couldn’t have been happier.
The next day, though, brought horrific news. The band members had all gone their separate ways after the party. Mike had left with a friend named Joe, a big-hearted, unassuming kid who had doubled as our sound guy for the concert. On the drive home, on Pacific Coast Highway, just south of Huntington Beach Pier, Mike and Joe had been involved in a terrible accident. I got the news from Tom Quecke, delivered through the haze of an earlymorning hangover.
“Joe fell asleep at the wheel,” he said, his voice catching. “They’re both gone.”
AT SEVENTEEN YOU don’t instantly make the cause-and-effect connection between drinking and death, but I was beginning to understand that the lifestyle I was leading—and at times loving—had its consequences. For one thing, when I drank, I tended to get really violent. Pot had a soothing, almost soporific effect. Alcohol, though, provoked anger. I was probably sixteen the first time I drank to the point of blacking out. It wouldn’t be the last. Invariably, my mood turned dark on these occasions. My intent was never to hurt anyone. It wasn’t like I popped open the first beer with the goal of finding a fight by the end of the evening. My motivation was much simpler: to feel good and find somebody who wanted to commiserate naked with me. Typically, though, the plans went awry. Let’s put it this way: I did not get in trouble every time I drank, but every time I got in trouble, I’d been drinking. That’s for sure. Smoking pot was an entirely different experience. I’d get up in the morning, wake and bake, watch MTV, sing along with the Buggles, play some guitar, take a nap, and get on with the day. No harm, no foul.
All of it was of an ever-expanding piece: the music, the lifestyle, the drinking, the drugs, the sex. For the longest time I was incapable of acknowledging even the slightest possibility that I might have a problem with substance abuse. I looked in the mirror and saw a prototypical rock star. A party animal. It wasn’t until many years later that I took another look and saw something else:
Oh, my God. I’m not Keith Richards. I’m Otis from Mayberry! A fucking drunk!
But that took time. Pot was for the most part a socially acceptable drug in the seventies; to a lesser extent, so was cocaine, although I shunned it initially because it was linked in my view to the disco movement and then to house music and techno. Cocaine was for the Village People and Donna Summer crowds, or the pussies you’d see at a Flock of Seagulls concert. For metal fans, especially for metal musicians, there was booze and drugs. The hard stuff.
A FEW DAYS after the accident, Dave Harmon and I went over to Mike’s house and tried to speak with his family. We awkwardly offered our condolences, and they graciously accepted, but it was a painful encounter. I suppose on some level they blamed us for what happened to Mike, if for no other reason than because of his association with the band. Someone had to be at fault, right? Isn’t that the way tragedy works?
We tried to resuscitate the band, even played a bunch of shows in Dana Point, Huntington Beach, and the surrounding areas over the next couple months. But the spirit was lacking; there was too much baggage, too many reminders of what had happened. Too much guilt, maybe. I can only speak for myself, and for me, it just didn’t feel right. The kinship that drives a band during the formative years was lacking. We didn’t like each other enough, and we didn’t want it badly enough.
Drug use around Panic was common. I was doing drugs with the band members, fronting people stuff, getting high on my own supply…spiraling down the path of drugs and alcoholism. Even the greatest of all fringe benefits—random, indiscriminate sex—began to lose its luster. I told Moira one day that I’d had a dream about engaging in a threesome with her and one of her best friends (this was true, incidentally); that afternoon, when I came home from rehearsal, Moira and Patty were standing on the front porch, naked and smiling, awaiting my arrival. One might reasonably assert that such a greeting would boost the spirits of any red-blooded American male. And it did…for a while. But something was missing. I just didn’t know what it was.
I’d gotten into rock ’n’ roll for the lifestyle, not because I aspired to great musicianship. I didn’t sit around waiting for people to come up and say, “Gosh, Dave, you arpeggiate so beautifully!” No, it wasn’t that at all. I was a rock ’n’ roll rebel. I had my guitar strung across my back, I had a knife in my belt, and I had a sneer on my face. And that was it. That was enough.
Or so I thought.
AROUND THE SAME time, I briefly reconnected with my father. It was June of 1978; I was seventeen years old, and for some reason I got the urge to track him down. Mom and Dad had been divorced for so long, and he’d been such a shadowy figure in my life, that I just had to see for myself whether everything I’d heard was true. So distant were the memories that they couldn’t be trusted, any more than I could trust the lurid stories of abuse spewed by my sisters and my mother.
It didn’t take long to track him down, and when I called him up and suggested we get together, he seemed genuinely moved.
“I’d like that, yeah. When?”
“How about this weekend?”
We met at his apartment, a dark, sparsely furnished little place with bad wallpaper and rented furniture. It was Father’s Day, but that was almost beside the point. I didn’t feel like his son, and I don’t know that he felt like my father. We were just two people—strangers really—trying to connect. Whatever emotion I expected—anger, joy, pride—was overwhelmed by the sadness of his pathetic little life. My father did not look like the bogeyman of my nightmares; nor did he look like the successful banker he’d once been. He just looked…old. At one point I opened up the refrigerator looking for something to drink and was stunned by its emptiness. There, in the door, was a little jar of mayonnaise, crusty at the rim. On the center shelf was a loaf of bread, open and spilling out of its bag. A few random bottles of beer were scattered about the fridge.
That was it.
I didn’t know what to say, so I just shut the door and took a seat at the kitchen table. I don’t remember exactly how long the visit lasted. I do recall apologizing for being such a terrible son, an acknowledgment that brought tears to his eyes and a dismissive wave of the hand. When I left, we hugged and agreed to make an effort to get together more often.
That didn’t happen. The next time I saw my father, about one week later, he was in a hospital bed, on life support. His job at the time was hardly glamorous—servicing cash registers for NCR. Apparently, as I understand it (although there is some dispute regarding the events leading up to his death), Dad was in a bar when he slipped off a stool and hit his head. I’d like to think that he was working on a cash register at the time, that his death was in some minor way noble. But the likelihood of that is small. It’s like the guy who gets caught in the whorehouse and says, “Uh…I was just looking.” My father was an alcoholic, and he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in a bar. Hard to imagine he was sober when it happened. The tragedy is that he might have been saved, but by the time the doctors tracked down anyone who could give them permission to crack his skull and relieve the pressure, he’d already lapsed into a coma. Imagine that. You have an ex-wife and four children all living in the area. You have several brothers and sisters. Grandchildren. But on the day that you suffer a terrible accident, there’s no one to call, no one who cares.
When I got the call from my sister Suzanne, I kind of freaked out.
“Dad’s in the hospital,” she said. “You’d better get down here right away.”
“What happened?”
“Just hurry.”
The first thing I did—the very first fucking thing—was grab a pint bottle of Old Grand-Dad whiskey. I tucked it into my shirt pocket, then ran outside, hopped on my moped, and drove off down Goldenwest Street toward the Pacific Coast Highway. Funny thing is, I hated whiskey; it wasn’t even my bottle, just some shit left behind after a party, no doubt. But I saw it and knew I wanted to hurt someone, and I figured whiskey would help get the job