Steel Notes Magazine
with three sides for the walls and slanted roof and a ditch down
the middle was the bathroom for everybody. It was for as far as
you could see this neighborhood and it was just unbelievable how
many people lived like that. Here you have this guy on a hill with
everything he wants overlooking that and I’m thinking Wow! How
could your conscience allow that?
Alexxis: I know, they must have
turned a blind eye to it...
Dennis: The party had giant silver
trays of cocaine it was very Scarface
I guess, and that wasn't good enough
for Glen. He was ready to go. So we
were at the Copacabana in Rio, we
played there as well on the same tour
and one night Glen was just crawl-
ing up the stairwell and we had an
old friend that showed up, this girl
Leslie who was a flight attendant for
a Learjet and we would see her all
over wherever the band went. All
of a sudden she just showed up and
it happened so often that she just
happened to be in the
same town so often that it
was no surprise, hardly a
surprise that she showed
up in Rio when we were
there. We said, “Hey Glen,
Leslie’s here!” But Glen
wasn't coherent he was
crawling up the stairs. So
that kind of stuff, excessive
behavior was definitely
happening with Glen and
Alice where Michael and
Neal and I may have been looser in the early days going on stage
when we weren't in our sharpest frame of mind. At one point
when we got a hit single, the three of us decided to buckle down,
Ok we’ll have a drink after the show and we’ll party after the show
but the show we’re going to play tight. So that’s what was going
on and there was little bit of resentment towards the three of us
who were trying to play as tight as we could and trying to put on
a great show every night where this looseness had moved into
the picture. There were nights when we felt we were definitely
carrying the weight and you know the thing is the Alice character
was so powerful that we could withstand that kind of thing, we
could have an off night. When people listen back to recordings,
you know bootleg cassettes or whatever from those days and they
hear oh well, Dennis played a bad note here and there well they're
comparing it to bands that just stood there and concentrated on
playing you know?
Alexxis: Yeah, sure...
Dennis: With us, a bad note meant somebody threw a beer can at
14
Steel Notes Magazine
www.steelnotesmagazine.com
Spring 2017
you or Alice was poking your hair with a sword or something. [
Laughter ]
We had all kinds of things going on onstage and it was dangerous!
Glen got hit in the knee with a hammer once and had to go to the
hospital, Neal got a dart in his back and it was stuck in his back.
Alexxis: Wow! That does sound dangerous!
Dennis: And M80s and we threw stuff at
the audience especially around Toledo and
Saginaw, Michigan they threw stuff back. [
Laughter ]
Alexxis: [ Laughter ]
Dennis: Yeah but we threw soft stuff like
balloons and feathers, they threw you know
hammers and stuff!
Alexxis: Wow! They would never get away
with that nowadays!
[ Laughter ]
Dennis: It still is scary because this Military
Government, these guys with the
machine guns that spoke Portu-
guese were with us wherever we
went. Well we were just going to
go to the sound check for this
gigantic thing in Sao Paulo and
they put us in these armored
vehicles and the street was solid
people and these guys just started
driving right through the crowd
and we’re like “No, we don't need
to get there, its ok take it easy!”
And they’d just laugh you know?
Alexxis: But they were running over people?
Dennis: They were running over people! So now there are these
two vehicles, half the band is in one Alice and Neal and I are in
one and Michael and Glen were in the other. They decide they’re
going to race and this freeway is 8 lanes wide. It’s unbelievable! [
Laughter ] And these two guys were going as fast as they could,
racing each other laughing and stuff and we’re like whoa! This
is scary! Even though the freeway had 8 lanes wide, it had these
little hairpin exits like from what you would have from a dirt road
practically, and they both raced to the exit and it was side by side.
These two cars were trying to make it through a one lane hairpin
turn and the one car went outside of the lane and the end of the
exit just went right into a street of a neighborhood of cars and
people’s cars parked along the street and one of the cars just went
over and smashed into a car and kept going!
Alexxis: Oh man! I would have been scared!