Q&A with Scott “Wino” Weinrich
- Story by J. Bennett
Crank, coke and staph infections: The Hidden Hand's mainman remembers hard times in Hollywood
This is the entire transcript of Decibel's two-hour interview with Wino.
Back the summer of 2000, Spirit Caravan spent three days at the house in Boston that I was living in with my business manager, Juan Perez. The band was on tour, and one of their shows on the way up from Maryland had been cancelled, so they needed a place to hang out for a few days before they played the Garment District in Cambridge. By the afternoon of day two, someone had accidentally destroyed the second-floor toilet and water was leaking though the ceiling to the first floor. When my landlord showed up to survey the mess, Spirit Caravan vocalist/guitarist and living super-legend Scott “Wino” Weinrich answered the door with no shirt on. My landlord looked at the water pouring through the ceiling, looked at me, looked at Wino, and then looked at the cloud of smoke billowing out of the living room, where bassist Dave “Sherm” Sherman and drummer Gary Isom were getting stoned to the Bejesus Belt. There was a long, uncomfortable silence. “Your security deposit is fucked,” my landlord finally announced, before stomping upstairs to assess the damage.
And it was fucked. But it was totally worth it: Over the course of those three days, Wino regaled my business manager and I with detailed recollections of his early DC days with the Obsessed in the late ’70s and early ’80s, his Californian drug trip with St. Vitus in the mid-to-late ’80s, the reincarnation of the Obsessed in the early ’90s, and all the weird shit that had happened since he had gotten clean and started Spirit Caravan. A former world-class tweaker who used to carry around a giant Buck knife with a hole burned through the blade from all the meth he had shoveled into his face, Wino had (and has) more fucking stories than just about anyone I’ve ever met. And despite all the shit he’s crammed into his veins over the years, our man has a mind like a steel trap. Today, he’s happily married, has three kids, and fronts the Hidden Hand—but he almost met his end back in 1994, when he wandered the streets of Hollywood, homeless and higher than a hundred motherfuckers.
How did you end up homeless?
What happened was, I moved out [to LA] in the ’80s to join Saint Vitus, and at the time, we could draw maybe 50 or 75 people if we played down at the Anti-Club or places like that. But we were on SST, so we would get on SST shows and stuff—and we would do okay, but the shows were few and far between. So I moved from Torrance, which is where the Vitus guys lived, into LA proper because I wanted to get things going. To be honest with you, I was starting to get a little burned out on SST. I don’t think they treated their bands very good. We never signed contracts or anything, and they never showed us any statements. So it was just kind of a weird situation. Finally, we got a call from Chuck [Dukowski] at SST, and he tells us there are these Germans who want to fly us over to Germany because apparently Vitus had quite a little fanbase over there. So we went overseas, dude, and we were blown away. We were treated like royalty, and we were playing to between 500 and 700 people every night. And, you know, the way they do it in Europe is that everything’s catered for load-in, then they take you to dinner, they stock the backstage with as much beer as you can drink, everybody works together—it’s not like here in the US, and it makes for a really good production. So of course we were really intrigued by this, because we couldn’t get SST to do anything. So the time was right—we decided to leave SST and sign with the Germans, who also had a label called Hellhound. Now, the problem with that was that I was young and pretty impressionable and one day after we’d had a few drinks, they got us to sign these artist’s agreements. And you know what that meant: I basically signed an exclusive deal with them.
So time rolls on, Vitus is on Hellhound, and I was like their main scout—I got them all the Maryland bands—Internal Void, Unorthodox, bands like that. Meanwhile, we started getting a little bigger in the States, and we heard through the grapevine that there was this guy from Columbia Records looking for us, but that the Germans were screening him from us, trying to keep him away. So we found out about it and we finally met with him. One thing led to another, and we ended up doing a showcase for this guy in LA. It went really well and he said he wanted to sign us. The only thing left was that we had to audition for his boss, and what that entailed was us getting from LA to New York to do this big showcase. So we plotted a little tour, got a driver and a van, and did the showcase in New York City. Now Columbia wanted to sign us, but then the problem of this artist’s agreement came up. That was really, really difficult, because the Germans had always told me that if the time came when if a bigger label was interested in us, they’d make it easy and be very fair. Well, that’s the exact opposite of what happened: They wanted an insane amount of money, an insane amount of points, distribution rights, and it just turned into a big old nightmare. Rosemary Carroll was our lawyer—she had been married to Jim Carroll, the guy who wrote The Basketball Diaries, before she was married to Danny Goldberg, who was then the Vice President of Columbia Records and Goldmine Records. So she’d show up with this huge file—and our file was like six inches thick—and it became this huge ordeal. My lifelong goal of being signed to a major record label had turned into this week after week-long drill of basically seeing just how screwed we really were. But we eventually signed to Columbia and released The Church Within. But there was no hit. And the reason there was no hit was because nobody in the band listened to a word I said—and there were only three of us. I thought “Streamlined” was the tune—it was three minutes long, it’s kinda like this bike-riding anthem, and it was the fastest song on the record. I was like, ‘It’s not like we’re selling out and writing a pop song—it’s a song that we play in our set and we love. We should really work on it—make sure we produce it and make the harmonies nice and pretty.’ I thought we should’ve made that the song, and the higher-ups at Columbia totally agreed with me. But the guys in the band wanted the single to be “Neatz Brigade,” which is a six and a half minute song, and the vocals don’t even start until halfway in. I thought that was like shooting ourselves in the foot. But they insisted on it. They came from such hardcore punk rock ethics that they didn’t wanna play ball. I agree with that ethic, but at the same time, I was smart enough to know that if we didn’t play ball a little bit, we weren’t gonna get anywhere. So, eventually, “Blind Lightning” became the single, and needless to say, we didn’t have a hit. After that, Columbia fell asleep on the record pretty quickly.
The whole time the Obsessed were signed to Columbia, it would take like ten signatures to get a check out of them. We eventually had to get a lawyer, who charged us a hundred bucks an hour, to write them a letter saying that if they didn’t pay us, they’d be in breach of contract. So it turned into this gigantic nightmare. Finally, Josh Sarubin, who was our A&R guy at Columbia, called us up and goes, “I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news. I wanna take you out to dinner and talk over your business arrangement.” So we went to Barney’s Beanery in Hollywood and he tells us that the good news is that the business people at Columbia had exercised their option, meaning they wanted our next record and that they now owed us starting-up costs. The bad news is that they wanted us to re-demo to be more commercial. So we pretty much decided to hang it up rather than re-demo to become a pop band. We did a European tour with Prong and Life Of Agony, and when we came back, Columbia owed us starting-up costs. But because they knew we weren’t gonna be on their label much longer, they straight-up stonewalled us. They knew they owed us money, and they had made us quit our day jobs so we could do all this press and all this stuff that they wanted us to do every day. We didn’t have anything. While we were on tour, I had been sending my girlfriend $1000 a month to pay the rent on my apartment. We came back from a two-month tour with 13 people—us, Prong and Life Of Agony—a double-decker bus. Life Of Agony was headlining above us, and they were barely of drinking age. I remember one day we were upstairs in the lounge and I started having heart palpitations because these Life Of Agony kids did not know who Miles Davis was. I swear to god, J, this is what I was dealing with. So I get back, and there’s a big eviction notice on my apartment. Turns out my girlfriend hadn’t been paying the rent and, to make matters worse, she was shacking up with our sound man/recording engineer, the guy who recorded The Church Within. So that’s how I became homeless in LA, in a nutshell.
How long were you homeless?
From the time we left Columbia until the day I decided to get on a Greyhound bus from Lancaster, California to Maryland in a pair of shorts and a Mexican cut-off serape. That’s all I had, basically, besides a t-shirt, a pair of sandals, and this little bag where I kept the bandages for the Staph infection I had in my foot and a couple of wah-wah circuits, because I was always trying to figure out new and better ways to make my wah-wah pedal sound better. I think I maybe had 15 bucks at the time—I was eating, like, a hamburger every two days.
Were you sleeping in your rehearsal space, or on the street?
Well, I was a speed freak, and I was slinging enough meth to keep me geeked out so I didn’t really have to eat or sleep that much. I gotta tell you, dude, I weighed about 120 pounds. I was wearing girls’ pants that your little sister would wear. My blood was so thin from mainlining crank that it was black. Check it out: One time, I had enough of this really good crystal—like, crystal clear—for one good hit, but I didn’t have a rig. But I knew my buddy who I stayed with sometimes had this emergency kit where you would jam this huge military-style thing into your thigh. I mean, the gauge was like a nail, basically. So I found that thing and used it. It put a hole in my arm so big that the blood was running down my arm onto the bathroom floor. When it oxidized, it was literally black, dude. And I just kept thinking about that Vitus song, “I Bleed Black.” [Laughs]
Did you get the Staph infection in your foot from trying to hit veins between your toes or something?
No, no, no… I got the Staph infection in my foot because I didn’t have any shoes. I was doing a lot of really bad stuff that I shouldn’t have been doing, and we were working with glassware and stuff, if you get my drift. We had a small explosion one time, and there was dirty glassware around and I happened to get a piece in the top of my foot and I got a really bad infection. I’m sitting at the pool with my kids right now, so I’m looking at the scar. It was eating my flesh down to the bone. It was go bad it was gangrenous.
You didn’t go to the hospital or anything?
Not at first. I remember going to my friend’s house, and he lived with a bunch of [Hell’s] Angels in this huge house and had a garage full of welding equipment. It wasn’t the kind of place that a normal, sane person would hang around, but the Angels were all actually very cool—they just spent their time building bikes. But I spent my time with my friend who was just as big a tweaker as I was. One day, I took off my bandage and he was like, “Oh my god, dude—that’s definitely gangrene.” So this is what we did: The swelling was so bad around the wound that we had to pierce it. He gave me a rag to bite on and took my knife—I had a Buck 110 at the time, a big knife—and he sterilized the tip. He held it above the swollen part, counted to three, and dropped it on the abscess. I made a noise that was inhuman, dude. But it was the only way we knew how—it was like pouring salt into open wounds just to buy myself a little more time. Finally, I realized that if I didn’t take care of it, I was gonna die. But when you’re mainlining a sixteenth of crank a day and eating nothing, just barely staying alive, the thought of lying down in the hospital for two weeks on an IV—which was what I needed—was more than I could bear. I was completely fearless in every respect back in those days, but there was one thing I was scared of: Going to sleep, because I would sleep for days on end. There was this one place where I would stay, where I would get these guys high if they let me sleep there. The problem was that I would sleep for four days and they were like, “When you do that, we don’t know if you’re alive or dead, because you never wake up.” And I was just like, “Well, that’s just the way it is, dude. You don’t hear me, but I get up in the middle of the night and prowl around in the fridge.” And they were like, “Oh, that’s where half that roast beef went.” It was like, “Yeah, dude—I woke up after three days and I was a little hungry.” [Laughs]
How’d you finally kick?
People will tell you that the will to live is incredibly strong, and they’re not lying. Dude, I’d walk around the city in a rage, just screaming, crying, balling my fists up. I’d be like, “The next car I see with the keys in it, I’m fuckin’ stealing that motherfucker and driving it as far as I can back home. And then I’ll ditch it and steal another one.” That was my mindset—and these motherfuckers from Columbia Records couldn’t pay my rent on time, you know what I mean? [Laughs] [Laughs] You starting to get yourself a stoner rock story?
I’d say so. Did you hate LA, or what?
Not at all. There were a lot of moments when I really, really loved it. My favorite moments in LA were when I’d been up all night and the sun would come up and I’d be walking around because I didn’t have a place to live. My dilemma was usually that I’d have a huge bag of speed, but no money. So I’d have to find someone to sell some to. Until that happened, I’d have about 65 or 70 cents, and I’d buy a can of Olde English and I’d walk from like, Silverlake up to like, Laurel Canyon. I’d probably done enough crystal to kill ten men the night before, so I’d just walk aimlessly. And my favorite time of the morning was around 4AM, ’cause you know how it is in California—it’s real hot all night but then around 4AM it cools off because the winds come up. So when that coolness would pass and the sun would be just about ready to rise, I’d walk around Beverly Hills because everyone had really nice cars and bikes. I’d be alone, the sun wasn’t quite up yet, and the dew would be gleaming on all these beautiful cars and bikes. And I’d just dream, man, like, “Look at that ’57 Buick…” That was my favorite time, man. LA was a shithole—especially the Valley—but Hollywood is magic, man. I never once hated Hollywood.
Who did you hang out with?
You know, man… I learned a lot in Hollywood. I started hanging out with these guys, and I didn’t understand… I was very naïve, actually, because I’d never done any real time in prison, and I was hanging around with dudes who had done serious time in prison and got out. Basically, these guys, they kinda had this look to them that I would kind of identify with the gay subculture. But they would have girlfriends, so I didn’t get it. And then they’d disappear into Silverlake, and I couldn’t come. Then I finally caught on: The more time these dudes would do in the pen, the more bi they would become. I was like, “Wait a minute, these guys are fags?” The thing is, they weren’t fags, but they’d adapted because they’d done so much time in the pen. And they’d made a lot of friends from selling drugs in the gay bars. And everybody knows that gay bars have the best drugs. But it took me a long time to figure all that out.
This is a pretty heavy story… I think I told it to Seconds magazine a few years ago, so I don’t know if you wanna reprint it, but there was this one guy who was pretty notorious for ODing. He had a death wish, basically, but his death wish was very impolite, because he would OD at other people’s houses. And, you know, turning blue in somebody else’s bathroom—I consider that to be the height of political incorrectness. It happened to me once and I apologized profusely, I can assure you—I still feel bad about it to this day. I’m very grateful that the two people involved saved my life, but I’m very unhappy that I chose their house to do that in. So, anyway, this dude, I watched him fuckin’ put together this ridiculous hit—an enormous amount of speed and enormous amount of heroin in one spoon. I watched him cook it up and shoot it, and then I took my eyes off him for a few minutes. The next time I looked over, he was pretty gray and fixin’ to die. It was me, him, one other dude, and the chick who owned the pad. Her dude was recently in the pen, so we were over there giving her moral support and kind of leeching on her pad the way speed freaks and junkies do. I remember we were listening to The Church Within. The other dude was a guitar player and he couldn’t believe it—he was like, “That’s you?” And I was like, “Yeah—that’s me. That’s what I used to do.” It was very, very sad times. Meanwhile, the other dude is turning this weird color—first it was aqua, then gray, and then this kinda blue-gray and then he was out, dude. Fixin’ to die. So right away I jumped into action and told the other dude and the chick to get ready to call 911. She’s like, “No way, no way—he can’t die here! Throw him out in the hall!” I was like, “What the fuck are you talkin’ about? This dude is fixin’ to die!” And she was like, “I don’t care! Get rid of him, Wino! Get rid of him!” I couldn’t believe my ears, the callousness, the pure unadulterated coldness in her voice—this woman telling me to throw this dude out in the alley. Finally, I go, “Shut the fuck up, you fuckin’ cunt. Get your finger on that phone and I’ll tell you when to call.” Now, the dude who had OD’d was this gigantic, scary prison dude. So me and the other dude dragged him into the shower, turned the water on, and I started slapping him in the face. [Laughs] My biggest fear—other than that he might die—was that he’d come out of it swinging and just knock my block off. [Laughs] So I’m slappin’ him and slappin’ him, and finally I was thinking, fuck, I’m gonna have to shove ice cubes up his ass or something. Miraculously, he woke up.
You played bass for the Mentors for three shows. What was that like?
It was like ’86 or ’87, and the people who had heard of Vitus had only heard of Vitus because of the black [self-titled] record. That was about as cult and underground as you could get at that point. I think it was Vitus’ first full US tour, and the Mentors were promoting You Axed For It!, which later came out on Metal Blade. SST got us on the bill because I guess they thought it would make for a good show. I remember the Mentors were traveling in the Circle Jerks’ van at the time—it was completely covered in graffiti, dented, scratch, every part of the van had a sticker on it… it was like punk rock to the bone. You can imagine, right? That’s what they started the tour with. [Laughs] Then, at some point during the tour [Mentors guitarist] Sickie Wifebeater got pulled over for drunk driving in Butts County, Georgia—which was so appropriate for the Mentors, because everything was about butts. If [Mentors vocalist/drummer] El Duce had diarrhea, he’d say, “Stop now or smell shit the rest of the tour.” We’d go to people’s places to stay, and he’d sleep standing up, wrapped in the curtains. At parties, he’d be chasing the women around with his dick out.
So anyway, Sickie gets arrested in Butts County, and in order to get him out of jail, they had to sell the van. Of course, they sold it to the cop’s cousin. And what they ended up getting was a tiny little open-bed Toyota pickup truck. Keep in mind, they had two roadies and three band members. So from Georgia to Florida, El Duce and one of the roadies got so horribly drunk that they decided that they’d ride in the open back. We’re talking a long tour drive starting in Georgia and ending up in Florida. They drove through the night, through burly heat all day long, through a rain storm—they were like lobsters in a boiling pot of water. When they got to wherever we were going in Florida, we were staying with this dude who had one of the only real pirate radio stations I’ve ever seen. He had a big fuckin’ transmitter and an antenna hidden in his basement, and he’d do these guerilla broadcasts on some weird frequency late at night. He had also booked the show, and we played in some fucked up place to like ten people, and none of them knew who the fuck Vitus was. Actually, pretty much no one knew who Vitus was on that whole tour. It was all punks who were Mentors fans. So the Mentors got this pirate radio dude to build them this enclosure for the truck. They called in “The Outhouse”—and that’s what it looked like: All it needed was a little crescent moon. Plus, the dude gave them a lawn jockey. And they put a bullet belt, like a bandolier, around the thing and tied it to the hood with old guitar cables. That’s what they toured in—I kid you not. And I’ll tell you what, man—one of the things I regret most in life is that I lost the scrapbook that I had pictures of that in.
Everywhere those guys would go, there was a problem. People would give them a place to stay and be like, “It’s cool—you guys can sleep in. I gotta go to work.” As soon as the Mentors woke up, they’d start rifling through the person’s shit—going through the medicine cabinet, looking for drugs, money, ransacking women’s underwear drawers. They lived up to every aspect of their image: They were ruthless, brutal pirate barbarians. I remember one time, Ed Danky, before he died—he was the bass player and had been in Wurm [as the guitarist] with Chuck Dukowski at one point—had stolen some Xanax from somebody, tied ’em off in a baggie, put them in his shirt and then washed them. What happened was that they turned to powder. We played this gig in Ohio somewhere, and he pulled this bag out of his pocked and was teasing me with it, like, “Wino—look what I got!” So I grabbed the bag out of his hand from him real quick, untied it, shoved a bill up my nose and snorted like half of it. Man, I was so fucked up. We ate, and then I went to the van to lie down. The rest of them went to this party where the blow was plentiful. Oh, and I think a fire started at the party or something. But what happened was that Sickie stayed up all night and totally blew off showing up to drive to the next gig. So they left him there. I forgot to mention: Somewhere around the third show, Sickie had picked up this fuckin’ stripper who he knew somehow, and she came on tour and became part of the show—she’d go onstage and take her shirt off. She was really well-built, so she became a fixture of the show.
Mentors fans are strange. They’re weird people, but they’re really dedicated. To be a Mentors fan, you’re the type of person who’d drive them around to do whatever they want. You’re basically an El Duce groupie. I know it’s hard to believe, but there were El Duce groupies. I remember this one girl, she was a skinny little thing, but she was a full-on El Duce groupie. She basically told him that she was game, and he was just like, “I’ll make it quick, honey,” and then picked her up and carried her off. I couldn’t believe it. Eldon Wayne Hoke was an amazing dude. He was a genuine person. He had a good heart, he was funny, and I liked him a lot. I tell you what, though: If you made the mistake of letting him come into your apartment to party or drink, your chances of being able to wake him up the next morning were extremely slim. But I had a way, and I’ll tell you what it was. I had a tape player that for some strange technical reason would play two different tapes at once. Check this out: I could get El Duce up and out of my house if I played the soundtrack to Eraserhead and Make Them Die Slowly by White Zombie at the same time. It’s a proven formula, tried and true. [Laughs] Oh, man—you gotta get every word of this in print. This is stuff that’s probably gonna end up in my book, but I can never remember it when I sit down to write. I can only remember it when I’m inspired by certain people, and you’re one of those magic people that can get it out of me. Plus, I’m in a good mood today, and I haven’t been in a good mood in a while.
So Sickie got all fucked up in Florida, and they left him there. And everyone in Vitus was kind of mystified by that, because he was the only one who could really play. So they took me aside, because they’d seen me stay up all night with Sickie playing these speed jams. They said Ed was gonna switch to guitar for a few shows, and asked if I’d fill in on bass. Honestly, I wasn’t a big Mentors fan, so didn’t really know any of their stuff. But they agreed to show me four or five of the easiest songs right before we went on. I remember we played at this place in Lawrence, Kansas—it was very famous. It was called the Outhouse, and it was this old abandoned building with no windows that was a famous punk rock club. Vitus played first, and during our soundcheck, I was standing right next to what used to be a window, and I saw something growing that looked like weed. So I reached through the window, and sure enough, it was weed. Anyway, I agree to play with the Mentors, but out of self-respect I knew I had to come up with a good disguise. I wasn’t quite as tattooed at the time, but I did have some tattoos on my hands, so I wore gloves, a different pair of shoes and pants, a long-sleeve shirt and a hood. And I chose my own stage name: Sir Lord Cunnilingus. It’s my favorite sport, so I figured that’d be fitting.
My cut for those three shows playing with the Mentors was more than I made on the entire tour with Vitus, because they were making like a thousand bucks a night to split between three people. Which is actually one of the reasons I decided to do it. So, to have like 900 bucks at the end of three shows—that was miracle money for me back then. But Sickie rejoined and the tour continued at its breakneck pace. I don’t even think Born Too Late was out yet.
It seems like your early days in Vitus were the best for you.
When I joined Vitus, we would rehearse five or six nights a week. I got a great job right away—I was making a ton of loot, and I bought a van. I had a place to live, and I was totally together. I was really, really in charge. I felt totally in command. I could snort a quarter-gram of crank and drink 12 beers every fuckin’ rehearsal. My voice was the best it could be, and the secret was that I got those guys to tune down a half-step. Standard tuning was always kind of a reach for me, either high or low, but I knew from playing in the Obsessed that a half-step down would put everything in my range. I had sort of a death-glam Mötley Crüe look back then, with the pineapple haircut, but we started doing that in the Obsessed before Mötley Crüe did. This lead singer we had, Vance [Bockis], kinda lead the charge and I kept that look after he left. He was way ahead of his time, for sure. But by the time I decided to join Vitus, I considered the Obsessed to pretty much be over. I was already tired of that look, and I’d always ran with bikers anyway. We had some interactions with the local one-percenters, and they were always really freaked out when they’d walk into the club and I’d be wearing spandex with my hair all bombed out. But they didn’t understand that I was listening to all kinds of stuff: Mott the Hoople, the Stooges, the Dictators… I was listening to that stuff just as much as Sabbath. I remember many a time, man, me and Victor [Griffin] from Pentagram would be standing around at some keg party in high heels, beads, full makeup, drinking off the keg, just begging to get killed, and we didn’t give a fuck. You don’t care about that shit when you’re that young. You’re ready to fight at any given moment—at the drop of a hat. [Laughs]
How did you make the transition from homeless in Hollywood to married with three kids in rural Maryland?
Well, you don’t turn blue too many times—that’s the first thing. And then you have to decide whether you wanna live, die, or spend the rest of your life in jail. I don’t know about you, but I did some one-nighters here and there for drunk driving when I was young—my main thing was getting in trouble for being drunk. But then I started shooting coke when I was like 16 years old. I was shooting coke before I even knew how. Back then, we used to get this dynamite blow for like $450 a quarter-ounce. So I’d shoot a gram of coke, drink a fifth of Jack Daniel’s—I wasn’t even old enough to drink at that point. I saw Sabbath when I was 12, took my first hit of acid when I was 13, and I was smoking dust when I was still on the junior high football team. That was the way we grew up. I had these two particular friends who were kinda wild and big for their age. They were only 15, but they could pass for 18. That right there was probably the primary reason why I did a lot of what I did. They were the first kids I knew who smoked, who’d hitchhike into town to get someone to buy them liquor, who’d be like, “There’s your mom’s purse, dude—go for it!” The first time I ever mainlined anything was with one of these guys. I started ignoring everything, telling my parents to fuck off, hitchhiking to the beach—that kind of shit.
When I got to California, the speed thing really got a hold of me, and that’s what woke me up. That’s when I took a look around and saw what was happening. I remember I bought a car with legitimate money—a real beautiful old Firebird. It was primed and ready to paint, with a big old engine in it. It was nice, man, but because I was such a speed freak, I spent every cent on dope and I never got that car legal. I remember it had two keys—one opened the trunk and the doors and the other was for the ignition. One day this dude asked to borrow my coat, which I gave to him, but the door key was in the pocket. I had the ignition key, so I figured I’d just break into it, but the cops caught me breaking into my own car. All the paperwork for the car was at my buddy’s house, but it was Christmas holiday and he was out of town. So I couldn’t prove I owned the car, and I had a few other things hanging, a couple of warrants or something. They threw my ass into County Jail in LA, and I spent two weeks there. I just missed the big riot they had there—this was like ’94. When I got out, I got the Staph infection in my foot, and what happens to you when you’re homeless and get sick or get arrested and have no place to be released to, you go to 6th and San Pedro.
Skid row.
Yeah. And back in those days, there was a tent city for four blocks that was basically Crack City. There was this four-story building there—one floor was a halfway house for people who had just been paroled, one floor was like the mental ward, and another floor was where I was—someone who wasn’t a criminal, but had been in the hospital and had no place to go. I had been in LA County hospital on an IV for two weeks because of my Staph infection, but it was eating its way to the bone. Plus, I’d been basically living on meth. I was in really bad shape, basically fixin’ to die from this huge hole I had in my foot. I went to this one hospital and they hooked me up to an IV, put me in a corner, and no one came to see me again for like seven fucking hours. I started starving to death, and I had to bribe one of the Latino workers who was sweeping the place up at night to go downstairs and get me a sandwich out of the vending machine. I came out of there the next morning, wheeling my IV in front of me like, “Sign me outta here right now.” A couple days later, it got so bad I went to another hospital, and I saw some horrific shit there—victims of gang violence, dudes who had been in these horrible car crashes, shit like that. When the doctor saw this huge hole in my foot, he was like, “What’ve you been doing?” I told him I’d been living on meth, so they asked me if I’d been shooting into that hole. That was common—they thought I had this huge, gangrenous fucking hole in my foot because I was using it to shoot in, dude. [Laughs] This is the kind of shit they would see.
Meanwhile, this friend of mine and her boyfriend were looking to move out of Hollywood, so they’d get high, gas up the car and take these long drives outside of the city looking for houses out in the desert. They saw this ad for a house for rent out in the Antelope Valley, the high desert. Turns out it was Aldous Huxley’s summer retreat—the Doors Of Perception dude. I guess one of the biker gangs out there—the Mongrels maybe—had owned it at one point. So my friend and her boyfriend ended up buying this place, and it still had a handmade latex mask of Aldous Huxley’s face in the garden as a scarecrow. When I got out of the hospital, I ended up in Crack City, and I immediately saw all the pitfalls that were before me, you know? So I called a buddy and he drove me out to the Aldous Huxley pad. That’s where I did my R&R and somehow cajoled enough money for a bus ticket back to Maryland. When I got back, I didn’t wanna play at all. The road just seemed too long. And at the time, I didn’t really have too much critical acclaim. The Obsessed got some, but I hadn’t really done anything else. But I was still pretty hungry, and I still had a lot to prove, but at the same time, it seemed really daunting. So I moved back into my parents’ house.
How old were you at this point?
Well, I’m 46 now and that was ’95, so I was about 33 or so, I guess. My parents let me move back in, but at the time, I was still drinking really hard. Like, bad drinking—like my mom finding me on the kitchen floor, that kind of shit. It was just one of those things where something had to give. I went to this party and I was drinking tequila and doing some blow, but I was feeling pretty mellow. This dude came to the party who I knew, and he was a great guitar player, so I started talking to him because I was trying to get something going. I asked what he was up to, like, “Hey, maybe we should get together and play a little bit.” And he was really, really negative, like, “You wouldn’t be into what I’m doing.” He kept going and going and finally turned his negative vibe into this aggressive, challenging kind of trip. He started in on me really good. I finally got tired of it. I mean, I was just trying to make some connections—I wasn’t trying to pick a fight. But this guy was trying to pick a fight with me. Finally I said, “Look, dude, if you don’t stop, something’s gonna happen.” And he was like, “Why don’t you just go ahead and do it?” He got right in my face. Next thing you know, they’re carrying him away on a stretcher. And this was my first date with my wife. She comes back in the room, and I’m licking this dude’s blood off my hands like some sort of barbaric Aztec priest. She was really scared of me after that, but I really liked her, and she had made the mistake of telling me the night before that she had some mushrooms. So the next day was the 4th of July and I called her up and said, “Look, don’t hold last night against me,” and convinced her to meet me and hook me up with some mushrooms. So I took a big ol’ amount of mushrooms and in the middle of my trip I just realized that I needed to quit drinking. All of a sudden, it was glaringly obvious that that was the whole problem. So I drank my last fuckin’ Heineken, and then all this good stuff started happening. I found this amp I really liked, and my wife—who was then my girlfriend—lent me the money for it. And all of a sudden I had the desire to play again.
