“Writing?”
“I mean, I wrote a few things and I’m jamming with this kid Josh a little, but it’s all pretty low-key right now.”
“Bob, you can’t just be delivering packages. You’re a songwriter, man. You got a demo?”
“I’ll bring you one.”
I felt damaged and afraid. I cleared my throat and shuffled my feet and we set up another meeting, for which I brought the demo. Paul listened to what I had delivered. He had a thoughtful look on his face. “You know, I’m giving some thought to starting a record label, Bob, but I’ll need artists. You’d be perfect for what I want to do. A good fit.”
I thought it was cool that he didn’t hold my reputation for fuckups against me, but I was worried about my finances.
“I don’t know, man. A full-time music thing would leave me broke. I’ve got nothing left. A few bucks in a checking account is it.”
“I’ll put you under contract, Bob. Get some money for you. It’d be better than delivering messages all day, wouldn’t it? One of my investors heard that song ‘Hurt.’ You know what he said?”
“No.”
“He said, ‘This song is exactly how I feel about things.’ He also said, and I agree, that this is music that needs to be heard.” I had a record deal.
Well, what was there to lose? I went home and felt pretty good. I was going to make another record. Back in business. This could work. On the other hand, I could work my ass off and have absolutely nothing to show for it. I had been down that road before.
I decided to call the band—Josh and I with an assist from Kevin Fitzgerald, who was from a group called the Geraldine Fibbers—the Bicycle Thief. The name came from Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 movie about a man on a search for the stolen bike he needs to earn a living. De Sica’s style also conveyed something of what I hoped to achieve: a gritty, unflinching realism that came out of my own experiences and feelings. Josh and I jammed and rehearsed and I began to put the songs together. Max was out one day when the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Is Max there?”
“No. She’ll be back later.”
“Can I leave a message? It’s Jill.”
“Sure. Let me get a pencil.”
Jill left her message and I wrote it down carefully on a piece of paper that I placed neatly next to the phone. Then it struck me: “I have a song here.” It’s weird how it works, but that incident captured how I felt as I made the journey from Old Bob to Newer Bob. In the old days, I might not have answered the phone at all. If I did, and the call wasn’t for me, I’d likely have forgotten about it. Drug addiction breeds a special kind of selfishness. Since I’d cleaned up, I was gradually remembering how to be respectful and courteous. Pencil still in hand, I scribbled down some lyrics under the note “Max, Jill Called.”
The telephone is ringing
But it’s not for me
Gotta remember to
Write a note Max Jill called
Gotta learn to be considerate
Our sound was spare and raw. Acoustic-driven. Unplugged. John Frusciante, who had by now gotten clean too, came by and would add guitar parts. Songs took shape and it all began to fall into place. Paul Tollett loved what he heard. He was now in the record business and I felt good that I was the reason the Goldenvoice label came into existence. I had what I thought was a great collection of songs. They were real and they took an unflinching look at my life. “The Cereal Song” was one that was special to me. It summed up everything: drugs, addiction, and where I was at. Over the song’s simple chordal structure punctuated with electric-guitar harmonics and jagged little fills, I sang about my love for heroin and cocaine.
But it wasn’t rock-and-roll decadence anymore. It was regret and redemption. It was working regular, anonymous jobs and being out of the loop. It was dental problems. But I didn’t want to be saccharine about it. I wanted to be truthful. My teeth, from years of neglect and drug abuse, were a mess. It’s an occupational hazard. Ask Keith Richards and Shane Mac-Gowan. When I smiled, it was a horror show. And worse, I couldn’t eat much more than mushy, half-liquid gruel. It was a drag, but it inspired a stanza about what drugs had given me in return for all the years of devotion I had given them:
Just some teeth I can’t chew
My favorite cereal with
Bleak, but truthful. The song crystallized every pain and regret I felt about what I had done to myself and what I had seen happen to my friends. Where had it gotten me? I had an answer for that:
Thirty-five years old now
I wash dishes in a restaurant
An angular solo by John Frusciante fleshed out the sound of “The Cereal Song” and we had something that was, I thought, one of the best things I’d ever written. This album was my masterpiece, and it was released by Goldenvoice in 1999. The record got mostly positive reviews.
In October of that year, Paul Tollett launched the first Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. It was an ambitious project. It was a two-day event that featured five stages, all of it set up under the blazing desert sun. In that part of the world, not far from where I had lived as a kid, the brutal summer lingers on well into November. Goldenvoice brought together a lot of acts. The headliners were Beck—who not many years before had been booed off the stage at the Viper Room—Rage Against the Machine, Morrissey, and Tool. The Bicycle Thief, Goldenvoice artists, were on the undercard along with the Chemical Brothers, Jurassic 5, Perry Farrell, Gil Scott-Heron, Ben Harper, Kool Keith, and a whole bunch of other bands, DJs, and hip-hoppers. The performers all carried some serious musical credibility … and, unfortunately,
