Authors: Bobby Blotzer
I think the biggest reason was that I've always had this uncanny ability to recall dates. Almost any date. I still do, obviously, because I've ratted off several of them in this book. Although, I must admit that at this age, my memory isn't as keen as it was 5 years ago.
It's actually very easy for me to do. I've always associated events in my life with the music I was listening to at the time. I recall events from the past by relating them to the songs I hear. I give it a context of music.
It was a sad, depressing time. I would study the judge while Stephen was on the stand. Stephen would be tripping himself up, stuttering and just fucking things up overall, especially during cross-examination.
The judge wasn't being obvious with his body language, but there were times he would look over at me with an incredulous look on his face at something Stephen had just said. The judge and I would lock eyes, and all I could do was raise my eyebrows and shrug.
It was a joke that wasn't funny.
It reached a point where Stephen had, let's just say, brought his credibility into question so many times on stand that it was clear he wasn't being taken seriously. Honestly, I don't know that Stephen was intentionally lying. He's one of those people who will tell himself something in his head so many times that he begins to believe it. I really feel that this was one of those situations. He had convinced himself that this was the truth, but it wasn't.
Warren was uncomfortable on stand. He just wasn't good up there, so our lawyer made me the primary witness. We also had our agent come up. Our manager testified.
Stephen was buried, and we won the case, as much as you can win something like that, anyway.
We won the trial and were awarded $478,000 plus $300,000 in legal fees. To this day, that money hasn't been paid. Stephen went through a bankruptcy to get out of it. So, we made a deal with him.
We didn't want to have another trial where we grind him beneath our heel on this bankruptcy thing. The precedent was set so that anyone who had "willful intent" to avoid a court ordered fine by filing bankruptcy, the bankruptcy wouldn't apply. However, you still have to prove that "willful intent" in court. We were so sick of court and lawsuits that we told Stephen, "Look, we'll let you off the hook on this.” We came to a mutually agreed to amount, and spread the payments over five months.
Warren and I had spent a fortune fighting that lawsuit, and all the pain and heartache it put us through couldn't get over with quick enough. At least as far as I was concerned.
As nasty as this whole thing was, even if we went our separate ways now, I don't think I could bring myself to go after him. It would cost him a million dollars before it was over, and the guy has had it pretty hard, already. Granted, he brought it on himself, but to his credit, he's trying to put himself back together.
Who am I to try and crush him? I'm not interested in ruining the guy's life. He's got one more payment, which will even us out for what we spent. After that, it's all Monopoly money, and I just want to forget all about it.
In truth, I don't care about it anymore.
With the trial finally behind us, 2002 was set to be a better year. But, that wasn't to be.
The Metal Edge Rockfest Tour asks us on. It was going to be us, Warrant, Dokken, Firehouse and LA Guns. That tour was booked through a very disreputable agency, whose name shall remain unspoken. Nonetheless, there was a lot of shady bullshit going on during that tour. They went with any promoter they could get, and with all those bands, it was a pricey ticket.
That tour was the first time I had to deal with Don Dokken since our little blow up at the Motorhead concert three years before. With all the names on that card, it was ripe with the potential of ego clashes. Complicate that with the shady promotion and my personal past with Don, and it wasn't looking like a fun tour.
When Dokken came onto that tour, they were really quick to DEMAND that they close! They were going to be the headliners! I figure it was a shot at RATT in general, and me in particular, but it was a non-event. We were only too eager to accommodate them. Truth is, we had played so many of those festival gigs in the past that we knew how they all went down. After sitting all day in the heat to watch bands, the crowd is pretty burned out by the time the last act takes the stage.
It's funny, because we never wanted to close that show, and we were prepared to fight so we didn't have to. Thankfully, Don made that easy on us by coming in with his grandiose demands. Because, sure enough, every night by the time Dokken went on, there was about a quarter of the audience left.
We had the best slot, because we were second up to Don. We would have the peak of the crowd's interest, so our shows were great. All these years, and the guy still hadn't learned the ABC's of this business.
We saw yet another classic Dokken meltdown while on this tour.
In Phoenix, during Warrant's set, Fred Coury and Eric Brittingham from Cinderella came up on stage to jam with those guys. They were playing some cover shit, like "Sweet Home Alabama", and some other stuff. Don storms up on stage.
The venue was "in the round", which means that the stage was in the center of the arena, with no backstage area. So the stage entrance was right through the middle of the crowd and up a long ramp. The style was made popular by Def Leppard during their "Hysteria" tour. The crowd sees Don stalking up on stage, and they think he's going to jam, so they start cheering.
He gets up there, and he's making the cutthroat motion. "Stop! STOP!” He grabs a microphone and starts yelling into it!
"I'm sick of you guys and all this fucking shit!” We watch Don have a nervous breakdown on stage.
It was a complete, "Oh, my God, I can't believe he's doing this" moment for all of us who watched it.
I mumbled under my breath. "He's fucking losing it.”
Mick Brown left the tour that night, and the bass player from LA Guns finished the rest of the tour on drums for Dokken. It was really bizarre.
I don't hate Don. I just wish the guy would normalize a little more. You know? It drives me crazy to hear anyone continually lie and build themselves up with complete bullshit stories and try to incorporate you into them. I have respect for his songs and his music. He's still like a brother, just a kooky brother that I don't deal with anymore.
Contrary to some of the things that Juan has said in the press, we did, as a band, try to take care of Robbin. There just came a point where his drug addiction was so out of hand that we knew anything we gave him, money wise, was going to go straight into his veins.
I wasn't going to do that.
I wasn't going to support the guy's habit, knowing what price he was going to pay. I had my own obligations at home, and there was nothing I could do that was going to help him. He had fallen out of touch with the band, and the only time we heard from him was if he needed money, or if we ran into him.
I did try to keep in touch with him through the 90's, but it was hard to keep track of him, which made it difficult to be consistent. Consequently, I didn't see his daily destruction, I only saw the graphic changes each time I would finally hunt him down.
Robbin was most put out with Juan. When Robbin was getting really sick, Juan wanted to put together a King tribute record. Robbin told me that he was really bent out of shape, because Juan was charging for studio time for the record.
Honestly, if what Robbin told me is true, that's bullshit. If you're going to make a tribute album for charity, donate the time. That's just common sense.
Robbin felt abandoned when he was in the hospital for so long. It's like everyone just forgot him. He felt betrayed that Nikki Sixx never came to see him, because those two guys were best friends for a long time.
It was a slap that Nikki ignored him like that. But, it was just so disturbing to go see King in that condition, man! I'd go and visit him, and every time I did, he was always up; always positive. He'd say things like, "Blotz, the doctors are saying I'm getting better. I'll get out of here soon, and I swear, I'm getting in better health. I'll be ready to get everything back together with the band.”
I'd be like, "That's great, bro. I can't wait.” But, inside, I'm just crushed for the guy, because I know…being up and being positive isn’t enough to change what’s happening to him.
He was so eager, but you could look in his eyes and know that he didn't believe it. It broke my heart to see him like that. I'd walk out of that place going, "I need a drink. NOW!”
King was this 6'5", larger than life, fucking Viking, and to see him in that condition was one of the most depressing things I've ever had to witness. He was a man's man. He just fucked it up. He fucked it up for himself, and he knew it.
I remember going to see him one time back in 1995, long before his two-year stint in the hospital. There's a tow truck on the street, and it's pulling this car out of the ditch. The thing looked like it had rolled out of Robbin's driveway and smashed into a tree.
I see Robbin come walking out of his house. He's got a huge out of control beard, and he's bare-footed. His appearance was shocking! He looked like a homeless dude.
I'm like, "Robbin, what's going on? Is that your car, man?”
He goes, "Yeah, the clutch gave out and it rolled into the tree. Just find a place to park over here.” I was ten seconds from just jetting right then, because he was really fucked up.
Still, I went ahead and parked.
I went inside, and the tow-truck goes off with Robbin's car. We went into his apartment, and it was so dingy and disgusting. I couldn't believe it.
I'm thinking, "This guy is living like this, now? What the hell?!?” The carpet was just black with filth. There was a fifty-gallon, exterior garbage can that had been drug inside and was full of empty liquor bottles, wine bottles, and beer cans. There were dirty plates and pizza boxes all over the place.
On the wall inside that apartment, the only piece of artwork in the entire apartment was a "Platinum For A Decade" wall mount that Atlantic had given us in 1990, commemorating ten million record sales in the U.S.
In 1999, after he had moved back to LA from El Paso, King had a North Hollywood apartment, which was a really bad part of town. I was going by to give him some money. That place was worse than the one in 1995.
Robbie Crane was with me that time, and we were both stunned at the conditions of that place, and of HIM! How could he have let himself come to this? I didn't understand.
It was really hard to watch someone you cared about degenerate like that, and know that you were powerless to stop it. King suffered a series of major events that completely changed him and drove him deeper into depression and drugs.
He used to be married to this chick named Laurie Carr, some Playboy centerfold gold-digger. She completely ripped him off in the divorce. I won't go into it here, except to say that like a lot of women, they hook into someone with money, and then use him up. Then they utilize the courts to ream him for everything they can get.
I had been in to see him several times in this convalescence home. The fact that the guy was laid up in that place, flat of his back for almost two years is more than I can stand. I can't comprehend what he went through. Just recently, I was laid up in bed with the flu for a week, and by the end of that run I was getting nuts. I'm going, "I've got to get out of this bed!”
When I'd go in, there he was, putting on the face of hope. He did get out for a short while, but he went right back in.
I went and spent Christmas Eve with him the year before he passed. I brought my sons, Michael and Marcus with me. Misty was still my girlfriend, and she came along. We brought him presents and all sorts of stuff.
I had a bunch of photos of him from the glory days blown up and framed, then hung up on his walls. He was so happy to see the kids. He was just tripping. They hadn't seen him in a real long time either, and it was just really touching. Really moving.
Warren went to see him that Christmas, too. He hung out with him for a while, and made the guy feel great. Someone told me that he said it was the best Christmas of his life.
In the end, Robbin was afraid that he was only going to be remembered as a loser junkie, who threw his entire life away. King died an early death, of a vicious habit, and he owned nothing in this world. He was used up. But, all of that aside, Robbin "King" Crosby was a loved man, whether he completely understood that or not.
It's a shame that he's gone, man. Everybody loved that guy; my mom, our friends, my kids, everybody. He was a consummate gentleman. He went out of his way to make sure everyone was happy, treated them all great. Anyone who was around the band, he was always, "Can I get you something, dude? Help yourself to that. Do you need anything?” He always made people feel comfortable.
You were always welcome with Robbin.
When I heard the circumstances about the way he died, I cried. He had gotten out of the hospital clean. He was in a wheelchair most of the time, but he was clean. The apartment he lived in was this tiny, little one bedroom, but he was making due.
Then he let this asshole loser of a friend move in with him. The guy was a junkie, and that was something King was never able to deal with.
It only took him a month before he had overdosed. Most people thought he had died from AIDS complications, but that's not the case. It was a massive overdose of heroin that killed the King.
All those years chasing the dragon, and he finally caught it. His demons drug him all the way to his grave.
I went to Robbin's memorial, down in La Jolla. We all did. That was a very uncomfortable situation. Juan and Stephen were there, and Warren and I were there. Everyone was doing their own thing, trying to ignore the others.
They took Robbin's ashes out into the ocean on surfboards, and then scattered them. Afterward, at a club in San Diego, Warren and I got up and jammed with some of Robbin's friends.
A lot of people had hoped that Robbin's death might bring together the band, but it didn't. Juan and Stephen wouldn't get up and play with us. The whole thing was really fucking lame. It was a very sad event.