It's So Easy: And Other Lies (17 page)

After a while we asked to go to the same place as often as possible, a place up on Sunset at the edge of Beverly Hills called Hamburger Hamlet. I never had a hamburger there, but they had a full bar.

Despite all these meetings, I was nervous when it came time to finalize a deal. I deemed myself more experienced than the other guys, having been through this once before, albeit with a tiny indie label. But I was out of my league. I didn’t fully understand the business. In fact, I didn’t really understand it at all. I wasn’t even going to pretend that I could handle a deal like this.

We still didn’t have a proper manager. Fortunately we hired a lawyer. He explained things to us. Preparing to enter into a contract brought changes in our intra-band relationships: we had to create a legal framework for what had been just a one-for-all-and-all-for-one gang. I didn’t even know we needed a partnership agreement. Why would we? Hey, we’re bros. But our lawyer got us protected within the band, and I will always be thankful for that. He did a great job lassoing in a bunch of guys and making sure we understood the implications of various aspects of the contracts among the band members and between the band and the label.

Splitting future publishing royalties caused a real clash. In the old days, with Rodgers and Hammerstein and other writing teams of the American songbook tradition, one person did music and one did lyrics. But songwriting didn’t work that way for most bands by the 1980s—and certainly not for our band. Guns wasn’t one of those bands where one person wrote all the songs. Or even a band where two people collaborated on the songs, like the Stones. We had done everything together—and in so many different ways. We found ourselves arguing about things we’d never had to deal with before: No,
I
wrote that part; no,
I
wrote that part. Everyone had his own version of how things had gone down. It got heated for about a week as we tried to hash it all out. Since it was so difficult to say who had done what with our songs, we finally agreed to split everything equally across the board. Our lawyer enshrined it in writing—and thank God for that.

After all the liquid lunches, Chrysalis offered the biggest advance, something like $400,000. We weren’t going to go with Chrysalis—like most of the record companies, they wanted to soften us up, both musically and imagewise. Geffen’s offer was much smaller, $250,000. But Tom Zutaut, the A&R guy pursuing us on Geffen’s behalf, was saying all the right things about how we should be produced. He got it.

Tom said we would have absolute artistic freedom at Geffen, and that was the clincher for us—but only after it was in writing. Our lawyer took care of that, too. Our songs were by far the most important thing to us—worth far more than the extra money offered by labels not willing to give us free rein. No one was going to tell us how to make our record.

Every step of the way I was thinking,
Nobody can ever take this away from us—we will have been signed by a major label.
Getting a major-label deal was considered massive, life changing.

There was no big fanfare when we finally signed a six-record deal on March 26, 1986. We never even looked at one another and said anything like, “Holy fuck!” We took $75,000 of the advance up front, divided it by five ($15,000 for each of us), and took half of each of our shares ($7,500) immediately. We had our new accountants sock the other half away to pay for personal expenses as we recorded our debut album. The balance of the advance, $175,000, would be administered by the accountants to cover legitimate band costs and the making of the album.

While the ink was still wet on the contract with Geffen, we rented a cheap rehearsal space out in Glendale, near the Burbank line. We had to get out of Gardner for various reasons, but we were careful not to go to SIR in Hollywood or some similarly expensive place. Our new space was in an old run-down shopping center—now long gone—called the Golden Mall. There was a stage. We had to move our gear out every day. It wasn’t ours twenty-four hours a day with a lock or anything—we didn’t have that kind of money. Our room at the Golden Mall is where the checks were delivered to us. Slash and I took our checks to a bank out in Glendale. We didn’t open accounts; we went in and asked to cash the checks. That raised alarms, I guess. They had to call a bunch of people, including the accountants at Geffen. It didn’t help that Slash’s check was made out to “Stash.”

Axl didn’t get a bank account, either. Like Slash, he had yet to change his name officially and refused to take out an account in any name other than Axl. So all of us ended up keeping our money in our boots or stashed under our mattresses. Not that the money lasted long. I had gone into Guitar Center by our Gardner space so many times to scope out the perfect setup for myself that I’m sure the sales guys there were totally shocked when I suddenly walked in one day and bought all of the stuff I had just looked at so many times before—with cash! I’m sure they had long since put me in the never-going-to-buy-a-damn-thing category. I bought the Fender Jazz Special and Gallien-Krueger 800RB that have helped mold my bass sound to this day. I also got my first tattoos: two guns and a rose on my left shoulder, a dagger that says guns n’ roses, and a dragon—all three of them within a few weeks. I bought some cowboy boots and a couple pairs of pants. We all bought new clothes, which had been a rare luxury up to then.

I also bought a steel chain and a chunky little padlock and started to wear that around my neck. It was just like the one worn by Sid Vicious, the bass player in the Sex Pistols. I was determined to carry that torch—the punk-rock torch—regardless of where this major-label deal took us. Call it punk-rock guilt.

At the time we received our advance, I was crashing on and off with a girl in Hollywood. We all had a few girls with whom we could stay if we needed a break from the loft at the rehearsal space on Gardner—some were friends with benefits, some were just friends. Now, however, I put myself on a small stipend that could pay my rent—or half-rent, I should say—for about six months. Another friend of mine was looking to move to Hollywood from her parents’ house somewhere down in Orange County. She and I decided we could share a one-bedroom apartment we found on Crescent Heights just below Sunset. She would get the bedroom, and I would get the floor of the dining room, which I cordoned off with a sheet to create my little den of darkness. The finishing touch on my lush new lifestyle was to fill the refrigerator. I could afford to eat. This was major-label success!

Suddenly I didn’t need to keep my job anymore, either. I had $7,500 in an envelope in my boot. We were going to be entering a recording studio to make an album. We were going to tour. As at every job, the guys at this place knew I was a musician, and knew that was my thing. They had even come to a few shows—tracksuits and all—to see what it was all about. The problem was, I knew a lot of things about a business that wasn’t exactly run by the books. How do you quit a job like that? Was there a debriefing process for leaving a mob job? This eventuality had never crossed my mind in the year I worked there.

I went into the office of one of the bosses after we signed.

“We just signed our deal this morning and I don’t have to work anymore.”

His expression didn’t change for a second. He just sat there, looking blankly at me. I began to sweat. Was I going to have to give him a cut of the money in my boot?

Then his face slowly lightened, he took an unhurried breath, and he said, “You do good, Mikey, you do good.”

He wanted to know that the label wasn’t ripping us off. I let out a silent sigh of relief.

We played a celebratory gig at the Roxy, or rather two—an early show and a late show—on March 28, 1986. To be honest, the shows had been booked prior to our signing with Geffen. They were supposed to be label showcases. Events overtook our plan, however, so we took out full-page ads in the local music papers to announce the gigs:
Geffen recording artists Guns N’ Roses, live at the Roxy.
Everyone in Hollywood already knew, of course—we were throwing money around, buying rounds of drinks for friends.

We all had fresh tattoos at the Roxy shows, and people wanted to touch them. We felt like we ran the city that night. My old bosses even came. They stood out like sore thumbs in a room packed with Hollywood street trash like us, helping us celebrate our collective takeover. They sent a bottle of champagne to us backstage. I was touched by the gesture, and we thanked them during our first set.

The icing on the cake came a week later, when Guns rechristened the Whisky a Go Go on April 5; the legendary Sunset Strip venue was being converted back into a club after serving as a bank for a few years. The poster asked,
WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU SAW A REAL ROCK N’ ROLL BAND AT THE WHISKY A GO GO
? And, since it was assumed we’d be making a record soon and then be off to tour the world—or, as eventually was the case, one-horse towns in the Canadian rust belt—below that was written:
THIS COULD BE YOUR LAST CHANCE
.

Reopening the Whisky was sweet. It meant that somehow, despite the fact that nobody gave us the time of day on the Strip during the year it took us to find an audience for our idiosyncratic sound and style, we now embodied L.A. rock and roll to the extent that this legendary venue wanted to associate itself with us to restake its claim on the city’s musical landscape.

We had moved the dial at the club level. Now, could we do the same on record, on radio, on MTV? Fat chance.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

With a legal framework overlaying our brotherhood, a sudden expansion of free time, and wallets (or rather, boots) flush with cash, it was clear things were changing. One change I didn’t see coming: heroin use in the band started to expand. Certain guys you just don’t peg as the type to fall for the romantic image of the rock-and-roll junkie. Slash and I were really big drinkers—alcohol addicts, if you will. Of course, if you are easily addicted to one thing, then chances are pretty good you’ll be easily addicted to others. Bingo. Though he’d dabbled a bit in the past, after we signed our deal and were all relatively flush with dough, Slash got himself strung out. And then so did Steven Adler. He was smoking crack, too. I think Stevie was willing to try anything that might dull the memories of his nightmarish childhood. Poor fucker.

I knew I was an alcoholic and assumed I would address that problem at some unspecified point in the future. These were only shadowy thoughts, though, and I really had no plan as to how I would one day tackle it. Still, I was the most responsible guy in the band during this period. I drank every day, but I still drank mostly beer. I had also found this killer belt—a boxing championship belt decorated with Budweiser bottle caps. Like I was the heavyweight champion of fucking beer. Since it was Bud, Axl started introducing me at shows as Duff “King of Beers” McKagan.

Axl continued to drop out of sight for days on end as a result of his erratic moods. Sometimes it was as if he was on speed, bouncing off the walls; then he would sleep for three days. When he was around, he was a bundle of energy: we’re going to do this and that, and, oh, yeah, let’s write some lyrics. And we were like, yeah, we’re going to do those things but we can’t do them all at the same time, Axl. I was always aware of what a fundamentally different type of person he was from me—
what a spectacle,
I thought,
what a figure
—but we continued to get along great, and I loved his sense of conviction about the band.

As 1986 wore on, Slash, Steven, and Izzy were in a constant cycle of cleaning up and going back out on the dope. It was hard to watch sometimes, but we were young and they held it together for the most part for the sake of the band—nothing was more important to any of us.

Getting signed didn’t earn us entry into some special fraternity of Hollywood elite or anything like that, though we did meet Nikki Sixx one night. Tom Zutaut, the guy who signed us to Geffen, had signed Mötley Crüe while at his previous job at Elektra. We went to Nikki’s house and drank. At first we were like,
Whoa, it must be amazing to make enough money from music to have a house!
Then we got really fucked up.

For us to start making
any
money, much less enough to buy a house, we needed to make an album. To make an album, we needed a producer. We wanted somebody who would capture us in the studio in a way that was true to our live ferocity. We made a mixtape for Tom to try to express how we wanted the recordings to sound: Motörhead, the Saints, Fear, Bon Scott–era AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols. Copies of the tape ended up circulating through Geffen’s offices, but our search for the right person to produce us went nowhere.

Part of the problem was that people didn’t really know where to put us—we didn’t fit comfortably into the sort of categories industry people dealt in. The knee jerk inclination was to shoehorn us in with Whitesnake, W.A.S.P., Autograph, Poison: heshers and poodles. We didn’t like the sound of those kinds of records. Most bands being signed at the time—Warrant, White Lion, BulletBoys, all that shit—fit the bill. We were different. Poison wasn’t playing alongside punk bands, that’s for sure. And we didn’t hang out with the types of people who formed bands like BulletBoys. (Like us, Jane’s Addiction didn’t fit in, but
Nothing’s
Shocking
wouldn’t be released until almost two years later.) The guy who signed us really believed in us and tried to help us find the right producer, but we kept running up against the same attitude. Everyone wanted to take the edge off our music or to transform it into something they already understood.