Bob and the Monster

This is Bob.

I'm good, how are things going, are you hanging in there?

Okay.

Yeah. It's kind of shocking to you, right?

Yeah, with... Yeah, with cutting

and eating disorders and drug and alcohol dependency.

The therapeutic community doesn't wanna tell you anything.

You know it's a strange environment that I work in.

We're trying to help your daughter come up with a game plan

to process her feelings and why this is going on.

Instead of just a standard diagnosis

and then put her on some medication and...

It's a snake chasing its own tail.

Bob's life is an amazingly perfect story.

He was this like wild, alcoholic, drug addict guy.

And, and then he just flipped it, like, a 180 into this guy

that brings people to sobriety.

I'm pretty good at, you know,

making them feel comfortable and, and trusting and stuff like that.

'Cause I have a kind of different approach to the whole thing.

Well, he's given up his life, essentially.

You have no idea how many times he's...

Helped my family.

Okay, I'll call you back.

Sure it's gonna be all right. Okay.

How I got to be a drug and alcohol specialist was a long hard strange,

crazy, wonderful, fantastic road,

and it started in music.

Bob Forrest is one of the, was, and everyone will tell you,

one of the biggest assholes ever to live.

* I say, fuck you, Jesus I don't need you to shake my leg

* I don't need no fucking Jesus to save me at all

* I'm here

Bob is the artist that had all the aces and the trumps.

And just, tore them up.

I didn't mean to hurt anybody but myself.

Okay, here's the thing. When I was a kid,

I read the book, uh, Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce, right?

When I was 13 years old all I wanted to do was shoot heroin.

Like that's what I wanted.

Most people thought I was gonna die.

I thought I was gonna die.

But you don't think in terms of like I'm gonna die today,

I'm just gonna take some more drugs today.

Inevitably this isn't gonna end well.

Then I was mistaken, 'cause it does end well if you don't die.

This is Brooke Shields and I got my radio station on Rodney on the ROQ.

* Jenny said, when she was just about five years old Hey, you know,

* Nothing happens at all

* Every time she puts on the radio

* There wasn't nothing going down at all

* Not at all

* Then, one fine morning, she puts on a New York station

* You know, she couldn't believe what she heard at all

* Not at all

* She started dancing to that fine, fine music

* You know, her life was saved by rock 'n' roll

* Rock 'n' roll

* Despite all the imputations

* You could dance

* To the rock 'n' roll station

* It was all right

Hollywood in 1981 was the place

where people were mad to live, mad to talk.

Crazy for everything, wanting of everything.

I was going to LA City College,

but to me it was just school was in the way of doing what I wanted to do

which was drink and go out and have fun and be around music

and be around writers and poets and...

Junkies and hookers. And so I did that.

I wrote poetry and I managed a book store.

I wanted to be around those people that Bukowski and Chandler wrote about.

There was so much pulling me to all of this.

Like there's this part in Kerou On The Road where he says,

"And they danced down the street, and I shambled after 'em.

"As I've been doing my whole life after people who interest me.

"Because the only people for me are the mad ones.

"The ones that are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.

"Desirous of everything at the same time.

"The ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing,

"but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles.

"Exploding like spiders across the stars.

"And in the middle you see a blue center light pop, and everybody goes, 'Ah.'"

* Despite the imputations

* You can dance to a rock 'n' roll station

* You know it was all right *

That thing that Jack Kerouac describes,

most everyone that I associate with in Los Angeles had it.

And I'd come from this kinda Catholic, weird,

Palm Springs Republican background.

And like meeting people like this was...

It was like I had fallen into paradise.

It was one of the most exciting times ever in this town, musically for sure.

With the Monster, and The Weirdos and Jane's Addiction

and the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fishbone and all of these bands,

we were all kind of... The party was happening here.

* We got the neutron bomb We got the neutron bomb We got the neutron... *

It wasn't obviously about the money. It was about having a fuckin' good time.

A really unusual, weird setting.

Let's find old places downtown, throw our own parties.

It was just like a wild urban experience.

* We got neutron bomb! We got the neutron... *

It was honest, bold faced, musical passion.

It was one of the most magical times ever.

This movement of life and music and attitude.

You know, it was electric man.

I mean at that point, all of Los Angeles really was from Highland to Gower,

and from Franklin to Fountain.

I mean that was basically where everyone in that musical community lived.

It's funny how you just kinda find your people.

When you're that young and you're that poor...

And you have that few resources, you go wherever the wind takes you.

And one day that wind took me to Bob Forrest.

Are you gonna keep going? I think you should stop now.

The story is that Flea and I were walking down

Hollywood Boulevard homeless because...

I don't know that that's true.

Oh it's true. This is what happened.

Anthony and I didn't have a place to stay at the time.

I don't know where I was sleeping, on someone's floor or something,

and he said that we could stay at his house.

And I had now known him for about two minutes,

and, uh, he was giving me a place to live.

And it didn't take me long to say, "yeah,

"yeah, we'll be there. We will be moving in with you shortly.

"Nice to meet you."

Our mission was you know let's get high,

let's have fun, let's meet girls, let's listen to music.

Maybe we'll write a song in between all of that.

Bob was always around Flea and Anthony, and Flea and Anthony were...

Always magnets for me and my girlfriends. For whatever reason.

Flea and I were still kind of driven

to pursue this musical experience that we had started.

And Bob was kind of...

He hadn't really found his, his niche yet.

I wasn't sure is he a poet, or you know, preaches?

I didn't know what Bob was.

But he had great style.

He always had you know beautiful women around him.

He always had good musicians around him.

One time we, uh, we took a drive to see Van Halen play in San Diego,

and on the way down there Bob was singing rock 'n' roll songs in the back seat.

And I remember thinking, "Jesus Christ this guy can actually carry a tune."

Which is something that I certainly could not do at that time in my life.

And uh, and I was thinking that's, that's...

You know he could do something with that.

I always wanted to be a writer.

'Cause I thought you know I had a pimply face and I was kinda nerdy

and I always had friends that were musicians and they...

Musicians just didn't look like me.

I'd had my drum set about three months before Thelonious Monster started.

You know the thing, there's like me, Bob,

Anthony and Flea used to go out drinking all the time.

And we'd usually end up the night out in front of where we were

drunk and singing together.

And so then I was like, "Okay, I have a rock band,

"I'll make that guy the singer."

You know in the beginning, it was, uh,

Pete Weiss, Chris, Bob and myself.

And then we added Bill Stobaugh, who I think looked amazing.

Tall, skinny guy with glasses.

And I think K.K. was the fourth guitar player, I mean not the fourth in line,

the fourth guitar player to be in the band.

There were seven people in the band.

They were just so freaky. I mean you would just think, so crazy,

and they all wore glasses you know.

They were a real collective of oddballs.

And then Dix Denney was the first non-glasses playing member of the band.

And that was like a big coup when they got Dix.

Dix was a, you know a real musician.

Dix had been in The Weirdos and he's part of a punk rock royalty,

and I said to Bob,

"Has he ever seen us play before?"

I liked his enthusiasm.

For a bunch of guys just saying, "let's, let's start a band.

"We don't care what happens."

For somebody to see this band for the first time,

which sort of looked looser-ish, nerdy,

and then come on stage and play like this,

bluesy, blistering garage rock.

* Well, I went to the supermarket to get some aspirin

* Because my head was hurting from a combination of heroin and gin

* Well, there was a man in the parking lot

* He was doing some peculiar fishing

* He had a rod and he had a reel *

Their live shows were just real funny and real wild and...

It was the gnarliest show I'd ever seen dude.

It was rowdy as fuck.

The angst was there. The like inter-band squabbling was there.

The drugs were there.

And Bob was just like this out of control alcoholic drunken maniac.

And he danced and sang his ass right off the edge of the stage.

That was the funniest shit I ever saw. Like, "whoa, look at that shit!"

That's punk rock dude.

The singing was out of control, and his pitch was suspect at times.

But he just had sort of a wild abandon and a lot of soul.

He was like one of the soulful-est white boys that I knew.

We had written four songs,

and so we decided we're gonna make a record. Or at least a demo.

Pete, can you hear me?