Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  I was also now spending most of my time in LA and doing a fair bit of hanging out myself with Slash – and Duff and Axl. It was now that I first got a real sense of who each of them might actually be – and how different they all were from each other. Slash was the one I got to know best. A Hollywood sophisticate compared to the others – not least, Axl, whose small-town background was about as far removed from Slash’s formative years as it was possible to imagine – he was the most in-control, out-of-control person I’d ever known. Anthony Keids, singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, would describe himself to me around this time as ‘the buffest junkie you ever saw!’ But that said more about his swinging from one extreme to another than it did his ability to somehow ‘manage’ his drug addiction. Slash seemed to be on a whole other, far more laidback, worldly level. He hated confrontation, yes, something that would prove to be his downfall when it later came to standing up to Axl’s increasingly high-stakes demands. But there was something else about him, too. A kind of well-bred insouciance that allowed him to make shooting smack seem like the partaking of a delicacy. That transformed what seemed to the outside world a morbid fascination for handling killer snakes into a kind of benediction. A gypsy’s blessing; one for the road, perhaps. Until you or someone like you might show him something better. Should you, or someone like you, be foolish enough to try …

  I recall going out for dinner with him one night after they’d finished the Aerosmith tour. Slash hunkered down in the dark of a corner booth at the El Compadre restaurant, the cheap Mexican place opposite the Hell House he’d now left far behind. Old habits and old haunts, it seemed, died hard. The shock of curls were the same, but behind them he looked tired, not just road-weary or stoned but bearing the weight of everything that had happened to him – to them – over the past 18 months.

  He’d called to suggest dinner and then brought us out here: ‘I know this place is kind of sleazy and rundown, but I like it, I feel comfortable,’ he said. He told me about the Hell House days and the girls that would give the band blowjobs from under the tables at the El Compadre. But he was in far from his usual hell-raising mood. We spoke about Donington and I asked if he felt in any way to blame. He said not, but talked for a long while about how he’d partition the crowd into separate, safer sections if the band ever played there again, and about how he was agonising over whether or not he should write to the families of Landon Siggers and Alan Dick.

  Appetite for Destruction had just passed sales of five million, so we talked about becoming rich and famous and what it meant. ‘I’m not gonna take it to the point where I let it have an effect on my personality,’ he insisted. ‘I’m not going to let it turn me into one of those insecure rock star types who doesn’t actually know what the limits of what a fucking pop star means …’ Yet already the strange kind of rootlessness that overwhelming success can bring was beginning to manifest itself. He was, by his own admission, burned out from touring so hard, and yet ‘already bored’ by being off the road and back in LA. There were plans to go back into the studio to record a new album – he was recording songs on an eight-track machine at home, he said – which they wouldn’t, at least for another two years. There were the endless requests for phone interviews as Appetite began to take off across the world, and he was handling most of those because ‘Izzy doesn’t want to do it, he wants to stay in the shadows. Steven doesn’t do a lot of stuff because it’s never been his role. Duff likes to do stuff but right now he’s at a wedding …’ And Axl? ‘He’s very emotional … It’s not any particular thing …’

  When I told him that we had an annual sweep at the Kerrang! magazine office over which rock stars might snuff it in the forthcoming year and that he was currently top of the list, he laughed and said that Alan Niven had already packed him off to Hawaii once to clean up, ‘but I had a girl fly out …’

  In fact, Niven, who understood that Slash ‘was not one for rehab’ had, in his words, ‘been forced to get inventive when Slash’s habit began to completely own him and threaten his very existence’. The first time he put him in his spare bedroom to make him go cold turkey. ‘My wife and I took turns to watch over him, wipe the vomit from his mouth and carefully dispense the Valium to take the edge off the process. Sometimes that wasn’t enough. He’d refuse the invitation to come to the house.’

  Hence the idea of getting Slash out to Hawaii to try to dry out in the sun. ‘Hey, Slash, be at the office at noon tomorrow, you’ve got an interview with Guitar Magazine and it’s a cover feature,’ Niven had told him over the phone. ‘When he arrived he was hustled into a limo by Goldstein and driven straight to the LAX airport. There was no such interview scheduled. The two of them flew off to Hawaii … totally out of Slash’s element and far from his smack sources. He’d have to go cold turkey in the Islands.’

  But then Slash had had his ‘girl fly out’ and when he returned to LA he was as bad as ever. His only real concession to his health, he told me now, was that he’d switched to drinking vodka because the charcoal in Jack Daniel’s had begun to stain his tongue and teeth.

  A Mexican band started playing loudly in the restaurant, and he got restless. Before we left, he said: ‘I’ve been drinking a lot for a long time and I’m only twenty-three years old and I know that, right? It’s not something I’m just so ignorant about that I’m going on this major blowout until all of a sudden something stops me physically. I’m more aware than that, but I’ll do it anyway. So if anything does happen, I won’t be complaining about it because, you know, I knew.’

  We parted and I wouldn’t see him again for a few months. The momentum behind Appetite for Destruction was unstoppable, and began to separate the band from their contemporaries. Guns N’ Roses were selling more records than Aerosmith, Mötley Crüe and Poison combined. They would sell more than Bon Jovi, who had just released New Jersey, a follow-up to their squillion-selling breakthrough Slippery When Wet, from which they would ultimately have five hit singles. They would sell more than Def Leppard, whose two most recent albums had become the first consecutive albums in America to sell more than seven million copies each: Pyromania and Hysteria.

  Guns N’ Roses were now entering a place that very few bands had ever visited, and no one had a map of this unknown territory. They were adjusting to new and different lives. They had received their first significant money: each had received a cheque for $850,000, and there was plenty more to come. Axl bought an apartment in Hollywood, on the twelfth floor of a condominium block called Shoreham Towers, behind the Tower Records store on Sunset Boulevard, and a substantial plot of land in Wisconsin. He said he planned to buy a place in New York, too. He toggled between a hotel and the LA home with Erin, and spent some more of his money on a customised Corvette Sting Ray and a black BMW. The LA apartment was decorated in black, with mirrored walls and a display of his gold and platinum records.

  Izzy was now holed up with his girlfriend, Desi, ‘in the shadows’ as Slash put it. Duff was still married and alternately drinking, fighting and making up with his wife. Steven grew so restless he asked Alan Niven if he could go on the road with Great White (the answer was ‘no’). Slash had rented an apartment of his own and even, in a bow to his new domesticity, bought a microwave oven. He would soon find a larger house up in the Hills. They were struggling to get comfortable in their old-new city, seeing the other, moneyed side of LA for the first time. As Slash would tell Rolling Stone magazine in their cover story of November 1989, they felt ‘like tumbleweed’. And as Izzy would later tell me, summing up the months of limbo they were about to enter: ‘That was a real dark period for all of us. The drugs and stuff was a big part of the isolation but it was more than that. It was, like, self-imposed and it got worse …’

  Guns N’ Roses were still conspicuous around LA, but they were not conspicuously together. Slash and Duff, the good-time guys, still surfaced at every rat-hole club night party and after-hours watering hole, but Izzy and Steven were falling deeper into the claws of heroin, and the messy, cha
otic, twilight lifestyle of closed curtains, phones off the hook and junkie insularity. Axl, in a new uniform of full beard, shades and backwards baseball cap, was around, often at the Rainbow or the Cathouse, but he had his own little retinue now: his amiable half-brother, Stuart, his faithful chronicler and co-writer, Del James, the photographer Robert John, a guitar-playing friend from back home named Paul Huge and another friend from Indiana, David Lank, plus Dana Gregory, West Arkeen and a revolving cast of others.

  The Rolling Stone cover story had revealed that Axl had ended the Appetite tour travelling on a separate bus (‘First of all, it was Izzy’s idea to get a separate bus,’ he said, ‘and secondly, after shows I can’t afford to party out like the other guys. There’s been several times when I had to leave the bus because of nerves. It’s impossible to sit there completely straight, listening to someone who is annihilated go off about something or another’).

  He was beginning to try to help himself, not least via a diagnosis of clinical manic depression, for which he’d reluctantly started taking medication (the diagnosis had been made, he explained, after he’d filled in a 500-question form and the only thing the medication did ‘was keep people off my back because they figure I’m on medication’). Then other times he knew for sure it wasn’t him that had the problem, it was the rest of the world. He had an apartment full of weapons, including an Uzi submachine gun that he bought after seeing an advertisement in Soldier of Fortune magazine that read: ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get an Uzi.’ Aside from a three-week period on heroin – an interlude he would often describe in ecstatic terms as ‘one of the greatest times of my life’ – he and Erin holed up in the apartment, ‘listening to Led Zeppelin and fucking’. Yet, with his prescribed medication, he felt he was far cleaner than his band-mates, his iron will stronger than any drug. And having proven himself in LA, left behind his painful upbringing, his belief in himself and his judgement had been justified. Axl was now sure of it.

  It was now that the seeds of his eventual takeover of Guns N’ Roses were being sown. Not just through his deep need for control, but in the hands-off-the-wheel way in which the others hid themselves from the coming storm. By the time of my next meeting with Slash that March, Appetite for Destruction had sold seven million copies and been joined by GN’R Lies in the Top 5 albums charts … Duff and Steven would appear on the Howard Stern Show. Slash and Steven would join Ozzy Osbourne at Irvine Meadows for a blast through the time-honoured ‘Paranoid’. Axl would play a low-key show with West Arkeen, running through early versions of ‘The Garden’ and ‘Yesterdays’. Del James would tape another interview with Axl that would appear on the B-side of the ‘Patience’ single. Axl would hang out with the former Hanoi Rocks singer Michael Monroe on his video set and go to Syracuse, New York, to appear onstage with Tom Petty. Slash would appear onstage with Great White at a show in Montana … They would ride out the ‘One in a Million’ storm (Billboard’s editorial had called it ‘a piece of racist, gay-bashing garbage’) and discover that it barely touched the edges of their fame and success …

  What ate at them instead were the drugs. Given the band’s now seemingly limitless supplies of cash, Slash, who’d already had that unsuccessful stint in Hawaii for rehab, had a new place up in the Hills, playing with his pet snakes, and was ‘sinking deeper into my hole’. Izzy spent so much time out of it, he found himself driving down the LA freeway convinced that it was snowing: ‘I was staying with this coke dealer and I’d been up for five fucking days, which may have had something to do with it,’ he told me. ‘I didn’t even know I was in trouble until someone pointed it out to me.’ He was obsessing over the money he thought the band should be getting while walking around with a cashier cheque for $850,000 crumpled up in his pocket. Steven was ‘sitting in some big fucking empty house I’d bought, shooting dope 24/7. I was very naive to the dangers of heroin. The first times I did it were two years apart. It made me so sick. Then the third time I did it, it didn’t affect me that way. So I did it every day for a month.’ When he cashed his big cheque, ‘I was so fucking happy, driving my Mercedes around with my fucking stereo on, and the top down … and people just yelling, “Hey, Stevie, what’s happening?” That was great.’ Now, months later, he was spending most of his days ‘never going nowhere, never seeing no one, just out of my fucking mind …’ Duff wasn’t into the permanent midnight of smack, but he was well on his way to alcoholism, and his usually affable nature was being tested by the strain of his marriage to Mandy, which was made more volatile by his endless days back home in LA, with nothing to do but drink, drink, drink …

  ‘Patience’, the gentlest track from GN’R Lies, replete with Axl whistling over twinkling acoustic guitars, was a hit single that summer, and its sweet melody at least showed that Axl could express his vulnerability in more nuanced ways. But the general vibe was downbeat, best summed up by Slash when I took a trip up into the Hills for an evening at his new home, where we sat surrounded by guitars, amps, three pythons and stacks of books and video cassettes. King Kong flickered on the big screen. Now that the tongue and teeth stains had disappeared, he was ‘bored’ of vodka and back on the Jack and Coke. He was jumpy and jangly. It was way past midnight but the phone never stopped ringing. His guitar tech, Adam, had moved in downstairs. The band were supposed to be ‘writing and rehearsing’, and he’d written some songs that Axl liked that he was supposed to be showing the rest of the band, but ‘I’ve missed rehearsals with them, they’ve missed rehearsals with me …’ He’d even discussed moving in with Axl and maybe Izzy and Duff somewhere that they could work, but the phone kept ringing and he kept getting distracted …

  It was obvious that he was both out of it and unhappy. ‘Now we have a lot of money,’ he said, ‘we can do whatever we want, except there’s nothing I want to do except play. I just want to get back out on the road. I envy all those bands who’ve got their album done and they’re ready to go out.’

  LA, once a fantasy playground, had become with fame just another pain in the ass. ‘It’s actually at a point where I go to a club and end up leaving, totally depressed,’ he said. ‘It really brings me down. Everybody wants to have your undivided attention, and if you don’t give it to them they act like you’re an asshole … I don’t go out much. I don’t have that many close friends … It gets to be a little bit lonely after a while …’ We talked for a few hours, and just when I was going to call it quits, Izzy turned up with Billy Squier in tow, looking for a 12-string guitar of Slash’s he wanted to borrow. He didn’t find it but the party lasted another two days …

  They did make an attempt to get together over the summer, when Slash, Duff and Steven stayed on Chicago’s North Side for a number of weeks working up ideas – among them were the skeletons of parts for ‘Civil War’, ‘Estranged’, ‘Bad Apples’ and ‘Garden of Eden’. Mostly, though, they just hung out and got wasted while they waited for Axl and Izzy to join them. Slash could be seen some days riding his BMX bike up and down Clark Street, close to the makeshift porta-studio they had installed above a local venue, the Cabaret Metro. They lived in a split-level brownstone apartment where cocaine was hidden in butter dishes and Italian food was thrown from the balcony at fans below. Girls followed them everywhere – ‘Psycho bitches!’ Including the daughters of some high-ranking cops. When squad cars showed up the band all ran and hid.

  As Slash recalls in his memoir: ‘My personal consumption at that point was a half-gallon bottle of Stoli per day, plus whatever I consumed when I was out at night. I’d wake up in the morning and fill a Solo cup eighty-five per cent full with vodka, ice and a bit of cranberry juice. I called it breakfast of champions. Duff was in the same league … Some days Duff and I even went to the gym, usually just after our morning vodkas. We’d go to one of those big public YMCAs with our security guard, Earl, to pump iron. We’d be down there in our jeans, doing sets between cigarette breaks – it was invigorating.’

  According to Duff’s memoir, however, their time in Ch
icago was largely a washout. ‘After two weeks in Chicago, Axl was still a no-show. Slash, Steven and I started to get a little resentful. I mean, what the fuck? Here we were in a city in which we had no interest, no friends – and no singer…. I started to drink harder.’

  Steven Adler’s memoir meanwhile veers somewhere between the two in terms of how he saw his time in Chicago. He recalls the studio they worked in as ‘awesome. It had a top-of-the-line PA and a grand piano, and my drums were miked. It was located on the fourth floor of a high-rise building. In the basement of the complex was a popular local nightclub … At night, Duff, Slash and I would go downstairs to the nightclub, where we would pick up girls and fuck them right in the club. We rarely took them back to the condo.’

  The most telling detail of all though was that Axl didn’t arrive until just two days before the band was due to return home to LA. ‘Seven weeks and five days later, Axl finally arrived,’ Adler writes. ‘We have two days left in the studio and were anxious to show him all of the new material. He sat there like we were putting him through some kind of torture. Plain and simple, Axl wasn’t interested in our material! He just wanted to record a new song he had been working on called “November Rain”.’

  Izzy Stradlin, meanwhile, didn’t show up at all. Izzy had flown to New York to join up with Axl. Rather than going to Chicago to try to write new material with his band, the singer had decided to fly himself and West Arkeen up to New York, where they checked into the Mayflower Hotel on Central Park West. But when Izzy got there he was treated like an interloper. Like he was the one spoiling the party. Or maybe that was just his paranoia? Izzy was now hitting the cocaine and heroin so hard he didn’t trust anybody any more.