We shifted over to United Sound and started recording the basic tracks. We always put down a scratch vocal, because that was the era when you’d record a scratch and then try to beat it. We didn’t have comping vocals, where you’d sing a song twenty times and cut and paste the best syllables. George put me in the middle of the room, not off in some other room, so I felt like a part of the band, which was a wise thing to do, since everyone had always said, “Oh, the Chili Peppers are great live, but you’ll never capture their zany onstage chemistry in the studio.”
During the recording process, we started getting an unusual visitor. His name was Louie, and he was a pale and bald Middle Easterner. Turned out he was George’s personal coke-delivery guy. After a few visits, it was clear that George was into this guy for a lot of money, but George was unflappable. Louie began showing up with a couple of henchmen, and he’d say, in his slow thick accent, “George, I’m real serious, man, you’re going to have to make good before I can give you anything else. I’m running a business here.”
George would go, “Louie, look around. Do you think I’m strapped for cash? In this business, you get paid when you get paid. When I get paid, you’re the first motherfucker who gets paid after me.”
Louie would look pained. “George, I’ve heard that before. I didn’t bring these guys for show, and if they have to hurt somebody . . .”
George never blinked an eye, because he had a plan. He knew Louie was fascinated by the music business, so he intuited that making Louie a part of the whole process would ensure a steady flow of coke. Finally, George promised Louie that he could make his vocal debut on the album.
I was thinking, “Okay, I trust George, I know that everything’s happening for a reason here, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let this motherfucker on my record. This shit is sacred.” George told me, “Don’t worry, everyone will be happy. He’ll be on the record, and you will not mind.” George was right. At the very beginning of “Yertle the Turtle,” you hear a weird, out-of-context voice come in and say, “Look at the turtle go, bro,” and then the song goes into a syncopated funk beat. That was Louie’s debut, and that was what made him happy enough not to hurt somebody. The longer the sessions went on, the more regularly he would show up with the blow, because he was wanting his fifteen minutes in the damn spotlight.
Right before it was time for me to go in and do the final vocals, I decided I wasn’t going to do any cocaine for two weeks, which is like deciding to be celibate when you’re living in a brothel. My decision had nothing to do with sobriety, because even though I was twenty-three, I was still an emotionally troubled youth. I just didn’t want to get back to Hollywood and go, “What happened? I had my chance making a record with George Clinton, and I fucked up.” The two-week period was the time that was allotted for my vocals. I guess I realized it was harder to sing when you’ve got coke dripping down the back of your throat.
One of the reasons I was so concerned about my vocals was that during the preproduction process, Flea started to play a Sly Stone song, “If You Want Me to Stay,” on the bass. Hillel and Cliff got into it, and we decided to cover that song, which was daunting to me, because I can sing anything I write, but another man’s tune is always a challenge—let alone one by Sly Stone, one of the most original vocalists in terms of phrasing.
George must have sensed my uneasiness. “You have this in the bag, don’t even worry about it. I know what you’re capable of,” he reassured me. Then he invited me to his house for the weekend to work on the song. First I decided to visit my mom for a few days, and I took the tape of the song with me and practiced it over and over again. On the way back from Grand Rapids, I stopped at George’s house. We talked about the song and we practiced it, then we took these long strolls through his property. I didn’t even see it, but he was quietly schooling me. We’d be talking about anything under the sun, and he was subconsciously building my confidence and steering me toward getting comfortable and creating magic in the studio. I think he realized that Hillel was a tremendously talented guitar player, Flea knew exactly what he was doing on bass, and Cliff was an ace drummer, but I was this guy with a lyrical ability who wasn’t so sure of his voice.
Early in the morning, we’d go out fishing in his pond. His whole demeanor changed when he fished. He was no longer the rabble-rousing toastmaster of the funk universe, but more of an introspective, quirky man who had some vast experience. Fishing was his meditation. And he didn’t care what we caught, he was eating it. Bluegills, sunfish, catfish, whatever that lake was spitting out was going in the frying pan. We’d catch them and bring them back, and his wife would cook them for breakfast.
By the time I left his place, I felt good about the song. George mentored me even during the recording process. He had a mike set up inside his booth, and he’d send up shout-outs or sing along. We’d be out there recording the basic tracks and hear this great voice coming through the little transistorized speaker. When we set up the vocal booth and it was just me doing my vocals, George came into the studio, put on headphones, and sang and danced along with me while I was singing. He was like a big brother to me, thoughtful, totally sensitive, and understanding of the colorful and zany place where we were coming from. I wanted never to let him down.
We finished the record, and in our minds, it so far surpassed anything we thought we could have done that we were thinking we were on the road to enormity. Some EMI execs made a trip out to Detroit to hear some of the material. We played them a few tracks, and instead of them going, “You guys are going to be huge,” they said nothing. I’m dancing and singing along, going nuts, and they’re like “Well, we’ll see what we can do with this.” Of course, we’re talking about a record company that did not have an inkling of the awareness necessary to take something different and original and recognize its worth and introduce it to the world. They were looking for another band like Roxette.
We went back to L.A. feeling absolutely accomplished and more experienced, and then everyone jumped back into his madness. By this time, Jennifer’s mother had moved from Cahuenga to an apartment complex in Pasadena. Right next door to that was an abandoned building, so Jennifer and I started squatting there. The hot and cold water still worked, and we ran an extension cord into the building so we could listen to music, and we set up a bed and some candles.
That’s when I really started getting into heroin sex. I realized that if you were in love with somebody and you were sexually inspired to begin with, being high on heroin could amplify the experience tenfold, because you could have sex all night and not be able to come but still be interested. I remember having these marathon sex encounters with Jennifer on that bed, thinking, “Life doesn’t get any better than this. I’m in a band, I’ve got a couple of dollars in my pocket. I’ve got a beautiful, sweet, hot, sexy, crazy little girlfriend, a roof over my head, and some dope.”
Those feelings would disappear, and the next day I’d be off on a run. Jennifer would do her best to deal with my insanity, as she was slowly working on her own. Around the time I got back from Detroit, I intensified my relationship with a girl named Kim Jones. My friend Bob Forest had this monstrous crush on Kim, but she had jilted him (he promptly wrote a song about her with the chorus “Why don’t you blow me and the rest of the band?”). He was still obsessed with her, and he used to take me to her apartment in Echo Park, and we’d knock on her door to see if she was around.
Bob would recite her many virtues—she was brilliant and beautiful, she studied in China, she wrote for the L.A. Weekly, she was from Tennessee, plus she was a lesbian, because she had left Bob for this really hot girl. Turns out she wasn’t a lesbian, but all of her other virtues were true. As soon as I met her, I knew we’d be best friends. We were both Scorpios, and there was never any sexual tension between us.
In some ways, Kim was a female equivalent to Hillel, because there was no crime you could commit that she would not forgive you for, no heinous act of selfish behavior that she would not try
to find the good side of you behind. Of course, she was also a complete mess. Intelligent but dizzy, a drug addict, codependent, an enabler and a caretaker, just a beautiful, warm kindred spirit to me. I started to become closer and closer to Kim, because she was a source of love and comfort and friendship and companionship and like-mindedness without any of the difficulties of a girlfriend. I never lost my sexual attraction to Jennifer; the longer I was with her, the better the sex got, but I was not a great boyfriend. If I said I’d be home in an hour, I might stroll in three days later. Today, if someone did that to me, I’d have a heart attack, but when you’re a kid, you don’t know any better.
Kim didn’t care if I left for three days at a time, so there was no downside to hanging out with her. It was never like “You motherfucker, you looked at that girl, you didn’t come home, you spent all the money.” Kim expected me to spend all the money, look at all the other girls, and disappear. One time I went over to Kim’s house, and she wasn’t there. In a fit of desperation, I grabbed her toaster oven and traded it for a bag of dope. When she got home, she was unfazed. “That’s okay, we’ll get another one.”
Before long, I moved in with Kim, and our daily mission became getting high. She was getting some cash inflow—disability checks because her dad had died, checks from the L.A. Weekly, or checks from her mom at home in Tennessee. We’d cash them and meet some French guy or some Russian guy on a corner in Hollywood and buy the heroin, and if we had any money left over, we’d score some coke. Soon we both had a habit. Hillel was also using, and he had a crazy girlfriend named Maggie who was a friend of Kim’s, so we’d have a lot of small drug parties.
From time to time the band would go on tours to San Francisco. We were still young enough and not so damaged that we could play well, even though we had these drug habits. In September 1985 we played two shows with Run-DMC, one in San Francisco and one in L.A. The L.A. show was at the Palladium, and besides opening for Oingo Boingo, it was our biggest show to date. Sold out. Of course, the night before the show, I went on a drug binge, so I showed up for the gig hammered on coke and heroin. The band was furious at me, but somehow I managed to pull it together and made it onstage. That show was notable for two things. About halfway through the show, George Clinton came rocking onto the stage, and he and I started doing a full, funky ballroom dance to our jams. He injected a fat dose of color and love and energy and meaning into that show.
It was also memorable because, shortly before George came out, I decided to interrupt the set and give a heartfelt, ten-minute-long rambling discourse on the dangers of doing drugs. I certainly hadn’t planned the speech, but something came over me as I was looking down at my black-and-blue arms, and I just started rapping.
“If you haven’t ever put a needle in your arm, don’t ever do it. Let me tell you from experience that you don’t have to do this, that’s where I am right now, and it’s horrible, and I don’t want anyone to ever have to feel like I’m feeling right now. Let me do the suffering for you, because this is something that no one needs to subject themselves to. If you’re doing this, okay, just do it, but don’t ever think that you’re going to be the same once you’ve gone this far.”
I proceeded to explain, in detail, why it was a big mistake to shoot drugs. I kept going, I couldn’t hang up on it. Meanwhile, the band was shooting me looks like “Oh my God, this fucking idiot.” After the show, I was afraid to face the guys. I thought they’d hate my guts for saying that stuff and being a hypocritical moron. In the middle of everyone giving me dirty looks, my friend Pete Weiss, the drummer from Thelonious Monster, came backstage.
“Swan, I’ve heard you say a lot of stuff from the stage, but that was the coolest shit you ever said,” he gushed. “That was riveting, you had every single ear in the place. They knew you were a fucked-up bastard but also that you cared and you were just trying to share some love. Don’t let that band of yours fool you, you did the right thing tonight.”
A month later, when it was time to tour the U.S. for Freaky Styley, my speechifying hadn’t changed anything for us. Both Hillel and I were strung out, but for the first time, I noticed that he wasn’t doing so well. He seemed weak, and while I was able to bounce right back from a run, he didn’t seem to have that Israeli fire stoking like he always had in the past. It became evident when we started our usual on-tour wrestling diversion. Hillel and I had teamed up; I was his manager, and he was set to wrestle Flea. Even though Flea was real solid, Hillel was bigger, and he had massive tree-trunk legs, like a tall Pan. We had a two-week buildup to this match, and when they wrestled in a hotel room one night, Flea destroyed him in as long as it takes to grab somebody and hurl him to the ground and pin him mercilessly to his death—ten seconds. I could tell that Hillel had no inner core of strength; he had been robbed by his addiction of the life force that allows you to at least defend yourself. It was a sad moment.
Hillel and I didn’t do heroin on the road, so we would drink bottles of Jägermeister, because that gave us the feeling closest to a heroin high. He’d always tease me that I was a sloppy drunk, because I’d get drunk and take off all my clothes in the motel and walk down the hall and knock on people’s doors, whereas he’d get drunk and act suave.
Leaving to go on tour was an ordeal for me then, mainly because of my volatile relationship with Jennifer. Even though I was staying mainly at Kim’s house, Jennifer was still my girlfriend. Jennifer became convinced that Kim and I were having sex. One day she came by Kim’s house, and Kim and I were sound asleep, naked and cuddling up. I know it would look like a bad scene if you were the girlfriend of the boy in the bed, but we were just having a nice drug high. No romance, just friendship.
Jennifer didn’t quite see it that way. Kim and I woke up to Jennifer shattering the bedroom window. She wouldn’t come in with a good, old-fashioned baseball bat; she made her entrance with an elaborately carved and painted bird-head cane from the Mayan lands. After she broke through the window, she proceeded to try to kill me with the cane.
When it was time to leave on a tour, I’d avoid Jennifer for days before, because I knew some kind of hatchet was going to be thrown at me. One time I was early to the breakout place, which was the EMI parking lot on Sunset. I was with Kim, and we were both completely high on heroin, sitting in the front seat of some car.
I guess in my half-awake drug reverie, I had somehow unbuttoned Kim’s blouse because I wanted to see her milky-white chest. I may even have been sucking on her nipple or holding her tit when, BAM, BAM, BAM, there was the loud sound of something rapping against the window. I looked up and it was Jennifer.
“You motherfucker, you’ve been gone for days, and I knew that this was going on,” she screamed.
“Jennifer, believe me, I may have had her shirt open, but I’ve never had sex with this girl, she’s just my friend,” I protested.
“You said you were coming home three days ago, and you’re leaving for three weeks, and by the way, I’m pregnant,” she screamed.
Meanwhile, the dispute had escalated to the sidewalk, and Jennifer was trying to kill me or at least scratch my eyeballs out.
“Jennifer, you see, this is why I don’t come home for three days before I leave, because I don’t want to get hit and you’re too hard to deal with and I know you’re not pregnant, because you just had your period and I haven’t had sex with you since you had your period, so don’t try to tell me you’re fucking pregnant.” I tried to reason with her, but she was a bull. Not that I can blame her.
There was no stopping her, and Kim was getting caught in the crossfire, so I ducked inside the EMI building. Jennifer followed me in and proceeded to pull my hair and scratch at my face. I was still high out of my mind and trying not to lose an eyeball or a tuft of hair, so I started running through the halls.
Jennifer chased me. For some reason, I had a bag of cookies, so I started throwing the cookies at her, to keep her far enough away that she couldn’t connect with any of her punches. She grabbed some blunt instru
ment, so I put my foot out to keep her from hitting me with it, and she went further nuts, if that was possible.
“Don’t you try to kick me in my stomach just because I’m pregnant. I know you want to get rid of the baby,” she screamed.
Thankfully, Lindy came to my rescue. “Jennifer, we’re only going away for a couple of weeks. I know how much this boy loves you. You’re all he ever talks about.” Somehow we made it out on tour in one piece.
Despite our touring, EMI never got behind the album, and they wouldn’t give us any money for a video. That didn’t stop us. Lindy had one of the first home-video cameras, and he shot footage on our tours and took that footage and cut it into a BBC documentary that had filmed us lip-synching “Jungle Man” at the Club Lingerie in Hollywood. He attached two VCRs in some back room at EMI, did an edit, and we had a video for a hundred dollars. Later, our good friend Dick Rude shot a video for “Catholic School Girls Rule” that featured a shot of me singing from the cross, among other blasphemous things, so that video got played only in clubs.
When we weren’t touring, I was pretty much staying high. It was like Groundhog Day every single day, exactly the same. Kim and I would wake up and have to look out of her window to see which direction the freeway traffic was going to determine whether it was dusk or dawn. Then we’d hustle up some money, get the drugs, shoot up, and go for a walk around Echo Park Lake, holding hands, in a complete haze. If I was supposed to show up to rehearsal, I would probably miss it. If I did show up, I’d be too stoned to do anything, so I’d nod out in the corner of the room or pass out on the loading dock.
Every day Kim and I would get high, and right in the middle of the euphoria, we’d vow that tomorrow we were going to get off that stuff. The next day we’d start the whole process over again. By now a lot of our friends were strung out on dope, and often the only time we’d see each other was when we were in our cars waiting to cop. We were each scoring from the same French guy, so we’d page him, and he’d call back and say, “Meet at Beverly and Sweetzer in ten minutes.” We’d drive down there, and on one corner we’d see Hillel and Maggie in their car and on another corner we’d see Bob Forest and his girlfriend. The dealer would go from car to car, and Kim and I would always get served last, because we were the most likely either to not have the right amount of money or to owe money; but we were patient and willing to take whatever we could get. Then we’d go back, and I’d be in charge of splitting the bag and loading the syringes. Because I knew I had a much greater tolerance to heroin than Kim, unbeknownst to her, I would always take 75 percent of the bag and give her the rest. Ironically, that practice almost killed her.
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