Slash

by Slash

  I got to the show and I ran into an old friend, a porn star we’ll call “Lucky,” who I’d known some years before. She was a friend of an ex-girlfriend of mine, the porn star Savannah, whom I’d dated for a few months when I had downtime in L.A. during my time off from Renee. Savannah was intense. I had no idea that she was a junkie. The clue I should have picked up on was that she only liked to fuck after she’d fixed; I didn’t know it at the time. We got into a huge fight one night when she spontaneously decided to give me a blow job in the middle of some bar in New York City.

  I first met Lucky when she came over to hang out with us at the Mondrian. She and Savannah got stripped down, and when we ordered some champagne they invited the room service guy into the room to watch them go at it, and before long the only thing holding this guy’s eyes in their sockets were a few little tiny veins.

  Anyway, I ran into Lucky at the show and we got to talking. I gave Lucky passes and about seven hundred bucks in cash to get me as much heroin as she could find. We did the show—it was great—then I went straight back to my hotel room and waited. I kept drinking the whole time, maybe did some blow, but when she showed up at five a.m., I was pretty much ready to pass out.

  Lucky and her boyfriend came rolling in with all of this crack and smack and I’m sitting on the floor watching them spread out all of the drugs across the coffee table. They’ve got rigs, points, shooters, tools, hardware, whatever you choose to call them—they’ve got brand-new needles. We get it all going, the three of us, and we are all fiending hard. It was intended to be a fun illicit thing—momentary, as far as I was concerned—but this is getting intense. We all do a hit, but the shit isn’t strong, so I do a few more. They are sending the crack pipe around.

  The hours go by and we are really loaded. Matt calls me sometime in the early morning he invites me to his room to do some blow.

  “Okay…yeah…I’ll be right there.”

  I get up, weak-kneed, reeling from my last crack hit, and I look over at Lucky and her boyfriend; they are having the time of their lives—they have never had a motherload of drugs like this for free. I make my way across the carpet to the door, dragging my feet, realizing that I’m dizzy and I can’t speak. I open the door; I don’t have my wits about me at all. I see a maid in the hallway pushing her housekeeping cart and I ask her which way to the elevator. That is what I try to say. I remember it all in slow motion; I remember hearing my voice speak far away.

  I collapsed like a rag doll in the hallway…I blacked out, and my heart stopped for eight minutes, or so I was told. I don’t know who called 911. My security guard, Ronnie, was there and so was Earl, Axl’s guy, and they took care of me and got the paramedics. I woke up when the defibrillators sent an electric shock through my chest and stunned my heart into beating again. It was like being slapped in the face hard enough to wake you from a deep sleep. I remember the bright lights in my eyes and a circle of people leaning in over me: Ronnie, Earl, and the paramedics. I had no idea what was going on; it wasn’t an easy wake-up call.

  I was put in an ambulance and taken to a hospital, where I was given the once-over. I was told to remain overnight for observation, but I wasn’t having that. After a couple of hours I signed myself out and went back to the hotel, Ronnie in tow. I had no remorse whatsoever about my over-dose—but I was pissed off at myself for having died. The whole hospital excursion really ate into my day off. I was hoping to make it through without a hitch and was kicking myself for not being able to maintain my balance and just stay awake through the whole thing as planned.

  Back at the hotel, the vibe was pretty somber. Apparently, my halfway swan dive didn’t look so good. Everyone thought that I was a goner and was acting appropriately serious, which is something that I could never understand. My attitude at the time was, “Hey, everybody, I made it! Let’s go!” When I got back, my highest priority was finding Lucky and her boyfriend. From what I was told, Earl had scared them off. I completely understood that because Earl was terrifying: He was a big black guy, over six feet tall, with a football player’s build and an oddly sweet face. That feature actually made him more disturbing because when he was pissed, you really knew about it.

  I’m sure the mention of prison and me dying was enough to drive Lucky and her man to vacate quickly. It wasn’t their fault that I couldn’t hold my shit together. I don’t know for sure, but Earl probably threw the dope away in the course of kicking them out. At least that’s what I told myself because they hadn’t left me anything…and that bummed me out most of all.

  I cooled down in my room for a few hours, with both security guards posted in the hallway outside of my door to ensure that I didn’t go anywhere. Eventually Doug Goldstein came in and launched into one of the most pathetic displays of bullshit concern that mankind has ever known. He gave me a long speech at the top of his lungs about what I’d just done, about how people love me and this, that, and the other. It was very aggressive, very dramatic, and very fake. To illustrate his “seriousness” he threw a bottle of Jack Daniel’s through the television. When he left, I retrieved that bottle, which hadn’t broken, and poured myself a stiff drink to get over his intervention.

  Shortly afterward, Doug called a band meeting in Axl’s room. We all gathered around, and I was still nodding out at this point. Everyone voiced their concern for my well-being, but Axl’s comment stood out most of all. It snapped me out of my haze, actually.

  “You gave us a scare,” he said slowly, looking right at me. “We thought you were dead…. I thought I’d have to look for a new guitar player.”

  The next morning we boarded helicopters and flew to Oakland for the gig, and the whole time Ronnie and Earl monitored me like two hawks tracking a mouse. From there we did the L.A. Coliseum, then San Diego, which was killer: Motörhead, Body Count, Metallica, and us. We did the Rose Bowl in Pasadena after that, which was just huge, and then we ended the tour in Seattle. And after a few days, everyone realized that what I’d done was a onetime thing.

  As great as that tour was, I was relieved the moment it was over. I was thankful that I didn’t have to see the Metallica guys every day anymore, considering that I was never sure of what Axl was going to do from gig to gig. That last day I felt as I had felt for the entire tour: I was elated at what we had achieved, yet bummed that it hadn’t been as amazingly stupendous as it should have been.

  AT THE END OF OUR YEARLONG TOUR the biggest mistake of all came to light: we’d barely made any money. Between the union dues incurred by Axl taking the stage late night after night and the theme parties that bled us dry night after night, we had next to nothing to show for all of our hard work. Doug finally confronted Axl about the band’s spending on the Metallica tour and the fact that our profit margin had been eaten up by our excesses. I think Axl had a few suggestions as to cost cutting that wouldn’t have done much, but Doug finally got through to him: he told Axl that if he wanted to keep his nice new multi-million-dollar mansion in Malibu, he needed to earn more money.

  And so Doug booked us another year of dates, starting with South America, Europe, Japan, and Australia from October 1992 through January 1993. As hard as it was to endure, Doug got no argument from the rest of us—we wanted to play. What else would I be doing anyway? And at the same time, I thought maybe things would change. I also wondered continually whether the extra tour had been booked out of concern for the band’s finances or to land Doug a hefty commission.

  Before we headed out again, I got married to Renee in October 1991. We definitely didn’t do it small—it was this really big production that I had very little to do with. My only memories of planning it involve Renee showing me an endless number of books full of gifts to pick out. I couldn’t relate to any of it and my lack of interest made her very upset. The wedding took place at the Four Seasons in Marina Del Rey, with Duff as my best man, a couple hundred people, including my bandmates and crew, and a lounge band. As soon as we were married, we headed to Africa, to Tanzania, on safari for two weeks f
or our honeymoon. For a wildlife fanatic like me, Africa was always on the top of my list for a vacation: there I could see what I’d been reading about in books and seeing on television my whole life. I was obsessed with leopards while we were there; I’d get up at five every morning to go out on safari and get back by six in the evening. It was the greatest place in the world to forget about everything that was weighing on my mind. It’s hard to imagine that any of it matters when you’re standing in the middle of the Ngorongoro Crater far from any trace of civilization.

  Before the wedding, Renee and I had a coed bachelor/bachelorette party at the Troubadour, because Renee didn’t want me to get together unsupervised with the guys. And at that little party, I ran into an old friend named Perla.

  Perla and I had been introduced in Las Vegas when we were headlining the Thomas & Mack Center during the first leg of the Illusion tour. At that point I was sleeping around a lot; it was when Renee and I were still dating very casually. Perla didn’t know shit about Guns N’ Roses and she didn’t care to—she’d come out from L.A. because she’d seen a picture of me and wanted to meet me. Ron Jeremy introduced us before the show, and afterward we met at my hotel and hung out all night long. Let’s just say that she left a major impression on me that grew into a serious infatuation.

  We exchanged numbers and kept in touch when I headed off on tour after that. Eventually she became a tenant of mine; she rented the Walnut House from me for a year and was the best tenant I ever had. It says a lot about the strength of Perla’s character that she lived there without losing her mind because that place had a detrimental effect on everyone else who lived there—myself included, I suppose.

  My first tenants were two bisexual chicks that I met during one of our four L.A. Forum shows. They were in the front row and they were going at it pretty provocatively during the entire gig. I had them brought to the dressing room afterward for more of the same and we stayed in touch; I’d call them up and have them over and watch them and we’d all have a good time. I rented them the house when I was going off on tour, which seemed like a good idea, but they completely lost it—they got strung out on meth and one girl killed the other girl’s cat and then attacked her. The “victim” moved out, and then the other one moved a meth dealer into the house. I had to go over there and take care of the situation, and when I saw that one girl again I barely recognized her. My second tenant was this guy Jim who worked at a zoo as a snake keeper. I hired him to look after my snakes and eventually took him on as a tenant. Apparently he suffered some kind of meltdown too and completely lost it while living there as well. Perla was the only one who wasn’t fazed by the place—and the only one who paid her rent on time and actually enjoyed living there.

  Anyway, once I’d gotten back together with Renee, and gotten engaged and all of that, I did my best to avoid Perla because I knew that there was something serious between us that I couldn’t deny. After my fight with Renee over the prenup and my OD in San Francisco, I didn’t give a fuck, however, and arranged to meet Perla at our San Diego show, just two shows before the end of the tour and just a few weeks before my wedding. We spent the night together there, and the next time I saw her was when she crashed my bachelor party. She was dangerous; there was such an attraction between us that neither of us could deny. At the same time, she was way too ambitious and energetic to get into a relationship with; she was seventeen and I was twenty-five; she was too crazy, so not in a place where I wanted to cancel my wedding to be with her. She was a real firecracker, though, and the connection was strong enough that I spent the night with her once more…the night before my wedding, in fact.

  IN LATE NOVEMBER, WE SET OFF TO PLAY South America and found ourselves in the middle of sudden political unrest when we did a show in Caracas, Venezuela. Corrupt law enforcement, abundant drugs, and the world’s most dedicated and zealous crowds are the status quo across that continent, so I can’t say that I was surprised. We were scheduled to play the biggest concert in the history of the country, and since there wasn’t a venue large enough to hold the forty-five thousand ticket holders, the promoter created one in a huge parking lot. It was an amazing show, and all went off well…until the next night, when the country experienced a sudden military coup just after we left for Colombia. We made it out, but a few of our crew, and over half our gear, did not—they got held up in the chaos at the airport.

  We were supposed to play two nights in Bogotá, Colombia, after that, but without that huge cargo crate of equipment, it wasn’t really an option. The promoter decided to roll both nights into one show, to take place the next night, so we had a day off to relax in our hotel. The hotel was pretty huge, it was part of some kind of complex with a big movie theater downstairs, and I remember coming up the escalator and watching a Jurassic Park pinball machine emerge on the horizon as I got to the top. I’d just seen the movie and I had to play that thing; it combined two of my favorite interests, dinosaurs and pinball. When I got to my room I arranged to have it brought up and spent the entire day being the ball.

  During our stay, word got out to the authorities that we had drugs, so, in another move typical of South America, the authorities got “warrants” to search our rooms, in hopes of finding something that might require us to buy them off, I imagine. The day of the show, the cops barged in on all of us. I had nothing; they came in, guns drawn, and found me, freshly showered, in a towel playing pinball.

  “Oh, hey,” I said. “Hi!”

  They showed me the warrant and started searching my room. I was pretty jovial as they tore through my stuff.

  “Señor, is it okay if I keep playing?” I asked.

  The show that night—November 29, 1992—was pretty magical; it was one of those moments that you can’t believe is happening even as you watch it all unfold, even as you’re a part of it. There was a torrential rainstorm the entire day before as our crew set up; the weight of the water buckled the stage roof (which wasn’t ours), sending a lighting rig crashing to the ground. Luckily, no one was hurt. The whole stage had to be redesigned. Then the day of the show, a sudden storm damaged some of our equipment. Despite more rain, people filled the arena and were lined up outside, where fights broke out, a few cars were burned, and the police had to use tear gas to calm everyone down.

  When we took the stage sometime around eleven p.m., the place went crazy. We were playing really well, and the rain had held off throughout the first hour of our set until we played “November Rain.” As we started that song, literally on cue, the sky opened and it poured once again. It was one of those massive tropical downpours where one drop can fill a coffee cup. It was coming down in a black mist that mixed with the steam rising off of the audience. I could barely see through the clouds that formed in the arena; the people were a sea of silhouettes. It was very dramatic and very beautiful; it felt as if they and the band were one. The audience was as moved as we were—they were into it, truly passionate. It rained so hard that we finished the song then we had to break until the storm passed, and once it did, we came back on and gave it everything we had.

  We had every obstacle possible befall us between our show in Venezuela and the shows in Colombia, and considering the band’s chemistry in the recent past, you would expect that we’d have fallen apart under such duress. But that was the thing about Guns: we’d self-destruct when everything was easy, but in those instances when every single factor seemed to be against us, everyone, Axl included, pulled together to make it happen. The extreme lows might have left me feeling like there was no tomorrow, but when we’d pull off these valiant rock-and-roll productions in the face of adversity, I’d feel like we were invincible; I’d think we were the strongest band around. Those moments renewed our collective faith and boosted morale like nothing else. Rather than be frustrated by what befell us in South America, we let the audiences at all of those gigs sustain us with their passion and drive us to be our best. Our playing was elevated; it was as intense as the fans were—we were carried away along with them. We re
ached that point that musicians talk about where you are immersed in what you are doing to the degree that you don’t even know who you are—you are part of the performance so fully that you aren’t thinking anymore. Those moments are magical and that whole tour was like that, every single night. It was the band at its best; it was something that anybody would have given their left arm to be a part of…if it occurred consistently. But it wasn’t ever that simple: when we weren’t being transcendent we specialized in self-inflicted disaster.

  IN JANUARY 1993, WE SET OFF ON A tour of Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, with an eighty-person crew and entourage in tow. We ran into Ronnie Wood in Japan, which was great. He and I had been friends for years by then, so he joined us onstage at the Tokyo Dome for “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and Duff and Matt and I hung out with him after the show. That was a really good night. The rest of that tour was just more of the same—great shows, some drama—plus a lot of expensive go-karting, yachting, and dining. The theme parties might have been eliminated but the wasteful days off were not.

  We returned to the States in early February and had a month off before we started the next leg, an American tour we called Skin and Bones. This jaunt in particular was aimed at making us money, because the production was stripped back to the bare essentials: we kept Dizzy Reed, but Teddy and the horn section were gone, as were the backup singers. This tour featured an acoustic section in the middle of the set that showcased the hits off of Lies as well as a few cover songs, such as “Dead Flowers.” I couldn’t have been happier: finally we were touring as a bare-bones rock-and-roll band again.