Don't Try This at Home: A Year in the Life of Dave Navarro

by Dave Navarro, Neil Strauss

Overview

Step into the booth. Check your judgments at the curtain. Close your eyes. Listen: you can hear the voices of the visitors who sat here before you: some of the most twisted, drug-addled, deviant, lonely, lost, brilliant characters ever to be caught on film. What do you have to offer the booth?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062045270
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/09/2012
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	399
File size:	29 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Dave Navarro racked up four platinum records and three Grammy nominations as the guitarist of Jane's Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. His 2003 marriage to Carmen Electra was captured in MTV's popular reality series, 'Til Death Do Us Part: Carmen and Dave.

Neil Strauss is a ten-time New York Times best-selling author. His books, The Game and Rules Of The Game, for which he went undercover in a secret society of pickup artists for two years, made him an international celebrity and an accidental hero to men around the world. Both books topped The New York Times best-seller list and were #1 on Amazon, and the former has the dubious distinction of being the most stolen book at Barnes & Noble besides The Bible.

His other best-selling books include Emergency, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star with Jenna Jameson, The Dirt with Motley Crue, and The Long Hard Road Out of Hell with Marilyn Manson. 

Strauss has also contributed to Esquire, Maxim, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, Details, The Source, New York Newsday, and many other magazines and newspapers. Beyond journalism, Strauss has acted in everything from Curb Your Enthusiasm to rock videos by Beck and 30 Seconds to Mars. He has written liner notes for albums by Nirvana; performed on albums by Marilyn Manson; and DJ’ed at clubs around the world. He also hosted his own interview show, The Inner Circle with Neil Strauss, on SiriusXM. And has written television shows for HBO, FX, and Cartoon Network.

Read an Excerpt

Don't Try This at Home
A Year in the Life of Dave Navarro

Chapter One

The Concept

"Do you know what to do when somebody shoots up too much?"

That's the first question Dave Navarro asked as we began this collaboration on June 1, 1998, making it clear that I had more than a life story on my hands; I had a life. Not a series of past events filtered through the dirty grate of memory, but a heart that was still beating. To document the beating of that heart was the goal, and if the past was relevant at all, it was only as the blood that coursed through that heart and gave it a reason to beat. Or to not beat. Because at times, that heart didn't want to beat.

That night, Navarro showed me what he called his Spread movie. It began with a phone call to a rehab center. Navarro told the operator that he was in trouble and needed help badly; the operator said she'd call back later. The rest of the movie was a series of scenes he had filmed to the accompaniment of his music. It centered around three images: a spoon in a bowl of Jell-O, symbolizing the nourishment of his past; a spoon with a rock of cocaine, symbolizing the nourishment of his present; and a picture of his mother, the bond that connected both spoons. In the movie, he shoots up with a picture of his mother in the background, an image all the more disturbing if you consider that Navarro's mother was murdered by an ex-boyfriend, a man Navarro had grown to trust. Occasionally, that camera would pan to a computer screen, which displayed the phone number of his lawyer and directions on how to find a certain song in his CD changer.

The movie seemed disgusting not because of the images, but because Navarro's eagerness to exploit a tragedy for the sake of a self-aggrandizing art film. At least, that's what I thought until Navarro said it wasn't an art film. It was his will. The song in the CD changer, which he wanted played over and over at his funeral, was "This Is How We Do It" by Montell Jordan ...

Don't Try This at Home
A Year in the Life of Dave Navarro. Copyright © by Dave Navarro. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

	June
Part I	The Concept	2
Part II	This is How I Do it	12
Part III	How The Record Industry Is Like a Unicorn	14
Part IV	Stalked	18
	July
Part I	The First Person Dave's Paid to Come Over to His House Who Has Actually Kept Her Clothes on	22
Part II	Love in L.A.: Christmas for Grown-Ups?	35
Part III	She's Such a Great ...	42
Part IV	An Image	53
Part V	Spiritual Guidance	54
	August
Part I	The Rhetoric of Dave	58
Part II	The Great Chili Peppers Debate: "Bringing it on Yourself"	64
Part III	The Great Steve Vai Debate: "Speak Only for Yourself"	74
	September
Part I	How to Get off Drugs without Really Trying	84
Part II	Ten Ways to Tie Off	101
Part III	On Dave's Dick	108
	October
Part I	Dear Diary	113
Part II	About a Girl	118
Part III	Crystal Koalas, Pet Rocks, and the Tennis Mom Theory	130
Part IV	The Mystery of Mr. Young	136
Part V	Invaded at Home	138
Part VI	The March of the Baby Unicorns	142
	November
Part I	It's Too Bad Dave Can Only Die Once; He's Got So Many Ideas	146
Part II	Show and Hell	148
Part III	Close Calls	152
Part IV	Good Omens/Bad Omens	154
Part V	It's Too Bad Dave Can Only Die Once ...	158
	December
Part I	The First Time (with Sound Effects)	162
Part II	Cuckoo or Cuckold?	164
Part III	Love in L.A. II: The Myth of Counting on One Hand	166
Part IV	One Hot Visit	168
Part V	Dear Dad	170
Part VI	Psychobabble	172
Part VII	Closer Calls	174
	January
Part I	The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: A Watched Object Changes Its Course of Motion	178
	February
Part I	Navarro Hypothesis #9	184
Part II	A Temporary Reprieve from Darkness	186
Part III	Dear Adria	188
Part IV	Love in L.A. III: Intimacy and Communication	190
Part V	Running on Empty, Scene One	192
Part VI	Running on Empty, Scene Two	193
Part VII	Running on Empty, Scene Three	194
	March
Part I	Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the C: A Journey into The Mind of a Girl Considering Prostitution	198
Part II	Cracking Up in The City that Never Sleeps	204
Part III	A Series of Answering Machine Messages	206
	April
Part I	The Sweep	210
Part II	The Note	212
Part III	The Confession	214
	May
Part I	A Not-So-Triumphant Return	218
Part II	Tori's Story	220
Part III	A Triumphant Return	228
Part IV	The Outpatient	230
	June 2000
Part I	"What Was I Thinking?"	234
	Postscript: June 2004
Part I	Good-Bye to Hollywood	240
Part II	Love in L.A. IV: Love Doesn't Have to Crush Your Heart Like a Coke Can	243
Part III	This is How We Did It	245
Part IV	Ten Reasons Not to Tie Off	252
Part V	A Final Image	253
	Acknowledgments	255