Wow, this is quite a reaction.
I am one lucky guy.
My friends emerged from the building and started whispering to one another just out of earshot. I could tell something was going on. Did they have a surprise for me? Did something happen while I was gone? Then my girlfriend began to cry and told me she had gotten drunk and slept with another guy while I was gone. Right then and there I said we were finished. It wasn’t even an issue, not a subject for discussion.
But I couldn’t understand the situation.
Is there something wrong with me?
I know she loves me—so how could she do this?
I was destroyed. First my panic attack, now this? I just couldn’t understand why Stacy would do this to me. My only understanding of such things was based on what I had witnessed with my dad. I retreated into a weird place.
Stacy was completely distraught, too. And she seemed genuinely contrite. She started calling my mom, my brothers and sisters, and my friends. People said, Dude you have to give her another chance. The guy who slept with her apologized, saying it was just a drunken mistake. But I didn’t know if I could go back to her after that.
I talked to my mom about the whole thing. She said people just make mistakes sometimes. She said it was obvious Stacy had made a mistake and was devastated because of it.
“I know you love her,” my mom said. “You have to find it in your heart to forgive her.”
So Stacy and I were back on. It’s the only time I’ve ever gone back to someone after something like that. Things went great for about a year. I even heard about a job opening at Lake Union Café’s patisserie that could get me out of Schumacher’s Bakery. My hair was dyed different colors all the time, so jobs that put me in the public eye were out of the question. Fortunately the opening was for a dishwasher. And as it turned out, the head pastry chef was an oversized and extremely flamboyant homosexual who didn’t look twice when he saw my hair at the interview. He actually liked the fact that I was a musician. I suspect he may have taken me for gay. I got the job.
Then, in 1983, my band Ten Minute Warning got the opening slot on a tour of the Northwest with the big Vancouver punk band D.O.A. When I came back home from a week or so on the road, I walked into our place to find Stacy hanging out with a guy I knew was part of a crew of people dabbling in heroin. I was worried.
We didn’t address it directly, but as the signs that she was using began to get more obvious, I would spend more and more time away from our apartment. I didn’t want to be proactive, I didn’t want to deal. Stacy finally told me she was indeed doing heroin. I moved out. She drowned herself in smack for the next few years. We were done.
I struggled to deal with the loss of that first love—all the more so because of the way it happened. At first I was physically ill—so sick that I couldn’t hold down any food. Of course, I also needed a new place to stay right away. One of my best friends, Eddy, had a great idea. His mom bought houses and flipped them; he did renovations on the properties for her. He and I moved into one of the places they were fixing up to resell.
Eddy and I had first met on the basketball court during a third-grade city league practice. I fouled him too hard while trying to block his shot—the kind of thing you do when you have yet to achieve control of your growing body. He punched me right in the nose in retaliation. For some reason, when boys get into a fight, they will often become inseparable friends. That proved true for me and Ed.
As we came up through junior high together, Eddy and I got into all of the same trouble and experienced all the same stuff together: sports, girls, drugs, grand theft auto. At some point in the eighth grade, as Andy and some other friends and I began playing instruments, Eddy joined in our new fascination with punk rock. He couldn’t play the guitar or drums, so he started to focus his attention on being a singer. And why not? He had always been the coolest of us and could certainly stand in front of a crowd without an instrument to hide behind. It didn’t take long before he was singing for one of the city’s most promising punk bands.
Once ensconced in one of Eddy’s mom’s renovation projects, we developed a routine. I would get up in the morning and go to work at the Lake Union Café; Ed would get up and work on the next phase of the refurbishing—drywall, plumbing, electrical, whatever. Most nights we would go to gigs, either playing with our bands or going to see friends’ bands. With both of us in bands, we had seemingly unlimited opportunities to meet and sleep with girls. Newly single and working my way out of an emotional funk, I now took advantage of those opportunities.
I was eighteen, and here we were, two best friends living on our own in a big house in a nice neighborhood. One night, Billy Idol, who had just rocketed to mainstream success with his second solo album, Rebel Yell, was to perform on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. It was the first time any of our punk heroes had managed to get on a show as big as this, and we were on a mission to watch it—though not enough of a mission to stay in for the night. On the way home, drunk, we got pulled over for speeding just blocks from our house. I was at the wheel of my “new” car, a 1971 Ford Maverick I had picked up for three hundred dollars. As I rolled down my window, copper penny in my mouth to throw off the Breathalyzer, I said to the cop, “But officer, we were only speeding because we can’t miss Billy Idol on Carson!” Eddy was snickering in the passenger seat and I was stifling laughter myself. The rock gods were with us that night, and the cop let us go.
Soon I could see less and less work getting done at the house. Ed was also coming out of his bedroom less frequently. The good times were coming to an end. In Ed’s case, once he started doing heroin, it took away his willpower, stripped it absolutely clean. I watched helplessly as my friend slowly sank deeper and deeper into a pit. It seemed I had lost him and didn’t have the means to do anything about it—another casualty to heroin in my innermost circle.
CHAPTER NINE
Not too long after I got laid off from the Black Angus I found a steady job again at an office in a back alley near where Hollywood Boulevard crossed the freeway. The company ostensibly sold office supplies, but the specifics of my work made me wonder. A day’s work typically consisted of a pistol-packing guy in a tracksuit with a difficult-to-pinpoint East European accent telling me to drive an unmarked truck or panel van between two random, anonymous addresses in the city. Scratch that—to call the hidden alleyways, abandoned lots, and remote underpasses where I found and left trucks “addresses” would be a stretch. I never asked what was being transported. It didn’t seem like a safe question, I guess.
With all that driving around town, I began to see how segregated L.A. was. A lot of my colleagues would refuse to make “deliveries” to Watts. That blew me away. In Seattle, there just weren’t places people refused to go. Seattle had a “black area”—the Central District—but things weren’t delineated nearly as starkly as they were in L.A. I went to school in the Central District. In L.A., people who lived in Hollywood didn’t leave Hollywood, people in the Jewish enclave of Fairfax didn’t leave Fairfax, people in Watts didn’t leave Watts and didn’t even seem to know where Hollywood was. Fear swathed the city.
One day in February 1985, as I was coming home from work, I ran into Izzy. He told me he was starting a new band with a couple guys from L.A. Guns, the band Slash had taken me to see back in October. Axl Rose, the vocalist from the version of L.A. Guns I had seen, had grown up with Izzy in Indiana, and had followed him out to L.A. Axl had just moved into a place on our low-rent high-crime block of Orchid Street, this buzzing hive of prostitution and drug dealing. Izzy’s new band also featured Tracii Guns on lead guitar. They were calling the new group Guns N’ Roses.
Almost immediately the new group parted ways with their first bass player. Izzy came to me at that point.
“Don’t you play bass?” he asked me.
“I own a bass,” I said. I was getting comfortable playing four strings by then, but I had not come close to developing my own style yet. Fortunately, one of
the advantages of being young—I had just turned twenty-one—was fearlessness and unbridled confidence. Not to mention the fact that I no longer had a guitar. At this point it was bass or nothing.
When I showed up at my first GN’R rehearsal in late March, 1985, Axl and I said hi to each other and started joking around about this and that. I liked him right away. Whoever was running the sound then asked Axl to test out the microphone. Axl let out one of his screams, and it was like nothing I had ever heard. There were two voices coming out at once! There’s a name for that in musicology, but all I knew in that instant was that this dude was different and powerful and fucking serious. He hadn’t yet entirely harnessed his voice—he was more unique than great at that point—but it was clear he hadn’t moved out to Hollywood from Indiana for the weather. He was here to stake a claim and show the whole fucking world what he had.
As for Izzy, he wasn’t a great guitar player, but I liked that—both in him and in general. I wasn’t a great guitar player, either. It was a punk thing. One night when we were talking after a rehearsal, Izzy mentioned a band called Naughty Women. It rang a bell.
“I know that band,” I said, trying to place the name. “I think I played a gig on the same bill with them once. Wait, wait, wait. Were they … cross-dressers?”
“Yep,” Izzy said.
He paused.
“I was the drummer,” he said.
Cool, I thought, this guy really was a veteran of the punk-rock club scene. He was the real deal.
Izzy and Axl already had some songs, and the other guys knew them: “Think About You,” “Anything Goes,” “Move to the City,” “Shadow of Your Love,” and “Don’t Cry.” And we did sped-up punk versions of the Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”
Rob Gardner, the drummer, played a double-kick drum set—a metal dude. Tracii was an incredible guitar player, but his sound was also really metal. My initial impression was that he didn’t have the feel I had recognized in Slash. Once again I realized with a sinking feeling that this was not the band I was seeking, not one that could move the needle musically.
They had some gigs booked, though, and since Izzy and I had a lot in common and Axl seemed so unique, I decided I would stick it out for a while. After we’d played the Dancing Waters club and another gig so forgettable I can’t remember the name of the venue, any excitement I had about the band dwindled. I missed the next rehearsal. Axl called me after that. He could tell I was pulling back and asked me to please come to the next rehearsal. I reluctantly agreed.
Axl met me outside the rehearsal space to talk about my reservations.
“You have to be part of this,” he said. “Give it another chance.”
One thing I soon learned about Axl: if he saw something in a person, he would do everything possible to ensure that person remained part of his vision.
Part of my problem with the band was that I was skeptical about the commitment of Tracii and Rob, who both had comfortable suburban lives in L.A. I had already recognized a difference between people from L.A. and people who had moved there. Axl and Izzy were distinct even from other transplants—they were serious in a whole different way. Axl sometimes slept on the street back then. It was also clear that Izzy would do whatever it took, heroin habit or not. You can come with us or not, they seemed to say, but we’re going to make our way and realize our dream. I liked that. Still, I wasn’t sure how best to express this to Axl. I told him I just didn’t think that Rob and Tracii were cut out for going all in and sacrificing everything to work on their craft. Axl didn’t argue. We went inside.
During rehearsal I had an idea. I had been through the punk-rock crucible; I was used to sleeping on floors and doing anything else necessary to get my band out there. In my experience, conditions like that also offered a chance to see what your bandmates were really made of. A shake-out cruise could be just what Guns N’ Roses needed.
I pulled aside Axl and Izzy.
“Listen, how would you guys like to play some places beside fucking Dancing Waters in San Pedro?”
They nodded.
“If we’re going to play for three people,” I said, “let’s at least go do it other places.”
“Fuckin’-A,” said Izzy.
I could tell immediately that Izzy understood what I was up to—he had been through this before. He knew this was a way to test the links in a band and find the weak ones.
In the first wave punk bands I played in, we booked our own gigs, functioned as our own tour managers, handled our own dough, made our own concert T-shirts. The do-it-yourself ethic had been strong, and as a result I knew the nuts and bolts of the business. With some songs mastered and these local gigs under our belts, I knew I could use the contacts I’d accumulated over the years to line up some shows for the fledgling Guns N’ Roses—a punk-rock tour of the West Coast.
“I think I can book us a tour,” I said. “It’ll be bare-bones, but we’ll be out there playing.”
They loved the idea.
“Yeah, let’s do it!”
I was excited now, too: we would know by the end of this whether GN’R was the real deal or not. Punk-rock tours in those days ran on pure adventure and adrenaline. You counted yourself lucky if you earned enough to pay for gas and still had something left over to buy ramen noodles. You slept at a crash house if you could find one or on the club floor if the owner liked you. But none of that was important. The main thing was that it offered the chance to prove yourself, to push yourself beyond the confines of your comfort zone, to take music you believed in to other people’s towns, to throw all caution to the wind. Come to think of it, there was no caution in those days.
I was able to book us a string of dates, mostly in places I’d played with previous bands or been through while working briefly as a roadie for the Fastbacks. The first show would be a homecoming gig for me—a June 12 slot supporting the Fastbacks at the then new Seattle club called Gorilla Gardens. The rest of the dates were in little punk venues, communal houses, and squats down the coast back toward L.A. We would play 13th Precinct in Portland, the basement of a communal punk house in Eugene, another house in Sacramento, and a club called Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. That was the full extent of the plan. We would figure out everything else, including where we would sleep and how we would eat, on the fly.
Rob and Tracii were skeptical about the idea from the start. I guess they weren’t sure whether to take the leap of faith necessary to leave home with nothing but your bandmates and wits to depend on. And just a few weeks before we were to leave, they broke the news: they weren’t up for a no-budget road trip. Not knowing where we would sleep each night was too much for them. I assured them we’d find places to crash, and anyway, what did it matter—we would be on tour, a concept that to me was pure magic.
It didn’t matter. First Rob and then Tracii backed out.
We had ten days before we were scheduled to leave for the tour.
“Don’t worry,” I told Izzy and Axl, who were fully committed and for whom hitting the road had the same mythic appeal it had for me. “I know a couple guys we can bring in.”
CHAPTER TEN
By early 1984, my band Ten Minute Warning was becoming the biggest punk act in the Northwest. Back then, to make two hundred bucks for a gig put you on top of the heap. We sometimes made $250 or $300. A weekly alternative newspaper, the Rocket, featured us on its cover, and the Seattle Times, one of the big dailies, wrote a piece about us. We were headlining concerts in Seattle and playing real shows elsewhere with good bands—we had toured with the Dead Kennedys, D.O.A., and our heroes, Black Flag. We had broken down what had always been an impenetrable wall between punk and metal when we co-headlined a show at a roller-skating rink—where all the suburban metal acts played—with a band called Culprit. Our songs had made it onto some punk compilations. And in early 1984 we signed with Alternative Tentacles, the record label run by Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys. They had us recording demos f
or an album.
The band had evolved from the Fartz. I’d been the drummer at one point and was still close to the Fartz guitarist, a guy named Paul Solger. Paul and I had taken road trips in his ’65 Mustang—a gift from his parents—to see Johnny Thunders in Portland and Vancouver. Eventually, Paul and I began to write songs together on the side—both of us on guitars—and we decided to put together a new band. I switched to rhythm guitar and we recruited drummer Greg Gilmore, who went on to play in Mother Love Bone, and bassist David Garrigues, a local skateboard legend. Our choice for singer was a guy named Steve Verwolf, a dude we all knew from the punk scene. Steve was definitely a visionary. His hair was long and he wore black leather hip-hugger pants and little else. Onstage he was a man possessed, mixing Iggy Pop–like antics with the doom and gloom of Bauhaus’s Peter Murphy and the shamanic power of Jim Morrison. By that stage I’d formed or played in a lot of bands, but up to then there had always been weak links in the bands. Ten Minute Warning felt different.
We created a new sound, too. By then a lot of us in the punk scene were getting fed up with paint-by-numbers hardcore. Ten Minute Warning’s solution was to slow things way down from hard-core speeds and add a sludgy, heavy psychedelic element. Black Flag’s singer, Henry Rollins, told us we sounded like a punk-rock version of Hawkwind—the 1970s British band that launched the career of Lemmy Kilmister, who later formed Motörhead. We took this as high praise. Ten Minute Warning had real character and dimension. We had begun to share the stage with other bands also coming out of the hardcore scene and striving to do something new, like the Replacements, a Minneapolis band we played with when they came to Seattle. We were getting better and better.
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