The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

wanted it. And I’m still going through hell. You know, the only way to get out is to go through all the way, to the very bottom.
    I’m sorry. Have another line.
    Sniff the dust? Okay [Cutting and clicking sounds. Sniffing sounds] . Where were we?
    We were talking about Daisy.
    So when Daisy got out of the hospital, we told him, “Fly out. Come hear the mixes. Let’s work on fixing these other songs.” The day that he was supposed to leave, he missed his flight and showed up late. He walked in the studio, and Trent had never met him face to face before. Trent said hi to him and Daisy was kind of abrasive and greasy. He always seemed to have baby oil dumped on his face and on his hair. The kid needed some Stridex. So he came in, and he was like this angry greasy pimple guy with cigarettes coming out of every orifice of his body, and Trent’s like, “You wanna hear the mixes?”
    And Daisy says, “No, I wanna go smoke a cigarette.” He was a dick right off the bat, which made me feel uncomfortable because I had to defend him. When Daisy eventually did listen to the mixes, he didn’t even pay attention or make a comment. He just kept bragging about the musical shit that he could do.
    We spent the next month or so trying to re-record songs and fix things up, and everyone learned early on that Daisy was not someone who was easy to work with. He was stubborn and he never had a song or the album in mind. He just had his personal agenda as a musician. He wanted to display his idea of what his talents were. Sometimes it got frustrating making that record. But most of the time it was fun. It was new. Life still seemed like something to be enjoyed.
    As we were working on Portrait , Trent was starting his album The Downward Spiral , and we had some good times working together. I thought that was what making music was about. Everyone was pretty sober except for maybe having drinks at the end of the night, and I can’t recall anybody doing drugs except Brad Stewart being passed out on heroin. All I had to be pissed off about was the rest of the world, the things that weren’t a part of my life, the way I saw everybody else’s life. So it was still okay to be idealistic. I hadn’t been scarred by the bad sex, drugs and touring that came afterward.
    Can you recall any of those good times?
    Well, the studio had a large window where you could view the live room, and one night we wanted to have someone entertain all of us. So we taped $ 150 to the inside door of the studio—Trent and I each put in seventy-five dollars. In order to win that money and get in all our good graces, the challenge was to go outside the studio, which was on Santa Monica Boulevard where all the transvestite and transsexual prostitutes come out after dark like little hermaphroditic cockroaches, and pick up one of them and bring him-her-it back.

    At first, all of us went and walked around. There were lots of people driving by and they seemed to be having an easy time picking these people up. But the prostitutes were clearly afraid of us, and we came back frustrated and ate dinner.
    Pogo, who was a skinhead with a long goatee then, went into the bathroom and shaved his head. He always carried around clown makeup because at random times he liked to go out dressed up like a clown. He made up his face Gene Simmons-style and went out by himself. We were starting to record some tracks when all of a sudden Pogo walks in with some she-male and takes her into the live room. All we had to do was turn on the microphones that were recording the drums and we could hear their conversation. Apparently this person’s name was Marie, and from far away it looked pretty much like a woman, and not that unattractive, at least for a prostitute. But upon closer inspection we could see that underneath her fishnets there were some open sores on her legs that looked like they came either from being burned with giant cigars or the first stages of something that we didn’t want to know about.
    What ended up happening was that she was smarter than we thought. She knew we were watching and wanted to charge extra. We weren’t really into it that much so Pogo went into the other room and, to the best of our knowledge, he jacked off on a man’s tits—and I’m not sure what that makes him, other than depraved, of course.
    Was it scary working in the Sharon Tate house?
    One strange thing that happened was we