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“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)

J ANNINA CASTENEDA WAS THERE FIRST. I fell for her, and then I fell for Mary Forsberg. Mary went away. Jannina stayed. Mary came back, only to go away again and then return. All the while, filled with guilt and passion, I tormented myself, making one ill-fated decision after another.
    NOW I REINTRODUCE MARY FORSBERG —blessed Mary, mother of two beautiful children, the love of my early dreams, the woman who overwhelmed my heart and my head for much of my life.
    It was the dawn of the nineties. I had just turned twenty-three. Eric Kretz, Dean and Robert DeLeo, and I had an unsigned band called Mighty Joe Young. I needed work and took a job as a driver for a modeling agency. Robert worked at a music store, right across the street from the agency. He’d come over with ideas for songs—chords, melodies, riffs. Words and stories started coming to me as well. “Plush.” “Creed.” “Wicked Garden.” We were doing live shows and had developed a strong following in San Diego as well as Hollywood. On any given night, we could draw two hundred people. For an unsigned band, that was good. We got gigs opening for Rollins Band, Ice T, and Soul Asylum.
    I was a young man driving beautiful young models to their jobs in my old ’65 Chrysler Imperial Crown. My job paid eight dollars an hour, not so bad for those times. Before that, I was mainly being supported by my beautiful girlfriend Jannina. I never thought that driving models would lead to high drama. If you had asked me, I would have naïvely said, “It’s good