O.C. POP BEAT : To Hell and Back

It’s a fairly juicy story of rock ‘n’ roll decadence that Jeff Drake has to tell, and as he sits in a cheap neighborhood restaurant in Anaheim, unreeling it forthrightly over a plate of Mexican seafood, a grin sometimes plays across his full lips.

It’s the tragicomic tale of the Joneses, a raunch-rocking Orange County/Los Angeles band that seemed like a comer on the Hollywood club scene in the mid-’80s as it freely copped musical styles and bad-boy attitudes from the Stones, the Ramones and the New York Dolls. The Joneses drew crowds and press attention with catchy, hell-bound songs about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll that Drake sang in a bratty drawl.

Oval-faced and apple-cheeked under a thick haystack of dyed-black hair, Drake, at 33, doesn’t show many outward signs of having spent a decade living the life he sang about. Recounting the history of the Joneses in a soft, nasal, deadpan voice, he puts a comical spin on a saga that is part Spinal Tap and part William S. Burroughs, with gross-out interludes worthy of Ren & Stimpy. A touch of Willie Sutton is reserved for the farcical climax.

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Drake doesn’t gloat about behavior that he thought was glamorous at the time, but he isn’t ashamed of it, either. He freely confesses to an eager passion for heroin that eventually came to rule his life, and he has no qualms about discussing every detail he can remember of the afternoon when, in a junkie’s panic, he made a spur-of-the-moment decision to rob a bank. The police collared him easily within an hour or two, and he spent 2 1/2 years in federal custody for unarmed robbery.

As it worked out, Drake says now, botching a bank robbery was one of the luckiest things he ever did. Had he been cut out for crime, he might not have lived to add another chapter to the Joneses’ story--one in which the music is as raunchy as ever, but the only shot he craves is a shot at a record deal for the recently re-formed band.

A dinner interview with Drake is not for the weak of stomach.

“All the stories that are coming to mind are vomiting stories,” he says with a smile when it becomes obvious that this is a common thread running through Joneses lore. Drake’s heroin sickness tended to manifest itself at inopportune moments--such as the time a couple of road-tripping Joneses fans arrived in L.A. from Tulsa, Okla., only to have him heave a noxious greeting at their feet.

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Onstage dental distress is another motif: Drake says that as his addiction worsened, he had a chronic problem with a loose dental crown that would come flying out of his mouth as he sang. Drake, whose drug budget didn’t leave much for dental care, would have to stop the show and ask fans to help him scrounge for the lost crown.

“It got to the point where I would take it out of my mouth and put it in my pocket when we were playing,” he says. One benefit of prison was the full set of dentures he now sports, replacing the teeth he lost in his drug days.

He says his keen interest in drugs took hold during his childhood, around the same time he was developing a fondness for stripped-down, hard-driving rock ‘n’ roll. The oldest of three children (his younger brother Scott sings in the Humpers), Drake spent his early years in Anaheim and Irvine. He says he was only 9 when his second cousin’s death from a drug overdose made a deep impression on him: For some reason, he says, it didn’t repel him but, rather, planted a fascination with the idea of taking heroin that he would act on readily years later when he finally got the chance.

When Drake was 12, his parents--rock-loving record collectors who brought the music of Chuck Berry, the Beatles and the Doors into the house--moved the family to Merced, a farming community in Central California. There, Drake became enthralled with his key influence, the New York Dolls.

He also was struck by early punk rock, which encouraged him to start banging on a guitar and writing songs of his own. He says such prophetically titled staples of the Joneses’ repertoire as “Pill Box” and “Criminals” first were played by his high school band, named Slider after an album by the British glam-rock band T-Rex.

By 1981, he was back in Orange County, looking to get into a band. After playing together in a rockabilly group, Drake and bassist Steve Olson launched the Joneses. Drake became the singer because nobody else in the band wanted the job. Olson came up with the name. He wasn’t thinking of the street meaning of jones as a term for a drug craving, but Drake certainly was--and loving it.

Soon after the Joneses started--Drake, who had been into pot, pills and alcohol since the age of 12 or 13--got his first taste of heroin.

“This English guy was hanging around the band and was trying to manage us,” he recalls. “I’d picked him up in Huntington Beach, and we were driving to a rehearsal in Garden Grove, and he said, ‘Hey, pull over--you want to do some heroin?’ He put it on the corner of a credit card, and I snorted it. I was still high the next morning when I woke up. Everything I thought about it was validated. I thought, ‘This is what I want.’ ”

Drake had been primed for the moment: “Keith Richards, Johnny Thunders--everyone I thought was really cool was a heroin addict. When you’re a teen-ager, you don’t think you’re cool, and I thought it would make me cool. When you’re that age, adult credibility is zero, so you don’t believe what they tell you (about the dangers of hard drugs). The warning signals were there, but I just put my foot down on the accelerator.

“It wasn’t until I was 23 (about 2 1/2 years later) that I had the heroin sickness and knew what it really was. I did it every chance I got. As the band got more popular, I had money, and people wanted to hang out and buy it for me. So I was doing it all the time.”

By 1984, the Joneses were a hot item in Hollywood, drawing good crowds and landing a feature write-up that declared them “one of L.A.’s most talked-about practitioners of no-holds-barred garage rock.” The band had gone on two do-it-yourself national tours, released a self-financed EP and had its songs featured on a couple of Southern California punk-rock compilations.

It also had begun a pattern of frequent lineup changes: Drake, the only constant figure in the band, estimates that 20 to 30 different musicians have played with him in the Joneses. Not all shared his drug habit, but enough did to make the band a model of instability even at its height.

Drake says that “the drugs had a lot to do with” the personality clashes that led to the revolving-door lineup. “Especially on heroin, you have these egotistical episodes where you think you’re like God on Earth.”

Looking back, he thinks that even if the Joneses had landed a major record deal at their peak, they wouldn’t have been able to capitalize on it. “By that time (the mid-’80s), the drugs had become such a problem it would have screwed things up anyway.

“That’s why (record companies) stayed away from us. We had a reputation for drugs and an outlaw lifestyle. Which is funny, because not long after that, they snapped up Guns N’ Roses and L.A. Guns. They didn’t sound like us, but as far as the image and posture they assumed, they were influenced by what we were doing.”

Johnny Nation, the Joneses’ lead guitarist in 1985-86, says he once got a call from Axl Rose, who wanted the Joneses to come to one of his band’s gigs and let him know what they thought. After that, the Joneses played on some bills with the still-emerging Guns N’ Roses.

In 1986, the Joneses finally put out an album, “Keeping Up With the Joneses”--the first album released by Doctor Dream Records, which went on to become Orange County’s best-established independent-alternative rock label. The album won good notices but had a miserable fate: Soon after its release, Greenworld, the distributor that Doctor Dream relied upon, went bankrupt and the Joneses hardly found their way into the marketplace. A discouraged Drake dropped out of rock ‘n’ roll for about a year.

The Joneses returned in 1989 with a raucous EP on an even-smaller label, Trigon.

Brick Wahl, Trigon’s manager at the time, recalls: “It could have been a good step back for those guys, but you got the impression that Jeff was really having problems adjusting to the idea of starting from scratch. The only way you were going to make it work was to play constantly, and Jeff had already done that. He’d been doing this rock ‘n’ roll paying-his-dues thing for a long time.”

Drake says he was in no condition to mount any kind of bootstraps campaign for his flagging rock career: “By that time I was completely incapacitated by heroin. I had to be loaded every minute or I was sick. I had no business being a musician at that point. I could barely function as a drug addict, let alone anything else.”

During the first week of 1990, though, he made a small killing off his band: A group from Boston, also called the Joneses, was about to release an album for Atlantic, and Drake extracted a big settlement in return for dropping any claim to the Joneses name (under the settlement, the financial terms of which he says he agreed not to disclose, Drake renamed his band the Hollywood Joneses). Drake bought a 1968 Ford Mustang and went on a $200-a-day heroin binge. By the end of the month, he says, he had blown all the settlement money--a bigger sum than he ever had seen in his life.

The junkie business ended suddenly on April 12, 1991. It was a Friday, and Drake had spent his last money on bus fare to a clinic in Santa Ana, where he hoped to get a dose of methadone to quell oncoming heroin sickness. The doctor wasn’t there; Drake says he was told to come back the following Monday. He trudged back to Anaheim on foot, resolving to beg his dealers for drugs on credit. He stopped to rest on a bus bench on Anaheim Boulevard, then realized he was sitting in front of a First Interstate Bank.

Drake says he had never stolen to feed his habit. Drawing on holdup tactics he’d picked up listening to a couple of drug-dealing robbers he knew, he walked into the bank and scrawled, “This is a robbery, give me the money” on a withdrawal slip. “The teller looked at me kind of incredulously, and I said, ‘C’mon, I’m serious, and I’m in a hurry.’ She just piled a bunch of money on the counter, and I shoved it in the crotch of my pants.”

He scrambled across Anaheim Boulevard, dodging cars. He discarded his baseball cap and leather jacket and made his way to his dealers’ house, where he bought a gram of heroin. They shooed him away, and he retreated to the bathroom of a McDonald’s for his fix.

Then, he says, he went to a convenience store for a hot dog, soda and cigarettes. The police arrived soon after, responding to an electronic signal sent out by a tiny transponder attached to one of the stolen bills. The cash was still in his pants crotch; Drake says he never did count it all but found out later that he had made off with $3,050.

After a hellish 12 days in jail (“the sickness was overwhelming; I just wanted to die and get it over with”) he was allowed to stay in a drug treatment facility while awaiting disposition of his case. He pleaded guilty to unarmed robbery and was sentenced to 33 months in prison.

“At first I thought it was the worst thing that happened to me, but in time I realized I was happy I wasn’t a drug addict anymore and I wasn’t dead. By the time I got out of prison, I realized it was the best thing that could have happened to me.”

He says his hitches in federal prisons in San Diego and at Boron in the Mojave Desert were uneventful, filled mainly with reading and watching sports on TV.

“At Boron, they had electric guitars and amps and drums in the recreation department, and a rehearsal room,” Drake says. “I had a band called the Sand Crabs. We did a couple of Joneses songs and punk covers. We weren’t very popular.”

He seldom had access to a guitar after he was transferred to San Diego, a high-security prison where, he says, he was sent not for misbehavior but because the facility needed some tractable inmates who could be trusted to do cleanup work outside.

Prison did not bring out the songwriter in him.

“I tried, but the stuff I was coming up with was just crap,” he says. “It was real negative, whining about being in prison, and I threw it all away. Most of the songs I write are about real-life experience. In there I was shut off. It was the same thing every day.”

He completed the last few months of his sentence in a halfway house and was given an early release in September, 1993. He has worked steadily in white-collar sales and service jobs and now lives in Pasadena with his girlfriend, Laurie, a petite, sweet-natured woman whose sister is married to Mike Occhiato, the Joneses’ bassist.

In April, Drake returned to rock ‘n’ roll, as the Joneses’ original recording lineup reunited briefly to play a few club dates. By July, he had put together a new version of the band that he hopes can make the sustained bid for success that his ‘80s bands were in no condition to muster.

Occhiato, guitarist Nation and piano player Greg Kuehn, all veterans of previous stints with Drake, are in the band along with a new drummer, Byron Reynolds. They started playing shows in September and plan to record five new songs to be released on CD along with some older material. Honoring the agreement he struck in 1990, Drake says he will call the band Hollywood Joneses for recording purposes; for now, they are gigging under their original name.

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Drake’s life has hardly been smooth since his release from prison. He was banged up in two car accidents and has been embroiled in messy child support and visitation-rights proceedings with the mother of a 5-year-old boy he fathered in a brief liaison.

“Like Laurie used to tell me,” Drake says lightly, “my life is like a miniseries.”

“Every time I talk to him it’s something else,” Nation, who is serving his third or fourth hitch in the Joneses, said in a separate interview. “It never seems to end, but somehow he works his way through it. He keeps his head up and deals with it.

“He’s more positive than I’ve ever seen him. He used to get in funks, just seem dead to the world. But every time I’ve talked to him he’s been in a good mood and (had) high energy. He knows he had a real bad thing going there, and now it’s good again.”

“I’ve got work, I’ve got the band, I’ve got Laurie--the kinds of things people normally have in their lives,” Drake says of the new chapter he is trying to write. “My short-term goals are to keep this band together, put out something (independently) and get a record deal. My long-term goal is to support myself playing music. I’d still like to give it one more shot.”

* The Joneses, the Hangmen, the Purple Gang and the Neurotics play Friday at the Blue Saloon, 4657 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. 9:30 p.m. $5. (818) 766-4644 (club) or (818) 771-7992 (taped information).