Slash

by Slash

  Jaws 3-D wasn’t that great; and neither was that shot of heroin. I noticed, halfway through the film, that I wasn’t high and that I’d drunk about two or three of those beers, while Todd had downed the rest, one after the other, just pounding them. Then he suddenly left the theater to call Girl. He was gone for a really long time, and I hoped that was a good sign—maybe they were patching things up. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case: when the show was over I found Todd slumped on the floor by the pay phone completely beside himself because Girl had rejected him, apparently in an extremely harsh manner.

  I steered Todd back to my hotel doing what I could to sort him out, hoping to get him settled down. He was completely distraught, but after a while, I managed to get him relaxed, lying down in bed, slowly edging toward sleep. And that was precisely when our “friends” from earlier in the day knocked on the door. They were all set to shoot dope and hang out and Todd suddenly perked up and was eager to join in. It was another losing battle, so I got on board, I shot almost all of my dope because this stuff still had yet to kick in. At the same time I was monitoring Todd to be sure that he didn’t have too much, because he had been drinking heavily for about eighteen hours. I can’t say what happened for sure, but I’m almost positive that he got a shot from someone else who was there that night when I wasn’t looking. What I gave him wasn’t strong enough to cause what happened.

  Maybe an hour after everyone showed up, Todd stood up in the middle of the room, kind of leaning to one side, then suddenly collapsed. His breathing was slow, he wasn’t responding, so I got him into the bathtub and doused him with freezing-cold water. I shook him, I slapped him, I did everything I could to wake him up. All while our “friends” gathered themselves and fucking split without so much as a word.

  There I was with my best friend, Todd, in my arms in the bathtub. I was freaking out; I’d OD’d before but I’d never dealt with anyone else OD’ing on me. I did everything I could to keep him conscious. I was confused because I did, as far as I knew, twice the amount that Todd had done and I wasn’t even high. I started to wonder what else he had in his system that I didn’t know about. I didn’t know what the fuck to do. Suddenly Todd came around: he was semiconscious, he was breathing, and for a few fleeting moments his eyes seemed to focus on me and the room around him. His breathing became regular and finally I felt comfortable. I dried him off and got him into bed.

  I sat there next to him, watching his breathing, and called our mutual friends to tell them what was going on in an effort to calm myself down a bit. I also called the only person that I knew in New York well enough to confide in—a girl named Shelley who worked at ICM, with Bill Elson. I was speaking with Shelley, watching Todd carefully, when all of a sudden, his breathing stopped. I dropped the phone and shook him, and slapped him, while holding him up. I beat on his chest in desperation but he wouldn’t come around. I called 911, then threw water on him, but nothing worked. I couldn’t save him—Todd, all of twenty-one years old, died in my arms. I was flooded with every emotion, fear, panic, anxiety…and where the fuck were the paramedics?

  When they finally arrived, they were complete assholes. It had taken them nearly forty minutes. They came in the room and stared at Todd as if he were a bag of garbage.

  “Oh shit,” one of them said, a bit too loud for my taste. “What is this, now?”

  “I know,” the other one said. “This is stupid, he’s long gone.”

  “I don’t know why we even bothered…. Glad we didn’t rush!”

  They took the body away and left me there in the room with Todd’s wallet, cowboy boots, and his other belongings. I had barely begun to grasp what had happened when the police arrived. They gave me the whole good cop/bad cop interrogation, asking if I knew where he got the dope, asking me where the syringe was. They set themselves up in two separate rooms in the hotel and they sent me from one to the other for about three hours. Once they were done and satisfied, they split and told me that I’d need to be at the station at eight a.m. the next day to sign papers confirming “receipt of the body.”

  That statement alone was way too much for me; once they left I went down to the street, sat on the sidewalk with my back against the wall of the hotel, and tried to figure out what had happened. I saw the sun come up and before I had any kind of answer, it was time to scrape myself off the pavement and get down to the precinct. I’ve never been so disoriented in my entire life.

  That place was as ramshackle as Barney Miller and I signed whatever it was that I needed to sign—which was as impersonal as filling out a form for lost luggage. I returned to the hotel in a daze. Lois had yet to return from the night before. I was lying in the bed when I heard an inhospitable knock on the door. It wasn’t housekeeping—it was serious. The manager and a security guard stood there, telling me that Lois had not only not come home but she’d bailed on her bill, and the hotel had no intention of granting me a late check-out.

  I returned to my perch on the sidewalk, and after a while, not knowing who else to call, I called Alan. He arranged for me to go to Shelley’s place and get some rest. Once I did I just passed out from the exhaustion. The next thing I knew Alan was there; he’d flown in to make sure I got back to L.A. in one piece. I’m glad he did, because I was numb and paralyzed.

  That was the worst thing that had happened to me up until then—or since. Todd was my best friend and he was gone. It didn’t end there. When we went up to San Francisco for the funeral, I had to deal with finger-pointing from Todd’s obviously distraught family and the guys in his band—everyone thought that his death was my fault. Todd’s stepbrother was friends with Del James—he knew me and even he thought I was to blame. It got very ugly. Todd’s family even hired a private investigator to check me out for a while; so on top of the mourning, an unjust black cloud of accusation followed me around, while I’d been the one in the end who had done everything possible to keep Todd alive.

  It was a hell of a wake-up call: not only had I come face-to-face with the realities of the voracious lifestyle I lived, but I also learned that by living so overtly I would always be an easy target—even to those I trusted—those who knew me the best of all.

  8

  Off to the Races

  I can say one thing about the “musical highlights” of 1987, it’s that they were more stereotypically eighties to me than the entire decade put together. In 1987, Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” spent February 14 through March 7 at number one—more weeks than any other single that year. In 1987, Whitney Houston became the first female solo artist to have an album debut at number one. Robert Palmer took home the Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance for “Addicted to Love” and the Eurythmics took home the Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Group for “Missionary Man.”

  Dirty Dancing and Three Men and a Baby were the big movies of that year and every song that came on the radio was saccharine and over-produced: Madonna’s “Who’s That Girl?,” Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time,” Steve Winwood’s “Back in the High Life Again.” The music industry was full of other bad ideas in 1987: compact discs were already out, but the powers that be decided that “cassette singles” were the future—and launched that format with a Bryan Adams track called “Heat of the Night” that withstood the test of time just about as well as cassette singles did.

  As for straight-ahead hard rock in 1987, Aerosmith made their comeback with Permanent Vacation, but other than “Rag Doll” and “Dude (Looks Like a Lady),” the songs most played on the airwaves were nothing but the weak and weaker. There was Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again,” Heart’s “Alone,” Great White’s “Once Bitten,” and Billy Idol’s cover of “Mony Mony.” And somewhere between the two there we were: neither Guns N’ Roses nor Appetite for Destruction fit into any preexisting niche in the musical landscape of 1987. As much as we’d “made it,” it was the same as it ever was: we had to build a space of our own.

  Appetite for Destruction was released on July 21, 1987, to little or no fanfare
at all. To be kind, I’ll say that it was a hit on the underground circuit; it had a small cult following, transmitted by word of mouth, like Metallica’s Kill ’em All. We found early fans in The Cult after their lead singer, Ian Astbury, saw us play at the Marquee in London; later on he told me that he knew immediately that we’d be huge. He got us signed up as the opening band on a two-month leg of their North American tour in support of Electric.

  That album was produced by Rick Rubin and was a major departure from The Cult’s Goth-influenced roots. It made sense that they’d want a hard-rock band like ours supporting them because Electric sounded like it was recorded in 1973. The Cult had a huge worldwide audience by then, and though Electric would be the album to do it for them, they hadn’t quite hit it big in America. I was exposed to that record through the girl I was sleeping with at the time. Chicks were good for finding out what was cool at the moment—they always seemed to be up on the records of the day.

  Before we took off on The Cult tour, we shot the “Welcome to the Jungle” video, which was our first. It was a two-day shoot. The first day we shot all of those little vignettes that define each of us as individual characters in the video: Axl gets off a bus, Izzy and Duff are seen out the street, etc. If you blink, you miss my appearance: I’m the drunk sitting in a doorway with the brown-bagged bottle of Jack. We shot those scenes on La Brea, outside of some little storefront that our director, Nigel Dick, had found. I was not unfamiliar with the long and arduous process of making videos: I was an extra in a Michael Schenker video for a song off his Assault Attack album in 1982.

  Over the course of the evening as I waited for my call time for “Jungle,” I got plastered drunk. I found the constant cycle of “hurry up and wait” that is standard on any kind of film or video shoot so boring that by the time they were ready for my scene, it was more of a candid portrait. That video captured where I was at in that moment: a minute after the director called “Cut,” I got into a fight with our manager, Alan Niven, over what I have no idea—and neither did he. I told him off and then I wandered into the night and hitchhiked to who knows when.

  The next night we shot at the Park Plaza Hotel, which was the location of Dale Gloria’s Scream Club. Dale is a local nightlife celebrity in Los Angeles who has owned and run a variety of clubs—Scream was the most legendary. That second day, yet again, was another long shoot on location, but at least we shot the band performing the song live. We made it an event: we did the song on a closed set, then we opened it up and filled the club with an audience and played it three times in a row. That was cool. And that was a wrap on our first video.

  A day or two, maybe a week, later, we set off on tour with The Cult to support them during a two-month, August-and-September swing through Canada, the West Coast, and the South. That tour was great; none of the usual bullshit happened where the headliner predictably sabotages the opening band by turning down their sound so that they make that much more of an impact when they take the stage. I think The Cult had circumvented that issue by choosing us; a band from L.A. that no one had heard of. Whatever it was, there was great camaraderie among our bands. Ian and Axl got along very well and Duff and I hung out a lot with bassist Stephen “Hagus” Harris. Still, I’m not quite sure that they knew what they were getting when they hired us. One thing was for sure: this outing confirmed my passion for touring. These were meager beginnings, but they launched my enduring love affair with the road—I remain an irretrievable road dog as of this writing.

  Another pattern that has endured in my life established itself again at this time: I had ditched heroin as a daily habit and made the smooth transition into booze. We were working now, so I’d predictably replaced one addiction with another, exchanging smack for full-tilt drinking. I was naive to think that I was so tough that I’d gotten myself all clean and had no problems with addiction whatsoever—the truth was I hadn’t changed anything. I’d only substituted the substance. I transitioned my addiction from illegal to legal; because alcohol was acceptable to everyone. It was an expected facet of everyday life in rock and roll, so if I was drinking heavily but not shooting up, those in my circle were fine with that. What did they know?

  From that point on, aside from a few isolated incidents, it was a few years before I had serious heroin issues again. The interesting thing is that in the interim, my entire point of view on heroin changed: soon it was as if I’d never tried it at all. Somehow I totally forgot about it, and lost all interest in it, even when people around me did it in my presence. I still don’t get it. I did take my drinking to an all-time high as a replacement, though I tried really hard to be mindful of never exceeding my limitations before a gig.

  A long time ago someone had taught me that the best cure for a hangover was another drink—the hair of the dog that bit you. That became my philosophy, because it worked; the only problem was that during this period, the parties never seemed to stop, and so began a cycle. I woke up with a hangover every day, so I started every day with a fresh drink, and then drank through to the next party that night. In no time, the parties blurred: I was drinking all night into the next day and into the next night into the night after that. There really wasn’t a day when I took time off from drinking because there was generally a party to get to every day; it was all part of my daily routine.

  We were a gang of heathens who thought we knew everything but in reality we knew nothing.

  ON THE CULT TOUR, WE STAYED IN cheaper hotels than they did, but that didn’t stop us from wreaking havoc at theirs. Often, the night ended with Duff and me being kicked out either by the hotel staff or the band themselves, and being faced with the challenge of finding our way back to wherever the fuck our hotel was. One night I was so drunk that I passed out on a couch in the lobby of The Cult’s hotel and Duff left me there. I woke up at around five a.m. after just having wet myself in my sleep. To make matters worse, I didn’t have my hotel-room key and had no idea where we were staying. The staff at the hotel would not help me at all, probably because I was soaked in pee and smelled like a bar. I headed out into the Canadian cold; it was freezing, and I wandered around, just hoping I’d find my way. The only hotel that I could see once I got outside was a long walk away, but lucky for me it turned out to be ours. I was even luckier to be wearing my leather pants, because I wasn’t as frozen as I might have been. That’s a wonderful side effect of leather pants: when you pee yourself in them, they’re more forgiving than jeans.

  I was just so excited to be on tour anywhere with an actual tour bus, no matter how shitty or unreliable it was. As a band, we were like the scrappy underdog team in a sports movie; we had inferior gear, and nothing but the clothes on our backs, but we had enough heart to win the championship—we were a rock-and-roll version of Slap Shot. We were even playing in hockey rinks in Canada: the tour started out in the eastern provinces and continued on to the West Coast, down into the American Pacific Northwest, south through California, then across Arizona and Texas into Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta region. It was a trek.

  In Canada, nothing shocked us but we shocked everyone. Too often I felt like we were the Blues Brothers in that scene when they show up to play the redneck bar and they’re pummeled with beer bottles. We had the attitude to back it up whenever we found ourselves unexpectedly in a hostile environment, which was good…because a few times we did.

  Even when we didn’t, all across Canada, we got weird looks wherever we showed up. We thought we were normal, but I could see pretty clearly that the way we carried ourselves was not normal to these people at all—or other people for that matter. We were a gang of heathens who thought we knew everything but in reality we knew nothing. I imagine that The Cult looked at us like a volatile piece of equipment: we were interesting to some of them because we had a unique timbre; but we were a machine that might crap out at any moment.

  Cult singer Ian Astbury was really entertained by how explosive we were: he enjoyed it; in his mind, we were ferocious and really hungry and all of the qualit
ies that seasoned rock people envy. He was right: we were all that and more—we were like an M80 in a Coke can. Cult guitarist Billy Duffy, on the other hand, just seemed like, “Yeah, whatever.” He either wasn’t interested or wasn’t buying it. In any case, more often than not, they’d stop by to take a look at our antics.

  WE GOT UP THERE AND DID OUR GIGS every night on that tour, but the truth is that I never felt satisfied doing those shows. We had yet to become a solid touring entity; we weren’t seasoned pros just yet and that ate at me. It probably made us entertaining because we were so loose around the edges: we showed up with no experience; just the clothes on our backs, the gear on the stage, and a handful of songs to play for people who had never heard of us. I think we were the only ones who knew we had a record out.

  We played hockey rinks, theaters, and a few small festival dates with a handful of bands on the bill. And as much as I was happy to be out there touring, which I thought was the greatest thing ever, I couldn’t get over the fact that it wasn’t quite as good as it should be. We never got there in my mind because our presence on a large stage just wasn’t up to par. But that’s just me being overly critical, which is definitely a part of my character. I was unable to write those gigs off like I imagine the Sex Pistols would have.

  That said, it felt like a homecoming when The Cult tour arrived at the Long Beach Arena. I remember rolling in there late the night before and staring at the building, completely starstruck. I’d seen Ozzy, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Billy Idol, and countless others there and for so long, I’d thought playing there meant you’d arrived.

  I’d even seen Ratt there against my will: as I mentioned, Yvonne had dated their singer, Stephen Pearcy, back when they were still called Mickey Ratt. When she and I were together, the group headlined there and she was still so proud of him that we had to go, even though he was a complete moron. She was thrilled that Ratt had made it from living together in one cheap apartment to headlining the Long Beach Arena. And now I had and I can’t lie; when we got that gig, I had a tremendous feeling of accomplishment. To a big touring band, in the grand scheme of things, playing to five thousand or so at the Long Beach Arena didn’t mean shit—but to us at the time, it was everything.