We would mug for the camera at all of our shoots. We had been born in an era when posing and posturing and pursing and pretty-boyness had taken over the landscape. It was all about trying to look as handsome as possible while making thin and empty music. And we were anti whatever was popular. So mugging and distorting our faces seemed like the natural response to all of these people trying to manicure themselves to perfection.
We also made our first video. Enigma/EMI came up with some money, and we hired Graham Wiffler, who had done films for this oddball San Francisco group called the Residents, which we loved. He designed a video for “True Men,” and we showed up and put in an eighteen-hour day doing things like sprouting up from under the stage through these sand holes, because some farmer was watering his cornfield. We completely gave up the body. If we’d had to dive onto a bed of nails ten times in a row, we would have done it. I remember waking up the next day and feeling a hundred years old. I loved the video, although it was still weird to look at something and see Jack Sherman instead of Hillel.
Probably a week after our record came out, unbeknownst to me, Flea got a call from Johnny Lydon, of Sex Pistols fame, to audition as the bass player for his new group, Public Image. Flea quietly went and did the audition, not unlike the time that he had auditioned for Fear when he was playing in What Is This. It went very well, and he was the first choice. Then he consulted with Hillel, like he had with me when he was approached by Fear. They listened to both groups, and Hillel asked Flea if he wanted to be a supporting member of Lydon’s trip or a creating member of something new. Flea made up his mind to stick with our band. Thank God for that, because I was a torn-up rag doll of a human being at that point. I’m sure Flea was constantly thinking, “Jesus Christ, I can’t rely on this freak. He’s dying out there, covered with track marks. Black and blue, up and down. Stealing cars, disappearing, going to jail. Just a fucking nutcase. How can I tolerate that?”
One time around then, we were supposed to be rehearsing, but I didn’t show up. Jack Sherman was raring to go, but Flea was sitting there with his bass on his lap and his head hanging down.
“C’mon, let’s do something,” Jack said.
“Shut up,” Flea growled.
“What’s wrong with you? Why are you so down? Why can’t we just get some work done?” Jack complained.
“If your friend could die at any minute, you’d be down, too,” Flea said.
I didn’t hear about that exchange until this year. That early on, as far as I remember, Flea never expressed anything even close to that to me. Whenever we would talk about it, it was never “I’m worried about you. I think you might have a problem, or you might be setting yourself up to die young.” It was always “I can’t do this. You left me hanging. I need someone I can rely on.” I assumed that he was more like Jack and didn’t consider himself a brother’s keeper, just a driven professional who needed a reliable partnership.
The album was released that summer, and to promote it, we were scheduled to go to New York and play the CMJ New Music Seminar, which was the most important venue for alternative acts to get themselves known. I almost didn’t make it to New York, not because of cocaine and heroin, but because I abused another drug—alcohol. I was home in Michigan for my annual summer visitation. I brought Jennifer, who showed up with her typical tricolored canary-yellow, pink-feathers-coming-out-of-her-head hairdo. When I introduced her to my family, they didn’t know what to make of her. She looked like a giant field of blossoming daffodils. And the first thing she did was march out to the peach field behind the house and build a tepee. I thought she was going to build a toy tepee, but she had this legitimate passion for Native American culture, so she spent all afternoon and well into the night out in the woods harvesting tepee poles. I don’t know if she had brought material with her, because she always had bags full of clothes and raw materials, but she wound up building a fifteen-foot-tall bona fide tepee that withstood the next harsh Michigan winter.
Before I left L.A., I was using more heroin than I wanted to. I started off with these rules that I’d do it once a week, because if you do it more than once a week, you’re in danger of getting strung out. Then it would be like “I’ll do it twice this week, but I won’t do it at all next week.” Day three comes up, and you’re like “I’m just going to put a day in between each time I use, because that way I can never get strung out.” Then it was like “If I do it two days in a row, and then don’t do it for two days, and then just do it one day, I won’t get strung out.” I was losing that battle.
Meanwhile, Jennifer was making great friends with my sisters. My mom didn’t know what to think of this pretty, crazy bird. Of course, like all moms, she didn’t realize that the craziest bird in the house was her own son. One night I was feeling ill because I had run out of the tiny amount of dope I had brought with me. I intuitively knew that I needed some medicine to take away the pain, so I left Jennifer at home with my mom and went to go meet my friend Nate, who was at a bar with a bunch of straight, sheltered midwesterners. They all dressed the same, they all drank the same, they all drove the same cars and had the same kind of jobs and lived in the same kind of houses. And they drank a lot. Alcohol was never my first or even second or third drug of choice. I drank regularly, I just never got the tolerance thing happening. But I was feeling sick and going with the flow of this bar scene in Grand Rapids, which was kooky and lame and without much spirit. So I started drinking beer out of what seemed like giant popcorn containers. I was matching bucket for bucket with everybody there, and we were getting drunk and this was working for me, taking the place of all that stuff I’d run out of. I thought I was fine, but I had no idea how high I was.
It was about a twenty-mile drive down a straight country road to get back to my mom’s house. I never wear a seat belt, even to this day, but when I was saying good-bye to Nate, as a joke, I made a big deal out of strapping on the belt. So I put the pedal to the metal on my mom’s Subaru station wagon, which probably put me between eighty and ninety miles an hour. I was getting really tired, and I’d start to nod off and then jerk up sharply. I did this a few times, and then I decided that I was just going to close my eyes for a second. There was so much booze in me that my lights went out.
I blacked out, and the car veered into the oncoming lane, jumped the edge of the road, and hit a bump, at which point I woke up and saw a huge clump of trees in front of me. “Trees? What the . . .” Boom—the car accordioned into an elm tree face-on, and the engine was now next to me in the driver’s seat, and the steering wheel had broken on impact with my face. I would have stayed there, unconscious and bleeding, for who knows how long if not for the fact that off in the distance, a person had heard the crash. By luck, that person was a paramedic who happened to have his ambulance in the driveway.
Within a matter of minutes, he had called some firemen, and they came and got the jaws of life and pried me out of the car. The paramedics were hovering over me, asking me who the president was. I answered each question perfectly, though I couldn’t understand why they were testing me for brain damage. I didn’t realize that my entire head had split wide open and I resembled a plate of spaghetti and meatballs.
I was rushed to the nearest hospital, and my poor mom was notified. She was home helping her husband, Steve, recover from his recent quadruple bypass surgery. But within minutes, my mother and my sister, Jenny, came marching into the operating room. They looked at me like a ghost. I asked if I could use the bathroom, and the nurses reluctantly let me. I went straight for the mirror, and looking back at me was the Elephant Man. My upper lip was so fat that it actually covered my nose. My nose looked like a bowl of cauliflower splayed across my whole face. My left eye was completely shut, but it looked like it had swallowed a pool ball before it closed. And there was blood everywhere. I instantly thought, “Oh my God, I will never look like a human being again.” I could see out of only one eye, but I saw enough to know that was the end of my face as I knew it.
I s
tayed in the hospital for a week, taking Percodans every day and filling the script up faster than I could down them, loving this new supply of heroin. The doctor finally saw through my game and cut me off cold. After a few days, the swelling went down, and they repaired the broken bones. I had a broken skull, a broken eye socket, and a shattered orbital floor, which is the wafer-thin bone that supports your eyeball. The plastic surgeon had to work from a photo that my mom supplied, but with a little titanium and a little Teflon, he got me back to a reasonable facsimile of myself.
I called Lindy and apologized and told him I didn’t think I’d be able to make it to the CMJ show. But Flea asked if I could show up. By then I had been fitted with a face cast that looked kind of cool, so we decided that I’d play with it on. Jennifer had made me a purple atomic-age angular cowboy hat, so I got on a plane with my face cast and my purple cowboy hat and my leather jacket with the cups, and the band did our best job at playing this huge showcase. I remember being nervous and terrified and stricken and energized, and it was the first time I realized that, okay, I had to find a way to take this adrenaline and this fear and these butterflies and turn them into a performance. It was a feeling that stuck with me for life, because if I don’t have some of those feelings before a show, the juice is not flowing.
After the show, Flea and I crashed the MTV media room. George Clinton, Madonna, Lou Reed, and James Brown were on a panel, but Flea and I took over in the interview area. That was the beginning of our two-headed-monster routine; unlike some bands, we didn’t have a singular spokesperson. We were the Loudmouth Two from the beginning, sitting in the same chair and sharing the same mike. It’s something that, unfortunately, dissipated over the years, because we used to be so at ease with supporting each other and setting each other up, and starting and/or finishing each other’s sentences in the best possible way. The weird sense of competition that’s always been present between us didn’t interfere with our singular purpose at that time. We were just happy to have a spotlight and happy to share it. I guess symbiosis is something that fades in time for no good reason. It’s sad. We’d go out to the Zero Club early on and introduce ourselves to people as In and Out, and go into an Abbott and Costello routine: “I’m Out? I thought I was In.” “Oh, I’m back In again?” We used to sleep side by side in railway stations. Now you couldn’t get us to share the same house.
We felt we were the greatest, most successful band in the world. We didn’t ever look at bands who sold lots of records and played in arenas as being more successful. EMI was disappointed in our sales, and when they told us that our record hadn’t sold, I responded, “Okay. And the problem is what?” I wasn’t one of these kids who grew up dreaming of gold records. To me, my life was what was in front of me, and that was going on this tour of America in a blue Chevy van. Everywhere we showed up, there were people, and they cared, and we rocked them out, and we gave it everything.
Nothing can describe how unprepared I was for any of this. Lindy said, “We’re going on tour,” and we said, “Okay. Where do we go?” This was when we got hooked up with Trip Brown, our first music agent. I didn’t even know what a music agent was, but it turned out that besides a manager, you had to have yet another industry dude/weasel—not that our guys were weasels, but generally speaking, these guys are a weasely ilk. So Trip booked us on this tour that was sixty dates in sixty-four days, covering all of America. It never even crossed our minds to say, “Hey, that’s a lot of shows, and there are no days off.”
Before we left, the band invested in a beautiful blue Chevy van with white stripes. Lindy got it from a church group, and it was a big, heavy V8 that hauled ass. The few times that Lindy would let me drive it, I’d be able to get it airborne. Bob Forest wound up driving the van to our first gig, which was in Detroit. Bob was a talented songwriter and performer, but he offered to be our roadie, so we hired him. Having Bob drive your van across country is not as simple as it sounds. This was a guy who couldn’t manage five dollars, he’d accidentally spend whatever money you gave him on the most useless things possible, none of which had to do with gas or oil or accommodations. So by the time he got to Detroit, he was a drunken wreck. And he was bitter and angry. “How come you guys got to fly and I had to drive?” “Because we hired you to drive the equipment. That’s your job,” we told him. And we had to live with it constantly, that “I’m happy to be out here, but fuck you guys, I should be performing.”
Our first show was at a gorgeous old venue called St. Andrews Hall. Back in those days, we would sound-check before almost every show if it was at all logistically feasible. So we started, and Jack was being as anal as a man could be. He fastidiously pointed out every conceivable problem. “This cord is only eight feet long, and it has to be twelve feet, because I have to stand here to get the correct mix off my monitors, and I have to find my Fingerease, because the travel has made the guitar strings dry.” We were ready to go buck wild and destroy the place, and he was standing there fretting.
We went to sound-check “True Men,” and even though there was no audience, I let everything go on the first note, just to get started. I must have done some dance move that unplugged Jack, or kicked his guitar or kicked him or knocked his pedal over. And it wasn’t intentional, but he quit. He walked offstage and said, “I can’t be in a band where that’s the sound-checking procedure. I need my plane ticket home.” Lindy smoothed it out, and he played that night.
Jack would accuse me of deliberately trying to pull his cord out of his pedal. But you can’t steer the dance, you’re spinning like a top. I never exhibited any physical belligerence against him. To Flea and me, part and parcel of the stage experience was getting hurt. In fact, if you got hurt, it was the sign of a meaningful performance. If you came off the stage bleeding from the head or the body, you’d done your job, you went out there and you gave it everything. The stage was the stage, and that wasn’t the place for boundaries. At one point, Jack even put tape down on the stage and told me that his space was off-limits. Why would you want to cut yourself off from your bandmate, spiritually or physically?
Right at the beginning of the tour, I knew that our relationship with Jack wasn’t meant to be. We were crammed in the blue van, going from town to town, making no money at all. Flea was breaking his bass strings every night, and bass strings are real expensive. So he said, “I’d like to bring something up for band discussion. I’m having to replace my bass strings every other show, and that’s pretty much my per diem, and I think it should be a band expense.” Jack chimed in, “That’s not a band expense. You chose that instrument. I am not chipping in for bass strings.” Flea almost lunged at him in the van.
We had a lot of strange things happen that tour. We played Grand Rapids, and my dad’s old friend Alan Bashara was the promoter. He booked us into a place called the Thunder Chicken, out in the suburbs. It was a big hick shack that usually booked country music or REO Speedwagon cover bands. Even though all my family and relatives were there, that didn’t stop us from doing our usual show. That night Flea had a few beers before we went on, and he didn’t handle his liquor too well, so he pulled his dick out onstage. It wasn’t even that obnoxious of a dick pull, more like an exclamation point at the end of a song. But parents covered their kids’ eyes, and people stormed out.
We left town, and the next day the local paper ran an article with a huge headline: IF I HAD A SON LIKE THAT, I’D SHOOT HIM. All of the local Christian Reform residents of Grand Rapids were talking about how horrible we were, that we were the devil’s seed. My mom did not take that lying down. She responded with the lion heart of a mother and wrote a letter to the editor saying, “You do not know my son. This is one of the greatest men on earth. His capacity for compassion and helping his fellow man is beyond anything that you’ll ever do with your life. I insist that you take back every negative thing that you said about my boy.”
A couple of weeks into the tour, it was clear that Bob wasn’t the most responsible roadie in the world. So Lindy hi
red this guy named Ben, and now we had another body crammed into that blue van. Both Ben and Bob were getting something like twenty dollars per diem for food, so Bob cut a deal with Ben. He would give Ben half of his per diem if Ben did all the roadie work. Bob spent the rest of his money on beer.
And drugs. Every night that we could, we’d get high on something. I didn’t have a heroin habit, but I did have a constant craving for cocaine, especially after I drank. After a while on the road, I’d developed dope-fiend radar. We’d play some hole-in-the-wall club, and I’d zero in on the one person I knew had to be a dealer or at least know a dealer. People who are into drugs can sniff them out in the desert if they have to. And they’ll find the codeine cough syrup or the person who’s got some prescription that most resembles the drug of choice. It’s weird, I was such a survivor and so wanted to be a part of life while I was trying to snuff out the life that was inside of me. I had this duality of trying to kill myself with drugs, then eating really good food and exercising and going swimming and trying to be a part of life. I was always going back and forth on some level.
Sometimes we had the drugs but didn’t have the rigs to shoot them. We were staying in a sketchy downtown area in Cleveland one night, and I didn’t feel like leaving the motel to find some syringes, so I sent Bob. An hour went by. Two hours. No sign from Bob. I went out into that bitter-cold night and asked a stranger on the street where someone would go to find drugs in Cleveland. He directed me to an all-night coffee shop about three blocks away. Off in the distance, I saw the neon, which was a beacon of hope. I went in and scanned the room, and sure enough, at one of the back booths, there was Bob in his torn-up suit and dreadlocked hair, sitting with two crazy-looking big black chicks.
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