C H A P T E R  E I G H T

so.....it's february 1991--we're done with BLACKOUT, done with touring for a while, and home...we were stars , our debut record was hailed , we felt good...now on to the second record. Skid started writing furiously and we began to demo up songs for what would be called WASTED. but now SONY wanted to take a more active role in our lives, when we sent them what we thought was a good batch of songs they were REJECTED. wow...we had jumped the gun, as usual. I was sick that week and my voice sounded like shit but we went ahead and sent the songs anyway, expecting SONY to just OK it as a matter of course. but they didn't . they made us go back to the drawing board.

now, the reason why Joe and I were indispensable to the writing process was our contribution to what I call QUALITY CONTROL. Skid brought in songs, sometimes too hastily, and what we did was to kinda cut the fat off the piece of steak. or sometimes throw away the  whole steak. the  song  SPIT was originally called "Your Little Bump" referring to Skid's girlfriends clit, believe it or not. it was a good song once we agreed to remove the offensive part. the first lyrics to " Don't Fuck With Me " were horrible, really campy , so those got re-written. and on and on. no big deal, Joe and I just a part of the process, separate the wheat from the chaff.  so we kept at it until we came up with a better batch of songs to submit.

it was my idea to move to New York to do the second record. we had no allies at the Los Angeles office, our boy David Kahne lived in N.Y. ---so I thought why not go to New York, rent a loft similar to the one we had out here, and record the record in N.Y.-- I loved New York, it was so cool, and I thought it would be a real Bohemian thing to do. I had to convince EVERYBODY,  no one wanted to do it. we had a huge recording budget for WASTED, there was more than enough $$$ to spare. our manager Tom Consolo went to N.Y.  and scouted a place for us. he found an old deserted gay bath-house that had been wrecked in a fire and they re-built it, complete with bedrooms, a rehearsal room , kitchen, everything we needed to live there and rehearse.

our guys at Sony got us Jon Jannson to produce the WASTED  record, again, it was one of those things of them telling us what to do. it began this way...we didn't sell up to expected , and they started to take a firmer hand in our careers. after all, it WAS their $$$ we were spending. being on a major label is great in some ways, you get first class treatment, record promotion, marketing, etc.  the down- side is that THEY OWN YOUR ASS, play their game and everything goes smoothly, bitch and moan and they start to get pissed. 

I would have to say that the time I spent living in New York was among the best times I've ever had.  Skid and I arrived there before the others, scouted out the loft, met our weirdo landlord, a lady named Hayne and got acclimated to being a New Yorker. first off, you can drink till 4 A.M. there...this proved to be influential in accelerating my drinking problem. second, there were plenty of young ladies there that we'd yet to screw, so we set about filling in THAT  discrepancy, with extreme vigor. then a problem...Skid wanted to write and direct a movie--WASTED IN AMERICA-"  The Movie" --a "Rockumentary" what he wanted to do was fly out our ex-singer M. xxxx, and PAY  him to work and edit this film with him. we said no...for a plethora of reasons--first off, M. xxxx was neither a film editor or anything, really, he was Skid's drinking buddy . he was still writing music and it was good ...but a cinematographer he was not and of  COURSE the band would have to shoulder the bill for this movie. I think if Skid had said" I want to do this movie" and I'll pay for it...we might have thought different. I was in New York to make a record , NOT to be the "star " of some quasi-movie . Skid was furious, of course, he started to call us the NON-ARTISTS--and wasn't it fucked that THE NON-ARTISTS were standing in the way of what the ARTIST  wanted to do...I won't go into it too much, but this wasn't the first time that Joey and I had to put the brakes on one of Skid's mad-cap schemes. six months before we got signed to SONY  , Skid wanted to change the name of the band to the DEVILDOLLS,  we were gonna go full Motley Crue, full make-up, Alice Cooper....we said  no. Skid locked himself in his room for 3 days and wouldn't talk to anybody...this kind of shit happened ALL THE TIME, Joey could tell  ya, Skid was and is very talented, maybe the best songwriter I've ever worked with, but being a good songwriter doesn't always endow you with other skills...like good judgment . so...we said no to the movie... but it reared it's ugly head later as we shall see...so we started to make the record. I'd go in the morning to do vocals , and the other guys would come in the afternoon to do their parts. we were drinking and fucking hard, we had the best parties, we had a rock'n' roll life to DREAM FOR, and I enjoyed it to the fullest--over the top....over-indulged  in booze and tawdry sex.

Jon did not have a good time in New York . unfortunately, there's a million and one ways to fuck your self up ----all the drugs you can eat, and jon fell victim . he couldn't wait to get home. 'nuff said on that subject. so we finished the record and had a huge going-away party at our loft. I too was happy to get home, New York can bring out the worst in people, it can exacerbate your drinking problem to Herculanean  size.   so we went home...

as far as WASTED  goes, at the time I thought we had made a good record--I liked "Miss America" , I thought it was a good single for the band, but ...the label thought differently, the "metal" people at SONY  thought we had "gone soft", they thought we had lost the edge we had on BLACKOUT... and of course in hindsight they were right. in my mind we were trying to get on the radio, we needed a "cross-over " hit to make it on radio, and our label wanted us to keep our hard-rock integrity. David Kahne picked HAPPY HOUR  to be our single, a stupid move on his part. HAPPY HOUR  was a weird eclectic song that was definitely not gonna be understood by the mass of radio-listeners. but SONY had spoken...we started to have less and less say in our careers, actually, and there was nothing we could do , save launch a mild protest...you can't BITE THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU...but that's exactly what Skid started to do...