It's So Easy: And Other Lies (13 page)

When we returned from Seattle, our first stop back in L.A. was Canter’s Deli. We were starving after being on the road and getting only a few solid meals. But equally urgent was the determination to conquer the hometown club circuit—and for that, we needed photos to use to try to book gigs and make flyers. Marc Canter did a photo session—and by “photo session” I mean he took a black-and-white snapshot—in a booth at the deli while people ate at the adjoining tables. That picture became the flyer for our second-ever L.A. gig with this final lineup. Then we went out into the alley behind Canter’s and Marc took the shot we’d eventually use on the back of the
Live! Like a Suicide
EP.

We began to look for gigs the second we got back. And we started rehearsing with a burning sense of purpose fueled by the knowledge that each of us was all-in. Initially we met at a rehearsal space owned by Nicky Beat, a well-known figure in the early L.A. punk scene. His facility was in an industrial wasteland out by Dodger Stadium. It was also Nicky’s house—or rather, he also lived there. And apparently Nicky had become obsessed with exercise. Every day when we walked in, Nicky was lying on his back on a weight bench, stark naked, doing sit-ups. He would stop and say, “I’m doing a thousand a day!” We’d give him a thumbs-up and walk through to the practice room.

The timing for me and Steven to meld as a rhythm section was perfect. Steven had tons of drive, and we kept at it hour upon hour, day after day—just mercilessly. At that point, I was probably a better drummer than bass player. Not that I was so talented, but at least I had played drums in working bands. By contrast, I was still working on my bass style—Guns was the first band in which I played bass in earnest. I was heavily influenced by R&B and soul music at that stage, and for Steven and me, listening and playing along with Prince, Parliament, Cameo, and Sly and the Family Stone became our gauge and music school.

Of course, I definitely fashioned myself after punk bassists, too, especially those whose work had really propelled their bands’ songs, like Barry Adamson of Magazine and Paul Simonon of the Clash. In 1979, I had seen the Clash at the Paramount Theater in Seattle and Simonon struck me as the embodiment of what was good in rock and roll. A year later, when
London Calling
came out, the cover art showed him smashing a bass on a stage. Greased-back hair, rolled-up sleeves, black engineer boots—cool incarnate. Some of the great bass players from the post-punk and noise era introduced more of a mood—almost a sense of color: Raven from Killing Joke is a good example. The actual playing is not the thing that grabs you—it’s the attitude behind the playing that makes you want to break shit. Then there was Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead, whose bass tone is still second to none. Mötley Crüe’s first EP, 1982’s
Too Fast for Love,
got a lot of play at punk-rock parties, and Nikki Sixx—the bass player—was the musical leader of the Crüe. So while many people felt guitar players like Eddie Van Halen forged the sound of the early 1980s, it was easy to see an alternative history where bass players led the way.

Another new band called Jane’s Addiction was using Nicky Beat’s space, too. They had an interesting rhythm duo made up of Eric Avery on bass and Stephen Perkins on drums. I suppose competition makes for a better “product,” and Steven Adler and I would go watch Jane’s Addiction play gigs whenever possible once we got to know them. It made us better—and I think we made them better, too.

As Steven and I crafted our sound as a rhythm section, I got to know him a lot better as a person, too, and quickly realized I couldn’t have asked for a better musical partner or a better friend. I also realized that, as with all the members of the band, what you saw with Steven was not necessarily what you got. Despite his metal-dude hair and the fact that he’d go off and see Leatherwolf shows, he liked nothing more than to listen to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.

One night when we were out together, Steven said to me, “You know, all I want in life is to make enough money one day so I can have a bag of good weed and a big ball of crack around—all the time.”

I laughed.

“We’ll never make that kind of money,” I said.

And besides,
I thought to myself,
if we ever do, you’ll look back at that dream as nothing more than a teenage joke.

The Seattle road trip marked the start of a period of almost round-the-clock interaction between us five Guns members. We would go see bands together, play acoustic guitars together, learn to play as a unit, work on songs together, and post flyers together for the increasing number of gigs we started to book. Of course, we got into a ton of mischief together, too, and drew and redrew new lines in the sand as we pushed toward the outer edge of survivable behavior. Sex was blissfully plentiful and carefree; booze and drugs remained inextricably tied to partying, not coping; and rock and roll became the redemptive raison d’être of the next two years of our lives in a way it never had been in any of my other bands and, unfortunately, in a way it would cease to be in Guns a few years later.

Our social circle soon included a group of recently transplanted New Yorkers who moved out west to—I always suspected—escape legal problems. “Red” Ed, Petey, and Del melded nicely into our lifestyle, which included twenty-four-hour alcohol consumption, scoring any available drugs (I was starting to warm up to various kinds of pills at this point), sundry debaucheries, and plenty of Motörhead, Rolling Stones, and Sly and the Family Stone.

In addition to Big Jim, I had been corresponding with Eddy since I’d left Seattle, too. It seemed he took my departure as something of a wake-up call. He’d been trying to clean up. He got himself on a methadone plan with the help of his mom. When he got out of a stint in rehab, Eddy’s mom called and asked if he could come down and spend some time with me. She thought it might be a good idea for him to come join me in Hollywood to get away from all of the dealers and junkies up in Seattle.

Eddy flew down and I picked him up at the airport. Over the next few days I guess I was too busy rehearsing to notice much beyond the work right in front of me. I didn’t pick up on the fact that Ed had gone off methadone and slipped back into a nice heroin run right there in my tiny apartment. It took about four days. Junkies can always find other junkies. And in this case it happened to be our rhythm guitar player that Ed found. I just didn’t think Eddie would put it together so fast. I couldn’t deal with him or his drug use at this point, and I told him that he would have to leave. Over the next few years, horror stories trickled down from Seattle about how strung out Eddy was. I heard that someone Ed knew well was murdered. I heard Ed was on the run. Hearing things like that made me put on my blinders even tighter and forge forward.

I had been seeing a girl named Kat for a while at that stage, and we decided to move in together. I moved out of Orchid Street to another ground-floor place (they were always the cheapest) on El Cerrito, which I shared with her. The apartment was definitely a move up because of the cross streets: instead of being between Hollywood and Franklin, this building was half a block up the hill from Franklin. Lots of strippers lived on the block, but there were no longer hookers plying their trade outside my window. And I could leave my gear at home without constantly worrying it would get stolen.

When Kat and I moved in there, I didn’t have much more than a mattress. This little troll of a guy came out as I was moving in and helped me carry the few things I had. His name was West Arkeen, and he lived in the apartment next to ours. Turned out he was one of those guys studying at the Musicians Institute around the corner from my previous apartment. West was one tough motherfucker. He was one funny motherfucker. And he quickly became valuable not only for his friendship but for his song-writing.

He wasn’t the type of guy who wanted to play in a band, but he was an incredible guitar player. He ended up writing songs with several of us. He had a hand in an unreleased song called “Sentimental Movie,” and in “Yesterdays” and “The Garden,” which eventually turned up on
Use Your Illusion.
All of those songs were written there on El Cerrito together with various members of our band. West also showed me open-E tuning, an alternative way of tuning a guitar so it plays an E-major chord when strummed with no fingers on the frets. That’s why he got a songwriting credit on “It’s So Easy”—without open-E tuning, that song wouldn’t have happened. I didn’t know alternate tunings existed.

Kat and I had heard that an eccentric old musician lived above us, but we didn’t care. We weren’t the best neighbors, either, what with Axl, Izzy, Slash, and Steven dropping by, cranking up music all the time, drinking, singing, and strumming with West. But the guy upstairs turned out to be none other than Sly Stone, whose music Steven and I jammed to almost every day, working on our groove. He started to give me cassettes of cracked-out demos he made on a four-track in his apartment. Then he began to use my place as a sort of psychic bomb shelter. It didn’t go over too well with Kat.

I’d be next door at West’s place, working on some lyrics, and I’d hear her cursing and then she’d scream down the hall.

“Duff, that motherfucker is smoking crack in our bathroom again!”

That was one of those pellucid moments in life. I watched the illusions I had about one of my idols evaporate before my eyes. Was the great Sly Stone living the good life, jamming in a home studio tucked away somewhere in his sprawling mansion? Nope, he was sneaking past my girlfriend to smoke crack in my bathroom.

Our first gig back in L.A. was on June 28, 1985, at the Stardust Ballroom, out east of Highway 101. They had a club night called Scream. It had started as a Goth night; Bauhaus and Christian Death were the most popular acts the DJ played. We were at the bottom of a four-band bill and had to go on stage at 8 p.m. The next show was on the Fourth of July at Madame Wong’s East, a restaurant in Chinatown that hosted a lot of punk-rock shows at night. Guns played second on a four-band bill that night. Only three people showed up for our set, including Kat and West.

The gig at Madame Wong’s was like many of our first shows in that we were booked alongside punk bands. Early in our career we played shows with Social Distortion, the Dickies, and Fear. I guess at first we must have been perceived as that—punk. But the cool thing about our band, and what set us apart from the beginning, was that we couldn’t be pigeonholed. Sometimes this could work against a band. If you weren’t punk enough for the punk-rock set, or metal enough for the heavy-metal crowd, you risked ending up without gigs. But with the addition of Slash and Steven, we somehow seemed to capture the best of both worlds. In the right setting now, Axl appeared both more punk and more metal than the whole L.A. scene put together.

The glam scene across town seemed like a private club with some mysterious secret handshake. We got a few gigs with rising glam bands, but it was clearly a mismatch. Rather than treat it as an opportunity to mix things up, insiders in the glam scene made sure to rub our outsider status in our faces. The Sunset Strip scene was all coke and champagne, and we were definitely from a different place. The people who came to those shows were a bit scared by us, too. We meant what we were doing; it wasn’t safe or choreographed or pretend badass in any way. We also went through a period where we played a shit-ton of gigs with Tex & the Horseheads and other cow-punk bands, but we weren’t an easy fit in that scene, either.

All the while we eyed the Troubadour in West Hollywood. Most bands started there in an opening slot on a Monday or Tuesday night. If and when you began to draw an audience, you could earn a chance to move up the bill, maybe even to a headlining slot, and you could shift to more desirable days of the week, and finally to weekend gigs. The Troubadour was always packed on weekends. If you could manage to headline there on a Friday or Saturday night, well, that was an indicator of real potential: some weekend headliners got signed to major-label deals out of the all-important “Troub.” For now we were a little too dirty to get even an opening slot on those coveted Friday and Saturday night bills. We would have to start at the bottom and get there on our own.

One of the staples in our early sets was a tune called “Move to the City,” which was eventually recorded for our
Live! Like a Suicide
EP. We always heard that song the way it was recorded—with a horn section. And sometimes, even at the smallest venues, where we could barely all fit in the backstage area, we put together a few brass instruments to come onstage for that song. I recruited my brother Matt, who played trombone, to be part of the horn section. The first time he played with us, he looked out from the backstage area and said, “Where is everybody?”

He was right. Our early gigs were practically empty. Often the few people who were there had come to see the band playing after us. People would throw cigarettes at us and spit on us. Not that it was meant as an I-hate-you thing; people were just rowdy and having fun—that was the way some of the L.A. punk venues were back then. We got used to being treated poorly by everyone—audiences, promoters, clubs, and fellow musicians.

As soon as Guns began to play regularly in L.A., we started up a phone and mailing list. We obsessively made sure people who came to shows signed up—well, actually, what we did was send stripper friends out into the audience and have
them
convince people to sign up. Obviously we had to write good songs and play well live to get a bigger audience. On that front I already knew we had the components we needed. But the mailing list really worked for us—within six months we had a thousand names with contact info for each. Other bands had mailing lists, but one of the secrets to GN’R’s success was how much time and effort we spent building and maintaining ours. We knew we had to make it on our own, and after our Seattle road trip, failure was not an option with this crew.

The established rock clubs in Hollywood at that time had devised a brutal system to ensure themselves against low attendance. By instituting “pay to play,” they shifted the financial risks of the nightclub business downstream to the musicians. A club would require an act to pre-buy, say, thirty tickets at ten dollars a pop. At that point the club didn’t care anymore—their money was already in the can. The band would have to sell those tickets on their own to recoup their money.