving, warm and wonderful Freddy Silverstein.
• • •
With Fleebin’ Dabble attending to details and watching my back, I got ready to storm the country with the Dice Rules tour. To make sure the show was tight and right, I was rehearsing in a studio in Rockaway, Queens. I wanted to make sure that the music segment had the same nonstop energy as the comedy. That’s why I was using a live band. A rock-and-roll comic had to have a rock-and-roll band. When other comics hit it big and went out on tour, they treated the theater like it was a small club. They stayed with that same tame-ass buttoned-down stand-up shit. Not me. I was thinking of when Elvis played the Astrodome. I was thinking of a gigantic, loud, raucous, balls-out, mind-blowing, blasting assault. I wasn’t looking at these shows as a comedy routine to amuse the fans. I was seeing them as an experience, a once-in-a-lifetime event.
I bought one of those video recorders that were just coming out at the time. I was into it, recording everything, including the band rehearsals. I basically just started taking it everywhere I went. One night me and the boys drove over to Brooklyn and Pips, the comedy club where it all began. For the sake of good memories, I wanted to see what was happening there.
Minute I walked through the door, I saw this big man onstage. He had to weigh three fifty. His hair was worked up in a giant pompadour. Marty Schultz told me the big boy’s name was Michael Parise, but he called himself Wheels. And he was actually up there riffing on my material.
I didn’t mind. Matter of fact, I wanted to record what he was doing, so I climbed onstage and moved around him with my video camera aimed at his head. No one seemed to mind—especially since there were only nine or ten people in the audience. Naturally he was shocked to see me up there, but everyone was getting a kick outta what I was doing. I was circling him with my camera and telling Wheels, “Breathe. Just breathe.” In response, he picked up his game, revved up his rhythms. He liked to talk about his weight. He said, “Man, I’m bloated. You ever get bloated? That Chinese food will fuck you up. You can’t eat that shit. They put that MSG in there and you swell up. I’m usually one fifty, one sixty. Then one beef and broccoli, and look what happens. It’s not my fault. I like being fat. Fuck skinny people.”
When his set was over, we walked off the stage together—Wheels the comic and me his videographer—and who was waiting for us at ringside but none other than Downtown Ronny.
“Hey, Dice,” he said. “What do ya think of Wheels? I think he’s gonna be a star, ya heah?”
“He’s okay,” I said. I was sounding like Rodney Dangerfield describing me.
“I think this Wheels is going places,” Ronny continued. “I think you’re the guy to take him places. He’s a fuckin’ perfect opening act for you. Ya heah what I’m saying, Dice?”
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