Slash (17 page)

So Guns N’ Roses was finally signed, but once we were, our new label didn’t want us to play gigs anymore. They wanted us to lay low, build our mystique, and get our business in order: they insisted we find a
real
manager, and a producer, and focus on making a record. They wanted us to live off our advance and not be distracted by the routine of playing weekly while we took the necessary next steps. Little did they or any of us know that setting
us loose with any kind of funds was a bad idea; they were sanctioning a degree of freedom that we had never known. Out of all of us, I was the most apprehensive about not playing any gigs. We were just going to sit idle with thousands of dollars to burn? That wasn’t going to end well. The five of us had managed to make every day an epic on a budget that was determined by what we found in our pockets that morning; with our advance money in our hands and a record label behind us, much too much was possible.

As we all came to find out, back then and again and again, the worst thing that ever befell this band was having nothing to do and some money to spend.

Restlessness is a fickle catalyst; it can drive you to achieve or it can coax your demise, and sometimes the choice isn’t yours. My restless nature is what earned me my nickname and it’s kept me looking for the next thrill, the next gig, and the next mountain to climb for as long as I can remember. It’s not the kind of thing that takes days off.

Before Guns got signed, I had no job and was living in a vomit-stained garage that was about as charming as a South American jail. All of my energy went into day-to-day survival and working to further the band, one show at a time. Once Guns was signed I didn’t have to worry about money, food, or shelter. This minor sense of stability was unfamiliar to me; I had no concern for acquiring any of the trappings of normal life, so what seemed to be a blessing to me was almost a curse.

We were signed for something like $250,000, and our signing advance was around $37,000, of which my cut was about $7,500. I translated it into American Express traveler’s checks that I kept in the right front pocket of my jeans, thanks to my trouble with the IRS. Saving my share wasn’t an option, but I didn’t celebrate by buying myself a new guitar or anything—I spent almost all of it on heroin. Each of us learned the same lesson in our own individual way before we got ourselves in line to do what we’d set out to do. It wouldn’t be the last time that we’d need to rally against our instincts: whenever we earned ourselves some peace of mind, the same restlessness that fueled our success threatened to destroy it all.

I
t was obvious to everyone in our camp that Vicky Hamilton wasn’t going to cut it as a manager once our operation increased in scale. It was also time to get a real crew: Joe wasn’t a tech in any way, and Danny was a drug bud (whom I continued to hang out with in that capacity for years) but not any kind of road manager. We weren’t entirely happy about making those changes, but it had to be done. It was the end of an era; we were no longer scrappy with nothing to lose: now we were scrappy with corporate backing.

Tom Zutaut arranged a few meetings with potential managers, the first of them being Cliff Bernstein and Peter Mensch of Q Prime, who managed Metallica, Def Leppard, and others, then as they do today. I went to Tom’s office and they were late, so I passed out on Tom’s couch waiting for them. For the record, I’m not sure if I was high or not. What I do remember is that the meeting didn’t go well.

“Guns N’ Roses just doesn’t have a musical enough sound to be a band that we’d consider representing,” one of them, I’m not sure which, said.

I sat there, pretty dumbfounded.
Huh?
I might have mumbled.

Basically, I took that insult lying down, because actually I was lying down, and that was the end of it. I didn’t say anything, but my face must have registered a look of disdain or at least some skeptical confusion.

“You know those guitar solos you do?” the other one, I’m not sure which, said.

“Yeah,” I mumbled.

“They just sound like noise to me, whereas if you listen to Metallica, their playing sounds really melodic.”

“Okay, man,” I said.
Whatever you say, Jack,
I thought to myself.

The whole time Tom did his best to mediate a potentially explosive situation by chiming in with comments meant to cheer things up and keep it positive.

“Well, the music really isn’t well represented in the demo, guys,” he’d say. “You really have to hear the songs properly produced.”

Tom knew, as well as I did, that the music was
very
well represented in the demo—these guys, like so many others, just didn’t get it. They passed,
of course, and they regretted it. Everyone Tom introduced us to in those days who passed on us regretted it—which in the end was a lot of people.

At the time Izzy was still living in his apartment and Duff was now living with this Hungarian girl, Katerina (whom he’d later marry), in an apartment on Hollywood Boulevard, coincidentally, next door to Sly Stone. I guess you could say that he and Duff had a tight neighborly relationship: Sly used to come by Duff ’s place unannounced to smoke PCP, crack, or a mix of the two, alone, in Duff ’s bathroom and then just leave. That blew our fucking minds. Apparently he did that all the time, but most of us didn’t see it because we never really hung out at Duff ’s place—his girl wasn’t the type to host a bunch of guys sitting around the living room. But I used to meet Duff over there before rehearsal, so I did witness it once.

There was a knock at the door, Duff opened it up, and there was Sly.

“Hey, man,” he muttered because he never remembered Duff ’s name. “Is it cool if I use your bathroom?”

“Oh yeah, sure,” Duff said.

And that was it. Duff said that Sly might be in there anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.

Duff also made the acquaintance of West Arkeen while he lived in that building. The only place I knew West to live on a regular basis back then was in his beat-up El Camino. I think at that point he was parking it outside of Duff ’s building, so he was a tenant by extension. I was introduced to him through Duff and he became friends with the band; much more so with Axl than with me or the rest of us at first. At that point especially I was wary of meeting new people because all manner of riffraff had started to hang around us, so I was standoffish to newcomers. It takes a lot for me to trust someone, though after a while, West and I became friends.

West was a guitar player from San Diego and a consummate party guy who became more of a fixture than the average friend of the band: he even cowrote some of our songs like “It’s So Easy” and “Yesterdays” with Duff and “Bad Obsession” and “The Garden” with Axl. Duff and West would hang out and write songs and I would join them sometimes, but West and Axl got really tight. In addition to writing with Guns, he cowrote songs for Duff ’s and Izzy’s solo projects and all of us contributed to his project, the Outpatience, in the late nineties, just before he died of an overdose.

West was a hard-drinking, hard-living good-times guy, so he fit in with us just fine. He was the kind of character who was so secure in his own skin and content with his own existence that if you weren’t nice to him, he’d still be amiable to you; that’s probably why he won me over in the end. For better or for worse, West was the guy who introduced the rest of us to what was then called speed and what is now called crystal meth. Speed was his thing; he always had a lot of it, he had major connections to it down in San Diego, and everyone in his orbit was always on it.

Eventually West somehow got the money together to rent a nice house in the Hollywood Hills; it was three stories, right on a cliff, tucked away in the trees. He lived there with “Laurie” and “Patricia,” these two speed-demon chicks that might have been attractive if they weren’t so strung out. Laurie somehow held down a job in the film industry and drove a nice Suzuki jeep, while Patricia never seemed to work, but she always seemed to have money. I could never get my head around how they maintained some appearance of a normal life, with a house, money in the bank, and all that—all while doing speed with the utmost abandon. But then again, I didn’t know much about speed then.

I used to crash there whenever I had nowhere to crash, and as West became closer to all of us, there was one thing I could never figure out: how he, too, always had money. Especially as things got crazier for us, West became the only thing like a friend that our band had in the world. He was the only one that always came through when any of us needed anything; for a long time he literally was the only one we could trust.

AS SOON AS WE GOT OUR ADVANCE
money, we collectively managed to do one practical thing, which was to rent an apartment. We got turned down by almost every management office we approached because it’s not like we had good credit—or credit at all. But finally we found a place on the southeast corner of La Cienega and Fountain; a two-bedroom, two-bathroom, ground-floor apartment. We actually got a bit domestic for a moment and went out and rented some furniture—two beds and a kitchen dinette set. We rounded out the decor with a couch we found in the alley behind the building and a TV that Steven’s mom donated to our
cause. When we first moved in, Steve’s mom also kicked us off with some groceries. It was the only time that we ever had them—for maybe a week, if you opened our fridge it actually looked like somebody lived there.

Steve and Izzy shared a room, and Axl and I shared a room, and that apartment is still there; I drive by it all the time—it’s the space with the big bay window on the first floor overlooking the intersection. When we first rented it, Izzy was still living with his girlfriend Dezi on Orange Avenue and Duff and Katerina were on Hollywood Boulevard, but mutual interests dictated that Izzy spend much of his time over at our place. Following some sort of domestic dispute, he became a full-time resident for a while.

To me, our place was deluxe; I even relocated my anaconda, Clyde, from Yvonne’s to join me there. Unfortunately, moving out of our garage into an ostensibly nicer apartment didn’t curtail our debauched delinquency; we ended up getting evicted after the three months we’d paid for—and never got our security deposit back. It didn’t work out as efficiently as planned, but being in the same place was more or less a step toward organized productivity as a band.

Everything was great until we got evicted, as far as I was concerned. We’d just gotten some money and I tried to be as frugal as I could in the smack-buying department, just making it stretch as far as it could go. In spite of my efforts, our place became a real shooting gallery: we’d cop down in East L.A. and it seemed like there was an endless supply in the street. Mark Mansfield came by one night, and unbeknownst to each other, we’d both become junkies, so it was
great
to see him. He was working with a Texas band called Tex and the Horseheads, who were also all strung out, so all of us hung out over at our place. Before this, I did dope when I could get it here and there, but I could never afford to get it consistently. At this point, though, I could finance a daily habit, and I was enamored enough of drugs that I didn’t know or care what I was getting myself into.

The label had rented us a rehearsal space at a place called Dean Chamberlain’s over in Hollywood, where Jane’s Addiction rehearsed as well. We’d roll in there every day at about two or three in the afternoon and play for about four hours. This little box was about eight feet by twenty feet, just very narrow and long, and was lit up by unpleasantly bright, hospital-strength fluorescent lights. Basically it was like rehearsing in a 7-Eleven.

Ironically, one of the first songs we worked up there was “Mr. Brownstone,” a track that was conceived under much dimmer circumstances. Izzy, his girlfriend Dezi, and I were up at their apartment one night when we came up with it. They had a little dinette set that we’d sit around cooking up our shit and then we’d just jam. We were sitting there complaining, as junkies do, about our dealers, as well as just complaining about being junkies, and that’s where that song came from. It basically described a day in the life for us at the time. Izzy had a cool idea, he came up with the riff, and we started improvising the lyrics. Dezi considers herself a cowriter on that track and for the record she did come up with maybe a noun here, perhaps a conjunction there. When we had it all together, we wrote the words down on a grocery bag. We brought it down to the Fountain apartment and played it for Axl and he reworked the lyrics a bit before the band worked on it at our next rehearsal. Axl could always take a simple Izzy melody and turn it into something fantastic, and that is just one of a few examples.

Tom Zutaut was eager to find us a producer and to get us on the road to recording—little did he know how long that road would be. The first candidate he sent our way was Tom Werman, who was a big fucking deal. Werman had recently produced Mötley Crüe’s
Shout at the Devil,
which sold a few million in 1985, and before that had made a name for himself producing Cheap Trick, Ted Nugent, and Molly Hatchet. Werman went on to work with Poison, Twisted Sister, L.A. Guns, Stryper, Krokus, and Dokken—basically he became the sound of eighties metal.

But he couldn’t handle us. We never even got to properly meet him. He came to our rehearsal space and we were playing “Mr. Brownstone,” at jet-engine decibel levels. Izzy and I had just gotten brand-new Mesa Boogie stacks and I was playing a new guitar: it was a Les Paul that had belonged to seventies blues guitarist Steve Hunter. I’d traded my BC Rich for it at Albert and Howie Huberman’s place, Guitars R Us. That store was an institution for every L.A. musician who couldn’t afford Guitar Center, it was
the
musician’s pawnshop. It was where I got rid of all of my shit and got new stuff. Or, when the money dried up, it was where I sold my equipment for cash to score more smack.

In any case, we were playing “Mr. Brownstone” so brutally loud that Werman walked out immediately. He came in with his assistant, paused in the
doorway, then turned around and disappeared. We finished the song and I went to the door to see if they were outside and found an empty street.

“I guess it must have been a little too loud,” I said to the other guys.

We shrugged it off, but I was bummed because I thought we sounded great. Then again I was used to people not getting it.

Guns was the type of snarling beast that thrived in pits like that.

The most well-known figure that considered working with us was Paul Stanley of Kiss, who was looking for the right band to launch a side gig behind the mixing board. Izzy, Duff, and I couldn’t have cared less; we told Zutaut that we had no idea what Paul Stanley could bring to the equation. Steven, of course, was beside himself—Kiss were his heroes, so we figured we’d let Steven have his jollies and agreed to the meeting. The process began with Paul coming down to our apartment to “discuss music.” By this time heroin had become a daily thing, so when Paul arrived, Izzy and I were doing all that we could to keep from nodding out; just barely keeping it together enough so that it wasn’t obvious…or so we thought. Izzy and I parked ourselves on the couch, and since we didn’t have a chair in the living room, Paul sat on the floor next to Steven and Axl.