Danny and Nick, my managers, begged me to record just one good song. It could even be a cover song, but all the others would have to be written or cowritten by me so I could get the publishing rights. If I had just been able to take songs from everybody and do those, I might have been able to make a decent album. After a year of this, RCA gave up on my ever writing a big hit. But Bob Buziak still had faith in me. “We can sell Bob,” he’d say. “He’s an interesting character. He’s got dreadlocks. Let’s put him in an Armani suit and pick covers for him to do.” There was the idea to have me possibly contribute something for a movie soundtrack, and RCA decided that I would sing Jimmy Ruffin’s 1966 Motown hit “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.” Anthony Kiedis rapped over the outro. As soon as they brought in the female backup singers, I left the studio and went home. “If this song gets the plays we think it will, it’ll be huge. It can be the lead track on the album!” said the executives at RCA. The song was never released. I still don’t even know which movie they planned to ruin with this poorly conceived attempt to manufacture a hit. This felt like the lowest I could go. A few years earlier, major American newspapers had said I was Bob Dylan. Now I was Greg Brady from
The Brady Bunch,
singing somebody else’s song and wearing somebody else’s suit. It was just like the episode where record-industry slicksters with blow-dried hair and polyester shirts tried to shape him into a teen-pop star named Johnny Bravo. Was this what I had become?
Flea and Anthony and almost everyone else I knew pointed me toward rehab. “You have to go, man,” they said. “Look at yourself.” The thought terrified me. My identity was wrapped up in being wasted. It was who I was. It was what made me uniquely me. “Fuck you guys! You’re supposed to be my friends. You should be supportive! I never said shit when you guys were slamming dope.”
“Because we were addicts, Bob. Now it’s just you.”
Those words stung. True, we had all been addicts, but Flea had cleaned up right after we had all moved into the La Leyenda. Anthony had stuck with it longer, but he had managed to kick his habits recently. They hit even harder when, alone at night, I listened to those demos I had recorded for RCA. I couldn’t escape the horrifying fact that drugs and booze were ruining whatever skills I had as a songwriter. Worse, I had started to not care. I liked to pretend I was still having fun and that drugs somehow made me cool. Weren’t all rock stars supposed to be wasted? That my friends couldn’t handle the lifestyle just showed how much stronger I was than them. That’s what drugs do sometimes. They can convince a man that wrong is right and right is wrong. When he wakes up in the morning and is dope-sick and miserable, he doesn’t say, “This stuff is killing me.” No, he bangs up a shot, and as the sickness eases he tells himself that he’s never felt better in his life. Suddenly, he’s Superman.
And then I got the phone call. Professionally, I may have felt fucked up, but on the surface, everything else was seemingly great. I had a cool pad in Mount Washington just north of downtown. I slept a sound, dreamless sleep in the custom-made bed Christian Brando, Marlon’s kid, had built just for me. A preternaturally sexy Playboy model shared the mattress with me. It was almost perfect. Or at least it was until six o’clock that morning, when the phone on the nightstand let out a shriek and I bolted upright. The sun had yet to break the horizon but it was close enough to fill the room with that weird blue glow that isn’t day and isn’t night. The phone screamed again and Ms. Playboy let out an annoyed little moan and burrowed deeper under the covers. I grabbed the receiver. A call at this hour is never good. “Hello?” I said. It was more of a question than a greeting.
“Hey, Bob! What’s up?” said a cheery voice on the other end.
The voice was familiar, but my sleep-fogged brain couldn’t quite place it. “Who is this?” I asked.
“It’s me, man. Al Kooper. Have you heard the news?”
Oh, God. Somebody’s died, I thought. I hesitated. Did I really want to know? “No, dude. I’ve been asleep. It’s six o’clock in the fucking morning here.”
“Your boy got fired, man,” said Al.
“Huh?”
“Buziak’s out. Gone. Big investigation or something over there.”
“What the fuck does that even mean, Al?” I asked.
“It means you better figure out something fast,” Al replied. I said good-bye.
It was too early to call Bob at RCA, so I killed time as best I could. I drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and watched CNN, but the time still dragged. At nine o’clock, I called his office. The receptionist put me through right away. He picked up. “Are you okay?” were the first words out of my mouth.
“Yeah. I’m fine, but I guess you heard. I’m not going to be overseeing your record anymore. In fact, I’m not going to be around to protect you anymore. The drugs, Bob. The inability to write a hit. People around here don’t have confidence in you. You should probably call Danny and Nick right away,” he said.
“They can wait,” I said. “How are you?” I asked.
“Bob, when guys like me get fired, we get lots and lots of money. I’m fine. You need to call Danny and Nick now,” he said again.
“Hey, I don’t care if RCA drops me,” I said. “I have a firm three-album deal. They’ll owe me a lot of money if they do that.”
“Call Danny and Nick,” he said one more time. Click.
I can’t say I was surprised when RCA dropped me. I got some buyout money. What else was there to do but get the band together? I spent the money I had gotten from the buyout to purchase everyone new equipment and to make them feel comfortable with me again after I had left them high and dry when I signed with RCA. Thanks to the competitive nature of the music business, we got a deal with Capitol pretty quickly. They said all the right things: “You know why it didn’t work with RCA? That company doesn’t
get
you, man! You’re a
rock band
. RCA tried to make you into something you aren’t. We know how to do this. The budget will be tight, but you’ll be in a band again and you’ll be on the road three hundred nights a year and we’ll make sure you get on college radio.”
We signed and recorded
Beautiful Mess
. Of course, Capitol wanted a hit too, and that record didn’t have one single on it. Oh, it had some fine music and a lot of great guests, but no singles. And then came the never-ending bus tours. Eighty-nine shows in ninety-three days, two weeks off, and then start the whole thing over again. I’d hide in my hotel room and do drugs.
“Hey, where’s Bob? We need to hit the road!”
“He’s holed up in his room. Says he’s not coming out.”
“What? What the fuck’s wrong with that guy?”
“Says someone needs to call the label. He wants a bigger per diem. Says he won’t come out otherwise. Wants money now.”
I could hear an angry fist pound at the door. “Goddamn it, Bob! Let’s go!”
Something had to give, and I suspected that would be me. It was 1992 and a trip to rehab was in my immediate future. I had been down that road before.
They always say that nuthin’s perfect … Trust me, I’m well aware of that.
—“Nuthin’s Perfect,” Thelonious Monster
I
n late January of 1989, under the low lights of a fancy Hollywood restaurant called Citrus, I sat with people I trusted and listened to their concerns. It wasn’t an intervention. At least it wasn’t in the traditional sense of how you might think of it. Everyone sitting at the table knew me well enough to realize that any ham-handed attempt to scare me sober wouldn’t work.
“You gotta do it, man. You need to straighten yourself out,” said Anthony, who had himself recently taken the cure.
“Anthony’s right,” said my girlfriend Marin.
Danny and Nick, businessmen to the bitter end, just asked me how my songwriting was going. I didn’t have a good answer to that. It wasn’t going at all. I played with my food while everybody else ate and talked at me. By the end of the meal, I felt like I really didn’t have a choice. I agreed to go to treatment. Time to lose my cherry.
All drug addicts go through rehab, Bob,
I told myself.
I knew I did a lot of drugs, but was I really as bad as they all seemed to think? By any measure, for a young guy, I did all right. I lived in a house in the Hollywood Hills, I had money in the bank, and I ate at the Musso and Frank Grill every day for breakfast. They knew me there. “Right this way, sir!” the ancient waiter in the red vest would say as he led me to one of the plush booths. “Shall I bring you the usual?”
“Yes,” I’d say, and add, “But yesterday the bacon wasn’t cooked enough. Can you make sure it’s right today?”
“Absolutely, sir! May I get you something from the bar?”
“Vodka and orange juice, man.”
“Excellent choice as always, sir!” he’d say, and smartly march to the bar and quickly return with my order in a tall, cold glass. And there I would sit, sipping my drink until the food arrived. My order was always the same: a couple of the joint’s famous flannel cakes—thin, golden pancakes of an uncommonly large diameter, topped with fresh creamery butter and genuine maple syrup—accompanied by a pillow of fluffy scrambled eggs the color of lemons accented with a sprig of fresh dill and a couple slices of crisp bacon.
I lived a sweet life. How many people could say that? But the more my friends talked, the more I became convinced I had a problem. I may have been an alcoholic and a drug addict, but it was still hard for me to really believe it. I thought I had solid control over my habits. When I was at home with Marin, I only smoked heroin. It was my little concession to the domestic life. How many hard-core junkies could stay off the needle like that?
“Please, Bob, just go,” Marin said. It made sense. She came from Hollywood royalty: her dad was actor Dennis Hopper, and her mother was actress Brooke Hayward. Her grandmother was Margaret Sullavan. Her mother’s great-grandfather was Monroe Hayward, a former United States senator from Nebraska. Marin grew up on the East Coast and attended prep schools with the Fonda kids. She had gone to Ivy League Brown University. Life with me was something she wasn’t exactly prepared for.
They wore me down. By the time the check arrived, I had agreed to go to rehab. Two days later, on February 2, 1989, I found myself at LAX and wondered if I had made a mistake.
I’ve had better mornings, for fucking sure,
I thought. It was one of those shatteringly clear Southern California winter mornings that happen when the dry Santa Anas—the hot, seasonal winds that blow in from the desert—scrub the skies clean and all the happy, normal people of Los Angeles give hosannas and praises in thanks that they don’t live in some barren, ice-bound part of the country. They walked around with a particular look on their faces, a frozen rictus that seems to barely disguise an inner scream. Or maybe they really are happy. It’s always hard to gauge people here in L.A. It’s plastic and fantastic, just like you’ve heard. At the moment, I hated the sunshine and the blank-faced happiness it inspired, and it filled me with disgust.
I was on a Northwest Airlines flight bound for the heart of the snowy Midwest. I was a little bit dope-sick and a whole lot hungover. I made my way to the center of business class and found my seat. I wanted to bolt as soon as I sat down. I fought the overwhelming urge to run back to the gate and catch the first taxi home. I’m not a good flier. I’m not a good passenger. I don’t like to wear my seat belt. I don’t like to keep my tray in its upright and locked position, and I don’t like to stow my gear in the overhead bin. The whole machine of air travel is made of rules and regulations and even under the best of circumstances, I have difficulty with it. There was one thing about air travel that I did like, though, and that was vodka and orange juice. I needed mine right now.
I tried to hold it together while the pretty, plasticized attendant gave her practiced rundown of what we were supposed to do in the event of an emergency. Whether over land or water, it didn’t seem to me to matter. If something happened, we all knew we were completely fucked. Going down might have been the kindest nudge that fate could have given this bird. The whole thing was out of my hands anyway. No sense in being gloomy and doom-struck. I just wanted my drink.
Before I left for the airport, I had stood alone in the bathroom in front of the mirror and smoked a generous quantity of black-tar heroin. I put a blob of the dark, sticky resin onto a piece of creased foil and held a disposable Bic lighter under it to slightly melt the dose. With a McDonald’s plastic straw clenched between my teeth and a flame under the foil, I caught the thick, almost oily smoke that slowly boiled up along the crease like a pyroclastic flow in reverse and pulled it deep into my lungs. I was well rehearsed in the technique and never wasted any of my stash. Even now, with my shaking hands and distracted mind, I could have pulled it off while wearing a blindfold. There were a lot of unknowns in my immediate future, but this wasn’t one of them. I knew exactly what came next, the warm embrace of an old chemical friend and a sense that everything would be just fine. Of course, I was on dope, so, really, what the fuck did I know?
I watched my reflection in the cold depth of the mirror and saw my pupils contract to pinpoints while a rush hit me deep down in the viscera and spread to the outskirts of Forrest County, USA. The mirror bit was a little ritual I had. It allowed me to see what happened to me. It assured me that the stuff was working. In a nod to choreographer Bob Fosse and the movie
All That Jazz,
I fanned the fingers of both hands in front of my face and whispered, “Showtime!” at the gaunt and chalky visage in the mirror.
My adventure had begun.
I sat in my seat aboard the Northwest 737 and I could feel my anxiety start to build. When would this peppy attendant stop with the flight safety rundown and get on to the important things, like serving me my booze? She droned on and I sensed movement as the plane taxied down the runway. There was a brief pause before the hum of the engines turned into a banshee’s feral howl and the awesome force generated by those screaming turbines pressed me back into my seat like I was a piece of putty. Good. Maybe I could just disappear. I felt conspicuous in the foam recess of my little nest. Something inside of me churned and bubbled and it was a bad feeling.
That was forgotten when I heard the announcement, “Your attendant will now take your drink orders.” Relief was just an order away. When the attendant stopped next to my row, I put on my best face and worked the charm angle: “Two double vodkas with orange juice, please!” It was important to keep up my vitamin C intake. It was also important to keep up my hustle. Dreadlocked musicians like me weren’t seen as rock stars by the general public back then. We were freaks, and freaks were dangerous and under scrutiny. The attendant was a lovely young woman. She looked almost military in her uniform, but she was nice. She had a sense of humor and exhibited the kind of mercy usually possessed only by those who nursed the terminally ill. “We’ll just pretend one of those drinks is for whoever is sitting here,” she said, nodding toward the empty seat beside me. I liked her. So this is what they meant by “the friendly skies.”
“We’ll serve them one at a time,” she joked.
“Make sure you remember me,” I shot back as she gave me my plastic cup filled with ice, my orange juice, and four tiny bottles of airline vodka. I declined her offer of free peanuts.
I don’t think I ever enjoyed a drink so much. The cold bite of the ice that rattled hollowly in the plastic cup, the sweet tang of the orange juice, and the tasteless after-burn of the vodka was beautiful. As the mixture absorbed the surrounding light it took on the appearance of some strange, unnamed gem. As I drank, I could feel myself stutter-start to rough, shambling life. The medicine was doing its work, I thought, and I felt my strength and confidence return as I leaned back and made myself comfortable. Now I was starting to feel good. I felt even better when I finished my second double … and I ordered two more.
I mean, seriously, what the fuck was I doing here? My mind snapped back to the present. I was on my way to Hazelden, a rehabilitation center planted squarely in a bucolic and serene setting in the generic-sounding town of Center City, Minnesota, where alcoholics, pill heads, junkies, blow monkeys, and every other type of drug funneler, drinker, miscreant, and fuckup known to man or beast could start that long, unsteady walk toward sobriety and what I had been told was a better life. I wasn’t half convinced. I felt I had been conned. Now, up here in the clear blue sky, above the clouds, it all seemed like such a ridiculous situation. I was on a two-and-a-half-hour flight by myself, so it gave me some time to think, but I really only needed five minutes to formulate my plan: Forget Hazelden, forget rehab, and forget any half-assed reformation. I would connect at the airport in Minnesota and go on to New York City. Sure, everyone I knew would be mad at me, but it was my life and no one pressured me into anything I didn’t want to do or didn’t believe in. This whole flight had been a mistake and I needed to move forward. I’d go to New York, where things were cool and where I could be myself and avoid people who wanted to hassle me about how I chose to live my life. They’d get over it.
I was still working out my plan when the plane swooped out of the sky and touched down in Saint Paul. All airports are the same: You leave the placental safety of the plane and get squeezed out into an explosion of sound, light, and shiny surfaces. I felt like my feet were moving through heavy syrup. I really needed to find a connecting flight and get to New York …
now
.
But as I craned my neck and ran down my options, out of place in this Midwest bustle where people said “Excuse me” and “Pardon me, sir,” I saw an odd little gnome of an old dude who was holding up a sign that read bob forrest. I had so much on my mind that it took me a second to realize that he was there for me. He was such an unusual sight, standing there in his shirtsleeves and suspenders when outside the cocoon of the terminal it was well below freezing. He intrigued me. I walked up and introduced myself. “Hi. I’m Bob.”
“Are you ready to begin the greatest adventure of your life, young man?” he said through a completely sincere and friendly grin. Had I just stepped into a cartoon? I felt like I was on acid.
I thought to myself,
What the fuck
is
this?
but I had to admit, I felt comfortable around this little guy and walked out with him to the official Hazelden patient delivery mobile in the parking lot. It was absolutely nondescript, like something an undercover cop would drive. I got in and the little guy, Sonny, was a ball of positive energy. He had done this enough that he knew the minds of the clients almost better than they knew them themselves.
“So, before you saw me, you were planning to run, weren’t you?”
“New York,” I answered. “I was going to go to New York.”
“You need money to be bad,” he told me.
We drove on through the countryside for a number of silent, wintry miles. It was peaceful. I enjoyed studying Sonny and his calm demeanor. He was a unique specimen. We drove through a gate at the edge of the property and I felt like I had been delivered to a college campus. Hazelden was far from the type of grimy prison my worst nightmares had conjured. It was pleasant and nonthreatening, even though I still had no idea what to expect. Sonny parked and brought me to the detox unit, which was also the check-in area. They were expecting me. I took one look around and thought,
This is how things are supposed to be done
. Presentation is everything, and the spotlessly clean lobby and my orderly room put me at ease. There were a nurse and a doctor who were friendly, kind, and professional. They knew what they were doing. They took my vitals, checked me out, and got my medical history.
“Surgeries?” asked the nurse.
“I lost part of my finger,” I said, and held up the stump so she could see. I had been on a bike when I was eight years old and a parked car’s door suddenly opened. I slammed into it at thirty miles per hour and my finger was caught in the hand brake. It was damaged beyond repair, never to return. She winced when she saw it.
“History of mental illness?” she read off the sheet attached to her clipboard.
“Is drug addiction a mental illness?” I joked. She smiled.
At least they’ve got a sense of humor around here,
I thought.
“Any allergies to medication?” the nurse asked.
“Not so far,” I answered. She gave me a quizzical look. “No,” I said, clarifying.
“Okay, then. We’re ready to get started,” she said, and stood to leave. “A nurse will be in shortly. Just sit tight.”
I had barely shifted in my chair when another nurse brought in some medications. “Bob, this is Librium. It will help with any alcohol withdrawals you may experience.” I swallowed the pill with some water she handed me.
She had a another pill. “Now, this one is chloral hydrate,” she said. “It will help a little with the heroin withdrawal.” I swallowed that one too.
Finally, she handed me something I recognized. “This,” she said, “is Valium. It’ll just keep you calm. You may experience some agitation and this will help with that.” I could feel the Valium kicking in and I was taken to my room, where I went to bed. Someone on staff came in and monitored me at regular intervals.