It's So Easy: And Other Lies (43 page)

I went back to L.A. every once in a while and one time in early 2002 I met Matt Sorum for lunch at Swinger’s in Hollywood. We were joined that day by Randy Castillo, a drummer friend of Matt’s. Of course, I knew who Randy was—he had played with Ozzy for years—and I had probably met him a few times in my using days. But it had become clear to me that meeting people sober was meeting them anew. Randy had throat cancer, though he told me and Matt that he’d gotten through the worst of it and was on the mend. A few months after that lunch, however, Randy’s cancer returned and he died.

Randy had neither health insurance nor sufficient spare funds to cover everything out of pocket when this tragedy hit. After his death, the costs of his treatment trickled down to his parents and other family members. I guess they must have cosigned for a loan or a hospital stay, or both. Matt decided to put together a fund-raiser and memorial concert for Randy at the Key Club on Sunset Strip. His first calls were to me and Slash. We both agreed to do the gig, and the event—scheduled for the last Monday in April 2002—sold out in something like ten minutes. We were all rather surprised, but obviously happy to be able to help Randy’s family in some small way.

Classes were still in session for me, so I flew in the weekend before the Monday-night gig. I had a statistics exam on the Tuesday after the show. Keith Nelson and Josh Todd from Buckcherry agreed to fill in on rhythm guitar and vocals. This was looking like a pretty kick-ass band.
All right!
At rehearsal the day before the gig, Slash and Matt and I finally played our first notes together in almost nine years. It was like a 747 jet taking off in that room. Powerful yet familiar, comfortable, and friendly. There were no assumptions or ulterior motives. We were doing this for a friend’s family in need. End of story.

Backstage at the Key Club, I had my business statistics textbook under my arm and tried to cram while the other acts played. The crowd lost it when we came out and started our set with “It’s So Easy.” By the end, Steven Tyler from Aerosmith got swept up in the excitement and hopped onstage with us to close out the benefit singing “Mama Kin” and “Paradise City.” It was a great night of rock and roll that has stayed with me ever since. I let myself forget for a little while the early-morning flight and the exam awaiting me back in Seattle. That was tomorrow, and tonight we had just conquered. Everyone who was there said the same thing, and I believe it to be true: Randy Castillo was in the room smiling down on us that night.

My flight departed on time and I got through the exam, but now Slash, Matt, and I faced a bona fide dilemma. It felt too good together not to continue after that gig. We didn’t have any new material yet, and had only the foggiest of ideas about what we might do, but the sheer power of us playing together was unmistakable and we knew that if we worked hard, the rest would somehow come. Same as it ever was, really.

Any lingering reluctance to continue had to do with a funny thing that happens after you’ve been in a popular band like GN’R—the personal stakes are higher for anything you do together with those same guys. It went unspoken, but I’m sure there was a tinge of fear about forming a band without Axl and having it fail. Then we might be dismissed as having been just the sidemen of a lead singer—sidemen who couldn’t hack it on their own. Rumors that we were going to start a band without Axl had already circulated in 1996. We heard murmurs of “What do they think they’re doing, trying to replace Axl?” One thing will always be certain, Axl is irreplaceable. Even now, in 2002, we figured we’d get slammed as GN’R–without–Axl. The difference now was that I didn’t care. I’d been through way too much to let a few threads on Internet chat sites dictate the course of my life.

The search for a singer was on.

At that point, my band Loaded had been going for about two years and our latest lead guitar player was Dave Kushner. Not only had Dave played in the band Wasted Youth, but he and Slash had gone to high school together. Small world. I suggested to Slash and Matt that Dave might be a good fit as second guitar in our new band. He came down to rehearsal one day and got the gig. Just like that. Izzy was coming around a lot, too. I think he thought we could use a helping hand; plus he got to hang out with his old buddies. Whatever his motivation, Izzy gave us a nice spark from the get-go. I had watched and learned from Izzy from the moment we met in L.A. years prior—he was the quiet tough guy in a town that could have eaten me alive, and I learned to survive with his help. Izzy and I rarely ruminated about the past, but now that I was sober, I watched and learned from him again—now with a completely different perspective on survival. I found he was still a guy I looked up to. My sober friend. My old friend. It was something of a miracle that he had made it out of the darkness during all that madness, and he had become a guy who could see the humor in it all.

Dave Kushner was understandably a bit wary that Izzy was going to steal his gig, but I knew Izzy was just coming around to play some music and that a long-term band project complete with a lead singer was never again going to work for him. He already had a nice solo career that he could start and stop as he pleased and that suited him just fine, thanks. I totally got it. After the experience of Guns N’ Roses, the prospect of doing something with so many moving parts could be daunting. And sure enough, once we started looking in earnest for a front man, Izzy just kind of faded from the scene, though ever since he’s remained a close and treasured friend.

Ah, yes. This was going to be easy, right? We could find a singer at the drop of a hat. Just put out an ad and have singers send tapes to a PO box. Shouldn’t take more than a couple months. Wrong. Oh, so wrong. As the months passed, we received hundreds of tapes and CDs from all over the world. We brought a few people in to audition live and a few were pretty interesting, but nobody quite fit.

We were writing a ton of songs, however, and that kept us going. We were also still hashing out our sound. Of course, we weren’t seeking to completely reinvent ourselves as current or hip. But for my part, I hadn’t been living in a musical vacuum. Playing with a bunch of different artists up in Seattle and forming Loaded had kept me in a good place as far as songwriting and seeing new bands. In fact, I seemed to be finding my way again as a player and songwriter, and it felt really, really good to continue doing so together with my old bandmates. We all brought good stuff to the table, and it showed.

I had known Scott Weiland for a while—Susan had introduced me to him and his wife, Mary, who was a friend of hers. Scott and Mary had kids, too, and our families had gotten together for dinner on a few occasions. Scott was having problems with his band, Stone Temple Pilots, and he had been through trouble with addiction—on those occasions when our families met up, we had a lot in common to talk about. But I didn’t consider him for the new band because he had a band.

As 2002 turned into 2003 and we neared the one-thousandth demo tape of our search for a singer, a state of desperation nearly took hold. The project had gone from something none of us had even thought about to something we all really wanted to continue. But shit, were we ever going to find a damn singer?

Then one day I got a call from one of our managers.

“I just heard that Stone Temple Pilots broke up,” he said. “You should call Scott.”

I was reluctant at first because Scott and I were friends in a completely different context and I wasn’t sure I wanted to cross that bridge. Besides, he still went through periods of pretty serious drug use and I hadn’t spent big chunks of time with anyone in full-habit mode for about eight years. Still, I did have a lot of sober time under my belt and no harm could come from just asking Scott if he would be interested.

I called him.

He was into it.

Here we go.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Scott came to our rehearsal studio and absolutely nailed it. He was head and shoulders above anybody else we had seen or heard. And he could hold his own on a stage with the big personalities in this band.

It was the first time that I had ever been in a situation where the band said, “Okay, we have all of this material—now go write your vocal parts.” But Scott had a great ability to listen to something and concurrently hear a different arrangement of it in his head. He took demos we had recorded of “Fall to Pieces,” “Set Me Free,” and “Big Machine” and went into his studio in Burbank. He sang over the first two. Then, with “Big Machine,” he twisted our arrangement into something he could really sink his teeth into and leave his mark on. He sort of turned the song upside down. It was clever. And it instilled confidence in us about Scott’s ability, despite his being strung out on opiates and various other supporting drugs.

A movie producer who had heard rumors about the band approached us about using “Set Me Free” as the end-title song in Ang Lee’s upcoming version of
The Hulk,
coming out in late June 2003. The deal gave us some breathing room. Everyone had some scratch, and we recouped some of the costs of our rehearsal space.

Things were really clicking. We settled on the name Velvet Revolver for the band. Matt and I were getting really tight as a rhythm section. Slash was pushing himself in new directions. Dave earned the nickname “Morphius” because of his wizardlike knowledge of cutting-edge guitar-effects technology. We had also cemented a team mentality: there were a lot of people just waiting for us to fail and, faced with all the naysayers and obstacles, we were determined to make the record of our collective lifetimes.

Then Scott just
disappeared.
His wife was down in San Diego taking care of their two small children and Scott, it turned out, had holed up alone in their apartment in L.A. and gone on a run for the ages. He was in the depths of heroin and crack addiction. Just months before, Scott, Mary, Susan, and I were having nice conversations at family picnics and Susan and I had even contemplated renting the apartment below theirs as a pied-à-terre in L.A. Now things had gone off the rails for Scott and for his relationship with Mary and his family. It was a mess.

I found myself dealing with a raging addict and all the drama that entailed. I thought I was strong enough to deal with it. In fact, at this point I thought of myself as bulletproof. That turned out to be a major mistake. All of us in the band had been through this crap before—rhythm guitarist Dave Kushner had been sober for about twelve years—so we figured we were the perfect group of dudes to get Scott through this. We tried hard to help. But he had been through rehab a dozen times already. Even we were tiring of his lack of progress as work on the rest of the songs ground to a halt for weeks on end. Finally he decided to go back into a drug rehab center one more time. Okay, this was a step in the right direction.

We all knew it wouldn’t be easy for him. We had all been there. Even so, when I heard Scott had bailed on the rehab center to go down to see his family in San Diego, I was pissed. I knew he wasn’t going there. I knew this was an excuse to go score and go on another run. I heard that he was back at his apartment in L.A. and I went there with the intention of telling him he’d worn out my patience—and maybe not in such measured words. I’m not sure how or why, but when I entered the apartment screaming and yelling Dave was already there. I tried to calm down, but I couldn’t contain my anger. I threw off my coat and was ready for anything—even kind of hoping something would happen so that I could further vent my rage. I had seen how hard everyone had tried to help Scott. I had exposed my family to the dark side, too, and all of that boiled up inside me as I stood there yelling at Scott.

But he wasn’t combative at all. Instead he asked me to help him one last time. He asked whether I would show him how I got sober through martial arts. He said traditional rehab techniques obviously weren’t working for him. He needed a different way. He pleaded.

I regained my composure.
This guy’s a dad,
I thought. In fact, I had originally become friends with Scott because we had that in common: we were fathers.

I agreed to help.

Immediately I had to come up with a plan.

Trying to accomplish anything in L.A. seemed like a bad idea. A few years prior, Susan and I had bought a cabin in the mountains about 150 miles east of Seattle—a getaway now that we had relocated full-time to the Northwest. I had found a dojo in a nearby town run by a kung fu teacher—or
sefu
—named Joseph. He was a completely different type of guy from Benny, but he knew Benny—everyone in the martial arts world seemed to know Benny—and let me work out in his dojo. Over the years I had learned that Joseph was a solid guy and a very respected martial artist. My first thought was to take Scott up to my cabin and have him go to Joseph’s dojo every day, and also work out, hike in the mountains, go waterskiing. Just do normal shit while he detoxed. The cabin was pretty far off the beaten path and it would be hard for Scott to leave and find drugs.