Johnny Cigarini (22 page)

I had to climb over broken glass to leave my house. All the mirrors, books and other crap was scattered on my floor. The coyotes that lived on the land next door were running around in circles, howling at the moon and the sky. It was apocalypse LA, like some sort of dystopian sci-fi movie. My drive was steep – I was lucky to be able to use it – and I went down the hill to see my friend Paul Weiland. He had rented a house near me while he was directing
City Slickers 2
. I went into his house, no more than 400 yards from mine, and all his family photos were still standing. I said, “You've tidied up fast.” He didn't know what I was talking about, so I took him to see my house. “See,” I told him.

“Jesus, Chiggars, I'd have shit myself.”

“Well,” I told him, “I kind of did!”

I went up to Maureen Tigrett, who also lived nearby, to see if she and her children were okay. I was worried about her as Isaac was away. All the residents of her gated community were sitting out on the lawns in the street. The aftershocks were freaking everybody out, and they did for days.

We also had floods and mudslides in Malibu, and an El Niño high tide in '95 that took away the sand from under people's houses and left the decks hanging in the air. For some reason, after all of that, it made more sense to me to be by the beach. Even though the mad weather nearly killed me, I did manage to have a good time too, and the beach had a lot to do with it. I fell in love with beach life and Siobhan and I grew closer. Due to her music video connections and her then boyfriend Howard Napper's modelling career, their house in Malibu was always full of young models, filmmakers and musicians. It was not unusual to have twenty people for lunch at the weekend.

Siobhan knew all about my Christmas trips to Thailand with the Saatchis and she wanted to go. In 1993, she sent a location scout to find a hotel we could take over on Koh Samui. As I have said, Siobhan and her Limelight company always had a large entourage, and we filled a hotel of about twenty bungalows with all kinds of rich and high-profile faces. Richard Branson included.

One night, a few of us went to a bar in the village where I met a Thai girl. I took her back to the hotel but walked into the lobby, and it was full of my English mates. “Err… uhhh. I ran into my niece…” I told them. They weren't buying it.

My prosthetic heart valve makes a ticking sound, the rhythm of which obviously depends on my pulse rate. Whilst doing the dirty deed with the young girl, I opened my eyes to look at her… it happened as I was about to come. She was lying there, oblivious to what I was doing, but holding her wristwatch to her ear and looking at it quizzically, wondering where the rapid ticking noise was coming from. I burst out laughing and it completely put me off the job at hand.

People can sometimes hear the ticking in a quiet room. I went to the ten-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat in Wales with my friend Howard Napper. The retreat was a long way from the nearest village, and en route in my jeep, we passed some New Agers walking with their rucksacks. After I found out how far it was, I decided to go back and give them a lift. Amazingly, they refused to get in the truck. They called it a terrible gas guzzler. On the one hand, I respected them for standing up for what they believed in, but on the other, weren't they all dressed in modern clothing and factory-made backpacks? Walking in hiking boots made from oil? Were they so committed to the prophecy of the hippy that they would never step onboard an aeroplane again, never sail on a boat?

Anyway, it was my introduction to Vipassana and I found the experience very interesting indeed – and fortunately didn't need to listen to any New Ager preaching like I had experienced in India, as nobody was allowed to speak. I enjoyed not talking for ten days, but mostly not listening to anyone's crap! It was difficult seeing Howard when we did the walking exercise, which was rather like a prison exercise-yard walk. Howard and I wouldn't be able to look each other in the eyes, otherwise we would get the giggles. We had to get up at 4am each morning to do the first meditation and that was particularly hard to get my head around: getting up out of bed… to go and sit down! I don't think I achieved enlightenment or perhaps I'm not one of the chosen few? But I did enjoy the silence and I enjoyed getting the giggles with Howard. It made me feel like a kid again, but the best thing was when someone complained about the “person with the loud watch”. It was my heart valve, and they made me bind my body with clothing for sound insulation and sit right at the back like a naughty boy. Well, that wasn't exactly spreading love and harmony now, was it?

In 1994, I went to Antigua to join my friends Simon and Lorraine Kirke for Christmas. They were staying at the Copper and Lumber Store Hotel in Nelson's Dockyard and Keith Richards was there, on a family break from the Rolling Stones' US tour for the
Voodoo Lounge
album. Keith was a friend of Simon's, who is the drummer with Bad Company, and most days both families and I would go for a beach picnic. Keith would do the barbecuing. I'd had a previous run-in with Keith in the seventies. I had a new Swedish model girlfriend, who was the spitting image of Marlene Dietrich. I took her to Tramp, and we sat at a table with Keith and some other people. She was my beautiful date and he took her home.

One night Keith, Simon and I went on a bender in a spare room they had. Keith had received a Christmas present from the tour guitar roadie. It was a Dobro steel guitar, the same as the one Robert Johnson was holding on the cover of a biography that Keith had. He was very proud of it. Keith is a beautiful singer; in fact, his songs are always my favourites on the Rolling Stones albums. He sang songs all night; interspersed with anecdotes, interspersed with Jack Daniels, interspersed with cocaine. I hadn't done coke since leaving London, but I was weak that night. Gimme a break… I was partying with Keith Richards for fuck's sake.

At one point, I told them I had recently been to Graceland and had bought Priscilla Presley's autobiography to see what her life with Elvis was like. Keith told me he had been a close friend of Priscilla Presley. Mick had been a close friend of Priscilla Presley. In fact, the whole band had been close friends of hers. That was the difference between him and I: I was reading a book about her, while he had been there with Priscilla Presley! Keith was very dismissive about Elvis and his manager Colonel Parker. “Do you know what the Colonel's previous act to Elvis was? Dancing chickens! He had chickens in a cage on a bed of straw, and underneath the straw, he had live electrical wires, which he switched on and off. When the chickens got electrocuted, they danced!” It was one of the most memorable nights of my life and we all went to bed at dawn.

A few months later, the Rolling Stones were playing at the Coliseum in LA and I had tickets from the tour office through Ronnie Wood. They included backstage passes, but when I got there, I found there were about two thousand people backstage – none of whom were the band. There, I ran into Jo – Ronnie's wife. I had known her since she was a sixteen-year-old model and married to Peter Green, in the rag trade. He once told me, “You've got to get them young, so you can mould them,” but then Jo left Peter and married Ronnie! I had known Ronnie when he was with Rod Stewart in The Faces through the super groupies on the King's Road, but in 1975 he joined the Rolling Stones. Jo had had a son Jamie from Peter Green, and Jamie, then a young man, was with her backstage at the Coliseum. She introduced me and told him, “This is my oldest, oldest friend.” She then took me into the inner sanctum, where the band were and no one else. It was such a heartwarming thing she had said, and I shall remember it forever. It proved to me also how important it is to be nice and to be nice to your friends.

We went to the trailer that Ronnie and Keith Richards were sharing. Ronnie and Keith were in there alone and we all had a beer. It was just the two of them, the girl I was with and yours truly. Keith remembered me from Antigua a few months earlier. Eventually, a security man came and told them it was time for the show. We all walked together to the back of the stage, them carrying their guitars. They climbed onto the stage and my friend and I went to find our seats. She was very impressed. So was I. I felt very privileged.

Isaac Tigrett was also in LA in the nineties. He had married Maureen Starkey, Ringo's ‘secret' wife during The Beatles' heyday. I would see a lot of Richie, as she called Ringo, at her house, as his children still lived there. The Hard Rock Café was the world's biggest collector of rock ‘n' roll memorabilia, and Isaac claimed with great affection that Maureen was the most authentic piece in the collection. I went to their wedding in the South of France. They were living in a large house on a year-long rental in Cap Ferrat, and held it there. I was one of the best men, along with Dan Aykroyd and his pal Larry Bilzarian. Before the wedding, we best men and Isaac stayed in the Château d'Eze, a fab hotel on a mountain peak that looked over the coastline. I remember the wedding well; it was a great party and Isaac spent $80,000 on caviar! I ruined a brand new Commes des Garçons linen jacket, jumping into the crowded pool to save a three-year-old girl from drowning. Afterwards, all her mother Carole could say to me was, “Oh, she's always doing that.” Sometimes rich people really piss me off.

I also remember it because Isaac had a friend from Texas, Mike Powell, whose mother had been best friends since childhood with Princess Grace of Monaco. Consequently, Mike had known the Crown Prince Albert for years. We all went out on a motorboat to look around an American warship that was moored in the bay and Prince Albert told me the most disgusting joke: “Why do Tampax have a string? So you can floss after you have eaten.” I thought,
I'll remember that when you are crowned Prince of Monaco
– which he is now. On that note, what is it with royalty and tampons? It reminds me of the time that Prince Charles had his phone hacked – wasn't he caught telling Camilla it would be his “luck” to “come back” as her Tampax? It just goes to show that royalty are normal human beings like the rest of us, and just as crude.

Isaac and Dan Aykroyd started the House of Blues in 1992, with the first being in Harvard Square, Boston. It was only a small club, but it got Harvard University interested and they invested $15 million in the venture. I went to the opening of the next one in New Orleans, in January '94.

I was with Isaac and Maureen Tigrett, Dan and Donna Aykroyd, Ian and Doris La Frenais, and Jeff Lynne. Jeff, the La Frenais' and I regularly had dinner together in LA. Jeff was the former leader of ELO, for whom he wrote the great songs ‘Evil Woman', ‘Mr Blue Sky', ‘Free Fallin'' and ‘Sweet Talkin' Woman', and he is nothing short of a musical genius. He was previously with The Move, the pioneering British band from the sixties. He was also, with George Harrison, the instigator and founder of the Traveling Wilburys, featuring himself, George, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. In 2008,
The Washington Times
named Jeff Lynne the fourth greatest record producer of all time. Ian La Frenais is best known for his creative partnership with Dick Clement; together they wrote many of the classics of British TV comedy, such as The Likely Lads, Porridge, Lovejoy, and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

We had a lot of fun in New Orleans; that place sure had some sleazy dives. I was sitting in an alcove in one club, with a lap dancer sitting astride my lap and my face buried in her naked breasts, when Doris La Frenais came in and started talking to me as if I was on my own. “Chig, where are we going for dinner tonight?”

“Doris, do we have to talk about it now?”

Doris is a great bird; I love her. She used to always embarrass me, though, and probably her husband Ian, by saying about me to friends, and in front of him: “This is who I am running off with, if anything ever happens to Ian.”

Isaac had a House of Blues half-time show at the Super Bowl held in New Orleans, and he arranged for me to go on the private jet owned by Jean Paul DeJoria, owner of Paul Mitchell hair products. The problem was Chelsea were playing Liverpool that weekend, so there was no question – I had to stay in LA to watch it in the Cock and Bull. I soon regretted it, though, when Chelsea were six-nil down at half time. The Super Bowl would have been fun, I guess, but you can take the boy out of Britain… you know the rest.

Isaac is a character. He had a train car that he used to commute with from LA to New Orleans. The carriage had belonged to his mother's family for decades; her family built railways. Isaac tracked it down and restored it, but he restored it with a difference; the inside became an opulent Indian palace. He bought carved wooden panels, fabric and furniture from India, and it was absolutely splendid. Isaac would call up Amtrak and hook it onto the back of a regular scheduled train. The charge was $1.15 cents a mile.

The House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard is a wonderful building. The land drops off from Sunset very steeply, so all you see from the strip is a one-storey shack made of rusty corrugated iron. The rest of the huge building – containing the auditorium, bars and restaurants – is hidden down the slope. Isaac found the rusty shack at the Crossroads. The building itself is a piece of rock ‘n' roll memorabilia, the Crossroads being the mythological crossroads in Mississippi where Robert Johnson was supposed to have sold his soul to the devil in return for the devil teaching him how to play the blues. It was on the route that all the blues musicians took to get from the Deep South to Chicago. Eric Clapton recorded an album called
Crossroads
, also the name of his rehab clinic in Antigua.

The House of Blues was said to cost $11 million to build and Isaac's attention to detail is wondrous, so you find in there walls filled with southern folk art and bar counters made of thousands of bottle caps. The large bar on the second level hydraulically splits in two and swings open to reveal the stage down below.

The opening parties lasted a week. Aerosmith, who were investors, were on the first night. I had never seen them and they really were that good. Top acts played throughout, including John Lee Hooker. A year later, I had a pee standing next to him at the Hollywood Center Studios where I worked, so I can justifiably claim to have hung out with John Lee Hooker… if you get what I'm saying. On the official opening night, James Brown and the Famous Flames played. It was, I think, the tenth time I had seen them, but not since the seventies. I once saw them three times in one month: twice in London and once in LA. They were the band that Mick Jagger regularly flew to New York to see at the Apollo, before he became a star – James Brown being Jagger's inspiration for his great dancing moves. I don't know how I did any work that week.

Isaac had also created an Indian room in the Hollywood House of Blues. It was the VIP area, called the Foundation Room, and you had to be a member to get in. Isaac, Dan and Donna Aykroyd, Ian and Doris La Frenais, Jeff Lynne and his girlfriend and I must have spent every evening there for at least two years. Maureen, unfortunately, didn't make a couple of years. She collapsed on the day of the opening party. She had been dieting to get into that ‘special' dress, and everyone thought that was the cause. It turned out she had leukaemia. I went to see her in hospital in Seattle after she had a bone marrow transplant from her son Zac, but she didn't make it and she died in December '94. I cried on the shoulders of Fiona Copeland at Maureen's wake in the House of Blues, which was quite unusual for me. I had always dealt with death quite matter-of-factly, but not when Maureen died; for some reason, it was different. I really loved her and I felt very sad for my young goddaughter, Augusta. I think that when my parents died and my granny died, it wasn't the end of the world. I always knew somehow I would be okay, but when Maureen died, I was sad for Augusta and I cried so damn hard.

Every night, we would have dinner in the Foundation Room and then go to see the show downstairs in a reserved seating area. I was a regular at the House of Blues and I saw some fantastic acts: Al Green, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bobby ‘Blue' Bland, the Neville Brothers, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Leon Russell, Bo Diddley, Taj Mahal, John Lee Hooker, James Brown, Etta James (three times) and my mate Eric Clapton. Even Tom Jones played – the girls still throwing their knickers, which was quite amusing. Some of the bloomers flying through the air were just ginormous!

My neighbour from Escondido Beach and friend from the Playboy Stocks House, Stash de Rola, and I were at the club one night when we bumped into Tony Curtis. It was like a Stocks House reunion. Tony had another statuesque, buxom lady with him – his new wife, I think – and she also towered over him. He sure liked ladies with the big boobs.

I had my fiftieth birthday at the club on 8 June 1994, two months after it had opened. I booked all five tables along the bar that opened onto the stage, each containing ten people. Fifty special friends for my fiftieth. Junior Walker & the All Stars were due to play that night, one of the biggest acts on the Motown label. I remembered their big hits, ‘Shotgun' and ‘(I'm a) Road Runner', from the 1960s, so I was looking forward to seeing the famous sax player. Unfortunately, Junior Walker had a heart attack that day, and the House of Blues house band took his place. Walker died eighteen months later, at the young age of sixty-four.

Having felt that I missed out on investing in the Hard Rock Café, I was keen to invest in the House of Blues. Initially, before the clubs had opened in New Orleans and LA, I had put in $20,000 and I hadn't even been in the clubs – but after I saw them, I was impressed. Planet Hollywood had gone public and made a fortune for Robert Earl and the shareholders. Robert Earl had been running Grand Met when they bought up Isaac's half of the Hard Rock Café. He had found that Isaac had built up a big collection of Hollywood memorabilia… and that was the beginning of Planet Hollywood. Isaac was talking about the House of Blues going public and I wanted in. I begged him to let me invest more, but he kept saying things like, “Those shares are reserved for John Goodman.” In the end, he let me raise my shareholding to $300,000, but I lost it all. I thought you might all like to know – after all this bragging about cars and whatnot. If I'd invested that kind of money in 1995 in any tech stock, like Microsoft or Apple, I would be a very wealthy man, but I've stayed positive about it. I reckon I had my money's worth in fun.

Things started to go wrong for Isaac at the 1996 Atlanta Georgia Olympic Games. He always paid frequent visits to his guru, Sai Baba, in India and he was undecided whether to open a House of Blues at the Olympic Games. He asked Sai Baba, about a month before the Games, and the baba told him he should open a club, so Isaac had crews working double time through the night to get the club finished in time. It supposedly cost $9 million to build, for a club that was only going to stand for a month. Unfortunately, the thing that really did it for Isaac was the bomb that went off at the Atlanta games, killing one person. Whole areas where the House of Blues was planning to sell merchandise were closed off and the whole thing was a disaster. By then, the House of Blues had a number of large investors who had put in $10-15 million each. In addition to Harvard University, there was Disney and someone who had made a fortune selling Mexican salsa. After the Atlanta debacle, the public listing was cancelled and the figures no longer stacked up. Isaac fell out with the financial partners and left the company.

The whole House of Blues fun was over and eventually the clubs were sold to Live Nation concert promoters.