Free Running With Monsters: A Memoir by Bob Forrest Page A

than the fact that we had critical praise, nothing else had changed. I was still an unpaid aide-de-camp for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which mostly meant that I hung out with them and offered suggestions, moral support, and the occasional critique. They never held my disastrous stint as a paid crew member against me, but they never put me back on the payroll either. I was broke.
    I needed a job. Luckily, Jon Huck’s girlfriend Sosie Hublitz, who later became my second wife, was an art director in the movie business and she always looked out for us. She helped me get some jobs working as a production assistant. Robby Müller, a cinematographer, also helped us find work. I loaded furniture. I was a set dresser. You could always pick up some work on a rock video or a commercial for toothpaste or floor wax. In Los Angeles, there was always some kind of shoot happening. Jon Huck and Pete Weiss kept doing sound work. K. K. Barrett kept on with his production-design work. We were all wired into that film world. We felt like we were the coolest people in Hollywood. I may have been at the fringe of it all, but that business pays pretty well. I worked on a movie called The Boss’s Wife . One of the stars was Christopher Plummer. I probably made $10,000 just for moving furniture around. That went really far back then, although it could have gone farther if I didn’t spend nearly all of it on heroin and cocaine. But those film jobs allowed me to live and eat and be me, even if “being me” led to employment problems. Keeping any kind of job is difficult when you’re in a stupor.
    The album didn’t help us get better gigs, either. Despite all the critical praise heaped upon Baby … You’re Bummin’ My Life Out in a Supreme Fashion, we found ourselves playing the same little clubs we’d been playing. When the record came out to such accolades, I was convinced it would change everything. Instead, nothing happened. We just foundered around. We made a second record, this time for Relativity Records. The company signed us solely on the praise we had gotten from the first. The deal we got wasn’t great, but we made enough to buy a van to take on tour. Next Saturday Afternoon is Flea’s favorite album of ours, and even today, I’m proud of those songs.
    I wasn’t too worried. I had seen the same thing happen with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were my de facto business model. They had made their first record, gigged, and didn’t make much money. Then they made the second record and started to get booked in places like the Universal Amphitheatre. I figured we’d record the new album and it would make us popular enough to play places like the Hollywood Palladium. Next Saturday Afternoon came out in 1987, and we toured like crazy behind its release. It was grueling.
    People think, “Oh, you’re on tour! That’s great! You get to go places, meet interesting people, and see the country!” You don’t get to do any of that. You show up and do a sound check, go to a bar, have some drinks, see a dressing room, get wasted, do a show, and then drive through the night to the next show, where the routine starts again. It’s not a “See America” sightseeing jaunt. It’s fucking work. And it’s brutal, mind-fucking work. K. K. and Jon quit under the strain.
    “You can’t quit now!” I said.
    K. K. said, “Dude, I have a real career back in Los Angeles. Tear-assin’ around the country in a van isn’t doing me a bit of good.”
    “Jon? Come on, man. We wrote ‘Life’s a Groove’ together.”
    “Bob, I can make good money back home. I don’t need this bullshit. Sorry, man.”
    They were right. They had real careers. But Pete and I were full bore and wide open. We were all in. Chris was in just because he was a student then and could arrange his schedule to accommodate the band. It was all good to him. And he wasn’t a drunk or a doper. He earned a doctorate in linguistics and another one in architecture. He didn’t go