Slash (10 page)

I’m not sure how, but somehow that experience didn’t scar me enough to desert the notion of getting a job at Cherokee. I had been pestering the studio’s day manager to hire me for an entire year. I’d stop by daily, like clockwork, during my lunch break at Hollywood Music across the street. I continued to do so, business as usual, but a few weeks later he finally gave in and offered me a job. In my mind, it was a milestone; I was now just one step away from becoming a professional musician. I was very wrong, but
my plan was that once I worked in a studio, I would make connections because I would meet musicians and producers every single day. In my mind, a studio was the place to meet other players who took it seriously and by working there at the very least I’d get free recording time once I got a band together. With that kind of bullshit in my head, I quit Hollywood Music feeling like I’d just won the lottery.

I was hired at Cherokee to be a gofer to the engineers, no more no less. I didn’t care; I showed up to my first day, ready to run errands, take out the trash, whatever, whenever. Or so I thought: I visibly wilted when I discovered that my job for the week was to fetch whatever Mötley Crüe might need, day or night. Just over a week before, these same guys had refused to let me into the studio and might have had my girlfriend (I believed her when she said nothing happened, but still…), and now I would have to spend the next few weeks as their errand boy. Great…

The studio manager gave me one hundred bucks to fill Mötley’s first order, which I was sure was just the first of many: a magnum of Jack Daniel’s, a magnum of vodka, a few bags of chips, and a couple of cartons of cigarettes. I looked down at the money as I walked outside into the sunlight, debating the pros and cons of swallowing my pride. It was a really nice day. I stopped when I got to the liquor store to think about this for a minute.

I squinted up at the sky; I stared at the sidewalk, and then I started walking again—toward home. That was all she wrote for Cherokee and me: considering how many hours I’ve spent in professional recording facilities over the years since, it’s almost ridiculous that I’ve never again set foot in Cherokee Studios. At this point I have no intention of doing so—I owe those guys a hundred bucks. The one day I did spend there taught me an invaluable lesson, however: I needed to pave my own way into the music business. It didn’t matter that any idiot could fulfill the duties of fetching for Mötley Crüe, or anyone else for that matter—that job was something that I refused to do on principle. I’m glad that I did; it made it that much easier when Mötley hired us to open for them a few years later.

SO I’D DITCHED HOLLYWOOD MUSIC,
thinking that my studio job would be the last day job I’d ever have before
I made it. Hardly. Things weren’t looking too good for me at that point: I hadn’t graduated high school, I wasn’t going to college, and as far as I knew, I’d walked out on the only job that might have helped me on my way.

I was unemployed and undirected there for a while, which was a perfect moment for my mom to get me into school again—any school. God bless her perpetual commitment to getting me educated. This time she did the only thing that made sense—she knew that I loved music, so she enrolled me in some weird vocational music school.

I’m very disappointed in myself that I can’t remember the name of this place, though I do remember how unfocused our teachers were. I’m now pretty sure that my mom found out about this place via a flyer at the Laundromat. In any case, I enrolled, I showed up, and within weeks my teachers had me out in the field laying cables and putting filters (“gels” they’re called) over lights at various live venues. This place educated its students in the arts of sound and light engineering for live performance in a very hands-on fashion. There were about six of us in my class and almost immediately we were assisting techs on-site at venues like the Country Club, the FM Station, and various others in L.A. Actually it was a total sham: the school was clearly funded or run by the production company that put on these shows, so we, the students, were not only working for them for free, they had also taken our tuition money. Shady as it was, I did learn to run light and sound for live concerts. I enjoyed it, too, until the night I did the light show for a group of Duran Duran wannabes called Bang Bang. I realized two things as I watched their set: 1) it wasn’t possible for a music performance to be more ridiculous, and 2) this sound-and-light gig was taking me nowhere fast.

I WAS DESPERATE TO BE IN A BAND; SO
I combed the ads in
The Recycler
—L.A.’s free musicians’ paper—every week, looking for an invitation to something that appealed to me. For the most part it was futile: the ads were nothing but shredders seeking shredders. But one week, I saw an ad that intrigued me: it was a singer and guitarist looking for a fellow guitarist in the vein of Aerosmith and Hanoi Rocks. And more important, it expressly stated that “no beards or mustaches” need apply.

I called the number in the ad and made arrangements to meet them at this guesthouse that they were renting on some street up in Laurel Canyon. I showed up there with a girl that I was dating and recognized Izzy immediately from the day he came into the music store with my Aerosmith drawing. I then realized that the other guy must be that high-pitched singer I’d heard on the tape. I thought,
Cool, this might actually go somewhere
. Their little shack was more like a closet: there was room enough for a bed, with space to sit on the floor in front of it, and room enough for a TV—which was the only source of light in there.

I talked to Izzy for a while, but Axl never got off the phone, though he nodded his head in acknowledgment when I came into the room. At the time I thought it was rude, but now that I know him I understand that wasn’t the case. When Axl gets into a conversation, there’s no stopping him. In Guns, we used to call it a Twain Wreck: when Axl started telling a story, he was as long-winded as Mark Twain. That first meeting, though, was pretty uneventful: either they’d decided that they were no longer interested in a second guitar player or I just didn’t look the part. Whatever the problem was, it went nowhere at all.

THE MINUTE STEVEN GOT BACK TO HOLLYWOOD,
he proudly informed me that he’d learned to play drums at his mom’s house out there in the Valley, which I am sure contributed to his being kicked out again. Steven was ready to start our band, even though at the time I was still halfheartedly playing with Tidus Sloan and answering the odd ad in the paper looking for a guitar player. I didn’t take him seriously; to me Steve was my social director—and a bit of a nuisance: he started coming to Tidus Sloan rehearsals, and every chance he got, he insisted that he was a better drummer than Adam Greenberg. When I eventually found myself without a band, Steve had annoyed me so much that I wasn’t even willing to watch him play, let alone play with him.

Steve’s grandmother had given him her old blue Gremlin; a car that looks exactly like it sounds—stout and boxy. Apparently, every day, since he couldn’t practice in his grandmother’s house, he’d been loading his drum kit into this thing and driving out to the public park on Pico across the
street from Twentieth Century-Fox studios that includes a swimming pool and a golf course. I knew it well; I used to play soccer there when I was nine. As weird as it was, Steven would set up his drums next to a section of the walking path and just practice all afternoon and evening. I’m sure the seniors, joggers, ducks, and dog walkers were happy about it; a blond rock kid with teased-out hair playing a full-size double-bass-drum metal kit as hard as he can is bound to be a crowd pleaser in any setting.

I eventually agreed to check him out, though I continued to wonder what the hell I was thinking as I drove out to meet him. It was completely dark when I got there. I parked next to his car and wandered out to the jogging path and there he was, drumming away in the dark. He was back-lit by the distant floodlights, while the huge expanse of the park and the golf course loomed behind him. It was a very weird scene. I took that in for a while before I even paid attention to his playing. But once I did, I forgot about the backdrop. Sitting there in the dark, watching Steven play, I wasn’t convinced of his abilities, but I was satisfied. Besides, I didn’t have a better option open to me anyway.

STEVEN AND I WERE IN A SITUATION
that was familiar and unwelcome—we were looking for a singer, and this time, a bass player as well. Steven was an asset in that regard, because he knew all the players: he was out so much that he had seen nearly every band there was to see in the L.A. rock scene at the time. Steven was also up on the gossip: once Mötley Crüe took off, Steve heard that Lizzy Grey, Nikki Sixx’s cofounder in London, intended to put that band back together. That was huge—Steven and I had seen London when we were younger and they blew our minds. Izzy Stradlin was in that second version of London, but once he left, things fell apart a bit and there was a vacancy for a guitar player and a drummer. Steve and I auditioned for them at the space where the legendary funk band War used to rehearse and record on Sunset, down the street from Denny’s. By this time that spot was nothing but a bombed-out hovel; today it’s where Guitar Center Hollywood is, by the way.

So we rehearsed there with London for four days; we learned a ton of their songs, and even though it was a step up from nowhere, nothing ever came of it. If anything, the experience was interesting because I saw firsthand just how pompous those who believe themselves to be rock stars can be. The guys in London behaved like they were larger-than-life, as if Steven and me and everyone else in the world existed on the other side of an invisible fence. It took me back to my childhood and all of the rock stars that I’d met back then through my parents. Growing up around my mom and dad’s clients and friends, I’d seen it all and had learned how to act and how not to act. I’d seen real rock stars throw temper tantrums and watched my mom deal with them. I’d learned through observation just how delicately to treat those personality types.

At the time I thought the guys in London were worldly and I was intimidated and impressed. Not so much now. I saw the guy who was singing for them at that time on the street in early 2007 while I was driving to the studio to record with Velvet Revolver. There he was, cruising down Sunset Boulevard wearing the same getup, still looking for a gig.

After that fruitless endeavor, Steven and I struck out on our own. We needed a bass player and a singer, but we figured we’d go about things logically and land ourselves a bassist first so that when we began auditioning singers, we’d actually have a whole band for them to sing over. We took out an ad in
The Recycler;
it was in the “Seeking” section, and it went something like this:

Bass player needed for band influenced by Aerosmith, Alice Cooper. Call Slash.

We got a few calls, but the only guy we wanted to meet was someone named Duff. He’d just moved out from Seattle and he sounded cool on the phone, so I told him to meet us at Canter’s Deli at eight p.m. Steven and I got a corner booth right near the front; we had our girls with us—my girlfriend Yvonne had a big bottle of vodka in a brown paper bag in her purse. She was the one who introduced me to vodka, actually; before I met her, I drank nothing but whiskey.

No one remotely resembling a musician came into Canter’s for a long while and the girls were definitely drunk when Duff did show up. I think
the four of us were debating what he might look like when this bone-skinny, six-foot-plus guy with short spiked blond hair rolled in wearing a Sid Vicious–style chain and padlock around his neck, combat boots, and a red-and-black leather trench coat in spite of the seventy-five-degree weather. No one had predicted that. I kicked Steven and hushed the girls.

“Check it out,” I said. “This
has
to be him.”

Duff had been in a series of punk-rock bands in Seattle: the seminal but mostly overlooked outfit the Fartz, for whom he’d played guitar, the legendary pre-grunge power quartet the Fastbacks (drums), and a few others. Just before moving down to L.A., he had taken up bass. Duff was as musically versatile as he was driven: he didn’t leave Seattle because he wasn’t creatively satisfied; he left Seattle because he knew that the scene (at that time, at least) was a losing proposition and he wanted to make it. He knew that Los Angeles was the West Coast music capital, so without a plan and with no friends waiting to take him in, he packed up his beat-up red Chevy Nova and drove down to L.A. to make a name for himself. I respected him immediately for his devotion: he and I shared a similar work ethic. It established a kinship between us right away that hasn’t faltered at all over all of these years.

“So you’re Slash,” Duff said as he squeezed himself in beside me in our booth at Canter’s. “You’re not what I expected at all.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “Well, what were you expecting?”

“With a name like Slash, I thought you’d be much scarier, man,” he said. Steven and the girls and all laughed. “I’m not even kidding, I expected you to be some kind of punk-rock psychopath with a name like that.”

“Oh yeah?” I said smirking. We shared a laugh.

If that hadn’t broken the ice, my girlfriend Yvonne made sure to smash it a few minutes later. We’d sort of settled into small talk: Duff was getting to know us and vice versa, when, apropos of nothing, Yvonne leaned across me and put her hand on Duff ’s shoulder.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” she said, louder than necessary.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

“Are you
gay
? I’m just curious.”

For the first time in hours our table was silent. What can I say, I’ve always been attracted to outspoken women.

“No,” Duff said. “I’m definitely not gay.”

After that exchange faded the five of us went upstairs, piled into the bathroom, and broke out the vodka. And not long after that, we formed a band right then and there, and once again spent the next month or so looking for a singer. We auditioned Ron Reyes, better known as Chavo Pederast, when he was the front man for Black Flag for a few months back in 1979. There were a few other characters in there as well, but as usual, we couldn’t find the right guy. All things considered, we wrote some really cool material: we came up with the main riff to the song that later became “Rocket Queen,” and a few more great ideas.