Slash

by Slash

  Another stripper worth mentioning is Adrianna Smith, the girl that both Axl and Steven dated and that Axl forever immortalized on our debut record…but we’ll get to all of that in just a little bit. My little universe over at the Seventh Veil was great: I’d show up around eleven p.m., gather some tip money from the girls, head down to the liquor store, stock up on Jim Beam (the poor man’s Jack Daniel’s), and have a party started for them back at their place when they got off work. As someone with no place of his own, it was the best setup I could imagine: a cool, reckless spot full of girls where I could get away with drinking or doing whatever else I wanted to do without anyone giving me a hard time.

  In the back of my mind, I was aware that we were no closer to choosing a producer and that the inertia was destroying us. I was strung out, drinking, doing drugs when I could, with very little money—and the rest of us weren’t much better. I was back to relying on friends and living on couches and living the street life once again—but this was worse than the old days. Back then it was fun because the band and I were working toward something. Now it felt like we were too disorganized and fucked up to be anything other than vagrants and we’d “made it.” I knew deep inside that I needed to get my shit together, that I couldn’t last in the abyss much longer.

  Around this time, our dealer Sammy got busted, and that was a real turning point. I was at Izzy and Steven’s that day and Izzy’s girlfriend Dezi had gone out to meet Sammy for us at one of his regularly scheduled spots where all of his clients came out of the woodwork to score. The cops had planned a sting, and when Dezi left and never came back we got worried. Much later on we got her phone call from jail. They’d taken in all of Sammy’s clients, and were going to spring her, but Sammy was not coming back for a long, long time. That was a big reality check for us; I remember Izzy and I desperately scouring the streets looking for some smack. It was a mess. I ended up going back to Yvonne’s and kicking there for the third time. I just stayed up for days and didn’t feel well, claiming I’d caught the flu again.

  Meanwhile, Tom Zutaut was at his wit’s end. He called us into Geffen one day, we thought to discuss another handful of producers that he wanted us to meet. Once he got us in his office, he just stared at us for a while. I was nodding out, still a mess from drying out at Yvonne’s, and the rest of the guys looked rough as well.

  “What the hell can I do for you?” he said. “Take a look at yourselves. Do you even think you’re capable of making a record?! You guys have to get it together! Get focused! Time is running out!”

  His comments hung in the air, but they made an impression because slowly but surely, without making a big deal about it or even acknowledging it, we got ourselves together.

  ALAN NIVEN AND TOM ZUTAUT HAD SENT every producer in town to meet us, and just when it seemed hopeless one finally stuck—Mike Clink. We did one session with him and recorded “Shadow of Your Love,” which was the best song in the set the first time I saw Hollywood Rose. Our version of it didn’t make the album, but it was eventually released on a Japanese EP.

  In any case, when we listened back, it was all there: finally we heard ourselves on tape exactly the way we wanted to. It was just us, but refined; Clink had captured the essence of Guns N’ Roses. Finally all systems were go. We’d spent seven months in limbo, barely playing and intermittently recording with producers that weren’t right. It felt like an eternity; because the way we lived, a few months would have decimated a lesser band.

  Mike Clink had what it took; he knew how to direct our energy into something productive. He knew how to capture our sound without losing its edge and he had the right kind of personality to get along with everyone. Clink’s secret was simple: he didn’t fuck with our sound—he worked hard to capture it perfectly, just as it was. It’s amazing that no one had thought of that. Clink had worked with Heart and Jefferson Starship, but what sold us was that he’d worked on UFO’s Lights Out. That record was a standout to all of us, because Michael Schenker’s guitar playing on it was both outstanding and sounded amazing.

  I’ve always found that producers are the type of people who have all the answers to other people’s problems but never to their own. They’re the first to tell other people what to do, how to play, how to sound—all of it. They often don’t have their own identity, which makes them hard to respect. Mike was different, he was amiable, he was never intrusive, he was easygoing, quiet, and observant. And he knew who he was. Rather than make suggestions as if he knew better, he chose to take it all in. From the start we completely respected him.

  We booked ourselves time at S.I.R. studios and with Mike at the board, the band felt free to be ourselves; at our very first preproduction session, we started writing what would later become “You Could Be Mine.” At another session, we started to work up “Perfect Crime,” which was something that Izzy brought in. We weren’t in there to write new material, but we were so comfortable that it just came to us.

  We started to demo all of the songs that we were considering for Appetite, and went through them with Mike pretty much as we’d done them before with very few changes. The only creative shift that occurred was one of Alan’s suggestions actually. In “Welcome to the Jungle,” originally we repeated the section where Axl sings “When you’re high, you never want to come down.” Alan suggested taking one of them out. He was right. It made the song tighter. But aside from that, all of those songs were captured as they were in one or two takes. It’s a testament to how well things were going in the studio and how great a mood we were in. We never listened to suggestions—from anyone. But we were willing to give it a shot, and we found out that it worked. Alan was already managing Great White at the time; he also produced them and served as a cowriter. It’s a very good thing that none of us were aware of that at the time, because that session might not have gone so well and “Welcome to the Jungle” might have been a very different song. It never bothered me once we found out about Alan’s connection to Great White, but it had quite a negative, snowball effect among some of the other members of our band.

  I can only imagine how ecstatic Tom was that Guns N’ Roses now had a real manager and a producer that we wanted to work with. It took a couple of years, but it finally looked like this group of lunatics that he’d convinced the label to believe in was actually going to turn out the way he’d promised we would.

  Alan set us up in Rumbo Studio in Canoga Park, where Clink liked to work, to do our basic live tracks. Canoga Park was close to where Steven grew up in the Valley, which was a foreign country as far as I was concerned. I think that might have been the point—they thought keeping us out of Hollywood would force us to focus on recording. Alan rented us an apartment at the Oakwoods, which are these generic fully furnished complexes all over the world. He also rented us a van for transportation. For some reason, I can’t imagine why, I became the designated driver.

  Mike hired some real professionals to help out his street rats: Porky, a famous guitar tech, and Jame-O, the drum tech. They’d done hundreds of records, total pros who were also fun-loving partiers. They were invaluable to us.

  Recording a real album in a proper studio was new to us: we’d done demos in various locations around L.A. Some of them were epic: we did the earliest versions of “Don’t Cry” and “Welcome to the Jungle” at Hollywood Sound, in the same studio where Led Zeppelin recorded their second album. Some of our sessions were epic in a different way, such as the time we got into an altercation over payment with the owner of some shitty studio in Hollywood. He was so coked out that he pulled a gun on us.

  “You’re gonna fucking pay me,” he said, his eyes opened far too wide. “Right now!”

  “Oh, you’re right,” we said. “Yes, we’re wrong…you’re right; we’re just going to go.”

  Someone grabbed our tapes on the way out and thankfully no one got shot.

  The first day of recording, we commenced with “Out Ta Get Me,” doing the same thing we’d always done, but in an entirely new setting: w
e set up in a big live room and just jammed. When I heard the playback, I realized that I had a huge issue on my hands: my guitar sounded like shit coming through a real studio’s soundboard.

  During my period of recklessness, I’d managed to hock nearly all of my equipment, including Steve Hunter’s Les Paul. I’d convinced Marshall to send me some amps when we had our rehearsal space out in Burbank but I’d never paid for them, so they took them back. Basically I had nothing: at the time I had three guitars. Two were Jacksons, one of which had been made especially for me: it was a black Firebird with my Shirley tattoo on the body (it sounded like shit). The other was a Strat-like prototype with an arch top that they had loaned to me, and I never gave back. It was one of only two that were ever made. My third was a red BC Rich Warlock. And none of them sounded good through the studio monitors.

  I was so frustrated and nervous. We’d come this far, and I was determined to have my guitar sound perfect on the record. But I didn’t know how I was going to make that happen, because I was more or less bankrupt. I tried to downplay how I felt during those basic tracking sessions by drinking a lot and jumping around while I played with the band, knowing that somehow I had to figure this out and rerecord all of my parts. The other guys weren’t going to need to do that—Izzy, Duff, and Steve were so tight right off the bat that those tracks needed no improvement at all.

  Recording was going great, but life in the Valley was not. After we wrapped each night, Tom Zutaut, Axl, Duff, and Mike would go home. Theoretically, Izzy, Steve, and I were supposed to go to the Oakwoods and do the same. Usually we were much too excited, so we’d try to go out and we quickly became problematic residents of Canoga Park. We figured that there must be nightlife somewhere, so we sought out anything at all that appeared to be a rock club, a pub, or a bar. We’d roll into what always turned out to be a very conservative neighborhood disco, if that even makes sense, or some bar ruled by a suburban country-music situation. A scraggly mini-gang of long-haired guys in either of those scenarios was an instant clash.

  At the time Alan had hired a guy named Lewis, who was posing as our security guard, to look after us. Lewis weighed somewhere between three hundred and four hundred pounds and drove a late-seventies sedan with the driver’s seat pushed completely into the backseat just to accommodate his girth. He was a really sweet guy from Houston and I loved him, but when he was supposed to be on security detail, he was usually eating. Lewis had this way, and I don’t know how he did it, of going around to the back door of any place we might go to and procuring a huge carton of food from the kitchen. They would literally give him a cardboard box full to the top of take-out containers with everything on the menu in there. This wasn’t a burrito or a taco kind of handout—Lewis had entire entrées, like four of each of them. It was something the likes of which I’ve never seen. He’d take this haul out to our car and just eat.

  Meanwhile, inside, usually the three of us got into or just barely avoided full-on bar fights. We were psycho enough to scare people off most of the time, but sometimes it got ugly. Luckily, we weren’t ever hauled out to the parking lot by a mob of redneck shitkickers—if we had, we might have interrupted Lewis’s meal.

  Valley nightlife got so tedious that one night when we came home after a great day in the studio and a few hours of heavy drinking, we did the only thing that made sense: we destroyed our Oakwoods apartment Keith Moon style. We tore down everything that wasn’t nailed to the wall, and smashed everything else beyond recognition. We turned the beds over, we smashed the nightstands, and we pulled the kitchen counter out of the wall. We smashed the huge sliding-glass doors, we broke the windows and every mirror, glass, and plate in the place; we destroyed the TV, and the armoire the TV was in. There were splinters and glass everywhere. I woke up on the couch, which was broken, too, with an insane hangover and surveyed the room through squinted eyes.

  “Uh-oh,” I mumbled…to myself.

  Once my accomplices and I were awake enough, we agreed to lie: we decided that someone had broken in when we weren’t there. We came back late that night and passed out, opting to deal with it in the morning. We told Alan that exact story that day at the studio, because by then he’d become the band’s mother figure, a lot like Malcolm McLaren was for the Sex Pistols.

  We had every intention of sticking to our bullshit version of events, but as Alan began to ask questions, our story got more and more confused and transparent. Before he called us out, we admitted everything. The funny thing is, after considering his options, Alan decided to go back to the Oakwoods and feed them the same story we’d invented. They didn’t buy it either—I can’t imagine why—so it went on our tab. For a while there we were banned from all Oakwoods properties worldwide. Apparently the ban was lifted somewhere along the line, because I lived in another of their locations briefly five years later. I managed to be a problem once more, this time by mistake: my snake—I can’t remember which one I had with me—got adventurous and crawled down the toilet. It resurfaced in a neighboring room and scared the shit out of someone. Sorry about that…

  WE WRAPPED UP THE BASIC LIVE recording in just a few weeks and everything sounded great—except my guitar. Alan had booked me time at a studio called Take 1 to rerecord my parts, but I still hadn’t found a proper guitar. I didn’t know what I was going to do; I tried to play it cool and not show signs of stress, but as our time drew to a close, there was no solution in sight. On our very last day at Rumbo, Alan came into the control room and laid a guitar case on the small couch behind the soundboard. The little cubby where the couch fit was lit by one overhead light, which perfectly spotlighted the guitar as Alan opened the case.

  “I picked this up from a local guy in Redondo Beach,” he said. “He makes them by hand. Try it out.”

  It looked good: it was an amazing flame-top 1959 Les Paul replica with no pick guard, and two Seymour Duncan pickups. I felt it out and I liked it, but I didn’t get to plug it in until I arrived for my first session at Take 1.

  I have romantic memories of those days at Take 1: from the first to the last moment, the entire process was magic to me. It was a small place with no frills—basically just a glorified home studio, but it was my first time recording guitar parts, and what we accomplished there can never be duplicated.

  The moment I plugged in my new guitar I thought it sounded pretty good; I was ready to find the right amp. We started going through different Marshall heads—many of them actually, and it was an arduous process. I remember taking every rental amp, putting it in the studio room, miking it, and plugging in. I’d play a few chords, then my tech, Mike Clink, and I would tweak the head, then I’d play a few more. Mike might make some adjustments in the control room or come out and move the positions of the microphones, then I’d play a few more chords and we’d do it all again. It was all entirely worth it. Mike Clink is such a genteel and laid-back guy that he just let me do what I needed to do even if it wasn’t necessary: I kept renting and returning amps; we went through about eight before I found the one that sounded exactly how I wanted it to. It was like an act of God because this amp wasn’t stock—it was a Marshall that had been customized by someone.

  I used it on the entire record and I intended to make it mine when the sessions were done; I told the rental company that it had been stolen from the studio. Unfortunately, my own guitar tech returned it without telling me. Once S.I.R. received an amp that I’d reported stolen, they weren’t exactly ready to send it back out to me: when I called they told me that it had already been rented out to someone else.

  Anyway, when I heard my guitar through that amp, I knew that it was right immediately; it was a truly magic moment. I plugged into it, as I had all of the others, and casually hit a few chords—and that was it. It was that perfect Les Paul/Marshall combination where the depth of the guitar’s tone and the crunch of the amp come together perfectly. It just sounded amazing.

  “Hold on,” Mike said. “Don’t move. Don’t do anything.”

  He made
a few minor tweaks to the head and it sounded even better. And that was that—no adjustments were made to my guitar setup for the entire session—no mikes were moved, no knobs turned, nothing. We’d found the sound I’d been looking for and we weren’t going to lose it.

  That guitar has been with me ever since. It was made by the late Jim Foot, who owned Music Works in Redondo Beach. He made about fifty of those Les Paul replicas entirely by hand with no detail overlooked. It became my only guitar for a while, and has become my mainstay in the studio ever since. It has sounded different on every record I’ve done, but it is the same exact guitar. It just goes to show how volatile recording is: the size and shape of a room, the soundboard used in recording, as well as the molecular quality of the air all play a part—humidity and temperature affect a recording tremendously. Where the guitar and amp is placed, how it is miked; all of these things can drastically influence the result.

  I didn’t know any of that at the time, but I am glad that we didn’t move the amp or guitar one inch for the Appetite sessions—it was just fine where it was. But now I understand why I have never been able to re-create my exact sound on that record ever since. It is more than just setting up the same equipment in the same booth, because believe me many have tried. There has been a lot of interest in the equipment and the exact technical specs of the amp that I used for Appetite but it can never be replicated. I’ve actually played a modified Marshall amp that is supposedly identical, but even with that original guitar, it didn’t sound the same. It couldn’t—because I wasn’t in the same studio under the same conditions. Those sessions were one of a kind.