“This is an important gig, Bob,” Nick said, chiming in.
I knew it. I could sense it. Here we were, primed for an eight o’clock show in front of forty different record company executives.
We blew it.
We were nervous. I had the brilliant idea to parody U2’s recent ZooTV tour, throughout which Bono and the lads commented on celebrity and media through the use of costumes, masks, and multiple large-screen televisions. They played stadiums. We were at McCabe’s. The microscopic stage cluttered with small-screen TVs just didn’t work. Worse, we were out of synch. Our shows had always been messy, but this one needed to be tight. It wasn’t. I showed up stone-cold sober and I couldn’t remember the last time I had done that. I tried my absolute best. Pete, who had just about reached the end of the line with me, didn’t give a fuck. It was another Thelonious Monster train wreck. Whatever game plan we had before we went onstage didn’t amount to anything. Everyone just did what they wanted to do. This was a crucial moment and even I realized that we had reached a point where we couldn’t be like this anymore. We needed organization. The poor performance we gave and the tepid response we drew devastated me. I knew we were good and I knew we could do better, but nobody but me seemed to want to put in the effort that night. We crashed and burned.
The bright spot was that Bob Buziak, then the president of RCA Records, was in the audience. He was seen as something of a genius because he had taken a bunch of old rock-and-roll hits and packaged them together as the soundtrack for the movie Dirty Dancing. He saw Thelonious Monster play at Raji’s, a popular Hollywood club, and he approached me after the show.
“Bob, I love your songs, man,” he said as he shook my hand.
“Yeah? Thanks. What other songwriters do you like?” I asked as I tried to figure out if he was a real music fan or just some slick businessman.
“Oh, so many. I’m a huge songwriter fan. Off the top of my head, I guess I’d say I like Tom Petty, Neil Young, Tom Waits …”
Well, at least we spoke the same language.
“I’d love to sign you, Bob,” he said, but there was a slight hesitation in his voice.
“You’d like to sign me, but …,” I said.
“I’m not interested in the band.”
I understood his reasons. He definitely didn’t want or need the trouble that a bunch of drug addicts would inevitably bring. He was a fan of songwriters. He had signed Lucinda Williams and Michael Penn. He liked things to be simple and easy with as little drama as possible. He offered me a deal and I signed immediately. I didn’t even think of the band. My ego told me that I was the rock star, not them. What else was I supposed to do? I had just come off Stormy Weather and that was a lot of work. After you write songs like that, you need to rest up and recharge and get your mind right for the next round. The only way I knew how to recharge involved lots and lots of drugs. But now that I was signed to a major label, I was under a microscope. There was a lot of money involved and I was expected to produce. Bob knew I was in no shape to flesh out a complete song, so he hooked me up with other songwriters and musicians in the hope that they might steer me toward that elusive Big Hit Record I seemed unable to write. There were some impressive people I was paired with. Al Kooper, who played with Dylan when he went electric; Pete Anderson, who had brought some dirty and authentic Bakersfield punch to Dwight Yoakam’s records; Stan Lynch, from Tom Petty’s band the Heartbreakers; Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar, a premier L.A. studio guitarist who had left a mighty footprint on the sound of every Los Angeles–based singer-songwriter from the early seventies. They were supposed to help me, but they shut down all my ideas.
“You can’t write a song about heroin, Bob!”
I can’t write a song about heroin? They say write what you know, and for the past several years, that had been what I knew best … along with alcohol and amphetamines. I was a doper. I was a doper before I started the band. It was who I was, I thought. Did people give Keith Richards shit when he wrote “Dead Flowers”?
Well, if I can’t write about heroin, maybe I can write about religion, I thought. Everybody can relate to that, right? The reaction was swift. “You can’t use Jesus’s name in a song title, Bob. Are you nuts? People get offended. People who buy records!”
I thought I’d write a love song. I tried to write one with Victoria Williams. I had always had a huge crush on her, but she was married to Peter Case. That pent-up emotion came out in our song. It was darkly beautiful. It was about a girl who committed suicide and the observations of a man who once loved her while he ate cake at her funeral. I played it for RCA … and they hated it. My manager Danny Heaps thought I was an idiot to even attempt to write something like that. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Bob?” he yelled at me. “You write a song about a girl who kills herself and you’re eating cake at her funeral? Who the fuck wants to hear something like that?” I started to become resentful. “If all the people I keep getting hooked up with are such great songwriters, why aren’t they writing hits for themselves?” I asked.
Maybe I just wasn’t paired with the right people. I went out to Nashville to work with country rocker Steve Earle, who had a reputation almost as wild as mine. He was high the whole time I was there and stayed holed up
