Slash

by Slash

  Instead of coming up with a new method to account for our issues, all of the problems just snowballed. This was when a good manager might have turned the situation around, but we didn’t have one. Throughout this process, Doug and our management were useless; they didn’t seem to want to take the time to deal. Alan was still in charge, and Doug was our day-to-day man, and he wasn’t doing anything but enabling us. Their attitude was that we were supposed to know how to do this shit ourselves. And we did; we accomplished creatively left to our own devices…but only when we were living together as one, living five similar lives. Now that we’d become a band who had to set up shop, and we were coming from different perspectives, that dynamic was gone. There is no one to blame; we did the best we could.

  We’d had to get going without Axl there, and we found his absence disrespectful, and that disrespect built up into such great animosity that when he did finally show up, the rest of us were pretty resentful. We were an out-of-control band with some some semblance of integrity who had lost their ability to properly channel it all: for the life of us, we just could not get on the same page. We also made no effort to pursue the adult way of handling things. I wouldn’t call it innocence or naïveté looking back, but we all played a hand in mixing the pot. None of us stood back and took a moment to ask one another or ourselves, “How do we do this? How can we get everyone together and working and satisfied?” We needed to be clearheaded about it; if one thing didn’t work, we’d need to keep trying. But we didn’t do that. Outside of the fact that our management didn’t care to take the lead, the biggest catalyst to the demise of the band was the lack of communication among the members.

  Admittedly, I was pigheaded; I didn’t want to always feel like I was bending over backward. I thought of us as equals, and I was making a conscientious effort to get things going, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to understand what Axl was expecting, or the patience to sit down and talk it out with him. As with any relationship, when someone lands on your bad side, it gets hard to be empathetic. My guard by then was way up. With all of that going on, it was much easier to just enjoy the summertime in Chicago because the bars were mighty inviting.

  In our plentiful free time, Duff and I also did our personal best to stay in shape. I had one of my BMX bikes out there and I used to ride it between the apartment and the rehearsal space, bunny-hopping over everything in sight, riding on the sidewalk. It was a good workout. Some days Duff and I even went to the gym, usually just after our morning vodkas. We’d go down to one of those big public YMCAs with our security guard, Earl, to pump iron. We’d be down there in our jeans, doing sets between cigarette breaks—it was invigorating. We’d usually cool down afterward with cocktails at a sports bar. It didn’t matter how big we were back home or how many records we’d sold or the shows we’d played; in Chicago, we were nobodys. We were just a couple of regular Joes to our fellow bar patrons; and there is not a bigger haven for regular Joes in America than the sports bars of North Clark Street.

  Every night we hung out at Smart Bar, which was very cool, but a much different rock scene than L.A. It was 1990, and that place was all about techno and industrial music like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. We didn’t really gel with people there, because we were clearly of a different variety, but we made a circle of friends anyway. We had dozens of chicks; it was a like a shooting gallery in that place, but eventually I settled on one. Her name was Megan; she was nineteen. Megan lived with her mom and younger brother in a nearby suburb and she was really exotic-looking, a heavy-chested, bubbly, sweet girl.

  I began to settle into a cozy little relationship with her, and was getting used to the routine of jamming however long by day and hanging out with her all night. And that is when Axl showed up, which changed the dynamic immediately. Despite the resentment, we were so glad to see him that no one wanted to aggravate the situation by confronting him about his lateness. We started to work with him on the days that he actually came to rehearsal, but we were never quite sure which days those would be. If we’d decide that we’d all start jamming at four p.m. or six p.m., he might show up at eight or nine, or not at all. When he did come down, Axl generally tinkered around on the piano or sat and listened to some of the ideas we’d worked out. All things considered, we managed to produce a few good tunes: “Estranged,” “Bad Apples,” and “Garden of Eden.”

  Over all, I found our time in Chicago to be a huge waste, which will always be a point of contention between Axl and I. He seemed to think that we were really getting somewhere and that I was the one who ruined it all. I might have felt differently if he’d been there the whole time, but after almost eight weeks—six of them without him—I felt we didn’t have enough material to show for it, and I was frustrated and unwilling to wait around to see if we’d get it going consistently. The vibe among us was just too dark and not conducive to real creativity. We were also being so frivolous with our money that I couldn’t ignore it: we had moved our entire operation to the Midwest and come up with nothing but a few complete songs and a handful of rudimentary ideas, many of which we’d brought out there with us.

  I did try to stay the course once Axl got to town, but two incidents put an end to my time in the Windy City. The first was the night we came home after drinking to find a feast of Italian food on the sidewalk in front of our apartment. I got a bird’s-eye view of the mess because, as I recall, I had insisted on spending the entire night lying on the roof of the car whenever we drove from bar to bar. Our favorite Italian place was right on the corner and apparently Axl had unloaded the band’s entire dinner on a few people who had found out that we were living there and were heckling him from the street. (By the way, this was not the inspiration for the title of The Spaghetti Incident; that came from one of the complaints against the rest of us that Steven listed in his lawsuit—which we’ll get to—after he was fired. I’m not even sure what he claimed…something having to do with Axl throwing spaghetti at him, I believe. I guess that was a theme in those years.)

  Anyway, after Axl chucked our dinner at the hecklers, he proceeded to trash the entire kitchen and break every glass item in the apartment. And, as we’d find out a few days later, sometime during his tantrum, Izzy arrived, having driven in from Indiana. He took one look at what was going on from down on the street and turned his car around and left immediately without even entering the building.

  I suppose that the rest of us should have noticed that Axl was unhappy and acting out after that first incident, but by then we’d gotten to the point where we just let him do his thing and tuned it out. Who knows, maybe if we listened to what he wanted to do and just complied a bit more he wouldn’t have freaked out so hard. Still, who could fathom what he was unhappy about? He showed up with this very sort-of-bitter attitude that seemed to be coming from a very depressing place. But, to be honest, I was more worried about Steven than Axl by then: he was a huge problem; he was doing tons of blow and his performance had become irregular. I didn’t catch on at first; he kept his coke hidden in the refrigerator in the downstairs apartment where he lived.

  We would be hanging out and sharing a bit of blow, but I couldn’t figure out how Steve was always that much more wasted. He’d just get this twinkle in his eye and say, “Hey man…butter tray,” and point at the fridge.

  “Yeah, okay, Steve. Sure,” I’d say. I’d go to the refrigerator, fix myself a drink, and come back with nothing remarkable to report. I didn’t think he actually wanted me to look in the butter tray. He was that fucked up that I didn’t take it seriously.

  “Did you see?” he’d ask, grinning wildly. He’d just keep pointing at the refrigerator and saying, “Butter tray.”

  “Yeah, man, I saw it,” I’d say. “That’s a great refrigerator you’ve got there. Really nice butter tray, man.”

  “Butter tray.”

  “So, Steven…what are you trying to say?”

  Tom Mayhew discovered it eventually: Steven had a steep supply of coke piled up in that butter tray of
his.

  At this point, I really had no choice but to see that we were all unraveling. No matter how in control I felt I was or thought everyone else was, I realized that Steven was growing irretrievable. As soon as the band ended its stay in Chicago, Steven and I had less and less interaction; he was completely isolated once we got back to L.A. We were tight as a band gangwise, but during our two years on tour, Steve and I developed a distance between us as individuals that grew nothing but worse.

  One of the few things we had in common as a band at the time, in Chicago though, was a shared interest in Faith No More’s album The Real Thing. It was the background music for that entire trip. It would be playing all the time on the different stereos in our apartments.

  There is the background; in the end this is why I left. The last straw involved some girls that were brought back to our place one night. My girlfriend Megan had gone out and I was at home in bed. Late at night, I heard some commotion; the sound of a few people filing in and heading past my bedroom down to Axl’s room. Until then, Axl had spent most of his time in there alone, constantly on the phone. This night was clearly an occasion.

  My room was at the front of the apartment, separated from Axl’s by our living room and a long railroad-style hallway. So I went down there to see what was going on; I found our security guard Earl, Tom Mayhew, Steve, and Axl hanging out with two happy-go-lucky Midwestern girls that they’d brought back.

  We all hung out, and as it got later, it was suggested that the girls have sex with all of us. They were willing to blow everyone in the room, which seemed reasonable to me, but they didn’t want to fuck us. For whatever reason, that really pissed Axl off. The girls had a very intelligent rationale for their point of view, but Axl begged to differ. This debate continued for a moment, and it was pretty relaxed, but suddenly Axl exploded. He threw them out with such rage it was shocking. The way it went down was completely unnecessary. The coup de grâce was that one of the girls’ dads was a prominent officer with the Chicago police, or so I was told. Later that morning I packed up my stuff and flew back to L.A. A few days later, I had Megan move out and join me.

  GUNS WAS A BAND THAT MIGHT BREAK apart at any second; that was half of the excitement. When we had a common goal, that was less likely to happen. The more time we spent apart, as our communal, creative vibe became more a memory than a reality, our lack of communication and the disadvantage of not knowing what was truly going on with one another disabled any ability we might have had to deal with change.

  At the creative level, things between us had changed drastically. Until Use Your Illusions I and II Guns wrote songs one way: start with an idea that anyone would come up with and then we’d collaborate. Axl is so prolific lyricwise and has such a heartfelt sense of melody that combined with Izzy’s songwriting skill and Duff and myself, creating great guitar parts was easy, and so we’d have amazing songs in no time. Izzy and Axl had such great chemistry because Axl knew how to transform one of Izzy’s simple structures into a perfect, well-rounded, melodically and lyrically rich song. A great example is “Patience”: Axl really elevated that song of Izzy’s into something else entirely. I have such a powerful sense of melody and riffs that I’d tie it all together. A lot of the time I would start the core writing of a song with a guitar hook that Duff would expand upon with a great bass line, or I’d come up with a bridge and chorus section that would inspire Axl to write incredible lyrical hooks.

  Slash kicking back on a balcony with some toad venom.

  When Izzy and I brought a song to the band, usually some or all of the words were there, but when Axl sang them his way…it would really come together. Back then it was easy; but by 1990 we’d lost that communal inspiration to produce. The desire to get together and write songs is one thing: that’s like a day job. It’s quite another to be inspired by a mutual collaboration. That was the harshest reality for us to come to terms with. For the first time we had to work at it; all the same when we finally got down to it, it was great and it came quickly, but everything along the way was a complete fucking chore.

  I WAS PRETTY DISILLUSIONED ABOUT the band when I got back to L.A. from Chicago. I moved back into the Walnut House, with Megan. I’m not quite sure what I was thinking because I hadn’t known her long, but there she was. Everyone else in the band, aside from Izzy, was still in Chicago, and after a day or so, they realized that I was gone. They started to trickle back, but in the end Axl stayed behind for about two weeks after I left. Considering that he was furious with me for ending our “creative reprieve” there, he didn’t spend that time writing down in our prepaid rehearsal space. From what I understand, he spent the time sleeping and threw a few more apartment-wrecking tantrums, as well as sending me berating messages, via management, usually Doug on a semiregular basis. Doug would call me as if he was Axl’s boy, and I can’t say I automatically trusted whatever he had to say, but I’d respond as honestly as possible and hoped he’d convey the truth about why I’d left to Axl. Regardless, Axl just stayed out there and sent messages to all of us for a while, I guess.

  Guns was a band that might break apart at any second; that was half of the excitement.

  Axl and I had a very interesting sort of love/hate relationship, and always did. Most of the time Axl and I were like fishing buddies who don’t have much to talk about unless they’re fishing. Then there were times when he and I had a great rapport, when he’d come to me to talk when he had a lot on his mind. For all of those periods, there were stretches when we were so obviously on opposite sides of some invisible fence that we didn’t communicate at all. During the months before we got to writing again, Axl and Erin were having very serious problems in their relationship and he and I had many deep talks about it. What they were going through was very serious: in fact, one time after Chicago I had to go over to Erin’s house to help defuse an argument they were having. Every couple has their inner workings, and if there is one thing I would never try to claim is that I understood the inner workings of theirs. Still, I was friends with both of them so I could help mediate. Despite all the shit going on with Guns, we were still bandmates and friends. If Axl ever needed me for something, I’d always be there.

  MY RETALIATION WHEN I GET FRUSTRATED creatively is to be self-destructive with drugs. It’s my excuse to go down that path. It’s a common phenomenon for junkies. So shortly after I got back to L.A., considering the state of affairs with the band, when the opportunity presented itself, I was too eager to take advantage.

  Megan and I had settled in; we were happy in our new home. She turned out to be quite the homemaker, and took to keeping the place up, cooking, and being domestic very naturally. She would go to bed early and get up and go to the gym and then clean up and make dinner. After a few weeks her friend Karen came out from Chicago and they spent a week shopping. That was the first day that I had to myself and I ran into a friend that I hadn’t seen in years: a chick from back in the El Compadre days. It’s this amazing Mexican restaurant on Sunset and Gardner, and when Guns was still coming up, Duff and I would hang out there constantly, holding court as if we owned the place: we’d bring chicks in there and they’d suck us off or fuck us under the table and just do all this crazy shit.

  This old friend that I ran into used to cut hair—mine included—and mentioned that she still did so, but she also sold dope here and there—it was all the encouragement I needed. She came over later with a bag of clean rigs, and before I knew it, before Axl even got home, and before Megan and Karen returned from their tour of Melrose and Beverly Hills, I was back on smack with a vengeance again.

  Megan was one of those chicks who dated the wrong guy and got dragged through the mill with me. She was pretty innocent; she might have thought she’d fallen in love, but I don’t think she had any idea of what she’d gotten into or what was going on with me once we returned to L.A. She’d met me when I was a complete drunk; and, as I’ve mentioned, to the naked eye, a clever heroin addict doesn’t act that much different, unless you coun
t their drinks. Megan was so innocent that she didn’t pick up on the fact that I’d suddenly stopped consuming a half gallon of vodka per day, though, if anything, I was acting just as drunk—if not more so.

  We continued a very sweet, very twisted, almost 1950s kind of relationship. She would tend to the house, then head to bed at ten or eleven p.m. and I’d stay up all night, downstairs in the living room, shooting up every few hours in the black bathroom. Some nights I’d write songs on the couch, some nights I’d just stare at the snakes. Before I noticed, it would be morning and Megan was up and we’d hang out and have a great time until I got tired. She never asked questions and we got along that way for a while, very happily. We had pet names for everything. Everything to her was either “cute” or “sweet,” and I was usually “sweetie.” Looking back on it, Megan sounded a lot like Jennifer Tilly.

  Megan was also, as I mentioned, really domestic. She fixed the place up, especially the kitchen, and made it all entirely livable. She liked to have people over for dinner, if the occasion presented itself. I remember that I had Mark Mansfield come by once, more to get high and catch up than have any kind of meal, but Megan made us a feast: she served us some variety of chicken with several side dishes, garlic bread, and a nice salad, all served on place mats—the whole thing. She was really pleased, and didn’t seem to notice at all how dark a state both Mark and I were in. We were so stoned that we just kind of played with the food. It didn’t matter; at the end of the night, Megan told me that she thought Mark was charming. Megan was interesting in other ways: more often than not, rather than screw, she liked to just jerk me off and watch it…I guess we did have a pretty strange relationship.