by Slash
At the time we were still living at the Stiefel house officially, though once we chose Alan as our manager, we began to vacate in anticipation of letting Stiefel know the bad news. Axl moved back to Erin’s, I don’t know where Steven was staying, and Duff was where he’d always been, so Izzy and I became the only full-time residents, living in comfortable squalor in the downstairs back bedroom. It was a gypsylike scene; our friend Danny crashed there much of the time, too, amid the sparsely appointed rooms.
Finding dope in L.A. had become difficult suddenly, so Danny and I scoured the streets regularly looking to score. One of those nights we got lucky and managed to pick up a sizable amount. We were elated; we drove back to the house and stashed it all in a gun-shaped lighter of mine. We hid it in my drawer because the next morning we were off to San Francisco. I saw no reason to bring any along, because in San Francisco, I’d never had a problem scoring top-grade China White.
We packed all the gear in the van we’d rented; Danny and Izzy and I drove up in Danny’s car, and when we got there, Izzy and I went straight to someone’s apartment, where we planned to score our shit. The dealer didn’t get there before the show, so we went and did the gig, which was a blur because all that I could think about was getting my smack afterward. The rest of the band packed up, Danny included, and headed back to L.A., while Izzy and I offered to drive Danny’s car back ourselves because we wanted to score. We went back to the apartment and waited around for the shit to show up. We waited…we waited…we waited…nothing. At that point, we were getting jumpy, and when the dealer finally showed up it was crap—just useless. We looked at each other, both realizing that we were a fuck of a long way from home, and we didn’t have much time before we turned into pumpkins.
It was well into the next morning when we hit the road, but we knew that, at the very least, I had a bunch of shit stashed back at the house. All was well, we were making good time…until we ran out of gas. We lost a good hour there what with hitching to the gas station and back. Once we got on our way again, speeding to make up for lost time, as the itchiness stalked us, we got a flat tire. Changing a tire is never fun, but when your internal clock is counting down the seconds to your demise, it’s something else altogether.
We finally got home that night, thinking that we were cool and all was well. There’s a dope camaraderie that kicks in between junkies who are about to get high together, and as Izzy and I headed into the house, we were the greatest friends, just as tight as can be; all arm in arm and laughing about everything we’d just been through getting there. We went into my room, I opened up my stash drawer…and discovered that all my shit was gone.
Then I called Danny.
“Hey,” I said. “Didn’t I stash my shit in my lighter?”
“Yeah,” he said innocently.
“It’s gone.”
“No way.”
“I can’t find it.”
“That really sucks.”
“Get over here and help me!”
Izzy and Danny and I proceeded to tear the bedroom apart, then the rest of the house. I knew that I had put it there and I knew that Danny was the only one there with me when I did, but I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“Man, you know what?” Danny said after we’d exhausted every possible stash spot. He shook his head. “I hid it. I hid it when I was high. I’m going to try to remember where…let me think.”
After Danny thought about it long and hard, he came up with a few corners we hadn’t checked; a few wild goose chases. Then he went home again, leaving Izzy and me with the impossible task of trying to hook up with Sammy, our Persian dealer—our only dealer at the time. It was not looking good: we beeped Sammy every ten minutes and he never called back.
The next morning, Izzy’s girlfriend Dezi came over and she could tell that the situation was dire: we’d been up all night, we’d driven from San Francisco, we’d been paging dealers unsuccessfully all day, and we had to open for Ted Nugent in a few hours. Izzy and I were tripping out, nothing was happening, we had no one else to call, and we were wrecked. We were starting to jones pretty hard; we were like vampires out of Blackula, just rolling around on the ground and going to the bathroom to puke every five minutes.
Our show with Ted Nugent was all the way down in Santa Monica, at seven-thirty p.m. Sammy was not calling us back, so we had to figure out how we were going to get something in our system—anything at all—to make us human enough to make the show. We were in no condition to perform, let alone even drive ourselves to the gig. In desperation, Dezi called her friend Melissa, who lived up in Hollywood, in Izzy’s old apartment. She had heard from Sammy and was going to meet him shortly.
That was enough to motivate us: we drove over there somehow and hung out waiting for Melissa to return with our drugs. It looked like we might have taken care of one problem, but at the same time, it was around five p.m. and we were about an hour from the gig. Finally she returned, Izzy and I got our shit, we did all that, and what a relief that was. Fuck! We were once again functional. We had barely enough time to join our band, who were waiting for us so that we could play our first arena, to a sold-out crowd of three thousand.
We hightailed it over there. We had no artists or parking lot passes on us, and after the night we’d had, we looked like scabs off the street. We left Dezi to park the car and climbed the fence at the back of the arena for lack of a better plan. In the process I got caught on the chain links and the button of my jeans popped off, so I spent the rest of the night making sure my zipper didn’t go all the way down leaving me hanging out there, because I’ve never been the type to wear underwear.
Izzy and I somehow snuck into the loading area and made it up to the backstage area, and as we started down the hallway toward the stage I saw Gene Simmons. He was standing at the other end giving us a foreboding stare, which is something he is very good at doing. I had no idea why he was there, but it added to the surreal quality of the last twenty-four hours. Izzy and I got to the dressing room with less than ten minutes to spare. The guys may have been annoyed at first, but they were soon relieved. Disaster averted…we took one look in the mirror and headed to the stage.
And that was the first time we ever played “Sweet Child o’ Mine” live. I hadn’t at all mastered the signature riff to the degree that I could execute it on a whim, but I pulled it off anyway and the band as a whole played it really well. The whole set was good, and we had a collection of friends there: Yvonne, Marc Canter, and a few more of my “normal” friends. Even better, right after we got offstage, Izzy got beeped back from Sammy, who was going to meet us at the Stiefel house. Yvonne and her friends were there backstage, and at the time she and I were together again and the whole intervention incident was bygones. She didn’t know exactly where I was in terms of drugs—and I didn’t feel the need to tell her.
She was just there being a very supportive girlfriend, cheering her boyfriend on at his first big gig at a live arena. All things considered, she was letting me do my thing. Of course she wanted to celebrate afterward, which was a problem. I couldn’t wait to get out of there and get home to do drugs, but I didn’t want her to know so I tried to tell her that I’d call her and we’d meet up after we dropped off our guitars, but she wasn’t having it—she and her friends were going to meet us up at the house.
Izzy and Danny and I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate our show than with some smack, so we flew back toward Griffith Park to score. It was so early that it wasn’t even dark out yet, so as we cruised up Fairfax and stopped for a red light at Fountain, it was easy to see our dealer Sammy’s car in the lane beside us. It added to the elated, epic mood of the day—and cut Sammy’s commute in half. At this point, I felt like I stood a chance of getting high at the house before Yvonne arrived.
We scored from Sammy, sped up to the house, and ran inside like lunatics: Izzy ducked into our room and slammed the door and I locked myself in Steven’s bathroom, which was lit by a red bulb he’d in
stalled. I was in there trying to navigate my fix, all while shaking and huffing and puffing from nerves in this unnatural red light, when suddenly there’s a knock at the door.
“Hey, babe,” Yvonne said. “Are you in there?”
“Oh, yeah, I am!” I said…. “Yes I am. But I’m taking a shower. I’m all sweaty from the show.” Then I turned on the water.
“Let me in, babe,” she said.
“I’m in the shower,” I said. “I’ll be right out.”
I finished what I needed to do, I threw some water on myself, and I went outside. I’m pretty sure she knew about it. Yvonne didn’t want to stay over at our house—I can’t imagine why—so I agreed to go back to her place with her. And that was the night that I decided fuck it, I’ll just kick. I’d fixed in the early evening, so it wore off at about one a.m. and for the next few days I did a cold turkey there in Yvonne’s bed. It wasn’t the last time I’d do so before we all got it together to record Appetite, but each time I did, I never told her what was really going on. I acted like I had the flu and played down how terrible I felt. Yvonne was busy; she was in school, so most of those days I was on my own in bed, in hell. The truth was, she was happy enough that when she left I was there and when she came back I was there, even if I was just a shadow of myself on my back, in her bed.
I kicked at Yvonne’s that time for a whole week, and despite the potential fiasco surrounding the gig, no one knew about it for better or for worse. Everyone in the band was on such a high after that show; I only regret that I didn’t meet Ted Nugent that night, because he’d been such a huge influence on me when I was young.
Danny eventually admitted to Izzy and me that he’d done all of that dope I’d stashed, and I’ve never forgiven him for it. It was a cold-blooded thing to do that nearly ruined Izzy and me in the eyes of our bandmates. If it had all gone wrong, it would have caused our band untold professional embarrassment at a very crucial point for us. But that’s the thing about smack—it’s the devil. It is so alluring and seductive that it turns you into a dishonest, backstabbing demon. Being a junkie is akin to what we imagine vampires are: it has an enticing aura at first but it becomes a hunger that must be fed at all costs. It completely takes over, and it reels you in. It starts with a taste here and a taste there and then you’re doing it all the time. You think it’s your choice, but it’s not that way—soon you need to do it all the time. Then you’re hooked into a really vicious cycle before you’re even aware that you’ve become just another statistic.
IN TRUE GUNS FASHION, I DON’T THINK we ever formally informed Stiefel and company that we weren’t going to sign with them—we just deserted the house, leaving a sea of trash and property damage in our wake that Tom Zutaut had to deal with. Alan was our manager and that was that.
Releasing the Live Like a Suicide EP afforded a small advance, so Izzy and Steven rented a small apartment just south of Sunset right near the Rock ’n’ Roll Ralph’s—the supermarket in West Hollywood where every local musician buys beer and whatever else they subsist on. Duff was where he always was, living with Katerina, and Axl lived with Erin. I was the only blatantly vagrant member of the band, shacking up with Yvonne or other girls or crashing on whichever floor I found at the end of the night.
At this point in time, there were many strippers in our midst. All I can say is God bless them all. Many a band before and after us have had this connection. Strippers who hang together are virtually like a band themselves, and we related to one another. They were generous and thought we were cute or dark, mysterious musicians, or just lost puppies that they had to tend to and found attractive. And maybe they felt protected around us, too. The fact that they usually had this uninhibited sexual energy didn’t hurt. All in all, they were entirely appropriate for guys like myself.
There was one named Christina who had a roommate, and I’d shack with either one of them on any given night. I lived there for a while and would sleep in one or the other’s room, or with them both, depending on how things went. Those girls lived down the street from Izzy and Steven in an apartment building full of strippers on La Cienega. I was hooked up over there, you could say, and called that place home as the band proceeded through another waiting period, which, as usual, spelled nothing but trouble.
Steven, Izzy, and I had a lot of fun over at Christina’s: dope was more readily available now that we were all back in Hollywood, though still nowhere near as plentiful as it had been when we’d lived there last. After I got clean, though, I did my best to stay off it. I remember one night I was hanging out with Axl and Izzy over at the stripper house and trying my best to abstain. I didn’t have any money on me that night: dope was scarce enough that it could be found but not easily enough that people were willing to share for free. I thought I could just hang out and not do it, but I couldn’t—I had to get out of there. Not long after that, I was back on it—it was no use.
I crashed wherever I could, and did whatever came to mind, and there was a point in there when I hooked up with Dave Mustaine of Megadeth. We became friends; he was strung out on smack and crack and he lived in the same neighborhood, so we hung out and wrote songs. He was a true, complete fucking maniac and a genius riff writer. We’d hang out, smoke crack, and come up with major heavy metal riffs, just fucking dark and heavy as hell. Sometimes Dave Ellefson would join us; we got along great, we wrote some great shit. It got to the point, in our drug-fueled creative zone, that we started seriously entertaining the idea of my joining Megadeth. Guns was in a holding pattern, after all, and I was high enough to consider all kinds of bad decisions. Dave Mustaine is still one of the most genius musicians I have ever jammed with, but still, in my heart of hearts, I knew I couldn’t leave Guns.
Another place I frequented, as did many of us, was Hell House, a pit that embodied our collective mind at the time. It was a very obvious Rorschach test for anyone who might consider working with us or knowing us at all. Hell House was a West Arkeen production; it was a place—in theory, a “home”—that he’d rented with a few of his Harley-Davidson biker friends who had relocated from the East Coast.
The house was a ranch with three bedrooms along one end from front to back. The rear bedroom was occupied by Red Ed and his girlfriend/wife. Their room was off-limits to all because Ed was the biggest biker in residence and his girl was an even more formidable threat—you knew on sight not to fuck with her—but they were both sweet as could be. No one ever disturbed their room; in fact I don’t think anyone had ever even been in it. The middle bedroom was where these other bikers, Paul and Del James, lived. Their place was set up to be a small home recording studio, and West had the bedroom in the front, which was such a pigsty that no one wanted to go in there. All you could do was lie down on the bed; it was such a mess you couldn’t stand in there and you couldn’t sit down.
I hear that there was a backyard at Hell House…I’d love to know what it looked like. During all of the time that I spent there, including my time as a resident, I never made it past the kitchen. That was one of the areas, along with the living room, where transient members like me gathered and left the formidable bikers and their girlfriends well enough alone in their rooms. Visitors were allowed in the living room, the kitchen, and that other room…I guess it was the “den.” There was also the pantry, where West often chose to pass out. As chaotic as it was, some kind of unspoken law applied where no one disturbed the legal residents, while every common area was a free-for-all war zone where everything in sight could be broken or lit on fire no problem.
I can’t imagine who decided to rent those fuckups their property because they turned it into a communal crash pad more gruesome than anything else I’ve ever seen in a first-world country. It was the second-to-last structure on the block; it was surrounded by apartment buildings, and the front lawn sloped up so that it looked like it was on a hill. It was just south of Sunset on Poinsettia, and as you came down the block, it stuck out like the house in Psycho. There were a few things that only spending a night
there could teach you, the most important being that if you lay down anywhere there was a two-to-one chance that you’d leave with crabs. I’m still not sure why the lot of us weren’t just hauled in by the cops every single night. There were always cars and bikes on the lawn and trash all over the place; there were always people coming and going and loud music at all hours of the night. Hell House was so raucous that from a distance it appeared to be vibrating.
One of the regulars to be found at Hell House was Del James, a true oxymoron: he was a biker guy with tattoos and the whole thing, but he was a writer. Del was tight with all of us at one point but he became tighter with Axl as time went on. Axl really took to him, responding to his intellect and how Del patiently listened to Axl express himself deeply. They did a lot of writing together and I think they still do. Del ended up writing treatments for some of our videos, as well as having written the short story that inspired Axl to write “November Rain.”
During this bit of band downtime as we searched for a producer, we frequented Hell House a bit too much, but I was the only one vagrant enough to live there on and off as well. I even did a few early interviews there. When I read them I couldn’t believe how shocked the journalists were by the surroundings. To me there was nothing crazy about it at all.
She gave each and every one of us crabs.
MY OTHER MAIN SOCIAL SCENE, ASIDE from Hell House and the stripper complex across the street from Izzy and Steve, revolved around the ladies of the Seventh Veil, which is a strip club on Sunset that is still alive and kicking. I liked to shack up with a few of the girls who worked there who shared an apartment off Hollywood Boulevard where we’d usually drink ourselves senseless all night long. One of the girls in that scene was named Cameron. Every single one of us fucked her at one point or another, and Steven ended up dating her for a while, and across the board she gave each and every one of us crabs. It was ridiculous; we started to call her Craberon—to her face. I gave her the benefit of the doubt; I thought that maybe I’d picked up crabs over at Hell House or any of the other questionable places I chose to sleep at the time, but that wasn’t the case. Craberon had a nice little apartment of her own in West Hollywood and the one time I slept with her over there I got crabs there, too.