Butch Walker - Drinking with Strangers

WILLIAM MORROW

An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

To my father and idol, Willard Butch Eugene Walker, and my loving, patient, and talented mother, Ruby Melissa Walker. I turned out all right

CONTENTS

Drinking with Strangers

Notes from an Expert

Thats the Way You Do It

A Young Metalhead Comes of Age

Foxy Guys and Tainted Angels

Adventures in the Department of Alcohol & Restaurants, Sunset Strip Division

The End of an Error

My Hair Metal Band Went to China, and All I Got Was This Lousy, Copyright-Infringed Tour T-shirt

Too Much of a Rock Star for a One-Hit Wonder

Playing the Numbers with Marvelous 3

Left of Self-Centered

Failing Upwards into a Solo Career

Going Back, and Going Home

Following the Smoke to Sycamore Meadows

My Happy Ending

Drinking with Strangers, Playing Something Called a Banjolin with Stevie Nicks and Taylor Swift, and the Critics Finally Get It

I f you are reading this foreword, please put this book down now if you think it will be anything like that Mtley Cre book. Put it down if you are expecting me to tell you I slept with Lindsay Lohan, or if you think it will contain any of the following:

1. Heroin use

2. Fucking the dog in front of Grandma

3. Satanism

4. Orgies with small people

5. Constant use of the word fuck (example 2 exempt)

I know Thats all the good stuff, especially since the bar for gratuitous shock value has been raised so high in modern literature these days. Nope. I am a bore , but I do think you will find some of my journeys enlightening and entertaining, or maybe just worth picking up for five minutes while pooping in the morning. Either way, I am gonna tell you the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me... Waitso help me who?

P.S. The names and identifying characteristics of some of the places and individuals featured throughout this book have been changed because I dont wanna come across as a total dick

Drinking with Strangers

Notes from an Expert

I ronic. This book is going to be called drinking with strangers. I just rode my bike down to a local beach bar to proofread the final edit of this book, sat down at the bar, and this is how the next hour of my life went:

Two guys to the left of me, in their mid-forties, and three girls to the right. The girls are cute: theyre maybe in college or work at a hospital together (I havent been able to distinguish the two types from each other). The guys to my left are perfect, sloppy, textbook What the hell have I becomes. They wont leave me alone. For the next hour, I will be accosted with the subjects of hair metal, the Internet, and their past sex lives. All the while, for what seems like an eternity, John Cougar Mellencamps Lonely Ol Night is playing on the speaker in the background.

At this point in my life, I cant help but think this is some kind of joke, what with the ironic history I have had with all of the visual suspects at hand And audible. I played this song by the Coug when I was not even old enough to drink, but old enough to masturbate every day after school to Nina Blackwood on MTV. The two guys at the bar keep talking about how I couldnt relate to what they were talking about because I am too young (they are two years older than me), and that the music they grew up on had so much more substance than nowadaysexcept for Gaga. They love Lady Gaga.

At least they bought me two Cadillac margaritas, and l left without having to give my life story or them asking for some sort of business card. Just know that after you read the rest of this book, you will understand this scene a lot better. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to pry my helmet from underneath the seat of the nurse/pledge leader next to me

Thats the Way You Do It

A Young Metalhead Comes of Age

The music business is a Crel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. Theres also a negative side.

Traditional folk wisdom (often attributed, incorrectly, to Hunter S. Thompson)

The record business is fuckedits kinda funny

Itll separate a boy from a man

You can buy every copy of your record with your money

But youd be your only fan

Butch Walker, Song for the Metalheads

S crew or be screwed in the music industry, those arent mutually exclusive concepts: it is possible to do both simultaneously. The term rock and roll actually comes from a euphemism for screwing, and with good reason. From the beginning, the music held such a sexual allure, Ed Sullivan felt it necessary to censor Elvis Presleys hips on national television. Since those early days, musicians have also been getting screwed out of their earnings by managers, record company dudes, greasy promotions men, ponytailed, burned-out, nonmusical disc jockeys, alleged songwriters with nicknames like the Doctor, and so on. Yes, screwing and popular music prove inextricably intertwinedalthough, for me, it was a bunch of grown men wearing makeup and platform boots that put me on the path to losing my innocence, fiscal and otherwise, to rock and roll. When my ears lost their rock-and-roll virginity, it led to me actually losing it as a whole, which led to me getting screwed (several times) in the music business. As a wise philosopher with a seven-inch tongue rumored to be surgically enhanced with cow parts once wrote, The first step of the cure is a kiss. Or, in my case, KISS

In Christianity, they call the period before spiritual enlightenment Before Christ (or BC). For me, that period is known as Before KISS (or BK). Today, I am considered a decent success in the music business (well, when it actually was a functioning business): you may not know my name, but chances are if you even occasionally listen to the radio in your car, youve probably heard a song Ive produced, or written, or maybe even played cowbell on. As a producer and songwriter, Ive worked on songs for the likes of Pink, Avril Lavigne, Weezer, Katy Perry, Dashboard Confessional, Fall Out Boy, andplease dont hold it against me, I can explain, reallyLindsay Lohan (okay, that wasnt a hit, but it makes for a hell of a footnote). In 2005, Rolling Stone even named me Producer of the Year, graciously overlooking the whole Lohan thing. As a performer, Im often derided as a one-hit wonder thanks to Freak of the Week, the ubiquitous-on-the-radio-for-a-minute single from my old band Marvelous 3, which is typically lumped in with the other number bands populating the second wave of the 90s alternative rock, like Eve 6 (number band), 3 Doors Down (Southern rock number band), and yes, Horseshit 6 (asshole by numbers). Ive even had a long-standing solo career as a mid-level artist, which among music professionals can be considered both an insult and a compliment simultaneously: basically, if youre a mid-level artist, youve obviously got some talent, but youre both too smart and too stupid to sell out effectively.

In the music biz, Ive seen it all, from playing stages in the lowliest dive bars to taking meetings in the lowliest corporate boardrooms to being in the first rock band to ever tour Communist China, bringing late-period hair metal to confused locals surrounded by Red Army militia in rural sports arenas. Its been one hell of a colorful ride, and I owe it all to my mother, father, sisters, cousins, wife, Peter Criss, Ace Frehley, Gene Simmons, and Paul Stanley.

When I was a child, it would take me some time to discover the healing qualities of my future career path in hard rock and heavy metal. Indeed, metal would prove the catalyst, the spermal conduit, to the social diseases, problems, and relationship woes that bratty little teenage snot punks get themselves into. But even BK, I was still very much into music, even as a little kid. I grew up a white boy, in a white family, with very white taste in music. My parents came from beer-drinking, sometimes embarrassingly loud, working-class folk from the backwoods of Tater Hill, Georgia. Rome, Georgia, however, is the city I was born in on November 14, 1969, and I was raised there until I was one year old. Then we moved to Columbus, Georgia, where my dad worked for Southern Bell (pre-AT&T, yall) until I was five or six. Then we settled in Cartersville for the rest of my youth. In our house, we didnt listen to blues or jazz music, say, or anything that cultured. Growing up in small-town Georgia in the 70s, I heard more of the epitome of whatever bad music was on the radio at the time, like, oh maybe Leo Sayer.