DISGRACELAND - Billy Idol: A Motorcycle Crash, a Rude Awakening in Bangkok, Sexual Deviancy, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Animals

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

With his spiked blond hair, perpetual sneer, and gloved hands clenched in defiance, Billy Idol seemed like an avatar of punk rock dreamed up by central casting. But Idol's look, his attitude, and especially his music were completely authentic. He was a pure rock 'n' roll animal. Few rock stars lived a life as hedonistic and debaucherous as Billy Idol, and even fewer lived to tell the tale.Who is the most debaucherous star you've heard about in Disgraceland? Let Jake know at 617-906-6638, [e-mail], or on socials @disgracelandpod.To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership.Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - GET THE NEWSLETTERFollow Jake and DISGRACELAND:InstagramYouTubeX (formerly Twitter) Facebook Fan GroupTikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis. This is a story about a rock and roll animal. About the rock and roll animal. It's about debauchery, so debauchous that listing all of it out here at the beginning of this episode won't do the insanity of it all justice. It's about a rock star we take for granted.

He's always been there on our radios, on our televisions, looking like they contrived his technicolor punk rock MTV image in central casting, but the truth is that look, that attitude, and that rock star's songs were as authentic as it gets. It is behavior, his transgressions, prove it. High-speed car chases, destroyed hotel rooms, John Belushi overdosed and dead next door, arrests, accusations of sexual deviancy, military extradition under forced sedation,

under forced sedation because he was just that fucking unhinged. This is a story about Billy Idol, a man who made great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called, I can't believe how fucking hot that chick in that video is MK2. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to, How am I supposed to live without you by Michael Bolton? And why would I play you that specific slice of no-talent ass clown cheese could I afford it?

Because that was the number one song in America on February 6, 1990. And that was the day that Billy Idol, after returning from what would go down as one of the most out-of-control rock star vacations of all time, ran a stop sign and crashed as Harley Davidson nearly dying in the process. On this episode, a motorcycle crash, speedballs, a Bangkok bender to beat the band, no talent ass clown cheese, and Billy Idol. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace land. Billy Idol awoke in a hotel room bed, and the rising sun outside shone through the floor to ceiling windows,

violently piercing his eyes. His head was pounding. The phone started to ring. And there was that voice again. A voice he thought he was just imagining, but now was convinced was somewhere in the room. A voice that was saying, out go the light. Billy shot up to a sitting position, so fast that his brain, or what was left of it, sloshed around in his skull. He felt like he was going to vomit.

He looked around the room. What a mess. Liquor bottles, pill bottles, empty vials that, once contained one illicit white powder or another. Articles of clothing were strewn about, furniture was turned upside down, glass was broken, and blood was shed. Wait, was that really blood? The phone finally stopped ringing.

And Billy looked around for whoever was talking, but saw no one. Where the hell was he? And where the hell was Harry? Jesus Christ, he needed some dope, something, anything. Again he heard the voice, and again it sounded like it was coming from inside the room. And this time it was saying something different. This time it said, there was a pounding on his door. And he heard voices on the other side.

Speaking of language he could not understand, he began to really panic now. It wasn't unusual for Billy Idol to overdo it, to partake in some wild concoction of alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and or pills that eventually knocked him out only to wake him up with some big breasted bombshell at his side. But this was different. Everything was foggy, and nothing was making sense. The knocking on the door intensified. And Billy sprung to his feet and felt his knees wobble. He struggled to stay upright. And as he tried to catch his balance, his hotel room door was kicked down.

And into the room flooded men in military gear. For a split second, Billy had a moment of clarity. This was the Thai army he was looking at. Was he in Bangkok? The army men began to surround him like dog catchers cornering a mangy old mutt, and they grabbed his arms and legs and wrestled him onto a hospital gurney. Billy knew he'd really fucked up this time. If only he could remember just how he'd wound up in this situation in the first place. He racked his addled brain, but before he could find any answers, he was being stuck with a long needle and delivered a very powerful sedative,

which sent his mind back not to the beginning of this three-week bender, but to eight years earlier. all the way to 1981. Eight years earlier, it was 1981 and Ronald Reagan was not dead, but punk rock was. The 40th president of the United States had been shot and wounded in Washington, D.C., just days after 25-year-old Billy Idol moved from London to New York City. Years earlier, when Billy was just a little boy, and still going by his given name, William Broad, Billy's family relocated from their native England to Long Island for his father's work. even though they only lived there for four years before returning to the UK,

in some ways this felt like a homecoming. But things were different now. New York, like London, had been forever changed by punk rock. Punk had been Billy's salvation once too, the thing that drove his teenage rebellion that inspired him to cut school, even to stop talking to his father for two years. And Billy remained, punk's avatar really, his Gene Vincian,

Vincent, duck's ass hairdo, dyed shockingly blonde, his leather fingerless gloves, his curled upper lip, his fists clenched in youthful defiance. As the lead singer of the excellent London punk band Generation X, Billy Idol breathed the same air as the clash, the Ramones, and the sex pistols, but even Johnny Rotten had left all of that behind, now fronting Public Image Limited as John Leiden. In New York City, in 1981, the survivors were everywhere. Patty Smith, David Johansson, Debbie Harry, and now, Billy Idol, looking at a new world that very much resembled the one that he knew so well. The grime, the dirt, the disgusting bathrooms that smelled like last night's puke, the walls decorated by some spray paint Picasso, stretches of wet pavement that reeked of garbage and piss,

the little slots and tenement doors through which the man, once you were done waiting for him, of course, handed you your fix. The fury may have been old news, but the filth remained. Billy Eible was subsisting on a not-so-steady diet of heroin and late-night pizza slices, living like an animal because that's what he was, a rock-and-roll animal,

obsessed with what punk music really and truly was when he got down to it, which was just rock-and-roll, simple music that made you feel great, simple music made by young, ordinary people about their young, ordinary lives. Add to that, the pulsing sounds of Alan Vega and suicide, the orgasmic moans of dawn of summer, all of it visceral, all of it as vibrant as punk once was, as essential as oldies but goodies like Tommy James and the Chondelles as mony-money. The music throbbed in his head as he descended into the heart. heart of darkness, the Lower East Side, and some dude he just met with a 38 stuck in his waistband

as his guide, his protection, because scoring dope in New York City in the early 80s was no fucking joke. And with the help of his armed companion, Billy Idol procured that weak smack and snorted it, as was his preference. And the euphoria hit, helping him forget about his girlfriend, Perry Lister, a smokeshow redhead who was back in the UK. and also easing the guilt he felt about getting high with and fucking other women in her absence and then those timeless oldies but goodies flooding into his brain again. Billy sought out another junkie, a fellow lover of old rock and roll and punk rock alike. Lou Reed and suggested they collaborate on some songs for Billy's debut solo album,

which he was about to begin recording. Lou was into it, but he didn't come cheat. He told Billy that he charged not by the hour, but by every half hour. It was an insanely high rate. Higher than that low-grade A-street junk made you feel. So, fuck that and fuck Lou Reed, too. True, Billy was used to a songwriting partner, which was how he came up with the material for Generation X,

including their hit Dancing with Myself, which was technically recorded by his old band, Generation X, and only later re-released under his own name, Billy Idol, and which also featured cameos for members of the clash and the pistols, but I digress. Billy was a solo artist now with a new path to forge, which meant some things he'd have to go alone, like writing songs. And so long before he became one of the biggest rock and roll stars in the world, years before he woke up in the luxury hotel room in Bangkok with no knowledge of how he got there

or what he'd done over the course of three very long and debauchous weeks, with the local military literally knocking down his door, sedating him like his heroes in the Ramones once sang about and strapping him to a gurney. Billy Idol left his new home of New York City without Lou Reed, without his girl Perry, without much but a record contract, and he took off for the warmer climbs of Los Angeles, California, where the sun was shining and the birds were singing,

and the women were willing, and the drugs were up. plentiful. In short, it was a nice day to start again. Billy Idol had a debut album to record. Chrysalis, the British record label, which had previously signed Billy's band Generation X, had it all planned out. Time was booked in early 1982 at Westlake Studios in Los Angeles, where Billy could first hammer out some demos with his signature epiphone casino hollowbody electric guitar and a drum machine before presenting them to the band, which was being led by the pyro-technic guitarist Steve Stevens, who also possessed some of the biggest hair in the game for what that's worth. But Billy still needed a few new songs for the record, and he still had doubts about his being able to write them on his own.

But that was a problem for future Billy Idol to figure out, because all that, the writing, the recording, it was happening tomorrow, the day after Billy arrived in Los Angeles. He was just trying to make sure that today, his first day in town, wouldn't be his last. And it wasn't looking. Billy braced himself as the car he was riding and rocketed through a busy intersection, wincing as it barely missed getting teaboned by a car coming from the cross street. He turned to give an incredulous look at his driver, a washing machine salesman high as shit on too many percatans. The guy's cheeks were still puffy and swollen from that morning's wisdom teeth extraction, and his eyes were clearly communicating that, yet, he was a lot of

Yes, the drugs had taken hold, and no, he was not stopping for the police cruisers that were hot in pursuit with their sirens screaming at full blast. Billy looked back at his friend, GA, sitting in the back seat, and then at the LAPD squad cars gaining on them now with every second. Perkerdam man cut the wheel hard, and to the tune of screeching tires, motored the very fast-moving vehicle down an alley. Again, taking another corner at the end of said alley, where he suddenly had a slam on the brakes to avoid cold. crashing into someone's fence. The cops were blocking them in now, and the bright lights of their cruisers cutting through the darkness.

Then came the piercing squeal of a bullhorn. Where we can see them. Why was Billy Idol in a car driven by a washing machine salesman high on prescription opioids, actively outrunning the police on this his first day in L.A.? Why are you even asking? You'll find no real clarity to this sort of question. In the lawless 1980s for a...

rockers such as Billy Idol, a junkie such as Billy Idol, life was one big blur of scores, fixes, verses, and choruses, and not always in that order. Furthermore, the only true clarity one had to possess was in the recording studio or on stage, where the real work was to be done. So after Billy smoothed things out with the LAPD and after the cops were satisfied that no one in the car had a criminal record, after Perkadan man agreed to pay a small fine for the damage done, and after Billy's friend GA promised he would take the wheel, they were free to go, which, for Billy, meant going to Westlake Studios the very next day. With his epiphone casino in his hands and the clock on the wall ticking away, he found

his favorite key of B, the same key he'd written Generation X's Ready, Steady Go, in. His favorite time signature, 4-4, and a compelling story from which to write a song. And that story was not what had just happened to him the day prior, but Instead, one inspired by his own sister, who had recently gotten married while pregnant. The lyrics came to him quickly, as did a twist in which he pivoted away from his own life and had the song's narrator hinted at some sort of incestuous relationship. It was weird, dark, incredibly compelling. In just 20 minutes, Billy Idol had written the minor key goth-punk-pop smash, White Wedding.

In the fall of 1982, White Wedding, with its unmist, mistakeable hopscotch and pickslide intro by Steve Stevens, that song was released as the second single from Billy's debut solo album. It didn't make him a star overnight, but thanks to all the play it received in urban dance clubs as well as the heavy rotation on the then-new MTV, which had a finite library of videos to choose from the time. White Wedding lifted Billy Idol up a bit, which, most importantly for Billy at the moment, meant that his inner circle of rock and roll friends got bigger, as did his drug budget, and the caliber of place in which he did those drugs with those friends. I'm talking places like the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood,

and that's where Billy and Steve decamped when they were kicked out of the Sunset Marquis, up the street a bit and around the corner. Armed with a stash of tequila and heroin, Billy did his best to get kicked out of his Chateau bungalow as well, and he probably would have. That is, if the cops weren't busy with John Belushi's corpse. after the famous comedian, former Saturday Night live cast member and fellow hard party or just so happened to overdose in his own bungalow a few doors down from Billy. Less deadly were the hangout sessions with rock royalty like the Rolling Stones, with whom Billy found himself sharing a bottle at Ronnie Wood's birthday party.

Ronnie passed the bourbon to Keith and then Keith to Mick and then Mick to Billy, upon which Billy took a look at the bottle's label, which featured a picture of a Confederate soldier riding a horse next to the bourbon's name. And the name of that bourbon was Rebel Yell. The name stuck with him. And just like the blast of creative inspiration he channeled to write White Wedding, he did the same with his next big hit, which would also be the title of his next album.

Upon its release in November of 1983, Billy Idol's second solo record, Rebel Yell, again with the help of MTV, solidified the one-time punk rocker as one of the most recognizable faces and voices of contemporary rock and roll. in the same way that Madonna or Michael Jackson represented the pop side of the tracks. Billy set out on a massive tour, and he fucked and drugged his way across North America, and then back again, an embarrassment of women and heroin and cocaine and booze. It was all so much Billy would play, he'd party, he'd pass out, he'd wake up,

he'd be strung out, he'd get pissed, he'd fly into a rage, break shit, and then repeat the whole process all over again pretty regularly. He woke up in Tucson with a sheriff pointing a loaded gun in his face. He woke up in London, his unconscious junkie body being miraculously revived in a freezing cold ice bath. He woke up with a bloody nose with a throat on fire, naked. The curtains drawn, porn flickering on the TV set, his broken freebase pipe held together with Gaffer tape. In Rochester, New York, he was accused of sexual deviancy by a woman who claimed he kicked her out of his hotel room for not fucking another woman in front of him. his long-suffering girlfriend, Perry Lister, the one who first stayed behind in England.

When Billy made the move abroad, she definitely had some idea about Billy Idol's sexual deviancy, even after the charges were dropped. But as long as that idea wasn't flaunted in her face while she was around, which was becoming more frequent as the years went on, that whatever Billy did was all good with her. And that was until Billy got sloppy. First, there was the undercover staying in Washington Square in New York, which landed Billy and a female friend in police custody.

NYPD only needed one crackhead in cuffs, so the friend took the fall and then immediately gave a press conference in which she introduced herself as Billy's girlfriend. Perry wasn't going to take any of that. And Perry responded by giving her own press conference to make sure the world knew that she, and not the Coke-smoking harlot on Billy's arm on that faithful day in Washington Square Park,

she wanted the world to know that she, Perry, was Billy's one and only girlfriend. and Perry further proved it by moving with Billy to Los Angeles, to the Hollywood Hills, where, after Billy Idol's live version of the Tommy James classic, Moni, Moni, went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and after Billy used the money from that huge hit, to buy himself a Harley-Davidson-Glad motorcycle,

and then joined a local motorcycle club called Rude Dude, and after the couple, welcomed a son in the summer of 1988, Perry's suspicions of the depths of Billy's sexual deviancy were confirmed when she heard him talking to his sidebeast, I shit you not, over the baby monitor. One year later in 1989, this memory, this colossal fuck up by Billy Idol, and how his girlfriend, Perry, responded to it by moving out and taking the baby with her. All of it was flooding Billy Idol's head like an old rock and roll melody as he began to regain consciousness inside of a Bangkok airport. The Thai soldiers who'd busted into his...

hotel room, forcibly removed him and sedated him and had dumped him here with a one-way ticket on the first plane leaving so that they could get him the hell out of their country. This pain, this emotional pain now that was occupying Billy's head was the reason Billy came to this country in the first place to cast out this grief by snorting and smoking and fucking the pain away. But the pain was back now, and so was his memory. memory. And now, Billy Idol could remember everything. We'll be right back after this world, word, word. Three weeks earlier, Billy Idol and the leader of his rude dude motorcycle gang, his friend

Harry Johnson, no, that is not a joke. That's actually his name. Look it up. Billy and Harry flew from Los Angeles to Bangkok in search of escape. In the short time between when Perry left him and when he left on this trip, Billy had managed to father another child. a daughter with another woman. But his failure to hang on a Perry, it's still hung over him like a dark cloud. And so drowning his sorrows and untold amounts of hedonism

halfway across the world sounded like just what the good doctor, Dr. Feelgood, that is, ordered. Billy was also in need of a break from recording his fourth solo album, Charmed Life. He wasn't sure if that title was wishful thinking or whether it was the truth. But seeing as though he could pick up stakes at the drop of a hat and fly 8,000 miles

Thailand for a boondoggle, he was doing all right, all things considered. The making of charmed life was, even by Billy Idol's standards, a degenerate affair in which recording sessions were regularly punctuated by doses of ecstasy in GHB, lines of cocaine and scores of naked women, at whose arrival Billy and the crew would just strip down to their biker boots and scarves. So I guess in a rare show of abstinence, Billy and Harry agreed that once they got to Bangkok, it would be alcohol only. Furthermore, they planned to spend as much time in the brothels as they could handle. And they did.

The women were beautiful, and the sex was mind-bending. They had to drag themselves away to retire to their presidential suite on the top floor, the Oriental Hotel, with incredible views that competed with Bangkok sex workers when it came to taking Billy's breath away. But this self-imposed alcohol-only rule got old real quick. All that drinking just made them pass out earlier, and they wanted to go all night. So they held the cab and asked the driver if he could score them some blow. He was more than happy to oblige, but he did them one better.

He procured for Billy and Harry, not cocaine, but China white heroin. This defeated the whole purpose in a way, which was to get some drugs that would keep them awake and alert, but once a junkie has that little vial in his hands, there's no way he's giving it back. And a little of this stuff went a long way. Within minutes, the two friends were stratosphericly high. And when I say hi, Billy wrote in his memoir, I mean zombie high. And pretty soon, the hotel staff was asking questions. Why are these two American gentlemen buying so many chocolate bars from their mini bar?

Why? Well, because they couldn't find any tinfoil at the local stores to cook their heroin in. Another question. Why are there so many scantily clad women from the brothels running through the lobby and hallways, of our respectable establishment at all hours of the night? Well, obviously, because those two American gentlemen are screwing their brains out six ways to Sunday. And oh, excuse me, sirs, would you mind moving to a different room so that a very special guest, the president of Cambodia, can use the presidential suite?

It is, after all, called presidential for a reason. Well, the answer to that question was, fuck no. Fuck the president of Cambodia. And fuck this really good heroin, which Billy and Harry had finally run out of. They replaced the smack with bottles of cocaine and such, purchased at a nearby pharmacy, so that their withdrawal from the China White wouldn't be too much of a bitch to conquer. And they chased the pills with more liquor.

And once again, Billy Idol collapsed, and everything went black. He woke up on the floor the hotel's elevator, half of his body inside the elevator car and half of it in the hallway. The elevator doors were trying to close, but they kept hitting his motionless body and then reopening. Billy, come on, man, get up. Harry was standing there, trying to rouse him. And Billy opened his eyes to see multiple pairs of feet navigating their way around what appeared to be his pretty corpse.

It was a family. Billy looked up at the father and thought, wait, is that? Mel Gibson was ushering his children past the very fucked up Billy Idol and towards another elevator bank, all while giving Billy a look that was part sympathy and part pity.

Clearly, this was a sign that it was time for a change, and I don't mean as in time to go home. Billy and Harry checked out of the Oriental and made their way to the seaside resort town of Pataya, Thailand, some 90 miles away where they moved into the Royal Cliff Hotel. There they took more pills, tranquilizers this time, and the result was more of the same. Billy passed out, and Billy woke up hours later, in the middle of the night to find Harry gone, and two new sex workers by his side. And Billy pulled that old Chateau Marmont bullshit again. He picked up the hotel room's table and launched it through a sliding glass door. And that little outburst cost him $20,000 to ensure that the hotel

management didn't call the cops. This on top of the $25,000 that he'd already paid for a jet ski he'd rented and crashed while high as fuck. And so, once again, it was time to move on. Back to the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. And it was there where all the transgressions of the last three weeks were beginning to pile up and inflict real damage on Billy's body and mind. And that mind of his was cramped with smells, tastes, and sounds, the music of ecstasy and indulgence. Some cut-up tapestry of orgasmic shrieks and butane lighters and crumpled up chocolate bar foil and jet ski motors. And that Vietnamese woman Harriet picked up and was dragging around. The one that only knew two phrases in English, out go the light and boom, boom.

And now, on top of it all, the phone was ringing. America was calling. His record label was pissed. He, of the rebel yell, was rebelling a little too much. And the only way to curb such rebellion to get the rebel back on track, to get him back to yelling in the recording studio and on stage, back on schedule, was to tap the big guns, literally, as in Thailand's very capable and very efficient military,

who quickly overpowered Billy Idol, and, despite urban legend, did not shoot him with some huge tranquilizer gun, but instead injected him with a sedative, and then drove him to the airport where he woke up puking his brains out and put him on a plane back to Los Angeles, where he returned to the recording studio to put the finishing touches on his charmed life album while continuing to do more drugs, not just cocaine and heroin, but now ecstasy in GHB as well. All while more naked women paraded into the studio's control room to get Billy off again and again right there on the floor, on the couch, on the chair, as a rough mix of Billy's cover of the door's LA woman thundered to the studio speakers. The music, the sex, the drugs, the friends, strangers, vacation, work, home, away. There was no differentiating one thing from the next. It was all decadent, all depraved, all incommel.

And never ending. February 6th, 1990, Los Angeles. The morning sun reflected off the black and chrome of the Harley-Davidson Yglide as Billy Idol, his belly lined with booze and pills, steered his bike away from his house in the Hollywood Hills, and down a steep canyon road, toward what was certainly main drag gridlock on sunset below. The wind whipped through his spiky, bleached blonde hair,

just the way he liked it. No helmet, no safety net. Not back in London in 1977, not in the Lower East Side in 1981, and not in Bangkok the year prior. Certainly not now, on the streets of his second adopted American home. Clutch, throttle.

The Y-glide lurched forward, giving Billy that thrill in the process. The same thrill that sex, drugs, and rock and roll gave to him. Pure euphoria. But this euphoria, like all the others, had a tendency to be too much, too distracting. The Harley kept up its fast clip, gaining speed even. Billy was oblivious to the world, into his troubles, and to the stop sign he'd just blown through. The UK press broke the news that Billy Idol was dead. But unlike the rumor that he was subdued with a tranquilizer gun in Bangkok,

the rumor about Billy Idol's death took only hours to debunk. Because although he was not wearing a helmet and was also admittedly intoxicated and thus very easily could have died, Billy Idol was in fact very much alive, and the truth was much gnarlier than fiction. Billy had indeed been hit by a car, and upon impact he was thrown from his bike, and his right leg took a beating.

Pieces of bone had shattered his. inside his shin, leaving a gaping hole in his flesh the size of a baseball. His forearm was broken, as were his clavicle and some ribs. But it was his leg that was the real issue. He nearly lost it. It took seven surgeries over the next month to put him on the mend. A brand new walking cane now helped him get around. And this is why, if you remember, 1990, the music video for his number two Billboard Hot 100 single at the time, Cradle of Love, you know the one with that chick who strips down and seduces an uptight businessman in his apartment. That video features Billy only in occasional shots and only from the waist up, working his ass off to sell the song in the video, even though

he was no longer on hospital morphine to dull his pain and keep him high, but once again relying on the copious other recreational drugs he continued to take on the regular. Hold up. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, wait a minute, Jake. Shouldn't this be the part of the story where our hero, Billy Idol, has a near-death experience after years of destructive behavior, which immediately serves as this monumental wake-up call to get clean and sober. Well, you're not wrong. Read any recent interview with Billy Idol, and he'll point to this very incident as the moment when he realized he had to do something about his reckless devil-may-care behavior if you wanted to be around to watch his two small children grow up. The thing is, it didn't happen overnight.

Asking Billy Idol to immediately stop being Billy Idol is like asking Mr. Mr. Rogers to stop wearing that red cardigan. Billy is the manifestation of what we talk about when we talk about the rock and roll animal. Today, in 2025, he may seem like an overblown caricature of this ideal. But that's only because Hot Topic became a thing, and anyone with a few bucks could suddenly buy a bunch of, quote-unquote, edgy punk swag and pretend they were a fraction of the badass that Billy Idol is.

Billy Idol is and was authentic to his core. And so, in 1990, learning how to alter the way that an authentic rock and roll animal lived while also maintaining that authentic image was going to take a minute. But for the moment, he remained a version of the animal he'd always been. In 1992, that animal went feral, when Billy Idol pleaded no contest for punching a woman in the face while in the back of a car and was fined $2,000 for the offense. A less deplorable and more mischievous example of the continuing rock and roll animalism came on the final show of the U.S. Leg of the Charmed Life Tour in Seattle on Halloween night,

1990. As the opening band, The Incredible Faith No More, played their alternative rock hit Epic, they were pelted with 600 dead fish by the road crew upon Billy's instruction. And then, during Billy's headlining set, five men naked from the waist, down, they're swinging dicks just swinging away, dance the conga line across the stage as Billy sang his 1986 song to be a lover. And that little stunt summoned Seattle PD who showed up to the Seattle Coliseum ready to make some arrests for indecent exposure and perhaps even put this curled lip rebel in his place

once and for all. But by the time they arrived, Billy Idol and his crew had already hit the road. And besides, since those five mostly naked dudes have been wearing paper bags over their heads, No one could say for sure just who had gone streaking on stage. For the Seattle Police Department, now is that. But for Billy Idol, it was the start of a new era, a new day to start again. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace land. All right, thanks for hanging out with me and Billy Idol on this episode. I hope you guys dug it.

Apple podcast listeners, make sure you have automatic downloads turned on so you don't miss any episodes. All right, this week's question of the week is. is who is the most debauchous rock star you've heard about here in Disgraceland? And why? Is it Billy Idol or is it someone else? 617-9066638 to let me know via voicemail or text at Disgraceland Pod. Let me know via Instagram, Facebook, or X. And you'll be able to hear your answers on the after party bonus episode coming up right after this one.

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