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Another place I frequented, as did many of us, was Hell House, a pit that embodied our collective mind at the time. It was a very obvious Rorschach test for anyone who might consider working with us or knowing us at all. Hell House was a West Arkeen production; it was a place—in theory, a “home”—that he’d rented with a few of his Harley-Davidson biker friends who had relocated from the East Coast.

The house was a ranch with three bedrooms along one end from front to back. The rear bedroom was occupied by Red Ed and his girlfriend/wife. Their room was off-limits to all because Ed was the biggest biker in residence and his girl was an even more formidable threat—you knew on sight not to fuck with her—but they were both sweet as could be. No one ever disturbed their room; in fact I don’t think anyone had ever even been in it. The middle bedroom was where these other bikers, Paul and Del James, lived.
Their place was set up to be a small home recording studio, and West had the bedroom in the front, which was such a pigsty that no one wanted to go in there. All you could do was lie down on the bed; it was such a mess you couldn’t stand in there and you couldn’t sit down.

I hear that there was a backyard at Hell House…I’d love to know what it looked like. During all of the time that I spent there, including my time as a resident, I never made it past the kitchen. That was one of the areas, along with the living room, where transient members like me gathered and left the formidable bikers and their girlfriends well enough alone in their rooms. Visitors were allowed in the living room, the kitchen, and that other room…I guess it was the “den.” There was also the pantry, where West often chose to pass out. As chaotic as it was, some kind of unspoken law applied where no one disturbed the legal residents, while every common area was a free-for-all war zone where everything in sight could be broken or lit on fire no problem.

I can’t imagine who decided to rent those fuckups their property because they turned it into a communal crash pad more gruesome than anything else I’ve ever seen in a first-world country. It was the second-to-last structure on the block; it was surrounded by apartment buildings, and the front lawn sloped up so that it looked like it was on a hill. It was just south of Sunset on Poinsettia, and as you came down the block, it stuck out like the house in
Psycho
. There were a few things that only spending a night there could teach you, the most important being that if you lay down anywhere there was a two-to-one chance that you’d leave with crabs. I’m still not sure why the lot of us weren’t just hauled in by the cops every single night. There were always cars and bikes on the lawn and trash all over the place; there were always people coming and going and loud music at all hours of the night. Hell House was so raucous that from a distance it appeared to be vibrating.

One of the regulars to be found at Hell House was Del James, a true oxymoron: he was a biker guy with tattoos and the whole thing, but he was a writer. Del was tight with all of us at one point but he became tighter with Axl as time went on. Axl really took to him, responding to his intellect and how Del patiently listened to Axl express himself deeply. They did a lot of writing together and I think they still do. Del ended up writing treatments
for some of our videos, as well as having written the short story that inspired Axl to write “November Rain.”

During this bit of band downtime as we searched for a producer, we frequented Hell House a bit too much, but I was the only one vagrant enough to live there on and off as well. I even did a few early interviews there. When I read them I couldn’t believe how shocked the journalists were by the surroundings. To me there was nothing crazy about it at all.

She gave each and every one of us crabs.

MY OTHER MAIN SOCIAL SCENE, ASIDE
from Hell House and the stripper complex across the street from Izzy and Steve, revolved around the ladies of the Seventh Veil, which is a strip club on Sunset that is still alive and kicking. I liked to shack up with a few of the girls who worked there who shared an apartment off Hollywood Boulevard where we’d usually drink ourselves senseless all night long. One of the girls in that scene was named Cameron. Every single one of us fucked her at one point or another, and Steven ended up dating her for a while, and across the board she gave each and every one of us crabs. It was ridiculous; we started to call her Craberon—to her face. I gave her the benefit of the doubt; I thought that maybe I’d picked up crabs over at Hell House or any of the other questionable places I chose to sleep at the time, but that wasn’t the case. Craberon had a nice little apartment of her own in West Hollywood and the one time I slept with her over there I got crabs there, too.

Another stripper worth mentioning is Adrianna Smith, the girl that both Axl and Steven dated and that Axl forever immortalized on our debut record…but we’ll get to all of that in just a little bit. My little universe over at the Seventh Veil was great: I’d show up around eleven p.m., gather some tip money from the girls, head down to the liquor store, stock up on Jim Beam (the poor man’s Jack Daniel’s), and have a party started for them
back at their place when they got off work. As someone with no place of his own, it was the best setup I could imagine: a cool, reckless spot full of girls where I could get away with drinking or doing whatever else I wanted to do without anyone giving me a hard time.

In the back of my mind, I was aware that we were no closer to choosing a producer and that the inertia was destroying us. I was strung out, drinking, doing drugs when I could, with very little money—and the rest of us weren’t much better. I was back to relying on friends and living on couches and living the street life once again—but this was worse than the old days. Back then it was fun because the band and I were working toward something. Now it felt like we were too disorganized and fucked up to be anything other than vagrants and we’d “made it.” I knew deep inside that I needed to get my shit together, that I couldn’t last in the abyss much longer.

Around this time, our dealer Sammy got busted, and that was a real turning point. I was at Izzy and Steven’s that day and Izzy’s girlfriend Dezi had gone out to meet Sammy for us at one of his regularly scheduled spots where all of his clients came out of the woodwork to score. The cops had planned a sting, and when Dezi left and never came back we got worried. Much later on we got her phone call from jail. They’d taken in all of Sammy’s clients, and were going to spring her, but Sammy was not coming back for a long, long time. That was a big reality check for us; I remember Izzy and I desperately scouring the streets looking for some smack. It was a mess. I ended up going back to Yvonne’s and kicking there for the third time. I just stayed up for days and didn’t feel well, claiming I’d caught the flu again.

Meanwhile, Tom Zutaut was at his wit’s end. He called us into Geffen one day, we thought to discuss another handful of producers that he wanted us to meet. Once he got us in his office, he just stared at us for a while. I was nodding out, still a mess from drying out at Yvonne’s, and the rest of the guys looked rough as well.

“What the
hell
can I do for you?” he said. “Take a
look
at yourselves. Do you even think you’re
capable
of making a record?! You guys have to get it together! Get focused! Time is running out!”

His comments hung in the air, but they made an impression because slowly but surely, without making a big deal about it or even acknowledging it, we got ourselves together.

ALAN NIVEN AND TOM ZUTAUT HAD SENT
every producer in town to meet us, and just when it seemed hopeless one finally stuck—Mike Clink. We did one session with him and recorded “Shadow of Your Love,” which was the best song in the set the first time I saw Hollywood Rose. Our version of it didn’t make the album, but it was eventually released on a Japanese EP.

In any case, when we listened back, it was all there: finally we heard ourselves on tape exactly the way we wanted to. It was just us, but refined; Clink had captured the essence of Guns N’ Roses. Finally all systems were go. We’d spent seven months in limbo, barely playing and intermittently recording with producers that weren’t right. It felt like an eternity; because the way we lived, a few months would have decimated a lesser band.

Mike Clink had what it took; he knew how to direct our energy into something productive. He knew how to capture our sound without losing its edge and he had the right kind of personality to get along with everyone. Clink’s secret was simple: he didn’t fuck with our sound—he worked hard to capture it perfectly, just as it was. It’s amazing that no one had thought of that. Clink had worked with Heart and Jefferson Starship, but what sold us was that he’d worked on UFO’s
Lights Out
. That record was a standout to all of us, because Michael Schenker’s guitar playing on it was both outstanding and sounded amazing.

I’ve always found that producers are the type of people who have all the answers to other people’s problems but never to their own. They’re the first to tell other people what to do, how to play, how to sound—all of it. They often don’t have their own identity, which makes them hard to respect. Mike was different, he was amiable, he was never intrusive, he was easygoing, quiet, and observant. And he knew who he was. Rather than make suggestions as if he knew better, he chose to take it all in. From the start we completely respected him.

We booked ourselves time at S.I.R. studios and with Mike at the board, the band felt free to be ourselves; at our very first preproduction session, we started writing what would later become “You Could Be Mine.” At another session, we started to work up “Perfect Crime,” which was something
that Izzy brought in. We weren’t in there to write new material, but we were so comfortable that it just came to us.

We started to demo all of the songs that we were considering for
Appetite,
and went through them with Mike pretty much as we’d done them before with very few changes. The only creative shift that occurred was one of Alan’s suggestions actually. In “Welcome to the Jungle,” originally we repeated the section where Axl sings “When you’re high, you never want to come down.” Alan suggested taking one of them out. He was right. It made the song tighter. But aside from that, all of those songs were captured as they were in one or two takes. It’s a testament to how well things were going in the studio and how great a mood we were in. We
never
listened to suggestions—from anyone. But we were willing to give it a shot, and we found out that it worked. Alan was already managing Great White at the time; he also produced them and served as a cowriter. It’s a very good thing that none of us were aware of that at the time, because that session might not have gone so well and “Welcome to the Jungle” might have been a very different song. It never bothered me once we found out about Alan’s connection to Great White, but it had quite a negative, snowball effect among some of the other members of our band.

I can only imagine how ecstatic Tom was that Guns N’ Roses now had a real manager and a producer that we wanted to work with. It took a couple of years, but it finally looked like this group of lunatics that he’d convinced the label to believe in was actually going to turn out the way he’d promised we would.

Alan set us up in Rumbo Studio in Canoga Park, where Clink liked to work, to do our basic live tracks. Canoga Park was close to where Steven grew up in the Valley, which was a foreign country as far as I was concerned. I think that might have been the point—they thought keeping us out of Hollywood would force us to focus on recording. Alan rented us an apartment at the Oakwoods, which are these generic fully furnished complexes all over the world. He also rented us a van for transportation. For some reason, I can’t imagine why, I became the designated driver.

Mike hired some real professionals to help out his street rats: Porky, a famous guitar tech, and Jame-O, the drum tech. They’d done hundreds of records, total pros who were also fun-loving partiers. They were invaluable to us.

Recording a real album in a proper studio was new to us: we’d done
demos in various locations around L.A. Some of them were epic: we did the earliest versions of “Don’t Cry” and “Welcome to the Jungle” at Hollywood Sound, in the same studio where Led Zeppelin recorded their second album. Some of our sessions were epic in a different way, such as the time we got into an altercation over payment with the owner of some shitty studio in Hollywood. He was so coked out that he pulled a gun on us.

“You’re gonna fucking pay me,” he said, his eyes opened far too wide. “Right now!”

“Oh, you’re right,” we said. “Yes, we’re wrong…you’re right; we’re just going to go.”

Someone grabbed our tapes on the way out and thankfully no one got shot.

The first day of recording, we commenced with “Out Ta Get Me,” doing the same thing we’d always done, but in an entirely new setting: we set up in a big live room and just jammed. When I heard the playback, I realized that I had a huge issue on my hands: my guitar sounded like shit coming through a real studio’s soundboard.

During my period of recklessness, I’d managed to hock nearly all of my equipment, including Steve Hunter’s Les Paul. I’d convinced Marshall to send me some amps when we had our rehearsal space out in Burbank but I’d never paid for them, so they took them back. Basically I had nothing: at the time I had three guitars. Two were Jacksons, one of which had been made especially for me: it was a black Firebird with my Shirley tattoo on the body (it sounded like shit). The other was a Strat-like prototype with an arch top that they had loaned to me, and I never gave back. It was one of only two that were ever made. My third was a red BC Rich Warlock. And none of them sounded good through the studio monitors.

I was so frustrated and nervous. We’d come this far, and I was determined to have my guitar sound perfect on the record. But I didn’t know how I was going to make that happen, because I was more or less bankrupt. I tried to downplay how I felt during those basic tracking sessions by drinking a lot and jumping around while I played with the band, knowing that somehow I had to figure this out and rerecord all of my parts. The other guys weren’t going to need to do that—Izzy, Duff, and Steve were so tight right off the bat that those tracks needed no improvement at all.