Scar Tissue (37 page)

“Why don’t you show John and Chad that thing I saw up at your house the other night,” Rick suggested.

“No, no, Flea’s not even here,” I said. But John and Chad were both paying way too close attention. They both sat down and said, “Hey, let’s see that little gentle number you have in there.” I sang it to them in probably three different keys from beginning to end, not knowing where to go with it, but after I had finished, they got up and walked over to their instruments and started finding the beat and the guitar chords for it.

The next day John came over my house to polish the song. He brought a miniature Fender amp and plugged in. “Okay, sing it again. How do you want it to sound? What do you want it to feel like? Where do you want it to go?”

I sang it to him, and he came up with three or four different chord options. We picked and chose until we came up with the perfect, most inventive chord progression for the melody. And that was the birth of one song on the album.

John was instrumental in realizing another song that would end up on the album. It was a song inspired by my short and curious relationship with Sinéad O’Connor. I met Sinéad at a festival we were playing in Europe in August 1989. Flea and I were big fans of her
The Lion and the Cobra,
and I liked bald girls to begin with, because I knew that someone who would shave her head was tough and real and didn’t give a fuck. Here was this super-ridiculously hot bald Irish girl with a magical voice and great lyrics and a crazy presence. We were playing first, so during our set, I was retarded enough to dedicate “Party on Your Pussy” to this morally ethical, politically correct fighter for the rights of the underdog.

When we finished our set, Flea and I stood by the side of the stage and watched Sinéad. This was before she became famous, so she wasn’t self-conscious; she was just bold. She came onstage in a dress and combat boots and hit her first note. Like a crazy little Irish princess warrior, she started belting out these amazing songs. I was dying a million deaths of desire watching all this, and then she made a reference to my mention of her, and it was positive. Okay, now she was aware of me, so that was a good thing.

After the show, we sought her out and told her how much we appreciated her music. Instead of saying a cursory thank-you, Sinéad invited us to hang out. She was shy and demure, and we talked until her road manager stormed in and rounded her up for the ride to the next venue. Fearful that I was never going to see her again, I ran back to the dressing room and wrote her a pretty meaningful letter, letting her know that I had some feelings for her. I rushed back and caught her just as she was about to board her bus and gave her the letter. She accepted it and smiled and waved good-bye.

And nothing ever happened. Not a word back. She disappeared into the giant cloud of a different world, and we went on our way, and that was it, adios. Life goes on, we toured Japan, and I met Carmen and had a yearlong relationship with her. By then Sinéad had released another album and overnight became the most popular female vocalist in the world. One day Bob Forrest told me she had moved to L.A., and there’d been a sighting of her at Victor’s Deli, one of our favorite breakfast spots.

A few weeks later, I was doing errands and ran into Sinéad. One look at her, and I just melted. I would have married her on the spot. We struck up a conversation, and I reminded her that we had met back at the festival and that I’d given her a note.

“Oh yeah, I know you gave me a note,” Sinéad said. “I have it. It’s in my kitchen drawer at home.”

“That note I gave you is in your kitchen drawer?” I was incredulous.

“What did you think?” She smiled. “You’d write a note like that and I’d throw it away?”

The next thing I knew, she was inviting me over for dinner. Soon I began regularly hanging out with her and her son, Jake. I can’t say that it was a typical dating scenario, because it was a strange time for her—she was gun-shy from everything that had happened to her—but we started going to movies and museums, and I gave her driving lessons in my ’67 convertible matte-black Camaro. We’d drive around and listen to music and kiss and whatnot, but she wasn’t exactly letting me all the way in her door, so to speak. And I don’t mean just vaginally. This went on for weeks, and it became the most wonderful, nonsexual relationship I’d ever had. I adored her, and every day I’d wake up and write her a little poem and fax it to her.

Our relationship was progressing, she was showing me a little more love and affection, emotionally and physically, and then suddenly, it all came to an inexplicable halt. I had made a bit of an ass of myself when she told me that she was going to the Academy Awards. 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. I felt slighted, not so much because she was hanging out with someone else, but because it wasn’t me, and I wanted to be with her so much at that point.

Even after that incident, she never gave me any indication that she was anything other than absolutely enamored with the time we were spending together. Whenever our time together came to an end, I looked in her eyes, and she was as happy as a blossoming flower. I was excited and probably a little heavy-handed and overbearing, but she had a soothing and subtle way of bringing me back down to a more reasonable state of mind. She was calm and laid-back and not buying into the heaviness of my approach. It was good, we were finding a balance.

One day I called and left a message on her answering machine, then went off. When I came back, there was a response on my machine.

“Hey, Anthony, this is Sinéad. I’m moving out of Los Angeles tomorrow, and I don’t want you to call me or come by before I leave. Good-bye.”

I was shattered. It had gone overnight from “Can’t wait to see you again” to “Don’t call and don’t come by.” I didn’t know who to turn to, so I called up John. He was irate that she could treat me like that, and he suggested that I write about it and we’d get together later that night and create a song. It had been raining for two days straight when I sat down at my dining room table, put Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower” on continual rotation for inspiration, and started writing some lyrics about what had just happened to me.

From “I Could Have Lied”

I could have lied, I’m such a fool

My eyes could never never never keep their cool

Showed her and I told her how

She struck me but I’m fucked up now

But now she’s gone, yes she’s gone away

A soulful song that would not stay

You see she hides ’cause she is scared

But I don’t care, I won’t be spared

I drove over to John’s house around midnight. He was like a mad scientist, empathizing with me, but absolutely possessed with the idea of finishing this song. So we worked and worked and stayed up all night, listening to that pouring rain. We finally finished the song at five in the morning and, cassette in hand, rushed out to drive through this rainstorm of rainstorms, straight to Sinéad’s house. It was her last night there, and I didn’t knock, I just bundled up the tape and shoved it through her mail slot. She left town the next day. The years went by, and our record came out, and life moved on. There were tragedies and triumphs and successes and failures and people died and people had babies and I always wondered what it would be like if I ever saw that girl again.

Years and years later, I was at the Universal Amphitheatre for some stupid MTV awards show where Flea and I were presenting with Tony Bennett, of all people. After the show, I was in the back parking lot, hanging out and schmoozing, when a limousine pulled up. I looked in and saw Sinéad and Peter Gabriel in the car. I walked over, and she poked her head out of the window, and we both said hi, and then nothing came out of me and she gave me a really fake smile. There was nothing to say. I can’t even remember if I asked her whether she had gotten the tape. The whole encounter was the most horrible, awkward, poisonous, communicationless exchange. Maybe she did me a favor in the end. Who needs that kind of trouble?

We really expanded our musical palette with this album. One day John approached me with some interesting music that was very melodic and in a unique time signature. John hummed a verse and a chorus, and the emotion of the chords he was playing seemed to correspond to my breakup with Carmen. Even in the heat of our turbulent battles, I never considered her an evil person or hated her. I just saw her as a girl who never got a chance to grow up and deal with all her pain. I wasn’t hurt by our breakup, I was relieved; I wanted her to feel the same and find her way in life.

At the same time, I began to question myself and wonder if I was stuck in repeating my father’s pattern of hopping from flower to flower, the girl-of-the-day thing. I certainly didn’t want to end up like Blackie, because as exciting and temporarily fulfilling as this constant influx of interesting and beautiful girls can be, at the end of the day, that shit is lonely and you’re left with nothing. The lyrics reflect both those points of view.

From “Breaking the Girl”

Raised by my dad, girl of the day

He was my man, that was the way

She was the girl, left alone

Feeling the need to make me her home

I don’t know what, when, or why

The twilight of love had arrived

Twisting and turning, your feelings are burning

You’re breaking the girl

She meant you no harm

Think you’re so clever but now you must sever

You’re breaking the girl

He loves no one else

Recording the song was tremendous fun, because there was this big industrial bridge, so we went out and got all these scraps of metal, and the four of us donned protective eye gear and smashed the shit out of the metal with hammers and sticks and came up with a beautiful orchestration of scrap-metal percussion.

When we started figuring out which songs would ultimately make it to the recording stage, it turned out that the delay with Epic and Mo’s last-minute stepping up to the plate had enabled us to write almost two albums’ worth of new material. Working with Rick had changed the way we thought about songwriting. In the past, we were coming from a groove place, as opposed to a song place, which was where Rick’s heart lay. This album would become the best of both of those worlds. We never tipped over to the conventional notion of songwriting, which would have mitigated against our stirring the pot of Africa. But you need to get into jamming to do that, so taking Rick’s advice and focusing on song crafting were hugely important. Yet we never turned our back on being a funk band, based in grooves and improvised jams.

One of those jams would lead to the breakout song on the album. I was off on one side of the rehearsal studio, working on lyrics, while the band was jamming as a trio. Sometimes they’d be serious intellectual craftsmen, trying to intertwine their minds and come up with specific parts, but other times they’d rock out in a very joyful manner. On one of those latter days, Flea started playing this insane bass line, and Chad cracked up and played along. I was so struck by Flea’s bass part, which covered the whole length of the instrument’s neck, that I jumped up and marched over to the mike, my notebook in tow. I always had fragments of song ideas or even specific isolated phrases in mind. I took the mike and belted out, “Give it away, give it away, give it away, give it away now.”

That line had come from a series of conversations I’d had years earlier with Nina Hagen. Nina was a wise soul, and she realized how young and inexperienced I was then, so she was always passing on gems to me, not in a preachy way, just by seizing on opportunities. I was going through her closet one day, looking at all her crazy clothes, when I came upon a valuable exotic jacket. “This is really cool,” I said.

“Take it. You can have it,” she said.

“Whoa, I can’t take this. This is the nicest jacket you have in there,” I said.

“That’s why I gave it to you,” she explained. “It’s always important to give things away; it creates good energy. If you have a closet full of clothes, and you try to keep them all, your life will get very small. But if you have a full closet and someone sees something they like, if you give it to them, the world is a better place.”

I had come from such a school of hard knocks that my philosophy was you don’t give things away, you take whatever you want. It was such an epiphany that someone would want to give me her favorite thing. That stuck with me forever. Every time I’d be thinking, “I have to keep,” I’d remember, “No, you gotta give away instead.” When I started going regularly to meetings, one of the principles I learned was that the way to maintain your own sobriety is to give it to another suffering alcoholic. Every time you empty your vessel of that energy, fresh new energy comes flooding in.

I was busting out on that mike, going, “Give it away, give it away,” and Flea was flying down the length of his bass, and Chad was laughing hysterically, and John was searching for his spot on the canvas to put his guitar part, and we just didn’t stop. We all came away from the jam convinced we had the makings of a great song.