part 2

During the first three albums everybody looked to me for the "Well, what do you think?" The last word. I really don't know why. I think I was maybe a little more mature. All they knew how to do was kid around. I guess the trusted me. My nickname was "The King." They'll probably all deny this, but I'm telling you the truth. By the end of the Invasion tour, well, by the time we went and did the Dancing tour I just let my position drop. It was like, whatever. I couldn't handle the fighting anymore. It was absolutely getting worst. It depended on the day, but mostly it was me and Stephen butting heads with the rest of them.

I had met my wife, at the very end of the Invasion tour. When I got home I was really burned out, so I started smoking heroin. That became a ritual. At that point, I was doing a couple of hundred bucks a day. I just liked the way it made me feel better and I didn't get all drunk and hung over. I thought it was great. I went through the whole "it's not going to happen to me" and the "I can handle it" thing.

Then we did the whole Dancing recording session. That was very tough. There was lots of weirdness. Who's songs are we going to do? "7th Avenue" had potential. It just never really got its feet on the ground, but, of course, since Warren wrote it, it was great! He was starting to get bummed out that I was on all the magazine covers with Stephen. He was very quiet and didn't have a whole lot to say and magazine guys picked up on that. He was a boring interview and it wasn't my fault that they'd call up and want an interview and a photo shoot with me and Stephen. Again, I'd start getting shit from stuff like that from the whole band.

I went on Howard Stern, but I had no idea who he was. He wasn't God of the World yet. I had been with Tawny Kitaen for years and I had dated Apollonia. At that point the Playboy issue with my wife Laurie Carr was out (there were a couple of pictures of me in there too) and that's what Howard wanted to talk about. He didn't know anything about the band, but he liked the tune "Round and Round." Stephen was with me, but that's all he wanted to talk about. I did interviews all over New York and Jersey that day. Must have done, at least, 20 stations and everybody was like "I heard you on Stern this morning. That was great." When I get back to the guys they were like "real fucking nice, King! What the fuck are you doing talking about that shit for? What's that got to do with Ratt?" So like for days, it was like "fuck you" when they'd see me. That was their headset. Get yourself into that headset and you can pretty much see where the band was at. You know what I mean? It was ridiculous. They'd be up partying all night, and so was I, but I'd still get up early, fly ahead to the next city, and do interviews because nobody wanted to do radio interviews, but I never got a thank you. It was always just "fucking King." They just thought I wanted all the attention, but all I was trying to do was help the band. If you ever read anything I ever said, I'd lie through my teeth and say we were "the best of friends" and in a lot of ways that's what I dreamed of. I grew up with Warren. I played at his ninth grade graduation. That was before he ever picked up a guitar. It broke my heart, literally, the whole fucking thing.

So, now we're getting to Dancing Undercover, which was a big difference tour wise. Although we were still doing big crowds, it wasn't quite what the Bon Jovi / Ratt tour was. The Dancing tour was kind of a wash really. We have Poison with us and the same shit is going on. Bret was ripping off Stephen's trip, the clothes, the make-up, the choreography, they're doing our whole bag and stealing the show. The rest of the guys just hated them and were begging management to get them off the tour. So, Poison was kicked off the tour and we got Queensryche to open up. We watched ticket sales take a nosedive. Queensryche and Ratt was a bad mix. We were a party band and they were like a dark thing. It just didn't fly. I begged everyone, until they knuckled down and ate a huge dinner of crow, to get Poison back. All of a sudden the tour got big again.

I saw Warren on this MTV thing that was taped a couple of years ago and he was saying that "the whole thing looking back was not really a happy time for me." That just blew my mind. I was trying to have the time of my life and they just stopped me from doing that. The band should have just broken up, but wanting to get a hit and having another big album kept it together and we were sure that Reach For The Sky was going to be it.

We got a new producer, Mike Stone (which was a big mistake). We were getting really good drums sounds and guitar tones, but all of a sudden we had a real meltdown. We just could not get the bass to tune to the tracks and everybody was blaming it on Juan. I don't know what was going on, but there was so much fucking coke being shoved up everybody's head (producers included). It was crazy.

That was the first time we actually had a year off, but it was a whole year of recording this fucking record. Finally, Atlantic wanted to hear some demos and immediately fired Mike Stone and brought Beau Hill back in to salvage the tapes 'cause they figured that Beau was the answer to the band.

The sounds were great and the band was great, but Stephen�cThis album was already up to $800,000 and sounded like shit. When Beau came in to fix it up, he didn't feel there was a hit on the record, so he and Warren got together and came up with "Way Cool Jr." All the rhythm, guitar and drum tracks were done, but we did all the vocals with Beau. Stephen and Beau have a certain way that they did things, which, of course, some of the guys hated. But it was the only way to get Stephen to sound the way Stephen sounds. Stephen never rehearsed with the band so we never knew what was going to be sung or what it was going to sound like. It was really kind of irritating to me and to Juan (who were going to have to sing back-ups).

For live shows, he rarely sang in rehearsals. He'd show up a week before and maybe make it through a set and then that was that. We were just supposed to know what to sing as back-ups. It was extremely frustrating 'cause Stephen's not a singer's singer. He doesn't sing on key and every night it's something different, so to harmonize to him is next to impossible.

This whole thing makes me feel so bad. I mean Stephen used to pick me up at high school and we'd go smoke joints and rock out. Plus, like I said, I grew up with Warren. It just makes my heart hurt to even talk about this. You know my dream came true with people that I loved and it just got so bad. I just couldn't believe it and I know that's why the whole drug thing just enveloped me. I was hurting so bad inside that showing up to any kind of thing was more than I could take. Another argument session�c I'd get loaded. When we had that year off for Reach For The Sky, it was really the killer for me. I'd never use on tour. I'd just go cold turkey and the first couple of weeks were kind of a drag, but the Reach tour was difficult for me 'cause I got all strung out from all that time off. There was a lot of animosity, everybody was doing their family thing and we all just drifted apart. When we got to doing it again, I know a lot of us were really ready to get back into it and get away from the domestic bullshit (which I was never cut out for). I should have known from the beginning that getting married was not me.

We cut off the end of the Reach tour by about three weeks. It just wasn't happening you know. It seemed like the smart thing to do rather than burn us into the ground. We weren't going to make a fortune by doing the shows, so we were all real happy to cut it short. The gigs that were coming up weren't real impressive, but that never really mattered to me. Whereas, a lot of the guys, if we weren't doing Madison Square Garden or the Forum where just blah. They'd go out there with a half-ass attitude, but I always tried to give it my all. You get fan mail and it says, "We're from Bug Tussle, Arkansas and we drove three hours to see you guys and you kicked our ass." That makes you feel so good.

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