Slash (56 page)

It didn’t matter; the energy level was so high that it was just in-your-face. The chemistry of the band live was powerful stuff and as organic as it gets. That was the defining moment for us: we were finally a group. We had worked together in every capacity except for the most essential one—live performance. That El Rey show was the moment of truth. In the dressing room afterward, we were so inspired by our chemistry onstage that we didn’t know what to do—should we make a record or should we just go on tour—right now?

WE OPTED TO MAKE A RECORD BECAUSE
that was the more practical thing to do. Besides, at the time we were in a writing zone and new material was coming to us very quickly. Before we’d gotten together with Scott, we’d been writing for over ten months, so to say that we overloaded him with potential songs to write lyrics for is an understatement. We gave him more than anyone could expect anyone to listen to.

He came through, though: he chose a few and turned them into things that we’d never have expected and loved all the same. Scott has a small studio and rehearsal space in Toluca Lake called Lavish, where he works with his engineer, Doug Grean. They took those demos and rearranged the music to accommodate the vocal parts that Scott came up with. Out of that huge body of material, we got “Big Machine” and “Dirty Little Thing,” while we continued to come up with new stuff, like “You Got No Right,” “Slither,” and “Sucker Train Blues,” which we all worked out, as well as a song called “Do It for the Kids,” among others. Everything came together really cool.

It all seemed to be going great until Scott got arrested in the parking lot at Lavish one night: he was caught sitting there with some girl and they had drugs in the car. He was already on probation, and that was his last strike. It was a real turning point for him: when he was released from jail, he didn’t go home, he went back to his studio. He cued up a piece of music we’d given him a while before. And he wrote the lyrics to the song that became “Fall to Pieces.” Scott let it all out in that song: it’s a more honest portrait of where he was and what he was dealing with at that particular time than anyone could ever hope to see. It really paints a picture of what was really going on with him, and consequently with us as well.

WE WEREN’T SURE WHO SHOULD PRODUCE
our record, so we tried out a few people; we threw around a few different names: Rick Rubin, Brendan O’Brien, and a few more. I’m not exactly sure who suggested Bob Ezrin, but we went into the studio and recorded “Slither” with him at Henson Studios. He’d just done the latest Jane’s Addiction record, but aside from that, his past work with everyone from Alice Cooper to Pink Floyd spoke for itself. It didn’t go as well as I’d hoped it would; Bob’s creative input for the song was too produced. He had too many things going on at once, using up too many tracks; the end result sounded too congested and too complex for what we saw as a simple song from a fairly simple rock-and-roll band.

We then decided to record a track with Josh Abraham, whom all of us knew. He was relatively new on the scene; his big claim to fame was producing the Staind record, which was a big hit. At least I was familiar with it and at the time he was working on the new Courtney Love record. We did a test track of a new song called “Headspace” with him at NRG Studios in North Hollywood. The track sounded good, the drums and guitars and vocals sounded good. It was enough for us to decide to do the rest of the album with him.

At that point the word was out about Velvet Revolver and we were getting a lot of interest from all of the major labels, although there weren’t that many left at that particular time. There was Chrysalis, Elektra, RCA, and Warner’s, and they were all interested. In the end we went with RCA.

But first we did the whole wine-and-dine free-lunch shuffle out in New York for a week or so. It wasn’t hard to decide who we’d go with once Clive Davis got on a plane with his A&R guy, Ashley Newton, to come see us rehearse in Toluca Lake. It was a great show of integrity and solidarity considering the setting. They sat in a room that was about twenty feet deep, with a pool table separating them from us and all of our amps right in their face. They sat through five songs like that. They wanted to get past the hype that now surrounded the band and see us play in our natural habitat.

“That was great, really great,” Clive said when we were done. “Thank you.”

They loved “Slither” and “Fall to Pieces,” and pretty much after that, our mind was made up. We went with RCA.

After preproduction with Josh at Lavish, we moved over to NRG to do the basic tracks. Coincidentally in the studio next door, Dean and Robert from STP were working on some new stuff, once again, right next door to us. This time they were unavoidable; they were literally in the next room and we shared a lounge. It was only a matter of time before Scott ran into them no matter what we did, but it was cool. They’d gotten over it; Dean sat down with Scott and I don’t know what they talked about, but afterward there were no hard feelings. Scott even played him our demos, all of us hung out, and it was all okay. That was the first time I met Dean, and I’ve seen both of those guys around since then and it’s been nothing but fine—both of them are really good guys.

WHEN IT CAME TO RECORDING MY
guitar parts for the album, I wanted to go into a smaller studio to save the band some money, so Josh suggested that we do them at his studio on the south corner of Highland and Sunset boulevards; it is where Jimi Hendrix recorded
Axis: Bold as Love
. I walked in and the place was just a bit funky: bad shag carpet, an old paint job, cockroaches…stuff like that. I got into the studio with Josh and there was a really nice mixing board, but I looked up and noticed that there were just two small Yamaha AS-10 studio monitors for speakers, which are great for listening to stuff back, but I record my guitar in the studio by placing my amps in the main room, where the microphones are, and playing in the control room, where the producer and the mixing board are. I do this mostly because I can’t stand headphones. This setup was not going to work at all for my purposes. Up until then, as a rule, I’d recorded the basic tracks live as scratch-guitar tracks and redone them in the control room at megadecibel levels so that it felt like an actual concert when I truly laid them down. The monitor speakers are my reference points as to what I am recording, so they need to be big and they need to be
loud
. The pair in front of me weren’t going to cut it.

“So is this how you record guitars?” I asked Josh.

“Well…yeah, usually these studio monitors are enough.”

“I’ve never played that way and I can tell you right now that they’re not going to be loud enough.”

At that moment I thought of what my wife, Perla, had told me over and over again: I like to do things the hard way. I could see that I was throwing Josh and his whole studio setup into a tailspin. I wanted to work on that tendency of mine, so rather than make a fuss and insist that we book a new studio and perhaps a new producer, I chose to adapt.

“Listen, just call in some bigger speakers and we’ll make it work,” I said. Josh looked genuinely relieved.

I can’t say that it was a pleasant experience. The studio engineers kept renting us new speakers but none of them did an acceptable job. That’s not true—they got exactly the right set on the very last day of recording. In the end, I was satisfied with my work on our debut record, but when I look back on it now, it was a very uncomfortable, confining session for me. All in all, my playing is pretty reserved on that record, which is why there aren’t as many solos as there could have been. I felt too restricted to improvise the way I usually do.

I think Dave got a lot more out of the digital studio setup than I did when he came in to do his parts. He did great; he added all of these sound textures that really made the guitars complete.

At the time Scott had been court-ordered to stay in a halfway house, a sentence that resulted from his arrest. He’d come in and do his vocals and then go right back. He was only allowed to work for three hours a day.

DUFF AND I WENT TO NEW YORK CITY
to sit in on the mixing sessions with George Marino engineering and then
Contraband
was finished. I had my first drink in over a year that night. I remained pretty quiet about my feelings on the GN’R/Axl situation up until Duff and I did a promo tour supporting the release of Velvet Revolver’s first CD. At that point, I hadn’t gone public about what had transpired between Axl and me, and I hadn’t planned on going there. But the media wanted to know my thoughts on the subject and I couldn’t help it. I had nothing pleasant to say. It was as if they had touched a raw nerve, and suddenly everything that came out of my mouth was bitter and spiteful—the
complete antithesis of how I really wanted to react. When GN’R and I parted ways, I had honestly wanted to stay low-key and never bicker in the press, mostly because so many artists before me had gone that route and I thought it distasteful. But here I was, put in a corner with press in every direction, hungrily looking for controversy and prodding that raw nerve. I couldn’t control my responses. Everything I said about Axl was negative; it was almost emotional. This, of course, pissed off Axl and was definitely the catalyst for rant against me in his 2005 press release, not to mention complicating the GN’R lawsuit even further.

While the CD was being packaged, Duff and I went on a press tour to promote it in Europe and Japan for a few weeks. The band went on the road before it even came out. Our first gig was in Kansas, and from there we hit every city in just about every state. We managed to generate enough buzz that when the album was released in June 2004, it went to number one in its second week. We were in Vegas for a show when Clive called us to let us know that we’d hit the top of the charts, and I have to say that after all I’d seen and all I’d done, getting a call from the legendary Clive Davis with news like that gave me goose bumps: it was an
arrival
, in my book. That was the start of a tour that seemed to keep going and going, building momentum the longer it went on. All in all we remained on the road for nineteen months, playing everything from clubs to festivals to stadiums.

The band played to crowds of thousands around the world and our record sold three million copies worldwide. We worked hard on that tour; we’d often play five nights a week, a different city every night. We did it all on a bus, in close quarters. We did Live 8, we did the Donnington Festival, we put out three videos on that record. It was pretty successful; suddenly we were once again in a major band.

Our last gig was in Orlando, then everyone went home and resumed their lives. And once we did, we got into all kinds of shit. There were rumors that we were breaking up, there were rumors that all of us were back on drugs and on the verge of self-destruction, and too many more rumors to name.

I, FOR ONE, YET AGAIN, DID HAVE A
very hard time readjusting to being home. When we were writing
Contra-
band,
way before we went in and recorded all of it, my son London was born in August 2002. I had gone with Perla to get her ultrasound and at the time I was still getting my head around the fact that I had a child on the way—obviously this was going to be a new experience for me. That said, once I knew one was coming, I thought I wanted a little girl, figuring she’d be just like her mom and they would be inseparable, a notion that further fed my denial about my inescapable new responsibilities.

That was my little idyllic vision of fatherhood until I realized something I’d been ignoring: I have a hard enough time with grown women, forget about little ones. A daughter would probably be my undoing. I breathed a sigh of relief when Perla delivered a beautiful, healthy nine-pound baby boy. We named him London not only because he was conceived in the U.K. but because I’d had a friend with that name in grade school and never forgot how cool I thought it was.

I didn’t have any experience raising children, obviously, but I did get some training. Perla felt an overwhelming rush of the maternal instinct when she got pregnant, and one day she brought home a Pomeranian puppy from the pet store. The dog immediately became my responsibility, especially once Perla was ordered to a few months of bed rest. I was forced to raise this dog and that was my preparation for fatherhood. It was the only experience I’d had raising anything, because one thing is for sure—having cats and snakes doesn’t really count. All things considered, I must have done something right because our dog was very well behaved by the time London was born.

Having a child forced me to be present; it insisted that I honor my sobriety. When I wasn’t with Velvet Revolver, I was home with my wife, raising our son. I was the dad, assembling the nursery, shopping for toys, putting together the electric mobile sets. And then Perla got pregnant again. We found out that it was another boy, and I breathed another sigh of relief. Our new baby was a breech as well, though the complications didn’t develop until later on in her term. It was rough on Perla once again.

I was on tour when my second son was delivered. I managed to fly home regularly to visit Perla in the hospital, but the day that my second son was to be delivered I had a show the night before. I had to fly from the hospital to Atlantic City on a red-eye then fly home on a red-eye to be there in time
for his birth the next morning. I missed my flight back to L.A. and was lucky enough to get another one. They had to hold up Perla’s C-section until I got there. I went right to the hospital and arrived just before he was born. I spent that night and the next morning with Perla and my perfect new little eight-pound baby boy, then I flew back out and met the band at the next gig. Such is the life my two sons have been born into.

We didn’t know what to name our second son until we remembered what our good friend movie mogul Robert Evans told us we should name our first son. As usual, he had a strong opinion that I couldn’t deny.