It's So Easy: And Other Lies (18 page)

The first candidate came in and said Steven needed more rack toms and china cymbals. We had worked so hard to get Steven down to a small drum kit and get that groove going. Next up was Paul Stanley of KISS, who wanted to produce our record, too. He came out to see us play at Raji’s, which was a grubby little place where a lot of underground bands played. We were surprised he showed up at such a dive, and we agreed to meet with him as a result. When he arrived at our rehearsal space to talk about his vision, he said he wanted to add double kick drums. Steven loved KISS, absolutely
loved
them, and for a member of KISS to suggest he revert to his teenage drum setup was something beyond his wildest dreams. “Yeah, yeah, great idea!” Izzy and I looked at each other, though, and we both had the same thought:
This isn’t going to work.
We didn’t tell Paul to his face that we didn’t want him to produce us, but it was over from the word
go
(or rather, the word
double
).

For a time we thought we could get Mutt Lange, the producer behind AC/DC’s
Back in Black.
But Mutt wanted $400,000 to walk into the room, plus a cut of the future earnings of the record. We had to pay for the studio and the producer out of our $250,000 advance, and we had already taken out $75,000. We weren’t going to borrow money to pay for a producer.

With these pressures mounting and the band still recovering from the feuds over various aspects of the signing process, Geffen asked us to stop playing live. By then we were doing gigs nearly every week, and sometimes more often than that. Those regular appearances were a chance to—depending on your mental state—channel everything into your performance or block everything out. Just as important, the transcendent experience of playing our songs for an audience was a way to regularly refresh the brotherly bonds of rock and roll that held us together. Now, just when we needed that most, Geffen pulled the rug out from under us. The rationale? We had to build
mystique
by dropping out of sight, putting a premium on our performances.

To say we didn’t see eye to eye with this decision is an understatement. We acquiesced at first, though we had some gigs already booked that we honored. Soon, though, we had to figure out ways to play—we just functioned best when we could get onstage regularly. And we got bored. So we began to play a bunch of shows as the Fargin Bastydges to get around the label’s injunction. We took the name from a scene in the movie
Johnny Dangerously.
It was an alias, not an alter ego: the set list and everything else was exactly the same as our normal Guns shows; it just allowed us to avoid fighting with Geffen. One of the shows we played was at Gazzarri’s, a venerable Hollywood dive we had always sort of wanted to play—just to say we had—but not the sort of place a band signed to a major label was supposed to play. But that was us. The industry had one set of priorities. We had our own.

We picked up another Fender’s gig at the end of July, playing—as Guns N’ Roses, that is—with Lords of the New Church, a punk supergroup featuring Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys and Brian James of the Damned. In hindsight, we might have seen the seeds of later trouble being sown at this show: Axl turned up so late we had to start without him.

We played at the Whisky again on August 23, a month after a “Farewell to Hollywood” show at the Troubadour. Still, it’s hard to imagine the label people were too upset, because we debuted two new songs in concert that night, “Sweet Child o’ Mine” and “Mr. Brownstone.”

We continued to take high-profile opening slots for national tours—I suppose Geffen saw those gigs as different from shows in a club milieu, as we were getting in front of new audiences. We played with Cheap Trick, Ted Nugent, and Alice Cooper. The night of the Alice Cooper gig, Axl showed up late again and then was unable to get into the venue. Izzy and I sang. At the time it was almost funny—though we were definitely pissed, too, and we absolutely trashed the dressing room. We traded some words with Axl when we found him in the parking lot afterward, but at the end of the day the situation lacked much in the way of consequences. We did the show, we got paid, and the crowd was there to see Alice anyway. That was that. For now.

Probably the most memorable show of this sort took place on Halloween, 1986. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were just starting their rise as a national act, and the Dickies were headlining a show at Ackerman Hall at UCLA, and we opened. We still had yet to enter the studio. We were feuding with Geffen about whether we had enough songs to warrant recording, and we still hadn’t found a producer we liked. We reached a compromise with the label to put out a limited edition “bootleg” EP,
Live! Like a Suicide,
and we had finished it just before this show. That night we felt like we were finally making some forward motion.

The Dickies were still a big draw then and, aside from Social Distortion, pretty much the last band standing from the original wave of L.A. punk rock. For me, the cool thing about this show was that Black Flag’s Henry Rollins watched our entire set from the wings of the stage and came up to us afterward and told us how much he liked our band. I considered him the most credible guy in rock, and he had a reputation as a guy who didn’t mince words. He definitely wouldn’t fawn over a band just for the sake of doing so. And we got the thumbs-up.
Kick ass!

It turned out he had seen us once before. The year before, someone in Black Flag’s crew had dragged him to some Hollywood club to see a couple glam bands. Apparently we had opened the show. Rollins described the night in his journal, published years later as
Art to Choke Hearts:
“The opening band was called Guns and Roses and they blew the headliners off so hard it was pathetic.”

And then we met Mike Clink. He had produced a couple of Triumph records. I hated Triumph. But Clink loved GN’R and had seen us live a few times. He said he would come down and record us for nothing and convince us with his recording. When we got together, he said a cool thing about how the microphone picks up the sound and it goes through a cord and onto a tape—it was his way of saying he didn’t want to change us, couched in producer-philosophy speak. He did a playback and said, “This is how I think your record should sound.” And it was basically us live. And I immediately thought,
That’s exactly right.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

With my favorite punk bands, the bass was the loudest thing and led the way. And now as Mike Clink started to produce the songs that would make up
Appetite,
the bass was the loudest, roundest thing on the recordings. It had a lot of space. And it wasn’t on the outside or underneath the way it was on a lot of records back then—Clink had it right in the middle.

We were pretty disciplined about the sessions, but outside the recording studio it was business as usual in our world—partying, fighting, getting into scraps with the police. Half the band slept at the studio sporadically because they still didn’t have beds anywhere else, though I was actually moving in the opposite direction on the personal front. After a period without an exclusive relationship, I started to see a girl named Mandy. She was in a band called the Lame Flames. By spring 1987, as Guns was finishing the record, Mandy and I moved in together. Our apartment became an oasis of stability not just for me and Mandy, but for people around me—like Todd Crew. His band, Jetboy, had just signed a major-label deal. Whenever people needed to find Todd—his band, their management, his family—they called my number. Now that I had an actual phone instead of having to use a pay phone, I was also able to call home a lot more. I talked to my mom frequently, excited to tell her about Mandy and the foundation I seemed to be building with her.
For the first time since Stacy, I feel as if I am in a relationship with long-term potential, Mom.
I talked to Big Jim a lot more, too. He had continued to write me, always managing to track down my latest address as I lived like a nomad during those two years since the trip up to Seattle for GN’R’s ill-fated shake-out tour. Jim confided in me during some of those long conversations that he was thinking of moving down to L.A. I was psyched at the prospect of having another solid friend around.

Once the
Appetite
sessions were over, we needed another outlet as we waited for all the peripheral stuff to get done—the record wouldn’t be released until July. Axl, Izzy, and Slash went to New York to sit in on the mixing process. I started playing rhythm guitar in a side band called Drunk Fux, just screwing around with various friends.

One afternoon Todd was sitting in my apartment when my phone rang. Jetboy’s manager was on the line. I handed the phone to Todd. The conversation didn’t last long. Todd looked devastated as he hung up.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“They just kicked me out.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m no longer the bass player in Jetboy. They fired me.”

“What? That’s all he said?”

“He said they decided I drink too much and hang out with the Guns N’ Roses guys too much.”

Todd was absolutely crestfallen. The payoff for several years of hard work had suddenly been jerked away from him at the last minute.

At the time I was royally pissed off at Jetboy. In essence, they fired Todd for being too fucked up. It ruined the camaraderie we had with that band. Unfortunately we would face a similarly heartbreaking situation within our own band in a few short years.

For the short term, Todd joined Drunk Fux, which now consisted of him on bass, me on rhythm guitar, Steven Adler on drums, Del singing, and West Arkeen on lead guitar.

Then I realized I hadn’t heard from Jim in quite a few days. I couldn’t seem to reach him, so I started calling a few other Seattle people to see what the story was. But then my phone rang. It was Jim’s girlfriend. She was crying. Jim had died of a heroin overdose. At first I didn’t understand. He wrote me letters. He sent me pictures. He was coming down to L.A. Now he was dead. Oh, god. My heart sank. It felt as if something inside me had been ripped out.

Why didn’t you move to L.A. before this happened, Jim?

I flew home for Jim’s funeral in Seattle. All my old feelings about heroin came flooding back: Joe Toutonghi, who had urged me to get out of town three years prior, spoke at Jim’s funeral—and as he eulogized yet another overdose victim, Joe himself was clearly nodding out. Seeing my old friend and roommate Eddy again at the funeral, I was really scared he might be next. It was clear he was what people called a “to die” junkie. The kind who just couldn’t stop no matter what—only death would break the habit of a “to die” junkie.

But there was no time to hunker down and reflect on the macabre events. Guns N’ Roses was on our way to London. The gig came about because of our
Live! Like a Suicide
EP, released six months before, in December 1986. The EP was a fast and furious collection of songs, two originals and two covers. At the time we were relieved to have something—anything—out on vinyl. (By the way, the crowd noise on that EP is from recordings of a 1970s rock festival called the Texxas Jam—we thought it would be funny to put a
huge
stadium crowd in the background at a time when we were lucky to be playing to a few hundred.) But the EP didn’t make a stir anywhere in the world. Except, we soon found out, in Britain. Unbeknownst to us, a cult following was building over there and was champing at the bit for any news about the band. When
Kerrang!
magazine sent a photographer over to Los Angeles to shoot us for a cover article in early 1987, we had been completely baffled.
Kerrang!
was the biggest rock magazine in the UK. We had received some local press coverage in L.A. at this point, but
Kerrang!
? We were half convinced somebody was playing a prank on us, but the photographer showed up and the article ran. Then a London concert promoter had contacted us and asked us to play the famous Marquee club in June, before the release of
Appetite.
Up to then, the only place I had been outside of the United States was Vancouver, Canada, to play punk-rock shows with my various Seattle bands when I was a teenager. So this was big news to me. Huge. Magnificent.

Kids in the UK would sort of latch onto one band and make a big deal out of it. In the mid-1980s, that band was Hanoi Rocks, an amazing group of Finns who had relocated to England and were writing some of the best and dirtiest rock on the planet. When Hanoi came to tour America in 1984, their drummer died in a car crash while making a booze run with Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe during a few days off in L.A. that December. I had just moved to Hollywood that fall, and Slash and I had tickets to the Hanoi Rocks gig that never happened because of the car accident. It was an incredibly sad moment in rock and roll, and Hanoi Rocks never recovered—they broke up soon after.

Flash-forward to our gig in the UK in June 1987. After the first Marquee gig sold out in record time, they added a second date. That sold out just as fast, so they added a third night. By the time we arrived in London, we were minor celebrities. We discovered we had become the “it” band the youth of England had been looking for to fill the void left by Hanoi Rocks. We stayed in a rent-by-the-week apartment because it was much cheaper than a hotel, and at times people would stop us on the street. They actually knew who we were! It was a weird sensation, even on such a small scale.