sure how I was supposed to go to the store for groceries after I’d played arenas in Japan the week before. I’d been on tour long enough to forget that I once bought my own liquor and cigarettes, and what I really couldn’t shake was the thrill of playing every night. I expected each day to hit that same dizzy climax. I had to fill the void. With the band on break, I embarked on a solo tour that never left L.A. I was more decadent than I had ever been; because when things stop, when things slow down, and when I don’t know what to do with myself, I’m the most self- destructive person I know.
I don’t see it as some kind of fault. I see it as a natural side effect. After two years of touring, it will take anyone at all a long time to wind down. I had been living at breakneck speed wherever I lived; I had no idea of what was going on with me. I’d done nothing at all to slow or calm down, so I sure as hell wasn’t prepared to stay in one place. Our career had meant working constantly just to make it take off. And then it kept on. It was five years, it was eight years… I was eighteen, I was twenty-three. I’d done it; we’d done it. And now I was home; I smacked up against the wall.
At one point in my life I was so obsessed with heroin and opium and anything derived from poppies that I went to the library to study the culture and the science of them every day. I read what I found; from the textbooks that explained the chemical makeup of the drugs to the history books that chronicled the evolution of the Triads and the other Chinese gangs who ruled the trafficking and smuggling of it. I also read about all of my rock-star heroes… all junkies. All things considered, I did manage to come into that part of the drug culture without an image in mind that I was trying to portray or mimic. It was a simple contradiction that made complete sense to me: everyone in town was doing heroin, and because of that I wasn’t interested in it at all. But once I actually did it, I was
The first and last rock-and-roll books that I ever read were loaded with heroin and drug use, and were much too sensational. I read
In that way I never did my “homework”; I never studied the lives of other junkies in rock and roll. But at the same time I didn’t have to: I got hip to Keith Richards and Eric Clapton and Ray Charles later on in life. I think that anyone who is a true junkie has an innate kinship with other junkies. Somehow I knew that we shared mutual interests; that addiction speaks to you. Without knowing it, you’re attracted to them.
Heroin was novel to me then, it was an adventure, it was a private hideaway in my own body and mind. After I’d been through withdrawal and gotten clean more than once, the inescapable discomfort never discouraged me. I may have realized how crippling addiction was whenever I got clean, but after I was clean awhile, I’d reminisce about how much I loved to get high.
IT HAD BEEN A WHILE AND I WAS ABOUT to discover it all again. It was 1989: We’d toured most of America, Canada, Europe, Japan, and Australia. We’d watched our album sit around and do nothing for a year before breaking the Top Ten and having a number one single; we’d shot three videos that became mainstays on MTV, a channel that helped us out, but that we didn’t care for. We performed at the American Music Awards, playing “Patience” with Don Henley on drums. We’d toured with our friends and heroes. Finally and suddenly we were the band that we’d always known we were… just better.
When we landed in L.A. at the end of the
Izzy made a call and we went over to a friend of Seymour Cassel’s who we’ll call “Bill.” We’d gotten a taste of smack again in Australia, so the craving was there by the time we got home. Besides, after two years of touring, subconsciously, we both felt that we deserved it. Anyway, Bill had a taste for drugs and always had plenty of every variety; he was also very generous.
When you start to get famous at all, a few typical things start happening: in Hollywood, if you’re out at a bar, everyone wants to buy you a drink, you can get into any club; whether you like it or not, you are suddenly a figure on the nightlife circuit. When that started happening to us, there was nothing less interesting that I could have imagined doing with my time. That Hollywood scene was the same old shit, and the more recognizable I was, the less I liked it. The amount of “dudes” who wanted to “party with me” had quadrupled, so I became entirely insular. Even on the rare occasion when I wanted to go out, I found that the Hollywood scene we’d known was dead: the Cathouse was closed down and there was nothing else in L.A. that I found interesting at all.
Everyone in the band needed time to decompress; looking back, it makes complete sense to me that I allowed myself to slip into that seductive heroin comfort zone. It was the one aspect of success and fame that wasn’t vapid to me; there was really nothing else. I didn’t want to go to strip clubs or look for hot chicks or otherwise exercise my newly found status. All I wanted to do was hang out at Bill’s and do drugs.
The only stability that I’d enjoyed in my life up until then was the constant traveling, which was a contradiction not lost on me. I was twenty-three and I hadn’t had a stable life or home since I was thirteen; home for me was living with girlfriends or being on a bus with the band. I lived for playing my guitar and being on the road, plain and simple.
Like I said, Bill wasn’t a real dealer, he just liked to get high casually. He always smoked heroin and he had lots of self-control about everything he did. Meanwhile I was the opposite: I had a fiendish, obsessive/compulsive attitude toward heroin and was always eager to get around it and get more of it. That first night over at Bill’s I didn’t have any gear to shoot it with, so we all smoked it. But I couldn’t wait to grab a bit and leave the next day in search of a rig. It turned out to be the start of a long and nightmarish obsession with heroin that lasted from 1989 through 1991.
BILL’S PLACE WAS ON FRANKLIN AND Western in East Hollywood way off the beaten track; he and his wife and their friends were really cool. Izzy and I hung around there on a daily basis and fit in just fine. Bill never allowed shooting up at this place, so I would smoke a little there, pocket some for later, and shoot it up at my leisure when I cut out to do my errands or go to appointments.
One of them was a photo shoot with Izzy for
For the record, that shoot contained the famous picture of me that is in the Rainbow, where I’m laid out with my hat on the ground and a bottle of Stoli, my guitar, and the rest of it at my side. If you have decent vision and you take a look at Izzy and me in those frames, you will easily see how out there I was. I was high off the entire success of touring and we were both in search of the kind of excitement you will never find walking around Hollywood playing rock star. I was in search of someplace dark.
Eventually Bill got arrested and was sentenced to thirty years to life for being caught three times with illegal drugs in large enough quantities that they qualified for “intent to sell.” In the end Bill served eleven years and got out. But at one point before his arrest, he was under surveillance from his phones to his home; every move was monitored. Two of the people who made regular appearances, of course, were Izzy and me, and Bill told me later that the cops were particularly curious about us. Supposedly they were willing to bargain with Bill if he dropped a dime on us because by then we were famous, to a degree. But Bill wouldn’t do that. God bless him.
EVENTUALLY I DECIDED THAT, IN LIGHT of the band’s success, I should rent a place of my own. My apartment on Larrabee was the first that I’d ever had to myself, under my own name, and I was proud of that. It was just one room, a fully furnished, perfect studio, laid out exactly like a hotel room—and that’s exactly what I liked about it. Unfortunately, like every other apartment I’d lived in before then, I was pretty quickly evicted.
