Slash (62 page)

There was already an uneasy tension between Maiden and Guns. This obviously sent the tension level to Yellow—Red being nuclear. The buzz went around the crew network, and from that point on, there was no socializing at all between the two bands. It was awkward but we were determined to hang in there and see it through.

The Maiden tour wound its way through Canada and headed south into Seattle and Northern California. I’m not sure, but I think that it was a Bay Area date when Axl refused to leave the hotel to do the gig. If I remember correctly, he was still in his room when the rest of us left for the venue, and Alan was with him. Not long after, we got the call that Axl wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t perform. The crowd awaiting Maiden was pretty large, so Alan insisted that Duff and I go out there and let them know that Axl was sick. When we first walked on stage, there was a ripple of excitement and cheering, until they heard what we had to say. It was a huge deal—it sucked; I wish that it didn’t have to happen. For better or for worse, when Duff and I delivered the news, it wasn’t well received—and that was the first time that we’d ever gotten such a reaction in our career. The crowd was upset to the point that it was obvious that they really did care—and we weren’t even the headliner. We hadn’t expected much from Maiden’s fans. We had no idea that we’d crossed over the way that we had. It was a nice surprise.

There were just a few Maiden dates for us to do in California to end the tour, and as much as none of us wanted to do them, we were all committed. There were two shows at Irvine Meadows, but Axl’s throat was such that he just couldn’t do those last two shows—there was just no way. I’m not sure how that went over, but it was registered early enough that Alan had time to scramble to fulfill the contract. In the end, L.A. Guns were hired to play the opening slot so long as enough of us showed up to jam with
them. Duff, Izzy, Steven, and I showed up reluctantly—at best—to play at least a few songs. We got up there and our crew told me after that L.A. Guns had tried to sabotage our gear; they’d turned down all the amps to make us sound bad. I guess Tracii was worried that I was going to outplay him. Whatever it was, they tried to nip it in the bud, but our people caught it and fixed it. In any case, that show ended any sort of “civil” relationship between Tracii Guns and me.

THOSE SHOWS WERE THE LAST DATES ON
our schedule. When we got back to L.A. I started hanging around with West Arkeen and there was a rumor and general worry in the band’s circle that I was back on smack. The truth is, I got high once and that was it. But their intentions were good: they were worried that I might do myself in if we had nothing to do. And they weren’t exactly wrong. I had a penchant for being unruly and they could never nail me down. With that in mind, Alan decided that Doug should take me to Hawaii to chill out for a bit.

Doug and I went to Maui and he’s a total golf head, so he was completely absorbed because we stayed at a premier resort that he picked for that very reason. I was supposed to soak up the sun and “relax”…it was a nightmare. The place was entirely bungalows; we had a rental car for the week and stocked our little huts with groceries. It was as expensive as a hotel but wasn’t like a hotel at all. We were scheduled for a two-week stay, but after five days I was ready to leave. I started calling Doug demanding plane tickets to somewhere more interesting. “I can fly anywhere, man!” I shouted. “Fuck this place, why am I here?”

“Slash, relax, it’s cool,” he said. “Okay, where do you want to go?”

“Anyplace!
Fuck
. I’m going to fucking New York City!”

In the end, instead of flying me out, he agreed to fly in this hot stripper I’d met in Toronto. Doug arranged it all and then I was happy. I was supposed to be chilling out, but I still got really drunk on that trip. One night in particular I tied one on with her and for some stupid reason I found it necessary to smash all of the glass louvers in the front door of our bungalow. I didn’t think about
it at all; it seemed perfectly natural at the time. Suddenly there was a knock at the door that night as we sat on the couch and this enormous Samoan guy who was a guard at the resort was out there and he was not happy at all.

“Did you break all of this glass?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “So what?”

“You’ve got to clean it up,” he said ominously. “You’re going to clean up this mess.” He was right; morally, yes, I should have cleaned up the glass I’d broken. But I was paying nearly a grand a night just to be there, and at those rates, I wasn’t about to clean up anything.

“Why don’t
you
fucking clean it up, man?” I told him.

The guy stared me down for a second, then he grabbed me by the neck and slammed me up against the wall. I didn’t know what he had planned; all I knew is that I could hardly breathe and that my naked back was seriously feeling the stucco wall.

My girl went crazy and jumped on the guy’s back, totally raising Cain. It didn’t matter much; he was locked onto my neck like a pit bull: he swung at her with one arm, but the other one never loosened its grip on my throat. This whole scene was pretty loud; after a few minutes we attracted a crowd. This couple from next door came over, and when the Samoan guy saw them, it was like kryptonite: all of a sudden he straightened up and just ran away. The next day I tried to find him, but it was no use: he disappeared and never came back; he left his job and all of it behind, apparently.

WE DID A MINI-TOUR SHORTLY AFTER
that: it was something that Alan booked to keep up our momentum. We played a theater in Phoenix with TSOL, and I remember that when I arrived there, everyone in our camp was happy and relieved to see me. I was suntanned, and Doug was very proud; according to him, he’d taken me down to Hawaii and straightened me out. I found that pretty funny.

We did the first gig and it was fine, but the second night Axl didn’t show up: he refused to leave his room. I don’t know how intensely Doug
and Alan tried to get him out of there, and I still don’t understand why he wouldn’t come out, but it was a serious blow to morale in my mind. We in the band were beside ourselves; we were headlining and we couldn’t just forgive this. There aren’t too many reasons to miss going onstage—if there’s a death in the family, or you’re dead yourself, or sick or at best deathly ill, it’s excusable. Aside from that you crawl onstage if you have to. It set off a chain reaction—the floodgates of dysfunction were open from that point.

Steven found someone who was holding in Phoenix and I got loaded, he got loaded; I’m not sure what Izzy and Duff were doing, but Steve and I were three sheets to the wind. All that I remember of that night was that our hotel seemed cavernous; the distance from my room to Steven’s seemed like six miles. That hotel was dark and moody: there were a significant number of people who had gotten rooms there strictly to party after going to the show and they were in full swing, so there was a sinister, druggy vibe hanging about the place.

As the sun came up, Doug and Alan called a band meeting over breakfast. Duff, Izzy, Steven, and I filed into whatever restaurant and sat down with Alan and he delivered us the business. He told us that we were on the verge of ruining everything we’d worked so hard to achieve. It took all of my strength just to keep my head up for two seconds while Alan went on about how we couldn’t go on like this. We made a point of expressing our disappointment with Axl’s disregard and the fact that he didn’t even show up for the meeting. But we also knew that we couldn’t go out and just get a new singer. It seemed like Alan was with us and was going to talk to him. It didn’t make a difference, of course.

We returned to L.A. and canceled the rest of our tour. Next up: opening for Aerosmith. The controlled environment of being an opening band seemed like it would be good for us at the time. Their manager, Tim Collins, had spearheaded their sobriety and the band had spent millions getting themselves cleaned up and into a sober universe. And they’d hired an opening band that was falling apart at the seams. I can only imagine the lies that Alan came up with about how great we were doing to close that deal.

Steven Tyler, Slash, and Joe Perry.

Tom Zutaut, Alan Niven, and Doug Goldstein were read the riot act about endangering Aerosmith’s sobriety by Tim Collins and we then met with him as well. We showed up to his hotel room in L.A., where we ordered about $1,000 worth of booze from room service when he went to the bathroom. As they wheeled in this huge cart of drinks and food, Tim didn’t say anything, he just smirked.

“Sorry, man,” I said. “We were hungry…and thirsty.”

It was our way of showing him that we weren’t willing to relinquish our lifestyle, but we were open to following a few essential guidelines. All alcoholic drinks would be consumed in unmarked cups and all bottles of booze would be kept out of sight, and of course no mention would be made of heroin or cocaine. That wasn’t a problem: it was never hard to lie when we were holding drugs because none of us were ever the sharing kind.

The tour started in July and lasted for two months, and I couldn’t have been happier about supporting one of the bands that meant so much to me. Aerosmith’s new album,
Permanent Vacation,
was the first that was written by outside songwriters and contained the first hits that the band
had enjoyed in years, but as much as I didn’t think that the use of songwriters was particularly cool, I was happy to see them resurrected from the dead.

The first night of the Aerosmith tour was tumultuous: it started in Illinois, and while the rest of us showed up early enough to watch them sound-check, Axl was missing in action until half an hour before showtime. I remember Steven Tyler coming up to me and saying, “Hey…so where’s your singer?” It’s become a recurring punch line; it’s his standard greeting whenever he sees me. Axl showed up at the very last minute, which obviously caused tension to be high all around, but we played well enough to make up for it.

We played Giants Stadium on that tour, with Deep Purple on the bill. That stadium is so huge and we had so much room on that stage that we could really run around; we were always good at that. We did a forty-five-minute set and we played “Paradise City” twice because we were shooting it for a video. The crowd just freaked. That stadium can hold eighty thousand, and even though it wasn’t completely full, we’d never played to a crowd that large. The energy was incredible. It was one of those moments when I truly realized how popular we were becoming in the “real” world. It was a moment of clarity.

I remember sound-checking that day; I walked out into the middle of the arena, this huge expanse, and played my guitar, just for a while, to take it all in. We’d walked into so many situations since that first gig in Seattle, and that same chemistry and energy was still there. If anything, we were stadium-worthy from the start; we had an irrefutable way of doing things that needed very little adjusment once we made the leap to a grand scale.

We came offstage and I was on cloud nine, so I went onto our bus and celebrated with about five lines of coke and a few deep tumblers of Jack Daniel’s. Literally the minute after I’d finished my last line, Gene Kirkland, a photographer I knew, burst in and said that he was there to shoot Joe Perry for the cover of
Rip Magazine
and Joe had requested that I be a part of it. The coke was really hitting me and the Jack wasn’t helping much; I felt like Frosty the Snowman.

Slash pretends he didn’t just do three grams of blow. Joe Perry knows Slash just did three grams of blow. Note Slash’s clenched jaw and stiff arms.

I told Gene that I’d be there in a few and pounded as much Jack as I could stomach, then I tore the bus apart searching in vain for my sunglasses. I checked myself in the mirror, took a few deep breaths, and headed outside as nonchalantly as possible. I strolled over to Joe trying not to twitch, hoping that my smile looked more relaxed than it felt. Coke makes you paranoid and this particular batch was some speedy New Jersey, stepped-on Sopranos coke so it was hard to hide the effects. I’d met Joe before but I did not want to be around him all coked up. Every time I see the resulting picture of us, I have to laugh, because anyone who knows me at all knows that I never smile like that or ever hold myself quite so stiffly. Somehow I managed to keep my jaw in line but it wanted to swing like a barn door in the wind.