Steve Stevens plays a relatively small part in Billy Idol Should Be Dead, the documentary hitting theaters on February 26 after premiering at last summer’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.
But we all know he plays a significantly larger part in Billy Idol’s story.
The New York native has, after all, been at Idol’s side since the start of the British rocker’s solo career during the early ’80s, co-writing favorites such as “Come On, Come On,” “Rebel Yell,” “Eyes Without a Face,” “Flesh for Fantasy” and more.
There have been some breaks along the way, but Stevens has played on eight of Idol’s albums, including last year’s Dream Into It — for which he co-wrote eight of nine tracks, including the Academy Award–shortlisted title track that’s included in the film.
“I’m very good at working with people, and I think Billy recognized that when we met,” Stevens tells us via Zoom from his home studio in Los Angeles. “There was a lot of common musical kinship, stuff that we had listened to, even though we were an ocean apart.
“I was such an Anglophile. And I was genuinely excited about all the stuff he’d done with Generation X. That was probably refreshing for him.
“I think he knew I had his back, and I felt like he had my back, even if we knocked heads over a musical idea because that happens with any great partnership. You don’t always see eye to eye, but you want to get results and you’re willing to work together to get results.”
Ironically, Stevens (née Schneider) says that as of this conversation he had not seen Billy Idol Should Be Dead in its entirety. At its Tribeca premiere, he says, “Billy and I were performing afterwards, so I had to go get set up before it was over. But my wife saw it and said she cried at the end.”
Despite the film’s title, Idol is very much alive, of course, as is Stevens. It got us wondering, however, about what a Steve Stevens Should Be … would entail.
He laughs.
“I don’t know,” says the guitarist, who’s aiming to write a memoir. “I haven’t even thought of that. There are a lot of stories, though.”
And some of those included here provide nice adjuncts to what’s covered in the documentary.
Atlantic Crossing
What made the Stevens-Idol combo click, he thinks, was a tricky collision of musical sensibilities — think of it as punk meets prog, although Stevens was more than just the latter as he rolled into the ’80s.
“Half of the equation was being able to play guitar; the other half was to be able to write and have a great attitude,” Stevens recalls. “The fact was that there was such a rebellion in ’77 against the technically proficient musicians in England — rightly so. A lot of the progressive rock stuff had kind of run its course.
I never took it personally if Billy or [producer] Keith Forsey didn’t like an idea. They were willing to try it. It was always given a chance. Billy respected my opinion.”
— Steve Stevens
“But by the time I met Billy, it was cool to have technique on your instrument, but do it in a cool way. I always had the attitude that, ‘Hey, man, I’m gonna throw out a lot of ideas, and I don’t expect you to love every one of them.’ I never took it personally if Billy or [producer] Keith Forsey didn’t like an idea.
“But what was cool was they were willing to try it. It was always given a chance. Billy respected my opinion. He knew I wasn’t just gonna do something for the sake of appeasing him.”
Mojo Workin’
Stevens says their collaboration really took off when they began writing together.
“Obviously ‘White Wedding’ was done when we started rehearsing for the first album,” he remembers, “and that really is a Billy Idol creation. But when we started collaborating, things like ‘Shooting Stars’ and ‘Hole in the Wall,’ I was really experimenting more with textures and effects and things like that, and that was an extension of some of the things he was moving towards.
I remember saying to Billy, ‘Everybody from Tom Verlaine to Johnny Thunders had played through that amp. There’s some good mojo in it.’”
— Steve Stevens
“On the sonic end, meanwhile, I always had one foot in the technical, electronic side of it as well as just playing guitar.
“And I had a really good Marshall amp at the time, the same amp I recorded the Rebel Yell album on — a late-’60s Marshall Plexi that had been at my buddy’s rehearsal studio where all the punk bands rehearsed. I remember saying to Billy, ‘Everybody from Tom Verlaine to Johnny Thunders had played through that amp. There’s some good mojo in it.’”
Catch My Fall
It wasn’t as bad as his worst gig, but while touring to support the Billy Idol album, Stevens was famously pushed off stage by the singer.
“That might have been at the beginning of the tour,” Stevens says now. “I think he was just drunk — I’m like, ‘What the fuck … ?’ and he was, ‘Oh, man, I’m sorry.’
“And by the next day it was forgotten. I was probably playing a self-indulgent guitar solo or something, and he probably went, ‘That’s not right…’”
Do Ya Think I'm Plexi
A popular rumor about the making of Idol’s third album, 1986’s Whiplash Smile, was that Stevens was so obsessed with getting the right sound that he slept in the studio and futzed with six vintage Marshall heads in order to find the right tones. Not quite, he says.
“No, I was never one to do that,” Stevens says. “What happened is I realized that you could no longer get these Marshall Plexis; everyone was using JCM800s. So I found a guy in Chicago, and whenever he got a good Plexi, he sent it to me.
“So I owned six Plexis. They all sounded different, but by the time I got in the studio they weren’t that reliable. Tubes would blow and everything — they were 25-year-old amps, y’know. So I made sure I had an arsenal of amplifiers, and once we found a good one, that’s what was in the studio. I used a Roland Jazz Chorus for all my clean stuff as well.”
Shock to the System
Among the revelations for Stevens in Billy Idol Should Be Dead is the depth of his partner’s drug addictions, including heroin, at the time they were making Whiplash Smile.
“It wasn’t something I was terribly aware of, although we misbehaved very badly,” Stevens says. “This was the ’80s, and a lot of things were accepted in the business. Everybody was kinda fucked up … but we always managed to do the work.”
Axe to Grind
While in Australia at the end of the Whiplash Smile tour in summer 1987, Stevens decided to smash his Roland GR-700 synth guitar onstage and throw it into the crowd.
“We were pretty burnt by the end of that tour,” he remembers. “We were all indulging too much.
I thought, ‘Oh, I’m gonna make something symbolic here. I’m gonna smash this guitar.’”
— Steve Stevens
“I thought, ‘Oh, I’m gonna make something symbolic here. I’m gonna smash this guitar.’ It wasn’t always the most reliable thing; it wasn’t one of my valuable guitars.”
It turned out, however, that the axe was listed on the customs document required to enter and leave the country, and if it was not there at the time, Stevens would have been subject to a heavy duty and possibly other penalties.
“So the crew went into the crowd and got the pieces,” he says. “They had to put it back together before we went home. That’s rock and roll, I guess.”
Train Keeps A-Rollin’
Stevens has a busy horizon. “I’ve started writing some music for what will hopefully be a solo record,” he reports. There’s no specific timetable, and Stevens says he may have guest vocalists contribute.
On the Idol front, “We’re starting to talk about doing another record,” he says. “Dream Into It came together really quickly. It wasn’t labored over. Now we’ve got a good team of people to work with. Obviously Billy’s time is gonna be taken up by promoting his film, but at some point later in the year we’ll reconvene and start working on things.”
