Scar Tissue

There’s a real psychological relief that comes from discovering what’s wrong with you and why you’ve been trying to medicate the hell out of yourself since you were old enough to find medicine

Then Flea dropped the bombshell. “The only way I could imagine carrying on is if we got John back in the band.”

We were in our postcoital glow when she said to me, “I have to tell you that this is so weird, because the very last person I had a sexual relationship with was your ex-girlfriend Ione. And by the way, I liked this experience much better.”

Flea is the type of friend who can be off doing his own thing, but when the shit hits the fan, he’ll be there for me.

But opening for the Rolling Stones is a shite job anyway. I can’t recommend it to anybody. You get the offer and you think, “Historically speaking, they’re the second most important rock band in the history of music, after the Beatles. So we should have a brush with history.” But the fact is, the Rolling Stones’ audience today is lawyers and doctors and CPAs and contractors and real estate development people. This is a conservative, wealthy group. No one’s rocking out. The ticket prices and merchandise costs are astronomical. It’s more like “Let’s go to the Rolling Stones mall and watch them play on the big screen.”
The whole experience is horrible. First you get there, and they won’t let you do a sound check. Then they give you an eightieth of the stage. They set apart this tiny area and say, “This is for you. You don’t get the lights, and you’re not allowed to use our sound system. And oh, by the way, you see that wooden floor? That’s Mick’s imported antique wood flooring from the Brazilian jungle, and that’s what he dances on. If you so much as look at it, you won’t get paid.” You’re basically like a little TV set on the stage, playing your show as eighty-five thousand wealthy, bored-out-of-their-minds fans are slowly finding their seats. They’re all wearing their Rolling Stones letter jackets and leafing through their catalogs, deciding which Rolling Stones T-shirt and which pair of Rolling Stones slacks they’re going to get. We were the music to be played for ushering, seating, snack-getting, and clothes-buying. It was a nightmare.

I was desperately trying to get John excited, telling him what a trip it would be to play with Nirvana, but he was just like “Nirvana, Shirvana, who cares?”

I remember getting a tape of a new album by a band called Nirvana and driving around the valley in my Camaro with the top down and marveling about where these guys had come from, the songs were so out of this world.

I suggested we go together, and at first she agreed, then she called back to tell me she was going with her friend Daniel Day-Lewis.

Meanwhile, I continued to get loaded. It’s a myth that something like that scares you into going straight. Even when your close friend dies, you maintain a false sense of invincibility.

At age twenty-four, I was totally clean for the first time since I was eleven years old.