Slash (47 page)

AMID ALL OF THE HIGH AND LOW POINTS,
we did some amazing performances that, thinking back on it, rival all of the bands I looked up to as a kid. We had a very established chemistry and a dynamic that was priceless. We’d made history, but when it was over I was fried, and as hard as it was for me to admit it, I was glad to be home for the first time in my life. The controversy and the struggle to pull the tour off had gotten to me more than anything else: the chaos of that emotional roller coaster, with all of its instability, had worn me out. When I came home, I had to reacclimate, to say the least.

I’d sold the Walnut House and Renee and I had bought a place off of Mulholland Drive, where we tried to stop the wheels for a second, which once again was very hard for me to do. I installed a full-on reptile zoo over there; just a gazillion snakes and all kinds of stuff. I built a small studio over the garage, and when the nagging desire to work started to rear its head again, I began working on demos for songs that I’d written on the road.

I started hanging out with Matt and recording demos of that stuff just for fun, and Mike Inez from Alice in Chains and Gilby started to come around and play with us. The three of us just got into a groove of jamming and recording every night. We didn’t know what it was going to be. At some point I played it for Axl, who took a pronounced disinterest in it.

That was fine by me. I was writing for the hell of it, just doing music that was indicative of where I was at that moment. I hadn’t grasped the idea of doing a Guns record or what that might be going forward; I was just having a good time with no pressure whatsoever.

We recorded about twelve songs. I had just mixed the last of them the night of the Northridge earthquake in 1994. I’d finished at about four a.m., and I went downstairs to our bedroom. Renee was sleeping, the TV was on, and I put the DAT of the entire twelve demos for what would become
Slash’s Snakepit
on the nightstand and got into bed. The second I turned out the light, the earthquake hit. There was a TV in a cabinet that raised and lowered at the foot of the bed. At that moment it was up, and the TV was on, and as it was blasting up the bed between Renee and me it exploded, just as all the power in the house went out. The next five minutes were like Godzilla shaking the place. It took me a few moments to even realize just what was happening.

Renee’s cousin was staying with us at the time; it was his first time in L.A., and when we’d had lunch down on Melrose earlier that day, he asked me what earthquakes were like. In the confusion I thought about him. He was asleep down the hall in the office, next to a room full of venomous snakes. I got Renee out of bed, and got her to the doorway of our bedroom. She was so groggy that she opened the door into her head about three times before she thought to move out of the way. After I got her situated, I went down the hall and knocked on the door. There was a giant armoire in that room and Renee’s cousin was sleeping at the foot of it on the floor. I panicked and called out for him but there was no answer. I thought that he must be trapped under the armoire until finally he responded. Like his cousin, Greg banged his head a few times on the door getting out of there.

The house continued to shake as the three of us huddled in the doorway to our bedroom. Renee was between us, with no shirt on, and she was pretty well built. Despite what was going on around us, I still found that pretty funny. We rode out wave after wave; each of them felt like something was attacking the house. The noise was deafening: glass was breaking, furniture was being tossed around, our eight cats were howling, and the mountain-lion cub that we had in the bathroom was squealing like crazy.

We waited there for what felt like a few hours until the last aftershock died down. The damage was unbelievable. There were TVs dumped in the
middle of pinball machines, our fridge had flown across the entire kitchen, the huge floor-to-ceiling windows in the front of the house were shattered.

I was most concerned about where my three cobras, Gila monsters, and the other venomous and potentially dangerous reptiles might be. I waited until it was light enough in the house to open the door to the room where they were kept because looking for venomous snakes in the dark isn’t a good idea. Somehow none of the tanks were broken and all of the snakes were okay.

The house was completely totaled and too much of a mess for us to handle, so we drove to the Four Seasons in Marina Del Rey and made plans to fly with Greg back to Chicago. We had our mountain lion, Curtis, with us; we snuck him into the Four Seasons in his cage and locked him in our bathroom. Like most of my animals, he was an orphan that I’d adopted and was raising in my home.

We cleaned up a bit and headed to the restaurant, and were waiting for the elevator when I turned around and saw Curtis, who had opened both the bathroom door and the door to the room and was following us to dinner. I realized that we had to deal with him immediately, so I called a friend who is an animal caretaker who picked him up and took him up to canyon country, where a friend of mine had a facility that housed exotic animals.

The next day we took off to Chicago, where we hung out with Renee’s uncle Bernie, who turned out to be a very cool guy…not someone who would kill me for cheating on his niece.

When we eventually returned to L.A. Renee and I decided to sell that house right away. It had to be torn down and rebuilt, so we leased a place and in the meantime I focused on recording. With Mike Clink producing, and Matt and Mike Inez playing, I properly recorded the demos we’d done. We found ourselves a singer—Eric Dover of Jellyfish—who fit the bill well enough at the time. He and I wrote lyrics for all twelve tracks and I think it’s pretty easy to tell which songs he wrote and which ones I wrote: all of my songs are directed at one person…though no one picked up on it at the time. I used that record as an opportunity to vent a lot of shit that I needed to get off my chest.

Matt and I got into a bit of a disagreement because I had chosen Eric without getting his express approval. He was really pissed about that, so we had issues for a while. Anyway, Dover finished recording the vocals
and I brought it to Geffen and they got behind it. Everything was in place and we were ready to take the Snakepit on tour, had it not been for the fact that Matt and Mike Inez weren’t able to go.

I wasn’t going to be discouraged by that, so I enlisted Brian Tishy and James Lamenzo, who are in Zakk Wylde’s band, and rounded out the lineup with Gilby Clarke. We booked ourselves a tour across the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia. We shot two videos and released the single “Beggars and Hangers On.” And we had a lot of fun: there was no drama; we just booked gigs, showed up, got up there, and played. We did clubs and theaters and it was great; it really helped me rediscover why I love what I do. That project was the essential soul-searching that I needed, because I felt like I’d forgotten myself over the last two years. It was a shot in the arm for me to rediscover what I always knew: being in a band doesn’t have to be so taxing emotionally and psychologically…it can just be all about the playing.

DURING THE TIME THAT I RECORDED THE
Snakepit demos and put that band together and went on tour, there were a few things going on simultaneously in the Guns universe. We put together
The Spaghetti Incident,
our record of punk covers, and packaged it for release. We’d worked on a lot of those tracks here and there over the previous two years. We’d recorded “Buick McCain,” “Ain’t It Fun,” and most of the others at the Record Plant, but a few, like “Since I Don’t Have You,” were recorded on days off on the road, probably during the
Skin and Bones
tour, because they feature Dizzy on piano.

That record was released in November 1993, and the single, which wasn’t the best idea at all, was “Since I Don’t Have You,” though it was a stellar version of that song. We did a video for it, too. Around that time I was partying a lot with Gary Oldman, and the day of my shoot, I took him with me to the set. After “November Rain” and “Estranged,” I was fed up with the band’s high-concept videos, and this promised to be another one—all of them masterminded by Axl. I nearly walked off the set when I was told that I needed to stand in a pool of water and pose while playing my guitar for something like fifteen takes. Gary was the one who intervened.

“No, no,” he said. “It will be fine. Just hold on.”

He disappeared into the makeup and wardrobe room for quite a while, only to emerge in a completely authentic Victorian costume, made up to look like the Marquis de Sade. He had a few props, too, and he decided that he was going to row me in a boat, across the river Styx, as I played my solo in the pouring rain. By the time we got to shooting, he lost the costume and ended up playing this white-faced demon in tight black shorts…he almost did too good a job. After that afternoon, I’m pretty sure that the next time I heard from him, Gary was in rehab.

DUFF, AXL, MATT, GILBY, AND I GOT
together on and off to try to write new material, which didn’t prove inspiring at all. By that point, the support group I’d always enjoyed to help me deal with Axl was gone—Izzy was the last one in the band who’d been able to get through to him creatively. Between Duff and me…we just didn’t have the proper tools to communicate with him effectively.

After a few months during which everyone did their own thing and we got nothing done when we met, Axl fired Gilby without consulting anyone. His rationale was that Gilby had always been a hired hand and that he couldn’t write with him. Axl then insisted on hiring Paul Huge, this guy he knew from Indiana who, for whatever reason, also calls himself Paul Tobias. They had history: the two of them cowrote “Back Off Bitch” among other songs. I was open to the idea…until Paul showed up: he had no personality whatsoever and no particular guitar style or sound that I could identify with. He was, without a doubt, the least interesting, most bland guy holding a guitar that I’d ever met. I tried my best to work with him, but it went nowhere. It was even more awkward than it sounds because our stilted interaction took place at rehearsal with everyone else watching us.

I tried to stick with it, but I wasn’t alone in feeling like we were being force-fed some guy with no innate qualities who didn’t deserve and couldn’t handle the gig. But it was hopeless, we couldn’t talk Axl out of it at all. I did what I could: I tried several times to have a one-on-one with Huge to see if I was missing some deeper spark in his character that Axl had seen…No, it was useless; the guy was irredeemable. It was like talking to a wall,
a wall with a bad attitude. He was totally arrogant and gave off the vibe that he was Axl’s boy, that he was in, and that everyone else had to deal with it. In a word, his vibe was “I’m great, fuck you!” And my response was “Yeah? Whatever!”

Duff and I hated him, Matt hated him, and Axl was left grasping for straws, yet determined to ride it out. I didn’t know why but I wanted him to be totally sure how we felt, so one day I took him aside.

“Axl, man, listen,” I said. “I’ve tried to work with Huge and I’ve tried to see what he could bring to the band, but I just don’t get it. We have no chemistry as players and he has no chemistry with the other guys. I just don’t see how it’s going to work with this guy…. I can’t even have a beer with him.”

Axl looked annoyed. “Why do you have to have a
beer
with him?” he said.

“You know what I mean.”

“No,” he said. “I
don’
t.”

There really wasn’t any arguing with that point of view.

We rehearsed with Huge and I tried to write some new songs at my home studio with him and it only grew more tense in every way. Renee hated the fact that we were there because the negative vibe permeated the entire house. She wasn’t even in the studio trying to work: It was so uncomfortable and awkward there that Duff and I actually got into it, which had never happened in the studio ever. And that was the last straw for me: the next morning I told Doug to let everyone know that we’d have to rehearse elsewhere because there would be no more getting together at my studio.

Axl was disappointed and a bit pissed off. The next time I saw him he confronted me. “Why can’t we write at your place?” he asked. “What’s the problem?”

“I’m at my wit’s end, man,” I said. “The whole vibe there is so negative and that’s my
house
. Everything we are doing right now is just bad energy.”

That was the last time that Axl and I spoke for a while. After that, I focused on Snakepit, and I wasn’t surprised, when I sent him some demos, that he wasn’t interested in the music I was writing at all.

IF YOU’VE EVER WONDERED WHAT THE
sound of a band breaking up sounds like, listen to Guns N’ Roses’ cover of “Sympathy for the Devil,” which was recorded for the
Interview with the Vampire
soundtrack in the fall of 1994. If there is one Guns track I’d like never to hear again, it is that one.

Tom Zutaut arranged the whole thing and it was a great idea: it’s an amazing, classic song, the movie was going to be huge, theoretically, it would get us all in the same room working again, and it would give the public “product” to tide them over. We weren’t touring
The Spaghetti Incident
and we had no plans to start writing the next album, so Tom was being practical—this might be our only new release for a while. I’m amazed that Axl even agreed to do it, because by then he had stopped talking to Tom Zutaut altogether. All in all, Axl had eliminated and replaced everyone who had helped the band build from the ground up back in the day. He always had a reason: I believe in Tom’s case, Axl claimed that he caught him trying to pick up Erin at some point. But don’t quote me on that.

Anyway, I was up for the idea of doing this cover because I was very familiar with the Anne Rice books; I thought they were great, which is why I had a hard time imagining Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise playing those roles. Anyway, Axl and I went to screenings of the film separately, and completely disagreed on what we saw. I
hated it;
I thought it was crap.