Slash (36 page)

“You are making a big mistake,” he said. “You are giving in. You are being weak, you need to think about this. Just come to a meeting with me.”

“I am not going anywhere with you,” I said. “That is not happening. Thank you very much for your help. But fuck that, I am out of here.”

I ordered myself a stretch limo to take me to the airport, as the owner continued to try to talk me into staying until the moment I got inside. I lowered the window and looked him in the eye.

“I can’t stop you but you are making a big mistake,” he said.

“
See ya.
”

A few miles down the road I saw a liquor store.

“Pull over,” I told the driver.

I bought a liter of Stoli. I opened it and threw the cap out the window. My anger at what I’d just been through grew as I progressed through the bottle on the way to the airport. I was insulted that my circle had thought that the ridiculous circus they’d sent me to would teach me now to control myself better than I already knew how. It was rude. I can’t imagine what my limo driver was thinking that afternoon: he’d picked me up from rehab and watched me down half a liter of vodka in under an hour.

At the airport, while I waited for my plane, I called a high-end heroin dealer who was a friend of Mark Mansfield and Matt Cassel from high school. I made arrangements to meet up with him the moment I landed; I knew that the first hit of heroin after a detox would be the finest, so I intended for it to be of the best quality. After I’d copped, I went home, I got high, and then I called my manager, Doug Goldstein.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Doug, it’s Slash,” I said. “I’m baaaaaack.” And then I hung up.

I've always had to do things my way

I SETTLED IN TO THINGS WITH MEGAN
again and everything was fine. I also started partying by myself again after she went to bed. She had no idea that I’d just kicked or been to rehab. The thing was, because detox had been forced, I refused to get clean…though I knew I had to. I didn’t intend to get back into heroin—I just wasn’t going to kick it on their terms.

I planned a trip for Megan and me to Hawaii, and I got myself enough dope to allow me to take my use to a certain point, after which I’d kick on
my
terms. She and I checked in to a villa on Kauai, and the moment we got there, I started the detoxing process. I was feverish, sweaty, jittery, and altogether miserable. I told Megan that I had the flu and she believed me; she was happy enough to go shopping and sightsee on her own.

I didn’t expect this kick to be as bad as it was, because I thought I’d gotten through the worst of it back in Tucson. Well…I hadn’t; it wasn’t easy at all. I hoped that I could drink it off, but I couldn’t: everything tasted bad and everything felt bad. The symptoms were
way
more violent than usual: the dry heaves, the stomach cramps, the profuse sweating, the anxiety, and the creepy-crawling sensations were such horrible unpleasant company. I couldn’t watch TV, I couldn’t relax, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I’m sure Megan purposely stayed away most of the time.

Suffice to say, I was miserable. I was in that state for a week or so while Megan and I just chilled in Kauai. The thing is, for as much effort as I’d put into getting drugs to feed my habit, every time I’d kicked, I never invested the necessary time to obtain the appropriate medicine to ease the process. It always seemed like a pain in the ass to get a bunch of prescriptions from my doctor; it always seemed like too much planning before the day that I decided to do it. Besides, I always have to do everything the hard way, so it had always been cold turkey for me.

After a week I got to the point where I could move around and I finally
started feeling better. I could see that I was almost out of the woods; and I started to make plans with Megan to do the usual things tourists do in Hawaii. At the same time, I also got the wise idea to call my dealer and have him FedEx me some smack.

All in all this was a really dumb plan, because at that point I was halfway through the detox process; I would have made it if I’d been able to hold on for a few more days. But I refused to, plain and simple. In any case, my dealer could only send me a finite amount, so it was no more than a short-term solution. Looking back, I must say that it was a particularly stupid decision.

The dealer in question was the most high-end of the guys that sold me heroin; and he convinced me that my yearning could be fulfilled safely, via first-class mail, with very little chance of being caught.

I agreed to it, and the moment after I did, I remembered something: Mark, the guy from Faster Pussycat, the guy we’d duct-taped and sent to the lobby in the elevator, had recently been busted for having someone send him drugs through the mail. What the fuck was I
thinking
?

The next morning I was all jumpy, as junkies will be, anticipating the arrival of drugs. I still worried that I’d be busted picking them up. I weighed the pros and cons back and forth all morning until the phone rang.

“Hello, sir, this is the front desk; you have a package here.”

“Huh?” I said. “I have a
package
? I’m not expecting a package.”

“Yes, sir, you have a package from the mainland. I believe it was sent from Los Angeles, California.”

I decided to take extra precautions; I took the service elevator to the first floor. It let me out in a concealed corner where I could sneak into the lobby maintaining a sniper’s perspective. Nobody in the area seemed obviously suspicious, but I wasn’t sure whether some of the hangers-about were cops or not.

I was sure, however, that whatever it was that I was wearing was totally unpresentable. I slunk up to the desk, from the alley by the service elevator, and just went for it, keeping one eye peeled, so to speak.

“You know, I got a phone call saying that someone sent me a package,” I said, to the entirely innocent-looking-but-maybe-she-knows-about-this-thing girl at the front desk. “It’s totally funny because I’m not expecting anything at all.” I smiled…at least I think I did.

She fetched the package, which turned out to be an envelope full of CDs hiding the dope. When she put it down on the counter in front of me, I froze; I looked at it but didn’t touch it.

“Here’s your package, sir.”

“Is this it?” I asked. “That’s so crazy, I wasn’t expecting anything.” I looked all around the lobby, my eyes prying the corners, searching for cops or feds moving in for the kill. “That’s really odd, I’m totally surprised. I did not expect to get a package sent to me here at all.”

“Well, this package arrived here for you this morning, sir.” She looked at me oddly and held out a pen. “Will you sign here, please?”

I stared at the slip of paper sitting on the counter between us. I realized that if I was being set up, if there was any level of law enforcement watching this transaction, it would be the end of me, and that once I signed this paper, they’d have all that they’d need. I looked up at the girl, I looked down at the paper. I looked all around again, too obviously. I didn’t do anything for what became a very pregnant moment. Then I thought,
Fuck it
; I signed for it, I said thank you to her, and I ducked into the service elevator and hurried back to my room.

Megan was still out somewhere at the time, but when she got back I was high, I was happy, and the rest of our trip was
wonderful
. Call me what you will, but that vacation took a one-eighty degree turn for the better once I got my meds. Megan and I started doing stuff, we went shopping, I rented a Jeep, and we toured some of the sights.

From Hawaii, Megan and I flew out to Chicago to spend Thanksgiving with her mother, whom I was meeting for the first time. I finished the last of my smack in the hotel in Hawaii, and by the time we got to Chicago, I was starting to experience the typical junkie itchy twitchy withdrawal. I only knew a few people in Chicago, and I ran into one of them at the Smart Bar our first night there. This guy was one of the engineers who’d set up our rehearsal rig, and though he didn’t have a line on heroin, he always had tons of coke, so he hooked me up with a pile of it. When I got back to Megan’s mother’s house, I started shooting it in an effort to get myself straight.

Megan had no idea, but I could tell that her mom knew that something wasn’t quite right with me; I’m just not sure whether she knew exactly what it was. It was tough to keep my whole scene under wraps that holiday sea
son because she and her mom lived in pretty close quarters. Their bedrooms were divided by a shared closet; so if the sliding doors on both sides were open, you could walk from one room into the other. At night, when I was watching TV and shooting coke after Megan fell asleep, I’d start tripping out, convinced that her mom was watching me from the other side of that weird divider. This went on for a few nights. I don’t know what I was thinking; I was shooting coke in her twin bed, between Megan’s body and the wall. It was ridiculous.

When Thanksgiving Day arrived, I took a shower and got ready to meet the family and friends; and I noticed as I walked down the stairs that somehow heroin had been cleaned from my system—it defies common logic, but my only explanation is that the coke had inexplicably taken the edge off on a very intrinsic level. I was out of my mind the whole time I was over there, regardless, and that Thanksgiving dinner was one of the most uncomfortable holiday meals I’ve ever had, but it did have its moments. We had plenty to drink and we had some good times, and then Megan and I flew back to L.A. and at that point I was clean(ish)—or so: no drugs, and very little booze. At least for a while.

Before I knew it Christmas was around the corner and Megan started planning a lavish party: she was
way
into the decorations, she bought a fondue maker, and she invited all of our friends to her winter wonderland. It was the most bizarre thing I had been involved with for a long time, and the fact that I was straight made that feeling pretty hard to ignore. The day before the party, she came home with about $400 worth of useless garbage that she’d bought at the market to decorate the house. That was my breaking point.

I watched her decorate our place, thinking all the while,
I don’t even know who the fuck you are
. We had the Christmas party, we had our friends over; and as soon as they’d gone, I set about telling Megan that she had to go as well. It wasn’t cool, and it was pretty explicit; I flipped on her for going to the market but that wasn’t the real issue: I was done with her, cut-and-dried, and I needed her to vacate the premises as soon as possible. It didn’t matter to me how she’d gotten there, it just had to stop. It had to end immediately. It went horribly: I looked her in the eye and said, “Go away.” And she went…her friend Karen, who hated me anyway, showed up and packed her up.

Looking back, once I was sober, I didn’t see Megan the same way at all. She was sweet, she was fine…but she was just
there
. Suddenly she was like a piece of furniture that I didn’t remember buying and I began to ask myself, each and every day, what we had in common. With nothing to cloud my vision, it felt like she was a stranger. I also didn’t have time for the time-consuming responsibilities and distractions of a relationship, so it wasn’t her so much as it was me. I was getting back to my old self; I was getting into work mode. All I kept thinking when I looked at her was,
What are you
doing
here? You’ve got to
go.
I’ve got shit to do
.
We’ve got a fucking record to make.
I believe I said as much to her. I treated her harshly, especially for me, because that’s not my style. But I just couldn’t take it anymore, and that’s the last that I ever saw of her. I’ve always had to do things my way; I’ve gotten high my way, I’ve gotten clean my way, I’ve been in and out of relationships my way. I’ve taken myself to the edges of life my way. And I’m still here. Whether or not I deserve to be is another story.

When we started this band, our future depended on our uncompromising unity; our attitude fostered a loyal camaraderie among us the likes of which is very rare. Success fragmented that bond by giving us everything we wanted and a lot we didn’t need—all at once. We’d made it in the conventional sense; and that meant money and money meant freedom. We were free to splinter off on our own trips. We went so far that we almost forgot what it was like to be in the same room; we almost forgot how we had earned that freedom in the first place.

In the end we found it again, just in time…but there were losses and growing pains we could not avoid. To get back to where we started, we had to reintroduce ourselves; we had to trim the fat. We had to rediscover Guns N’ Roses. It had only been a few years, but it felt like we’d forgotten how fun it used to be to be us. You’d be surprised how quickly you forget what’s important when you’ve suddenly got everything you’d never thought you’d have.

O
nce I had dropped the smack again, once Megan was gone, and once I started hanging more with Duff, listening to music, drinking, and doing the occasional line, it all came together. It was all no big deal; I’d transitioned out of smack like I had before and into drinking and I was ready to do some work again. And that was good.

Izzy hadn’t come back from Indiana yet—he wasn’t ready for the temptation of L.A.—so it was Duff and I who started going back down to Mates to write. We hoped to get the ball rolling by way of our example, by maintaining a regular schedule during which we’d write music. We were feeling out the foundation of a few new songs and doing some work on some preexisting ones. As in Chicago, our goal was to get Izzy and Axl back in the room with us, but we knew that before we could do that, we needed to deal with Steven. Our man Steve had built himself up a pretty pesky drug habit and was in full denial. Steve never grew out of those junior high rock-and-roll fantasies, even when the threat of losing them was staring him in the face, so we had our work cut out for us. Duff and I split our time between jamming at Mates and monitoring Steven, who conveniently lived down the street from Duff, but was as sneaky as could be about his consumption. When we were in Chicago, everyone had started to see signs that he was becoming a little bit neurotic and frail, but back in L.A. in my strung-out haze, I hadn’t registered how bad off he was.

At this point I could now see that his mental and physical health had become a bit questionable. Under the circumstances it was forgivable, but I think somewhere along the line we’d forgotten that Steven was the type who needed somebody to look out for him all the time. He was like a curious kid you couldn’t leave alone in the house, whereas the rest of us were the kind of people who had a sustainable way of doing things. You could do whatever you wanted to yourself, but you had to carry your own weight; you could make your own mistakes, but you had to deal with the repercussions. That was the way it worked with us.

Until our return from the
Appetite
tour, the years leading up to this had been casual fun drug-wise, more like recreational consumption. None of it
had any real baggage or so we thought, but at this point it had taken its toll. Once I saw how dark it was getting, I pulled myself out. Steve didn’t have the wherewithal to see it as clearly or take steps to change it. He was in such denial, but it was tough for any of us to come down on him, even for Duff, who still did coke. Steven just didn’t have all his faculties and couldn’t maintain a line between his excesses and his productivity.

We did what we had to do to get him back on track, but you couldn’t tell Steven anything. He would argue and then throw it back in your face. (In fact, to this day he is still arguing about why he got kicked out of the band.) Sometimes I’d think that I’d gotten him to a place where he could understand…then he’d pull a stunt like not showing up for a rehearsal. It was impossible to reason with him—with anyone, I guess, in that state of mind. And, really, emotionally Steven wasn’t much older than a third grader, a sixth grader tops.

Now, trying to curtail Steve’s abuse was an awkward situation, to say the least: here I was, the pot calling the kettle black, me, Mr. Recently Clean, who still drank, laying down the law to Steven. I was doing nothing more than criticizing my mirror image from the other side of the mirror. I knew there was some hypocrisy involved, but I didn’t care—the difference between Steve and me, no matter what our chemical diet consisted of, was that I was aware of my limitations. Unfortunately he wasn’t, and Guns N’ Roses needed to move forward at all costs.

Like Izzy and myself, Steven had slipped and lost his footing in a pile of cocaine and heroin, but unlike us, he couldn’t regain his balance. We’d go over to his place in the afternoon to try to get him to come to rehearsal and his eyes told us all we needed to know: they’d be tiny black pin dots that were way too easy to see against the blue iris of his eyes. He’d sit there insisting that he wasn’t on smack, that he was just drinking and doing a bit of cocaine, but we knew differently. It didn’t help his cause that Duff and I always found his stash; he generally kept it either behind the toilet or behind his bed. There was no one else keeping tabs on him but us; he’d had a girlfriend but they’d split up, so he was living alone as he went off the deep end. We made a number of attempts at rehab, and we did get him to check in to Exodus more than once. Every time he did, though, we’d get a call that he’d scaled the wall or run off out some back door. Of course whenever
he did that, he’d be predictably irretrievable for the next few days. It must be some kind of record: in total, during this period, Steven escaped rehab twenty-two times. Duff and I stuck by him, but we knew that it was a matter of time before he wore down whatever goodwill the rest of the band had toward him.

Meanwhile, somehow Axl and I had become civil again and were both excited about getting to work on a new record—I guess it was fishing season again. Axl knew I’d succeeded in getting off heroin, and was committed to staying off it. After so many false starts, Axl, Duff, and I started to regain our sense of unity and Izzy wasn’t too far behind. We were all glad to see him when he showed up at Mates. He wasn’t there every day, maybe two days on one day off, but we worked around all that. Izzy is just so easy to get along with.

He jammed with Duff, Steven, and me on a few new songs, and in those instants the old energy came back and it all became very exciting and electric.

We all gathered at my house, and wrote more than half of both
Illusions
albums on acoustics, literally in two nights. We started off by going through the stuff we had from the old days that we’d never done anything with. We reintroduced “Back Off Bitch” and “Don’t Cry”; we had “The Garden,” a song that Axl and Izzy wrote with West Arkeen. “Estranged” was a song that Axl had been working out on piano for a long time—he’d been playing the same parts over and over in Chicago and afterward; it was clear that it was working itself out in his head. I had started writing guitar parts for it back in Chicago, so it came together in no time once we focused on it.

“November Rain” had been ready to go on
Appetite for Destruction,
but since we already had “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” the majority of us agreed that we didn’t need another ballad. Besides, the original demo of that song was eighteen minutes long give or take, and none of us cared to conquer it in the studio at that point. It had been a song that Axl had tinkered with for years, whenever there was a piano present; it had been around forever, and it was finally getting its due. Axl had been annoyed when Tom Zutaut suggested that we hold it until the next album, because that song meant a lot to him. He let it go, though he resented that decision for years.

We’d had the rough framework for “Civil War” kicking around since
that first tour of Australia; I wrote the instrumentals, and Axl had written and revised the lyrics for it several times, but everything fell into place when we brought it out again. “You Could Be Mine” was another track that wasn’t new: it was written during the
Appetite
sessions and I always felt that it should have been on that album, because it is more reminiscent of that time than anything else on the
Use Your Illusion
albums.

We had spun our wheels for a long time, but over that couple of nights at the Walnut House, the creativity at the base of our band chemistry came back to us: Izzy and I both brought out a few rough ideas, and before we knew it, we’d all contributed to developing them into complete songs. I had a track called “Bad Apples” that was fresh from Chicago, along with “Get in the Ring,” which Duff had written the music for. Everyone jumped on those right away, as well as a long, heavy guitar-riff mantra I wrote when living with Izzy that evolved into the song “Coma.” The song was eight minutes long; it was just a repeating pattern that got increasingly mathematical and involved in its precision as it progressed. Axl loved it but at first it was the one song that he couldn’t come up with the lyrics for. He was very proud of his gift for lyrics, so he was pretty frustrated by it…until one night months later when the words just came to him. We finished another epic number I’d begun with Izzy called “Locomotive.” And there was “Dead Horse,” a tune which Axl had done the guitar and lyrics for years earlier before we’d ever met. Duff brought in “So Fine,” complete with music and lyrics. Before long, we realized that we had more than enough songs for an album. In a few sessions, we managed to pull all of that material together quickly and relatively painlessly.

I still had no idea why it had taken us this long, but it was clear that as soon as we took a second, put the bullshit aside, and got together without animosity, we fell naturally right back into the band vibe.

The thing that’s funny about the
Illusion
records is that aside from a couple of songs there are no really dramatic arrangements on them at all, because we threw them together real quick. The ones I brought in, like “Locomotive” and “Coma,” were fully arranged from the start when Axl wrote lyrics to them. With the exception of the piano epics, the rest of the songs were really simple and didn’t need much working out. We didn’t spend afternoons debating how many times a bridge was needed in a song or
coming up with tricky chords for a breakdown. Once we got together again, we were in such a good mind frame as a band, just hanging out together for the first time in quite a while. We were all getting along really well, so it was all fun again.

Of course nothing’s perfect. The funny thing is that whenever everything was going well, Axl always made it interesting. One of the sticky spots in the re-formation was that once we got into full gear, Axl wanted to add keyboards to our sound. He wanted to hire Dizzy Reed, the keyboardist for the Wild, the generic L.A. band who had practiced next door to us in our dingy storage unit studio at Sunset and Gardner. Dizzy was a nice guy; I just didn’t see any reason why we needed a keyboard player in Guns. I was
adamantly
against it and felt that it diluted the sound of what was already a great rock-and-roll band. Piano or electric is cool, but I’m old-school and I was never into phony synthesizer sounds.

Axl, on the other hand, felt passionate about the artistic evolution the band needed to make. Our conversations weren’t too heated because we were making an effort…so sometimes we’d crack jokes about it, and he knew the rest of us didn’t want to do it. All the same, as adamantly as I was against it, he was for it.

So in the spirit of keeping things happy, I finally and reluctantly gave in and so did the other guys. It wasn’t worth going backward. Dizzy became a hired gun and we proceeded to pick on him relentlessly. He was like the Ronnie Wood of Guns N’ Roses.

That was really the only creative glitch. Writing the songs for
Illusion
s felt like the way I’d always pictured an early Stones session to be back in the day; just hanging out up in a house in the Hollywood Hills working out ideas together. It was good to have Izzy, Axl, Duff, and me in the same room again. And more or less sober. I mean, I always had my cocktail, but I wasn’t into heavy tipping-the-bottle-style drinking. It was sad, though, that Steven wasn’t really there for any of it.

As I feared, he had become the odd man out. At rehearsals, Duff and I had the tedious job of dealing with him. While Axl was aware of the situation, he wasn’t obligated to watch over Steven 24/7 like we were. And as for Izzy, he would have nothing to do with it at all. Steven was becoming a heavier burden every day.

I couldn’t deny the fact that kicking Steven out of Guns N’ Roses for drug abuse was kind of ridiculous and excessively harsh.

WHEN WE STARTED REHEARSING THE
material that’s when Steven’s house of cards came crashing down. He was utterly useless when put to the test: most of the time he’d fade away from the proper time signature somewhere in the middle of a song or just forget where he was altogether. He was just incapable of locking in with Duff or me like he used to do. It was pretty dire; something had to be done. The band finally had momentum; we’d finally written new stuff and we needed to start recording and not stagnate. We couldn’t have it be an undertaking just to get through a song at rehearsal.

That’s not to say we weren’t really patient with Steven. We tried everything we could think of, though we probably should’ve taken further action…though I’m not sure what that could have been. We’d gone so far as to bring in people like Bob Timmons, the rehab specialist who had helped clean up Mötley Crüe, and others who were experienced in dealing with extreme cases. Their efforts were futile.

We got an offer to play Farm Aid in Indiana on April 7, 1990. That gig got us fired up in the same way that those gigs with the Stones had done for us not too long before. These kind of jump starts would kick the band into gear and get it all flowing again because when the band was working, we fired on every cylinder.

We put together a few songs just for the show; we worked up a cover of the U.K. Subs’ classic “Down on the Farm” and we fine-tuned “Civil War.” I was
really
excited to get out there and play together again, but things went south quickly. The second we walked out onstage, Steven took a run up to the drum riser, which is a pretty big platform that’s hard to miss, and took flight. I assume he was planning on landing next to his kit, but his depth perception and reflexes were clearly impaired, so he ended up landing about four feet short. I watched it as if it were happening in slow motion…. It was more than embarrassing. Steven hobbled through the show, and our performance was dodgy at best, though well received by the Farm Aid crowd. We all knew why we weren’t happy: the timing was all over the place. There’s a certain groove and rhythm that Guns and Steven had, and when that went missing the band lost its confidence because we had to use guesswork. That’s not what the band was ever about—it was based on a ton of cocksureness.