Chapter 2: Get Ur Freak On (Sex Lives of the Stars)
Here’s the logistical problem with having an active sex life on tour: generally speaking, the band’s bus rolls out of town around midnight, an hour or so after the show’s over. (To save on hotel-room bills, most rock groups just sleep in their bunks while the bus rolls down the highway to the next city.) So if you’re looking to score with a lithesome young local, you either have to work extremely quickly or convince her that although she’s parked her car in Detroit, she really wants to wake up in Milwaukee.
I once witnessed Rivers Cuomo of Weezer throw caution to the wind in the pursuit of post-show nookie (this was on the Pinkerton tour, long before he even contemplated a vow of celibacy). We sat in a club’s basement dressing room chatting idly about drugs (his management wouldn’t give him any), and then his head snapped up. “Fuck!” he shouted. “I’m sitting here dicking around and all the girls are escaping!” He ran up the stairs in pursuit of the escaping girls, and apparently he netted one, because not long after, the band and road crew watched him head back into his Holiday Inn with her.
“Rivers just got here.”
“Does he have some hot little number?”
“She’s not really hot. She’s not even Asian.”
“Man, he’s slipping.”
Time passed and it became clear that Cuomo wasn’t emerging from that hotel room. After a nervous phone call back to the West Coast management office, the road manager ultimately told the bus driver to move out. Cuomo made the show the following evening, but it required his buying a plane ticket to St. Louis.