Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  Everything was too complicated for Steven. And it didn’t get any simpler when he and Slash met a couple of strange cats from out of town with the even stranger names of Izzy and Axl.

  Gina rented an apartment in West Hollywood and Axl used it to store his stuff and as a crash pad when he wasn’t hanging outside the Troubadour or the Starwood, watching enviously as local celebs like Mötley Crüe or Ratt or even David Lee Roth caused little ripples to run through the crowds of kids that gathered around. Axl would later claim that no one spoke to him ‘for two years’, but Gina understood what he was doing, even as they drifted apart and she grew increasingly alarmed at his anger. ‘He was born to be a musician, nothing else,’ she said. The chaos of his life soon proved too much for her. Gina moved out and Izzy moved in. While Axl was still the cowboy-booted hick with the crazy eyes, Izzy already had the LA thing down. He looked like a star an age before he was one: jet-black hair, beanpole legs and, when he played, guitar slung low around his knees like Keef or Joe Perry.

  Axl finally got a gig on the strip when a short-lived spell with the going-nowhere-fast Rapidfire resulted in a set at Gazzarri’s. It would set in motion a slow-moving chain of events that brought the members of Guns N’ Roses together. When Rapidfire lost traction, Axl resolved to develop his partnership with Izzy, who was in turn keen to start a band with a young guitarist calling himself Tracii Guns. Tracii was one of the best on the Strip, fluent in Randy Rhodes-style shredding as well as dirty rock’n’roll, and already had something on the go, so he recommended Izzy to one of his high-school friends, Chris Weber. Chris and Tracii had attended Fairfax High together, where Tracii had a band called Pyrrhus and two other pupils, Saul Hudson and Steven Adler, had a pick-up outfit called Road Crew.

  Izzy and Chris met one night in the parking lot at the Rainbow, and spent a few hours talking. The next day, they began to jam. Four of the five future members of Guns were now, in the last months of 1983, in one another’s orbit for the first time. It would take another two years for the band to coalesce as they splintered and then re-formed in the casual, try-to-make-it-happen atmosphere of the Strip.

  Slash and Steven had created Road Crew almost in name only. Steven only had a set of pots and pans to hit at first, but once he had a kit and a beaten-up old car provided by his grandma, they were on the same footing as most of the other kids. In fact Slash, with his curls cascading around his face and his guitar slung down by his crotch, was already drawing admiring – and jealous – glances for his natural ability. He seemed to be able to play right from the first minute he picked up a guitar. His sphere of reference, musically, stretched from Rufus to the Rolling Stones, from Stevie Wonder to Led Zeppelin, but as a guitarist he felt as ardently about Aerosmith as Izzy did, and that root of influence would prove important.

  As far as Izzy and Chris were concerned, Axl Rose became a serious proposition after he laid his low baritone and shattering scream over some songs that they’d written inspired by Rock in a Hard Place, Aerosmith’s 1982 album. Axl’s wild unpredictability was, however, already evident. Chris and Izzy had even called their band A.X.L. and had the name spray-painted on a wall along the Strip in big letters, yet he still walked out without warning. ‘Axl was so full of energy that he would shake, literally tremble, when he got up there to sing,’ Chris remembered.

  He was soon back, changing the name to Rose and then the more atmospheric Hollywood Rose, and by mid-1984 they had a demo that contained the first seeds of at least one major song, the future Appetite for Destruction track ‘Anything Goes’, in ‘My Way, Your Way’. They played a few riotous shows and then Izzy quit to join London, a legendary Strip band with one apparently permanent member in the giant singer Nadir D’Priest and a revolving-door policy for the rest, who had included the soon-to-be-famous Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe, Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P., Fred Coury of Cinderella, and many more. Membership of London, however brief, was almost a rite-of-passage moment, and when Izzy realised his mistake and left, he discovered that Axl had been poached – or was about to be – by Tracii Guns for his new band, which he called LA Guns, only for Axl to fold soon afterwards and reform Rose with Izzy. It was permanent midnight out there for these nascent Strip bands. No one stayed anywhere for long, everything was real until it wasn’t.

  When Slash and Steven got to hear about Tracii’s desire to work with ‘the best singer in Hollywood at the time’, according to Slash, and when Steven picked up a flyer for a show at the Troubadour with Rose towards the bottom of a 12-band bill, he and Slash went along. A few days later Steven was introduced to Izzy through a mutual friend, Lizzie Grey, who was playing guitar in London at the time, and when Axl fired Chris Weber soon after that, Steven talked his way into bringing Slash down to a Rose rehearsal at a notorious punk space called Fortress. They began to jam but then Izzy took off halfway through, and Slash and Axl struck up a short but intense friendship that ended with Axl crashing at Ola’s house – at least until he’d outstayed yet another welcome.

  Hollywood Rose managed a few shows until Slash quit after a disastrous gig at the Troubadour where Axl went for a guy in the crowd, and Tracii Guns really did get his man when Axl then joined LA Guns and further severed his connections with Slash by sleeping with Slash’s on-off girlfriend Yvonne – although Slash’s call to confront Axl came when Axl was at work during a spell at Tower Video and ended with Axl getting Slash a job as a conciliatory gesture …

  Slash, in the meantime, had auditioned for a preening bunch of new arrivals, a band from Pennsylvania calling themselves Poison. They were pushing the glam look to the edge, with towering bleached blonde hair and full eyesore make-up and, as Slash recalled, the first question they asked him was, ‘You don’t wear those shoes onstage do you?’

  But then Axl pulled Izzy into LA Guns … Slash and Steven returned to Road Crew … Slash left Road Crew to join Black Sheep …

  This was how it went on the Strip in 1985, bands started, bands ended, you left one and formed another and, somewhere along the way, something would happen that would make the whole world open up for you like a key in a lock … That’s what you told other dudes anyway, as you lolled around pretending to know what the fuck you were doing. By the spring, Axl was again working with Tracii Guns and drummer Rob Gardner. They hooked up with Izzy once more and a flyer appeared which read: ‘It’s only rock’n’roll – LA Guns and Hollywood Rose present the band Guns N’ Roses. March 26. Doug Weston’s Troubadour’.

  Twelve people saw the show, of whom four had paid the $2 admission.

  And then the key to the lock did show up. His name was Michael McKagan, although since childhood he was known to his family – of which he was the last child of eight – as ‘Duff’. By the time he arrived in Los Angeles in September 1984, driving in his ancient Ford Maverick from his native Seattle via a few days at a squalid punk squat in San Francisco, Duff was 20 years old and had been, by his estimation, in 31 different bands. He was leaving behind a chaotic start in life, first the happy racket of a big, working-class family in which his father – much older than the fathers of his contemporaries – was a Second World War vet, a fireman and something of a local hero, and then, once he’d come back from school soon after his mother had begun a course at a local college and found his old man in bed with the woman next door, all of the pain of a family break-up.

  He started getting panic attacks that he medicated with alcohol and then drugs. He found solace in Seattle’s DIY punk scene. Duff could play anything – drums, guitar, bass – and if he couldn’t do that he was happy to roadie, or load gear or whatever else got him out of the house. He could also smile like his hero Sid Vicious – that corrupted Elvis curled lip – and had taken to wearing a padlock chain around his neck. He was 15 when he formed his first band, The Vains, playing bass, releasing one single a year later, ‘School Jerks’. At the same time he played guitar in another punk outfit, The Living, who once opened for Hüsker Dü. The same year he also began drumming with The Fastbacks,
playing on their 1981 single, ‘It’s Your Birthday’. Then he was in the charmingly named The Fartz, who only got as far as making demos – until Duff got famous and someone had the great idea of releasing them as an album.

  It was only when The Fartz became 10 Minute Warning that they achieved any real measure of punk immortality, though. By now Duff was back being the guitar player. 10 Minute Warning were at least different, still punk, but slower, heavier, more oppressive, paving the way for proto-grunge acts like Green River and Soundgarden to follow. Duff later claimed that if he’d known Seattle was going to explode the way it did in the early Nineties, that he would never have left town. But that wasn’t true. Duff was tall, good-looking, blonde, and looking for a good time all the time. He also liked to dress up. He had about as much in common with Kurt Cobain and his ilk as diamonds with rust.

  In LA he stayed with his brother, found a job as an apprentice server in a Black Angus steakhouse and began to get a handle on the scene. It was bigger than Seattle, because LA was vast and sprawling, but it worked the same way. Almost everyone he met seemed to be a guitarist so he figured bass gave him a better chance of gaining a foothold, and with the feeling in his bones that punk, for the moment at least, was dead, and this new rock’n’roll vibe on the Strip was his to grab hold of and shake, he picked up a local music newssheet, The Recycler, and answered an ad.

  ‘The name to call was Slash, so I assumed he must be a punk rock guy like me,’ Duff later recalled. They met at Canter’s Deli, Duff in a floor-length leather coat with an anarchy symbol on the back that he’d blacked out with a Sharpie, Slash and Steven with long hair and girls in tow. They ended up at Slash’s mom’s place, Duff immediately appealing to Ola’s mothering instincts, and they had a warm week or so of building a friendship if not a band, taking in a night at the Troubadour watching LA Guns. But Duff had his worries about Steven’s playing and the direction of Road Crew – the only one of the bunch who’d actually recorded and could play both guitar and drums – and so they agreed to shake hands and go their separate ways, Slash’s number on a piece of paper in Duff’s pocket.

  After he got laid off by the Black Angus, Duff found work as a delivery driver, and while he was doing his rounds one day he ran into Izzy, who told him about this new band he had that was kind of an amalgam of LA Guns and this other thing with a very good, if kinda crazy, singer. As it turned out, they’d just lost a bass player and hey … don’t you play bass? And in the way that things happen, Duff found himself at a rehearsal of Guns N’ Roses. He liked Axl right away, tuned straight into his restless energy, and as soon as he heard him let rip into the mike, ‘I knew in an instant that this dude was different and powerful and fucking serious …’

  They played some shows, and although they were good, Duff got the sense that Tracii and Rob were happy being big fish in a small pond, playing the same gigs around West Hollywood over and over until something happened. That wasn’t the punk way. In Seattle, where there weren’t any major-label guys always hovering at gigs, you didn’t wait for things to happen because they never did, and so Duff pulled Axl and Izzy aside and suggested a road trip, a string of gigs up the West coast, finishing off in Seattle. It would be an adventure, he told them, and a way to find out if things were going to fly away from the heady hothouse of LA.

  ‘I could tell immediately that Izzy knew what I was up to,’ Duff said, looking back. ‘He knew this was a way to test the links in a band and find the weak ones.’ They found them. Tracii and Rob bailed ten days before the tour, freaked, Duff felt, by the plan to get in a car, drive to the show and let the rest – food, a place to sleep, gas money, etc. – take care of itself. He felt around in his pocket for a phone number and called that guy Slash. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told Axl and Izzy, ‘I know who we can bring in.’

  The key slid into the lock and turned. Slash and Steven had three rehearsals with Axl, Izzy and Duff, played a raucous one-off on 6 June at the bottom of the bill in the Troubadour to get loose, and Guns N’ Roses were ready to go on tour. They had a couple of friends, Danny and Jo-Jo, whom they’d enlisted as roadies, and Danny’s car, a snarling Buick Le Sabre with a trailer on the back.

  It broke down 100 miles later. Danny and Jo-Jo were delegated to stay behind with it, as the band that would soon become the biggest in the world hit the road with their thumbs out. It was chaos. They missed all three gigs booked between LA and Seattle, but somehow strung together enough rides to arrive, triumphant, hungry and reeking to high heaven, at the Gorilla Gardens, for their first ever show outside LA. Barely ten people saw them, but this time it didn’t matter. There was booze, dope and Duff’s punk friends to party with, and more importantly they had made it, and made it together, through a 1000-mile odyssey of rides in trucks, sleeping at roadsides; starving, cold, tired, wired and looking, in Duff’s excellent phrase, ‘like hungry wolves’. They were a band.

  When the promoter at the Gorilla Gardens tried to welsh on their $200 guarantee – ‘You haven’t sold any tickets’ – Axl set light to some paper towels and tried to burn the place down. The bouncers chased them into the streets and they ran, screaming from the joy and adrenalin, into another club, where they attempted unsuccessfully to commandeer the equipment of the band playing there – a local outfit Duff knew called Soundgarden. That failed too, but when Duff’s friend Donner organised a ride back to LA, they returned happy, and, as Duff said, ‘A genuine band. A gang with the shared experience of a road trip gone wrong, an out-of-town gig and the knowledge that we were fully committed to Guns N’ Roses.’

  2

  WHERE THE GIRLS ARE PRETTY

  Although it was Duff McKagan who had booked what Guns N’ Roses were already calling ‘the Hell tour’ to Seattle, once they returned to LA, one thing was clear: with Tracii Guns out of the picture, the band had a leader, and that leader was W. Axl Rose. ‘Axl always had this kind of vision of where he wanted to be,’ Slash would tell me. ‘What he wanted the band to be. He didn’t like people he thought were trying to hold him back.’

  With Tracii now out of the way, and the other band members unready to challenge a guy so seemingly set in his own mind, Axl was ready to assume leadership. Sure, Duff was determined to keep pushing forward; like Axl, he wanted to rehearse regularly and get the show on the road as soon as possible, but he would yield to the singer in terms of writing. Slash and Izzy, who were more involved in the writing process, were so laidback (and increasingly strung-out) that they would often just leave him to it once things were up and running. And they both owed him: Axl had sold himself and Izzy as a pair, even when Slash had visions of a one-guitarist band, and in turn Slash had already blown it with Axl once and couldn’t afford to lose a singer that good again. Only Steven seemed able to talk back to Axl, but then Steven really didn’t give a fuck – about anything.

  Anyhow, it often helped if bands had a dominant personality: the Stones had Jagger, the Beatles had John Lennon, and so on through the history of rock. Sometimes, as with Metallica, the dominant business force (drummer Lars Ulrich) and the dominant musical force (singer-guitarist James Hetfield) were different but complementary. As Guns N’ Roses evolved, W. Axl Rose would become both. His desperate need for control, though, seemed to be of an entirely different order to that of most maniacal bandleaders. In the years to come, Axl would talk of the profound damage his dreadful childhood had done to him. And of his attempts, through various forms of therapy, to try to repair at least some of that damage. Right now, though, the other members of Guns N’ Roses only knew the bad-ass guy that didn’t take shit from nobody. Not even them. But the band would learn that his sudden and uncontrollable mood swings were there to be indulged – at least if they wanted a tolerable working atmosphere and the easy rock star life they’d always dreamed of. ‘We call him the Ayatollah,’ Slash would tell me when we first met, every part of his face smiling except the eyes. ‘With Axl, it’s always been his way or the highway.’

  After the Hell Tour came the Hell House
. And like the creation of a star, the Hell House was to suck in a lot of dark matter before it emitted the white heat and light of the Guns N’ Roses who were ready to make their first records. There are always torrid tales that surround the creation of a rock’n’roll legend, but in the Hell House bad things happened, things that do not reflect well on anyone involved – however famous and lauded they were to become. The building was located in West Hollywood, behind 7508 Sunset Boulevard near the junction of North Gardner Street, a one-room space of around 12 feet by 12 feet that was officially designated a ‘storage area’ (it’s now behind a shop called the Russian Bookstore). Just over the road was the Guitar Center, and nearby the Mesa/Boogie amp showroom. It wasn’t a dwelling space at all: it had a roll-up aluminium door, no bathroom, kitchen or air conditioning, and until Izzy and a couple of friends found some lumber abandoned behind the unit and used it to build a rudimentary gallery that just about slept three if you lay very still, was entirely unrecognisable as one.

  Anyone needing the toilet had to use the communal facility 50 yards up the street. It was a terrible place, one you’d only consider if you were young, broke and living day to day with some fucked-up dream in your head. Izzy described it as ‘a fucking living hell …’ Slash, having lost a job working on a newsstand and its attendant chance to crash at the apartment of the stand’s manager, was forced to choose between the Hell House or homelessness and even then sometimes took the latter option, sleeping in the Tower Records parking lot rather than the squalid, overcrowded nightmare that the House became.