Slash

by Slash

  I was unemployed and undirected there for a while, which was a perfect moment for my mom to get me into school again—any school. God bless her perpetual commitment to getting me educated. This time she did the only thing that made sense—she knew that I loved music, so she enrolled me in some weird vocational music school.

  I’m very disappointed in myself that I can’t remember the name of this place, though I do remember how unfocused our teachers were. I’m now pretty sure that my mom found out about this place via a flyer at the Laundromat. In any case, I enrolled, I showed up, and within weeks my teachers had me out in the field laying cables and putting filters (“gels” they’re called) over lights at various live venues. This place educated its students in the arts of sound and light engineering for live performance in a very hands-on fashion. There were about six of us in my class and almost immediately we were assisting techs on-site at venues like the Country Club, the FM Station, and various others in L.A. Actually it was a total sham: the school was clearly funded or run by the production company that put on these shows, so we, the students, were not only working for them for free, they had also taken our tuition money. Shady as it was, I did learn to run light and sound for live concerts. I enjoyed it, too, until the night I did the light show for a group of Duran Duran wannabes called Bang Bang. I realized two things as I watched their set: 1) it wasn’t possible for a music performance to be more ridiculous, and 2) this sound-and-light gig was taking me nowhere fast.

  I WAS DESPERATE TO BE IN A BAND; SO I combed the ads in The Recycler—L.A.’s free musicians’ paper—every week, looking for an invitation to something that appealed to me. For the most part it was futile: the ads were nothing but shredders seeking shredders. But one week, I saw an ad that intrigued me: it was a singer and guitarist looking for a fellow guitarist in the vein of Aerosmith and Hanoi Rocks. And more important, it expressly stated that “no beards or mustaches” need apply.

  I called the number in the ad and made arrangements to meet them at this guesthouse that they were renting on some street up in Laurel Canyon. I showed up there with a girl that I was dating and recognized Izzy immediately from the day he came into the music store with my Aerosmith drawing. I then realized that the other guy must be that high-pitched singer I’d heard on the tape. I thought, Cool, this might actually go somewhere. Their little shack was more like a closet: there was room enough for a bed, with space to sit on the floor in front of it, and room enough for a TV—which was the only source of light in there.

  I talked to Izzy for a while, but Axl never got off the phone, though he nodded his head in acknowledgment when I came into the room. At the time I thought it was rude, but now that I know him I understand that wasn’t the case. When Axl gets into a conversation, there’s no stopping him. In Guns, we used to call it a Twain Wreck: when Axl started telling a story, he was as long-winded as Mark Twain. That first meeting, though, was pretty uneventful: either they’d decided that they were no longer interested in a second guitar player or I just didn’t look the part. Whatever the problem was, it went nowhere at all.

  THE MINUTE STEVEN GOT BACK TO HOLLYWOOD, he proudly informed me that he’d learned to play drums at his mom’s house out there in the Valley, which I am sure contributed to his being kicked out again. Steven was ready to start our band, even though at the time I was still halfheartedly playing with Tidus Sloan and answering the odd ad in the paper looking for a guitar player. I didn’t take him seriously; to me Steve was my social director—and a bit of a nuisance: he started coming to Tidus Sloan rehearsals, and every chance he got, he insisted that he was a better drummer than Adam Greenberg. When I eventually found myself without a band, Steve had annoyed me so much that I wasn’t even willing to watch him play, let alone play with him.

  Steve’s grandmother had given him her old blue Gremlin; a car that looks exactly like it sounds—stout and boxy. Apparently, every day, since he couldn’t practice in his grandmother’s house, he’d been loading his drum kit into this thing and driving out to the public park on Pico across the street from Twentieth Century-Fox studios that includes a swimming pool and a golf course. I knew it well; I used to play soccer there when I was nine. As weird as it was, Steven would set up his drums next to a section of the walking path and just practice all afternoon and evening. I’m sure the seniors, joggers, ducks, and dog walkers were happy about it; a blond rock kid with teased-out hair playing a full-size double-bass-drum metal kit as hard as he can is bound to be a crowd pleaser in any setting.

  I eventually agreed to check him out, though I continued to wonder what the hell I was thinking as I drove out to meet him. It was completely dark when I got there. I parked next to his car and wandered out to the jogging path and there he was, drumming away in the dark. He was back-lit by the distant floodlights, while the huge expanse of the park and the golf course loomed behind him. It was a very weird scene. I took that in for a while before I even paid attention to his playing. But once I did, I forgot about the backdrop. Sitting there in the dark, watching Steven play, I wasn’t convinced of his abilities, but I was satisfied. Besides, I didn’t have a better option open to me anyway.

  STEVEN AND I WERE IN A SITUATION that was familiar and unwelcome—we were looking for a singer, and this time, a bass player as well. Steven was an asset in that regard, because he knew all the players: he was out so much that he had seen nearly every band there was to see in the L.A. rock scene at the time. Steven was also up on the gossip: once Mötley Crüe took off, Steve heard that Lizzy Grey, Nikki Sixx’s cofounder in London, intended to put that band back together. That was huge—Steven and I had seen London when we were younger and they blew our minds. Izzy Stradlin was in that second version of London, but once he left, things fell apart a bit and there was a vacancy for a guitar player and a drummer. Steve and I auditioned for them at the space where the legendary funk band War used to rehearse and record on Sunset, down the street from Denny’s. By this time that spot was nothing but a bombed-out hovel; today it’s where Guitar Center Hollywood is, by the way.

  So we rehearsed there with London for four days; we learned a ton of their songs, and even though it was a step up from nowhere, nothing ever came of it. If anything, the experience was interesting because I saw firsthand just how pompous those who believe themselves to be rock stars can be. The guys in London behaved like they were larger-than-life, as if Steven and me and everyone else in the world existed on the other side of an invisible fence. It took me back to my childhood and all of the rock stars that I’d met back then through my parents. Growing up around my mom and dad’s clients and friends, I’d seen it all and had learned how to act and how not to act. I’d seen real rock stars throw temper tantrums and watched my mom deal with them. I’d learned through observation just how delicately to treat those personality types.

  At the time I thought the guys in London were worldly and I was intimidated and impressed. Not so much now. I saw the guy who was singing for them at that time on the street in early 2007 while I was driving to the studio to record with Velvet Revolver. There he was, cruising down Sunset Boulevard wearing the same getup, still looking for a gig.

  After that fruitless endeavor, Steven and I struck out on our own. We needed a bass player and a singer, but we figured we’d go about things logically and land ourselves a bassist first so that when we began auditioning singers, we’d actually have a whole band for them to sing over. We took out an ad in The Recycler; it was in the “Seeking” section, and it went something like this:

  Bass player needed for band influenced by Aerosmith, Alice Cooper. Call Slash.

  We got a few calls, but the only guy we wanted to meet was someone named Duff. He’d just moved out from Seattle and he sounded cool on the phone, so I told him to meet us at Canter’s Deli at eight p.m. Steven and I got a corner booth right near the front; we had our girls with us—my girlfriend Yvonne had a big bottle of vodka in a brown paper bag in her purse. She was the one who introduced me to vodka, actually;
before I met her, I drank nothing but whiskey.

  No one remotely resembling a musician came into Canter’s for a long while and the girls were definitely drunk when Duff did show up. I think the four of us were debating what he might look like when this bone-skinny, six-foot-plus guy with short spiked blond hair rolled in wearing a Sid Vicious–style chain and padlock around his neck, combat boots, and a red-and-black leather trench coat in spite of the seventy-five-degree weather. No one had predicted that. I kicked Steven and hushed the girls.

  “Check it out,” I said. “This has to be him.”

  Duff had been in a series of punk-rock bands in Seattle: the seminal but mostly overlooked outfit the Fartz, for whom he’d played guitar, the legendary pre-grunge power quartet the Fastbacks (drums), and a few others. Just before moving down to L.A., he had taken up bass. Duff was as musically versatile as he was driven: he didn’t leave Seattle because he wasn’t creatively satisfied; he left Seattle because he knew that the scene (at that time, at least) was a losing proposition and he wanted to make it. He knew that Los Angeles was the West Coast music capital, so without a plan and with no friends waiting to take him in, he packed up his beat-up red Chevy Nova and drove down to L.A. to make a name for himself. I respected him immediately for his devotion: he and I shared a similar work ethic. It established a kinship between us right away that hasn’t faltered at all over all of these years.

  “So you’re Slash,” Duff said as he squeezed himself in beside me in our booth at Canter’s. “You’re not what I expected at all.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “Well, what were you expecting?”

  “With a name like Slash, I thought you’d be much scarier, man,” he said. Steven and the girls and all laughed. “I’m not even kidding, I expected you to be some kind of punk-rock psychopath with a name like that.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said smirking. We shared a laugh.

  If that hadn’t broken the ice, my girlfriend Yvonne made sure to smash it a few minutes later. We’d sort of settled into small talk: Duff was getting to know us and vice versa, when, apropos of nothing, Yvonne leaned across me and put her hand on Duff ’s shoulder.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” she said, louder than necessary.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

  “Are you gay? I’m just curious.”

  For the first time in hours our table was silent. What can I say, I’ve always been attracted to outspoken women.

  “No,” Duff said. “I’m definitely not gay.”

  After that exchange faded the five of us went upstairs, piled into the bathroom, and broke out the vodka. And not long after that, we formed a band right then and there, and once again spent the next month or so looking for a singer. We auditioned Ron Reyes, better known as Chavo Pederast, when he was the front man for Black Flag for a few months back in 1979. There were a few other characters in there as well, but as usual, we couldn’t find the right guy. All things considered, we wrote some really cool material: we came up with the main riff to the song that later became “Rocket Queen,” and a few more great ideas.

  Despite the creativity flowing between the three of us, I began to get really frustrated with Steven. He never kept up with the dedicated work ethic that Duff and I shared; though he maintained twice the social schedule. It was so aggravating to watch him expend his energy on partying when we had so much to do. At the time, it was obvious that should we find the right singer, we would really have a band that was worth something. The problem was, we didn’t have a singer, but Steven was behaving as if we’d already been signed by a major label. In the end I was the one who broke up the band; I told Duff it just wasn’t working and I broke off with Steven in every way for a while, too. Duff went on to greener pastures: coincidentally, when he’d moved to Los Angeles he got an apartment on Orange Avenue, directly across the street from Izzy. Soon enough, those two ran into each other on the street, and that was that; Duff became a player in the L.A. Guns/Hollywood Rose universe.

  THOSE WERE THE ONLY TWO BANDS COMING up behind Mötley Crüe that were worthy of note—L.A. Guns and Hollywood Rose, each of which were revolving-door outfits that shared a number of local players to an incestuous degree. L.A. Guns was founded by Tracii Guns, who had gone to Fairfax High with me—that band was nothing but a tighter, harder version of the sleazy blues shredding he played at keg parties back then.

  Hollywood Rose was something else. I met up with Steven just after he’d seen them, and as he described their high-pitched singer, a guy who could tear the roof off, I realized that for once, Steven wasn’t exaggerating. I didn’t put it together that I’d already heard this guy, probably because I’d heard him on what is most likely the shittiest, low-fi recording of a live band that had ever been made.

  Steve and I went to see Hollywood Rose at Gazarri’s and it was the first time that I beheld, hands down, the best singer in Hollywood at the time: W. Axl Rose. Much like the tape, the show was nothing more than an amateur garage band doing their best, but they had an amazing sense of reckless abandon and unbridled energy. At least two of them did: apart from Izzy and Axl, the band was pretty nondescript, but those two friends from Lafayette, Indiana, had an ominous presence about them. Izzy kept doing knee slides all over the stage and Axl screamed his fucking heart out—their performance was blistering. Axl’s voice drew me in immediately; it was so versatile, and underneath his impossibly high-pitched shrieking, the bluesy natural rhythm he had was riveting.

  As I said, Hollywood Rose (like L.A. Guns) was a revolving-door band whose players all knew one another and were always coming or going. Bass player Steve Darrow worked with Izzy delivering the L.A. Weekly during the afternoon, so they were tight, but Axl didn’t seem to like guitar player Chris Webber for whatever reason. Axl apparently up and fired Chris without telling anyone else and somehow Steven heard that they were holding auditions for guitar players the next day.

  It’s all as vague and illogical to me now as it was then, but Steven convinced me to show up at their rehearsal space, which was a room in some hovel called Fortress on Selma and Highland. That place was the epitome of ratty Hollywood punk, because only punk rockers would have thought to trash it so extensively. Rock guys don’t trash things until they’ve made it and are older; only punks do that out of the gate. I’m not sure what color it was originally, but the carpet at Fortress had turned a sick yellow brown, not only on the floor, but all the way up the walls and ceiling, where it had been installed to dampen the noise. Every corner was disgusting; the entire room was a lice-infested cube.

  I started rehearsing with them and it was going fine—until Izzy took off during the second song. Now I know that bolting is Izzy’s defense mechanism when he thinks things aren’t quite right: he never makes a show of it, he just slips out and won’t look back. Apparently Izzy had no idea what I was doing there that day and understandably didn’t like it that Axl had fired Chris Webber without consulting, or even informing, him.

  Eventually, a while later after we’d become good friends, I asked Izzy about it. Izzy always maintained an aura of cool; he was never ruffled, he never let that guard down. But when I asked him about this, he leveled a deathly serious gaze at me, so I had no doubt that he was sincere.

  “It’s pretty fucking simple,” he said. “I just don’t like being dictated to under any circumstances.”

  In any case, he split. I’d been dragged into the middle of that situation, entirely clueless to it. After Izzy left, there was a short, awkward moment…and then we just started playing again.

  I didn’t even know that there was another concentric circle of tension around the move to bring me in: Tracii Guns had been vying for that gig. He’d been trying to recruit Axl and Izzy into a band for quite a while. I can’t imagine that he was excited to hear that they’d chosen me over him. I had no idea about any of this, and even if I had I would have ignored all of it anyway. Finally, finally, I was in a band with a great singer—or a singer at all.

 
Slash in Hollywood Rose, bassist Steve Darrow is at left. Slash is playing the voice box.

  Axl had been brainstorming on how to put together the right band, and he thought Izzy and I would make a great pairing, but since they’d never actually discussed it before he put it in motion, I was in but Izzy was gone. Hollywood Rose, as I knew it, was Axl, Steve Darrow, Steve Adler, and me. We booked gigs at Madame Wong’s East and West and rehearsed in a studio called Shamrock on Santa Monica Boulevard between Western and Gower. That place was an incredible scene, where just about anything might happen; considering that it was located way past East Hollywood, anything really could happen without arousing the authorities. There were three studios in the complex and the owners threw insane parties every weekend, where it was always balls to the wall.

  Axl and I became really good friends during this period because, for a while, he lived with my family and me. It wasn’t because we were soul mates or anything: Axl never had a place of his own back then; he just crashed wherever he could. When he lived with us, he’d spend his days sleeping in my subterranean room surrounded by my snakes and my cats while I was at work. When I got home, I’d wake him up and we’d go to rehearsal.

  All the same, I learned a lot about Axl during that time. We talked about music and the things we thought were great; we’d listen to a particular song and dissect it, and it was clear that we had a lot in common in terms of our musical taste. We had a mutual respect for all the bands that had influenced me.

  Axl also had an interest in talking about life, both his own and in the greater sense. I didn’t have a lot to say but I was always a good listener. So he told me about his family and the hard times he’d endured in Indiana; it was half a world away from anything I could comprehend. Axl impressed me then the way he always has: no matter what anyone might say about him, Axl Rose is brutally honest. His version of events might be singular, to say the least, but the truth is, he believes in what he says with more heart than anyone else I’ve ever met.