It's So Easy: And Other Lies (5 page)

Shit, the boat isn’t stopping.

My brother thinks I’m holding on—joyriding.

Sheer terror took hold as water gushed into my mouth and nose and I struggled for breath.

The rope had cut all the way down to the bone on my right arm and stripped the muscle from my shoulder to the elbow—just taken it all down like a sock.

I’m going to drown.

I’m going to die.

Suddenly it felt as though time had been suspended. Everything started to slow down. I looked intently at the cool green light refracted beneath the surface, particles suspended in the sunbeams, dancing in slow motion. Silence replaced the howl of water rushing past my ears. All I felt was the pale sunlight on me. Then the dim underwater light began to burn brighter until it saturated my field of view. A feeling of warmth and bliss washed over me and I sensed a welcoming presence—it felt as if I were surrounded by family, generations of family, forefathers I’d never met but somehow knew. By the time I resurfaced and everyone started to scream and people gathered along the shore of the lake, I had blacked out.

Someone onshore managed to revive me. I was rushed to a hospital. Doctors were able to roll the muscle back up my arm, but we didn’t have enough money to pay for them to reattach it. Obviously we also couldn’t afford cosmetic surgery on it either, so to this day my upper arm looks as if someone took a wedge of muscle out of it with a hatchet.

Soon after the accident, my mom had me participate in a study at the University of Washington on near-death experiences. My recollections appeared in the resultant book,
Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children.
That warm, peaceful embrace removed any fear of death I might ever have had. I felt a sense of exceptionalism after that, but I also now operated under the assumption that I would die young—that this had just been a preview of a death that would come sooner rather than later, and definitely by thirty.

After glimpsing the other side, that seemed just fine.

CHAPTER THREE

In September 1984, I pointed the grille of my 1971 Ford Maverick south, with $360 dollars in my pocket. I was twenty years old.

Heading out of town, I had the sensation that I was carrying the weight of Seattle on my shoulders. Obviously that sort of sentiment is overly dramatized when you are barely out of your teens, and it probably also reflected the extent to which, like anyone that age, I maintained a rather more grand sense of my own importance than was warranted by reality. But I had been the boy wonder of the scene, the eighth grader playing in bands with people in their twenties, the kid who could play everything—guitar, bass, drums, none of them particularly well, but all well enough to play in a band. Now, with my sights set on L.A. and the Space Needle in my rearview mirror, I felt as if everyone was counting on me to be “the guy.” Some of the pressure was no doubt self-imposed, but people had started talking once I said I was leaving, taking sides about whether I would make it in L.A. or come slinking back home.

My first stop was San Francisco, where I flopped in a punk squat. The intention: to stay overnight. The upshot: I stayed a week. Inevitably, there was a girl. I also knew and liked a lot of the people in the Bay Area punk scene. Still, I wasn’t interested in joining a band there and playing the same old kind of stuff.

When I finally left San Francisco, my $360 kitty had dwindled to sixty bucks. The situation looked dire. From a gas station pay phone I called my brother Matt, who was by this point studying at Cal State Northridge, which was in greater Los Angeles.

“Dude, you know I’m coming down there?”

“Yeah, I heard,” he said. “Where you going to go?”

“I dunno, Hollywood. Any openings at the Black Angus?” Matt was paying his way through school working as a cook at a steak house out in the valley. He played trombone and wanted to become a music teacher.

“Maybe,” he said.

“I have a reference from Lake Union Café,” I said. That was the name of the restaurant where I’d been working for the past two years in Seattle.

“I might be able to get you something,” Matt said.

“How do I get there?”

“Take 5 to the 405 and get off at the Roscoe Boulevard exit. Go west on Roscoe until you hit Corbin Avenue. Make a right. The restaurant is at 9145 Corbin.”

I drove straight there and started a shift as a prep chef that same night, September 14, 1984.

At the end of the shift, I figured I’d go check out my new home: Hollywood. I asked for directions.

“Well, it’s about twenty-five miles …”

What? Where the hell was I? I thought
this
was Los Angeles?

“You go down to Ventura and make a left. Follow that all the way to Laurel Canyon—you’ll need to take that over the mountain …”

Huh? A canyon that went
over
a mountain? How could that be?

I set off, keeping an eye out for anything resembling mountains. I saw plenty of hills, but no mountains. Eventually I found Laurel Canyon—a road that went up a hill and then … Los Angeles! From the top of the hill, I could see that the downtown was no bigger than Seattle, but that the twinkling lights of densely packed low-rise neighborhoods went on forever—the city stretched as far as I could see.

I stayed with my brother a few nights during the first couple weeks in town. But his place was just so far from Hollywood, which to an outsider like me seemed the center of the L.A. music scene. With the added drive time from all the traffic, my brother’s place—and the Black Angus—might as well have been in another city entirely. Besides, I couldn’t just show up and take over his apartment.

So on many nights I slept in my car in the Hollywood Hills. The cops didn’t cruise the nice tree-lined streets perched up above Franklin Avenue.

The luster of that year’s summer Olympics had worn off, and the police presence had virtually vacated central Hollywood since the end of the games, leaving the floodgates wide open for criminals and thugs and general unwatched anarchy. Gang activity was in high gear then, too. Crack was sold all over Hollywood. I landed in the middle of all of that—with a bass I was still learning to play.

Still, I had confidence in my social skills and in the belief that I had a lot to offer. I felt punk rock was basically in its death throes by 1984. The first two waves were done—the original punk bands and then the hardcore bands. Whatever happened next, the people my age—who had been through the punk scene and come out the other end looking for a new direction—were going to be the ones to do it. The future was resting on our shoulders. I was looking to find other guys out there like me, interested in trying to create the next paradigm. I was sure I was going to play an important and vital part in whatever musical innovation would be next. This was not conceit on my part, it was excitement.

With all of this going through my head, an ad in a free local music paper called the
Recycler
caught my eye during that first week in L.A. It was a want ad for a band seeking a bass player. The name to call was Slash. With a name like that, I assumed he must be a punk-rock guy like me. And if we had similar backgrounds, maybe he was also looking toward the horizon musically.

As far as I could tell, there was really no discernible rock scene in Los Angeles in the fall of 1984—only the palpable hangover of a once-thriving punk movement, a thriving but really bad heavy-metal scene, and something called “cow punk.” This was basically punk-rock dudes in plaid shirts trying to play Patsy Cline songs with their fat girlfriends singing.

Slash’s ad had listed his influences as Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, and Motörhead. This was far preferable to anything else I had encountered that first week. And anyway, I was just trying to meet people.

I called Slash on the phone and talked to him. He had the same soft-spoken voice he has now. When he said the name of his band, I heard
Rodker.
Wow, I thought, that’s a really strange name for a band. I arranged to meet him and drummer Steven Adler at a 24-hour deli named Canter’s down on Fairfax.

“I’ll make sure we have the first booth on the left,” he said.

I told him I had blue hair and would be wearing a long black and red leather coat.

“Won’t be able to miss you, I guess,” he said.

One thing I’d already realized: folks from Seattle just plain looked different in those days. When bands like Black Flag or the Dead Kennedys came through Seattle, they would always comment on how different the crowd looked, but I had never thought much about it. Until now. In L.A., I decided to use this distinctive look to convince people checking IDs at the door to bars that I was not from the United States and thus spoke no English. When asked for ID, I would produce my sunglasses and a puzzled look. They must have thought I was Swedish or something, but, no shit, it worked more often than not. Now I was about to see the other side of the coin.

I headed to Canter’s in my pimp coat, as promised. This was a floor-length black leather coat with red trim. Originally it had a big red
A
for “anarchy” on the back, but I had taken a Sharpie marker and blacked it out when a Seattle band I was in disbanded. The band was called the Fartz and our logo included the anarchist
A.

I walked in, looked at the first booth on the left, and saw all this fucking hair. Somehow I had expected these guys to look like Social Distortion. Instead, even though they appeared about my age, the dudes in Rodker had long hair and rocker chick girlfriends.

If the
sight
of two long-haired rockers from Hollywood was a shock for me, I could hardly imagine having to talk to them. Of course, with my short Day-Glo blue hair and long coat, I must have looked like a Martian to them, too. Both parties were a little surprised and curious when we first met face-to-face.

Slash’s long hair, it turned out, hid a shy introvert. He was cool, though. He had a bottle of vodka stashed under the table—he and Steven weren’t yet twenty-one, either, and this was as close as they could get to a bar. We drank vodka and ate bowls of Canter’s barley-bean soup. I still love that soup.

Club bouncers weren’t the only people confused by my Seattle punk look. Slash’s girlfriend got kind of smashed and leaned over and said, “Are you gay?”

“No, I’m not gay,” I told her, laughing.

“You have short hair—I think you’re gay. It’s okay, you can tell me. Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No,” I said, “I just moved here.”

“It’s okay, we’ll get you one.”

Steven Adler was really nice, and expressed himself with an infectious, almost childlike enthusiasm.

He said, “Listen, we’re going to be great—going to get the feet stompin’ and the hands clappin’.”

He still says that to this day when he climbs behind a drum kit and gets excited: going to get the feet stomping and the hands clapping.

We all went back to Slash’s place—he was living with his mom. It was obvious even on the acoustic guitar he played that first night that Slash was a special player. I was absolutely stunned by the raw, emotive power he so easily tapped. Slash was already in a league of his own and watching him play guitar was a “holy shit” moment.

Even so, I was afraid he and Steven were coming from a very different place musically than I was. Some of my fears reflected the way things had been in Seattle—long-haired guys there tended to be kind of behind the times. Long hair in Seattle meant kids from the suburbs or farming or logging towns. Long hair meant heavy metal. Those of us in the punk scene called guys like that “heshers.” We were city kids. We thought of ourselves as ahead of the curve. Of course, some of my fears about Slash and Steven were more concrete—Anvil’s “Metal on Metal” was part of the cover repertoire they played. And it turned out the decidedly less offbeat name of their band was Road Crew, not Rodker.

Still, the more we played and talked about music and listened to music, the more common ground we found. Slash also showed me some of his artwork that night—though I would never have imagined that less than a year later he would be hand-drawing a logo for a band we would be in together, a logo featuring two pistols with thorny rose stems twisting around the barrels.

Slash was an eccentric guy. He had a snake in his room.

“She’s really sweet,” he told me.

I didn’t say anything, but in my mind I was going,
Hmm, a snake, sweet?

Still, he was cool. If nothing else, I thought, he’s a genius guitar player—and I like him. And perhaps most important, I now knew where Slash lived and I knew how to get there. Given the fact that I didn’t know anyone else in town, this was key to our remaining friends. I met a lot of people in those first few weeks, but many I never ran into a second time. Now I could find Slash whenever I wanted.

As an added bonus I also liked Slash’s mom. She was great to me. She called my mom to let her know I was all right. Later she would call me at the Black Angus to make sure things were going okay. She became a surrogate mother during those initial weeks in L.A. (She ended up continuing in that role for years, in fact.)