SEVERED LIMBO INTERVIEW: MICKEY TURNER

Published August 1986

A Candid Conversation With The Mad Jester Of Pop

Written by Dr. Bill Island

"I knew the songs weren't going to sound like anything off of Love Hurricane," Mickey Turner says to me in a loud yell over the jukebox blasting at the Rainbow Room in Hollywood, California where I was instructed to meet him.

"The way I wrote, or co-wrote, these songs were much more….”

He points to a dead cactus in a pot on the table next to the napkins and ashtray.

“… organic. You know?” 

I didn’t.   But it’s clear to me what Mickey’s goals are in the months and even years ahead. He wants to create an amazing groundbreaking memorable second album to bring him out of the “one-hit wonder” label he’s been thrust into. He wants to remain in the eyes, ears, and hearts of the public and be a legend, so to speak.

“I want books to be written about me when I’m gone. Tribute albums. If that can’t happen then I’ll take a bench in Malibu named in my honor overlooking the ocean or something. I’m not sure I’ll be big enough to have a freeway named after me like Ronald Reagan but that’d be the ultimate. Maybe a parkway or an alley would be more like it. A sidewalk.”

Mickey is thinking out loud and his sarcasm silently whispers of being serious. A sidewalk is the last thing he needs to be named after him in his honor but it’d be a pretty close analogy of how people, namely critics, have treated him. Mickey’s songwriting is often compared to juvenile attempts at writing lyrics. One critic even described his lyrics as stories that children write in crayon on their first day of grade school. Something Mickey wants to disprove with this second album.

"After I listened to a few mixes of one or two of my first songs for this album, I realized 'Okay this is NOT what I thought the next record would sound like. It was too clean. I was changing. I’d been arrested 2 or 3 or 8 times and found some edge to my life. It needed to be rock and more energetic— something raw, something primal. It only took me a day and a detox from a concierge shaman to make me realize what I had done up to that point was complete garbage and I threw the master tapes on a bonfire right before the CMD kicked in. That was a turning point, a new feeling for the future of my music.”

And ‘feeling’ is what Mikey Turner is all about. One gets a sense of this from the habits he’s taken on to replace perhaps older, more destructive habits. Instead of smoking a cigarette, he’s been sitting with a stick of lit incense in his fingers like a thin cigar. Maybe it’s the smoke he needs. Or perhaps it’s the small white container, a travel mug, he carries with him everywhere.

“I carry my coffee with me throughout the day. People think it’s weird, but I like it. I painted a little green circle on my white travel mug and wrote my name on it just so I know it’s mine.”

He has taken on these strange casual habits with ease, giving almost no nod to them. It’s a part of him and it’s either this or perhaps back to smoking and drinking. I don’t ask further. He removes from his jean jacket pocket a pile of photographs to show me and lays them on the table.

“I carry these around for inspiration right now. Just got them back from the 1-hour photo. Walmart does the best job. 1 hour flat. Cheap. Matte finish. Come in this pouch thing.”

His photos are of an immaculate room at his house in Hollywood festooned with pieces of medieval armor and weapons. Another photo reveals a pile of books he’s currently reading, mostly made up entirely of romance novels from the 50s and 60s.

“I like the covers. I can tell immediately what each book is about just from the cover. This one’s a sweaty pirate probably there to steal women and treasure or something and then he falls for one of his captives. I mean how could you not with what she’s wearing here, or NOT wearing you know? Hanging over that crow’s nest. That’s totally me sometimes if you read into it.”

 It is this attention to detail that permeates his entire life, be it recording music with Tibetan monks "way before it was cool", to sailing with his manager’s 30-foot catamaran through the Bermuda Triangle to try to make contact with Amelia Earhart’s ghost. Even when he joined a Boyle Heights street gang for a few hours for “research”, no one blinks. That’s Mickey. His only scar from that gang is still on his right collar bone. He has no regrets.

“I met some cool people and learned a lot the Dodgers.”

Mickey is known to go to places where famous people once were. It doesn’t matter if they walked through it or stood by it or lived there, he will go there and try to absorb any creative energy they may be left behind. He has often been seen loitering at Walt Disney’s first animation studio in Los Feliz staring at cracks on the walls or picking up litter on the street Michael Jackson and Director John Landis filmed Thriller.

“I pour myself into my art even though it’s just pop songs. Most of my ideas come to me when I”m staring at the same thing someone who changed art and music stared at but like 5 years ago or 20 years ago. Inspiration works like that. It’s timeless. But probably most of my ideas come when I start picking up trash along the road.”

Mickey has served more hours of community service from his many arrests than your average celebrity so it doesn’t surprise me that he finds some strange solace in picking up litter along freeways. But it wasn’t always this way. The pressure to create, the never-ending demands of public attention, media criticism, tour managers, press and media and local police were all added on the moment “Hit Single” became a hit for 5 weeks.

Born in Scotland and raised in Ireland, Mickey’s mother died when he was 15. Widowed, his father decided to take a good job as a doctor in Beverly Hills to escape a lot of the brewing violence and turmoil of the IRA. Mickey struggled to find his footing and often ditched school to spend time with a small group of skateboarders and surfers in Venice, Ca. He soon found himself kicked out of the house by his father and living in Huntington Beach, California where he found his introduction to bands and music. He discovered he could sing one day when his friend’s band, Courtesy Flush, needed someone to replace their drunk singer for an important rehearsal before a show at the Huntington Beach library. There was a rumor that Brian Wilson would be there along with a record label looking for acts to sign. The show was canceled and Brian Wilson was nowhere near Southern California but Mickey sang so well at their practice, he became the new lead singer on the spot— something Mickey will always remember.

“It’s like the lights went on and I thought. This. This is what I want. All of it. The attention. The energy. The girls. The free food. Losing my hearing from the cymbals. The shocks from a microphone not being grounded. All of it. I wanted all of it.”

Courtesy Flush broke up shortly after 12 rehearsals but Turner was unswerving in his dream to sing for a band and tried his creative hand at the burgeoning Pomona, California art-rock scene with an all-female (except him) band aptly named Mickey Turner and the Man. Mickey and 3 sisters played often but struggled in a surfer rock and Bob Dylan ONLY Orange County, ultimately deciding to move to Hawaii hearing that a budding rock scene was forming in a Tiki village not far from Honolulu. After 6 months, they discovered there was no rock scene there but kept playing in Tiki bars. Reckless Summer Records owner Colonel Lombard was vacationing there with his family and heard them and was very impressed. Thinking they were local to Hawaii he was shocked to hear they were on their way back to LA and signed them to a 10 song album. But before it could be released in the fall of 1982, the horrific plane accident took all 3 sisters on their way to visit family in Montana. Something Mickey rarely talks about to this day.

“Damn peanuts. Who knew they all had severe allergies in their family. I think they are the reason airlines now serve pretzels. So there’s that silver lining.”

After laying low for 2 years making bead jewelry for a local drug dealer, he moved back stateside and believed doing music again would help him heal from the loss of his friends and bandmates but he didn’t want to seem disrespectful. He started working with famed producer Terrance McCarty releasing two albums of soft rock on Reckless Summer Records called "More Coney Island than California" and “Meet me in Manila” under the name Slayd Rabel to not garner any heat for making music too soon after the deaths. But the albums barely made a ripple as listeners had already moved on to glam metal.

"That wasn't the right sound for me anyway. I was listening to a lot of Air Supply and I thought I could do it too. Songs about hot air balloons and love and stuff. I remember the studio was wall-to-wall shag carpet. The room was so dead, my thoughts had nowhere to go, so they kept bouncing back into my brain, and then more thoughts would come out, and they'd bounce back and it drove me crazy. Plus, the Slayd Rabel name was garbage."

Whatever it was that had inspired those albums seemed to have disappeared, along with the masters and Turner felt a change in sound and venue would be the right move. He decided to return to what he loved more than anything, pop and rock music, and so began his journey to being the Mickey Turner we have heard today.

We leave the Rainbow Room and go to his hotel room to a tiny corner table overlooking Sunset Blvd. 

Turner grabs an acoustic guitar and strums a few chords to s song which later will be called "Hot Sister (You got A) ", a fitting tribute to girls he’d meet at the mall in front of Montgomery Wards that became surrogate muses and an ironic look into Turner's often self-inflicted psychic trauma. He hits the last chord, the last lyric lingers in the air, he reclines in a chair seemingly crafted from a stuffed lion and sips from a leftover beer bottle from the hotel room refrigerator.  I am offered another already open bottle of beer to which I decline.

“I actually like flat warm beer better. Reminds me of Morocco. Hey, that’s a good line ‘Reminds me of Morroco.’ I“m always writing man. Always. But...I'm not sure I'll be able to write another record," he laments.

He trails off, looks toward the window, and can see Tower Records in the distance.  I see on the table more photos mickey carries around to remind him of things or inspire him. One photo shows him in Egypt with his manager,  bent over an Egyptian sarcophagus, all smiles and peace signs. The dig workers in the background look horrified.

"Oh yeah. They said we'd been cursed for defiling the dead or something.”

Turner's hotel maid knocks and enters the room with fresh towels and refills the large glass bowl with root beer candy that spills over the top.  Mickey hands a wad of cash to the hotel maid and then suddenly places a boom box on the coffee table.

A flick of a switch and the tape player comes alive. I begin to write down my impressions as the music emanates from the small speaker. "It reminds me of when l was a kid, listening to music on a tiny a.m. radio," he says before he performs a snatch of my pencil that would make Gollum jealous. I try to commit his words to memory as he launches into an explanation of just how he came to make his new album.

Between the demos, I distinctly hear a woman's voice, urging, guiding Mickey toward the hook of a song.

"That was Diane. She was an inspiration. Before she met Bon Jovi … “

Shallow puddles form in his eyes, his lip quivers. Diane Lane has long disputed claims of being in a romantic relationship with Mickey, calling it more like a “friendship you have with the guy who sits next to you Algebra 1 class”, but Mickey has always seen it as perhaps the “one that got away.” I can briefly see it in his facial expression he wants to cuss and punch a wall but his anger instead goes to a happy place. Perhaps that happy place is memories of the confirmed relationship, his longest, with Bengals singer Sussana Hoffs who he met at Live Aid in Philadelphia. New actress Courtney Cox had introduced them backstage saying Mickey was instrumental in helping her land a role on the TV show Misfits of Science. Sussana immediately saw him as “a different dude who wore eyeliner but didn’t act like he wore eyeliner” which piqued her interest. The rest was a love affair that managed to stay out of the tabloids miraculously for a year.

"I think it’s because we just never went out- which was a problem for Sussana. I was messed up, man. I mean, eating frozen french bread pizza every day, chasing it with a gallon of sweet tea and vodka. I put on so much weight. I couldn't leave my loft, all I had was Sussana… and the AOL chat room. Once everyone started talking about how Emily Brontë’s brother may have written Wuthering Heights, I bailed. “

Known for talking sense into him, Justine was a “saving grace” keeping him balanced amidst bad press and the demands of fame. But enough was enough for Sussana and their breakup was sudden at a Depeche Mode concert after keyboardist Martin Gore “talked sense into me” Hoffs claimed years later in an interview with VOGUE CABBANA.

That was then. This is now. Mickey claims to have gotten a lot of therapy and “alternative Moroccan medicines” to help. Perhaps things are going better in his current relationship with V’s Jane Badler? I don’t ask out of not wanting to interrupt his writing process.

On the recording still playing for me, Mickey is clearly trying to write a melody for the first time, humming, struggling to find the right note for the hook. He's almost there. Probing, each new note closer, until.

"There it is," he smiles. "Yahtzee, that feels so good. I wish everyone could have that experience. Creating something beautiful and life-giving."

I compare it to childbirth. He shrugs.

"You don't get a top ten hit from pushing out a kid. Unless that kid is me, but the hit isn't really yours, is it? It's mine when I grow up. Damn…. I just forgot what I sang. Do you remember?" 

I shake my head. I did, But it wasn’t good enough to sing back to him. He can do better, I thought. Maybe that’s what Lisa, and his manager, and his friends have always pushed him to do: better.

On the tape, “Diane” congratulates him for doing just that, better, then I hear a crunch and a chewing sound.

"That's my treat, for doing good," he says with closed eyes, a trembling smile, his jaw grinds back and forth as he relives the moment. "She'd slip me a root beer barrel anytime I'd have a breakthrough, or play a guitar part correctly all the way through. I'd eat it right out of her hand. It's a sensory thing I use to this day."

I can still tell the damage drugs and alcohol have done to him.

Turner stops the tape, ejects it, and returns it to his inner pocket, safe again. He speaks feverishly as he places the tape recorder back on the shelf, no doubt aligned perfectly with the dustless square it previously inhabited. He’d been at the hotel a while. At least a month.

I mention the new songs have a common theme musically, a feeling of melancholy, love lost and losing control of life, and trying to get it back. How will they translate to rock and roll and energy?

"I guess they are sort of slow and deep. Do you know what I hear? Kickass drums and a guitar solo, but I guess art is subjective. The new record will be all me. I'm playing all the instruments, except for lead guitars, drums, bass, keyboards, and some other things, but it's all me because I tell them what to do."

With a knock at the door, it is Mickey Turner’s manager’s son, a 10-year-old kid named Brock. Brock armed with a Pepsi and a MAD magazine lets me know it’s time to end the interview.

Mickey offers to see me out and walks me down to the lobby despite my assurance he doesn’t need to. I don’t mention to him that my room is actually three doors down from his at the same hotel but I play along to be polite. The bicycle Mickey Turner’s manager provided as transportation still sits in the lobby for me. I may have to ride away on it briefly just to make him continue to feel everything is going well.

"Let me give you a parting gift." He takes my notepad, holds out his hand for my mechanical pencil. His signature is child-like, looping, and uneven.

“Beam the Dream! - Mickey Turner”

He hands it back with a smile before pocketing my pencil. Ouch. My pencil.

I ride down the driveway and look back to see Turner wave goodbye. He turns around and disappears into the lobby. I can't help but think about my pencil he took, a vintage Faber Castell won from Thomas Pynchon in a game of Scrabble. 

Zomoskepsis. The winning word. 

Perhaps Mickey’s greatest achievement is that, to remind everyone else that they are winners even if he feels he may not be.   This second album maybe his Zomoskepisis and I hope it is.

If I learned anything about my time with Mickey it is that he’s someone I want to root for and see succeed, just so he can keep eating more root beer barrels with happiness and have less and less of the voices who say he can’t do it on his own. I hope he gets at least an alleyway or park bench named after him someday but it doesn’t seem like Mickeys going anywhere anytime soon. I mean…well, you know what I mean. The coast is clear and i head back to the lobby and to the elevator to go to my room. I reach in my pocket and find a root beer barrel. My treat, for an interview well done.

- Dr. Bill Island, Esq.

Dr. Island is Dean of Musicology at the Center for Gender Studies in Cologne, Germany. His books, Anatomy of a Herder,  Jazz: Music For Cults and the teen mystery series Frat House Detective Agency are currently out-of-print.

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