“You’re Bob Forrest, aren’t you?” she asked in a breathy voice.
“That’s me,” I said. I recognized her right off, but I didn’t want to seem starstruck.
“I love your band! The last record was great. I dance to it all the time.”
I snuffled back my postnasal drip, the result of the coke I had just snorted in the bathroom. “Can I buy you a drink?” I asked.
“I’m leaving. There’s a party up in the hills. Do you want to come?”
Of course I wanted to. She was beautiful.
“Here’s the address. I’ll see you up there.” She smiled.
I went and mingled, just like I did in my early days on the rock club scene, and if you’re anyplace long enough and often enough, people get to know you. Most of the young actors at that time were deeply into music, and they accepted me. It didn’t hurt that they liked my band. It wasn’t a superficial thing. They loved music the same way I did. It was passionate and deep. They understood the language. Actors these days might associate with the music scene because they think it’s a hip thing to do, but in the nineties, they embraced the cultural revolution the music represented.
Johnny Depp, in particular, had an innate understanding of and love for the Los Angeles music scene. He also had really good taste. I think the only other person who had as much feel for music was Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante, who lived, breathed, and slept it. Frusciante was what we all considered a true artist. The son of a Florida judge, his passions were his guitar, his music, and his drugs. I think he loved narcotics even more than I did, and he actively promoted them to anyone who’d listen.
I think Depp fit in with us because he had originally been a musician. He was an accomplished guitarist, and I hit it off with him right away. We already had mutual friends, and we formed a tight little group. Johnny and River Phoenix made up the actors’ wing, while John Frusciante, the Butthole Surfers’ Gibby Haynes, Ministry’s Al Jourgensen, and I held down the musician end. Most of us were seriously committed to our poisons of choice and no lectures, warnings, or treatments were going to dissuade us from our off-hours pursuits, which, in those days, involved a lot of coke. We spent a lot of time at John Frusciante’s house up in the hills above Hollywood, where Johnny would busy himself filming footage for a planned rock documentary.
“Hey, John,” I’d ask Frusciante as we cooked cocaine and baking soda on the stovetop and turned the mix into crack, “do you think it’s a good idea to have this stuff filmed?”
“I got nothing to hide,” said Frusciante, his unwashed hair falling across his face as he kept an eye on our kitchen chemistry experiment. “When did you get so uptight?”
“I’m not uptight. It just seems that this might be a bad idea.”
Frusciante shrugged. “Drugs are never a bad idea,” he said as he carefully dripped cold water into the jelly jar that held the cocaine mixture and started swirling it. The goop inside became a hard, white biscuit almost immediately.
“Dinnertime!” he called out.
We broke off a chunk and shoved it in a pipe. He was right, I reasoned; among this crew, who cared if anyone knew about our habits? Besides, the crack was calling.
River and Johnny, whose looks were their living, had to know when to say no. River—who loved to party—would clean up whenever he had to do a movie. I admired his fortitude. He had the enviable ability to just stop. Johnny mostly kept to the booze and didn’t use drugs. But when he was around us, they were always there. I think he was fascinated by it. I don’t ever remember Johnny joining in … but he liked being there in the middle of it all.
Johnny, flush with money from the Fox network’s teeny-bopper cop drama 21 Jump Street and his rapidly growing film career, along with actor Sal Jenco, had the idea to build a nightclub that would double as their own personal clubhouse. It made sense since Johnny and Sal always thought of themselves as a little self-contained club anyway. That’s how they approached the idea. I stopped by one night on my way back from the Whisky. From outside I could hear the knock of a hammer and the high-pitched whine of a tile saw. I knocked on the door and Johnny opened it, wearing a tool belt and knee pads and dressed like a workman. “Hey, Bob! Come in! You really have to see what we’re doing here!” He ushered me in and all I could smell was sawdust.
He beamed like a kid on Christmas. He was so proud of this space. Over in the corner, Sal pounded nails. Johnny laid the tile. They would call this spot the Viper Room. Johnny kept up the rundown: “It’s going to be great, man! We’re going to have bands in here!” Their idea was to create a great nightclub in Los Angeles for their friends. It didn’t hurt that Johnny was high profile. When the club opened in 1993, the first band to hit the stage was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The next night, the Pogues played. At that time, neither was what could be called a club band. They played big venues. The Heartbreakers had just done a gig at the Forum in Inglewood. But it seemed that every band wanted to play the Viper Room. It was a prestige gig, and the list of bands that played there was impressive: Oasis. Counting Crows. Joe Strummer. And the place only held about one hundred people.
I even booked some acts there. There was a young folksinger who was getting some buzz. He called himself Beck. Blond and blank eyed, he wasn’t much more
