by Slash
The thing is, because of friends of mine like Mark Mansfield and Ron Schneider who were still close to me and part of the music scene to a degree, at the time, many of my old friends became involved in the Guns N’ Roses universe once it got going. Because of our common friends, I reestablished connections with people I hadn’t seen since I’d left school, and many of them got sucked into our world—for better, and mostly for worse.
Michelle was one of them; even when we were kids she was always a nut case. When she started frequenting our circles, she ended up hooking up with Axl and they had a brief romantic interlude. He wrote those lyrics about her life, which tells the facts of her upbringing verbatim. Her dad was definitely involved in the porn business and her mom was a pill popper and drug addict who eventually committed suicide. But having my former school friend with whom I’d shared cigarettes in the bathroom back in junior high become the subject of one of our more intense songs was something else. I asked Axl about it one day, because I couldn’t imagine the Michelle I knew being happy about having her story made public.
“Hey, Axl,” I said to him at rehearsal after we’d run through the song, “don’t you think Michelle is going to be offended?”
“Why would she?” he said. “It’s all fucking true.”
“Yeah it is, but I don’t know if it’s going to be cool if you say all those things. Can’t you change it a bit?”
“No,” he said. “It’s the truth. Even if she doesn’t like it, I’m going to do it anyway.”
I expected the worst; even though we had nothing to sue for, I expected Michelle to come after us in some way. I at least expected her to hate the song and be mortified by having her business hung out there like that. I was very, very wrong: from the moment we played that song live through to when we recorded it for our album, Michelle loved the attention it brought her. Back then it was the best thing that ever happened to her. But like so many of our friends that were drawn into the dark circle of Guns N’ Roses, she came in one way and went out another. Most of them ended up either going to jail or rehab or both (or worse), but I’m happy to say that she’s among those who turned their lives around before it was too late. More than a few of our friends eventually moved to Minneapolis…maybe that had something to do with it.
“Rocket Queen” was inspired by a riff I came up with when I first met Duff. It was one of the more complicated arrangements on what became our album, mostly because we had to integrate the riff with Axl’s more melodic chorus. The song is based on our mutual friend Barbie, who even at eighteen had a notorious reputation. She was a drug addict and a queen of the underground scene back then. She’d eventually become a madam, but Axl was infatuated with her at the time. I hear she has managed to survive after all these years.
I was pulled under, I passed out cold, and fell off the chair and woke up sprawled across the floor hours later at daybreak
IT WAS DURING THIS PERIOD OF WRITING and rehearsing at the Sunset and Gardner Hotel and Villas that I started to notice something different about Steven. He would show up to rehearsal a little too elastic; he seemed like he was drunk but he wasn’t drinking anything. I couldn’t quite figure it out because his playing was fine, so I was intrigued. Steven was dating a girl who lived with a roommate on Gardner just down the street from our rehearsal space. I started to go over there with him every night after we were done practicing and found it to be a pretty heavy scene: it was like time stopped when you walked through the door; everything moved very, very slowly.
I got to know Steve’s girlfriend and her roommate, a girl so whacked out that it broke my heart. I have to admit, I also thought she was cute, so I started seeing her, and though I was aware that she was on something, I wasn’t aware of what it was. I’d go over there with Steven after rehearsal and the four of us would listen to the Stones’ Goats Head Soup all night long while I watched them nodding off all over the place. It finally dawned on me that heroin might be the catalyst for everybody’s subdued state. At first, none of them did it in front of me, so I figured it out later rather than sooner. But even if they had, I wouldn’t have tried it because at that point heroin had no appeal to me. I didn’t know much about it, and what I saw didn’t make me want to try it at all. Why would it?
The roommate was one of those useless L.A. stories: she was eighteen or nineteen; a rich girl who had taken her family’s money and done everything in her power to throw it in their face. In the process she’d fucked herself up pretty good, and she’d complain to no end about how her life was a shambles and how it was all her family’s fault. Her solution was to piss and moan until she couldn’t take it anymore, then get high and seek solace in nodding out, which, needless to say, got in the way of her limited, yet planned efforts to repair her situation. This movie came complete with the early-morning scene where her mother arrives unannounced to confront her and of course I made the mistake of getting in the middle of their horrible argument.
I didn’t say much, but her mother was convinced that I was the cause of her daughter’s condition. The truth is that I was the only one in her scene not on heroin. Her mother left that day hating me and leaving her daughter behind, but eventually she won out: that girl soon disappeared. After that, Steven’s girlfriend moved out, too, and neither of us ever saw either of them again.
Up until I watched Steven and the girls do it and eventually did it myself, all that I knew of heroin were the antidrug movies I’d seen in school and the plot of The French Connection, which centered on Popeye Doyle’s maniacal efforts to stop the import of a French cartel’s huge shipment of it. At that point I had no idea that all of my heroes were on heroin. But I’d soon find out. It crept into my life like ivy up a wall.
Izzy and I were at Nicky Beat’s rehearsal studio back in 1984, when I first chased the dragon with him, sucking up the smoke that rose from the foil through a straw as we heated it up. All it left me feeling was queasy and not very high at all. I didn’t get the instant buzz, so I lost interest in it quick; feeling sick was not my idea of a good time. Izzy was cool; he could smoke it and get complete satisfaction that way.
A few months later I mainlined for the first time and that was all she wrote; after that, I’d never do it any other way than straight into my bloodstream. I was just like every other cheap-thrill user; I wanted it fast and I wanted it now. I’ve never been able to get high doing it any other way than with a needle. If I can’t, I’d rather not bother; it’s a waste of drugs, a waste of time, and a conscious decision to be inefficient. I had tried to do it the way it is supposed to be done; the ancient civilized method of chasing the dragon according to Chinese custom, but that didn’t work for me. The Chinese were cool, collected, and composed about heroin, in the same way they were about opium. The intravenous method was developed much later, in the West, once people began using morphine recreationally. Needles were sought out for the instant gratification factor and that is what street people were after. In America, in the cowboy days of the Wild West, more women did it than men, all of them using needles, most of them hookers and barmaids.
One night really can change your life and this was the night that changed mine. I’ve thought about this a lot and I’m sure that it was probably because of all the Jim Beam I drank. We were in some chick’s apartment I ended up at with Izzy. I was at her vanity table, in her bathroom; it was very dimly lit, very druggy. She tied me off, loaded it up, shot it…and a wave engulfed me from somewhere deep within my stomach. I got this huge rush and that was all that I remembered. I was pulled under, I passed out cold, and fell off the chair and woke up sprawled across the floor hours later at daybreak. It took me a second to figure out what had happened: there was a bottle of Jim Beam next to me that I’d been drinking and for a moment I forgot altogether that’d I’d done heroin.
I looked through the doorway and saw Izzy and the girl asleep in the bed and that was when I realized that I felt somehow…different. I wasn’t sure what it was, aside from the fact that it wasn’t famili
ar. It was all fine, though, because I was in the best mood. When Izzy and the girl woke up we hung out and I was just so content, so happy, and entirely at peace with everything. Izzy felt exactly the same way.
The girl’s apartment we were in was off Wilshire near downtown L.A. and we left her that morning without a worry in the world. The future looked bright even though we didn’t have any prospects at the time. As morning came over the city, we wandered all the way back up into Melrose in central Hollywood and that’s when I got the bright idea that we should go visit this girl I knew. She was a really attractive girl who went to Fairfax High who had a crush on me. Though I didn’t know her all that well, I did know that her mom was at work every day, so we went over to her place and hung out and listened to the Beatles all afternoon. She had a big girlie bed with a fluffy comforter and the sunlight came into her room in a certain way; the whole space was very airy and white and pink and soft.
Izzy and I got there and fell out and listened to music. I was in love with the song “Dear Prudence.” “Revolution” into “Dear Prudence” seemed to be everything that mattered in the world. “Norwegian Wood,” that was good, too. We hung out there for the better part of the day, then left. On the way home, whenever we stopped walking, I would fall into that blissful nodding state that heroin brings. I realized that the buzz I’d gotten had lasted the whole day long.
This is the best thing I’ve ever done, I thought to myself. Nothing was ever like this.
I was nineteen years old.
OUR REHEARSAL SPACE/MY AND AXL’S apartment was where the band headed with our stragglers in tow at the end of the night. It was where we’d go after we’d played a show and whatever club it was had cleared us out. As our fan base grew, this ritual became an unwise proposition that wasn’t going to end well but we engaged in it anyway. The Villas were deep enough into the cross section of Hollywood and downtown that no one but hookers and drug addicts were hanging around after dark—our neighbors were nine-to-five businesses on each side with the exception of the Gardner Elementary School right behind us, whose hours were more like eight to three. It was easy for fifty or more people to party all night, shooting smack, smoking pot, and breaking bottles against the wall without any trouble from the police. Soon that scene grew enough to fill our space, the alley, and the entire parking lot next to the building: people with liquor in brown paper bags could be found engaging in illegal and sordid activities, less than fifty yards off Sunset Boulevard at any hour of the night. We’d be up past dawn, but when the kids would start filing into the elementary school in the morning, usually we started to wind things down. Luckily there was no interaction between our scene and theirs, although their playground did end at the back of our “studio” building.
Another band used the storage/rehearsal space next door to us and we could never remember their name…oh, wait, they were called the Wild. Dizzy Reed was in that band playing keyboards, and that is how he and Axl met and became friends. The Wild were a typical rock band of the day that I never went to see; I also never paid much attention to how they played. I did, however, party with them. Our entire rehearsal-space life was a scene defined by these two bands partying all night, every night in a dingy part of town.
The level of debauchery, for our part at least, got pretty outrageous. I remember being up in the bunk one night after a show with Izzy and some girl. We were taking turns having sex with her, but Izzy wasn’t wearing protection, so when he pulled out, he fucking came on my leg, since I was right there on the other side of her. That definitely stopped me in my tracks. I sat up, looked over at him, and said, “Hey! Izzy…man. We’ve got to get a bigger place.”
A scene that out of bounds wasn’t going to last, and when it crashed it did so very dramatically. After one particular gig, as usual, our friends and whoever else was in the club came back to tear it up at our place well into the early morning. Now, most of the girls who chose to party in our alleyway until six or seven a.m. weren’t the sharpest pencils in the box; but this particular night one of them lost it completely. My memory of the events is hazy, but from what I remember she had sex with Axl up in the loft. Toward the end of the night, maybe as the drugs and booze wore off, she lost her mind and freaked out intensely. Axl told her to leave and tried throwing her out. I attempted to help mediate the situation to get her out quietly, but that wasn’t happening.
About a week later, Steven was there when the cops stormed in and turned the place upside down. They broke a few pieces of equipment searching for contraband and hassled anybody associated with us in any way; they threatened Steven with arrest if he didn’t tell them where to find Axl and me because we were wanted for allegedly raping that girl. Steven got in touch with us and warned us, so we stayed away from home for the rest of the day. I headed back there the next morning; it was raining and unseasonably cold, and I found Izzy when I got there, picking his way through the mess that the cops had left behind. I was completely puzzled because I hadn’t done a thing that I could think of—I hardly spoke to the girl in question that night, nor had anybody else.
It was a bad situation, so I took my cue and split; I grabbed a few things and headed off to hide out with Steven at his new girlfriend Monica’s apartment, which was within walking distance. Monica was a Swedish porn star who’d taken Steven in and I couldn’t have asked for a better place to lay low because we used to have awesome threesomes. Monica was great, she was a really wonderful hostess that way, plus she had a phone, so I was able to receive constant updates on our legal situation. Generally, the news wasn’t good: this was a real situation—Axl and I were charged with felony rape. The future looked grim and the band’s progress halted immediately.
The girl’s parents had contacts in the LAPD, and intended to press charges to the fullest. Axl took off to Orange County and hid out at some girl’s place for a few weeks, while I stayed with Steven and Monica. For fear of arrest, we didn’t book gigs and maintained a low profile. The truth was, Axl had definitely had sex with the girl, but it had been consensual and no one had raped her. For my part I hadn’t even touched her! When we got our wits about us after a few weeks, we dealt with the situation through the proper channels.
Axl returned to L.A. and the two of us moved in with Vicky Hamilton and her roommate, Jennifer Perry, and Vicky hired a lawyer to handle our case. I’m sure Vicky regretted taking us in immediately: Axl and I took over the living room in her quaint one-bedroom apartment, and between the empty liquor bottles and the ceaseless parade of characters that seemed to trail along behind us wherever we went, overnight we converted it into a complete mess. Axl slept on the couch, I slept on the floor, and what was once a living room looked like a bomb had hit it. The kitchen was a fucking disaster; within a week there were dishes and trash piled a mile high. Luckily I’d convinced my ex-girlfriend Yvonne to watch my snake, Clyde, for a while. The case went to court, but somewhere along the line, the charges against me were dropped. Axl, however, did have to get himself a suit and face the judge, but once the testimony was given, the charges were dropped and that was it.
WE LOST WHAT SEEMED LIKE A YEAR OF our lives getting clear of that legal issue, because until then, every day had moved us forward with ferocious intensity. After that incident, we vacated our garage rehearsal space, and started playing out and working on new songs again. Our friends Danny and Joe were still in the picture; Danny’s green Oldsmobile was still our band transportation. Danny was a great guy with a James Dean haircut and a very cool, confident vibe. He and I became drug buddies, too: once I got into heroin, we would drive that green beast all over L.A. looking for smack.
Joe was our roadie and my guitar tech back then, though he was pretty lousy: I remember headlining at the Roxy and one of Joe’s duties was to bring me a slide during the solo section of “Rocket Queen,” but by the time he actually got the slide on my finger the solo was over. I was so pissed off that I physically kicked him offstage. But all was forgiven later on, because Joe was a loyal, true
-blue kind of guy that anyone would want to keep around. Joe was always the one to back any of us up when things got sticky and dedication like that can’t be bought.
We weren’t at all like the other bands playing clubs on the strip; we generally didn’t care what they were doing. We did, however, as far as other bands went, have an unspoken disregard for Poison, because they were the biggest local band on the block and the epitome of everything that we hated about the L.A. music scene. We were scheduled to share a few bills with them at different points, early in our career, but each time something major went wrong. I believe once they didn’t show up at all and we were forced to play two sets to cover for them, and I think another time the promoter pulled the gig at the last minute because of some shady move on their part.
One of our more memorable gigs from this era was an outdoor festival called the Street Scene that took place on six or seven stages in downtown Los Angeles that occupied a circuit of city blocks. It was our first time playing it, I and it was 1983, and we were scheduled to open for Fear, the only L.A. punk band that I really cared about. We drove down there in Danny’s Oldsmobile and were unloading our gear in the designated band parking lot when we noticed a sea of people running our way. We continued to unload as people sprinted past us, literally as fast as they could—from what, we had no idea. It was as if Godzilla was coming or a guy had set off a shotgun behind them. We couldn’t see what the problem was until we finally got close enough to the stage to realize there was no stage; Fear’s fans had overzealously rioted and torn it down before the band even went on.
