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An Interview With The Rock-God Doc By Zach Seemayer and Lev Shtrikman
Doc: Hey, thanks. I like that. I love my fans. RPM: You have a very devoted fan base and I am proud to say I’m a member. I don’t even know where to start. I could from anywhere. I guess I’ll start from the mountain incident. In 1990, while already getting your name known in small clubs across the country, you climbed Everest. What was that like and what lead you to want to do it? Doc: Well, actually, the idea came to me when I got real high and was watching TV. I saw a commercial, or a documentary, or possibly the TV wasn’t even on but anyway, I saw something about Everest and how a blind person climbed it and a man with no legs climbed it and I figured, “Hell, if they can do it, it can’t be that freakin’ hard.” Yeah, I was wrong. It was a real bitch. RPM: What was it like at the top? Looking out over the world? Doc: Well, when we got up there, my buddy Jake, who I went up with, told this joke about how he could see his house from here, then I made the whole pushing-him-off-the-mountain joke. I don’t know if it was the lack of oxygen that high up or whatever it was, but those were the funniest jokes ever. RPM: When you got back down from the climb, one of your party was missing, claimed by the mountain— Doc: Actually no. The mountain had nothing to do with it. RPM: Oh… okay. Can we talk about that? Doc: No, I’m sorry. It’s between me and Quen Gii, the Sherpa who was ki-… who passed away. RPM: Yeah, um, okay. Anyway, a year later, after the climb, your band Ragna released their first triple-platinum album Riding the Dragon and you went on the tour-circuit for two years. What was it like being on one of the most successful music tours in rock history? Doc: Music, as you know, is my passion. The tour was great. It was a whole new experience. For the first two months, it was all about the fans and the music, then we got bored with all of it so we wanted to end the tour. So for about three months we just kinda decided, ya know, fuck the fans. We would play badly, go on stage totally high, even pee on them and stuff. But they just seemed to love it more. Finally, it was more tiring to suck than to play good, so we became all about the fans again, and did top notch performances. They loved us even more than they did at first. RPM: Was it hard to give up your family and such? Doc: No, not really. My wife went on tour with us and we would have threesomes, foursomes, sometimes fivesomes with the hot groupies that would follow the band. Onetime we even had a tensome. It was just me being pleasured by nine girls. It wasn’t as fun as it sounds. Anyway, it just made me and Cynthia [his wife] closer. RPM: What is your inspiration for the music? Where does it all originate from? Doc: I am my own inspiration. I think everything I’ve done is great. People always say that they are their own toughest critic, but not me. I just always try to constantly impress myself more and more with each album, and I have never failed to do so. RPM: Since Riding the Dragon your band has released 10 albums, all of them have hit number one on the Billboard Charts, and each has sold more than the one before it. What is it like to have such incredible wealth and success and yet still be relatively unknown? Doc: I don’t really care. I know how hard I rock. I rock super hard. I have literally hundreds of millions of dollars that I just keep in stacks around my house. Who cares? I play for the fans that I have, and I make money, which keeps me occupied. Stardom is just a state of mind. RPM: Where did the title Riding the Dragon come from? I mean, is it a reference to opium? Doc: Well, the whole album was written in some very secret Chinese opium dens. It took for fucking ever to find them, but once we did, we spent a few months high out of our skulls scrawling words on the wall and whatever sheets of parchment we could find. We recorded them stoned out too, which is why it was so surprising that it turned out good. RPM: Wow, so you’ve had a lot of experience doing drugs. Doc: Doing them, dealing them, yeah, a lot of experience. RPM: I’m sorry, did you say dealing? Doc: Yeah. I was a big time Kingpin in Columbia in the 80’s. It was a weird scene. I have never had to quell so many revolutions in such a short amount of time. RPM: Are you sure you can talk about all this? Doc: Well, because of a deal I made with the President, I have amnesty from all my past crimes. I’m in with all the right people. RPM: What favor did you do for the President? Doc: I sang at his wedding. RPM: But the president got married in the 70’s, years before you started making music. Doc: Not his public marriage, his secret marriage. RPM: His what? His secret marriage? Is that what you said? Doc: Look, I can’t talk about it. Lets just say that a lot of things were learned by operating a huge drug-running ring and it just helped me with my career in the future. RPM: Speaking of your later career, you also starred in three consecutive feature films that were all box-office hits. Riding the Dragon, Riding the Dragon 2: The Venom of the Gods and the bio-pic Riding a Dragon up the Side of Everest: The Tale of Doc. What was it like making those? Doc: Well, Riding the Dragon, 1 and 2, was really easy to make. I just showed up whenever I felt like it, kinda hung out in my trailer, made random demands such as that I only wanted pink M&Ms in my trailer and that I wanted to be bathed in non-pasteurized milk. I would show up in set, sometimes high, always without having read my script. I kinda just rolled with it. I think the director [Gus Van Zant] got kinda pissed off, but fuck it. It ended up breaking every record they had. Number two didn’t do as well [only 500 mil.] but it was still fun. The bio-pic was probably the hardest RPM: Why is that? Doc: I don’t know. It was weird to see it. I mean, I wrote my life story a few years ago, and people seemed to like it. But to see it on the big screen, brought to life, it seemed more real than what even happened. RPM: It was interesting. I have never seen a bio-pic that only shows a man’s life after he turned 20 and made no reference to his childhood. In fact, no one knows anything about your early life. Why is that? Doc: I don’t want people to know about it. I’ve worked hard to keep it a total secret and never intend to change that. RPM: Well, in the film, Jude Law, who is playing you, does a number of insane things such as running into a burning building to save a little kid and wresting a giant squid in the middle of the ocean. Are these based on similar events? Doc: Similar? No. Exactly the same events. I really rushed into a burning building after the firemen told me everyone was out. RPM: Why did you go in? Doc: I was taught an early age… not to trust firemen. It was a good thing too because a little boy was on the top floor. People have called me a hero for all the charity work I’ve done, but I’m really a hero for saving that poor kid’s life and foiling the Fire Department’s nefarious plans. RPM: So what about the stuff with the squid? Was that real too? Doc: Every little bit. I saw one under the boat I was fishing on and I just decided that I wanted it’s pelt and dove in after it. It was a tough fight, but I finally surfaced it and brought it onto the boat. I don’t remember a lot after that, what with the massive loss of blood, but it was fun. RPM: Speaking of animal pelts, I noticed you have a nice wallet. What kind of fur is it? Doc: Leopard, RPM: Leopard? Where did you find leopard fur? On a safari or something? Doc: Nope. The Zoo. RPM: The… the Zoo? Doc: Yeah. It’s not something I’m allowed to talk about either. I don’t mean to short-answer you but I have a lot of legal binding. RPM: Well, going back to your bio-pic for a moment. After the film wrapped, reports started surfacing that you were dating one of the female leads in the film, a model named Eve St. LeMarc. How did your wife feel about this? Doc: It was my wife’s idea. She saw Eve and thought she was beautiful and I knew Eve was a big fan of my work and I just brought her home and we all dated each other for a few months. It was pretty fun actually. RPM: Well, it was also rumored that you and Dennis Hopper, who played your brother in the film, got in a knife fight during production. How did this come about? Doc: I don’t remember. I get in a lot of knife fights. RPM: Did this lead to complications? Doc: No, not at all. Actually, after the fight, we were both sitting on the floor and bleeding and we apologized to each other, and I think we were both impressed with each other, and we ended up buying a round of shots after getting bandaged up. RPM: Why were you impressed with him? Doc: I have wrested and skinned a giant squid, 3 crocodiles, and a leopard, and none of them put up as much of a fight as Dennis Hopper. RPM: Well, I’m very exciting about your new album coming out, From The Stars, and I’m sure it will rock just as hard as all the others. I really appreciate you coming and talking with us. Doc: Well, it was a pleasure. I always enjoy talking about myself. After all, I like the idea of inspiring young people to follow in my adventurous footsteps. I have done a little of everything in my life and I don’t regret a single thing.
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RPM: Wow, I can’t believe I actually get to meet you. This is a very big deal for me.
