by Slash
WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL KIDS LOOKED a few different ways. The influence of spandex seeped in, thanks to Pat Benatar and David Lee Roth, and that trend left its colorful mark: girls wore tight, low-cut, neon body suits, and some guys weren’t far behind. I remember seeing Capezios when I was in junior high, but thank God, they were out by the time I was a freshman; although feathered hair was still standard for either sex. It was far too common and wasn’t cool by any means.
Another huge influence was the film American Gigolo, starring Richard Gere, which chronicled the downfall of a stylish Beverly Hills male escort. It was the worst thing that could have happened to Hollywood teenagers because every girl who saw it strove to re-create their personal version of that world. Suddenly, girls who were thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen tried to dress as if they were twenty-five and aspired to date well-dressed, much older guys. I never dialed into their psychology, but I watched more than a few girls I knew, as early as fifteen, start wearing too much makeup, doing blow, and dating nineteen-year-olds and twentysomethings. It was fucking pathetic and straight up sad. A lot of them became casualties of the scene before they even reached legal drinking age. After all, they had a huge head start, so it caught up to them before they even got out of the gate.
I DIDN’T LOOK LIKE ANY OF THE OTHER kids in school and my interests certainly set me apart. I have worn long hair, T-shirts, jeans, and Vans or Chuck Taylors since I first had a say in the matter. Once I was in high school, all I cared about was music and playing guitar; I never abided by the trends that swayed my peers, so I was a throw-back. It’s always been a paradox with me; I stood out but I didn’t crave or court obvious attention. All the same, I was used to not fitting in and wasn’t comfortable with anything else: I had changed schools so often that I was the perennial new guy—and probably, in the minds of my peers, the freaky new guy.
It didn’t help that to the naked eye, I wasn’t obviously anything: upper-, middle-, or lower-class; white, black, or otherwise. As I got older, and as my home address continued to change, I realized and understood why my mom so deeply pondered my school registration forms before checking one box or another: if I was listed as black in certain school districts I might be bused out of the zone to an inferior school when I otherwise might be enrolled in the better school down the street if I were a registered Caucasian. I never found a niche based on race in high school, and I’ve always been aware of my race only when it was an issue in the minds of others. I have been in many situations, back then and ever since, when I’ve noticed very “open-minded” individuals adjust their behavior because they were unsure of whether I was black or white. As a musician, I’ve always been amused that I’m both British and black; particularly because so many American musicians seem to aspire to be British while so many British musicans, in the sixties in particular, went to such great pains to be black. It was another way I wasn’t like anyone else, but I can count on one hand the confrontations I’ve had that were racially motivated; they occured once I was submerged in the very white universe of eighties metal. One time at the Rainbow I got into a fight with Chris Holmes from W.A.S.P. Duff overheard Chris saying that niggers shouldn’t play guitar. He didn’t say it to me, but it was obviously about me. As I remember, Duff told me about it later and the next time I saw Chris I went up to confront him and he took off running. Aside from insulting me, it’s one of the more ridiculous and untrue things a musician, of all people, could ever possibly say.
I FOUND MY OWN CIRCLE OF FRIENDS in high school, people who were all pretty unique, different from the rest of the student body. My closest friends, Matt and Mark, defined that period of my life. Matt Cassel is the son of Seymour Cassel, one of the greatest character actors of the past fifty years. Seymour has been in nearly two hundred films since the sixties, most notably those made with his close friend John Cassavetes. He’s been in too many films and TV shows to name; in recent years, director Wes Anderson has been his champion: he’s cast Seymour in Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Seymour is a Hollywood legend; he supported indie film making before it became an institution (his philosophy was that he’d play a role he connected with for the price of the plane ticket). He was also a figure in a hard-partying class of moviemaking royalty that included Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, Roman Polanski, and others.
I could show up at Matt’s house, sit in his room, and play guitar for hours, learning stuff off the records he had: Pat Travers’s Live, AC/DC’s newest, Back in Black; those albums provided hours and hours of riffs to learn. They lived right above Sunset on Kings Road, tucked behind the Riot Hyatt, next door to an A-frame house that is still there. There were porn movies being shot in that house all the time while Seymour was growing weed in the backyard of his place. The A-frame was a huge advantage to hanging at Matt’s: we’d wander over there and mix it up with the porn girls. It wasn’t appropriate, but they liked to get us teenage boys all fired up and frustrated by playing with each other.
Seymour had the best parties, and he had raised his kids well enough to trust them to hang out. My mom knew Seymour, but she never would have condoned the goings-on over there. At Seymour’s parties there was a lot of freedom and it was full-on. His kids, Matt and Dilynn, were so smart and independent that he didn’t have to worry: they’d already figured out who they were amid this crazy existence. Seymour’s wife, Betty, never came out of her bedroom; it was a dark and foreboding mystery to me as to what went on upstairs. Coupled with the fact that Seymour ruled the house with a bit of an iron fist, Matt allowed only a select few of his friends, of which I was one, into their world.
One day Seymour looked at me and bestowed upon me the nickname that resonated with him more than my proper name ever did. As I was passing from one room to another in his house, at a party, looking for the next whatever it was I was after, he touched me on the shoulder, fixed me with that affable gaze of his, and said, “Hey, Slash, where ya going? Where ya going, Slash? Huh?”
Obviously it stuck. My friends who hung at Seymour’s started calling me Slash back at school and soon enough that was the only name everyone knew me by. At the time, my friends and I just thought it was a cool name, but it wasn’t until years later that I caught up with Seymour and he explained it properly. I was on tour during Use Your Illusions, and happened to be in Paris, with my mom along, when Seymour was there, too. The three of us had lunch and he explained that the nickname embodied my sense of hustle, in every sense of the word. He was proud of the fact that I’d actually made a name for myself and that he’d been the one to give me that moniker. His reason for calling me Slash was that I never stood still for more than five minutes; he saw me as someone who was always working on his next scheme. He was right: I’ve always been coming or going more than I’ve ever stayed still. I am perpetually in motion, often saying good-bye while saying hello and Seymour summed that quality up in a word.
I met a ton of people at Seymour’s—including the Stones. After they played the L.A. Coliseum they came by for an after-after party at his place. I had seen the show that night; they played “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” so soulfully that I’ll never forget it. I managed to shake Ronnie Wood’s hand; I was fifteen and little did I know that he’d be one of my best friends later in life. In fact, my first son, London, was conceived in his house.
My other close friend, Mark Mansfield, has popped in and out of my life ever since we first met back in high school. Mark’s dad, Ken, was a record producer and his stepmom was a singer—his real mom lived in Santa Barbara, where he’d often go when he got in trouble—and he was constantly in trouble. Mark’s family lived in a very nice house above Sunset and Mark was a mini James Dean with a touch of Dennis Hopper. He’d try anything and he’d do anything that anyone ever dared him to do—and he’d do it with sheer enthusiasm and a smile on his face. Slowly but surely that attitude led him down a dark road: juvenile detention, rehab, and the like. Mark was the kind of guy who once called me at ten a.m. to
tell me that he and a friend had just driven his friend’s mom’s car off the road somewhere along Mulholland. They’d stolen it out of the kid’s mom’s driveway since she was out of town and inevitably launched it off the shoulder, into the canyon. Luckily for them they landed it in a tree and were able to climb back up to street level. Needless to say, the next call I got from Mark was from exile at his mom’s house in Santa Barbara.
AS SOON AS I COULD STRING THREE chords together consistently and improvise a solo, I wanted to form a band. Steven was gone, he was off in the Valley, so I struck out on my own. I had tried to start a band at the very tail end of junior high but it hadn’t gone so well. I found a bass player and a drummer whose mom taught French at Fairfax High School. This was to be my first experience with a tempermental, tantrum-prone drummer; if he made one mistake, this kid would kick the entire kit over. Then we’d have to wait while he set it all back up. The bass player in that band was just awesome. His name was Albert, and we’d play Rainbow covers like “Stargazer.” Unfortunately, Albert got into a bike accident on Mulholland Drive and ended up in a coma for a month or so. He was in traction; he had pins in his neck and in both of his legs and braces holding his legs apart—all of it. He came to school looking like a big captial A, and he had no aspirations of playing bass at all anymore.
My first professional gig was at Al’s Bar, playing in a band with friends of my dad’s. My dad was very proud of my love of guitar and always bragged to his friends about me. I don’t know what, but something must have happened with their guitar player and Tony talked them into letting me play. I’m sure they were worried about whether or not I could do it. But I got up there and was able to handle it: it was all twelve-bar blues and standard blues-based covers like the Stones, which I had a feel for. I got free beers out of it, which is what made it truly professional.
There were a few guitar players in my circle of high school friends. I met a guy named Adam Greenberg who played drums and we found a guy named Ron Schneider who played bass and we became a trio dubbed Tidus Sloan. I still have no idea what that name means…I’m pretty sure that I got it off a guy named Phillip Davidson (who we’ll get to in just a little bit). One night when Phillip was mumbling incoherently I remember being really curious about whatever it was that he was saying.
“Tidus ally sloan te go home,” Phillip said. At least that’s what I heard.
“What?” I asked him.
“Tid us all de sloans to ghos hum,” he said. Or so I thought.
“Hey, Phillip, what are you trying to say?”
“I’m stelling you to tidus these sloans ta grow fome,” he said. “Tidus sloans to go home.”
“Okay, man,” I said. “Cool.”
I think he wanted me to tell all these girls in his house to go home, but I walked away from that situation thinking that Tidus Sloan, whatever the fuck that meant, was a pretty cool name for a band.
TIDUS SLOAN WAS A PURELY INSTRUMENTAL band because we never found a singer and I certainly wasn’t going to sing myself. Basically, I don’t have the personality to be a front man of any kind; it’s enough of an effort for me to get out there and talk to people at all. All I really want to do is play guitar and be left alone. In any case, Tidus Sloan played early Black Sabbath, early Rush, early Zeppelin, and early Deep Purple without vocals—we were retro before there was a retro.
Slash and Ron Schneider, two-thirds of Tidus Sloan.
We rehearsed in Adam’s garage, which drove his mom completely insane. She and the neighbors would complain constantly, which is understandable because we played much too loud for a residential neighborhood. His mom’s name was Shirley and I drew a cartoon in her honor: it was a woman in the doorway of a room screaming, “It’s too loud and I can’t stand the noise!” at the top of her lungs. The floor of the room in the picture is littered with beer cans and on the bed is a kid with long hair playing guitar, totally oblivious.
My caricature of Shirley became the inspiration for my first tattoo, though the figure that I had inked on my arm looks nothing like her—my version has Nikki Sixx hair and huge tits, while the real Shirley favored curlers and was old and fat—though also with big tits. I got that tattoo when I was sixteen; it’s on my right arm and it says Slash underneath it. Adam explained to me later that Shirley’s frequent outbursts were entirely my fault: I had just acquired a Talkbox from Mark Mansfield’s stepmom, which is a sound amplifier that allows a musician to modify the sound of whatever instrument is filtered through it by the movement of his mouth against a clear tube that’s attached to it. Apparently the sounds that I made reminded Shirley of her late husband, who died of throat cancer just a couple years previously. He’d had to speak through an artificial voice box and the sounds I was making were too similar for her to bear. Needless to say I stopped using the Talkbox at her house.
There were a few other guitar players and bands around my high school, like Tracii Guns and his band Pyrhus. I had a moment of envy when I first started playing guitar, before I owned an electric; Tracii had a black Les Paul (a real one) and a Peavy amp, and I’ll never forget how together I thought he was. We would check out each other’s bands at parties and there was definitely a competitive vibe about the whole thing.
In high school I started hanging out with whatever musicians I could find. There were a few guys my age and a few older, left-over Deep Purple dudes, who were irretrievably brain-dead and well past their expiration date to still be hanging out with kids from high school. The best of them was the aforementioned Phillip Davidson: not only did he unintentionally name my first band, but he had a Stratocaster, which was a very big deal, and his parents never seemed to be home. He lived in this beat-up house in Hancock Park that was overgrown with weeds and we’d just party over there all day and all night. We were teenagers throwing keg parties; no parents, just Phillip and his two stoner brothers.
I always wondered where his parents were; it was like the Peanuts cartoon, all kids, no authority figures. It was a mystery to me—I always thought that maybe his parents were coming home at any given moment, but they never did. I felt like the only one who was concerned; Phillip mentioned the existence of his parents, who owned the place, but they never seemed to materialize. There was nowhere they could be hiding either; this was a one-story house with three bedrooms. For all I knew, they could be buried in the backyard, and if they were no one would ever find them because the backyard was piled high with debris.
Phillip used to wander from room to room carrying his joint or cigarette or whatever combination of the two it was, while telling stories that were really long only because he talked really slow. He was a tall lanky guy with a true billy-goat goatee, long auburn hair, and freckles; and he was just stoned like really stoned. I mean, sometimes he would chuckle, but otherwise he was pretty expressionless. His eyes seemed perpetually closed—he was that kind of stoned.
Supposedly Phillip could play Hendrix and lots of stuff on that vintage Strat of his, but I never heard any of it. I never even heard him play anything at all. Whenever I was over there I only remember him putting Deep Purple records on the stereo. He was so burned out that it was just painful to hang out with this guy. I always see the best in people; it doesn’t matter what their fucking malfunction is. But Phillip? I waited in vain for something brilliant to happen, just that small spark in him to ignite a flame that nobody else might see. I waited for two straight years of junior high and never saw it. Nope, nothing. But, he did have a Stratocaster.
I do not like to combine cocaine and guitar.
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, TIDUS SLOAN was pretty functional for a high school band. We played our school amphitheater and plenty of rowdy high school parties, including my own birthday. When I turned sixteen, Mark Mansfield threw a party for me at his parents’ house in the Hollywood Hills and my band was all set to play. For my birthday, my girlfriend, Melissa, gave me a gram of coke and that night I learned a valuable lesson: I do not like to combine cocaine and guitar. I did a few line
s just before we went on and I could hardly play a note; it was really embarrassing. It’s been the same the very few times since that I’ve made that mistake: nothing sounded right, I could not find the groove, and I really didn’t want to be playing at all. It felt like I had never played guitar before, or as awkward as the first time I tried to ski.
We did about three songs before I just quit. I learned early to save any kind of extracurriculars for after the show. I can drink and play, but I know my limit; and as for heroin, we’ll get into that later because that’s a whole other can of worms. I did, however, learn enough to know to never carry that kind of habit on the road.
The most extravagant Tidus Sloan gig was at a bat mitzvah deep in the middle of nowhere. Adam, Ron, and I were getting high at the La Brea Tar Pits one night and met some girl who offered us five hundred bucks to play her sister’s party. When she saw that we weren’t that interested, she started dropping the names of many famous people, her “family’s friends,” who were going to be there, Mick Jagger included. We remained skeptical, but over the course of the next few hours, she built this party up to be the biggest happening in L.A. So we packed our equipment and as many friends as we could into our friend Matt’s pickup truck and set off to play this gig. The party was at the family’s house, which was about two hours from Hollywood—about an hour and forty-five minutes further than we expected; it took so long that we didn’t even know where we were by the time we got there. The moment we turned into the driveway, I found it impossible to believe that this house was about to host L.A.’s most star-studded party of the year: it was a small, old-fashioned, grandparents’ home. There were clear vinyl slipcovers on the furniture, blue shag carpet in the living room, and family portraits and china displayed on the wall. For the space available, this place was way overfurnished.