Things were great at the Cathay, but they could have been better according to the owner. There was a problem. The place was divided into two sections, upstairs and downstairs. Downstairs was where the bands played and where the crowd stayed. Upstairs there was a beautiful, ornate bar that was left over from the club’s restaurant days. Very few of the customers used that bar. There was no draw upstairs. All the music and fun happened downstairs. The reluctance of the crowd to go upstairs was costing the place currency. The major moneymaker at any club isn’t the door, it’s the bar. The owner, Michael Brennan, had an idea. “People won’t leave the stage because they want to hear music. What if we have music upstairs?” I was twenty-one years old, loved rock and roll, and lived two blocks away. Michael approached me with his idea. “You’re here every night anyway,” he said. “You come in, play some records, and make a little money too.” His logic was flawless, and the truth is that I would have carried out his plan for free if he had asked. I started coming in five nights a week with a crate of records to spin through the bar’s sound system. I took care and consideration with what I picked to play. I had a vast collection of vinyl I had collected over the years that covered just about every genre of twentieth-century music. I’d play everything from scratchy Delta blues to early rock to psychedelia to the latest underground sounds from Europe. It worked. People started sitting at the bar because now it seemed like something was going on. People would come up, buy a drink, sit and talk and cool out, maybe buy another round or two, and then go back downstairs. I couldn’t believe my luck. I was in the right place at the right time. The gig supplemented my student money. I got $15 a night and, equally important, I got all the booze I could drink on the house. Best of all, I was in the center of the action at one of the coolest clubs in Los Angeles.
One night, I was in the DJ booth playing “Defunkt” by Defunkt when this shirtless, hyper, rubber-faced kid barged his way in like some sort kind of punk rock commando, took the needle off the record, and flipped it over to put on “Strangling Me with Your Love.”
“That’s a better song!” he yelled at me before he ran out on the dance floor and started slamming around with the rest of the moshers. I was dumbstruck. It displayed a total lack of respect, although I had to admit, it was a pretty ballsy move on the kid’s part.
“Who the fuck was that? Security! This kid just came in and flipped my record!” I yelled. The guards went looking for him, but he was a slippery little bastard. They couldn’t catch him. And he kept doing it all night. I was impressed by his persistence—and his taste in music. Finally, I managed to get him to sit still long enough to tell him, “Look, man, you can’t just come into my DJ booth and flip my records.”
He looked at me like I was insane and laughed. “I’m Flea. I play bass for Fear!” he boasted. “I can do anything I want!”
Another regular was Lori Paterson, who eventually became my first wife. She helped book talent for Club Lingerie. She must have seen something in me and we started a fairly dysfunctional relationship right away. She was a little older than me and had absolutely no trouble matching me shot for shot and line for line when it came time to drink or get high. And it seemed like it was always the right time to indulge, although neither I nor anyone around me saw what we were doing as excessive or over the line. It was just something to do to keep the party in constant motion. I moved in with her and one day, fueled by booze and speed, we drove to Victorville in the high desert across the San Bernardino county line and tied the knot. She had faith in her man’s talents and kept after her boss, a flamboyant Scotsman named Brendan Mullen, to let me DJ at the Lingerie. Whatever she said convinced him. I also grabbed a gig where I spun records at Eddie Nash’s Seven Seas club. My schedule was full and I worked every night. From Lori’s apartment in Beachwood Canyon, my nightly routine took shape. I’d wake up late. Drink, do drugs, and crate up the records I planned to use that night. I didn’t have a car. I didn’t need one. My days in Orange County had been spent on the deck of a skateboard, and I had a fine fishtail ride. Powered by gravity, I’d start at the top of the canyon, my crate of records cradled in my arms, and free-fall, high out of my mind, down to Gower to the Cathay de Grande. Sometimes, I’d slide onto Franklin, or I’d just highball it all the way down Beachwood to the Lingerie. You can build some frightening momentum on your way down that hill. If I was scheduled to work the Seven Seas, I’d hook onto Hollywood Boulevard. The stone paving that makes up the Walk of Fame is a fast surface and I could haul ass as I dodged pedestrians and balanced my records.
Now there was movement. My life had direction. I no longer felt the
