The Organic Anti-Beat Box Band 9 страница

I went home, and I didn't have a lighter, so I tried to light the crack with matches, which was a horrible idea, because the match doesn't stay lit long enough to get the rock going. This went on for a couple of days, and then I made another trip downtown and found some powdered cocaine. I did the heroin and got completely anesthetized and passed out in my bed, the bed that I'd always been sober in up until that point.

Now my house was full of that dark energy, especially the bathroom, which was trashed. When I woke up, my first thought was "Please God, tell me that this was a nightmare." I figured there was a 2 percent chance that it hadn't happened. I was holding on to that, saying, "Come on, two percent, tell me that was a dream, tell me none of that happened." I got up and I was shaky and I peeked into the bathroom and it hit me. How did that happen? That was not in my script. Now the guy who was going to live and die sober had fucked up the track record. I didn't know what to do; I was dumbfounded.

Now that the beast within had awoken, it wasn't done. Part of me wanted to go with it, but part of me was so ashamed about having done that to myself that I cleaned up the mess and pretended it hadn't happened. But I felt empty and hollow, like I was made out of Styrofoam. All my strength was gone, and my brain felt empty. Looking back, it would have been an opportunity to go straight to somebody and say, "This is what happened. Let me start Day One right now." I should have gotten rid of the secret and gotten some help, but I couldn't do that.

I certainly didn't tell anyone in the band. We were still feeling our way, rehearsing and trying to write new material. One of the ways we bonded was by each buying a new Harley-Davidson. We even started a mock motorcycle gang that we called "The Sensitives."

Now that we were coming off a huge hit and we had a supportive record company that was prepared to spend money, we decided that a change of scenery might help in the creative process. Chad and I took a reconnaissance mission to Hawaii and found a beautiful farm on the south side of the Big Island. It was on acres and acres of land and complete with white horses in a corral. The main house had a nice kitchen and a big living room to rehearse in. There were two or three guest houses scattered across the property, along with a pool and a tennis court, all of this overlooking the magnificent Pacific Ocean and about a three-minute ride to some of the best snorkeling in all of Hawaii. We rented it for a month and shipped our motorcycles out. Extravagant stuff for guys who'd been living in small apartment buildings a couple of years previous.

The problem was the spot was so beautiful, it was difficult to start playing music, because we just wanted to swim in the ocean and have luxurious lunches and find some cliffs to jump off of. Finally, we started jamming. It was a slower, different flow than we'd ever had before. Good sounds were being created, but there wasn't any effortless telepathic transmission happening, where we were all instantly in one river going in one direction. I think I must have been lost in my own mental space, because I didn't go in there with an unquestioning sense of confidence. I wasn't sure what to make of the new sound that we were creating; I didn't know exactly how I fit into it. But I was willing to keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep on with my weird, bizarre style of writing, which seemed interesting to me, even though I wasn't getting much feedback from anybody else.

Some very nice things did get planted during those rehearsals, things that would later turn into songs. Flea wanted to reassert himself as a force in the creation of our sound and the direction of our songs, which was fine, because he'd always been an essential contributor, but I think he felt like it was now his turn to dominate in that respect, and it was different. I could tell that Dave was perplexed by our methods; he was looking around, going, "Is this how it's supposed to unfold? Anthony goes over there and writes in a corner all day while we jam? Are we getting anywhere?" Chad and I were like "Yeah, that's how we do it."

In retrospect, there was pressure because we were following up such a massive hit album. I don't think it was conscious pressure, where we talked about it, "Okay, it's time to do better than we did last..." It was more low-grade, subconscious pressure, a sense that we were under a microscope, that there was a built-in number of people who were looking at what we were doing. We had removed ourselves from mainland America, which gave a further bizarre flavor to everything.

While we were there, I would write lyrics for hours every day, but sometimes there were periods when new music would accumulate and I wouldn't have ideas for all of it. To get a change of atmosphere, I'd get on my motorcycle, drive to a corner of the island, find a bed-and-breakfast, and hole up with my tapes and write lyrics. I remember coming back once and Chad saying out of nowhere, "What's the matter, are you having writer's block?" I had to educate him that there was no such thing as writer's block, that writers write when they write, and when they don't, they don't. But he was convinced that I had it, and he actually gave an interview to Rolling Stone in which he told the guy that the sessions were going well except I had writer's block. That was a bone of contention for a while, coming from him, of all people.

Back at the ranch, we'd work in the morning, then we'd go snorkeling and have lunch. We'd work for a few more hours and usually spend our nights playing poker and Screw Your Neighbor. It was fun to sit outside, drinking beverages, after a long day of playing and writing, and just joke and shoot the shit and play cards. When we got ambitious, we'd take a day off and explore some of the places I'd found on my outings. We went scuba diving and volcano hiking, everywhere, on our four choppers.

All this time in Hawaii, I'd talk on the phone to Jaime for hours every night. After a month of work, our lease ran out on the house, and everyone went home for a week. But I stayed in Hawaii, and Jaime came out to visit. I picked her up and brought her back to the house, where we spent a very nice first night together. We had an arrangement: I was to do no ejaculating of any kind in her absence, no masturbation, no wet dreams, no other girls; I had to save every last ounce of my chi. Jaime was quite a sexual young girl, and she needed repeat performances, so she didn't want me having a shortage of juice. After that, we rented a tree house in the magnificent Waipio Valley, which was an enormous Garden of Eden. Then we spent a few days in Maui before it was time to reconvene the band and work again.

When we came back, we rented an old tropical mansion on the north side of the Big Island, which was a vastly different environment. It was a large bed-and-breakfast, and we rented the entire place for a month. By then we had about half of the album written. We worked but played, too, taking two scuba-diving trips, including one where we saw an amazing school of melon head whales pass right by us.

One day we were working and got a call from Lindy, who informed us that Kurt Cobain had killed himself. The news sucked the air out of the entire house. I didn't feel like I felt when Hillel died; it was more like "Jesus Christ, the world just suffered a great loss." Kurt's death was unexpected, because even if I see somebody who's on a mission to hurt himself, I always hold out hope that he can recover. Some of the worst junkies I've ever known in my life have gotten sober.

It was an emotional blow, and we all felt it. I don't know why everyone on earth felt so close to that guy; he was beloved and endearing and inoffensive in some weird way. For all of his screaming and all of his darkness, he was just lovable. So his death hit us hard, and it changed our whole experience out there. It did wake up a thing inside of me that wanted to express my love for him, in a particular way, without having it be an obvious "ode to." That day, I retreated to a back house on the property and started writing the lyrics to "Tearjerker."

Tearjerker

My mouth fell open hoping that the truth would not be true, refuse the news

I'm feeling sick now, what the fuck am I supposed to do, just lose and lose

First time I saw you, you were sitting backstage in a dress, a perfect mess

You never knew this but I wanted badly for you to requite my love

Left on the floor leaving your body

When highs are the lows and lows are the way

So hard to stay, guess now you know

I love you so

I liked your whiskers and I liked the dimple in your chin, your pale blue eyes

You painted pictures 'cause the one who hurts can give so much, you gave me such

We finished the rough outlines for probably ten songs in Hawaii. Now it was time to go back and finish the lyrics and begin work with Rick Rubin in the studio. Then I got derailed again. Someone had given me a coffee-table book about drug use in the New York projects. The book was rife with incredible tales of drug street life and resplendent with amazing photos depicting that world. I was sitting at home alone one night, and that book was on the coffee table looking at me. So I picked it up and started reading it, and a lightbulb went off in my head, and the little horns came out. I checked my pockets to see how much money I had, and I checked my schedule to see if I was free for the next few days. I realized it had been a few months since my last slip, and I could get away with this. My intention was always to go out just for the night and sleep it off, and then I'd go back to being a normal guy.

The drive downtown is an experience unto itself. You're controlled by this dark energy that's about to take you to a place where you know you don't belong at this stage in your life. You get on the 101 Freeway and it's night and it's cool outside. It's a pretty drive, and your heart is racing, your blood is flowing through your veins, and it's kind of dangerous, because the people dealing are cutthroat, and there are cops everywhere. It's not your neck of the woods anymore, now you're coming from a nice house in the hills, driving a convertible Camaro.

So you get off at Alvarado and make the right. Now your senses go into this hyper-alert radar situation. Your mission is to buy these drugs, and you don't want anything interfering with that, it's like being in a battle where your life is going to depend on seeing everything around you, the guy on the corner, the undercover cops, the black-and-whites. You don't want to commit any obvious traffic infractions, so you signal and make your left onto Third Street, cognizant the whole time of any cars behind you. Then you go two blocks and you're passing Mexican families and a couple of motels and a corner store and there's a grocery store on the left, which was the scene of many incidents in your life with Jennifer when you used to shoot up in the car and start throwing up out the window. All these memories are flooding back at you, and the minute you make the right on to Bonnie Brea, half a block up on the left, you see groupings of dealers. They're incredibly aggressive, and they watch every car that comes around that corner to see if it's a car there to buy stuff. You either pull straight up on Bonnie Brea or you make a left onto the next side street, and they come swamping down upon you. They're in your passenger window, they're in your back window, and you have to choose which madman you're going to buy from.

The dealers are used to people buying twenty dollars' worth, or forty or maybe sixty, but you pull out a wad of hundreds and tell them you want five hundred dollars' worth. They can't even keep five hundred dollars' worth of crack in their mouths, which is where they store it, just like the balloons of heroin, under their tongues, so they start hustling and pooling their resources and come to you with a handful of saliva-covered crack. You make the deal and then you ask these guys, "Who's got the Chiva?," and they point. Chiva is the dope. Then you go to another block and buy three, four, or five balloons, the whole while trying to make it happen quick, because the cops could be there any second. By now you know where to get pipes, and you're buying the little Brillo pads to use as screens in the pipe, all the techniques that you picked up from the street dealers. Then you go home and get high.

As soon as you hit the pipe, boom, there's that familiar instantaneous release of serotonin in the brain, a feeling that's almost too good. You instantly start short-circuiting in your brain, because to get all that serotonin at once is so crazy and so intense that you're liable to stand up and take off your clothes and go walking into the neighbor's house because you feel that good. And on one occasion I almost did do that. I came back to my beautiful, sweet, blessing-from-God home, up against this park, and I walked into the kitchen and took that first hit - and it's always about the first hit; the other hits are all in vain, trying to recapture that first one - and I stuffed as much rock as I could in the pipe and as much smoke as I could in my lungs, and I held it for as long as possible and then I released the smoke, and all that manic, psychotic energy came swirling around me again and I instantly became a different person. I was no longer in control of this person. I threw off my shirt, and it made perfect sense to go next door to my neighbor's house with half of my clothes off and see what was going on. I knocked on the door, and she came out, and I said something like "Did I leave my keys in there?" And she said, "No, I don't think so, but let's have a look." I was ready to take off the rest of my clothes and see how things went, because I wasn't in control of my faculties. She was kind and sweet, and fortunately, I didn't make too much of a scene. Three minutes later, that feeling evaporated, and I realized I was over there half naked, looking for keys that didn't exist, so I mumbled an apology and went back home and hit the pipe again. Absolute madness.

I'd been struck with a couple of bolts of relapse lightning, and my thinking wasn't that great. I was carrying around this secret inside of me, and it was poisoning my entire thought process. I was pretending that everything was A-OK, but the integrity of my entire psychic structure was starting to collapse. I had a few more songs to write lyrics for, and when you're in that state of mind, it seems like a good idea to change your geography. The problem, obviously, was the town I was living in. So I decided to go to New York, which was always an inspiring town for me. Plus, Jaime was there. She had made many a sojourn to L.A. to visit me, so I decided to return the favor.

My plan was to check in to the Chelsea Hotel and write for a month. The Chelsea was an artists' compound, full of freaks and old-timers and misfits and drag queens and dope fiends and jilted harlots. It was the land of a thousand character ghosts. For the same price as a four-star hotel room, I was able to get a beautiful penthouse with a full kitchen and an incredible view looking south.

I moved in, but I wasn't feeling right inside my own skin. Here I have this wonderful space in which to write, I've got great tapes to work with, I've got tons of notes and ideas, my girl's a ten-minute cab ride away, I've got the city in my view, but I feel fucked up inside. I set up my workspace, and I went to work and wrote a little bit and ate a little bit, and Jaime came over and we watched movies, but I didn't feel like myself, which is a horrible feeling. I was edgy and uggghhh, in that limbo of not being on a run and not being sober.

One night a week after I'd checked in, Jaime must have been off doing her thing, and I was home alone and it was nighttime and this overwhelming notion came over me to go down to Washington Square Park and see what the action was with the drug dealers. I jumped in a cab, went down there, and started talking to some of the local scalawags. I scored a handful of rocks and couldn't find any dope, so on the way back, I bought a couple of bottles of red wine, thinking that would take the edge off the coke. I smoked the crack, and it wasn't even getting me high, but one more time I was on this ride. I wasn't digging it. I started hammering the wine back, and I just wasn't well. I was like a clock that had exploded - my springs were hanging out, my hands were cockeyed, and my numbers were falling off. Jaime showed up, so I hid the wine and told her some cockamamy line of excuses that I must have eaten something bad. In the end we had an argument, because I was out of my mind. That was the color of my experience during that whole month. I'd get it together for a few days, but it basically disintegrated into an unproductive and sad month, because I wasn't getting much done. I wasn't sober, but I wasn't using in the way that would have given me relief.

In July the band went into the studio to record the album. Even though I wasn't finished writing all the lyrics, we decided to start cutting the basic tracks. By then I had put down the getting-high thing and was white-knuckling the dryness of not using, but I was behind in my work and not well prepared emotionally or physically. I did have some lyrics that I believed in, but I hadn't trained my voice to go in there and be able to do my thing. However, Rick and Chad and Flea and John were all ready to fire away.

It's funny. No one suspected that I had slipped from my more than five years of sobriety, but if you look closely at the lyrics I was coming up with, there were clues galore. In "Warped," I wrote, "My tendency for dependency is offending me/It's upending me/I'm pretending see to be strong and free from my dependency/It's warping me." Later in that same song: "Night craving sends me crawling/Beg for mercy, does it show?/A vacancy that's full of holes/Hold me, please, I'm feeling cold." Even on an upbeat song like "Aeroplane," there were lyrics like "Looking in my own eyes/I can't find the love I want/Somebody'd better slap me before I start to rust, before I start to decompose." That's a cry for help. Later: "Sitting in my kitchen/I'm turning into dust again/My melancholy baby, the star of Mazzy must push a voice inside of me/I'm overcoming gravity, it's easy when you're sad to be." Even "Deep Kick," which was a historical account of our journeys, referenced "this giant gray monster" of drug addiction that had enveloped so many of our friends. At that point, John was getting into his sordid drug trip. Bob Forrest, Pete Weiss, and Dickie Rude were all in never-never land. And River and Hillel were dead.

We laid down the basic tracks, but I was still having trouble with the lyrics. A lot had to do with my state of mind. When you're at odds with yourself, it's hard to create. Sometimes the writing process is as easy as opening up the window and letting in the breeze. And sometimes it's like chiseling away at a block of granite with a pencil.

On August 1, I should have been celebrating my sixth anniversary of sobriety. To the outside world, I was. My dad hadn't acknowledged the first five years of my sobriety, but on that would-be sixth anniversary, he sent me a T-shirt that said SIX YEARS CLEAN. I had to accept it, but it was one more thing to feel horrible about.

The band took a break from recording to play the Woodstock festival. Judging from my love handles in the photos, I'd have to say I stayed sober for at least a month before Woodstock. Woodstock was our first show with Dave, even though he'd been in the band since the previous September. Lindy came to us and said, "Okay, you're headlining Woodstock. Anything special you want to do?" I sketched out a giant lightbulb on the floor, and Lindy thought I meant a cartoon lightbulb that went off over your head, but I meant lightbulbs that would encompass our whole heads. Dave was looking at us, going, "I'm going to be wearing a giant lightbulb?"

We got a Hollywood propmaster in the Valley to create the lightbulb costumes, and we hired this Russian Mongolian seamstress to make five identical Jimi Hendrix costumes, because our encore was going to be "Fire." The fifth costume was for Clara, Flea's daughter, who at times became an integral part of our show. The lightbulbs were a tough way to initiate Dave into our performing thing, because that wasn't his style. He was more into being cool and sexy and risqué, a naked muscle guy, and here we had him dressed up in a silver spaceman suit with an enormous lightbulb head. But he didn't complain at all.

We didn't know what to expect for our first show with Dave, but we played for more than two hundred thousand people, and it sounded pretty damn great. The lightbulb costumes turned out to be difficult, because we didn't rehearse with them and didn't realize that it was impossible to look laterally out of them and see your fingers on your instrument. But they were a striking, sensational look.

Now it was time to return home and finish my work and concentrate on my sobriety. Instead, I did the opposite. My house had been tainted, and it was the perfect little isolation castle at the top of the hill. I had a gate down below, so no one could get up to the door. I decided it would be a good bad idea to start getting into the cocaine and heroin zone again. I ended up finding this Mexican billiards place downtown that was a full-service stop. I didn't have to go up to the corners, I didn't have to buy stuff right on the street or go to different guys, I could just go in there and grab a beer, and when they finished their pool game, they'd come by with gumball-machine containers filled with rock cocaine and heroin balloons. Occasionally, I'd see somebody I didn't want to see, some young white males from Hollywood who might recognize me, but I had taken to pulling my hair up under a baseball cap and wearing glasses, and that was a pretty good disguise.

Then I'd hop onto my motorcycle and drive to a deserted, derelict area of downtown. I'd take out my pipe, pack it full of rock, and smoke it, and it would be like a steam engine exploding in my head. My eyes would fall out of my head, my heart would start racing, and there'd be this ringing in my ears. Then I'd fire up the bike and kick that thing into high gear and take off like a rocket for home.

I'd come home and close the front gate, lock the front door, and turn off the phone. I had two or three places in the house that I would spend my high time in. One of those was the kitchen, which was where all the implements of destruction were. But I'd end up on the third floor of the house. I had this weird old '50s couch, a television, and a boom box on the floor. I'd go up there and drag along my art supplies - drawing pads, glitter, markers, and pencils by the gazillion, inks, and other weird objects that I could cut up and paste around. I'd get into this fixated thing where I'd get high and go to work on these bizarre creations, meticulous and precise drawings of faces and nude women, bizarre bodies and breasts and mouths and eyes, and also scary Japanese demon faces. Days would go by and I'd just sit there, very comfortable, because my whole body was acclimated to these chemicals. I'd also get out random art books and books of nude models and lay them all around the house so I could see the images wherever I went.

Meanwhile, I'd make the occasional contact with either Lindy or Flea. They'd ask me when they could book the studio so I could do my vocals. My excuse for not working was that I had a weird stomach ailment, something that had to do with my experience in Borneo, so I'd constantly see this stomach doctor and buy more and more time. I was even taking walnut-shell medicine that was supposed to rid my body of its "parasites." It was such an obvious line of crap, but it worked. Nobody questioned why I wasn't coming to the studio.

I kept going deeper and deeper into this world of repetition. Jaime would come to visit, and it wasn't pretty, because I wasn't well and she didn't know what the situation was. The sad thing is, people don't want to believe that the person they're in love with is out of his mind, drinking and using, so if you give them even half an excuse, they're going to want to believe it. A girl with no prior exposure to the disease had to be blissfully unaware of the nefarious tricks of the dope fiend. That's how I was able to get high all late summer and autumn and pretend like it wasn't happening. I was saying, "I'm sick." I was deteriorating physically and emotionally. Jaime was tolerant, and it did speak well of her character, because she was not the type to abandon ship during a crisis. She didn't consider backing off or bowing out, she was just there, which I can't say about everybody. I don't know if I could say it even about myself.

I began to drop some pretty tantalizing clues. I drove to the studio one day, and Flea came by the car and saw a discarded Cheetos bag on the floor. That would be a huge tip-off, because if I was clean, I would never even think about eating junk food. But Flea wasn't sure it wasn't left over from Jaime, so he never put two and two together. Another time Jaime was at my house, and we ordered some food delivered. I collared the delivery boy on the front steps and offered to give him a hundred-dollar tip if he would give me all the cash he had on him; I'd put the tip and extra cash on my credit card. Jaime was eavesdropping on this whole negotiation from the landing at the top of the stairs. There I was, in total conniving-whisper mode, trying to do this dirty deal with the delivery guy, who by the way did come through for me. Jaime said, "What was that all about?," and I had to be the abominable lying machine.

In the middle of October, we played two dates with the Rolling Stones. It was an awkward time, because my father was in town to visit, and he was staying at my house. I came home after the first show and made some lame excuse to drive down the hill and came back with a small amount of narcotics. And I wasn't Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin. I couldn't go trash myself and turn it into a soul stew onstage. I would trash myself and be half a man with half the joy in my step.

But opening for the Rolling Stones is a shite job anyway. I can't recommend it to anybody. You get the offer and you think, "Historically speaking, they're the second most important rock band in the history of music, after the Beatles. So we should have a brush with history." But the fact is, the Rolling Stones' audience today is lawyers and doctors and CPAs and contractors and real estate development people. This is a conservative, wealthy group. No one's rocking out. The ticket prices and merchandise costs are astronomical. It's more like "Let's go to the Rolling Stones mall and watch them play on the big screen."

The whole experience is horrible. First you get there, and they won't let you do a sound check. Then they give you an eightieth of the stage. They set apart this tiny area and say, "This is for you. You don't get the lights, and you're not allowed to use our sound system. And oh, by the way, you see that wooden floor? That's Mick's imported antique wood flooring from the Brazilian jungle, and that's what he dances on. If you so much as look at it, you won't get paid." You're basically like a little TV set on the stage, playing your show as eighty-five thousand wealthy, bored-out-of-their-minds fans are slowly finding their seats. They're all wearing their Rolling Stones letter jackets and leafing through their catalogs, deciding which Rolling Stones T-shirt and which pair of Rolling Stones slacks they're going to get. We were the music to be played for ushering, seating, snack-getting, and clothes-buying. It was a nightmare.

In November I tried to go back into the studio and do some singing, but I wasn't in any kind of shape to do it. I did a mediocre job. I was skinny and sucked up, bad color, bad skin, scraggly hair, droopy, dead-looking eyes. The cat wasn't out of the bag yet, and everyone thought I was run-down from being sick all summer. I was beginning to realize that drug addiction really was a progressive illness and, God forbid, if you should start using again, it would be worse than it was before.

When Jaime came to visit, I'd force myself to go without for a few days, then I'd take her to the airport and head straight downtown. I had a few close calls with the law. One time I was smoking coke in the car and was way too high to drive safely, and I had a bunch of paraphernalia and drugs right under the seat. I must have been driving erratically, because a cop pulled me over. I got the window halfway down, and this young, vicious-looking LAPD cop shone his flashlight on me and said, "Oh, Mr. Kiedis! My bad! I'm sorry, sir, excuse me for the interruption, but I really have to tell you that this is a pretty dangerous area, so you might want to exercise caution around here. You have a good night, now." That wasn't quite the reception I was expecting.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-31