Slash

by Slash

  There was a knock at the door, Duff opened it up, and there was Sly.

  “Hey, man,” he muttered because he never remembered Duff ’s name. “Is it cool if I use your bathroom?”

  “Oh yeah, sure,” Duff said.

  And that was it. Duff said that Sly might be in there anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.

  Duff also made the acquaintance of West Arkeen while he lived in that building. The only place I knew West to live on a regular basis back then was in his beat-up El Camino. I think at that point he was parking it outside of Duff ’s building, so he was a tenant by extension. I was introduced to him through Duff and he became friends with the band; much more so with Axl than with me or the rest of us at first. At that point especially I was wary of meeting new people because all manner of riffraff had started to hang around us, so I was standoffish to newcomers. It takes a lot for me to trust someone, though after a while, West and I became friends.

  West was a guitar player from San Diego and a consummate party guy who became more of a fixture than the average friend of the band: he even cowrote some of our songs like “It’s So Easy” and “Yesterdays” with Duff and “Bad Obsession” and “The Garden” with Axl. Duff and West would hang out and write songs and I would join them sometimes, but West and Axl got really tight. In addition to writing with Guns, he cowrote songs for Duff ’s and Izzy’s solo projects and all of us contributed to his project, the Outpatience, in the late nineties, just before he died of an overdose.

  West was a hard-drinking, hard-living good-times guy, so he fit in with us just fine. He was the kind of character who was so secure in his own skin and content with his own existence that if you weren’t nice to him, he’d still be amiable to you; that’s probably why he won me over in the end. For better or for worse, West was the guy who introduced the rest of us to what was then called speed and what is now called crystal meth. Speed was his thing; he always had a lot of it, he had major connections to it down in San Diego, and everyone in his orbit was always on it.

  Eventually West somehow got the money together to rent a nice house in the Hollywood Hills; it was three stories, right on a cliff, tucked away in the trees. He lived there with “Laurie” and “Patricia,” these two speed-demon chicks that might have been attractive if they weren’t so strung out. Laurie somehow held down a job in the film industry and drove a nice Suzuki jeep, while Patricia never seemed to work, but she always seemed to have money. I could never get my head around how they maintained some appearance of a normal life, with a house, money in the bank, and all that—all while doing speed with the utmost abandon. But then again, I didn’t know much about speed then.

  I used to crash there whenever I had nowhere to crash, and as West became closer to all of us, there was one thing I could never figure out: how he, too, always had money. Especially as things got crazier for us, West became the only thing like a friend that our band had in the world. He was the only one that always came through when any of us needed anything; for a long time he literally was the only one we could trust.

  AS SOON AS WE GOT OUR ADVANCE money, we collectively managed to do one practical thing, which was to rent an apartment. We got turned down by almost every management office we approached because it’s not like we had good credit—or credit at all. But finally we found a place on the southeast corner of La Cienega and Fountain; a two-bedroom, two-bathroom, ground-floor apartment. We actually got a bit domestic for a moment and went out and rented some furniture—two beds and a kitchen dinette set. We rounded out the decor with a couch we found in the alley behind the building and a TV that Steven’s mom donated to our cause. When we first moved in, Steve’s mom also kicked us off with some groceries. It was the only time that we ever had them—for maybe a week, if you opened our fridge it actually looked like somebody lived there.

  Steve and Izzy shared a room, and Axl and I shared a room, and that apartment is still there; I drive by it all the time—it’s the space with the big bay window on the first floor overlooking the intersection. When we first rented it, Izzy was still living with his girlfriend Dezi on Orange Avenue and Duff and Katerina were on Hollywood Boulevard, but mutual interests dictated that Izzy spend much of his time over at our place. Following some sort of domestic dispute, he became a full-time resident for a while.

  To me, our place was deluxe; I even relocated my anaconda, Clyde, from Yvonne’s to join me there. Unfortunately, moving out of our garage into an ostensibly nicer apartment didn’t curtail our debauched delinquency; we ended up getting evicted after the three months we’d paid for—and never got our security deposit back. It didn’t work out as efficiently as planned, but being in the same place was more or less a step toward organized productivity as a band.

  Everything was great until we got evicted, as far as I was concerned. We’d just gotten some money and I tried to be as frugal as I could in the smack-buying department, just making it stretch as far as it could go. In spite of my efforts, our place became a real shooting gallery: we’d cop down in East L.A. and it seemed like there was an endless supply in the street. Mark Mansfield came by one night, and unbeknownst to each other, we’d both become junkies, so it was great to see him. He was working with a Texas band called Tex and the Horseheads, who were also all strung out, so all of us hung out over at our place. Before this, I did dope when I could get it here and there, but I could never afford to get it consistently. At this point, though, I could finance a daily habit, and I was enamored enough of drugs that I didn’t know or care what I was getting myself into.

  The label had rented us a rehearsal space at a place called Dean Chamberlain’s over in Hollywood, where Jane’s Addiction rehearsed as well. We’d roll in there every day at about two or three in the afternoon and play for about four hours. This little box was about eight feet by twenty feet, just very narrow and long, and was lit up by unpleasantly bright, hospital-strength fluorescent lights. Basically it was like rehearsing in a 7-Eleven.

  Ironically, one of the first songs we worked up there was “Mr. Brownstone,” a track that was conceived under much dimmer circumstances. Izzy, his girlfriend Dezi, and I were up at their apartment one night when we came up with it. They had a little dinette set that we’d sit around cooking up our shit and then we’d just jam. We were sitting there complaining, as junkies do, about our dealers, as well as just complaining about being junkies, and that’s where that song came from. It basically described a day in the life for us at the time. Izzy had a cool idea, he came up with the riff, and we started improvising the lyrics. Dezi considers herself a cowriter on that track and for the record she did come up with maybe a noun here, perhaps a conjunction there. When we had it all together, we wrote the words down on a grocery bag. We brought it down to the Fountain apartment and played it for Axl and he reworked the lyrics a bit before the band worked on it at our next rehearsal. Axl could always take a simple Izzy melody and turn it into something fantastic, and that is just one of a few examples.

  Tom Zutaut was eager to find us a producer and to get us on the road to recording—little did he know how long that road would be. The first candidate he sent our way was Tom Werman, who was a big fucking deal. Werman had recently produced Mötley Crüe’s Shout at the Devil, which sold a few million in 1985, and before that had made a name for himself producing Cheap Trick, Ted Nugent, and Molly Hatchet. Werman went on to work with Poison, Twisted Sister, L.A. Guns, Stryper, Krokus, and Dokken—basically he became the sound of eighties metal.

  But he couldn’t handle us. We never even got to properly meet him. He came to our rehearsal space and we were playing “Mr. Brownstone,” at jet-engine decibel levels. Izzy and I had just gotten brand-new Mesa Boogie stacks and I was playing a new guitar: it was a Les Paul that had belonged to seventies blues guitarist Steve Hunter. I’d traded my BC Rich for it at Albert and Howie Huberman’s place, Guitars R Us. That store was an institution for every L.A. musician who couldn’t afford Guitar Center, it was the musician’s pawnshop. I
t was where I got rid of all of my shit and got new stuff. Or, when the money dried up, it was where I sold my equipment for cash to score more smack.

  In any case, we were playing “Mr. Brownstone” so brutally loud that Werman walked out immediately. He came in with his assistant, paused in the doorway, then turned around and disappeared. We finished the song and I went to the door to see if they were outside and found an empty street.

  “I guess it must have been a little too loud,” I said to the other guys.

  We shrugged it off, but I was bummed because I thought we sounded great. Then again I was used to people not getting it.

  Guns was the type of snarling beast that thrived in pits like that.

  The most well-known figure that considered working with us was Paul Stanley of Kiss, who was looking for the right band to launch a side gig behind the mixing board. Izzy, Duff, and I couldn’t have cared less; we told Zutaut that we had no idea what Paul Stanley could bring to the equation. Steven, of course, was beside himself—Kiss were his heroes, so we figured we’d let Steven have his jollies and agreed to the meeting. The process began with Paul coming down to our apartment to “discuss music.” By this time heroin had become a daily thing, so when Paul arrived, Izzy and I were doing all that we could to keep from nodding out; just barely keeping it together enough so that it wasn’t obvious…or so we thought. Izzy and I parked ourselves on the couch, and since we didn’t have a chair in the living room, Paul sat on the floor next to Steven and Axl.

  “First things first,” he said. “I wanna rewrite ‘Welcome to the Jungle.’” According to Paul, the song had real potential, but it lacked an impactful structure. What it needed was a chorus that was more memorable, more singsong, more anthemic—in a word, more like a Kiss song.

  “Ugh,” I grunted under my breath. As far as I was concerned, that was the end of our relationship. He was the epitome of the guy with the nice clothes, the trophy wife, and the nice car “stooping” to our level to tell us what to do. I didn’t take kindly to that.

  Paul was persistent, though. We saw him again not long afterward when we played a showcase that Geffen had set up. Basically, Tom arranged it because we needed to play a gig, so it was this industry-only, invite-only “concert.” It took place at Gazzari’s (today it’s the Key Club), which was a venue that we’d never, ever played on the circuit because it was totally against everything we stood for. It was so glam and gay that there were radio ads for it where the owner, Bill Gazzari, proclaimed in his thick East Coast accent, “All my bands got foxy guys in ’em! If they don’t got foxy guys, they don’t play on my stage.” Gazzari’s was where the really plastic glam metal could be found. And we definitely weren’t trying to be foxy. The only time I’d ever even been in there aside from this gig was to see Hollywood Rose back in the day.

  Anyway, Paul Stanley attended that show, and he actually bullied the sound engineer into allowing him to man the soundboard and control the mix. We didn’t find out until later, but when we did, I cringed at the thought: Paul Stanley had mixed Guns N’ Roses—at Gazzari’s. Really, how much more cliché could it get? I do remember that we got paid, because I remember counting and dividing our money and saying to Izzy, “I gotta go cop!” That was all that I cared about at the time—and that’s what I did; I took off out of there to meet up with my dealer friend.

  Paul still wanted to win us over, so he insisted on coming to our next gig, which we knew once and for all would show him who we really were and what our producer needed to capture. It was a week later, at Raji’s, which was a total dive, probably a twenty-by-twenty-foot room that reeked of beer and piss with a PA that sounded like an outdated console permanently in the red. The stage was a foot high, packed against the farthest wall from the door; the bathrooms were more disgusting than CBGB’s. In other words, it was Guns N’ Roses’ natural habitat. I think in Paul’s mind, he was coming down to prove to us once and for all that he understood where we were coming from. He was going to “hang out” on our “turf,” because, after all, he and Kiss had played dives back in the day. His intentions were good, but I can’t help but think that pretty quickly he realized that where we were coming from was somewhere he hadn’t seen in a long, long time. Guns was the type of snarling beast that thrived in pits like that.

  That show was fucking amazing: it was as dirty, muddy, shoddy, and teetering on chaos as Guns ever was in my mind. It was as honest and true as Guns N’ Roses ever got, because

  I did a big hit of smack before we went on, which, mixed with the liquor I had already been drinking, made my stomach so rotten that I’d turn around and blow chunks over the back of my amps every five minutes. I had a new guitar tech, Jason, who had to keep jumping out of the way to avoid getting coated. The overwhelming heat in there didn’t help the situation much. The show was so rambunctious, the audience so full of unruly diehards, that Axl ended up getting into a fight with some guy in the front row—he might have smashed him in the head with the base of his mike stand. The whole show was a fucking riot; there was so much energy packed into that tiny little overheated box of a room. It was fucking awesome. There’s a picture of that gig on the inside sleeve of Appetite for Destruction.

  I can’t imagine where he stood during the show, but Paul Stanley materialized after the set with his blond-bombshell girlfriend/wife, each of them in outfits that probably cost more than the market value of the entire building. There wasn’t a dressing room at Raji’s; there was a hallway between the side of the stage and the back door with a small set of stairs, where our entire band sat down after we were through playing. Paul and his girlfriend/ wife were so out of place but they tried to sit there with us anyway. We were sweaty and gnarly, and after puking about eight times onstage, I was doing my best not to lose it all over him as he said to me, with his Ivana Trump lady on his arm, “Hmm, well, that was interesting.”

  The next day we made it official: I told Tom to let Paul know that we were going to continue our quest for a producer, thank you very much. I’m sorry to say that not long afterward, I retold this story to the L.A. Weekly with an excessive degree of attitude directed at Paul. I meant no harm; I was so enthusiastic about what we were doing that to me everyone who didn’t get it was just wrong. I didn’t even remember insulting Paul publicly and therefore had no qualms about calling him a month or two later to ask for a favor. We’d begun recording, at that point, but I’d pawned my best guitars for dope and I hoped that he would be able to hook me up with some studio-worthy gear via his sponsorship deal with BC Rich.

  “Hey, Paul, it’s Slash,” I said. “It’s been a while. How are you, man?”

  “I’m good,” he said.

  “Hey, listen, I know you’ve got that deal with BC Rich. Do you think you can get me some guitars?”

  “Yeah, I could, it wouldn’t be a problem,” he said, followed by…silence. “But I won’t. Here’s a piece of advice: you should be careful about airing your dirty laundry in public. Good luck to you.”

  Click.

  Dial tone.

  It took a while, but in 2006, I got the chance to apologize to Paul at Vh1’s Rock Honors show, where I was part of a tribute to Kiss along with Tommy Lee, Ace Frehley, and others. It was all okay; it was water under the bridge. Looking back on it, I see exactly why I behaved that way: I was arrogant back then, and when you’re arrogant, regardless of who you are as a person, the fact that you’re not a fan of someone’s band is a legitimate enough reason to be a prick.

  There was no way in hell that I was going to county with fingernail polish on.

  WE WOULD PRACTICE EVERY DAY; WE wrote new songs, and we partied every night. As I mentioned before, smack was easy to find so I wasn’t keeping track of how often I did it. In my mind, it was strictly recreational—it wasn’t supposed to be the center of the universe.

  The first time I realized that I had a problem was the first time that there wasn’t any around. I didn’t think too much of it—ignorance is bliss. On that particular day
when it all caught up to me for the first time, Izzy and I decided to go to Tijuana with Robert John, the photographer and good friend who’s shot us since day one and became our official photographer on the road all the way through 1993.

  Anyway, it was a great day trip: we drank a few bottles of tequila, we wandered the streets; we watched drunk Americans be ripped off by whores in every dive bar and brothel shack on the strip. As the day wore on, I just thought I was tired and drunk and catching a cold; I had no idea of what was really going on in my body. When we got back to L.A., I remember, I passed out immediately. I woke up later that night still feeling sick, so I figured that a few whiskeys at Barney’s Beanery would cure me. I headed down there around ten p.m., and after my first couple of drinks, I didn’t feel any better; actually I felt worse. I went back to the apartment and assumed the air-raid position: I got on my knees with my head between them and my hands on my head, simply because there was no other position that felt comfortable to me. I remember that night vividly because Marc Canter popped by unexpectedly late that evening. He was as far removed from the junk scene as you can imagine. He eyeballed me curiously.

  “You really don’t look good,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “I have the flu.”

  The reality was that I was dope sick after just one day without heroin. It was hard for me to admit that to myself. As I lay sweating alone in my bed that night, I was still unwilling to regard it as anything else but the worst flu I’d ever had.

  I cut down I guess, but I continued on more or less the same path until the next time I was forced to face the fact that I had a habit—thanks to the long arm of the law. I was cruising around with Danny one night looking for dope and we managed to cop some shit, but it was very little; it was just a taste. We took it over to my friend Ron Schneider’s place (my bass player in Tidus Sloan) and we did it, hung out, and listened to Iron Maiden with Ron for a while and then left to head home at about four a.m. We were coming up La Cienega when the blue and red lights went on behind us. When we slowed down and pulled over, we were, literally, right in front of our apartment, spitting distance from our door.