The first few chapters of NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories — the So-Cal skate-punk stalwarts' revealing new memoir — hit harder than a drunk frat boy in the circle pit during "Linoleum." With more than three decades of touring behind them, the band's members could've filled the pages with hilarious road stories — deep-diving into the tales and characters we've long heard about in songs like "The Moron Brothers" and "Bob" — but frontman "Fat Mike" Burkett says the obvious route was never an option.
"A book about tour stories would be like everybody else," Burkett tells the Scene via phone, about an hour before having to run out the door to attend a mastering session for NOFX's forthcoming 13th studio album. "We made a deal, if we're going to do this book, everyone's got to go deep. We just have to open up. I read [Mötley Crüe's] The Dirt and [Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's] Please Kill Me, and I'm like, 'These are great books, because people are telling the truth.' "
Turns out NOFX's truth is staggering and, in some cases, heartbreaking.
Just a few pages after admitting he occasionally (and voluntarily) drinks piss, Burkett opens up about the guilt he still feels over not helping a young woman who was very clearly in danger outside a Vandals show. Guitarist Eric Melvin reveals he was molested as a child, a fact that only his mother knew until now. And drummer Erik "Smelly" Sandin is brutally honest about his years of heroin addiction, a history that includes sharing dirty needles and having contests to see how many women he could fuck on tour, to stealing money from his bandmates and overdosing.
Many NOFX songs have touched on these topics — death, violence and random, unapologetic assholery — but it's easy to shrug off the weight of the situations behind the lyrics when the songs are paired with goofy puns, anthems about not liking to shower and the band's infamous, self-deprecating stage banter. But Hepatitis Bathtub makes it impossible to look the other way.
Because it's pieced together from 10 to 20 hours of individual interviews with co-author Jeff Alulis (aka Jeff Penalty of Dead Kennedys), no one in the band knew what the other was going to reveal. The format reads like a sweeping, intriguing conversation, but the book also has a cinematic quality, as each person (including departed members Steve Kidwiler and Dave Casillas) recalls the same moments in time from his own perspective. Sometimes the stories match up, other times they don't. While one guy remembers a tour being a success, another walked away from it broke and defeated; while Melvin recalls the time his girlfriend narrowly escaped being raped, Burkett admits there's another side to the story.
"That was really weird," says Burkett. "I had to call Eric [Melvin] when he started reading the book, and say, 'Dude, there's something in there that you should really be warned about.' And that was rough."
We find out how each guy got into punk rock (or, in guitarist Aaron "El Hefe" Abeyta's case, how he pretended to get into punk rock). The book also sheds light on the band's early, oft-forgotten years, when they were dismissed as a Bad Religion rip-off act. And Burkett also touches on why the band decided to stop making videos and ghost the media.
But the most intriguing moments are the ones the band didn't want to tell at all, but did anyway, diving headfirst into the whole, sometimes horrifying truth.
"Smelly never wanted to talk about fucking Courtney Love; he always wanted to keep that secret," Burkett says. "And Hefe didn't want to talk about selling speed because of his kids. But we tell our kids the same thing. It's like, 'Hey, we made bad choices as kids. Don't make the same choices we did.'
"I'm screwed because my daughters are going to hear, 'Your dad's a piss-drinker.' " Burkett adds with a laugh. "And you can't get around that. That just sucks."
Still, now that the book is out, bringing every last skeleton in the NOFX closet along with it, Burkett says he has no regrets.
"It's really freeing, kind of," he explains. "Melvin, he told his molestation story, and I'm so proud of him, because it's such a brave thing to do. And I have my cross-dressing chapter — I'm wearing a dress right now — and I think that's really going to help people. I'm really so proud of [all the] guys in the band, because everybody told their deepest stories. Everyone said it all."
Read more from our interview with Fat Mike here.
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