I just feel like I may have put a damper on the fun you guys were having.
And thanks for the D+D thing, but honestly, David and David did not have the most durable of engines. For one thing, Dave always, and I mean always had the biggest chip on his shoulder about me. He was never able to let go of it really, and punished me horribly and always in the most passive aggressive manner. I'm sure I was obnoxious, but I was really just trying hard to learn how to be a functioning artist, and the passive aggressiveness just made me more confused, hurt and angry.
He vanished on me for close to two years, not answering the phone, etc, etc, etc, even after I moved into that shitty apartment building where Willie DeVille and Ziggy Marley were also staying, just because it was a 3 minute walk from Dave's apartment studio. But even there I couldn't get a hold of him, short of sitting on his stoop and stalking the guy, which I wasn't prepared to do.
He also was a more diplomatic and professional guy than I am, and seemed more interested in producing than being the actual artist, and got very close with the top brass at A&M, and very much joined in the "David Baerwald is dangerously insane" gossiping at the record company, which I of course heard about and didn't feel great about.
Also I was writing and writing and writing, so much so that in time I filled this enormous paper towel box full of them, the kind the paper towel manufacturers use to ship to grocery stores. I mean hundreds of lyrics. But waiting for him meant that nothing ever happened with the stuff, and it all started getting mashed up together so confusingly that I ended up so frustrated and confused that I burned them all, figuring, aw hell, I'll just sort through the chaff by the simple method of "is it solid enough that I can remember it?"
That's where all the lyrics and much of the music from Bedtime Stories came from. Davitt Sigerson actually started booking recording dates for Dave and I finally, which got even him to show up, and we set up at Westlake Audio (in Michael Jackson's studio) and the negativity was just debilitating. He just hated everything, everything I was writing, the way I sang, my shirt, whatever. He just frankly hated my guts, and I'm still not exactly sure what it was I had done, other than be who I am, which I guess was intolerable.
That's when Sean Penn and I hooked up, ostensibly to write a screenplay, but in reality we just ended up going on an extremely wild and justifiably heavily-armed tear in Hollywood with a homicide cop friend of ours, getting into some really heavy scenes.
I was sort of hooked on a constant flow of adrenaline, so I got involved in this sort of investigative caper with my cop friend in the early days of the LAPD's Internal Affairs investigation of the Rampart Division of the LAPD, a notoriously corrupt and violent crew, who all assumed for some reason that I was both a musician and somehow also a DEA agent, and they were very frank about their extremely illegal and psychotic practices. My cop friend wanted them taken down, but he had already had his life threatened by other officers, and considering a decent part of his job description was was kicking doors in of gang bangers in the most violent LAPD Division at the time, Newton Division, and he would have been very easy to kill in those sorts of activities. That whetted my appetite for that kind of thing, and so after that affair I got involved in an even more dangerous journalistic project with a mysterious friend and a gut Named Mike Ruppert, who sadly shot himself. for an extended period of time, involving these Naval Investigative Service coverups of a massive series of murders in the Navy and Marines, ostensibly related to the drug-dealing side of Iran/Contra, which was an activity Dave had no sympathy for. (I'm sure I'm getting a lot of this chronology wrong.)
Meanwhile Dave was in this super-spiritual space with his girlfriend of the time, another singer, also on A&M, who was also managed by our manager. I was just a real duck out of water with all that. Dave insisted that in order for me to understand his vision that I must join him in this kind of Ecstasy-fueled seance at this unbelievably crooked record producer's mansion in Malibu, where people would get enormously high under this pyramid in the mansion's ballrooms, where everybody would hold hands and try to make these giant crystals which were hanging from various specially-encoded parts of the pyramid move with the collective power of our minds. I tried, I really did, but it was quite clear to me that those crystals weren't moving, or if they did happen to spin a little, it was not because of our telekinetic abilities, but rather the ocean breeze. But I felt extremely insecure about how damn unspiritual I was. I tried to be, but it just wasn't in me.
After the Sheryl Crow success and the ensuing carousel of deaths related to that we set up up shop again for another try, actually building this massively expensive studio in an old film storage building in Hollywood in a real attempt to to something, with a wonderful engineer from the Peter Gabriel camp named David Bottrill, but we just couldn't get past the dynamic. He could not work if I was around him, my very presence seemed to shatter him. He finally said that—"I can't work if you're around I need time alone," which, fine, so I went to Mexico for 3 weeks or so, and when I came back I went to the studio and found Bottrill alone there, cleaning some dirty pots on the mic-pre racks. I said, "hey, what did you guys do while I was gone?" He said, "well, I'll play it for you," and pressed play. It was a gorgeous synth pad, beautifully recorded, and I thought, "wow, nice intro sound," but it never changed. It was just this one chord, unmodulated, never changing keys, for seven minutes long.
Dave finally showed up and found Bottrill and I listening to the thing, and I said something like "fantastic intro, Dave," which was not the right thing to say at all, because he thought of it as already a song, which, who knows, maybe it was, but I just didn't know what to do over it.
Ultimately he disappeared again, went to India with our mysterious friend, who had spent a lot of time there doing god knows what. Which, by all means, do what you need to do to find peace in this crazed butcher shop of a society, far be it from me to cavill, but on this earthly plane ended up with me being held accountable by A&M for all the 100s of thousands of dollars we'd spent on the stuff, because I still had a cross-collateralized deal with A&M.
I still really admire Dave, and always enjoy hanging out with him, but it is seemingly not possible for us to get out of each other's way.
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