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

out. He didn’t party. It was music or school with him. Chris saved his money. He didn’t spend one unnecessary dime. He even scrimped with his per diem money. But he managed to pay his way through school and eventually bought a house in France from the dough he made in the band.
    We toured Next Saturday Afternoon, and I felt like a musical success. My ego was in full bloom. And it was time to go cut a third record. It was 1989. Pete and Chris were still on board and we had picked up Rob Graves to play bass and had Mike Martt and Dix Denney, who covered the vacated guitar posts. John Doe from X produced us. Looking back on it, Stormy Weather was a good title. It reflected the vibe, both inside and out. There was pressure with this one. Everyone expected us to have a hit and break nationally. Relativity Records had given us a real budget and we recorded at Existia Music Group, L.A., a real state-of-the-art facility. Welcome, my son, to the machine. I was absolutely as convinced as any drunken, drug-abusing songwriter could be that “Sammy Hagar Weekend,” a sincere homage to the life of the teenage hard-rock fan and a shout-out to the embodiment of the working-class rocker, Fontana, California’s hometown hero, Sammy Hagar, was destined to be a huge hit.
    ’Cause it’s a Sammy Hagar weekend
    It’s a big man’s day
    We got a Metallica T-shirt
    Got a little tiny baby mustache
    Got a jacked-up Camaro
    We’re sitting in the parking lot at Anaheim Stadium
    Drinking beer
    Smoking some pot
    Snorting coke
    And then drive
    Drive over 55, yeah!
    I had been that kid at the stadium. I knew what it meant to be out on a weekend like that, and I knew there were kids all over the country who knew what it meant too. Pete and I did not see eye to eye on the song at all. He didn’t even want it on the record. “That’s just a joke song,” he sneered. “Save it for your solo record, man.”
    My contempt for Pete grew. How dare he be so dismissive of my great song?
    “This song will be the hit off the record. You watch. You don’t know,” I slurred back at him.
    John Doe, our producer—who had always been a huge inspiration to me as a songwriter—told us, “These songs are fucking amazing! You don’t play ’em very well … but they’re really, really solid.” Once I heard that, there was no doubt in my mind that this would be the band’s shining moment and our big breakout. Then the record came out.
    “Sammy Hagar Weekend” didn’t go national. It stayed regional. But it did get people excited. We sold out the Palace in Hollywood. Two thousand people at one shot. We sold out a similarly sized club—the Channel—in Boston. I felt like we had made an impression. “Oh, my God, we’re rolling! There’s no stopping us!” I’d tell everybody. But, in the end, the record didn’t hit the mark I thought it would. It didn’t hit the mark anybody thought it would. My management team of Danny Heaps and Nick Wechsler took steps to make the band break. They set up a showcase for record-industry executives at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. It was a tiny, tiny space with a stage not much bigger than a postage stamp, but it had history in that any number of well-respected, big-time musicians had done some very special shows there through the years.
    “Now, Bob,” Danny said. “We need you to be sharp. Be on point. Be cohesive and … don’t be fucked up!”
    “This is an important gig, Bob,” Nick said, chiming in.
    I knew it. I could sense it. Here we were, primed for an eight o’clock show in front of forty different record company executives.
    We blew it.
    We were nervous. I had the brilliant idea to parody U2’s recent ZooTV tour, throughout which Bono and the lads commented on celebrity and media through the use of costumes, masks, and multiple large-screen televisions. They played stadiums. We were at McCabe’s. The microscopic stage cluttered with small-screen TVs just didn’t work. Worse, we were