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drunk together. I was humbled by his playing and decided I’d forgive him for his shitty taste in music. We talked on the phone a few times afterward, then I lost track of him.
    I began moving through bands like crosstops. I’d go to auditions listed in The Recycler , join for a day, and then never show up again. I eventually learned to leave my bass in the car trunk when I first walked in to meet a band. If they had no vibe—which was almost always the case since they were all Lynyrd Skynyrd and I was Johnny Thunders—I’d tell them I had to run to the car to get my gear, and then I’d split.
    But persistence paid off, and I answered an ad for a band called Garden or Soul Garden or Hanging Garden or Hanging Soul. They were a bunch of shady-looking guys with long black hair, which was more or less what I looked like. However, they played terrible Doors-like psychedelic jamrock, and I split. But I kept running into the band’s guitarist, Lizzie Grey, at the Starwood. He had long curly hair, a tube top, and high heels. A cross between Alice Cooper and a rattlesnake, he was either the most beautiful woman or the ugliest man I’d ever seen, with the sole exception of Tiny Tim. We soon discovered that we both had a passion for Cheap Trick, Slade, the Dolls, old Kiss, and Alice Cooper, especially Love It to Death .

    fig. 7

    It was through Lizzie that I joined my first band in Hollywood. Lizzie had been invited by a big, intimidating bastard named Blackie Lawless to play in a group called Sister, which also included a raving mad guitarist, Chris Holmes. I knew Blackie from the Rainbow Bar and Grill: He’d just stand in the middle of the room, tall with long black hair, black leather pants, and black eye makeup, and emit some kind of bad-boy magnetic power that would soon have dozens of girls stuck to his side. Somehow Lizzie talked Blackie into letting me play bass in Sister, rounding out a very ugly and menacing band. We practiced on Gower Street in Hollywood, where the Dogs rehearsed.
    Blackie was an amazing songwriter and, despite the fact that he was cold and shut-down, he was inspirational to talk to because he was into making an impression not just with music but with appearance. He was into eating worms and drawing pentagrams onstage—anything to get a reaction from the audience. We’d record songs like “Mr. Cool” in the studio, then sit around and talk about how we were going to look onstage or what he was trying to express with his songs for hours. But Blackie fell into the class of people, like me, who saw life as a war—and he always had to be the general. The rest of us were supposed to be good soldiers and nothing more. So Blackie and I soon began butting heads, over and over until we were bruised and bloody and, as band General, he had no choice but to dismiss me from service. He soon kicked Lizzie out as well, and the two of us decided to form our own group.
    By that time, I was broke. I had been fired from the liquor store and the factory for blowing off work to rehearse. I found a job at Wherehouse Music on Sunset and Western, where I could get away with showing up whenever I felt like it. When money was really tight, I’d give blood at a clinic on Sunset to pay the bills. One morning while I was taking the bus to Wherehouse Music, I met a girl named Angie Saxon. In general, I had no interest in women except for the moment or two of pleasure they could provide me: The rest of the time they were in the way. But Angie was different: She was a singer, and we could talk about music.
    Except for Angie and Lizzie, I had no friends that lasted longer than a week and no one I could trust. Because I was always starving and amped on uppers, I often felt as if I didn’t have a body, like I was just a vibrating mass of nerves. One day, when I was feeling particularly broke and anxious, I decided to find my father. I convinced myself that I was calling him because I needed money—money that he owed me to make