my side over at BFD management. When I left Guns, he led me to believe that he’d stopped working over there and would manage me, but I’m not so sure that was really the case. It is possible that he was a mole, letting Doug know my every move. But at this point he was acting as my manager.
At the time, in 1998, the music industry underwent a major change. Black Friday happened, the day that hundreds of music executives were fired; they literally walked down Sunset with their boxes of stuff. Most of the labels were consolidated, one of them being Geffen, which was folded into Interscope. It was the beginning of the end of the music business as I’d known it.
Once Geffen was restructured, I had to make the acquaintance of a handful of people I’d never worked with. I was working on a band that had nothing to do with the grunge sound or whatever you want to call what it was that happened in the mid-nineties: it was a very cool but short-lived moment. And it had been replaced by rap-rock limp crap and boy bands… and Interscope was more or less all gangsta rap. I had no interest in any of that, so I was completely unaware about the shifts within the business.
A new breed of executives had become the norm as well; they were much more bland, much more PC corporate-guy types than any of the characters I’d worked with. My typical loaded charm wasn’t going to get me far. The only person that was a familiar face at the label anymore was Lori Earle, who’d worked publicity with me since Guns was signed.
The guy assigned to deal with me was Jordan Schur and I remember coming home from my meeting with him thinking that I did not trust him one bit. He promised me the world and I’d only known him for twenty minutes. His was a kind of whitewashing bullshit: “We’re going to sell millions of records, get new cars,” all that crap. I knew right away that the guy was not for real. But he was Interscope head Jimmy Iovine’s boy, so I had to deal with it. I played him five demos from my next Snakepit record and he told me he loved them and couldn’t wait to put it out. I then met with Jimmy Iovine, and he suggested that I have Jack Douglas produce my album, which I thought was a great idea because Jack had produced Aerosmith’s
At this point Izzy had been dropped by the label, as had Duff; so I had my doubts, but Jordan appeared to be genuinely excited. Jordan scheduled another meeting, then bailed on it, and then suddenly did an about-face, claiming that Snakepit wasn’t the kind of music that his label produced. I wasn’t shocked; I felt, “Now, that’s more like it”—I could tell from the first time I met him that he was completely two-faced. With that, I decided to leave the label, and having already dumped a lot of money into recording the album myself, I offered to buy it back. In my mind, I had the house, I had the studio, I’d just record it all there and sell it elsewhere. I was very stubborn about the whole thing.
At the same time, Tom Maher hadn’t done anything to help me in the situation, so I decided to look for a new manager and I was introduced to Sam Frankel by Jack Douglas, who in turn introduced me to Jerry Heller. The idea was that Heller would manage me while Frankel would be my day-to-day guy. I was meeting a few people, but when I get my mind locked into accomplishing something, I’ll do whatever it takes with whoever can do it to get things done—right away. Jerry was
I felt like I was back in the early days of Guns, trying to get a band off the ground while working with subpar players: Jack was great but he hadn’t done anything recently, and while Jerry Heller had made his home in the hip- hop world, he hadn’t done anything of merit in the rock world; Sam was a nice Jewish attorney from the East Coast who visited his mom regularly and seemed to know nothing about the music business whatsoever. It was the carnival all over again, amid a music industry that was completely alien to me.
As far as the band went, it was no better: the singer, Rod Jackson, turned out to be unmotivated and a junkie, Johnny Griparic was and is a great bass player but didn’t have the touring experience he really needed for the long haul, and Ryan Roxie, whom I met from Alice Cooper’s band and hired as a second guitarist, was only interested in getting as much of the publishing as possible. The drummer, Matt Laug, was the most experienced and even-keeled of the bunch, and, of course, there was me, playing the role of boss, which wasn’t a role I was comfortable with. I split all of the publishing and advance equally with everyone, so it seemed more like a team effort than it really was, so in the end it was just a mess. All I wanted to do was get the record done and get back on the road. I took a deal with Koch Records because they made the most solid offer, which was a huge mistake due to the fact that they dropped the ball soon after the record was released, which did nothing to help the situation at all.
Jerry Heller proved to be a true cannibal manager; he tried to take me for everything given the chance. I’ve since heard stories to that effect from others in the business as well. The only thing that Jerry did do was get us the opening slot on the AC/DC tour for
Meanwhile, Jerry tried to get me to sign a contract that granted him 20 percent of all the money I’d make with Snakepit plus 20 percent of my future earnings from Guns… for eternity. Perla didn’t trust him and suggested I shouldn’t sign it, and when I showed the contract to my new attorney, David Codikow, he told me it was suicidal. He got into it with Jerry and straight up called him an asshole, so Jerry fired him, which was surreal because he had no authority to do so—my manager can’t fire my attorney—but not wanting to give him the pleasure regardless, David quit anyway. In hindsight, it’s all pretty laughable, but at the time it was tranmatic—it was all I could do to keep it together.
I was without an attorney at that point, when one night I was at home with Perla and there was a knock at the door. It was the police, who had a warrant for her arrest for violating probation. She was cuffed and stuffed. Perla had recently gotten a DUI and wasn’t supposed to be driving, but she had been. While she did fifty-six days in the county jail, Jerry got me to sign that contract when I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. I was drinking insane amounts of vodka from morning to night, and I can’t imagine that I was clearheaded enough to make rational business decisions.
It was way back on the Motley Crue tour that I first noticed the shakes as a result of having the DT’s in the morning. I started drinking early in the day not so much cure a hangover as to control the DT’s. It was a subtle change that would continue and get worse later. When Perla was in jail, I would go to sleep with a cocktail next to my head on the nightstand and would finish it in the morning just to be able to get out of bed to get to the kitchen to make a fresh one to start my day. Often the police wouldn’t let me into the county jail to visit her because I had been drinking. I was a real mess: aside from close to a gallon of vodka a day at home, I’d drink shots of whiskey with beer chasers all night when I would go out to clubs. The future didn’t look bright for me health-wise but nobody could have told me that back then.
AFTER THE AC/DC TOUR, WE DID A HEAD-lining tour of theaters. It was actually costing me money, personally, but I didn’t care. After two months Koch ditched us: they pulled our tour support and didn’t promote the thing at all. We’d show up to signings and the record wouldn’t be in the stores. I’d have to make a call to get a box of them sent out that day—it was way too
As the tour wore on, I remember progressively not feeling well. In Pittsburgh, I remember thinking that I should go to the hospital before sound check. My next memory is waking up two weeks later in a hospital bed with Perla sitting there, looking very worried. I had suffered cardiac myopathy. Years of overdrinking had swollen my heart to the point of rupture, to the point where it was barely strong enough to circulate my blood properly. I couldn’t get it through my head that I was out of commission, but I was. The doctors gave me six days to six weeks to live but not much more. Once I was well enough to fly back to L.A., I was on bed rest and forbidden from drinking or any kind of strenuous physical activity.
The doctors installed a defibrillator to keep my heart from stopping and to keep my heart rate steady. After a time I began therapy, starting with very minimal exercise and working my way up. Miraculously, my heart started to heal, and the doctors could not believe that my condition was improving. Eventually I was able to play again and I was determined to finish up our club tour. I had been out of circulation for about four months and I was totally sober. When I saw the band again, this time through clear eyes, I realized how dysfunctional it was.
Between the junkie singer who was on the verge of withdrawal at any moment and the bass player, they
