“Bam was about being a straight edge skateboarder. This isn’t him” said April on a worried phone call across the other side of the world.
Remember that scene from Wayne’s World 2 where Del Preston says “So there I am, in Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, at about 3 o’clock in the morning, looking for one thousand brown M&Ms to fill a brandy glass, or Ozzy wouldn’t go on stage that night.”. I had numerous requests like that or Bam wouldn’t get on stage that night, and they were mostly asked by Brandon Novak. At around 3.30pm, one afternoon before the Sydney show in Coogee Bay, I get a text message from Novak using a strangers phone that reads “Bam needs a bday cake for nikki, no questions asked or no performance .. you get it”. Here’s a screenshot:
I got the cake with ‘Happy Birthday Nikki” written on it within 45 minutes and I think it was that moment where Novak started acting like a diva towards me. To be honest he didn’t add that much value to the show apart from a pretty funny rendition of ‘In The Air Tonight’ aptly changing Novak’s name to Pill Collins for the performance each night. We were driving to the hotel from Ballarat after the show when Novak first made the van laugh with his high pitched, out of tune version of the classic Phil Collins. Apart from Ballarat, Pill Collins introduced the band every single night wearing nothing except whatever Bam told him to. “What do I have to wear tonight?” Novak asked Bam, whose only job seems to be whatever Bam tells him to do. “That fucker crashed my $100,000 car so now he has to pay me back” he said to the crowd one night. “I’m going to give $10 to each person who punches Novak in the fucking face” he continued. My point is that Novak didn’t add too much to the show. After his naked performance he just sat down and drank red wine before occasionally getting punched in the face during certain songs. Sometimes he made a little joke here and there, but for the amount of money it cost to get him into the country, feed and house him – wasn’t worth it. “Alex is getting his dick tasered on stage anyway, so what’s the point of having Novak” said Chad Ginsberg, one drunken night in Brisbane.
It wasn’t just Birthday Cakes on request; it was losing items everywhere he went, asking hotel management for drugs, high out of his head while police are trying to escort us out of the building and so much fucking more that did nothing but make my job harder and cause drama. In his first night in Melbourne he came into the “quiet” hotel room at 7.30am, turned the music on as loud as it could go and yelled “we’re raging” while spilling red wine all over the floor. If it wasn’t for me having some sort of sexual chemistry with the receptionist then we would have been fined a hefty cleaning fee. I sound like a massive dickhead saying “sexual chemistry” but it just seemed like that.
