The History of CrossTown Rival: Part 9 -- Finding Dr. Feelgood

When we last left our heroes, Pat and Murph learned from Chris Parnell that they needed to find Dr. Feelgood in order to bring their bass player Mick back from limbo. Enjoy.

The two non-limboed members of CrossTown Rival knew what was at stake: descend into the seediest, most deplorable excesses of rock and roll, or they’d never see their bass player again. They thanked Chris Parnell for his help, left the apartment, found the closest bar, and spent the next two weeks reveling in nonstop substance abuse and some ill-timed incontinence (Murph: “I never really like Planet Hollywood anyway).

Pat: “Chris let us crash at his place for a while, but as we spent most of our nights in gutters and garbage dumpsters, we didn’t see him much. On one of the few nights we made it home, Chris brought up the fact that the last group to connect with Dr. Feelgood was Motley Crue, who used their audience with the famous scientist to visit the afterlife and, if memory serves me, obtain some sort of property.”

Tommy Lee, Motley Crue drummer: “Yeah, Dr. Feelgood was a special man, man. In those days, bro, Vince was a bit of an agnostic, but Nikki, who at the time was big into some Sub-Saharan transcendentalism thing, turned Mick and me on to the idea of securing our place in the afterlife, like making sure we had a ticket or whatever. He said that the elders of his philosophy actually believed you could travel into the Terra de Morta or whatever and choose the exact space where you would spend eternity, and we were high enough to believe him…Ground Control to Major Tom…Ground Control to Major Tom…Oh sorry, did I just start singing? Totally spaced out on you man.”

Not finding success in their own methods, Pat and Murph put their one and a half minds to the task of studying how exactly Motley Crue took the long winding road toward self destruction town. After reading countless interviews, viewing their “Behind the Music” special, and interviewing groupies and musical contemporaries alike, subtle yet real patterns began to emerge. To their surprise, they found that the exploits of Motley Crue were not the random acts of a bunch of drug-addled oversexed idiots but rather a systematic and highly organized schematic of how they sought to find Dr. Feelgood. In other words, they boys found themselves a map.

Tommy Lee: “Oh, wait can you hang on a minute? I’ve gotta hit the…wait. I don’t remember. So, yeah, the roadmap or whatever was again Nikki’s idea, and it worked like a charm. Truth, Nikki died, used heroin again, and woke up with a needle in his arm, Mick and Vince went off the deep end with alcohol, and me…well…we all know what Tommy Lee did. Yeah. But it was all worth it; I may have lost my ability to smell, blink, or move my toes, but I’ve got a sweet bungalow right by the River of Dreams once I eat it for good. Me and Billy Joel. It’s gonna be great. That dude’s awesome.”

The map, nicknamed “The [expletive deleted]-It List,” mandated a number of increasingly deplorable acts in the many facets of the rock and roll lifestyle, including drugs, sex, booze, reckless indifference, casual indifference, assault with animals, improper use of candy bars, public urination, defacement of national monuments, indecent exposure, cautionary tales, and wanton destruction, all of which ultimately leading to them hitting rock bottom. With ever-present yet only recently mentioned roadie Montana Slim subbing in on bass and setting up gigs across the Northeast, Murph and Pat got to work immediately.

Pat: “The first steps were easy. We found every substance listed in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, locked ourselves in a hotel room, and went to town. Next, we started getting groupies for our band by putting up signs outside our gigs that said ‘We have no morals and will soon be famous.’ Finally, I stopped wearing underwear, bought a motorcycle, and cut my hair to look like Billy Idol. I too heard the rebel yell.”

Murph: “Oh man was that great. Here we were doing something good for Mick, and I have a good reason to do every stupid thing my brain could come up with. We played a show in Syracuse, and I’m feeling absolutely no pain. Come to think of it, I can’t remember feeling much of anything—not even my drumsticks. I hope I played okay. So anyway, we invite the entire girl’s judo team back to the Days Inn for a pool party. Good times. Next thing I know, I wake up alone in bed alone covered in bruises with the remains of a shark next to me and a Mars bar in my…never mind. Pat was a big hit with the ladies, though.”

Pat: “Although I certainly did it, I didn’t much care for the booze, heroin, meth, jet fuel, or expired milk I did. Just not my cup of tea. I did like the ladies though. Not gonna lie, after a show in Philadelphia, me, a city councilwoman, and the Liberty Bell. I did it for America that night. Let freedom ring.”

Tommy Lee: “CrossTown Rival? The Irishie dudes from Dover, New Delaware? Those guys were nuts, man. We were staying at the same hotel as them in Boston, you know, and about 4 AM, I hear this rumble coming from somewhere above me. Not like a Sharks and Jets rumble, but like a spaceship had landed on the top of the hotel. So I go up there and I’m like ‘oh man, is that a cannon? Dudes! You stole a cannon!’ No joke, man, they were firing this World War 1 cannon from the roof, screaming ‘take that Germany!’ with every shot. No way those things were hitting Germany—you know, I don’t think they knew where they were—but those dudes could party.”

Montana Slim: “Them boys was benter than a fire chief on the 4^th of July. They was running through that fudge-it list faster than I could print up new checklists and get ‘em laminated. Ménage a Trois with Vietnamese twins in a Post Office on tax day. Check. Stealing a polar bear from the zoo and painting it orange. Check. Lighting a Motel 6 on fire by filling the pool with gasoline and dropping in a hand grenade. Double check.”

Murph and Pat’s initial successes, though, were soon met by physical, mental, and actual roadblocks (Murph: “Let this be a lesson to you kids out there. Never take horse steroids and hijack a school bus. The cops will find you.”). Increasing medical bills (Pat: “Today, penicillin no longer works for me. It’s pretty sad.”) and court costs forced the band to play upwards of 37 shows a week, leaving little time in the day for their appointed duties. What’s worse, it was becoming harder and harder to top their efforts, leading to Caligula-Thomas-Crowne-Maury-Povich levels of excess.

Montana Slim: “That’s right. Things started gettin’ rougher than a steer’s rump in a snowstorm. The police was after ‘em, nobody was sleepin’, and to tell the truth, the whole rock and roll lifestyle thing started bringing people out to the shows to see what they’s a gonna do. That was a lot of pressure on them boys. One night, Pat drank an oil barrel filled with highway hooch (editor's note: highway hooch is a mixture of moonshine, bug repellant, and RC Cola) while Murph played his drum solo. Crowd went nuts, but by then Pat was so cranked on the silly sauce that he couldn't finish the show. You know, other bands would have collapsed or stopped all the nonsense long before, but with Mick still in limbo, they just wasn’t any quit in them boys.” Through the exhaustion of six nonstop months, Murph and Pat persevered, knowing that rock bottom was nearly within their reach.

Murph: “I knew we were getting close when we hit New York for some shows at a hole in the wall called Madison Square Garden. I don’t know, Montana found set them up. While drunkenly wandering around New York Harbor, I stole a sailboat full of Japanese tourists and crashed it into the Statue of Liberty. The cops took me to jail, and Pat decided to break me out like he had seen on an old Batman episode—ice cream truck right into the jail cell. Nice. And that’s the last thing I remember before waking up in Mexico. Weird”

It looked as though victory was theirs; On June 19^th, Murph and Pat triumphantly hit rock bottom, and unlike Murph, Pat can still recall the exact moment: “I can still see it today: there I was, slathered in my own feces, soaked in Mountain Dew, and snorting ants off the sidewalk outside a Denny’s in Toledo, Ohio. Not the good Denny’s in town; the other one. To my left was Murph, high on paint thinner and gun powder, shouting that he was hell-bent on selling his own legs just to get high one more time. To my right, a nineteen year old groupie named Veronica with a hook hand and a bouffant hairdo, drooling all over my arm which seemed to be covered with curing iron burns. My arm, not hers. She may have been married to Murph. There may have been a goat there. I was bald. I have no idea why.” And just as promised, Dr. Feelgood appeared at that very moment.

Will Dr. Feelgood lead Murph and Pat to Mick? Will Mick want to leave limbo? Will their newfound popularity lead to local, regional, or national acclaim? Find out next time in Part 10.