My Life With Deth Read online

  I learned how to play music on that Wurlitzer organ, which was excruciatingly boring. Then in the fifth grade I took up the tenor saxophone, mostly because it looked like the coolest instrument in the ensemble. I later learned that women like a sax man, so I should have gotten better at it, but it just wasn’t my bag. I mostly did it because I wasn’t into being a jock, and I needed to take some sort of elective.

  All these things led up to me asking my mom for a Gibson bass in the summer of 1976, when I was eleven years old. I wanted a Gibson because I’d seen the brand name on the back of a KISS album: I figured that if KISS used it, it must be the only one to have. Gibson had to be a go-to brand. We found a used Gibson EB-0 bass that came up for sale in the neighboring town of Fairmont, and we bought it for $150. Then we went to Worthington Music in a town about thirty miles away, and bought a little twelve-watt Fender Bassman amp with a twelve-inch speaker.

  It sounded awful, believe me. That combination of a Gibson EB-0, with its single pickup at the neck, plus flatwound strings and that little amplifier was terrible, especially at the volumes I wanted to play it. I got home and plugged in and I thought, “What the heck is this? This doesn’t sound like Gene Simmons at all!” I took note of this in my later career: when a kid buys one of my signature Jackson basses, I want it to sound like Countdown to Extinction or Rust in Peace. Even if the guy can’t play it, just striking the strings should make the bass sound something like “Holy Wars . . . The Punishment Due.”

  Even though it sounded terrible, I’d come home after school every day and for many hours I’d sit in the basement and learn to play that Gibson bass.

  My brother wasn’t like me: he played trombone for a couple of years in the school band, but my mom and dad had to stay on him the whole time to practice. He didn’t enjoy it; his musical tastes were different. He was into pop acts like Elton John and the Bay City Rollers. I didn’t appreciate Elton John until years later, because I regarded the piano as a lightweight, sissy instrument, and I didn’t care for it. I was into really heavy hard rock. Eliot also integrated more into the community than I did, and he started to get into country music, but music was strictly background for him.

  I really diverged from the family in that sense. My parents remained supportive, but both of them were very cautious because they knew about the allure and the dangers of rock ’n’ roll. I remember the father of a friend of mine telling me that I should go down to the Armory and play country music gigs, because I could make fifty bucks a week doing it. I thought, “Forget the fifty bucks. I’d rather play rock ’n’ roll for free!”

  I didn’t want to be a working guy: I wanted to be a rock star. The ’70s were such a cool time for rock ’n’ roll: bell-bottoms, platform shoes, long hair, sex appeal, cool guitars, glitter, studs. It was all so attractive to a young, impressionable person like me.

  So here I am in the summer of 1976, age eleven and heading toward twelve. KISS’s Destroyer had just come out, and my number-one ambition was to be a rock ’n’ roller. I had the Mel Bay Electric Bass Method Volume 1 and Volume 2 tuition books that I’d bought from the music store, and I basically taught myself to play bass from those books in my basement. I was so desperate to learn the instrument that at one point, I even called on one of the church music leaders, a guitar player, to come over and show me things as best he could. I would go to any lengths in small-town Minnesota to find musical camaraderie, so I could play the bass.

  But I didn’t want to just sit in the basement and be a great player for myself; I wanted to play in a band. I wanted to be onstage and emulate the musicians I’d seen. What’s interesting is that I wasn’t an extrovert or a kid who needed attention; I was actually rather shy and didn’t always like being the center of attention. But the bass guitar lit me up: it was the thing that gave my life purpose and direction.

  Eliot had two high school buddies, a guitarist named Mike Cushman and a drummer named Kent Libra, who were both pretty good players. We formed a band within three months of me starting to play the bass, and played covers of songs by Bachman Turner Overdrive, Kansas, KISS, and other bands, just copying what our heroes were doing. We did our first concert out on the porch of Mike’s farmhouse one night, in front of all the parents. That was the first time I performed live in front of an audience in a rock ’n’ roll band.

  The band was called Headstone, because that was the darkest thing we could think of at that age. I wore a cool pair of black platform shoes, because I’d been watching what KISS was doing. I had some bell-bottoms, too, white flashy ones, with a wine-colored satin button-up shirt. I was taking fashion cues from my idols, mostly ’70s rock stars. The parents looked at me with a bit of amusement, raising their eyebrows, but I didn’t care. I was gonna be a rock star, and it was all starting now.

  I started to grow my hair out about this time. When I was a little kid, I killed one of my front baby teeth with a Tinkertoy and it went yellow and died. So when my permanent teeth came in they were all messed up, crooked as could be. As a result, I had to get braces at around twelve years of age, which was so not cool for a budding rock star, and I had real bad acne till I was seventeen. It was right about that time that I started to have long hair around my ears. I remember wearing that maroon silk shirt around, which I’d have open, with the buttons undone. I was starting to look at the world in the way that I thought a rock star would, even at this very young age.

  My father saw me getting really into this rock star stuff, and one day we went over to a music store in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where they had a Dan Armstrong acrylic bass guitar. It cost five hundred dollars new, and he bought it for me, so now I had a collection: my Gibson EB-0 and my new Dan Armstrong. My father didn’t have a musical bone in his body, but he could tell when something had real value, and even to him this Dan Armstrong bass was something special.

  This set a precedent: throughout my whole career, I’ve always had flashy instruments. I’ve never had just a standard Fender Precision bass, for example, even though I temporarily wanted one because many of the 1970s rock bassists seemed to have them. That said, at the store in Sioux Falls, they had a really old, beat-up Ampeg SVT amplifier, and I looked at it as if I was worshipping in front of an altar. Every hero of mine had an SVT, and even though this one didn’t sound that good, it was an iconic piece of gear to me, through which all the arena rock gods played. However, I couldn’t afford it at the time and didn’t buy it, but this was a blessing in disguise because I was able to create my own individual sound. Ironically, not having the standard Fender bass plugged into an Ampeg SVT helped me to develop a unique tone. It was largely because I didn’t have these tools that I was forced to develop a style that would allow me to cut through the mix. One of those was playing the bass with a pick instead of taking the typical two-finger plucking approach.

  I initially learned how to play the bass with my fingers, but I found that style awkward, and once I started playing in a loud rock environment, I always felt that a pick sounded better. I could wear the bass in a different position where it felt cooler on my body, too: I never liked the look of the guys who had their bass high up so they could play with their fingers. I thought it looked effeminate, so I would play it down low and rock out with a pick. It made me feel like a rifleman going into battle, and it remains my stage stance to this day.

  The first major show I saw was KISS with Uriah Heep opening on their Rock and Roll Over tour, in February 1977, when I was twelve. We all went up to Bloomington, a suburb of Minneapolis, to the Met Center, where the Minnesota North Stars played hockey. My mom and her friend Sheri took me and Eliot, his friend Mike, my friend Greg, and Sheri’s daughter Marci to the show. It was amazing. I’d seen the pictures of the band and watched them on the Paul Lynde Halloween Special on TV, but in the arena it was a whole different experience. I just remember how enormous it was and wondering how KISS had gotten to this point. It seemed almost overwhelming, like looking at a jet airplane and wondering how in the world that thing
could ever get off the ground.

  I remember there being pot smoke everywhere—this was still the ’70s. As the night wore on, it seemed as if everyone in the audience was smoking pot. At one point in the night, these heads in front of us turned and offered some to me and Greg, and we said, “Oh no, we don’t do that!” I was completely naïve, and my mother was somewhere close by, chaperoning the trip, and she certainly would have frowned upon this. After the show I remember buying a T-shirt outside for six dollars; it fell apart after only a few washes in the washing machine. I now know that it was a bootleg shirt but when you’re a young, naïve fan, you just want to take something home as a souvenir. Things in the concert business were much looser in those days than they are now.

  Right about this time, Mike and Kent from my band Headstone had started to play with two other guys, Lee Meecham and Jim Tusa, both of whom were very accomplished guitar players in the area. They were about sixteen years old and went to high school, Jim in Jackson and Lee in the neighboring town of Fairmont, where I’d bought my Gibson EB-0 bass a few years earlier. They had cool gear: Electro-Harmonix Big Muff pedals, Fender Stratocasters and Gibson Les Paul copies, plus big amps. They had great licks and really looked like rock stars. Kent and another bassist, who played in our high school jazz band, came and played with these guys on a regular basis, but suddenly he couldn’t do it. So Kent and Mike said, “Let’s get Ellefson in!”

  Here I am at thirteen, and I’ve joined a band with a bunch of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds. I was always in bands where guys were older than me, which has helped me become a much better musician. I now knew what it felt like to be brought in as the new guy, plug my gear in and play with good tone, and have people say, “Wow, this kid is a good addition to what we’re doing.” Every gig I’ve done since then, I’ve always wanted to be that guy: the guy who can improve the band, not take something away from it. What’s more, by joining this band, I discovered that those Electro-Harmonix Big Muff pedals could make guitars distort and sound like real rock guitars, just like on the records I was listening to.

  We called ourselves the River City Band, largely because Jackson had the Des Moines River running through the middle of town and it was our connection to the area. It only lasted a short time: we played a couple of school functions and that was about it. In fact, I recall getting a gig at Riverside Elementary to play for the students, and it was truly electrifying. We had lights, sound, roadies, a dressing area, stage clothes—the whole bit. But from there it was a fun summertime thing to do after I’d been playing for a year or so. As with a lot of bands, interest waned and people got sidetracked by other things, but we did play live a few times.

  Another time, I remember going to Fairmont and playing a teen hall or something like that. We had to learn a lot of material and play three or four forty-five-minute sets that night, which was standard for hired-out bands in those days, in that part of the country. I liked learning about show business. You’d have a stage time, start with an intro tape, and play your set. You’d take breaks in between and then play another set. It definitely got your chops up, as well as your endurance. Usually by the end of the night I was really tired from the energy of it all, and I wouldn’t get home till almost 3 A.M. I wouldn’t call it rock stardom so much as just working in a rock ’n’ roll band . . . usually for free, after the travel expenses ate up the band’s fee.

  That was one of the first times I saw musicians drinking beer at a gig, and girls coming around backstage to smoke pot and get friendly with the band. After the midshow parties at the breaks, the guys would go back onstage and their playing was terrible. I was really bummed out by this. I was like, “Why did you do that? You ruined our show!” I was in the pursuit of excellence, and because I wasn’t taking part in the party life, I didn’t yet understand that aspect of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. My passion for music was all encompassing, and as a result, when I saw guys smoking pot and drinking and getting distracted by girls, I looked at them as if they were a bunch of losers.

  I wasn’t involved with the church much by this point. There was a disturbing period when I was around fifteen years old, when a religious group called the Peters Brothers out of Minneapolis embarked on a crusade of burning rock ’n’ roll records. Their point of view was that KISS was an acronym for “Knights In Satan’s Service,” and that Rush was about injecting heroin, and so on: they really took the morality angle to the edge. My mom came home one night from one of their seminars in Jackson, quite shocked and obviously reconsidering everything I was listening to. That, more than anything, turned me away from the church, although my mother eventually relaxed on the whole issue.

  I was becoming rebellious at this point, though. I’m sure part of it was the allure of rock ’n’ roll mixed with typical teenager stuff. I remember coming home with a pierced ear and, although I kept my hair over my ear to hide it, one day we were sitting at the kitchen table and my dad looked at me with the most disapproving glare. I thought he was going to kill me. He supported me in music, but seeing his son dress the part of a rock star never really sat well with him.

  Greg Handevidt and I were close friends—he was probably my best friend throughout most of my teenage school years. He had moved to Jackson in the fifth or sixth grade, and he was a troublemaker. He was always getting yelled at by the teachers, which I didn’t like so much, but I liked the fact that he was into KISS and had started to play a copy of a Les Paul guitar. He had lived in bigger cities than Jackson prior to moving there, so he was cocky and had an air about him as if he knew what was going on more than the rest of us. I’d go to his house, and he’d play BTO and KISS records on his stereo. We’d watch TV if there was any kind of rock ’n’ roll show on, especially The Midnight Special, featuring Wolfman Jack, and also Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. Greg seemed to know rock history and was quite diverse in his tastes. I remember arguing with him once about what KISS wore on the Halloween TV special, which they played during the Destroyer tour, and even the details of Gene Simmons’s bass at the concert we attended in Bloomington. We were passionate about rock ’n’ roll and about making it big as musicians. Plus, he had a real street-smart sense about him, whereas I was pretty wholesome and naïve, being from the farm.

  Greg was a mentor to me. He had lived in the city, and even though he was a few months younger than me, he was way more worldly than I was. He was into sports, which I wasn’t. He would tell me, “You need to get into sports so you can get in shape.” He was great when it came to teaching me not to be a dork from the farm. Pretty soon Greg and I got together with a drummer and formed a band called Toz. I have no idea what the name means, although I found out later that the fifth row down of an ophthalmologist’s eye chart is made up of those letters.

  Greg Handevidt (school friend):

  We were going to call the band Toyz, but then we realized how wimpy that sounded, so we dropped the y.

  This is about the time I started drinking and using drugs myself. It’s interesting: from the ages of fifteen to twenty-five, which were the years I participated in drugs and alcohol, the people I hung with were all defined by the chemicals they were using.

  When it came to alcohol, I had been quite sheltered from it all. I’d had a couple sips of my father’s beer and taken communion in church, which of course involved wine, and there were a couple of instances at Thanksgiving where I’d have a little glass of wine. I’d have that feeling of the alcohol hitting my head, and then I’d get really tired and sleepy. I liked the taste of grape juice better, so I wondered why people drank wine. I never liked the taste of alcohol, actually. Kind of ironic, considering the events that were about to happen next.

  A THOUGHT

  Religion: Opiate for the Masses?

  I spent the early years of my life on the farm in and around the church. Nothing fanatical, but I still had the fundamentals of a Christian ideology put upon me. Years later I would philosophize and question these teachings, even though they were the basis of my upbring
ing.

  Because of this moral compass, as a young man, I looked down my nose in disgust at older musicians who would partake of booze and drugs before we performed. I simply thought they played better when they weren’t stoned. That all changed once I took my first hard drink, though, and for the next ten years of my life I sought to feel good just like they did, usually with whatever they were offering. In many ways, I left religion behind, only to get caught up in a different type of opiate for my soul.

  CHAPTER TWO

  One Is Too Many (and a Thousand Isn’t Enough)

  “The best way to never have to quit taking drugs is to simply never start taking them.”

  —Donald Trump

  One autumn night, I went out with my brother, Eliot, and his two friends, Mike and Todd. We sat out in Todd’s car, on a dirt road about half a mile or so from where I grew up. I don’t think they invited me: I was just the younger brother who tagged along for the night. I remember it was a cold fall night, probably in early September.

  They had some Southern Comfort, peppermint schnapps, Miller beer, and Marlboro cigarettes—and we threw it all back and got hammered. I remember those first couple of sips of Southern Comfort were wretched: it tasted so bad. They said, “Chase it with a Miller beer!” so I did, which made it a little more tolerable, mostly because of the barley taste of the beer. The schnapps was much smoother and even helped the Comfort go down a bit easier.

  All of a sudden a warm, floating, fuzzy feeling came over me, and I started giggling and laughing. I was laughing at them and they were laughing at me, and that was my formal introduction into the world of alcohol at the age of fifteen, in September 1980. We went to the bowling alley that night and played Asteroids. I thought, “Okay, so this is what stoners and drinkers do.” Late into the night, Eliot and I snuck into the house while our parents slept, essentially getting away with it all.