Scar Tissue (36 page)
The record-company negotiations ultimately came down to two companies, Warner’s and Sony. We went to see Tommy Mottola of Sony/Epic in New York; he was currently riding a wave of success with Mariah Carey and Michael Jackson. Tommy was pushing the hardest to get us, and he made that clear by telling us he knew we were talking to all these other labels, but in the end, we’d sign with Epic.
Our thinking was that we had been mistreated at EMI. We’d had seven A&R guys in seven years, no stability at all. We were looking for a good home. When Eric convened a lunch meeting and told us that Epic had upped their offer by a million, the four of us got up and started doing a conga line around the restaurant chanting “Epic! Epic! Epic!” We had gone from being the earnest “Let’s have a family situation” to “A million more? Let’s go with the corporate monsters from New York.”
Eric dropped a bombshell on us at that meeting. He sat us down and said, “I’ve got news for you guys. Each of you will be getting a check for a million dollars.” We each had a few thousand dollars to our names, and we were instant millionaires. It felt like we’d won the lottery. We were screaming and hugging one another when we realized that for the first time, we wouldn’t have to scrape and scratch and live from week to week. Each of us decided on the spot to buy a house. Within two weeks’ time, we all had new homes.
My house was a brand-new construction on the top of Beachwood Canyon on Hollyridge. It was a blank palette that I’d end up redoing in a very nouveau-riche way. I took out all the carpeting and had antique teak hardwood from Thailand put down. In my bedroom, I painted each wall a different color. I had a crazy mosaic installed on the staircase so it looked like a river was coming down the stairs. But the pièce de résistance was my living room fireplace. I took out the standard-issue one and had a stoneworker bring river rocks from Ojai. Then I had a fireplace fashioned into the shape of a giant nude woman. You’d load the logs into her vagina, and she had fourteen-inch-across purple glass nipples. But the nicest thing about the house was my backyard, which backed up to the west ridge of Griffith Park, a large nature preserve. If you were lounging in the pool, all you had to do was look up to see the famous Hollywood sign above your head.
We decided to go with Sony, with the proviso that they buy us out of the last album due to EMI. The entire brass of Epic/Sony records flew out to the Four Seasons in L.A. for a lavish brunch to celebrate the decision and do some photo ops. We were ready to go to work as soon as they could extricate us from the EMI contract. But even though they told us it would be only a matter of days, the days dragged on and on and turned into months.
Meanwhile, my relationship with Carmen was tumultuous. She was off her rocker. I got her to go to therapy so she didn’t kill herself. One time we were in the car, and she started screaming and pounding on her face, giving herself a black eye. Then she tried to jump out of the car while I was driving full speed. I wasn’t trying to force therapy on her; I was offering to pay for her to get help, because she was clearly in pain. If I was looking through a magazine, she’d come over, grab it out of my hands, go back a few pages, and say, “Why’d you stop on this page so long? Who is this girl?” We’d go to the movies, and we’d be walking out in the middle of this packed-sardine crowd of people. I’d have my head bowed down, inching along, and she’d sock me and say, “Why are you looking at that girl?”
By now we were verbal battlers, so when she’d beat herself up and then show up in front of my friends with a black eye, everyone would look at me like “Dude, are you beating her?” Who would believe she was giving herself the black eyes? I kept trying unsuccessfully to end the relationship, but after I bought my house, she simply would not leave. She locked herself in the bathroom with a knife. She had gone in there to cut her wrists, and I had to knock down the door to get to her. She was standing there holding the knife, but she hadn’t cut herself, thank God.
The jealousy factor and the insecurity factor and the sex-as-medicine factor just got worse and worse. I think the minute she realized she was losing her hold on me, she felt she would perish. Anytime I suggested that we might not stay together, she would have a meltdown and start tantruming like an autistic child. The band had set a date to start working on our next album, and I had to become free of this crazed relationship so I could have the focus to work, because the record meant more to me than anything. I offered to get her an apartment, because she didn’t have the funds, but she wouldn’t accept that. I told her a hundred times that it was over and that she had to leave and we couldn’t be together, and she would come over and scream and shout and bang, and I would go down to the gate and say, “Carmen, you don’t live here. You can’t be here. We are not together, this is finished.” She would stay out there screaming and yelling and trying to force her way into the house.
I finally bought her a plane ticket so she could go model in Italy, and that was the end of our relationship. I was thanking my lucky stars that it was over. Maybe she had no idea how much hellish drama she was creating, because at the end of most of these episodes, we would end up having sex; maybe in her mind, that indicated that everything was fine.
Shortly after that, I got a phone call from Mo Ostin at Warner’s. “I heard about the deal you made with Sony,” he began. “Congratulations, it sounds like a fantastic deal, and Sony’s not a bad record company, so just go out and make the greatest record you can make. Go get ’em.” I hung up the phone, genuinely touched. The coolest, most real person we had met during all these negotiations had just personally called to encourage me to make a great record for a rival company. That was the kind of guy I’d want to be working for. I called up Flea, and he had gotten the same call. He felt the same way.
We called Lindy and asked for an update on the Sony/EMI situation. Apparently, Sony was hitting a wall with EMI. That was all we had to hear. We begged him to get us out of the Sony deal and go with Warner’s. We let Mo step up to the plate, and in one phone call to his old friend who ran EMI, we were off that label and signed with Mo. And we were ready to record the greatest record we could make.
We
were all elated with our relationship with Warner’s. Mo Ostin and his associates Lenny Warnoker and Steve Baker were all such soulful and musical people. Even though Mo was the corporate executive officer of Warner Bros., he rocked our world on a daily basis the entire time we were making our first album for him. He’d come down and hang out with us in the recording studio, happy to listen to anything we played. We’d never had a record-company relationship like that before.
Even though John and I had grown apart, the band was in the best space we’d been in for years. Chad and John no longer felt like the new guys, they were the guy guys. Flea and John had grown close both musically and as friends, and Chad was playing better than ever. We all trusted one another, and it showed when we’d get together for hours and hours and jam out songs. We were really in the pocket. When we were working on
Mother’s Milk,
it was squeezing blood out of a rock to get a song done, but every day now there was new music for me to lyricize.
Meanwhile, I began to bond with Rick Rubin. He was a fun-loving guy in a much different way from anyone I’d ever met. He loved to talk about girls, and he loved to ride around and listen to music ad infinitum. He started coming to my house. We talked about my lyrics and went through all of the different things that I was thinking of singing over this great music being produced, whether it was “Mellowship Slinky,” “Apache Rose Peacock,” or “Funky Monks.” I showed him the lyrics for “Power of Equality,” and even though he thought the music lent itself to that treatment, he made it clear that he wasn’t into sociopolitical lyrics.
“I like songs about girls and cars and stuff like that,” Rick told me.
“Girls and cars? I can’t write about girls and cars. That’s already been done. I want to write about some weird shit that no one’s been writing about,” I protested.
“I understand,” Rick said. “But if you want to write one song about girls and cars, I’d be happy to hear it.”
I did try to scribe one song following Rick’s outline, “The Greeting Song.” To this day, I hate that song. I hate the lyrics, I hate the vocals. It was a lively rock tune in the Led Zep tradition, but I never found my place in it. Ironically, years later, General Motors called us up and wanted to create an advertising campaign for Chevy by printing the words to “Greeting Song” on a blank page. I couldn’t let them do it; I didn’t believe in those lyrics.
Even though things were going well creatively, I began to feel like the outsider in the band, because part of Flea and John’s new bond was their mutual appreciation for pot. Maybe Flea felt that this was his chance to show me what it felt like not to be included in a three-point triangle of friendship with John. I’m sure John was probably resenting the fact that I always wanted everything to be clean around me and that he never got to do his own partying and drug experimentation. Plus, he felt that his creativity and songwriting ability were enhanced by smoking pot. It’s ironic, because by then I’d shed my militant cleanster feelings and was getting better about accepting the drug use of people around me, but there was still a sense of “here comes the narc” when I’d intrude on a pot-smoking scenario.
One day I showed up to rehearsal, and Flea and John were blazing on pot and in a “Let’s ignore Anthony” state of mind, and I experienced this melancholy sense of loss that John was no longer in my world. I could tell from the way he was looking at me that we weren’t really friends anymore, other than the fact that we were in a band together and respected each other on that level. I rode home from rehearsal that day on the 101 Freeway, and my sense of loss about John and the loneliness that I was feeling triggered memories of my time with Ione and how I’d had this beautiful angel of a girl who was willing to give me all of her love, and instead of embracing that, I was downtown with fucking gangsters shooting speedballs under a bridge. I felt I had thrown away so much in my life, but I also felt an unspoken bond between me and my city. I’d spent so much time wandering the streets of L.A. and hiking through the Hollywood Hills that I sensed there was a nonhuman entity, maybe the spirit of the hills and the city, who had me in her sights and was looking after me. Even if I was a loner in my own band, at least I still felt the presence of the city I lived in.
I started freestyling some poetry in my car and putting the words to a melody and sang all the way down the freeway. When I got home, I got out my notebook and wrote the whole thing down in a song structure, even though it was meant to be a poem to deal with my own anguish.
“Under the Bridge”
Sometimes I feel like I don’t have a partner
Sometimes I feel like my only friend
Is the city I live in, the city of angels
Lonely as I am, together we cry.
I drive on her streets ’cause she’s my companion
I walk through her hills ’cause she knows who I am
She sees my good deeds and she kisses me windy
I never worry, now that is a lie.
I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day
Take me to the place I love, take me all the way
It’s hard to believe that there’s nobody out there
It’s hard to believe that I’m all alone
At least I have her love, the city she loves me
Lonely as I am, together we cry.
I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day
Take me to the place I love, take me all the way
Under the bridge downtown
Is where I drew some blood
Under the bridge downtown
I could not get enough
Under the bridge downtown
Forgot about my love
Under the bridge downtown
I gave my life away
A month later, Rick was over my house one day, flipping through my notebook, which demonstrates how comfortable I felt around him then.
“What’s this?” he said, and handed me the notebook. He had stumbled upon “Under the Bridge.”
“Oh, that’s just a poem,” I said.
“That’s dope. You should do something with that,” he said.
“It’s not really our style,” I explained. “It’s slow and melodic and dramatic.”
“But it’s good. You should show this to the guys and see if they want to do something with it.”
I was touched that he liked the poem, but I still had doubts that it was a song for us. A few days later, I was at rehearsal and had some time to kill, because Flea hadn’t arrived yet.