I wasn’t in the mood for his judgments. Not again. I could picture him after the show: “Goddamn it, Bob! Let’s just play the songs!” Yeah, well, fuck him. I didn’t have to take guff off of a drummer. I launched myself straight over the bass drum and through the cymbals and connected with him. We rolled around on the stage while we traded blows.
“Holy shit, you guys! Knock it off!” Chris yelled. I snapped out of it. “Oh, right. We’re at a gig. People paid to hear us.” Pete and I broke it up and we played our song. The shows were sloppy and chaotic and always threatened to fall apart at any moment, but they were also very punk rock. Cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and lots and lots of alcohol made me act foolish more than once. “You’re a fuckin’ mess, Forrest,” Pete said with barely concealed contempt. He was right. I was—but our audience dug the excitement.
Flea had come to a couple of shows and had a suggestion. “You guys need to make a demo record,” he said.
“We need a place to do it, man,” I told him.
“No problem. I have the hookup.”
He certainly did. He was pals with a guy named Spit Stix who had played drums in Fear when Flea was in that band. Stix worked as a recording engineer at a studio on La Brea, just north of Sunset Boulevard. It was a gray building called Rusk Sound Studios. A rather anonymous-sounding name, but the place was owned by Giorgio Moroder. He had won an Academy Award for his score to the movie Midnight Express in 1978 and had never looked back. His work in film and with disco and techno acts was legendary. But because he was in such demand, he was never at Rusk Sound Studios, so Stix let us sneak in at night and record. We were all proud of the results.
“Hey, Bob! Did you hear?” asked Chris one hazy afternoon.
“Huh?” I said as I followed a double rum and Coke with a big line of speed.
“Man, Brett Gurewitz from Bad Religion heard our demo!”
“And?”
“Jesus, Bob, try to focus. He loved it. You know he runs Epitaph Records. He wants to record us.”
“A record deal?” I said. “A real record deal?”
“Yes!”
This was impressive. Gurewitz came to meet us one night. “I’d really like to do a proper album with you guys,” he said. “I think Epitaph could really do something with an album.” We were all in. It may not have been the best deal in the history of recorded music, but it was the first major step for the Monster. Our deal gave us one hundred hours of studio time. With Brett as producer, we went to Westbeach Recorders in Los Angeles at ten every night, where we’d stay until six in the morning.
“Bob, try to stay sober. We’ve got work to do!” Chris or Pete would plead. I thought the drugs and the booze had worked well enough to get us to where we were, so why stop now? I may have been completely fucked up, but I showed up on time, contributed to the songs, and laid down my tracks. Baby … You’re Bummin’ My Life Out in a Supreme Fashion was released in 1986, and I was unprepared for the response it got. Not many months earlier, we’d decided to start a band. We weren’t seasoned songwriters or musicians, but now, with a growing reputation for unpredictability at our live shows and a new, professionally recorded album showcasing our act, the Los Angeles Times, the Herald-Examiner, and the New York Times all hailed the record as a rock-and-roll masterpiece and compared it to the Stones’ Exile on Main Street and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. What the fuck? How did that happen? It was a complete turnaround. Sixteen months earlier, I was just a failed roadie for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and now I was being called a genius in major American newspapers. It could have gone to anybody’s head, except for one important detail. Other than the fact that we had critical praise, nothing else had changed. I was still an unpaid aide-decamp for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which mostly meant that I hung out with them and offered suggestions, moral support, and the occasional critique. They never held my disastrous stint as a paid crew member against me, but they never put me back on the payroll either. I was broke.
I needed a job. Luckily, Jon Huck’s girlfriend Sosie Hublitz, who later became my second wife, was an art director in the movie business and she always looked out for us. She helped me get some jobs working as a production assistant. Robby Müller, a cinematographer, also helped us find work. I loaded furniture. I was a set dresser. You could always pick up some work on a rock video or a commercial for toothpaste or floor wax. In Los Angeles, there was always some kind of shoot happening. Jon Huck and Pete Weiss kept doing sound work. K. K. Barrett kept on with his production-design work. We were all wired into that film world. We felt like we were the coolest people in Hollywood. I may have been at the fringe of it all, but that business pays pretty well. I worked on a movie called The Boss’s Wife. One of the stars was Christopher Plummer. I probably made $10,000 just for moving furniture around. That went really far back then, although it could have gone farther if I didn’t spend nearly all of it on heroin and cocaine. But those film jobs allowed me to live and eat and be me, even if “being me” led to employment problems. Keeping any kind of job is difficult when you’re in a stupor.
The album didn’t help us get better gigs, either. Despite all the critical praise heaped upon Baby … You’re Bummin’ My Life Out
