American Outlaw (17 page)

“Pretty okay,” I said. “They play music you can fight to.”

Glenn laughed. “Music you can
fight
to?”

My rival scoffed. “Real mature attitude for a security guard.”

“No, I’m curious,” said Glenn. He looked amused. “Tell me more, Jesse.”

I cleared my throat, shifted in my seat. “Well, I just think punk, it’s about letting off steam.”

“True,” Glenn said.

“You gotta pump people up,” I continued. “Otherwise, I mean, what’s the point? All this hair metal crap—Def Leppard and Guns N’ Roses and Skid Row—it’s just
soft.
It’s a waste of time, if you ask me.”

“Makes me sick,” Glenn agreed.

“I like intense music,” the black dude interjected. “Just with soul. That’s all I ask.”

Glenn ignored him. “What’s your take on Danzig?” he asked me. “Are we tough enough for you?”

“I’ve always dug your music,” I said, honestly. “I was listening to the Misfits when I was twelve.”

“Gee, thanks for making me feel like an old man,” Glenn said, laughing. “Well, okay. You wanna come aboard? We have a few shows left in the U.S., then a European tour right around the corner.”

“Fuck yeah,” I exclaimed. “I’m ready to go.”

The other candidate crossed his arms sourly. “I like to fight, too, okay? It’s just not, like, my first option.”

——

Doing security was a lot like being back on the football field—only with a super-intense sound track.

“Just make sure no one touches Glenn,” Chuck Biscuits told me. “That’s your main challenge. Glenn whips everyone into a fucking frenzy, and for some reason, his fans always want to fight him.”

I laughed. That made sense to me. “Keep them off the stage, huh?”

“Yeah, keep us safe. Keep the crowd safe, too—scare people, but don’t touch them unless you have to.” He grinned. “Basically, make sure no one gets too bloody.”

My first Danzig show, in Portland, Oregon, was unbelievably loud, and almost comically intense. I spent two and a half hours on stage, hovering nine feet above the writhing masses, watching them fight and bash one another like enraged beasts. Standing directly in front of the speaker, the deep bass vibrated through my body as the barricade pulsed with the force of a thousand death-metal punks.

“I can feel it jabbing!”
Danzig screamed.

The near-delirious band beat the shit out of their instruments, as if they never intended to use them again. The music was so deafeningly loud, it made my brain itchy inside my skull.

“Make me—come alive!”
he screamed.

Glenn Danzig was a monster on stage. Every lyric of every song, he growled forth a primal howl, whipping his long black hair around his head like it was a rabid animal he was trying to shake off. His front-row fans emulated him: they screamed at him, challenging
him to fight, giving him the finger, and showering in the nasty sweat flying off his hulking, compact frame.

After the show, we headed to a Portland strip club to unwind. The Acropolis was kind of a dive, but I suppose it could have been worse. At least no one was wearing plaid.

“So what’d you think, Jesse?” Chuck asked me.

“Blew my mind,” I answered, truthfully. “My ears are still ringing, man.”

“Pretty easy?” Danzig asked.

“Definitely.”

“Well,” Glenn said, “I don’t mean to nitpick, but I think there were a couple of things you could have done better. I was getting some bad vibes from this one shithead right in the front row. He looked dangerous, like he was getting ready to jump the barricade and come on stage.”

“That one kid with the tats on his face?” asked Eerie Von, their bassist.

“Exactly.” He turned to me. “Did you see him, Jesse?”

“No,” I admitted. I had been too involved with the overall experience: the music blasting relentlessly from the speakers, engulfing my body and my head.

“So, you gotta have better eyes, okay? Remember, we’re all depending on you. I’m sure you’re great at reacting—you got awesome reflexes and everything—but paying really close attention is even more important,” he said. “Instead of dealing with problems,
anticipate
them. It’s better that way.”

I nodded. “Yeah, man, I’m really sorry. You’re right.”

“No problem,” Glenn said. “You’re learning. I think you’re gonna be really good at this.”

Encouraged, I ordered another beer. We sat back and drank, and idly, I wondered whether the stories I’d heard about bands on tour were true—was it all a bunch of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll? If so, when was it going to start?

I began to get a nice little buzz going. In my little personal haze, I stared up happily at the gyrating dancer on stage.

Just then, I noticed Glenn, who was up at the bar getting a beer. An older dude appeared to have recognized him. He was leaning over him, harassing him, and Danzig seemed totally uninterested. Immediately, I saw that I’d been given the perfect opportunity to redeem myself.
Anticipate!

Popping out of my seat, I strode quickly toward Glenn and the older guy.

“Yo, jerk-off,” I growled. “Take a step back.”

“Jesse, it’s . . .” Glenn began.

“Not a problem, Glenn,” I said, turning to the older dude. “Are you
deaf
? My friend doesn’t want to talk to you. So take a fucking step back.”

“You telling
me
to step back?” the older guy said, amazed. “Why, you stupid lunkhead, I should . . .”

He never finished his sentence. I stun-punched him in the face, and his head snapped back into a glass stuffed-animal vending machine. The plate glass of the machine cracked, spiderwebbing.

The rowdy Acropolis suddenly fell completely silent. I could hear the record screech to a halt. The house lights came on. A blond, leggy stripper, who only moments before had been grinding lustfully on stage, covered her huge breasts with her hands.

“Jesse,” Glenn said quietly. “You just punched the manager of this club in the face.”

“I should send you to jail, you bastard,” he mumbled from the floor. The machine’s metallic claw wobbled unsteadily.

“I’ll pay for the damage,” I mumbled. “I’m really sorry.”

“You’ll be reimbursed for your machine, Jack,” Glenn said, shooting me a dirty look. “Not to mention a trip to the doctor. It’ll come out of our new security guard’s first paycheck.”

Our bus ride back to our hotel was somber.

“So . . .” Glenn began.

“Yeah,” I said. My head was already hurting from the alcohol. “I know . . .”

“You really can’t
do
that, Jesse.”

“I know. I know.”

“We have to find a middle ground, man,” Glenn said, laughing. “I need to know that you’re one hundred percent behind me, so I can be as crazy as I want to be. But I don’t actually want you to, you know, incur bodily harm on anyone.”

I sighed. “I’m sorry, Glenn. I was just trying to do my job right.”

“Just remember this,” he said. “You are the biggest guy in the room. You can make people do your bidding, simply by standing there. So watch your temper. Be
nice.
”

“Be nice,” I repeated.

“People
want
to obey you,” he said, smiling. “So let them.”

With Glenn Danzig’s words echoing around in my head like a confusing Zen koan, I took to the remainder of the tour with a newfound determination to execute my job like a pro. Again, I was reminded of playing outside linebacker: you used quickness and intelligence, not brute force, to anticipate the rush of the crowd. There was always going to be more of them than you, so you had to learn to watch them carefully, and let
them
expend their energy, instead of wasting yours. Being a bodyguard was not about crushing heads. It was about creating an impression of yourself that was bigger, calmer, and more woefully dangerous than anyone else in the world.

Of course, theories didn’t always translate to the real world, and they didn’t always save your ass from taking a beating every once in a while. As much as people liked to pick fights with Glenn, even more they liked to shout at me, insult me, and tell me to go to hell. Punk crowds were unified by a hatred of authority—and, as odd as it was to realize, I was that now. At one of my first shows, a quick
“FUCK YOU!”
alerted me to a Newcastle bottle spinning quickly toward my face.

Transfixed, I watched it come closer, unable to move. It made a curious humming sound as it spun. And then it smashed into my head. The bottle didn’t even break, but my head got a dent.

This job,
I thought,
is going to cost me some brain cells.

On the brighter side, Glenn and I grew close pretty quick. Both of us were fighters. We bonded around that.

“Come do this Muay Thai thing with me, man,” he’d say, all excited. “I want to show you how they box in Thailand, it’s
super
violent!”

We checked out all kinds of martial arts together, spurring one another to do more and more intense trainings. We must have made a funny pair: I was a six-foot-three, blond, and wide-eyed twenty-year-old. Then here was Glenn, this little black-haired Italian dude with a wrinkled forehead and tiny black boots, whose attitude was so relentlessly aggressive that half the time I felt smaller than him. On stage, Glenn was so full of testosterone and rage, he reminded me of some kind of mutant superhero.

He took the music real personal. Metal at that time really
had
gotten kind of soft and mushy, with glam acts like Poison and Warrant getting crazy airplay on MTV, filling arenas with their diarrhea power ballads and capturing the hearts of thirteen-year-old girls. To real punks like Glenn, it was insulting. And that came through in the focused rage of his performances.

Somewhat disappointingly, the sex part of this rock ’n’ roll dream never seemed to materialize. Maybe because we were mired in the late 1980s. AIDS was a real threat. It seemed like everyone knew someone who had died of it, and that took a lot of the zip out of casual sex. Plus, I was always skeptical: if I was at a show, and met a girl who immediately offered to give me head, well, then what did that make me? Nothing more than a guy who could get her backstage.

Glenn had pretty much the same attitude.

“Dude, you know what I always ask myself?” he said to me one night in his office.

“What’s that?”

“This groupie chick who wants to sleep with me, what was she doing last week?”

“I don’t know. What’s the answer?”

“Pantera.”

So Glenn was a rocker who didn’t fit that lecherous mold. Most of the time I knew him, he had a long-term girlfriend. She’d even come on the road with us occasionally. Slowly, as I observed Glenn and the way he treated people, he sort of grew into a role model for me. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a rock musician or live that lifestyle; far from it. But there was a type of dignity to him, the way he carried himself, that I hadn’t been exposed to before.

In due time, I became quite serious about being top-notch security. In order to get my band from the hotel to the show, on stage and off, then backstage, onto the bus, and finally rushed through the lobby to their hotel room without anything happening to them, every single movement had to be calculated. I had to be watching over my shoulder the entire time. I was kind of a mother hen to them, which was funny, since I was all of twenty years old.

Life was exciting. But due to my responsibilities, I rarely let loose all that much. For the most part, my rock life was wound up real tight. Stressful, even. And I still had a furious temper that would explode when I was challenged.

One night, at a show in Hamburg, Germany, a bald-headed punker in the front row began to go ballistic when the band shifted into the song “Mother.”

“Die you freaking cocksucking prick!”
he screamed at Glenn. That in itself wasn’t really a problem, since everyone screamed at the band. That was just part of the scene. But this dude was also spitting: sending gobs of saliva into the air, with great distance and accuracy. And that pissed me off.

“Knock it off!” I yelled, coming down to the barricade, spearing him with my meanest look. “Quit spitting at the band.”

“FACK YOU!” he screamed at me, his beer-breath exploding all over my face. He continued to scream maniacally at Danzig and the band, then leaned around me and launched another huge hawk of spit at the stage.

“Stop
fucking spitting,
” I demanded, furious. “Or I will kick your ass!”

“FACK! YOU!” he cried again, and, hocking up the thickest gob he could muster, he spat directly into my face.

Disgusted, I snapped my head back and head-butted the punk in the face as hard as I could. In an instant, I had split his face from the bridge of his nose to his hairline. Spraying blood like a burst water balloon, he crumpled backward into the crowd. Immediately, the pit turned on him like deranged wolves and began attacking him with crazed vengeance.

Sheepishly, I looked up to the band. Danzig was shaking his head, bemused, like a dad finding his kid fucking up, yet again. I shrugged my shoulders apologetically. I still had a few things to learn.

——

When Danzig’s tour ended, I headed back home to California. My mom’s house was still open to me, and I intended to stay there for a while.

But soon the word got out to other bands that I’d done a pretty good job for Danzig. They started to woo me into working for them. Part of me wanted to say no, but the money and the adventure were just too intense for a young punk to resist. Working a Slayer/White Flag/Social Distortion show? I couldn’t pass that up even if I tried.

I had the good luck to work with some pretty amazing bands in those days. In 1991, Rick Rubin hooked me up with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They were recording a new album, and Rick had the weird idea that they should do it as recluses in this funky old mansion that he’d rented. I lived there with them for about a month, helping them out and doing their errands, since it was
clear they never wanted to step outside for even an instant. It was a legitimately spooky house, which made sense: it had been Harry Houdini’s once upon a time. It fit perfectly with the name of the album,
Blood Sugar Sex Magik.