Slash

by Slash

  These two cops were clearly out to fulfill their nightly or monthly quota, because we weren’t speeding or doing anything suspicious at all. We had nothing on us, but Danny had forgotten the needle he had in the breast pocket of his shirt, which gave the cops carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. They started by shining their flashlights in our eyes.

  “Have you taken any drugs tonight, sir?” one of them asked me.

  “No,” I said, squinting at him through my hair.

  “Are you sure about that? It looks to me like you have; your pupils are pinned.”

  “Yeah, that’s because you’re shining a flashlight in my eyes,” I said.

  They weren’t having any of it: they impounded Danny’s car and arrested him for possession of paraphernalia. They cuffed me, too, but wouldn’t tell me on what charges. And it all came down within ten feet of my front door.

  They stuffed Danny and me in the back of the patrol car and continued on with their unstated mission to bust every long-haired “vagrant” in sight on their way back to the station. Less than a mile down the street, they picked up Mike Levine, the bass player from Triumph, who was exiting a 7-Eleven and heading to his car with some beer under his arm, on the premise that he intended to drink and drive. They put him in the back with us, and continued on. A bit farther down, on Santa Monica Boulevard, they busted a girl for “public drunkenness,” literally three blocks from the sheriff ’s office. The girl wasn’t visibly drunk at all—she was just walking down the street. Since there wasn’t any more room in the car, one of the cops opted to walk her across the street to the station.

  They put all of us males in the same holding tank and we sat around the jail cell for a few hours. Mike Levine got bailed out, and after Danny had sat around long enough, they let him go, too. He was booked for having the needle and was given a court date, and all of that. I was the only one left, and since I thought that I hadn’t done anything, I figured that I’d get out any minute now. It was Saturday by then, about eight a.m., and as the hours stretched on, I tried, unsuccessfully, to get the guards’ attention to ask why I was still being held.

  The only answer I got was being shuffled from the small cell of the night before to a larger cell with high ceilings, a rubber mat on the floor, one common toilet in the corner, a lot of inmates, and the rank smell of piss. I had no idea of what was coming next. My high had started to wear off; I was a few hours away from complete withdrawal. After a while we were loaded onto one of those horrible black-and-white transformed school buses with gates on the windows. I was shackled at the ankles and wrists and chained to the guy in front of me. I still had no idea why I was there, but I realized that I was going to the county jail, so I immediately started chewing off my black nail polish. There was no way in hell that I was going to county with fingernail polish on.

  It took hours to get there because the bus made stops at several jails along the way to pick up more people; all while I got sicker and sicker. At each jail we were loaded off into another group holding cell to wait while the new additions were processed. The county jail itself was about twenty miles away, but getting there, with all of those stops and red tape, took all day. We hit about six jails and finally got to county in the late afternoon. The process was no less endless when we finally arrived: they logged in my belongings and put me in a series of holding rooms with the other new inmates until my paperwork was complete.

  It was the most tedious bureaucracy I’ve ever seen in my life, and it didn’t help that I was genuinely dope sick during it all. Up until then, I knew about being dope sick in the abstract sense; I had heard stories, but even after I’d experienced a bit of it after that day in Tijuana, I regarded it with the same carefree bravado that had gotten me hooked in the first place. Faced with the reality of being dope sick, I figured that the best way to avoid it was to always know where to get more junk. It hadn’t been a problem in Hollywood. But being locked up in the county jail for a few days with no access to heroin was something else entirely: it was a forced detox in the worst possible setting.

  I was housed in one of those big old-fashioned rooms with a few rows of cots, where I sweated it out, nauseous, sick, and exhausted. I’m not sure exactly how long I was there altogether; I suppose close to three days; then all of a sudden they let me out, again with no explanation, and I had to go through the whole fucking entrance process in reverse. Axl had put up the bail, and had Danny pick me up, but I didn’t know that as I made my way through the exit procedure in my little jumpsuit, waiting in long lines, sitting in a series of rooms, sweating and coughing and sniveling and fidgeting, smelling really bad and looking and feeling fucking miserable. When they handed me my clothes and belongings, I was finally informed why I was there: I’d been hauled in for a six-year-old jaywalking ticket. There had been a warrant out for me after I’d not shown up in court or paid the fine. Of all the things I’ve done, I got busted for jaywalking. Well, at least I did my time and paid my debt to society.

  I walked around outside of county, bumming cigarettes for about an hour wondering who had bailed me out, until Danny suddenly showed up; we then drove straight down to Melrose and Western to cop. When I got back to the apartment, Axl was sleeping, so were Steven and Izzy, and Duff wasn’t around. I got high, took a shower, and when those guys woke up, I realized that they hadn’t even noticed that I’d been gone for a while. I wasn’t expecting much, but it would have been nice to get some degree of fanfare. When I found out later that Axl was the one who scraped together the bail money; I was touched. That was pretty cool of him.

  DESPITE OUR LIFESTYLE AND ITS unconventional set of priorities, we did get a lot of things done in that apartment. We wrote an acoustic version of “You’re Crazy” that ended up as an electric version on Appetite and in its original form on Lies. We worked that one up at Dean Chamberlain’s, giving it that edge by speeding it up about twenty beats per minute from its original state. Axl, Izzy, and I had some really great creative times in that apartment. But regardless, our advance, both collectively and individually, had dwindled, so our quest for a manager was suddenly important: we had lost our lease and two of us had more or less devolved into everyday junkies that needed somewhere to live.

  Tom Zutaut introduced us to Arnold Stiefel, a manager whose biggest clients at the time were Rod Stewart (whom I believe he still handles), and the actor Matthew Broderick, who was about to become a huge star off the back of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. That didn’t impress us any. But after a few great meetings with Arnold and his partners, somehow we walked away with the most ideal situation imaginable: they hadn’t signed us outright, but they agreed to put us up in a house until we found a producer and made an album, at which point they’d decide if they wanted to sign on as our managers. I have no idea what kind of deal Tom made with them to make that happen, but this was the perfect short-term fix: they were willing to let us “evolve” on their tab.

  I felt sorry for Tom by then. We were this self-destructive mutation of a band that he’d had the utmost confidence in and we were paying him back by showing no promise of ever getting it together. To us it seemed funny that none of the producers or managers seemed fit to do the job, but Tom was very aware that we were slowly but surely narrowing the “interest” gap between everyone in the industry and no one at all—I’m sure he was panicked: after two years he might lose his job if he didn’t make it work.

  The only good thing that Tom, as an A&R man, got out of this was that when he picked us up and signed us, we had a couple of really good songs, but this period of time allowed us to write a bunch more really good songs. Maybe in the back of his mind, there was a method to Tom’s madness, maybe he knew that we needed this time and did everything he could to make it happen, because in the end he got the good stuff out of us. It was never stated as his intent, but I’m sure he looked at the bright side that way. This band took up so much of his time from the moment we were signed to the time we got our record done and got out on the road that it must h
ave driven him insane. There was nothing that he could do to mold us or move the process along at all, because anything he tried failed. The band’s overall attitude and extracurricular activities opposed the right direction at every turn.

  Out of desperation, Tom did manage to get us into the studio with Manny Charlton, the guitarist for Nazareth, at Sound City Studios on Whitsett and Moorpark out in the Valley. We worked on demos of “November Rain,” which was about eighteen minutes long in its original version, so needless to say we really needed to sit down and focus on arranging it. We also worked on “Don’t Cry,” and almost every other song that made it onto Appetite, except “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” because we hadn’t written that one yet. It was a great day in any case, hanging out in the studio recording everything live in this great big room. Unfortunately, Manny didn’t feel right. The demos sounded great, but they were just that: a bunch of great demo tapes. We knew enough about ourselves to know it wasn’t okay.

  SHORTLY AFTERWARD WE MOVED INTO the Stiefel house, as we came to call it, a brand-new home in a gated community called Laughlin Park located way out in Griffith Park near the Observatory, the Greek Theater, and the L.A. Zoo. It was way out in East Hollywood, about a twenty-minute drive from where we used to live. That doesn’t seem like much, but since none of us had cars, this became the most unsocial period we ever knew.

  We were stuck out there in a new house, in a new complex, in the woods. There were two bedrooms upstairs—one was Axl’s and one was Steven’s and Izzy and I shared a bedroom downstairs…due to our “shared interests.” We lived there for four or five months but had little furniture to speak of; we had beds, one table, and a couple of chairs in the entire house. Axl somehow managed to conjure up a proper bed, a lamp, and a dresser from somewhere: his room was a well-equipped oasis guarded by a padlock, but the rest of the place was basically empty. The lighting situation was equally meager: there was one lamp in Izzy’s and my room, an overhead light in the dining room, and no lights in the living room or above the stairs or in any of the hallways. The entire time we lived there, it looked as if someone was about to move in.

  We did have a fireplace, and since we never bothered to buy lamps, once the sun went down, we lit fires and generally restricted ourselves to the living room or the kitchen, which also had an overhead light. We were so out of our element: for once we were living in a neighborhood where household items weren’t available for free on the street, in other people’s trash. The upside was that we were in such a far-off residential area that when we didn’t feel like playing acoustics, we could jam all night on our electric guitars. And if we’d owned practice amps we probably would have.

  The drug lifestyle was a dominant reality in our lives, and it played a major role in everything we did at that point. Once it showed signs of wear, there was definitely light at the end of the tunnel…whether we liked it or not. It was obvious to us all that the free and easy overindulgent smack days we’d enjoyed in West Hollywood were done: we’d run out of money, most of the shit on the street had gone dry, and because of our new address, we were at the mercy of the only drug dealer willing to travel. It was not good at all: what had been very fun a short time ago was now a major pain in the ass. Unfortunately, we were in no shape to just up and quit and forget about it. We were forced to be conscientious and frugal as we strove to scale ourselves back.

  When we did score, Izzy and I wrote a lot because back then heroin was a great catalyst for us. I thought it was the coolest of all the drugs because it made me feel really at ease with everything; it melted away my inhibitions and insecurities. On smack, I was cool and confident so collaborating was easy. As soon as we’d get high, Izzy and I would start jamming and working out ideas, just trading riffs and chords back and forth. Something always seemed to come out of it naturally, it seemed so inspired.

  I HAVE A WAY OF SITTING DOWN WITH the guitar and coming up with these hard-to-play riffs; they’re unorthodox fingerings of simple melodies. It’s my way of getting into playing or finding something interesting to do as opposed to just practicing scales. To this day, I still do it; rather than doing obvious “exercises,” I invent runs of my own design that both loosen up my fingers and keep my ears engaged, because if practicing doesn’t sound good, why bother with it at all.

  That is what I was doing one night as Izzy sat down on the floor to join me.

  “Hey, what is that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Just fucking around.”

  “Keep doing it.”

  He came up with some chords and since Duff was there, he came up with a bass line, as Steven planned out his drum beat. Within an hour my little guitar exercise had become something else.

  Axl didn’t leave his room that night, but he was just as much a part of the creative process as the rest of us: he sat up there and listened to everything we were doing and was inspired to write lyrics that were complete by the next afternoon. They became an ode to his girlfriend and future first wife, Erin Everly, daughter of Don Everly of the Everly Brothers.

  We’d found a rehearsal studio in Burbank called Burbank Studios, which was nothing more than a big warehouse owned by this old Asian couple, which is where we really started to work on the preproduction for Appetite, perfecting the songs we’d already demoed. At our next session, we worked our new song into a complete movement: we wrote a bridge, added a guitar solo, and so it became “Sweet Child o’ Mine.”

  That was all fine and well, but we still didn’t have a producer. Tom came up with the idea to try out Spencer Proffer, who’d worked with Tina Turner, Quiet Riot, and W.A.S.P., who Axl liked a lot back in the day, so we went for it. We took our gear down to Pasha Studios, which was where Spencer operated out of at the time and we agreed to work on “Sweet Child” together as a test. Spencer was a great guy; he was actually the one who suggested that the song needed a dramatic breakdown before its ultimate finale. He was right…but we had no idea what we wanted to do there. All of us sat around the control room, listening to it over and over, devoid of a clue.

  “Where do we go?” Axl said, more to himself than the rest of us. “Where do we go now?…Where do we go?”

  “Hey,” Spencer said, turning the music down. “Why don’t you just try singing that?”

  And so became that dramatic breakdown.

  We worked up a solid demo of “Sweet Child,” and worked with Spencer on demos for about half the tunes on Appetite, but by the end of the process we just didn’t feel confident that he was the producer for us, so our quest continued.

  IT WASN’T LOOKING GOOD—I’M SURE Tom was at his wit’s end, but right at the breaking point, we found a manager. Technically, we were supposed to be managed by Stiefel and company, whose house we were living in, but since neither Tom nor we had any interaction with them, we continued to take meetings with potential managers. The one that stuck to the wall so to speak was Alan Niven, a guy who knew right away what he was walking into by working with us.

  Izzy and I met Alan at a bar and I could barely keep my eyes open sitting there on my stool, but that didn’t seem to bother Alan at all. From the start he thrived on the reckless energy of our band and was excited to get us over the initial hump that had stalled us on our way to recording and touring and becoming a professional entity. I was very jaded and, as I mentioned, I was very paranoid about anyone who aimed to get inside our circle. But I respected Alan before I even met him: he was the architect behind the Sex Pistols’ signing with EMI so I knew that he had skills. He was a charming, raffish New Zealander who took to Izzy right off the bat and knew that we were worth the effort. Alan didn’t try to exert his will in the creative arena—he left that to us—he just did what he did best: marketing and management; that was his forte.

  Alan met everyone while we were still working with Spencer down at Pasha and listened to all of the demos we’d done and decided that we should take those takes, add a live audience track, and release it all as a live EP. He thought it was essentia
l for us to get some product out while we still had a strong buzz in the industry; it would keep the excitement alive while we recorded our full-length album.

  We came up with the idea of releasing the EP on our own label, which we insisted was financed by Geffen. It would appear to be a “live” EP on an “indie” label but in truth it wouldn’t be either. We called the label Uzi Suicide and the EP Live Like a Suicide. It was untouched demos of four songs we’d been playing since our first rehearsal: Aerosmith’s “Mama Kin,” Rose Tattoo’s “Nice Boys,” and two of our own, “Move to the City” and “Reckless Life.” They’re raw I guess, but if you ask me they still sound pretty fucking good.

  Playing the Troubadour circa 1986.

  So now we had a manager and now we had half an album of “live” tracks and Zutaut was happy. He believed the EP would attract eligible producers. It definitely got us noticed: I remember leaving Alan’s house in Redondo Beach with Duff and hearing “Move to the City” played on KNEC, this great heavy metal station out of Long Beach. The EP was a clear indication of our aesthetic, not to mention our lifestyle, and as it had always been, there weren’t too many easy-to-find like-minded souls. To say the least, it took a few dry runs to find the right guy.

  IT WAS AGREED THAT PLAYING A FEW gigs would keep us visible and keep us from losing momentum. I, for one, knew that if there wasn’t any concrete work commitment on the horizon, it was likely that I’d treat every day like a vacation. We went back up to San Francisco to open for Jetboy at the Stone, followed by a gig two nights later opening for Ted Nugent at the Santa Monica Civic Center.