by Slash
I had two snakes that had been given to me when I had my apartment on Larrabee: one was a six-foot red-tailed boa constrictor named Pandora that was a gift from Lisa Flynt, Larry’s daughter. The other was a nine-foot female Burmese python named Adrianna. Both of them lived in my bedroom closet and both were in the video. I had just moved them to the new house and I remember that the day of the video I sent Adam to get them and he came back completely freaked out—and without the snakes.
“Um, yeah, well, I tried to get them,” he said nervously. “But they are out of the cage, loose, and on your bed.” So I had to go back to the house to fetch them—no one else would.
I remember that day pretty well; I was just starting to become one of those junkie musicians that assumes that what they’re doing is so commonplace and accepted that they almost do it out in the open. I showed up at that shoot, breezed by all of the lighting and camera guys who’d been huddled around all day preparing for this scene, and locked myself in the bathroom. I was now that guitar player whose reputation preceded him and I lived up to it: I stayed in there for eight minutes, then came out loaded and lay in bed with my boa around me. I didn’t do much as they shot what they needed. I don’t think I said a word to anyone. It must have been surreal; it wasn’t the sixties anymore; it was actually the end of the eighties. In the sixties musicians traveled with their entourage and did shit like that. I was this lone guitar player with a snake, just doing my thing, shooting my scene.
AFTER RENTING FOR A WHILE, I DID what anyone with new money should do: I bought a house like my business manager told me to do. I still had no clue as to my future or how to handle finances; I had no material aspirations at all. I didn’t spend much on anything at that point; money was still an abstract concept to me. Possessions had never mattered to me, though suddenly everyone around me began to be very concerned with them.
I found a house off Laurel Canyon, which was the area of L.A. that set my mind at ease: it reminded me of the best memories I have of my youth. I bought my first house on Walnut Drive, just off Kirkwood, which is just off Laurel Canyon, and it was forever known as the Walnut House. Incidentally, Walnut Drive was just off the street where Steven fucked the thirty-year-old at Alexis’s party so many years before.
The Walnut House was a two-bedroom, funky little tucked-away pad in need of interior design, so it seemed natural to me to hire the team that had styled the “Patience” video to transform my new house into a similarly gypsylike environment. They found all of the furniture at thrift stores and antique furniture shops, and while they got it all together, I moved in with our international publicist, Arlette. She had been hired on back when we played those first three English dates at the Marquee. She’d taken a maternal shine to me, probably because I was such a stray puppy at the time. She let me bring my snake Clyde over, who’d been living with Del James for a while, as well as Pandora and Adrianna. Actually I moved a bunch of other snakes in there, too, into the living room of her two-bedroom apartment off Cynthia and San Vincente in West Hollywood, where Arlette still lives. She was incredibly generous to let me bring all of my pets there; unfortunately, she also had to deal with my rampant heroin habit: every single night one shady character or another came around back and knocked on my window…her window, technically. I knew she wasn’t a huge fan of my reptiles, but she was less a fan of me staying up all night, shooting dope, and having undesireables stop by in the wee hours of the morning.
A funny thing happened with the snakes, though. Arlette was scared of them at first but she became, with no encouragement from me, a true snake freak. I eventually gave her a baby Burmese python that grew to fifteen feet long. They became great friends: she took him swimming with her, she’d take baths with him, and she talked to him like he was a dog. She was convinced that the snake was human and understood everything she said, and I must say that he acted like it.
Arlette was very concerned for my welfare when I lived with her and she pointed out the obvious: I had transformed myself from a happy-go-lucky alcoholic into a fiendish monster junkie who bore no resemblance to the guy she’d known all those years. I knew she was right; I knew I didn’t look all that healthy and I didn’t feel all that healthy. I stayed with her for three or four months but I did little to change.
Instead, I occupied myself with the redesign of my house. It was turned into the gypsy opium den I wanted: they refinished all of the molding and wood, and painted every room in dark colors. The kitchen was a deep forest green; my favorite drug bathroom was entirely black. Another room was painted midnight blue and the living room was deep purple. There was a sepia tone to another room, as if it were out of an old Western movie. I also bought myself my first car to go with my first house: it was a Honda CRX, and like every car I’ve ever had, it was black inside and out.
I was pretty out of control at the time. I remember showing up to meet the contractor to talk about redoing my bathroom and thinking that breaking out a few lines would be a good way to break the ice.
He and I stood in the bathroom as he walked me through the work that needed to be done.
“Yeah, yeah, cool, man,” I said. I slapped down the toilet-seat cover and cut out four thick lines of coke. “You want one?”
He looked pretty uneasy. “No, no thanks. I’m on the job,” he said.
“Okay, right, that’s cool,” I said. “I’ll do yours, then.”
“It’s not just that, it’s also eight o’clock in the morning,” he said smiling apologetically.
At that moment I was every single nightmare cliché of what that guy had ever heard about rock stars, rolled into one: even more so because he had been hired to turn my extra bathroom and its huge corner Jacuzzi into a massive snake terrarium that took up a quarter of the room. He was going to build glass walls from the floor to the skylight to enclose the tub, which was elevated, plus add a set of Plexiglas stairs so that you could see my pets wherever they might be. I couldn’t wait to fill it with trees and all the other shit that snakes like. In the Walnut House I kept about ninety snakes and reptiles: I had lizards, caimans, all kinds of animals.
When the work was done and I finally moved into the Walnut House, I commemorated it by getting really high. I had this great round Oriental wooden table with intricate carvings and a glass top in the den. It was to be the centerpiece for all kinds of cutting over the years, but that first night, Izzy and I sat there with one lightbulb on, on this dark red velvet couch. Needless to say, I didn’t clean up right away.
Not long after I moved in there, I saw my ex-girlfriend Sally again. My bed in that house was a loft, on the second floor, in a room that was pretty pitch-black aside from the light cast by a lamp next to the pillow. I had these boxes around the end of the bed that were full of magazines and had remote controls mounted on the inside of them for the TV that rose from a cabinet at the foot of the bed. That bedside lamp was an antique with a salmon-colored glass lampshade that threw off the softest light; I loved it. Anyway, I remember that night very well. I’d gone to sleep earlier than usual and suddenly woke up with a strange premonition. I turned on the lamp to get my bearings and there she was. Sally was towering over the end of the bed; just this silhouette on the ceiling and wall—at first I didn’t know who it was. It was pretty scary. At that point in my life I had guns, but I didn’t have them with me and I’m glad; if I did, it’s possible that I could have shot her, she’d scared me so.
Getting inside wasn’t easy; she’d had to jump a fence, walk down a steep set of stairs, and she’d been lucky enough to find my extra key under the doormat—which, of course, was forever removed from there afterward. She was not in a good way, so I let her sleep over that night, and in the morning I drove her down Laurel Canyon and dropped her at the corner of Sunset. It wasn’t the last time I saw her, but it was the last time she ever got inside my house like that. From what I heard, she hung around L.A., and got into trouble. The very last time I saw her was in New York, where she was hanging around with Michael
Alig and the notorious Limelight crowd; after that I heard she went back to England. And is much happier now.
It’s tough to be the kind of person who hangs around the edgier fringes of society if you’re not a musician or someone who has a purpose being there. Everyone else is a disposable player out there in the void on the scene. Most of the girls who dated us back then were these innocent chicks whose lives were changed forever after one of us came into it for however long it lasted. We were like a vacuum back then that sucked people up and spit them out; a ton of people around us fell by the wayside that way. Some people died, not because of anything we did to them, but as a side effect of being too close to the flame. People would get attracted to our fucked-up weird life and just get it wrong and drown in our riptide.
STEVEN AND DUFF PURCHASED HOMES close to my new place, just over Mulholland Drive, on the Valley side of Laurel Canyon. They were on opposite ends of the same street. As I mentioned, Steven was building his version of domesticity with some chick, and Duff and his future wife, Mandy, were settling into their home life together. Duff was always very good at maintaining a household; he never fell into the transient kind of lifestyle that I did. I might have lived less than two miles from those guys, but I didn’t see them too often; if they’d been drug dealers, I’m sure that I would have.
All things considered, I realized that I had to clean up a bit before we’d be able to get rehearsing again. Duff didn’t want to write with me when I was high and I couldn’t blame him for that. When there was a bit of a drug drought in L.A., and it became a huge pain in the ass, my subconscious trigger of needing to play superseded my drug craving. I just locked myself up in my house and with the help of Dr. Stoli and his assistants I got through my withdrawal.
Once I got off the smack, Duff and I got reacquainted and we scheduled rehearsals. At that point we did so without any confirmation from Axl.
The only messages I got from him came officially through management via Doug Goldstein, who spoke with Axl on a regular basis.
It didn’t matter that we weren’t all there; Steven and Duff and I started jamming at Mates, our go-to spot. Izzy wasn’t quite up to joining us: he’d spent a bit too much time around Bill’s house and was on a path as dark as mine. He came to rehearsal every so often, but we never waited for him. At least we were trying to be productive; I have no idea what Axl was up to at the time because we didn’t speak, probably because a few of us were chemically out of control.
Drinking excessively became the thing again for me. I would drive home from rehearsal totally plastered, passing people on the wrong side while going up Laurel Canyon. I’d be doing ninety miles an hour in my little Honda CRX; I would have died easily if I’d hit anything. I’m thankful that I didn’t hurt anybody, get arrested, or die—someone is watching out for me, given how often I’ve come close to death and made it back alive.
One particularly outstanding night I turned off Laurel Canyon onto Kirkwood, the street that led to my street, Walnut Drive. There was a guy stopped at the corner of Walnut who was preparing to make a left onto Kirkwood. He was way too far over, in my lane; and in my mind he was in my way. Rather than stop or slow down, I just plowed into his car—on purpose.
I tried to back up and take off, but our cars were stuck together; I’d smashed him on the driver’s side by the rear wheel and my car’s front end was attached to his car. At that point it dawned on me that I probably shouldn’t have done that.
I sat there trying to back up and split; I pulled my bumper to pieces because it was severely mashed into this guy’s car. As I was doing so, he got out and walked up to my window.
“So?” I asked, and stared at him for a minute, squinting.
The guy reeked of booze; he was completely wasted and now totally confused by me.
“You’re fucking drunk,” he said, his speech a little slurry.
“No, I’m not,” I said. “You’re fucking drunk.”
I lit up a cigarette as he and I slowly came to the realization that both of us were pretty fucked up to the degree that police involvement was a bad idea.
“Do you have insurance?” the guy asked. “I don’t.”
“Listen…I can’t afford to get in trouble with the law,” I said.
“Let’s pretend this didn’t happen,” he said.
“Fine by me.”
We managed to pry our cars apart; that guy bolted and I drove up my little hill as fast as I could. I put the car in the garage and sat there for a moment. My heart pounded as the reality of what could have happened sunk in. I had a much-needed moment of clarity: the repercussions of that misadventure would have halted everything for me.
It didn’t take a clairvoyant to see that if we would ever be a band again, Izzy and Duff, Steven and I, would need to write some music and get Axl interested and back in the mix. We had a few songs going but we had to keep up the pace and stay focused. We were already almost there: it was becoming exciting again; the original hunger was returning and the fire was alive. We wanted to make Guns music our top priority.
We kept rehearsing, and once we’d gotten a few songs all together, we went over to Izzy’s place on Valley Vista and Sepulveda in the Valley to do some writing and see where his head was. It didn’t take me long to figure it out: I was in the bathroom over there taking a leak when I noticed the two-inch-thick layer of dust in his shower and bathtub. That thing hadn’t been used for weeks—Izzy was that far gone. Even Axl showed up that day, and regardless we started working on a song that became “Pretty Tied Up.” I remember that Izzy had taken a cymbal and a broomstick and some strings and had made a sitar out of it. Needless to say…Izzy was pretty fucking high.
We didn’t have to confront him at all; he had a serious scare one night that set him straight. Whatever it was, Izzy got too shook up to even talk about it. He just called his dad, who came out from Indiana, and took him back home, and that’s how and where Izzy got clean. He’s been clean ever since.
The rest of us continued to work, and once we had some material and were communicating with Axl again, he let us know that he and Izzy wanted to write the next album in Indiana. I couldn’t imagine why; both of them had left Indiana as soon as they could to come to L.A. and they never seemed too fond of the idea of going back. In any case, our situation was so unpredictable that I wasn’t going to move to a wheat field with no guarantee that we’d even get anything done. Their whole intention was to get away from the distractions of L.A. and I respected that; Axl wanted us to go somewhere where we could have our privacy to focus on writing. I wanted to do the same, but at least be in a major metropolitan area, so in the end we agreed on Chicago. It was close enough to Indiana that Izzy could join us when he felt ready, or go back there easily if he felt like his sobriety was threatened.
Doug Goldstein and I went to Chicago to scope out where we would live and rehearse. We chose the Cabaret Metro, the famous rock club on the north side of the city: it’s a concert space that houses a separate club called the Smart Bar in the basement, and also has a theater upstairs. It was perfect; we took over the theater and when we were done for the day, the coolest bar in the city was waiting for us downstairs. We rented out a two-unit, brown brick apartment building a few miles down the road on Clark Street, right by the elevated train, to live in.
We all moved out there, with our techs, Adam Day and Tom Mayhew; our production manager; and our new security guard, Earl. Duff, Steven, and the crew guys moved in downstairs, and Axl, Izzy, Earl, and I lived upstairs. That was fine by me because I had the place to myself for the most part—it took Axl more than a month to join us, and Izzy was there for less than an hour. It takes Axl an indeterminate amount of time to decide what he is going to do from the inception of an idea to the point of carrying it out, which always keeps things interesting. All in all what we were doing wasn’t business as usual for us, but it was a start.
For a while, it didn’t matter to me that we’d just relocated the entire band in order to satisfy
the only two guys who weren’t there because by then Duff and I were such enthusiastically social boozers that the miles of bars along North Clark Street were a new playground for us—all within walking distance. My personal consumption at that point was a half-gallon bottle of Stoli per day, plus whatever I consumed when I was out at night. I’d wake up in the morning and fill a Solo cup 85 percent full with vodka, ice, and a bit of cranberry juice. I called it breakfast of champions. Duff was in the same league, though I believe that he made a fresh drink, packed with ice, before he went to bed and left it next to his pillow; that way the ice would keep it cold enough while he slept that it would still be nice and fresh first thing in the morning.
I’d sit on the floor sipping my breakfast and watching TV each day until the rest of the guys were ready to go rehearse. We’d jam at the Metro for most of the afternoon, sometime into the evening, and then spend the rest of the night in and out of bars. We were more or less hanging out and writing riffs here and bits of songs there. When we were working we were focused, but we could never complete any of our ideas without all of the players in attendance.
I’ve learned that it is essential for everybody to be present at all times—our producer Brendan O’Brien insisted on it during the writing of Velvet Revolver’s last album, Libertad. Everyone in Guns was focused at this point—even Axl—but we didn’t have very good group skills and had no idea at all how to govern our work situation. The desire was there, but we needed regulation. If one of us didn’t show up, we’d work anyway, which was one of many things that held us back from getting it together properly. For one thing, Duff and I were intent on drinking all the time and considered that normal because it never interfered with work, but we were so ferocious about it outside of rehearsal that it was off-putting to Izzy. He couldn’t be around that kind of behavior then and he’s like that to this day. We weren’t aware of it at the time, and even if we were, we might not have cared—all we knew was that he wasn’t showing up to work and we couldn’t accept that. I’m sure Axl had his reason for doing things his way, too. But we didn’t have a good line of communication among us about any of these issues, so the end result was serious misunderstanding. Since these points of interest were simply never discussed, since there was never a conversation about how to adjust our game plan to take everyone’s needs into account, we kept doing things the way we had in the past, which considering that we’d all changed caused us serious internal tension.