Slash (13 page)

I didn’t realize it until years later, but that trip cemented us as a band more than we knew; our commitments were tested on that journey. We’d partied, we’d played, we’d survived, we’d endured, and we racked up a lifetime’s worth of stories in just two weeks. Or was it one week…I think it was one week…what do I know?

IT MAKES SENSE THAT GUNS’ FIRST SHOW
took place in Seattle because as much as L.A. was our address, we had as much in common with the average “L.A.” band as Seattle’s weather has with Southern California’s. Our main influences were Aerosmith, especially for me, and then there was T. Rex, Hanoi Rocks, and the New York Dolls. I guess you could even say that Axl was a version of Michael Monroe.

So we were back in L.A. with our first-ever gig as a band behind us. We were all set to get back to rehearsing and keep the momentum focused. We got together out at this space in Silverlake and were all packed into Duff ’s little Toyota Celica driving home after rehearsal. As we pulled into an intersection to make a left turn, we were broadsided by some guy doing about sixty miles an hour. Steven broke his ankle because his legs were stretched out between the two front seats, and everyone got pretty banged up, myself least of all—I walked away unscathed. It was a pretty gnarly little accident; Duff ’s car was totaled and we could have been, too. That would have been a sick twist of fate: the band dying together after we’d just gotten together.

WE STARTED HANGING AROUND WITH A
few of the seedier rock-and-roll people in the L.A. scene; they were part of an underbelly that the typical Sunset Strip rock fan didn’t know about. One of the characters was Nicky Beat, who was the drummer for L.A. Guns for a minute, but mostly spent his time playing in lesser-known glam bands like the Joneses. Nicky wasn’t necessarily seedy but he had a lot of seedy friends. He also had a rehearsal studio in his house in Silverlake where we’d go, set up our gear, and jam, and that is where the whole band really came together. Izzy had something called “Think About You” that we liked, and we revisited “Don’t Cry,” which was the first song I’d ever worked on with Izzy. Izzy had another riff for a song called “Out Ta Get Me” that clicked with me immediately when I first heard it—we had that one done in no time. Axl remembered a riff that I’d played him when he was living over at my mom’s
house, which was ages ago at this point: it was the introduction and the main riff to “Welcome to the Jungle.” That song, if anything, was the first real tune that the band wrote together. We were sitting around rehearsal looking to write something new when that riff came to Axl’s mind.

“Hey, what about that riff you played me a while ago?” he asked.

“When you were staying with me?” I asked.

“Yeah. It was good. Let’s hear it.”

I started playing it and instantly Steve came up with a beat, Duff joined in with a bass line, and away we went. I kept throwing parts out to build on it: the chorus part, the solo, as Axl came up with the lyrics.

Duff was the glue on that song—he came up with the breakdown, that wild rumbling bass line, and Izzy provided the texture. In about three hours, the song was complete. The arrangement is virtually the same as it appears on the album.

We needed an intro and I came up with one that day using the digital delay on my cheap Boss guitar pedal board. I got my money’s worth out of that thing, because as crappy as it was, that pedal provided the tense echo effect that set the mood for that song and eventually the kickoff for our debut album.

A lot of our earliest songs came to us almost too easy. “Out Ta Get Me” came to be in an afternoon, even faster than “Jungle.” Izzy showed up with the riff and the basic idea for the song and the second he played it, the notes hit my ear and inspired me. That one happened so quickly, I think that even the most complicated section—the dual guitar parts—were written in under twenty minutes.

I had never been in a band where pieces of music that I found so inspiring came so fluidly. I can’t speak for the other guys, but judging by the speed at which our collective creativity came together I assume they felt something similar. We seemed to share this common knowledge and a kind of secret language back then; it was as if we all already knew what the other guy was going to bring into rehearsal and had already written the perfect part to move the song along. When we were all on the same page, it really was that easy.

Slash, during Guns’ short-lived glam phase.

WE BORROWED SHIT FROM CHICKS AND
initially we had that trashy glam look, though a lot more rough-edged. Very quickly, though, we got too lazy to do the makeup and all that so our glam phase was short-lived. Plus the clothes were a problem because we were always changing girlfriends, and you never knew what the next “she” was going to have. Besides, I don’t think that look ever really suited me—I didn’t have the emaciated white-boy long-haired physique. Ditching
the whole idea worked to our advantage in the end: we were grittier, more traditional, and more genuine; more a product of Hollywood itself than the L.A. glam scene.

We were also the lunatic-fringe rock-and-roll band. We thrived on being out of place and took every gig we were offered. We practiced every day, and new songs came quickly; we’d test them in front of bawdy crowds at venues like Madame Wong’s West, the Troubadour, and the Whisky. I looked at whatever we did each day as the next step along a path to where everything was possible. In my mind it was simple: if we focused on nothing but surmounting the nearest obstacle, we’d make our way from Point A to Point C in no time no matter how great the distance.

With every show that we played, we made more fans—and usually a few new enemies. It didn’t matter; as we drew bigger crowds, it was easier to get gigs. Our fans, from the start, were always a mixed bag: we had punks, we had metalheads, we had stoners, we had psychos, the odd weirdo, and a few lost souls. They were never an easily identified or quantifiable commodity…in fact, after all of these years, I am still at a loss for a simple phrase that puts a bow on them—which is fine by me. Guns’ die-hard fans were, I suppose, kindred spirits; misfits who’d made their outcast status their stance.

Once our profile started to grow on the local level, we hooked up with Vicky Hamilton, a manager who’d helped both Mötley Crüe and Poison in their early days. Vicky was a five-foot nine-inch overweight platinum blonde with a whiny voice who just believed in us and proved it by promoting us for free. I liked Vicky a lot—she was very sincere and meant well; she helped me get posters for our shows printed, took out ads in the
L.A. Weekly,
and dealt with the promoters at our gigs. I worked alongside her doing everything I could to further our cause; with her help, everything began to really take off.

We started playing at least once a week, and as our exposure increased, so did the need to get some new clothes—my three T-shirts, my loaner leather jacket, one pair of jeans, and one pair of leather pants weren’t gonna cut it. I decided that I had to do something about it the afternoon before we played our first Saturday-night headlining slot at the Whisky.

I didn’t have the financial means to make much happen, so I wandered the shops in Hollywood looking for odds and ends. I stole a concho belt
from a place called Leathers and Treasures that was black and silver, just like the one Jim Morrison always wore. I planned on wearing it with my jeans or my pair of leather pants (which I’d found in the Dumpster of my grandmother’s old apartment complex) and continued browsing the various shops. I found something interesting in a place called Retail Slut. There was no way that I could afford it, and for the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure how I could steal it—but I knew I had to have it.

A large black top hat doesn’t easily fit under your shirt, though I’ve had so many stolen from me over the years that someone has worked out an effective technique that I don’t know about. In any case, I’m still not sure if the staff noticed and, if they did, whether or not they cared as I blatantly snatched that top hat off the mannequin and casually walked out of the store and never looked back. I don’t know what it was; the hat just spoke to me.

Once I got back to the apartment I was living in at the time, I realized my new “purchases” would best serve each other by becoming one: I cut the belt to fit the top hat and was happy with the way it looked. I was even happier to discover that with my new accessory pulled down as far as it could go, I could see everything but no one could really see me. Some might say that a guitarist hides behind his instrument anyway, but my hat added an impenetrable comfort. And while I never thought it was original, it was mine—a trademark that became an indelible part of my image.

WHEN GUNS FIRST GOT GOING I WAS
working at a newsstand on Fairfax and Melrose. I lived with my on-again, off-again girlfriend Yvonne full-time until she got sick of me, at which point we broke up once more, leaving me nowhere to live. My former manager at the newsstand, Alison, let me crash in her living room and pay her half of the rent. She was a very handsome reggae chick with an apartment on Fairfax and Olympic who was taking college classes at night. Alison was attractive, but I always thought that either she was a little old for me or that I was a little young for her; either way, we never had that kind of relationship. We got along very well, and when she left the newsstand for a better job, I was lucky enough to inherit her position.

Alison always treated me like the cute stray she’d taken in, and I did little to prove her wrong. As her tenant, I didn’t take up much space. My worldly possessions were my guitar, a black trunk full of rock magazines, cassettes, an alarm clock, some pictures, and whatever clothes I owned or had been given by friends and girlfriends. And there was my snake, Clyde, in his cage.

Anyway, the newsstand job came to an abrupt end in the summer of ’85 when a local rock station, KNEC, threw a party out in Griffith Park, complete with free charter buses that departed from the Hyatt on the Sunset Strip. I headed over there after work with two pints of Jack Daniel’s in my jeans, not giving a shit that I was expected to open the newsstand up at five the next morning. It was a pretty debauched summer night as I recall; people passed bottles and joints as the bus made its way across town. There were plenty of local characters and musicians on board, and when we got there, music playing and a barbecue. The grass was full of people engaged in everything.

I got so fucked up that night that I brought a girl back to Alison’s place and was fucking her on the living-room floor when Alison came home and caught us. She didn’t need to say anything—her expression told me that she wasn’t too pleased. I stayed up with this girl anyway until it was time for me to go to work. By the time I got her dressed and on her way, I was already late and my boss, Jake, had called. I was in the doghouse already because I used the phone at the newsstand to conduct band business so often that he’d started calling during my shifts to catch me in the act, which proved to be difficult. Those were the days before call waiting and I was on the phone constantly so it took Jake hours to get through just to yell at me. Needless to say he was pretty pissed off about opening up for me that day.

“Yeah, Jake, I’m sorry,” I mumbled, still pretty drunk when he called for the second time. “I know I’m late, I got held up. But I’m on my way.”

“Oh, you’re on your
way
?” he asked.

“Yeah, Jake, I’ll be there really soon.”

“No you won’t,” he said. “Don’t bother. Not
today
. Not
tomorrow
. Not
ever
.”

I paused for a minute and let that sink in. “You know, Jake, that’s probably a good idea.”

AT THAT TIME DUFF AND IZZY STILL
lived across the street from each other on Orange Avenue. Duff had a working-class-musician mentality like mine—until the band really got going, he didn’t feel right if he didn’t have a job, even if his job was morally suspect. He did phone sales or phone theft, depending on your point of view: Duff worked as a telemarketer for one of those firms that promise people a prize of some kind if they agree to pay a small fee “in order to redeem it.” I had a similar job before I got my job in the clock factory: I’d call people all day, promising them a Jacuzzi or a tropical vacation if they’d just “confirm” their credit-card number to cover their “eligibility fee.” It was a nasty, cutthroat gig and I got out the day before it was raided by the police.

Axl and Steven would do anything not to work a regular job, so they got by on the street, or via their girlfriends’ handouts. Though, as I recall, on occasion Axl and I took jobs together as extras on movie sets. We were in a few crowd shots at the L.A. Sports Arena for a Michael Keaton movie called
Touch and Go
where he played a hockey player. We didn’t care as much for the camera time as we did getting fed and making money for doing nothing: we’d show up in the morning, get our meal ticket, then find somewhere to sleep behind the bleachers where we wouldn’t be found. We’d wake up when they called for lunch to eat with the rest of the crowd, then sleep until it was time to clock out and collect our hundred-dollar check.