It wasn’t an easy transition. People I knew would walk in and I’d try to stay in the kitchen and hope they wouldn’t see me. My reputation was shot with so many of my old friends. “Forrest is a fuckup,” was what I imagined many of them said, and I just wanted to hide away from them. Out on the floor, as I picked up dirty plates and silverware, I’d keep my head down and clear the tables as fast as I could so I could get back into the safe anonymity of the kitchen. I saw myself as “that guy who used to be somebody.” And now look at me. One day, as I was elbows-deep in a pile of dirty dishes while hot water sloshed down around my shoes as I sprayed off the plates before I racked them into the washer, I heard a girlish voice behind me. “Bob? Bob Forrest?” I turned around and was confronted with the sight of a gorgeous, fit, sexy platinum blonde I immediately recognized as singer Gwen Stefani from the band No Doubt. She was luminescent. What the hell? What was she doing back here?
“I thought I recognized you. What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I work here. I’m the dishwasher. I also clear tables out front.”
She looked at me, and I couldn’t read her thoughts. I hoped she wasn’t pitying me. That would have crushed me.
“I just wanted to stop and tell you how much I loved listening to those Thelonious Monster records. They meant so much to me. I just wanted to say thanks for all the music.”
I was dumbfounded and stammered a thanks and watched her walk out. How do you respond to something like that? I also thought that maybe I didn’t really give a shit anymore. Great. She liked my music. What of it? A lot of people did. Nice to know, but it didn’t matter. Here, in the steamy kitchen of Millie’s Cafe, I was just a guy named Bob who washed the dishes to pay the bills. I was just some former junkie who tried to live his life as best he could. I was free from dope, free from a lot of the negative feelings that had haunted me since childhood … and I definitely wasn’t caught up in the viselike grip of the Hollywood entertainment machine. I lived day-to-day and it wasn’t so bad. In fact, right then I realized that everything was okay. I might not have been a big rock star living in a mansion or driving a Bentley, but I had a roof over my head and a car. I had people who cared about me, like Anthony, Flea, and my girlfriend Max. I had a job to do and it was a beautiful spring day. I felt satisfied. I felt good. For the first time in years, I started to feel more comfortable with myself. The strangest part was that I had no idea, not a clue, why it was working this time after all my previous failures at sobriety. Sometimes, that’s how recovery is.
I’ve decided
I’m not going through it again
—“Hurt,” the Bicycle Thief
I
n February of 1996, I got busted, got clean, and made the supplicant’s journey to Cri-Help, a twelve-step facility in North Hollywood, to attend meetings and get the counseling I needed to help me stay on the straight and narrow. The music business—among other things—had left me traumatized and I knew I needed to do what so many people had told me to over the years:
Just grow up, man!
It wasn’t an easy thing to do. I had very little training in it. The music business is practically designed so that the performers live in a state of perpetual adolescence. I started working at Millie’s Cafe, and, for the first time in years, I went to a real job. I stayed eighteen months in that sheltering, humbling cocoon before I decided I had to move on. But there was no way I was ready to go back to the music business, even though I wasn’t qualified for much else. I became reclusive and resentful, a tightly wrapped ball of self-pity who avoided old friends, at least the ones who still cared about me, simply because they had successful music careers and here I was, a dishwasher. I had also burned bridges and run scams as a dope fiend—it goes with the job description—and a lot of people didn’t want anything to do with me.
I took a job as a bicycle messenger for a movie company. The streets of Hollywood were ones I knew intimately and although they were the same dirty, crowded, traffic-choked avenues they had always been, I saw them from a completely different perspective now that I was on the back of a bicycle shuttling envelopes and packages from place to place. I wasn’t a rock star anymore, that’s for sure. I was just another anonymous Worker Joe who did the nine-to-five to pay the bills and take care of my own day-to-day expenses. It was tough work, but it was also good to be out in the open and feel the wind blow on my face as I pumped down Hollywood Boulevard. The famous names written in brass and embedded in the slick terrazzo left little impression on me. The ghosts of Hollywood’s past may have been all around, but to the tourists who walked up and down the street in flip-flops and T-shirts, many of those names didn’t register a blip. Once you’re gone, people forget who you are. It felt like it had happened to me. I had put a lot of time, energy, and work into my music career, and now I had nothing to show for it.
It was a difficult time for me, but I had my girlfriend, Max Smith. She’s probably the most significant woman in my life other than the mothers of my children. I had been on the radio call-in show
Loveline
one night. She told me after we had been dating for a while that she first became of aware me when she heard me on that show. I was fucked up, for sure, but I was also funny, open, and vulnerable. She listened in and turned to her brother and said, “I’m going to marry that guy someday.” We didn’t get married, but we had a long and happy relationship. She was thirteen when she heard that show. She was always very supportive. I had met Max a few years before when she was nineteen and I was thirty-two. It was instant infatuation. She was a pretty, wild girl and could match me bad habit for bad habit. But she found that the party-hard life wasn’t what she wanted for herself and she cleaned up. I wasn’t ready for that, and she seemed to understand. While she maintained her sobriety, I did my best to stay loaded. Through it all, she stood by my side, even when I’d engage in some questionable behavior. There was a famous rock chick who fronted a well-known band who had a taste for the narcotics. But as her fame and profile increased, sometimes it was easier for her to have me do the dirty work. She’d give me cash to go make a score and off I’d go to take a generous “finder’s fee” in product for myself, or, as I did more than once, use all that I had bought myself. It wasn’t like she couldn’t afford it.
“Bob, where’s the stuff?”
I’d stammer some lame excuse and add, “But you know I’m good for it.”
“You’re such an asshole,” she’d say with barely concealed contempt. “Now, if I give you some money, will you please go and get me a little something?”
“No problem,” I’d say.
“Okay, and no fuckups this time, right?”
“No, no, it’ll all be cool,” I’d say, unsure as to whether I’d run yet another hustle.
But after my bust, and my subsequent release from the clutches of the penal system, Max was there for me. She helped me along in my sobriety and she understood what I was going through. She had a great deal of empathy and seemed to know what I needed even when I didn’t. She gently prodded me forward. With her encouragement, I started to give some thought to music again. Music came back into my life, but in a strange sort of way.
I still played guitar, but not professionally. I’d play Dylan and Neil Young songs at home, but with no goal or purpose other than to entertain myself and Max.
“You really should start to play out again, Bob,” she said one night.
“I don’t know …” I trailed off, unsure if anyone other than my girlfriend would want to hear what I had to sing.
“Bob, you’re a musician. You can’t keep hiding from the world.”
“I’d need songs.”
“Well, write them. You’re just looking for excuses to not do this.”
“I’d have to start a band or get someone to jam with,” I said. “It’s how I work best.”
“I think I know somebody,” said Max. “He’s really good.”
That was a surprise. It was more of a surprise when I met the musician she had talked about. Josh Klinghoffer was a gangly fifteen-year-old kid in Chuck Taylor high-top sneakers. He lived around the corner from her. He was a friend of Max’s brother. I thought,
What the fuck is this? He’s just a kid.
Josh didn’t help himself either with his demeanor. He was so quiet and shy, he could barely look me in the eye when we talked. Even when he played music, on either the drums or the guitar, he kept his head down and his spindly teenage arms and legs tucked in tight. I thought at first that maybe this kid was autistic or something. But, no, he was just a diffident youngster who had a lot of talent. We started to have little jam sessions and we played a couple of covers gigs. I began to write again and Josh and I would record demos on a little four-track tape machine I had. All the bitterness and frustration of the previous years began to pour out of me, even if I only had three songs at that point. It felt good to write again, but I still had reservations about getting back into the game. I was a bicycle messenger now. A workingman. My music days were behind me. It was probably best not to set my sights too high.
One afternoon, after I had run all over town, my thirty-five-year-old bones feeling the strain of each pump of the pedals as I delivered my packages—there’s a reason why they’re called “delivery
boys
”—I saw a car parked in the lot where the Goldenvoice offices were. A guy I knew, Paul Tollett, the president of the concert promotion outfit, now known for the famous annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, was about to get into it. I had known him from my days on the music scene and I had a decent relationship with him, unlike with so many others. At least I was pretty sure I had never burned him. I was beat from riding that damn bike and thought I’d take a rest and say hello. Who knew? Maybe I could get a job with Goldenvoice delivering messages. I thought that might be cool.
“Hey, man!” I said with a smile while I balanced on one foot, still straddling the seat.
It took Paul a moment to recognize me. “Bob?”
“That’s me. How are you, man?”
“Good to see you. Let’s go back inside and talk in my office. It’s noisy out here.”
The rush-hour hum and hiss of the traffic as it funneled through the artificial canyons of urban Hollywood made conversation difficult. I was glad to go inside, where the climate was controlled and cool, and I was even happier to take a few minutes to sit down in a comfortable office chair and take off a load. Paul sat across from me, his arms propped on his desk as he leaned forward. “So what’s up with Bob Forrest these days?” he asked.
“This is it, man. Workin’.”
“Working? Doing what?”
“Delivering messages and packages. You need anybody like that? It’d be cool to work for you guys.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“No. Check out my bike.” I pointed to the two-wheeler I had dragged in with me.
I gave him the rundown of my recent past and watched his expression. “So you’re not doing music anymore?”
“A little. Keeping things small.”
“Writing?”
“I mean, I wrote a few things and I’m jamming with this kid Josh a little, but it’s all pretty low-key right now.”
“Bob, you can’t just be delivering packages. You’re a songwriter, man. You got a demo?”
“I’ll bring you one.”
I felt damaged and afraid. I cleared my throat and shuffled my feet and we set up another meeting, for which I brought the demo. Paul listened to what I had delivered. He had a thoughtful look on his face. “You know, the partners and I are giving some thought to starting a record label, Bob, but we’ll need artists. You’d be perfect for what we want to do. A good fit.”
I thought it was cool that he didn’t hold my reputation for fuckups against me, but I was worried about my finances.
“I don’t know, man. A full-time music thing would leave me broke. I’ve got nothing left. A few bucks in a checking account is it.”
“We’d put you under contract, Bob. Get some money for you. It’d be better than riding around on a bike all day, wouldn’t it? One of our investors heard that song ‘Hurt.’ You know what he said?”
“No.”
“He said, ‘This song is
exactly
how I feel about things.’ He also said, and we agree, that this is music that needs to be heard.” I had a record deal.
Well, what was there to lose? I went home and felt pretty good. I was going to make another record. Back in business. This could work. On the other hand, I could work my ass off and have absolutely nothing to show for it. I had been down that road before.
I decided to call the band—Josh and I with an assist from Kevin Fitzgerald, who was from a group called the Geraldine Fibbers—the Bicycle Thief. The name came from Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 movie about a man on a search for the stolen bike he needs to earn a living, which had some parallels to my current life and struck me as somehow apt. And it had an arty connotation. De Sica’s style also conveyed something of what I hoped to achieve: a gritty, unflinching realism that came out of my own experiences and feelings. Josh and I jammed and rehearsed and I began to put the songs together. Max was out one day when the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Is Max there?”
“No. She’ll be back later.”
“Can I leave a message? It’s Jill.”
“Sure. Let me get a pencil.”
Jill left her message and I wrote it down carefully on a piece of paper that I placed neatly next to the phone. Then it struck me: “I have a song here.” It’s weird how it works, but that incident captured how I felt as I made the journey from Old Bob to Newer Bob. In the old days, I might not have answered the phone at all. If I did, and the call wasn’t for me, I’d likely have forgotten about it. Drug addiction breeds a special kind of selfishness. Since I’d cleaned up, I was gradually remembering how to be respectful and courteous. Pencil still in hand, I scribbled down some lyrics under the note “Max, Jill Called.”
The telephone is ringing
But it’s not for me
Gotta remember to
Write a note Max Jill called
Gotta learn to be considerate
Our sound was spare and raw. Acoustic-driven. Unplugged. John Frusciante, who had by now gotten clean too, came by and would add guitar parts. Songs took shape and it all began to fall into place. Paul Tollett and his partner Skip Paige loved what they heard. They were now in the record business and I felt good that I was the reason the Goldenvoice label came into existence. I had what I thought was a great collection of songs. They were real and they took an unflinching look at my life. “The Cereal Song” was one that was special to me. It summed up everything: drugs, addiction, and where I was at. Over the song’s simple chordal structure punctuated with electric-guitar harmonics and jagged little fills, I sang:
Oh heroin, oh heroin
And cocaine and cocaine
Well, I loved them both
But they took my life, they took my friends
They won’t give ’em back
Well, I want ’em back
Oh, give ’em back now
It wasn’t rock-and-roll decadence anymore. It was regret and redemption. It was working regular, anonymous jobs and being out of the loop. It was dental problems. But I didn’t want to be saccharine about it. I wanted to be truthful. My teeth, from years of neglect and drug abuse, were a mess. It’s an occupational hazard. Ask Keith Richards and Shane MacGowan. When I smiled, it was a horror show. And worse, I couldn’t eat much more than mushy, half-liquid gruel. It was a drag, but it inspired a stanza about what drugs had given me in return for all the years of devotion I had given them:
And what has it gotten me?
Just some teeth I can’t chew
My favorite cereal with
Bleak, but truthful. The song crystallized every pain and regret I felt about what I had done to myself and what I had seen happen to my friends. Where had it gotten me? I had an answer for that:
Sometimes I’ll get sad
Or I’ll get mad
About where I should be
And where I am and I wanna go back
But where has it gotten me?
Thirty-five years old now
I wash dishes in a restaurant
An angular solo by John Frusciante fleshed out the sound of “The Cereal Song” and we had something that was, I thought, one of the best things I’d ever written. This album was my masterpiece, and it was released by Goldenvoice in 1999. The record got mostly positive reviews.