tremolo bar. I snapped the neck of my guitar, which flew up and hit me square in the face. It felt like I’d been smashed with a baseball bat: when it popped it sounded like an M-80 and it put a huge hole in my top lip. Someone was videotaping the session that day and I’d love to see an instant replay of that. The wound it left behind was the size of a nickel.
The sound alone caused everyone to stop playing and turn my way. And there I was with one half of my guitar in one hand, the other half in the other, with blood pouring down my chin, neck, and chest. I was dazed; they were all pointing at me and I had no idea what they were talking about. Being that I was in NYC, it was either wait for three hours to be seen by an ER doctor—or not. I opted to go back to the Paramount Hotel, where I sat at the Whiskey Bar with a bag of ice on my face and a bottle of Jack in front of me until I got on the plane with everyone else the next day.
Meanwhile, Adam took my guitar to a repairman to see if it could be fixed, and when I saw him on the way to the gate he told me that his buddy had managed to glue it back together.
“I did my best,” he said. He looked pretty tired. “It’s kind of a Frankenstein but it looks like it’s going to work.”
I’d like to take a moment to let Adam Day, my tech for the past nineteen years, know right now just how much I love him. There had been many times before that I’d felt as much, and many times since, but I’d like to give him the credit he deserves for doing what he did in this instance. That thing had broken to the point of no return, at least I thought so, but he stayed up all night getting it fixed, and to his credit, from that point forward, that guitar has sounded better than it ever did before.
THAT JAPANESE TOUR WAS JUST GREAT; every show was an event. The band was an amazing group of players, so it was a real learning experience and a lot of fun. I had a fling with one of the backup singers who was really hot. The very last night of the tour I was sitting with her and a few other girls in the balcony of this club celebrating. Bernard Edwards was there with us hanging out, but he was tired and left us a bit early; security escorted him to his room.
The next morning he was found dead on his couch as a result of severe pneumonia. When I got the call it was one of the most surreal moments of my life. “I was just with him a few hours ago!” I said. I really looked up to Bernard as a musician and a person. He was the coolest, smoothest, most gentle guy. He’d been a good friend, taking me under his wing during that tour, which was wild considering that I was a stranger in a strange land, jamming with all of these seasoned session pros, and Bernard didn’t even know that much about me or my music. On that tour he didn’t seem like he had any health issues or anything wrong with him at all; he just died peacefully in his sleep. It was a huge shock for Nile because Bernard was his writing partner and closest friend, and they’d just repaired their friendship after a long split. They had just gotten the band back together; they had all of these plans to record and embark on a new phase. Nile was in shock. Everyone was: we left one another in Japan and saw one another again at Bernard’s funeral in Connecticut.
I CONTINUED TO FIND INSPIRATION BY pushing myself to do projects outside of my expected range, one of them being the music for the soundtrack to the Quentin Tarantino–produced film
I met Quentin and he told me all about the movie and I started writing music that was inspired by the film’s main character, Gabriella, and the actress who played her, Angela Jones. Angela appears to be Latin, but she’s a white girl from Pittsburgh and I’d had a crush on her since the moment I saw her in
I flew out to New York, where Nile Rodgers produced the electric version of a few tracks. Then he and I flew out to Spain to have this major Spanish star, Martha Sanchez, do vocals. She is basically the Spanish Madonna, and it was clear to me that Nile had spent all of this money to get her involved just so that he could be with her. It was fine by me; I had a great time hanging out in Madrid. Martha took us to all of these speakeasy-type bars in these grottoes and ancient wine cellars deep below the city. In every single one of them, there would be the best flamenco guitar players—I learned a lot from jamming with them.
I showed up for the wrap party in Miami and quickly became friends with Quentin, Angela, and a few other people. She and I started seeing each other back in L.A.; that went on for months. Basically it was composed of doing it in her car. We’d meet at a restaurant and we’d do it in her car. We’d talk on the phone and meet up and we’d do it in her car.
I CONTINUED JAMMING WHENEVER AN opportunity presented itself, just trying to sort out what to do next. I had my hands full anyway, because while I was out sowing my wild oats, my marriage was falling apart. It was hardly sudden: even when I was in L.A. I was barely living at home. And now that I was done obsessing over Guns N’ Roses, I was obsessing over what to do next.
When I traveled I never brought Renee along, and I was never faithful on the road. We did go to Ireland together to visit Ronnie Wood and his family for a while. There were parts of my lifestyle with Renee that I appreciated. She was an aspiring actress and I respected that, yet at the same time she couldn’t seem to get a break and her career really wasn’t going where she wanted it to. I think she was frustrated because I had already established myself. I’d cemented a foot in the door. None of that really mattered to Renee anyway, or so it seemed, because I wasn’t from the kind of band that played the kind of music she was into. Come to think of it, I don’t even think she knew the magnitude of what we were doing. She probably thought it was pretty childish.
As our relationship began to erode, Renee started hanging around the lowest echelon of Hollywood actor scumbags, partying a bit too much. At the same time I was doing my thing, completely oblivious to my commitments as a husband.
After I’d been paid by the insurance company for the house that had been totaled in the earthquake, we shopped for a new one and found it in Beverly Hills on Roxbury Drive. It was a big expensive Spanish-style structure built in the 1920s and now in foreclosure. It also had a basement, which is rare in L.A. The house definitely had an aura; it was run-down, and in the basement there was a big disco ball hanging from the ceiling. I fell in love with it. On the third floor next to the master bedroom, there was this extra room that was stark white that seemed like it had been a darkroom: there were long, thin drawers to store photos and on each was an embossed black-and-white label with girls’ names like “Candy,” “Monica,” and “Michelle.”
We bought it immediately. It excited me that it had probably seen a few illicit photo shoots, and I can only imagine what kind of parties had gone down in that basement. All that mattered to me was that it
I spent most of my time hanging out at the Sunset Marquis, running away from everything. I was completely weightless after Guns N’ Roses; I entered a phase of just spending my time and money at the hotel pool, chasing girls, drinking at the bar all day, and distancing myself however I could from anything in my life that I considered a nuisance. If John Lennon had his lost weekend, I had my lost year.
My security guard, Ronnie, took care of things at the house. Meanwhile I continued my infidelity tour of L.A. and soon enough I got sloppy. I attended a few high-profile events where I shouldn’t have been misbehaving, so people were finding out—and so was Renee. Overall, it was a fun period without any sense of direction, though my
