Biography

With Alice, being on the road, when I first met him, he would preserve all his energy for the show. We would go to a shopping mall in every single town, every single day.

You do different things to get by. I was a dealer for illegal blackjack in New York City before I got the Alice Cooper gig. Then I got the Alice job, and the first plan was the fly us around to different places and let us write together. So one minute we're in a mansion in Beverly Hills, and the next thing I know, we're in Maui together. It was pretty wild.

The whole thing about being on the road, it's the ultimate life for any guy. Someone is always there to tell you where you're supposed to be, so that whole issue is taken off the table. You go to the hotel, you go to the venue for sound check, you go back to the hotel, you eat, and depending on when you want to feel it, whatever sexual thing you're into, you squeeze it in between all this stuff, then travel to the next town. Thousands of people are screaming for you every night, and that does something to your brain.

Yeah, 100 percent sober. That's one of the reasons they wanted me. They loved the fact that I was kind of against the grain, and we just hit it off together within the first hour we were together. There were a lot of great guitar players, and I don't know why they chose me. I guess some of the guys Alice had before, they were smoking something or drinking or shooting something into their arm, and he couldn't risk that going on the road again, so it kind of hung in balance, staying sober.

I don't really remember why we split up. It just sort of got to that point. I got a deal with Geffen, and things just reached an impasse. At the time, we were basically living together in Woodland Hills (north of Los Angeles), and one morning I woke up and Alice was at the door of my bedroom with two suitcases, and he says, "I'm leaving you." We just kind of laughed together. I almost joined again in '95 or '96 but by that time I was working on doing some graphics stuff for video games and all that stuff, but we did get a chance to play together recently, and it was incredible.