Not Dead & Not For Sale (6 page)

N
O MATTER WHAT CLUB WE PLAYED,
Soi-Disant brought the party back to one particular frat house that was attached to the University of California at Irvine. We did so for a simple reason: One of the frat members dealt coke.

It was during this period when, at one of our gigs, a tall, skinny bass player came onstage and joined us for a rendition of “Louie Louie,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” of rock and roll.

The guy was six foot two, weighed 155 pounds, and was the best bass player I had ever heard. He looked like John Taylor from Duran Duran. His name was Robert DeLeo, and he grew up around the Jersey Shore. He slapped the bass in the mode of the great funksters like Larry Graham of Sly and the Family Stone and Louis Johnson of the Brothers Johnson. In fact, funk was Robert’s thing. He was deeply steeped in the various forms of rhythm and blues. He said one of his idols was James Jamerson, the fabulous Motown bassist and founding member of the famous Funk Brothers rhythm section. Jamerson liberated the bass from its previous role as a mere background instrument: He put it out in front, and he showed generations of musicians how the bass, as a creative force, could sculpt the shape of a song as significantly as the guitarist or even the vocalist.

Cory and I didn’t know about Jamerson. In fact, we didn’t know much about R & B. Robert blew in with the force of a hurricane and brought the wisdom of an old-school teacher. He was rooted in music that was righteous and real. Robert was a madman who could play as well as Flea, the bassist with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Robert knew Led Zeppelin inside and out. We loved Robert. And then Robert disappeared. Nothing strange about that. Musicians jump onto the stage and jump off. Some come back, some don’t. We would have been thrilled if Robert had returned, but we weren’t about to go looking for him. We had our own thing going.

I sailed through high school with a minimum amount of work. I enjoyed history and literature and did well in college-level courses. The advisor said I would easily be admitted to a good four-year college, but I wasn’t quite ready for that. I had quit football, wrestling, and all other sports in favor of singing. Soi-Disant was my main passion. I couldn’t give it up, but I also couldn’t see myself skipping college altogether. My intellectual curiosity was keen. As a compromise, I enrolled in Orange Coast College, a community school.

I dug it. I was a liberal arts major because that let me flow in several different directions—political science, philosophy, great books. I took careful notes during lectures and got caught up in challenging books like
The Closing of the American Mind
. My grade average in high school was C plus; in college it became B plus. With its less restrictive atmosphere, Orange Coast was much more my style than high school. Enrolled in music theory, poetry, and art, I was committed to the liberal arts. Still am.

Ultimately, though, my commitment to music won out over college. It had to. If it didn’t, I saw that I wouldn’t be able to earn a living making music. I had to give music my all.

That’s also the reason Cory and I decided to reimagine our band. If we were going to make it, we needed to get better, which meant getting better players. We decided to move up to Hollywood. Living there, we would have contact with good musicians. Maybe we’d even run into Robert DeLeo.

I got a girlfriend, she goes to art school
I got a art school girlfriend

She left her home from sweet Alabama
Rose, Alabama, for the city, New York City

I got a girlfriend, she goes to parties
Underground parties, Andy Warhol everywhere
She wears the leather, I wear the makeup
We’ll never break up, been together for a month

W
HEN I MOVED TO HOLLYWOOD
in the pre-STP period of my life, I moved with my girlfriend, Mary Ann. She was an art student. But she didn’t come from Alabama. I put that in the song, which came out on STP’s
Tiny Music
album years later, because it made for a better story. The truth is that Mary Ann was a tough-ass chick from Orange County.

Mary Ann enrolled at Cal Arts while I found a job as a graphic/paste-up artist for the Los Angeles
Daily Journal
, a legal newspaper. I went through a quick training program and discovered I had the talent to put together a publication in a matter of hours. We moved into an apartment by MacArthur Park near downtown L.A. I didn’t know it at the time, but a few years later MacArthur Park would become the place where I’d get lost in the rabbit holes.

I had met Mary Ann at a club just after her boyfriend had moved to Paris. She was crushed, and I was determined to woo her. I loved her looks: strawberry blond hair, pale skin, blue eyes, full lips. She looked Irish but was mainly Lithuanian. I also loved her taste and talent for all things cultural. She was an edgy chick with a fiery personality, a ballet dancer as well as a student in an arts college in L.A. At the time, I was still living in Huntington Beach, but that didn’t stop me from burning up the freeway to spend the night with Mary Ann in her dorm room.

My wooing worked. Mary Ann and I hooked up. While I was trying to make progress in the rock-and-roll game, she was expressing her soul in paintings. Like me, she liked to drink to excess. She has since reformed, but when we lived together in L.A., daily life was wild. Mary Ann was my first type A girlfriend: the first girl to hit me, the first one to torch my car. (Actually, it was my dad’s old broken-down car that he had given me.)

After the torching, I asked her why.

“You said I was too much for you,” she answered. “You wanted to break up. You broke my heart.”

“But is that any reason to burn up a car?”

“Yes, it is,” she said. “Be glad I didn’t torch you along with the car.”

I WAS GLAD.

Glad to return to the challenges of rock and roll.

JANNINA CASTENEDA:

Beautiful woman, beautiful soul, beautiful spirit in my life when my life couldn’t appreciate her kind of beauty.

I met Jannina, who had an Ecuadorian mother and Mexican father, when she was nineteen and I was twenty-two. My career was still on stall. I was living off Wilshire Boulevard in mid-city L.A., where I hung out at the King King club at Sixth and La Brea. The Red Devils, a group I dug, often jammed there. Sometimes you might see Jimmie Vaughan performing. It was my kind of hipster scene.

One night I went in for drinks, met a dude named Tony, his sister Jannina, and Jannina’s friend Marina. We drank, danced, and brought the party back to our place. At first I was chatting up Marina, but couldn’t keep my eyes off Jannina. She was short—five foot three—with a tight, beautiful body; long, deep dark-brown hair; deep-set dark-brown eyes; a Roman nose; a perfect bubble butt; a small overbite that I found alluring; and an aura of sweetness that drew me to her. At the end of the evening, I asked for her number.

“I thought you liked Marina,” she said.

“I do, but I have a crush on you.”

She gave me her number; a few weeks later she gave me her love. We had much in common: We liked the same kind of music and we were believing Catholics, both from good families, both interested in a long-lasting relationship. Jannina had a good job selling makeup for Clinique at an upscale department store in Pasadena. Earlier in her life she had set her sights on going to the Olympics in gymnastics. A superb athlete, she came close, winning state and national championships. But at a critical point she lost on the balance beam and her dream of Olympic glory was dashed.

T
HE BIGGEST MUSICAL CHALLENGE
I had was facing the truth: I had to upgrade the quality of the musicians I was playing with. Cory agreed. But deep down, I also knew that Cory, for all his talent, wasn’t really up to the task of the major-league music biz. At the same time, he agreed that we needed to recruit Robert DeLeo.

Robert was still on the musical scene, so it wasn’t hard to find him. When I did, I put it to him plainly: “Join our band.”

Robert was reluctant. “I don’t want to play with Britt.”

“I understand,” I said. “We’ll get a new guy on keyboards.”

“I don’t think we need keyboards,” said Robert. “And I know he’s your close buddy, but I also don’t think we need Cory.”

“You will tell Britt he’s out?”

“Yes,” Robert agreed, “if you tell Cory.”

Thus the seeds of STP were sown.

Cory was cool about it. He sensed it was coming. He had tears in his eyes, but realized our ambition was greater than his. Britt wasn’t as cool. He felt duped.

NO MATTER, ROBERT AND I WERE MOVING AHEAD
. Eric Kretz, a superb musician, became our drummer. All we lacked was a killer lead guitarist. Robert had only briefly mentioned his brother Dean. He never promoted him. All he said was, “The best fuckin’ guitarist I know is my big brother.”

The trouble was that Dean, who had moved from Jersey to San Diego, was no longer playing. He was a super-successful businessman who had married his high school girlfriend and bought a beautiful home. When Robert and I joined forces, Dean helped us get gigs down in San Diego—that’s one of the reasons we got a reputation as a San Diego band—but he didn’t play with us. We’d all party at his house afterward. He was generous with his encouragement, but it took a long time to convince him to break out his guitar and jam.

Once he did, though, our lives were never the same. Our first jam with Dean was on a riff that became “Where the River Goes” on
Core
.

I wanna be big as a mountain

I wanna fly high as the sun

I wanna know what the rent’s like in heaven

I wanna know where the river goes

To us, Dean’s playing was big as a mountain and high as the sun. He pushed us up to a heavenly plane. Whatever had happened to him in the past—however he had become disillusioned or disheartened—the power of the music we made together pushed him out of retirement.

For months he was just our friend in San Diego, our bassist’s brother, a superhip guy who helped us book gigs. And then, with one jam, he became an integral part of the band. This was the late eighties, but Dean was essential seventies, a guitar worthy of Zeppelin. Musically, physically, spiritually, he was perfect for the part. Genetically engineered to be a guitar player, he was a gangly guy with thick, unruly hair, an oversize mouth, oversize lips, thundering chops. He was a skinny motherfucker, but he could play!

Beyond what might seem like a stereotype, he was a real person whose charisma drew everyone—including me—to his side. Jack Kerouac had his Dean Moriarty. I had my Dean DeLeo. His mantra was, “Everything in moderation, even moderation.” Like Keith Richards, he was a glorious rogue.

The DeLeos’ dad died young, and Dean became father to Robert: Even during his crazy high school days, Dean maintained a sense of responsibility. If I brought him the dark news of punk culture, he brought me the complete grammar of gunslingin’ guitarists, from Muddy Waters and Wes Montgomery to Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page.

Mighty Joe Young, May 7, 1990, at Club Lingerie, Hollywood, CA. From left to right: Robert DeLeo, Scott, Eric Kretz (drums), Corey Hickock (Photo by Bobby Levine)