“Hey, Bob, get the door,” said David. “We could all use some fresh air.” I gripped the knob to give it a twist and pulled. Nothing. I pulled again. The door was stuck. “Hey, Bob, quit fuckin’ around,” said David.
“I’m not kidding, man. This door’s stuck,” I said, and I wiggled the knob and pulled with both hands to emphasize the problem.
The Disco King kept his cool. “This ain’t good,” he said, but showed no panic as he leaned casually against the wall. The English girl, Gillian, seemed to come down with a sudden case of claustrophobia. She didn’t say anything, but her eyes widened like a cat’s during a thunderstorm and her breath came in short, sharp gasps. “Oh, my God,” she said quietly. Stephen didn’t say a word and faced the situation with typical English stoicism. Then David attempted to lighten the mood. “I wonder how much oxygen we have left in here,” he said.
Under the influence of cocaine, the conviviality and sparkling wit that can often result from a few well-managed rails is often replaced by raging paranoia and panic once the dose is increased. We had already gone well past any semblance of recreational use in that little room. David’s ill-timed reference to an old episode of TV’s
The Lucy Show,
the one that had Lucy and Mr. Mooney trapped in a bank vault, was meant as a joke, but people can get a little weird after they recognize that all avenues of escape are closed. They can get downright spooked if they’re gakked on coke. There was a crush at the door as everybody but the Disco King tried to claw his or her way out. It was a like a small-scale reenactment of the Who’s tragic 1979 concert at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati. Compressive asphyxia wasn’t even a remote possibility in that little room, but we all wanted out just the same. I gave a holler and hoped somebody on the other side of that door might hear. David ripped out one of his patented stage squeals. The Brits, being more reserved, just banged on the door with flattened palms. The Disco King merely observed the scene with detached amusement. Because the sound system at the Zero One was in maximum overdrive and the guests were caught up in buzzy little worlds of their own, no one heard our pleas. Or, if they did, they just figured it was private business and let it pass. We weren’t going anywhere. As that thought sank in, we all relaxed and caught ourselves. Then David said, “Man, I can’t believe we’re trapped like this.” That started another round of staccato raps on the door and screams to be rescued. After about two minutes of this idiot show, someone passed by and heard the ruckus. A good, strong push from the outside sprang the door from the jamb and we all tumbled out, looking sheepish. All except for the Disco King, who just adjusted his blazer and strolled out like a man in complete control of his surroundings. “That was
crazy
!” said David. We scurried off in different directions to our own ends with the understanding that what had happened in that room stayed in that room.
I thought about that code of silence as I sat with the Timmins group. I also could see how the party scene had changed over the course of the eighties. What started out as reckless good times at the beginning of the decade was rapidly devolving into something less fun. There were consequences. Bad press. ODs. Arrests. Tragedies. That kind of thing couldn’t be hidden forever in a town like this, although an army of press agents and managers tried its best to keep scandal, dangerous behavior, and dope-addled lunacy out of the public eye. More and more of my old party pals either had checked in, had checked out, or were knee-deep in the process of transformation. The newly reformed were fervent, and groups like the one Timmins ran, as well as other, more egalitarian rehab programs, gave us all a place of shelter and support. And, I had to admit, I thought things looked bright for me. I had a decent contract. My management worked tirelessly for me and it appeared that my music career was on the move. People trusted me again. They had faith in me. Sobriety was like a metamorphosis. But while I could see it happen to the people I came to know in Timmins’s circle, I couldn’t feel it happening within me. I was just going through the motions. So I went to more meetings and I talked one-on-one with people from all walks of life who supported and encouraged me and held themselves up as examples I could follow. It wasn’t like their message was that difficult to understand: Don’t get high. All fine and dandy in theory, but I felt like a fraud. When one of my old dope buddies offered me a taste, I didn’t hesitate and I found myself right back where I started. I put in eight months of sobriety for that first go-round and, until 1996, fell into a hellish routine of sobriety, another trip to rehab, and, always, the inevitable relapse. I racked up an impressive, if mostly failed, record of attempts to kick the habit. Before it was all over, I’d see twenty-six tries at a cure. But as I felt the dope hit me and I started to nod, all I could think in the crystalline moment was that the drug life was the best and most exclusive secret society of them all. And it was where I belonged.
I
t was junkie bravado. I figured everything was still okay. The money I had seen in ’89 was gone, but I had the keys to the Viper Room. The house in Mount Washington was gone, and I couldn’t pay the rent at the apartment I kept over on La Brea that I used as a place to arrange drug deals for my friends to ensure the survival of my own ever-increasing habit, but I still went on the road and played concerts. “Everything is okay,” I told myself. I couldn’t sense it, or maybe I just ignored it, but things weren’t as okay as I thought. They were on a steady, inevitable approach to critical mass. I had always loved the records of the old Delta blues singers ever since I first heard them as a kid. Trouble and hard luck were a bluesman’s best friends, but I wasn’t from Mississippi, and Hollywood in October of 1993 was a long way from the Delta.
I had been catapulted into this strange place once Thelonious Monster’s first album hit it big with the critics. It was a place where all things were possible and most things were permissible, an intersection where the worlds of music and film collided and partnerships and friendships were formed. A young actress, known to prime-time America for her work on a popular sitcom, approached me in a club.
“You’re Bob Forrest, aren’t you?” she asked in a breathy voice.
“That’s me,” I said. I recognized her right off, but I didn’t want to seem starstruck.
“I
love
your band! The last record was great. I dance to it all the time.”
I snuffled back my post-nasal drip, the result of the coke I had just snorted in the bathroom. “Can I buy you a drink?” I asked.
“I’m leaving. There’s a party up in the hills. Do you want to come?”
Of course I wanted to. She was beautiful.
“Here’s the address. I’ll see you up there.” She smiled.
I went and mingled, just like I did in my early days on the rock club scene, and if you’re anyplace long enough and often enough, people get to know you. Most of the young actors at that time were deeply into music, and they accepted me. It didn’t hurt that they liked my band. It wasn’t a superficial thing. They loved music the same way I did. It was passionate and deep. They understood the language. Actors these days might associate with the music scene because they think it’s a hip thing to do, but in the nineties, they embraced the cultural revolution the music represented.
Johnny Depp, in particular, had an innate understanding of and love for the Los Angeles music scene. He also had really good taste. I think the only other person who had as much feel for music was Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante, who lived, breathed, and slept it. Frusciante was what we all considered a true artist. The son of a Florida judge, his passions were his guitar, his music, and his drugs. I think he loved narcotics even more than I did, and he actively promoted them to anyone who’d listen.
I think Depp fit in with us because he had originally been a musician. He was an accomplished guitarist, and I hit it off with him right away. We already had mutual friends, and we formed a tight little group. Johnny and River Phoenix made up the actors’ wing, while John Frusciante, the Butthole Surfers’ Gibby Haynes, Ministry’s Al Jourgensen, and I held down the musician end. Most of us were seriously committed to our poisons of choice and no lectures, warnings, or treatments were going to dissuade us from our off-hours pursuits, which, in those days, involved a lot of coke. We spent a lot of time at John Frusciante’s house up in the hills above Hollywood, where Johnny would busy himself filming footage for a planned rock documentary.
“Hey, John,” I’d ask Frusciante as we cooked cocaine and baking soda on the stovetop and turned the mix into crack, “do you think it’s a good idea to have this stuff filmed?”
“I got nothing to hide,” said Frusciante, his unwashed hair falling across his face as he kept an eye on our kitchen chemistry experiment. “When did you get so uptight?”
“I’m not uptight. It just seems that this might be a bad idea.”
Frusciante shrugged. “Drugs are never a bad idea,” he said as he carefully dripped cold water into the jelly jar that held the cocaine mixture and started swirling it. The goop inside became a hard, white biscuit almost immediately.
“Dinnertime!” he called out.
We broke off a chunk and shoved it in a pipe. He was right, I reasoned; among this crew, who cared if anyone knew about our habits? Besides, the crack was calling.
River and Johnny, whose looks were their living, had to know when to say no. River—who loved to party—would clean up whenever he had to do a movie. I admired his fortitude. He had the enviable ability to just stop. Johnny mostly kept to the booze and didn’t use drugs. But when he was around us, they were always there. I think he was fascinated by it. I don’t ever remember Johnny joining in … but he liked being there in the middle of it all.
Johnny, flush with money from the Fox network’s teeny-bopper cop drama
21 Jump Street
and his rapidly growing film career, along with actor Sal Jenco, had the idea to build a nightclub that would double as their own personal clubhouse. It made sense since Johnny and Sal always thought of themselves as a little self-contained club anyway. That’s how they approached the idea for the Viper Room. I stopped by one night on my way back from the Whisky. From outside I could hear the knock of a hammer and the high-pitched whine of a tile saw. I knocked on the door and Johnny opened it, wearing a tool belt and knee pads and dressed like a workman. “Hey, Bob! Come in! You really have to see what we’re doing here!” He ushered me in and all I could smell was sawdust.
He beamed like a kid on Christmas. He was so proud of this space. Over in the corner, Sal pounded nails. Johnny laid the tile. They would call this spot the Viper Room. Johnny kept up the rundown: “It’s going to be great, man! We’re going to have bands in here!” Their idea was to create a great nightclub in Los Angeles for their friends. It didn’t hurt that Johnny was high profile. When the club opened in 1993, the first band to hit the stage was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The next night, the Pogues played. At that time, neither was what could be called a club band. They played big venues. The Heartbreakers had just done a gig at the Forum in Inglewood. But it seemed that every band wanted to play the Viper Room. It was a prestige gig, and the list of bands that played there was impressive: Oasis. Counting Crows. Joe Strummer. And the place only held about one hundred people.
I even booked some acts there. There was a young folksinger who was getting some buzz. He called himself Beck. Blond and blank eyed, he wasn’t much more than a kid. I had heard a demo of a song of his that had the funny title “MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack.” I had been given a copy of it when I had been on tour, and I loved it. I couldn’t stop playing it. When I got back into town, I saw Johnny. “You gotta have this kid Beck play here. He’s great.” Johnny, wired into the music scene like always, was aware of him, so we booked him. It was Beck’s first important gig in his hometown. He had a prime slot, ten o’clock on a weekend night. L.A.’s music scene at the time was not all that receptive to a solo neo-folk singer, and Beck knew he had to sell himself as something unique. He was also something of a performance artist. He had a crazy gimmick. In addition to his acoustic guitar, he would wear a gas-powered leaf blower on his back, just like the ones every landscaper and maintenance guy from the Hollywood Hills to the Malibu canyons strapped on as they did their magic on the homes and estates of the rich and pampered for whom they sweated and slaved. While a DAT machine played prerecorded music, Beck would dump a trash bag full of dried leaves, twigs, and yard clippings all over the stage; crank up his blower; and scatter-shoot the audience with vegetable debris. It was weird and it was goofy, but it was just the kind of thing that could help a fledgling folkie get some attention in ’93.
The night Beck took the stage at the Viper Room, Johnny was out of town. Beck did his act, complete with the leaf blower. Sal was going nuts, and not in a good way. I was watching the show and Sal was practically pop-eyed. “What the fuck is this kid doing, Bob?”
“Sal, he’s the guy that sings that song about MTV and crack. He’s great, isn’t he?”
“Get him the fuck off my stage!”
Poor Beck. The audience was hostile. They booed him. It was a train wreck. Here’s this twenty-three-year-old guy onstage who looks like he’s about fourteen but sings in the voice of a seventy-year-old black man from Arkansas … all while he blows trash and leaves into the audience. Some people tossed the trash back at him. Others yelled, “You suck!” Sal was livid. I said, “You have to wait until he sings the song about MTV!” Sal told the sound guy to shut down the PA.
“Sal, you’re a dick,” I said. “I’m telling you, this kid is great.”
Sal responded, “That kid ain’t fucking shit. And you’re not booking things here anymore, Bob.”
I went outside after and found a dazed and confused Beck on the sidewalk. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I thought it was a great show … but maybe the leaf-blower thing is too much. Just play your songs.” Beck was concerned. “Am I still going to get paid?” he asked. He was disappointed, but within the year, he was a local hero. He made the
Mellow Gold
album and you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing him. Now that he had made it, every hipster in town claimed to have been at that show and they all testified how weird, chaotic, and mind-blowing it was. The truth is, there were only thirty-eight people there that night, and they all booed because they didn’t understand Beck at all.
Despite that misstep, I remained part of the club’s inner circle.
Because everyone had such high profiles in those days, we knew we were being watched and we tried to be careful. The paparazzi were constantly skulking around and the supermarket tabloids paid big bucks for embarrassing photos of young TV and film stars. They didn’t seem to care about rock musicians as much. There was constant back-and-forth between Frusciante’s place and the Viper Room. His home wasn’t more than two minutes away from the club, and we’d all make these mad dashes over there.
“Hey, we’re going to Frusciante’s,” I’d say.
“Aw, man, there’s some creep with a camera out front,” Johnny might answer.
“Look, just lie down in the backseat. I’ll drive. They won’t follow me.”
I’d grab the keys and pile everyone in the back. Then I’d blast out of park and jet down Sunset.
“Turn right at the next light, Bob!”
I’d spin the wheel.
“Christ, Forrest, I’m getting seasick back here! Take it easy.”
“I think someone’s following us,” I’d say.
“Can you tell what kind of car?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a Benz.”
“Aw, fuck, Bob. Those photographers all drive crappy cars. Ease up.”
It was real cloak-and-dagger stuff, and kind of fun. We all lived close to one another. Johnny only lived a couple minutes’ drive from Frusciante’s house and the apartment I kept nearby. The Butthole Surfers’ Gibby Haynes, when he was in town, mostly stayed with Johnny. Sometimes I’d stay there or at Frusciante’s. I was hard to pin down. River usually stayed at St. James’s Club on the Strip, a flashy, high-end art-deco luxury hotel, also known variously as the Argyle or the Sunset Tower. The Viper Room was our headquarters, but Frusciante’s place saw almost as much use, although things had started to take on a dark and forbidding atmosphere there. It still didn’t stop anybody from dropping by. If any of us were working or out on tour, Frusciante’s house was the first stop as soon as we arrived back in town.
Frusciante’s place offered something the Viper Room had in short supply: privacy. But that also made it a liability. What had started out as a party place had devolved and spiraled into some dank drug den. Walls were covered with graffiti. Furniture was damaged. Walls and doors had huge, gaping holes. There was a current there—bad vibes and degeneracy. It was out of control and the kind of place that could make the hardest of hard-core junkies blanch and run in the opposite direction.
A few days before Halloween, Abby Rude, the wife of actor and writer Dick Rude, was set to celebrate her birthday. Dick had established himself as a punk rock screenwriter and actor through his association with British director Alex Cox and had worked closely with him on movies like
Repo Man
and the spaghetti-Western homage
Straight to Hell
. Abby was also involved in the film industry and worked as River’s personal assistant; her duties sometimes required her to prepare his vegetarian meals when on location. Her birthday celebration was held at the Hollywood Athletic Club on Sunset, an old, sprawling Spanish-style complex that had started out in the twenties as a health club but had been used since its construction for everything from housing the University of Judaism to being a very popular billiard parlor. In the mideighties, the property had been acquired by Michael Jackson’s family and housed offices, a nightclub with a two-thousand-square-foot dance floor, and one of the best sound systems in town, along with a restaurant and bar. It was a popular place for the Hollywood crowd to have private parties.
When I got there, River was already at the table. I hadn’t seen him in at least three months, since he had been in Utah shooting a movie called
Dark Blood,
in which he played a young, doll-making recluse awaiting the apocalypse on a nuclear test site in the desert. He asked me about his friend right away: “How’s John doing?”
“Dude, he’s getting worse all the time. Constant drugs,” I told him. “It’s madness up there at his place.” Frusciante’s house was even getting hard for me to visit. When I wasn’t at my apartment, I tended to stay with Johnny Depp. His place had a much more stable feel to it.
River seemed confused by what I’d just told him. He also may have been a little intrigued. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“I stop by nearly every day,” I said, “but it’s really fucking nuts there. The place is filthy. It’s a mess. John and everybody write all over the walls. Do yourself a favor and just stay away.”