Legendary rocker Sebastian Bach will be back in St. Louis this Sunday, appearing at Left Bank Books to sign copies of his new autobiography “18 and Life on Skid Row” at 6:30pm.
“This is the first tour I’ve ever done where I don’t have to play music,” laughed Bach, who appeared on The Brian Stull Show earlier today on WGNU 920am.
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“It’s been four years that I’ve been working on it, so it’s been a long time to get to this point. It feels really good finally to have it done.”
The book covers not just Bach’s time as the lead singer with Skid Row, but begins in his early childhood–with stories of how an infant voodoo ceremony, his parents divorce, and the impact of KISS all helped shape him. And of course, there are many tales of his time on the road and partying, including the time his grandmother tracked him down at Lars Ulrich’s house.
“I had set up meetings with my grandma, but I forgot,” said Bach, who was unsure how she was able to find him. “I can’t even answer that, but I was out being crazy with Lars–I don’t want to give away the ending, but somehow my grandma got involved and it’s kind of nuts.”
Over 450 pages, Bach shares many exploits and has lots of documentation to back his stories up–including a letter from the management of Motley Crue politely banning him from the band’s dressing rooms as to not be a bad influence during the Dr. Feelgood tour.
“It’s like stepping back in time,” said Bach. “I really had to sit down and quiet, think about, go back in my own head and think about what happened. It was a long time ago and it’s good to get it down on paper while I can still remember.”
Another story Sebastian remembers is the riot at Riverport Amphitheatre here in St. Louis after opening for Guns N Roses.
“I was on the side of the stage when you FREAKS went nuts,” he chuckled. “We had to get out of there with a police escort.”
“The funniest thing about that to me, someone told me the next day they found Izzy’s Marshall amp about two miles away from the venue at a bus stop on the side of the road. Some fan carried Izzy’s amp two miles down the road and I guess they couldn’t get it on the bus and they just left it there. What a night. What a night that was.”
As exciting as the stories are to hear about Sebastian partying and living the rock-n-roll dream, he doesn’t shy away from some of the sad realism of the lifestyle and how he in some ways has defied the odds to even still be alive.
“Not everybody can say that,” reflected Bach. “I think of my buddy that I just met a couple of weeks before he died, Scott Weiland. I went to a wedding with him and his wife. We had a great night out and three weeks later he was dead. And there’s, I can go down the list of guys like that. Shannon Hoon from Blind Melon, another guy I used to hang out with. He did the same stuff I did, but for some reason I’m still here and he’s not. That’s a crazy thing to realize.
“My favorite book that I’ve read is Keith Richards “Life”, and if anybody partied it was Keith,” continued Bach, who joked they were perhaps being a bad influence. “That book is like War and Peace, it’s so perfectly written. How the hell does that happen?”
“I don’t want to glamorize anything, that’s why everything’s is dated. Everything says what year it was, where it happened. And nobody’s living like that in 2016 that’s still around. So it’s like really a glimpse of what it was like in the mid to late 80s and it really was a different time back then.”
Purchase of a ticket is required for the book signing and space is limited.
