I was still excited about our deal when the phone rang again. Flea answered it. In the background, I heard him say, “Are you sure? Wow, wow, that’s really bad news.” I was sitting there going, “What? What? What?” when Flea hung up the phone and looked at me.
“Jack and Hillel just quit the band. What Is This got their own record deal, and they’re choosing to stay in that band,” he said.
I was speechless and in shock, feeling like a piano had fallen on my heart. I stumbled off to the couch and started to cry. This couldn’t be possible. We had invented something as a band, we had created this thing that the world must hear about, and all of a sudden it was like we were aborting a baby at six months. Flea was sitting there going, “This is fucked up, this is fucked up.”
Our sound was based on the drumming of Jack Irons and the guitar playing of Hillel Slovak. It wasn’t like these were incidental guys, they made up our vibe. We were kids from high school, we were a team, you can’t go shopping for a new mom and dad, it doesn’t happen. I was thinking, “Okay, my life is over, my cause is lost, there’s nowhere to go,” when Flea said to me, “We’re going to have to get two other guys,” and I went from a dead wilted flower to “Huh, other guys? Is that possible?”
“Yeah, I know some good musicians,” he said.
Once I started thinking about it, I realized that we had the songs, we had a record contract, we had Flea, we had me, we still loved what we did. We just hadn’t done it yet, so we needed to find a way to make it happen. Flea immediately suggested that we hire Cliff Martinez as our drummer. He’d played in the Dickies, Roid Rogers, the Weirdos, and Captain Beefheart. I didn’t know much about Beefheart, but I knew he was legendary. Flea and I went over to talk to Cliff. He lived in a wacky one-room apartment that you accessed through an underground parking garage on Harper. It wasn’t a proper apartment, just a storage room that had been converted. He had been in the Weirdos, so his band fashion sense was you get a washboard and you turn that into a shirt, then you find a teapot and you make a hat out of it. When he played with Roid Rogers, he performed with a tampon hanging out of his ass. He was far and away the most eccentric one of us all. I thought I knew some bizarre human personalities, but Cliff was on a new level, though in a very likable way.
When we asked him to join the band, he was goofy with joy, smiling and laughing and saying, “Let’s do this. I hope I’m what you’re looking for, because this can be an amazing journey.” We had our first jam, and it was clear from the get-go that Cliff Martinez not only could play crazy funk beats and super-inventive one-of-a-kind avant-garde art beats, but he could do a variety of styles and do them all well.
Now we had to find a guitar player. When we were jamming with Cliff, we discussed guitarists, and he suggested Dix Denney, a guy he had played with in the Weirdos. Flea had previously jammed with Dix, and he was a lovable fellow whom I had partied with. We felt comfortable that we could go on with these two guys. And Flea and I could go on to Europe.
We had a great time in Europe, exploring London, Paris, and then Amsterdam. In Paris, I ditched Flea for a few days to hook up with a beautiful Danish girl. He gave me the silent treatment when I got back, but then I bought some beautiful painted powder-blue tin cups off a street vendor and put them in the epaulets of our leather jackets, and we instantly became the Brothers Cup. We went on to Amsterdam and spent a few more days in London before returning home, but I realized that during the whole trip, I was unable to get Jennifer out of my mind, despite my fling with the Danish girl and a short-lived crush I had developed on a French hooker.
We returned to an interesting situation in our apartment at La Leyenda. We had been battling with the landlord for months over the rent that we weren’t paying, and she had sent many eviction notices, but we ignored them. A few months before we left for Europe, she had the door taken off the apartment. Even that didn’t stop us. We proceeded to carry on living there like it was no big deal that our apartment didn’t have a front door. We figured there was nothing worth stealing anyway. It got to the point where we couldn’t walk into the place, because she would hear us from her nearby apartment and make a charge, so we started climbing up the fire escape and entering through a window. Then she’d rush in through the front door and see Flea sleeping naked, and she’d be furious. When we returned from Europe, she’d finally persuaded the marshals to show up, and they posted notices that we were going straight to jail if we occupied the premises again.
Flea moved in with his sister, who had a one-room apartment above a garage in a Mexican part of town on East Melrose. Before long, I found my way there, and the three of us would share her queen-size bed. I didn’t stay there for a long time, but it was long enough for me to get back on my feet and find Jennifer.
Sure enough, I ran into her one night, and we connected. She lived out in the deep Valley in Encino with her dad, who was an ex-marine turned insurance salesman, and her little sister. They were in a classic giant megalopolis Valley apartment building with absolutely no character or charm. Jennifer’s best friend was her cousin, both bleached-blond Valley girls with an extreme flair for personalized fashion statements, divas who would spend hours painting their faces with outrageous makeup and creating kooky costumes before they went out clubbing.
They loved their Kamikazes and they smoked their Sherms, which were Nat Sherman cigarettes that were soaked in PCP. They were a couple of nutters, but there was something about Jennifer that I found absolutely fascinating, not just aesthetically but spiritually—something in her eyes, something in her soul, something in her being that attracted me. I fell for her.
No sooner did we start hanging out than we became boyfriend and girlfriend. Now I had this new person in my life who started taking up a lot of my time and energy, but she counterbalanced that by being an overall muse and a great giver. Jennifer was only seventeen, but she was coming off a relationship with a well-known Hollywood punk rocker. I was a fan of his, so I was a little bit jealous to hear the stories, but I also gave her extra credit for having been this guy’s girlfriend. She was a hard punk-rock flower who didn’t take shit from anyone and was very certain about herself and very accomplished for a young person. She was going to the Fashion Institute in Los Angeles when we met. She even had her own car, a yellow hatchback MG.
Like me, Jennifer was a very sexual being, although she had very little sexual experience. I’d been going strong for a while and was very sexually attracted to her. When we first started making love, I asked her if she’d ever had an orgasm, and she said she hadn’t. She’d get close when she was in the bathtub and using the showerhead, but she’d never had one during the act of sex. I promised that we’d work on that, and I started going down on her for what seemed like ages. She came closer and closer, and we finally cracked the code and she became this orgasmic being, which was a great accomplishment but also a great relief.
One time early in our relationship, she wanted to take acid with me. We dropped some and were driving around in her car, dying to have sex, so I took her to Flea’s sister’s place. I decided that instead of having sex in Karen’s bed, which wouldn’t have been a great idea, we’d go in the bathroom and have sex in the shower. We ended up in that shower for a long time, and we got pretty loud and it became a quasi-spiritual experience complete with hallucinations of rainbows. Then Karen came home. Karen was such a sexual person herself, and we were like sex friends who would share our various sexual escapades, so I didn’t think she would mind that I was having sex in her shower. But I was wrong, boy I was wrong. When I emerged from that bathroom, Flea pulled me aside and told me that Karen was very upset and what I had done in there was just not cool. So that was the end of my crashing with Flea and his sister.
I started staying out in Encino, and Jennifer’s father was not too pleased. But he did love his daughters, and if that meant he’d have to tolerate a hooligan, then so be it. To me the Encino house was yet another refrigerator and a source of food and a place where I could
be taken care of, especially when I fell ill that fall. I had suddenly lost all my strength, and even getting out of the bed was an effort. When I finally went to the doctor, he told me that I had hepatitis. Ironically, it wasn’t the type you get from needles, it was the hep you get from eating bad shellfish. After a week in bed, I was pretty good to go.
Now that I had captured the heart of the girl I’d been pining away for, it was time to get back to the business of being a band. One of our first problems was that Dix wasn’t cutting it at guitar. Cliff had learned all our songs right away. He’d go home and practice all night long and make sure he knew exactly what to play. Dix was a great musician who couldn’t apply himself to other people’s parts. If you asked him to write a song, he was a wizard. But when it came time to learn Hillel’s experimental funk riffs, that wasn’t his thing. We didn’t quite understand that; we thought anyone should be able to learn anything.
He would come to rehearsal, and we’d have monster jams, but then we’d say, “Let’s play ‘Get Up and Jump,’” and Dix would draw a blank. That was a major problem, because we planned on recording all of our early songs. So Flea and I decided to fire Dix. But how do you fire this gentle, lovable, quiet man? We came up with a plan to invite him over for a game of croquet. We’d explain in a civil manner that his style and our style were not melding appropriately, and therefore we should both be free to go off and express ourselves in our own manners.
There was a small yard across the street from Flea’s house, and we set up for a croquet game without even consulting his neighbors. We were hitting the balls around, and I said, “So, Dix, how’s everything?”
“Good,” he said.
“We’ve been doing some thinking, and what we were thinking—uh, Flea, why don’t you tell him what we were thinking,” I said.
“Well, we were thinking, strictly in musical terms—uh, Anthony, I think you could probably say it better,” Flea hedged.
“Well, musically speaking, let’s say that we’re going in this direction, and Flea, why don’t you go ahead and take over from there.”
“You’re a musical genius of your own variety, and you’re kind of going in that direction . . .” Flea said.
“And your direction and our direction just don’t seem meant to be together. We’re sorry,” we both said.
We kept on going on about how our musical directions were different, and Dix was listening, as usual, and not talking at all. After we thought we had told him that we had incompatible paths, Dix turned to us and said, “Okay. So rehearsal tomorrow is the same time?”
We had to spell it out that we couldn’t play in the band with him anymore, and at last it dawned on him and he packed his bags and got in the car and left. That was the first of many heartbreaking firings that Flea and I would have to preside over. We thought we would always be four knuckleheads from Hollywood, but now we were learning that we would have to deal with the realities of life.
We had guitar auditions and saw a lot of people, but it came down to two guys: Mark Nine, this hip avant-garde art school refugee who had been in a band with Cliff called Two Balls and a Bat; and Jack Sherman. I had no idea of his background, no idea how he got to the rehearsal, but I knew he was a nerd the minute he walked into the audition. Now, that wasn’t a bad thing, we were embracing of the nerd energy at that time. But this guy was a nerd without even realizing he was a nerd. He had this combed-back Jewfro hair that didn’t have any kinks, and he was neat and tidy. He’d come in with a huge smile, and he didn’t look very cool when he was jamming, but he locked right in with Flea and Cliff and it wasn’t stagnant and it wasn’t a struggle for them to find each other and there was an actual musical flow. Plus this guy had crazy chops, and the most complicated things came naturally to him. We played some of our songs, and though he didn’t have a down-and-dirty nasty-dog element to his sound, he was technically efficient, hitting all the notes in the right places. His playing didn’t have the same spirit as Hillel’s, but at least he was playing the parts.
So it was down to this hip dog and this average Joe. When we were leaving the rehearsal space that night, Jack was going, “Wow, that was really an amazing jam, and you guys are really cool. I haven’t played funk like that since 1975, when I played in this Top Forty band . . .” We told him that our first step was to make this record and then go out on tour.
“Oh, wow, making a record, that’ll be neat,” Jack said. Then he stopped in his tracks. “But should you want me in your band, I have to check with my astrologer before I go on tour, because I cannot go on tour when there’s a third moon in Venus that could be rising on the backside of Jupiter’s astral projection toward the fifth universe.”
We were waiting for him to go “Just kidding,” but he went on about these conjunctions and retrogrades and whatever, so we finally had to ask him if he was for real.
“No, I’m serious about this. It should be okay, but I do have to check with my astrologer,” he said.
We told him that we’d get back to him, and he left. We rehashed everything and somehow decided to go with the nerd. We thought that he had a lot of experience, and he was an amazing guitar player in his own way. He wasn’t the raw, explosive hellcat of funk that we were looking for, but he’d definitely be capable of going into the studio and putting down these parts, so we hired him. That was another moment of celebration, because now all the pieces were there.
With the band set, I needed a place to live. Bob Forest and I had heard that these office spaces in a classic old Hollywood Boulevard two-story office building were for rent, and they were cheap. Back then the Hollywood Boulevard area was in a state of disrepair. The building was called the Outpost, and it had probably been there since the ’20s, the kind of building that at one time would have housed private detectives. It was beautiful, with an elegant staircase and hallways with tall ceilings and old light fixtures and big tall windows and those old-school bathrooms with ten urinals, all nice old materials and tiles. I had saved up a few hundred dollars, and I told the landlord that I was a writer and I needed a place to work. We knew we couldn’t tell them we wanted to live in an office building, even though there were a couple of other people living there; you don’t say it, you just quietly go about it, and they don’t know and it’s okay. They showed me a few different places, and I took the biggest and nicest one. It had a tall ceiling and several huge windows looking out on Hollywood Boulevard. It was one big long room with no bathroom and a nice wooden door. Bob was on a tighter budget, so he took the cheapest space, which faced the back parking lot. My rent was $135 a month, and Bob’s was probably $85, just dirt cheap. We couldn’t have cared less that there were no bathrooms in the suites; we figured we’d wash up in the sinks.
Those Outpost rooms would become the scene of much decadence, debauchery, and the decline of young minds. Shortly after we moved in, Greg, an old kooky Orange County friend of Bob’s, moved in down the hallway. He was a coke fiend, a coke dealer, and a wannabe guitar player. A designer moved in next to me who lived with her boyfriend, a huge ornery guitar player named Carlos Guitarlos, with whom I’d had run-ins in the past. I set about the business of decorating my new house. I put a bed in the corner, loft-style, and I moved in a desk. Carlos’s girlfriend offered me this little round sofa that was covered in furry leopard skin, which was an absolute find.
Having Bob in such proximity was both a blessing and a curse. He would always be coming over, and we’d hustle up whatever meager amounts of money we could to go buy drugs. The heroin supply had eluded us, so we were doing coke and then trying to drink our way out of it. Of course, our new neighbor Greg had what seemed to be an endless supply. One night I got on a roll and was buying stuff from Greg, and I couldn’t stop and he couldn’t stop, so he started fronting me the drugs. I kept going back to his place and getting more and more. I even gave him some expensive skis I had as collateral until I could hock a guitar in the morning, which was a charade of lies to keep the white powder flowing, because I had
no cash and no guitar. I thought that Greg would pass out and fall asleep for five days and not hassle me.
The party finally came to an end, and I passed out in a gnarly state of discomfort. After sleeping for a few hours, I heard loud banging on my door. It was Greg, and he wanted his money. I was thinking that if I didn’t answer the door, he’d go away, I could outpatience him. Wrong. He kept coming back periodically, hitting the door harder each time. Eventually, I heard the cracking of wood. I peeked up from the bed and saw a big ax coming right through my beautiful thick wooden door. Hmm. Did not look good. I figured I could stay right there in bed and he’d rage in and chop me up with that ax because I had no money or guitar to hock, or I could charge him and try to turn the whole thing around and stand a chance of surviving.
I flew to the door, threw it open, and screamed, “You bastard! Look what you’re doing to my door!”
The air seemed to deflate from this enraged coke fiend. He looked at the door and then at me and said, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I am going to fix that door right now.”
I decided to parlay my advantage. “What were you thinking?” I said. “Now you owe me money for this.”
Greg looked confused. “No, you owe me money.”
“Owe you money? Look at what you did to my door, my friend. I think we should just call it even.”
“I don’t know . . . I owe my guy all that money . . .”
“Look, keep the skis. Get out of here, you destroyed my door.”