Worse, I was so in awe of all these people and what they had done in the past that I listened to everything they said, no matter how ridiculous. Al Kooper is a great guy and a talented musician, but by the time I worked with him in 1988, he hadn’t written a hit since “This Diamond Ring” for Gary Lewis and the Playboys back in the midsixties. Flea, who was aware of my difficulties, said, “Don’t you see, man? You need to be back in that little room and to play with guys in your own band.”
He was referencing the little twin bungalows that sat at the southeast corner of Fountain and Gardner in the heart of Hollywood, where I had lived with the band in a pair of ramshackle cottages that first saw life in the 1930s but were now so weathered and had sheltered so many lives through the years that they stood as haggard and rickety as I was. It was a world away from the sterile Hollywood Hills environment that I’d used my record company advance to put myself in.
Fountain and Gardner was a real paradise for me. It was the last place I had felt creative, as we rehearsed in the second house’s front bedroom. I wrote “Sammy Hagar Weekend,” probably the band’s biggest hit, from our album Stormy Weather, there. It was creative and vibrant and cheap. The band members had paid $100 a month for the rehearsal space and I paid $215 for my rent. Keith Morris, front man of Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, had converted the garage of the other bungalow and called that home. It was a chaotic scene, but I could work there. The place was always packed with local musicians and people visiting from out of town. In the back, we had a garden with a patio just made for drinking. Billy Zoom, the splayed-legged, Gretsch-slinging guitarist from the band X, had earlier purchased a brand-new bread truck with his bandmates and then had gotten down to the serious business of converting the inside of the hulking machine to a rolling hideaway. When he finished his project, the results were outstanding. It had heat, comfortable couches, a television, and an upper loft area for sleeping. He was a craftsman, and when X had gotten tired of their machine, Thelonious Monster bought it and parked it in the garden just to have another area in which to relax and enjoy this little private world we had created.
It was like being in a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of faces, some that were well-known on the scene and others, like those of the groupie girls, that were more anonymous. It didn’t matter because everyone was always welcome. The guys from the Sunset Strip metal band Ratt would drop by, and their hulking guitarist Robbin Crosby would stay with us for days. Alterna-funksters Fishbone were regulars too, as were the guys from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Hillel Slovak was always lurking around somewhere, as was his posthumous replacement, John Frusciante, who played with the Monster for a while.
I spent eighteen frenetic, fulfilling, and productive months in that little self-contained world, where I wrote, played music, and just did whatever the hell I wanted to do, whenever I wanted. And those times when we got wasted on the patio and passed around an old acoustic guitar allowed me to make up the songs that eventually led to a bidding war between RCA and Capitol to sign the band. “Leave me alone, leave me alone,” I wrote. “Leave me alone in my own backyard. I don’t need to be Bob Dylan, I’m Bob Dylan in my own backyard.”
“Those are the same chords you used for ‘Sammy Hagar Weekend,’ man,” said John Frusciante when I played it for him. It didn’t matter. I was having a ball and so was everyone around me. Anything was possible there. I would come home some nights to find Karl Mueller, the bass player for Soul Asylum, in my bed in the living room entertaining some girl he had just met, so I’d shuffle to the den, only to find Robbin Crosby shooting speedballs in there. Oh well. There was nothing left to do but go back downstairs and out to the patio and get into whatever might be happening out there, or go next door and watch television with Keith Morris. I was never one to play the heavy and kick people out. Besides, I discovered fairly quickly that being buzzed at two thirty in the morning in a crazy environment was the perfect thing for writing down some useful material. That never happened in that whole dismal year at RCA. It was doomed from the start. I was not wired to work like that. With a band, songs come together organically, naturally. I started to believe that songs like “Sammy Hagar Weekend” were flukes. I didn’t think I could write like that anymore.
The drugs and alcohol didn’t help. It became obvious that with each week that passed, I cared less and less about writing good songs. I was too caught up in doing drugs and playing the part of a big shot. I was insufferable. And yet, I had the notion that the one thing I loved and the one thing in which I took pride—my songwriting—was being destroyed by my use of drugs. Writing was something that I cared about and here I was tossing it away.
Danny and Nick, my managers,
