It's So Easy: And Other Lies (28 page)

The fog cleared a bit as we drove from the Helsinki airport toward the band hotel.

Ugh.

So beat.

Stiff. I groan.

Where am I again?

The echo of all those kids’ voices:
Là-bas! Oui, c’est lui!

Starting to shake.

Drink, just need a drink.
A drink.
A big one.

Room service: a half gallon of vodka, please.

Uh, large bottle, extra-large bottle—
any
bottle.

And ice.

Off to a club. The Black Crowes? Why not.

Vodka.

Surely someone has lined up a coke connection here.

More vodka.

Too tired to sleep.

But then again.

Rehearsal tomorrow.

Pill.

The next night Axl walked offstage just as we started playing “Welcome to the Jungle” and disappeared for twenty-five minutes or so. That was the first show of this leg of the tour. At the fourth show, in Stockholm, Sweden, he went to a street festival and watched fireworks before turning up to the gig three hours late. When you are an alcoholic, you need your intake or you get the shakes. You time your intake. We’d never go on at nine when we were supposed to. So I’d time it for, say, eleven, but when the wait extended longer and longer, it screwed everything up.

A few nights later, Axl’s assistant called us in Oslo as we were getting ready for a sold-out show there. He said Axl was in Paris. He wouldn’t be playing the concert.

I could see right then and there that Izzy wasn’t going to last. The cadence of his walk was different now: I saw it as clearly as the lurch of a bicycle with a misshapen wheel. His face was drawn, his eyes blank, his body language exhausted.

He had made it with us, sober, touring. But he couldn’t stand pissing off the fans and torturing the crew. He had to confront that reality sober. And at the same time he had to deal with Slash, Matt, and me trying to bury our own frustrations by obliterating ourselves with drink and drugs. It was only a matter of time now.

This cannot be happening.

Head down.

Bottoms up.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I open my eyes.

Where the fuck am I?

Thirsty as a motherfucker. Vodka?

Vodka, vodka, vodka.

I sit up. Drape my legs over the edge of the bed. Elbows on knees. Head in hands. I groan.

Vodka.

Fumble for the phone.

I clear my throat and spit on the floor.

Into the phone: ice.

Where the fuck am I?

That sound, that ominous sound.

Schiesse!

Scheisse, scheisse, scheisse.

Not a good word. The change in tone.

The bad rumble of a stadium of fans becoming foes. Again.
Not again, please.

I throw my full cup onto the floor of the stage.
No!
I turn around and glare toward the wings of the stage. I hold my thumb and pointer finger far apart and thrust my hand toward my bass tech, McBob. Then I pinch them almost together and gesture again.
That much vodka and that much cranberry.

I spit on the hotel carpet again and rub my eyes. Knock at the door. Thank fuck: ice.

I pour a tumbler of vodka over the fresh ice cubes.

Back in the jet, snort some more coke. Vodka. Vodka, vodka, vodka.

No, Izzy, man. No, it’s not going down like this. But no.

The whole room is vibrating. With anger. From within and, more ominously, from without.

Scheisse, scheisse, scheisse!

Mannheim, Germany. Last night. Maybe several nights ago now. Nights not slept.

They’re here for us. They hate us. They’re here for us. I can’t stop shaking. Give me another drink. I hold my thumb and pointer finger far apart and thrust my hand toward the caterer. Then I pinch them almost together and gesture again.
That much vodka and that much cranberry.

Fuck, not again, Axl. There’s no going back from this.

I see the line. I’m standing with my toes right on it. Time for a line. Another sort of line. Sober up. I disappear behind a stack of amps.

Flying like an aeroplane. Feeling like a space brain.

Get me to my airplane.

Get me the fuck out of here. Wembley? Vodka. Only an hour and a half gone by since the openers. On we go. I can stand. I can see.

Izzy, man, this was
your
band. This was
our
band.
Our gang.
This is a fucking war of attrition.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

When Axl left the stage in Mannheim, Germany, another riot looked inevitable. We had gone on really late again. The venue was huge, an outdoor stadium packed with twice as many people as even the biggest of the basketball arenas we had played in the United States up to this point.

Matt Sorum tried a novel approach when Axl left; maybe to a “new” guy it was the obvious thing to do. He went to find Axl and confront him. He was turned away by Axl’s security detail.

The promoters—not the band members, not the managers, not the entourage—saved the day. Their threat that Axl would be arrested if a riot occurred might not have worked on its own. But they had also locked us into the venue.

Axl returned and finished the show. Izzy disappeared as soon as the houselights came up. We still had one final show left on that leg of the tour, at Wembley Stadium on the last day of August 1991. I knew now that Izzy was definitely going to quit, but nobody knew for sure when he would actually leave us.

Izzy didn’t walk away and force the cancellation of the Wembley show. He stayed and played one last gig to draw the curtains on this leg of the tour—the last show before the release of the albums we were ostensibly touring.

Axl arrived on time.

We played spectacularly well, as fierce and inspired and
together
as ever before. If not for the additional people and gear onstage, it could have been mistaken for one of our club shows.

When the show was over, we limped back to L.A. and had about three months off before we had to set out on the next leg. My brother had since moved out to a life and family of his own and nobody from the band wanted to see the other members. I was alone.

I needed a tumbler of vodka and two lines of coke just to get off the mattress when I woke up. Alcohol and drugs I now bought in bulk. I wanted to have a sure supply around all the time. I was alone in my house and had no one and nothing to stop me from ingesting bad stuff whenever I wished. Panic attacks had been coming daily at this point, and they didn’t stop once I arrived home. I always took a bottle of vodka with me if I was going anywhere outside of my comfort zone, which is to say anywhere outside a ten-block radius of my house.

In late September,
Use Your Illusion I
and
II
finally came out and went to one and two on the album charts. In October, ousted drummer Steven Adler initiated a lawsuit against the band. In November, Izzy officially quit.

Ever since I was very young, I would just shut down sometimes. As if I were in a trance, sitting silently. Despite growing up in a huge and social family, I never knew how to talk things through with others very well. I probably thought it was a sign of weakness, a transgression against a false concept of manliness I held. Manliness was something I obsessed over after my dad took off. Now I was trying to deal with so many things without talking to anyone about any of it. I was also letting what I did define who I was as a person.
I am the punk-rock torch carrier! I wear the Sid Vicious chain! I am in the biggest, baddest band in the world! I am a party animal celebrating all my good fortune!

One morning, I found myself in my walk-in closet with a loaded shotgun. I had the barrel in my mouth and my right thumb on the trigger.

As I sat in my darkened closet with the twelve-gauge in my mouth, I thought about my waterskiing accident and the glimpse I’d had of the other side—the warm embrace, the blissful calm. How peaceful death seemed, a simple and beautiful way out.
Take me down. Take me home. Paradise …

My surroundings came flooding back in—the closet, the house, the hilltop, the buildings and beings sprawling out in every direction. And a thousand miles away on the distant horizon, my mom. I pulled the gun out of my mouth.

What has happened to my life?

CHAPTER THIRTY

We had only a few weeks to find a rhythm guitar player for the next leg of the tour, which started the first week of December 1991. We hired Kill For Thrills guitarist Gilby Clarke to replace Izzy. Billy Nasty took good care of my dog, Chloe, when I was away, but she still looked sad when I packed my bags to head out on the next leg.

After two shows in Massachusetts, we played three nights at Madison Square Garden. The first night, Axl showed up late. I hated listening to the crowd chanting “bullshit” after the first hour’s delay. We had three more hours of that. I drank more and more to deaden the angry sounds. I was fucking wasted.

By this point, the security guys were supposed to keep me from getting cocaine. They didn’t care about my drinking, it was the drugs they worried about. Actually, the problem wasn’t really the drugs, but procuring them: management wanted these security agents to keep me from getting arrested on some dumb-ass attempted drug score, as GN’R was their golden goose and they needed to keep us on the road. Truck, the security agent assigned to me, was charged with keeping things around me to a dull roar. Axl’s guy, Earl, also spent most of his efforts on me, too, as Axl wasn’t making drug runs. These guys were very good at their jobs, but the drug addict in me just got craftier and wilier as I was backed into a corner.

Gilby was under less scrutiny—and he was the new guy. I pulled him aside right before we finally went on at Madison Square Garden.

“You have to find me some cocaine.”

Gilby didn’t even do coke. This was typical of the bullshit I was putting people through. But he scored some for me.

I stayed in the pocket onstage. As long as my performances didn’t suffer, I knew nobody would hassle me too much.

These days tours are run with an iron fist. The smallest possible crew, no private plane; the idea is to come out with as much profit as possible. The philosophy was completely different back then. The idea was to promote record sales and make money from the band’s cut of those sales. By the end of the various legs of the
Use Your Illusion
tour, about seven million fans had come to see us in concert. But even though we were playing stadiums, we weren’t making any money.

The tour staff sometimes approached one hundred people. Not only were we carrying backup girl singers, a horn section, and an extra keyboard player, but also chiropractors, masseuses, a singing coach, and a tattoo artist. Each of us had bodyguards and drivers. Money—and this was band money, not individual money—poured into nightly after-show theme parties. There were gambling nights and toga parties; in Indianapolis the theme was car racing. The party staff was part of the paid entourage, too. The parties would go into the early morning hours. The guys in the band didn’t actually go to many of the parties. And neither did much of the crew. But the money was spent whether or not any of us showed up.