The Organic Anti-Beat Box Band 5 страница

Our thinking was that we had been mistreated at EMI. We'd had seven A&R guys in seven years, no stability at all. We were looking for a good home. When Eric convened a lunch meeting and told us that Epic had upped their offer by a million, the four of us got up and started doing a conga line around the restaurant chanting "Epic! Epic! Epic!" We had gone from being the earnest "Let's have a family situation" to "A million more? Let's go with the corporate monsters from New York."

Eric dropped a bombshell on us at that meeting. He sat us down and said, "I've got news for you guys. Each of you will be getting a check for a million dollars." We each had a few thousand dollars to our names, and we were instant millionaires. It felt like we'd won the lottery. We were screaming and hugging one another when we realized that for the first time, we wouldn't have to scrape and scratch and live from week to week. Each of us decided on the spot to buy a house. Within two weeks' time, we all had new homes.

My house was a brand-new construction on the top of Beachwood Canyon on Hollyridge. It was a blank palette that I'd end up redoing in a very nouveau-riche way. I took out all the carpeting and had antique teak hardwood from Thailand put down. In my bedroom, I painted each wall a different color. I had a crazy mosaic installed on the staircase so it looked like a river was coming down the stairs. But the piece de resistance was my living room fireplace. I took out the standard-issue one and had a stoneworker bring river rocks from Ojai. Then I had a fireplace fashioned into the shape of a giant nude woman. You'd load the logs into her vagina, and she had fourteen-inch-across purple glass nipples. But the nicest thing about the house was my backyard, which backed up to the west ridge of Griffith Park, a large nature preserve. If you were lounging in the pool, all you had to do was look up to see the famous Hollywood sign above your head.

We decided to go with Sony, with the proviso that they buy us out of the last album due to EMI. The entire brass of Epic/Sony records flew out to the Four Seasons in L.A. for a lavish brunch to celebrate the decision and do some photo ops. We were ready to go to work as soon as they could extricate us from the EMI contract. But even though they told us it would be only a matter of days, the days dragged on and on and turned into months.

Meanwhile, my relationship with Carmen was tumultuous. She was off her rocker. I got her to go to therapy so she didn't kill herself. One time we were in the car, and she started screaming and pounding on her face, giving herself a black eye. Then she tried to jump out of the car while I was driving full speed. I wasn't trying to force therapy on her; I was offering to pay for her to get help, because she was clearly in pain. If I was looking through a magazine, she'd come over, grab it out of my hands, go back a few pages, and say, "Why'd you stop on this page so long? Who is this girl?" We'd go to the movies, and we'd be walking out in the middle of this packed-sardine crowd of people. I'd have my head bowed down, inching along, and she'd sock me and say, "Why are you looking at that girl?"

By now we were verbal battlers, so when she'd beat herself up and then show up in front of my friends with a black eye, everyone would look at me like "Dude, are you beating her?" Who would believe she was giving herself the black eyes? I kept trying unsuccessfully to end the relationship, but after I bought my house, she simply would not leave. She locked herself in the bathroom with a knife. She had gone in there to cut her wrists, and I had to knock down the door to get to her. She was standing there holding the knife, but she hadn't cut herself, thank God.

The jealousy factor and the insecurity factor and the sex-as-medicine factor just got worse and worse. I think the minute she realized she was losing her hold on me, she felt she would perish. Anytime I suggested that we might not stay together, she would have a meltdown and start tantruming like an autistic child. The band had set a date to start working on our next album, and I had to become free of this crazed relationship so I could have the focus to work, because the record meant more to me than anything. I offered to get her an apartment, because she didn't have the funds, but she wouldn't accept that. I told her a hundred times that it was over and that she had to leave and we couldn't be together, and she would come over and scream and shout and bang, and I would go down to the gate and say, "Carmen, you don't live here. You can't be here. We are not together, this is finished." She would stay out there screaming and yelling and trying to force her way into the house.

I finally bought her a plane ticket so she could go model in Italy, and that was the end of our relationship. I was thanking my lucky stars that it was over. Maybe she had no idea how much hellish drama she was creating, because at the end of most of these episodes, we would end up having sex; maybe in her mind, that indicated that everything was fine.

Shortly after that, I got a phone call from Mo Austin at Warner's. "I heard about the deal you made with Sony," he began. "Congratulations, it sounds like a fantastic deal, and Sony's not a bad record company, so just go out and make the greatest record you can make. Go get 'em." I hung up the phone, genuinely touched. The coolest, most real person we had met during all these negotiations had just personally called to encourage me to make a great record for a rival company. That was the kind of guy I'd want to be working for. I called up Flea, and he had gotten the same call. He felt the same way.

We called Lindy and asked for an update on the Sony/EMI situation. Apparently, Sony was hitting a wall with EMI. That was all we had to hear. We begged him to get us out of the Sony deal and go with Warner's. We let Mo step up to the plate, and in one phone call to his old friend who ran EMI, we were off that label and signed with Mo. And we were ready to record the greatest record we could make.

10.

Funky Monks

We were all elated with our relationship with Warner's. Mo Austin and his associates Lenny Warnoker and Steve Baker were all such soulful and musical people. Even though Mo was the corporate executive officer of Warner Bros., he rocked our world on a daily basis the entire time we were making our first album for him. He'd come down and hang out with us in the recording studio, happy to listen to anything we played. We'd never had a record-company relationship like that before.

Even though John and I had grown apart, the band was in the best space we'd been in for years. Chad and John no longer felt like the new guys, they were the guy guys. Flea and John had grown close both musically and as friends, and Chad was playing better than ever. We all trusted one another, and it showed when we'd get together for hours and hours and jam out songs. We were really in the pocket. When we were working on Mother's Milk, it was squeezing blood out of a rock to get a song done, but every day now there was new music for me to lyricize.

Meanwhile, I began to bond with Rick Rubin. He was a fun-loving guy in a much different way from anyone I'd ever met. He loved to talk about girls, and he loved to ride around and listen to music ad infinitum. He started coming to my house. We talked about my lyrics and went through all of the different things that I was thinking of singing over this great music being produced, whether it was "Mellowship Slinky," "Apache Rose Peacock," or "Funky Monks." I showed him the lyrics for "Power of Equality," and even though he thought the music lent itself to that treatment, he made it clear that he wasn't into sociopolitical lyrics.

"I like songs about girls and cars and stuff like that," Rick told me.

"Girls and cars? I can't write about girls and cars. That's already been done. I want to write about some weird shit that no one's been writing about," I protested.

"I understand," Rick said. "But if you want to write one song about girls and cars, I'd be happy to hear it."

I did try to scribe one song following Rick's outline, "The Greeting Song." To this day, I hate that song. I hate the lyrics, I hate the vocals. It was a lively rock tune in the Led Zep tradition, but I never found my place in it. Ironically, years later, General Motors called us up and wanted to create an advertising campaign for Chevy by printing the words to "Greeting Song" on a blank page. I couldn't let them do it; I didn't believe in those lyrics.

Even though things were going well creatively, I began to feel like the outsider in the band, because part of Flea and John's new bond was their mutual appreciation for pot. Maybe Flea felt that this was his chance to show me what it felt like not to be included in a three-point triangle of friendship with John. I'm sure John was probably resenting the fact that I always wanted everything to be clean around me and that he never got to do his own partying and drug experimentation. Plus, he felt that his creativity and songwriting ability were enhanced by smoking pot. It's ironic, because by then I'd shed my militant cleanster feelings and was getting better about accepting the drug use of people around me, but there was still a sense of "here comes the narc" when I'd intrude on a pot-smoking scenario.

One day I showed up to rehearsal, and Flea and John were blazing on pot and in a "Let's ignore Anthony" state of mind, and I experienced this melancholy sense of loss that John was no longer in my world. I could tell from the way he was looking at me that we weren't really friends anymore, other than the fact that we were in a band together and respected each other on that level. I rode home from rehearsal that day on the 101 Freeway, and my sense of loss about John and the loneliness that I was feeling triggered memories of my time with Ione and how I'd had this beautiful angel of a girl who was willing to give me all of her love, and instead of embracing that, I was downtown with fucking gangsters shooting speedballs under a bridge. I felt I had thrown away so much in my life, but I also felt an unspoken bond between me and my city. I'd spent so much time wandering the streets of L.A. and hiking through the Hollywood Hills that I sensed there was a nonhuman entity, maybe the spirit of the hills and the city, who had me in her sights and was looking after me. Even if I was a loner in my own band, at least I still felt the presence of the city I lived in.

I started freestyling some poetry in my car and putting the words to a melody and sang all the way down the freeway. When I got home, I got out my notebook and wrote the whole thing down in a song structure, even though it was meant to be a poem to deal with my own anguish.

"Under the Bridge"

Sometimes I feel like I don't have a partner

Sometimes I feel like my only friend

Is the city I live in, the city of angels

Lonely as I am, together we cry.

I drive on her streets 'cause she's my companion

I walk through her hills 'cause she knows who I am

She sees my good deeds and she kisses me windy

I never worry, now that is a lie.

I don't ever want to feel like I did that day

Take me to the place I love, take me all the way

It's hard to believe that there's nobody out there

It's hard to believe that I'm all alone

At least I have her love, the city she loves me

Lonely as I am, together we cry.

I don't ever want to feel like I did that day

Take me to the place I love, take me all the way

Under the bridge downtown

Is where I drew some blood

Under the bridge downtown

I could not get enough

Under the bridge downtown

Forgot about my love

Under the bridge downtown

I gave my life away

A month later, Rick was over my house one day, flipping through my notebook, which demonstrates how comfortable I felt around him then.

"What's this?" he said, and handed me the notebook. He had stumbled upon "Under the Bridge."

"Oh, that's just a poem," I said.

"That's dope. You should do something with that," he said.

"It's not really our style," I explained. "It's slow and melodic and dramatic."

"But it's good. You should show this to the guys and see if they want to do something with it."

I was touched that he liked the poem, but I still had doubts that it was a song for us. A few days later, I was at rehearsal and had some time to kill, because Flea hadn't arrived yet.

"Why don't you show John and Chad that thing I saw up at your house the other night," Rick suggested.

"No, no, Flea's not even here," I said. But John and Chad were both paying way too close attention. They both sat down and said, "Hey, let's see that little gentle number you have in there." I sang it to them in probably three different keys from beginning to end, not knowing where to go with it, but after I had finished, they got up and walked over to their instruments and started finding the beat and the guitar chords for it.

The next day John came over my house to polish the song. He brought a miniature Fender amp and plugged in. "Okay, sing it again. How do you want it to sound? What do you want it to feel like? Where do you want it to go?"

I sang it to him, and he came up with three or four different chord options. We picked and chose until we came up with the perfect, most inventive chord progression for the melody. And that was the birth of one song on the album.

John was instrumental in realizing another song that would end up on the album. It was a song inspired by my short and curious relationship with Sinead O'Connor. I met Sinead at a festival we were playing in Europe in August 1989. Flea and I were big fans of her The Lion and the Cobra, and I liked bald girls to begin with, because I knew that someone who would shave her head was tough and real and didn't give a fuck. Here was this superridiculously hot bald Irish girl with a magical voice and great lyrics and a crazy presence. We were playing first, so during our set, I was retarded enough to dedicate "Party on Your Pussy" to this morally ethical, politically correct fighter for the rights of the underdog.

When we finished our set, Flea and I stood by the side of the stage and watched Sinead. This was before she became famous, so she wasn't self-conscious; she was just bold. She came onstage in a dress and combat boots and hit her first note. Like a crazy little Irish princess warrior, she started belting out these amazing songs. I was dying a million deaths of desire watching all this, and then she made a reference to my mention of her, and it was positive. Okay, now she was aware of me, so that was a good thing.

After the show, we sought her out and told her how much we appreciated her music. Instead of saying a cursory thank-you, Sinead invited us to hang out. She was shy and demure, and we talked until her road manager stormed in and rounded her up for the ride to the next venue. Fearful that I was never going to see her again, I ran back to the dressing room and wrote her a pretty meaningful letter, letting her know that I had some feelings for her. I rushed back and caught her just as she was about to board her bus and gave her the letter. She accepted it and smiled and waved good-bye.

And nothing ever happened. Not a word back. She disappeared into the giant cloud of a different world, and we went on our way, and that was it, adios. Life goes on, we toured Japan, and I met Carmen and had a yearlong relationship with her. By then Sinead had released another album and overnight became the most popular female vocalist in the world. One day Bob Forrest told me she had moved to L.A., and there'd been a sighting of her at Victor's Deli, one of our favorite breakfast spots.

A few weeks later, I was doing errands and ran into Sinead. One look at her, and I just melted. I would have married her on the spot. We struck up a conversation, and I reminded her that we had met back at the festival and that I'd given her a note.

"Oh yeah, I know you gave me a note," Sinead said. "I have it. It's in my kitchen drawer at home."

"That note I gave you is in your kitchen drawer?" I was incredulous.

"What did you think?" She smiled. "You'd write a note like that and I'd throw it away?"

The next thing I knew, she was inviting me over for dinner. Soon I began regularly hanging out with her and her son, Jake. I can't say that it was a typical dating scenario, because it was a strange time for her - she was gun-shy from everything that had happened to her - but we started going to movies and museums, and I gave her driving lessons in my '67 convertible matte-black Camaro. We'd drive around and listen to music and kiss and whatnot, but she wasn't exactly letting me all the way in her door, so to speak. And I don't mean just vaginally. This went on for weeks, and it became the most wonderful, nonsexual relationship I'd ever had. I adored her, and every day I'd wake up and write her a little poem and fax it to her.

Our relationship was progressing, she was showing me a little more love and affection, emotionally and physically, and then suddenly, it all came to an inexplicable halt. I had made a bit of an ass of myself when she told me that she was going to the Academy Awards. I suggested we go together, and at first she agreed, then she called back to tell me she was going with her friend Daniel Day-Lewis. I felt slighted, not so much because she was hanging out with someone else, but because it wasn't me, and I wanted to be with her so much at that point.

Even after that incident, she never gave me any indication that she was anything other than absolutely enamored with the time we were spending together. Whenever our time together came to an end, I looked in her eyes, and she was as happy as a blossoming flower. I was excited and probably a little heavy-handed and overbearing, but she had a soothing and subtle way of bringing me back down to a more reasonable state of mind. She was calm and laid-back and not buying into the heaviness of my approach. It was good, we were finding a balance.

One day I called and left a message on her answering machine, then went off. When I came back, there was a response on my machine.

"Hey, Anthony, this is Sinead. I'm moving out of Los Angeles tomorrow, and I don't want you to call me or come by before I leave. Good-bye."

I was shattered. It had gone overnight from "Can't wait to see you again" to "Don't call and don't come by." I didn't know who to turn to, so I called up John. He was irate that she could treat me like that, and he suggested that I write about it and we'd get together later that night and create a song. It had been raining for two days straight when I sat down at my dining room table, put Jimi Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower" on continual rotation for inspiration, and started writing some lyrics about what had just happened to me.

From "I Could Have Lied"

I could have lied, I'm such a fool

My eyes could never never never keep their cool

Showed her and I told her how

She struck me but I'm fucked up now

But now she's gone, yes she's gone away

A soulful song that would not stay

You see she hides 'cause she is scared

But I don't care, I won't be spared

I drove over to John's house around midnight. He was like a mad scientist, empathizing with me, but absolutely possessed with the idea of finishing this song. So we worked and worked and stayed up all night, listening to that pouring rain. We finally finished the song at five in the morning and, cassette in hand, rushed out to drive through this rainstorm of rainstorms, straight to Sinead's house. It was her last night there, and I didn't knock, I just bundled up the tape and shoved it through her mail slot. She left town the next day. The years went by, and our record came out, and life moved on. There were tragedies and triumphs and successes and failures and people died and people had babies and I always wondered what it would be like if I ever saw that girl again.

Years and years later, I was at the Universal Amphitheatre for some stupid MTV awards show where Flea and I were presenting with Tony Bennett, of all people. After the show, I was in the back parking lot, hanging out and schmoozing, when a limousine pulled up. I looked in and saw Sinead and Peter Gabriel in the car. I walked over, and she poked her head out of the window, and we both said hi, and then nothing came out of me and she gave me a really fake smile. There was nothing to say. I can't even remember if I asked her whether she had gotten the tape. The whole encounter was the most horrible, awkward, poisonous, communicationless exchange. Maybe she did me a favor in the end. Who needs that kind of trouble?

We really expanded our musical palette with this album. One day John approached me with some interesting music that was very melodic and in a unique time signature. John hummed a verse and a chorus, and the emotion of the chords he was playing seemed to correspond to my breakup with Carmen. Even in the heat of our turbulent battles, I never considered her an evil person or hated her. I just saw her as a girl who never got a chance to grow up and deal with all her pain. I wasn't hurt by our breakup, I was relieved; I wanted her to feel the same and find her way in life.

At the same time, I began to question myself and wonder if I was stuck in repeating my father's pattern of hopping from flower to flower, the girl-of-the-day thing. I certainly didn't want to end up like Blackie, because as exciting and temporarily fulfilling as this constant influx of interesting and beautiful girls can be, at the end of the day, that shit is lonely and you're left with nothing. The lyrics reflect both those points of view.

From "Breaking the Girl"

Raised by my dad, girl of the day

He was my man, that was the way

She was the girl, left alone

Feeling the need to make me her home

I don't know what, when, or why

The twilight of love had arrived

Twisting and turning, your feelings are burning

You're breaking the girl

She meant you no harm

Think you're so clever but now you must sever

You're breaking the girl

He loves no one else

Recording the song was tremendous fun, because there was this big industrial bridge, so we went out and got all these scraps of metal, and the four of us donned protective eye gear and smashed the shit out of the metal with hammers and sticks and came up with a beautiful orchestration of scrap-metal percussion.

When we started figuring out which songs would ultimately make it to the recording stage, it turned out that the delay with Epic and Mo's last-minute stepping up to the plate had enabled us to write almost two albums' worth of new material. Working with Rick had changed the way we thought about songwriting. In the past, we were coming from a groove place, as opposed to a song place, which was where Rick's heart lay. This album would become the best of both of those worlds. We never tipped over to the conventional notion of songwriting, which would have mitigated against our stirring the pot of Africa. But you need to get into jamming to do that, so taking Rick's advice and focusing on song crafting were hugely important. Yet we never turned our back on being a funk band, based in grooves and improvised jams.

One of those jams would lead to the breakout song on the album. I was off on one side of the rehearsal studio, working on lyrics, while the band was jamming as a trio. Sometimes they'd be serious intellectual craftsmen, trying to intertwine their minds and come up with specific parts, but other times they'd rock out in a very joyful manner. On one of those latter days, Flea started playing this insane bass line, and Chad cracked up and played along. I was so struck by Flea's bass part, which covered the whole length of the instrument's neck, that I jumped up and marched over to the mike, my notebook in tow. I always had fragments of song ideas or even specific isolated phrases in mind. I took the mike and belted out, "Give it away, give it away, give it away, give it away now."

That line had come from a series of conversations I'd had years earlier with Nina Hagen. Nina was a wise soul, and she realized how young and inexperienced I was then, so she was always passing on gems to me, not in a preachy way, just by seizing on opportunities. I was going through her closet one day, looking at all her crazy clothes, when I came upon a valuable exotic jacket. "This is really cool," I said.

"Take it. You can have it," she said.

"Whoa, I can't take this. This is the nicest jacket you have in there," I said.

"That's why I gave it to you," she explained. "It's always important to give things away; it creates good energy. If you have a closet full of clothes, and you try to keep them all, your life will get very small. But if you have a full closet and someone sees something they like, if you give it to them, the world is a better place."

I had come from such a school of hard knocks that my philosophy was you don't give things away, you take whatever you want. It was such an epiphany that someone would want to give me her favorite thing. That stuck with me forever. Every time I'd be thinking, "I have to keep," I'd remember, "No, you gotta give away instead." When I started going regularly to meetings, one of the principles I learned was that the way to maintain your own sobriety is to give it to another suffering alcoholic. Every time you empty your vessel of that energy, fresh new energy comes flooding in.

I was busting out on that mike, going, "Give it away, give it away," and Flea was flying down the length of his bass, and Chad was laughing hysterically, and John was searching for his spot on the canvas to put his guitar part, and we just didn't stop. We all came away from the jam convinced we had the makings of a great song.

Rick's emphasis on the mechanics of songwriting led to a tradition that we still use to this day, called "face-offs." Let's say we're working on a song, and we have the verse and the chorus, but we need a bridge, and there's no piece of music we have that works there. John and Flea will unplug their guitars, run up to each other in the rehearsal space, and get in each other's faces. Then one of them will go into the parking lot, and the other will go out into a hallway, and they'll each have five minutes to come up with an idea. They'll both come back, and we'll all listen fairly and objectively and decide which part serves the song best. We've never had a major disagreement with one of the guys holding out for his idea. Face-offs are a fantastic tool for developing a part, because they're spontaneous and creative. The idea appears competitive on the surface, but it's all playful and very much in the spirit of serving the song rather than an individual. By the time that part gets put through the process of Chad doing his thing to it, and either John or Flea putting his part to it, we all own that little piece of music equally.

After that long, long period of rehearsal and songwriting and incubating ideas, we were ready to record the album. Rick suggested that we consider recording in an unorthodox setting. He turned up this amazing, huge, empty, historically landmarked Mediterranean haunted mansion a stone's throw from where we all lived. Then he hired some guys from Canada to come down and set up a studio in the rambling house. There was a beautiful woodpaneled library in the house that connected by a window to the giant Mediterranean living room, which worked out great for us, because they built the control room in the library and set up the drums and the guitars in the huge living room, putting the bass amps and the guitar amps in separate rooms to get all the sounds just so. As we walked around the house, we spontaneously decided to live there for the duration of the recording, so we all chose our bedrooms in different wings of the house.

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