Slash (18 page)

“First things first,” he said. “I wanna rewrite ‘Welcome to the Jungle.’” According to Paul, the song had real potential, but it lacked an impactful structure. What it needed was a chorus that was more memorable, more singsong, more anthemic—in a word, more like a Kiss song.

“
Ugh
,” I grunted under my breath. As far as I was concerned, that was the end of our relationship. He was the epitome of the guy with the nice clothes, the trophy wife, and the nice car “stooping” to our level to tell us what to do. I didn’t take kindly to that.

Paul was persistent, though. We saw him again not long afterward when we played a showcase that Geffen had set up. Basically, Tom arranged it because we needed to play a gig, so it was this industry-only, invite-only “concert.”
It took place at Gazzari’s (today it’s the Key Club), which was a venue that we’d never, ever played on the circuit because it was totally against everything we stood for. It was so glam and gay that there were radio ads for it where the owner, Bill Gazzari, proclaimed in his thick East Coast accent, “All my bands got foxy guys in ’em! If they don’t got foxy guys, they don’t play on my stage.” Gazzari’s was where the
really
plastic glam metal could be found. And we definitely weren’t trying to be foxy. The only time I’d ever even been in there aside from this gig was to see Hollywood Rose back in the day.

Anyway, Paul Stanley attended that show, and he actually bullied the sound engineer into allowing him to man the soundboard and control the mix. We didn’t find out until later, but when we did, I cringed at the thought: Paul Stanley had mixed Guns N’ Roses—at Gazzari’s. Really, how much more cliché could it get? I do remember that we got paid, because I remember counting and dividing our money and saying to Izzy, “I gotta go cop!” That was all that I cared about at the time—and that’s what I did; I took off out of there to meet up with my dealer friend.

Paul still wanted to win us over, so he insisted on coming to our next gig, which we knew once and for all would show him who we really were and what our producer needed to capture. It was a week later, at Raji’s, which was a total dive, probably a twenty-by-twenty-foot room that reeked of beer and piss with a PA that sounded like an outdated console permanently in the red. The stage was a foot high, packed against the farthest wall from the door; the bathrooms were more disgusting than CBGB’s. In other words, it was Guns N’ Roses’ natural habitat. I think in Paul’s mind, he was coming down to prove to us once and for all that he understood where we were coming from. He was going to “hang out” on our “turf,” because, after all, he and Kiss had played dives back in the day. His intentions were good, but I can’t help but think that pretty quickly he realized that where we were coming from was somewhere he hadn’t seen in a long, long time. Guns was the type of snarling beast that thrived in pits like that.

That show was fucking amazing: it was as dirty, muddy, shoddy, and teetering on chaos as Guns ever was in my mind. It was as honest and true as Guns N’ Roses ever got, because

I did a big hit of smack before we went on, which, mixed with the liquor
I had already been drinking, made my stomach so rotten that I’d turn around and blow chunks over the back of my amps every five minutes. I had a new guitar tech, Jason, who had to keep jumping out of the way to avoid getting coated. The overwhelming heat in there didn’t help the situation much. The show was so rambunctious, the audience so full of unruly diehards, that Axl ended up getting into a fight with some guy in the front row—he might have smashed him in the head with the base of his mike stand. The whole show was a fucking riot; there was so much energy packed into that tiny little overheated box of a room. It was
fucking awesome.
There’s a picture of that gig on the inside sleeve of
Appetite for Destruction
.

I can’t imagine where he stood during the show, but Paul Stanley materialized after the set with his blond-bombshell girlfriend/wife, each of them in outfits that probably cost more than the market value of the entire building. There wasn’t a dressing room at Raji’s; there was a hallway between the side of the stage and the back door with a small set of stairs, where our entire band sat down after we were through playing. Paul and his girlfriend/ wife were so out of place but they tried to sit there with us anyway. We were sweaty and gnarly, and after puking about eight times onstage, I was doing my best not to lose it all over him as he said to me, with his Ivana Trump lady on his arm, “Hmm, well, that was
interesting
.”

The next day we made it official: I told Tom to let Paul know that we were going to continue our quest for a producer, thank you very much. I’m sorry to say that not long afterward, I retold this story to the
L.A. Weekly
with an excessive degree of attitude directed at Paul. I meant no harm; I was so enthusiastic about what we were doing that to me everyone who didn’t get it was just
wrong
. I didn’t even remember insulting Paul publicly and therefore had no qualms about calling him a month or two later to ask for a favor. We’d begun recording, at that point, but I’d pawned my best guitars for dope and I hoped that he would be able to hook me up with some studio-worthy gear via his sponsorship deal with BC Rich.

“Hey, Paul, it’s Slash,” I said. “It’s been a while. How are you, man?”

“I’m good,” he said.

“Hey, listen, I know you’ve got that deal with BC Rich. Do you think you can get me some guitars?”

“Yeah, I could, it wouldn’t be a problem,” he said, followed by…silence. “But I
won’t
. Here’s a piece of advice: you should be careful about airing your dirty laundry in public. Good luck to you.”

Click.

Dial tone.

It took a while, but in 2006, I got the chance to apologize to Paul at Vh1’s
Rock Honors
show, where I was part of a tribute to Kiss along with Tommy Lee, Ace Frehley, and others. It was all okay; it was water under the bridge. Looking back on it, I see exactly why I behaved that way: I was arrogant back then, and when you’re arrogant, regardless of who you are as a person, the fact that you’re not a fan of someone’s band is a legitimate enough reason to be a prick.

There was no way in hell that I was going to county with fingernail polish on.

WE WOULD PRACTICE EVERY DAY; WE
wrote new songs, and we partied every night. As I mentioned before, smack was easy to find so I wasn’t keeping track of how often I did it. In my mind, it was strictly recreational—it wasn’t supposed to be the center of the universe.

The first time I realized that I had a problem was the first time that there wasn’t any around. I didn’t think too much of it—ignorance is bliss. On that particular day when it all caught up to me for the first time, Izzy and I decided to go to Tijuana with Robert John, the photographer and good friend who’s shot us since day one and became our official photographer on the road all the way through 1993.

Anyway, it was a great day trip: we drank a few bottles of tequila, we wandered the streets; we watched drunk Americans be ripped off by whores
in every dive bar and brothel shack on the strip. As the day wore on, I just thought I was tired and drunk and catching a cold; I had no idea of what was really going on in my body. When we got back to L.A., I remember, I passed out immediately. I woke up later that night still feeling sick, so I figured that a few whiskeys at Barney’s Beanery would cure me. I headed down there around ten p.m., and after my first couple of drinks, I didn’t feel any better; actually I felt worse. I went back to the apartment and assumed the air-raid position: I got on my knees with my head between them and my hands on my head, simply because there was no other position that felt comfortable to me. I remember that night vividly because Marc Canter popped by unexpectedly late that evening. He was as far removed from the junk scene as you can imagine. He eyeballed me curiously.

“You really don’t look good,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “I have the flu.”

The reality was that I was dope sick after just one day without heroin. It was hard for me to admit that to myself. As I lay sweating alone in my bed that night, I was still unwilling to regard it as anything else but the worst flu I’d ever had.

I cut down I guess, but I continued on more or less the same path until the next time I was forced to face the fact that I had a habit—thanks to the long arm of the law. I was cruising around with Danny one night looking for dope and we managed to cop some shit, but it was very little; it was just a taste. We took it over to my friend Ron Schneider’s place (my bass player in Tidus Sloan) and we did it, hung out, and listened to Iron Maiden with Ron for a while and then left to head home at about four a.m. We were coming up La Cienega when the blue and red lights went on behind us. When we slowed down and pulled over, we were, literally, right in front of our apartment, spitting distance from our door.

These two cops were clearly out to fulfill their nightly or monthly quota, because we weren’t speeding or doing anything suspicious at all. We had nothing on us, but Danny had forgotten the needle he had in the breast pocket of his shirt, which gave the cops carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. They started by shining their flashlights in our eyes.

“Have you taken any drugs tonight, sir?” one of them asked me.

“No,” I said, squinting at him through my hair.

“Are you sure about that? It looks to me like you have; your pupils are pinned.”

“Yeah, that’s because you’re shining a flashlight in my eyes,” I said.

They weren’t having any of it: they impounded Danny’s car and arrested him for possession of paraphernalia. They cuffed me, too, but wouldn’t tell me on what charges. And it all came down within ten feet of my front door.

They stuffed Danny and me in the back of the patrol car and continued on with their unstated mission to bust every long-haired “vagrant” in sight on their way back to the station. Less than a mile down the street, they picked up Mike Levine, the bass player from Triumph, who was exiting a 7-Eleven and heading to his car with some beer under his arm, on the premise that he
intended
to drink and drive. They put him in the back with us, and continued on. A bit farther down, on Santa Monica Boulevard, they busted a girl for “public drunkenness,” literally three blocks from the sheriff ’s office. The girl wasn’t visibly drunk at all—she was just walking down the street. Since there wasn’t any more room in the car, one of the cops opted to walk her across the street to the station.

They put all of us males in the same holding tank and we sat around the jail cell for a few hours. Mike Levine got bailed out, and after Danny had sat around long enough, they let him go, too. He was booked for having the needle and was given a court date, and all of that. I was the only one left, and since I thought that I hadn’t done anything, I figured that I’d get out any minute now. It was Saturday by then, about eight a.m., and as the hours stretched on, I tried, unsuccessfully, to get the guards’ attention to ask why I was still being held.

The only answer I got was being shuffled from the small cell of the night before to a larger cell with high ceilings, a rubber mat on the floor, one common toilet in the corner, a lot of inmates, and the rank smell of piss. I had no idea of what was coming next. My high had started to wear off; I was a few hours away from complete withdrawal. After a while we were loaded onto one of those horrible black-and-white transformed school buses with gates on the windows. I was shackled at the ankles and wrists and chained to the guy in front of me. I still had no idea why I was there, but I realized that I was going to the county jail, so I immediately started chewing off my black nail polish. There was no way in hell that I was going to county with fingernail polish on.

It took hours to get there because the bus made stops at several jails along the way to pick up more people; all while I got sicker and sicker. At each jail we were loaded off into another group holding cell to wait while the new additions were processed. The county jail itself was about twenty miles away, but getting there, with all of those stops and red tape, took all day. We hit about six jails and finally got to county in the late afternoon. The process was no less endless when we finally arrived: they logged in my belongings and put me in a series of holding rooms with the other new inmates until my paperwork was complete.

It was the most tedious bureaucracy I’ve ever seen in my life, and it didn’t help that I was genuinely dope sick during it all. Up until then, I knew about being dope sick in the abstract sense; I had heard stories, but even after I’d experienced a bit of it after that day in Tijuana, I regarded it with the same carefree bravado that had gotten me hooked in the first place. Faced with the reality of being dope sick, I figured that the best way to avoid it was to always know where to get more junk. It hadn’t been a problem in Hollywood. But being locked up in the county jail for a few days with no access to heroin was something else entirely: it was a forced detox in the worst possible setting.

I was housed in one of those big old-fashioned rooms with a few rows of cots, where I sweated it out, nauseous, sick, and exhausted. I’m not sure exactly how long I was there altogether; I suppose close to three days; then all of a sudden they let me out, again with no explanation, and I had to go through the whole fucking entrance process in reverse. Axl had put up the bail, and had Danny pick me up, but I didn’t know that as I made my way through the exit procedure in my little jumpsuit, waiting in long lines, sitting in a series of rooms, sweating and coughing and sniveling and fidgeting, smelling really bad and looking and feeling fucking miserable. When they handed me my clothes and belongings, I was finally informed why I was there: I’d been hauled in for a six-year-old jaywalking ticket. There had been a warrant out for me after I’d not shown up in court or paid the fine. Of all the things I’ve done, I got busted for jaywalking. Well, at least I did my time and paid my debt to society.