by Marc Cantor
Although club owners could always bank on a thirsty crowd for Friday and Saturday nights, they lost money during the week. Therefore, Pay-to-Play was introduced in the 1980's: an insurance policy to cover the costs of operation during down time. It required that bands slotted to play during weeknights collect a minimum cover fee by pre-selling tickets to their own gigs. Club owners shifted the financial risk of running a club to the band, taking advantage of favorable supply-and-demand conditions. The more tickets sold, the better favor would be gained and a plum spot on the weekly line-up assured. If the band caused trouble, however, and cost the owners more than they brought in, getting blacklisted was almost guaranteed. This could be achieved by trashing dressing rooms, bar fighting and assaulting patrons. If a band was banned from enough clubs, they could kiss their dream of a record contract goodbye.
There was both an art and a hustle to promoting a club gig, especially when it came to flyering. Slash and Axl would cruise the Sunset Strip, tacking flyers up on every telephone pole and covering up their rivals' flyers in the process. They gave out tickets like candy on the street to anyone who crossed their path in an attempt to raise the minimum amount to play. When they fell short, friends of the band (like Marc Canter) often stood outside the clubs on the night of the show and sold tickets one-by-one. When that failed, someone had to pony up the remaining amount or the band didn't go on. If you wanted the dream, these are the clubs you had to play.
STEVE DARROW As far as the club gigs went, the main places you wanted to play were the clubs on the Sunset Strip or The Troubadour. The Troubadour was the place where you had to play to make it and be somebody. You would hand out your flyers and say, "Here come see our band three weeks from now at the Troubadour on Tuesday. You want to buy a ticket?" And most people would go, 'Well, I don't know if I can make it." You'd say, "Well just buy a ticket and that way you'll make it for sure." It was a hustle. If you were a new band without a giant following and wanted to book a gig at a club, you were faced with this stair-step hierarchy. You never really realized it until you tried to infiltrate the clubs and get in with the owners. Then the owners introduced what was coined 'pay-to-play.'
MARC CANTER This was the heyday of the pay-to-play bullshit when Los Angeles promoters would have the bands themselves shoulder the financial risk of their gig, by either taking on the burden of selling a certain number of tickets themselves or simply forking over the required amount out of their own pocket. They would essentially force the musicians to take on the risks that had generally been considered the reason for club promoters in the first place.
STEVE DARROW Here is how it worked: you sent in a package with your demo tape, waited a couple of weeks and if they called you back, they would slot you in on a Tuesday night at 7:30pm with five other bands after you. Pay-to-play required that you bring fifty people and each of those fifty people had to buy two drinks. If you weren't old enough to consume, you would have to buy a ticket equal to the value of two drinks. That was a lot for a seventeen-year-old kid to shell out.
RON SCHNEIDER Anything over 100 tickets was yours to keep. The more people you brought into a club on a Thursday night, the more power you demonstrated to the club that you could bring in a draw. The bigger the draw, the more booze they would sell, which means the more money you're going to make. Instead of closing a gig at 11:45pm on a Thursday night, you would start climbing up the ladder and move up to a Friday or Saturday night. There was a clear motivation for bringing people to the show: you wanted that plush spot.
VICKY HAMILTON It was pay-to-play, and obviously the club promoter wanted the band that had the biggest draw and, "the sexiest chicks at their shows," as Bill Gazzari once said.
SLASH Guns N' Roses went through a period of pay-to-play for a while in the beginning. I used to work at a newsstand up on Fairfax and Melrose and when I got the tickets, I gave them out to as many people as I could. We never paid for a gig ourselves, but we pandered them to everybody. I was really good at it because I was working a job where I came into contact with so many customers everyday. I was a pretty restless member of the band when it came to promotion and managerial things, because I never really slept. This thing was twenty-four-seven with me, everyday! And that was a good quality to have.
MARC CANTER Slash was working at Centerfold Newsstand, on Fairfax, off Melrose. A short time later, he was fired for conducting band business on company time.
RON SCHNEIDER There was big competition out there. You walked around and handed out flyers. It was seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Wednesday night at 11:30pm doesn't mean your at home in bed. You had to be out there and flyering. That's what you did. You would post flyers on the Strip and then some other band came along and put up their flyer right over yours. Big rivalries between bands flared up and it either ended up in a fistfight on the Strip or some drawn out drama.
CHRIS WEBER To get future gigs you had to draw a crowd. That's where the girls came in. You'd flyer all night and flirt with the girls. You'd say, "Come meet me at the gig and we can hang out after the show, and, oh, bring five or ten friends with you." And these girls would come. They'd drive from San Diego or Riverside just to hang out with a young, penniless rocker who basically said the same line to ten or twenty other girls. If you, and your band mates all did the same thing, you'd get a crowd, and another gig. Flyer and flirt; you had to be consistent.
SLASH We did that until we were such a huge draw that we didn't need to do that anymore. Then, those people that we used to give tickets out to expected to be on the guest list. So we ended up having a huge guest list for a gig at the Roxy, but we did make the promoters money.
STEVE DARROW Then you're going up the ladder. And eventually if you keep selling tickets and bringing in people, then they'll give you a headline slot on Monday or Tuesday which is still better than nothing, but it's still a Monday or Tuesday. After all that, you turn around and you've got four other new bands below you that are competing for your slot. It was a lot of work.
DUFF There was a lot of politics with the Troubadour. There was an older woman that ran the Troubadour and she could ban you. This woman was not somebody you would necessarily fuck with. You had to get on her good side. The Whisky was closed at that point and the only place for us to play on the strip was the Roxy and those gigs were few and far between. The Roxy gigs were legitimate gigs compared to the Troubadour, where you could always manage to get a spot -- maybe not a weekend night, but a Monday or Tuesday. At the Troubadour, we had to pay for lights and sound, which was a racket.
STEVE DARROW If you wanted to have a dressing room you had to pay another thirty bucks; if you wanted to use the light man you had to pay another thirty. It was like buying a car with all the secret add-ons that they don't tell you about. Essentially, the supply and demand was enough that clubs could get away with doing that.
SLASH In the early days we had our regular shenanigans as a band and were a little offensive to club owners. We definitely weren't invited back for gigs because they just had no viable reason to invite us back. It probably cost them money just to have us around. But we turned the tables on that eventually. We were starting to bring in a following, so they couldn't ignore us. Eventually, we were accepted as being destructive, but profitable.
The night after they played at the Troubadour, the band was asked to play this gig at a UCLA frat party with just a few hours notice. "Welcome to the Jungle" was played a few beats slower than the version that appeared on "Appetite for Destruction."
DUFF: I remember playing this frat party. We played for beer and thirty bucks. I don't remember how it came about. It was just a bizarre gig that we did and ended up having a great time cause there was a lot of beer. We were finding ourselves and finding our songs. Playing them for people under the gun helped the process of writing songs. But, we just wanted to play. We were a band. That's what we were there for.
Act II
Chapter 4: Reckless
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The Art and the Music Came First (1:31).
All five of us went to the Sunset Grill and split a cheeseburger -- cut into five pieces.
STEVEN ADLER
Guns N' Roses were more like orphans than professional artists; outsiders and runaways who found sanctuary in music. Riding on the edge of survival in Hollywood wasn't easy, but it was fun. They fended for themselves for baseline food and shelter on the streets and scraped together money from friends when they needed to fix their instruments. Axl slept underneath stairs behind his minimum wage job at Tower Video. Slash and Steven were lucky if they found a bed and fast food with occasional girlfriends. However, pastrami sandwiches were on the house at Canter's and the drugs and booze came free, since everybody wanted to party with the band.
To most people, the demand of that lifestyle is too much to handle; no predictability, all instinctual. But to Guns N' Roses and other musicians going for broke, it was precisely that impulsiveness, driven by the need to survive, that invigorated their lives and their music.
Survival literally meant making it to the next performance. Writing, rehearsing and performing; they were absorbed. Music was their source and sustenance. Food and sleep were necessary inconveniences. The only thing that really mattered was music and having a good time.
They developed a tough spirit and a thick skin, letting nothing stop them from playing. Despite empty stomachs, hardcore hangovers and even broken bones, the show went on and they became better players by figuring out ways to play around their pain.
CHRIS TORRES I didn't have that. I was still in high school and here I was staying up until two or three in the morning with these guys and I was still trying to get my diploma. Making it as a singer was secondary for me. I was having a blast and living the life, but I just had other ideas. To me the attitude was Axl. I knew I didn't have it when I went to see Slash and the guys when they were living in the Gardner apartment. They were sitting in this room where they rehearsed and they were pretty strung out on what seemed to be heroin. But, man, when they rehearsed it was just blood, sweat and tears and heart and I just saw the sacrifice it took. They lived for their music. When I saw that I knew I couldn't live like that. That's when I knew I didn't have it, even though I was still in a band. That's how raw and real they were. Their music represented the way they lived.
RON SCHNEIDER You had to live your life. You had to eat white bread and cheese sandwiches, or you'd have to go to the supermarket and steal food just to eat. You'd have to depend on a lot of people to help you get through just to survive. You had to get a job, as much as everybody hated doing that. My God! Work? No way! You borrowed money from people to help you make flyers. You had to do whatever it took. If you want to call it, "paying your dues," that's what we had to do to make it; to get the golden ticket. Then there were the Marc Canters out there that were feeding us or buying us guitar strings, picks or drum sticks.
MICHELLE YOUNG These five guys are homeless. They have nothing. They barely had any food. But they had this music, these instruments and a stage and that's all they needed. They were so secure in what they were doing and sure of themselves.
WILLIE BASSE We all wanted the same thing and we were willing to go to any length to get success in rock 'n' roll and I think if I could draw anything out of that period it would be that spirit and that heart that we all shared together. Everyone was going for it. It was like a do or die rock 'n' roll. All we cared about was music, packing the clubs and living that musical life. I don't think we realized it, but we were hardcore. There was no life but the music.
ROBERT JOHN The art and the music came first with this band, way before the party. They were serious about what they were doing. They were living the lifestyle, but it wasn't a style. They were creating it the way they were living.
SLASH We were all street kids. We were all, individually, very rebellious, so collectively we were a force to be reckoned with. We had a haphazard way of going about things. The survival of early Guns N' Roses pretty much comprised of little hustling here and there, a lot of really nice girls, a couple of odd jobs and a drive to survive. It was always about the upcoming gig, so whatever you had to do to stay afloat until the next show, you did. We played as many back-to-back gigs as possible. It was really about just having somewhere to lay your head between shows.
PAMELA MANNING The guys were going through some hard times, mostly struggling to get by and going from place to place. They just needed somewhere to crash.
RON SCHNEIDER A couple of guys had girlfriends that took care of them. If you met a girl and she took you home and slept with you and fed you and maybe let you do your laundry or take a shower, you had it made.
STEVEN ADLER If we didn't have a place to sleep that night, we had the rehearsal place to sleep; cockroaches and all! We didn't care. That was it. That was all we wanted to do.
DESI CRAFT Izzy had it made. I had us in a single apartment. The rest of the band members, I can't say exactly what they were doing at night, but certainly it was a struggle. We kept all the gear in our apartment; a big stack of drums the guitars and everything.
SLASH One of us might be lucky enough to find a place to crash and the rest of us would hide behind the bushes. When they said yes, we'd come running out and the next thing you know all five of us would be in there and you'd have to put up with us. We did a lot of partying, since we stayed up all night. It wasn't so much about having a roof over our head, just someplace to go and party. There were a lot of girlfriends and you could find some peace and quiet with them for a second and then it was back on the street again.
Axl and I were being sought by the police for something that we didn't really do, so I asked Vicky if we could crash at her place. It was Vicky and Jennifer Perry in a one-bedroom apartment off of Sunset Boulevard and that's where Axl and I lived for a while. We were right across the street from the Whisky. Izzy, Duff and Steve were with their assorted girlfriends. Vicky was great; she was sort of like the big den mother.
VICKY HAMILTON Slash called me and said, "Do you mind if Axl sleeps on your couch for a couple of nights because something happened and the police are looking for him?" And I had just gotten a new apartment on Clark Street and I was a little bit hesitant to let him come stay, but I let him come and what was supposed to be a couple of days ended up being several months. Living with Guns N' Roses was probably the best time of my life and definitely the worst time of my life. The funniest part of living with them was the fact that "Welcome to the Jungle" was on the answering machine and it played the part where Axl screams, "Welcome to the Jungle, you're going to die," and it just went off constantly, twenty four-seven. Even to this day when I hear that part of the song it makes me cringe. The police broke in my door a couple of times, shining flashlights into the bedroom to see what was going on. There were always a slew of groupies and people partying in my living room. I would barricade myself into one of the bedrooms in the apartment to get away from it.
STEVEN ADLER Axl and I got in a fight the day we moved out from Vicky's and destroyed her apartment, her furniture and the hallway. Axl threw me against this glass coffee table and a fire extinguisher and destroyed the apartment.
STEVE DARROW None of us really had a steady job at the time. I started this job working for the L.A. Weekly, which sounded more impressive than it was. I was basically the delivery guy with a '66 Dodge Van and I could haul a lot of newspapers. I'd deliver them all over Hollywood. So I did it a few times and then realized it was kind of a lot to do by myself. A lot of other delivery guys had kids helping them or they had assistants. So, I'd call up Izzy because he was always like looking for a way to make five bucks.
DUFF I worked phone sales for these Hungarian mafia guys. I was scared to quit that job because I was there since the first day that I moved to Hollywood. I stayed until the time we got signed. We were just making a go of it with the best situations we could c
reate for ourselves.
MICHELLE YOUNG I used to get money and drugs and feed their habits. My dad would always give me money, so I would feed them and take care of them. I would show up and bring them cocaine or Quaaludes or whatever I had. What was mine was theirs. I gave them rides. I took Axl to a lot of shows because he didn't drive. I put them up at my house. I did basically what all the other girls did, except I wasn't a stripper. Our parents weren't around and our friends become our family. I knew what I was doing. I was supporting a good cause. I was helping support these guys because I believed in their music and I believed in them as individuals.
DESI CRAFT We were selling drugs to help support the band. One of our clients was Althea Flynt. That's something that was tucked under the rug because her sister had always told us that if Larry ever found out who was selling her the heroin, he would kill them. I was always the one that had to go in the house to deliver the stuff because I was a female and it was less threatening, but it was very scary. I was eighteen-years-old, going into a huge mansion with security knowing there was a crazy nut in a wheel chair that's got nothing to lose but shoot somebody.
MIKE CLINK To see the band was to love the band because they were so energetic and so wild on stage. There was nothing that reckless that anyone had seen for years coming out of the L.A. scene or anywhere for that matter.
