Slash

by Slash

  It was an appropriate homecoming, too. We pulled into the arena and parked the bus on the street outside of the hotel. Somehow we managed to pick up two girls who were right there on the sidewalk, and a couple of the guys took them into the back of the bus. Then we checked in to the hotel and I remember sipping my drink while looking out across the parking lot at the arena, where that building loomed on the horizon, larger than life. The next day our friends from L.A. came out, and when we went on, they gave us more attention than all of the Canadian crowds combined had done. It was great, we were home.

  These were the type of any-band-anytime equal-opportunity groupies that were down to fuck everyone all the time.

  WE TOOK TO THE TOURING ROUTINE PRETTY naturally; we were off to the races, right away. We were built for it; we went through the paces without trying too hard. When we got to Arizona, I believe it was, we experienced groupies for the first time; not the kind that wanted to fuck us because they were fans of ours—we’d already had our share of those back home. These were the type of any-band-anytime equal-opportunity groupies that were down to fuck everyone all the time.

  Overall, groupies were usually between seventeen and twenty-two; if they were in their mid-twenties, they’d most likely been around the block a few times—maybe too many—and there were those older than that, which often involved some bizarre mother-daughter combos. But in a way, the groupies in the sticks were more understandable than the groupies in L.A.: culture was at a minimum where these girls lived, and they had devoted themselves to getting as big a piece of it as they could when it passed through town. It was almost respectable.

  Whenever we weren’t performing, Axl holed up in the back lounge, resting his voice and sleeping. Sometimes when we’d have a day off, he’d sleep back there instead of checking in to the hotel. Still, he’d come out every so often to hang out with the rest of us and that was always cool. Everything was really good at this point—put it this way, we got on stage on time. The camaraderie was high; we were the perfect bunch of guys for touring together…not that I had anything else to compare it to. But we were all quite content.

  Until the compressor on our shitty bus broke down, taking the air-conditioning with it, somewhere in the middle of Texas. As we sat there sweating bullets in the heat, it occurred to us that there had to be a class above touring on the level we were at.

  West Arkeen came out to Texas for a few days, which took the party up a few notches in spite of the Sahara-like conditions on the bus: West left us four or five days later looking like a shadow of his former self. I estimate that he lost about eight pounds in sweat. We had three days off in Texas after that, in this resort hotel in the middle of nowhere, and during those three days we fired our bus driver and a tour manager we’ll call “Cooper.”

  Cooper was a character; he wore a newsboy cap all the time and drove a yellow Lotus. He was this skinny, wiry English guy with a very jumpy demeanor—I guess that was due to all of the coke he did. The problem with Cooper was that he had turned into a self-centered rock star and forgot that he was a tour manager. We’d gotten sick of Cooper luring the chicks we’d picked up to his room with the promise of coke, and keeping them there in the hopes of getting laid. He’d even lie to us when we’d call his room, asking where the girls were. He’d say they’d split and we believed him until the one time we stormed down there and caught him red-handed.

  He also had a bad habit of promising Izzy and me a gram of coke if we got up in the morning to do interviews. He’d give us the smallest taste, but once when we were done at the radio station or on the phone or whatever, and demanded the rest, he usually tried to back out of his promise. That was just stupid—if you promised us drugs and didn’t deliver, we were the kind of people who’d kick your ass.

  The last straw was a situation where Alan had entrusted Cooper to take care of the band and he just lost it and got us to a gig very late. It was a big-time fuckup and that was it for him; Alan sacked him and the bus driver at once. They were just gone. The next we heard was that Cooper was selling phone books door-to-door.

  I was impressed when Alan booted Cooper without so much as an explanation—that’s when I knew that he was serious. It was an example of the overly protective, paternal, and possessive stance he took toward us. It was comforting because we were such hell-raisers that someone needed to give a shit.

  It was great that Alan trimmed the fat; but the reality was that after those days off, we needed to get to the next gig in Houston and we had no tour manager and no bus driver. We had to seek out other transportation on the spot. I don’t remember what the other guys did, but Duff and I drove in this Trans Am with this girl I’d picked up. All was fine until we got caught in a torrential rainstorm because her car had no windshield wipers. The rain was coming down so hard that I had to lean out of the passenger-side window and use my upper body as a shield to keep the rain off one half of the window while I wiped the other half with my arm so that she could see well enough to drive.

  Our Houston gig was killer, and after that we saw more of the South. Louisiana was right up my alley, especially New Orleans, with all of the voodoo and the presence of African religion and black magic. We went to a really authentic bayou restaurant in the swamplands where I ate rattlesnake and blackened alligator. It was such a great time for me; I came to realize that there was no other place that I’d rather be than on the road and that I’d hit it right in terms of a career.

  WE LOCKED OURSELVES INTO A SET road crew for this tour as well, a cast of characters that became our team for years. We’d rehearsed before the tour with Mike “McBob” Mayhew as the rhythm-guitar-and-bass tech; and “McBob” used his keen sense of humor to remind us of just how low we were on the food chain by constantly pointing out the pedestrian nature of our traveling accomodations. He had years of experience on the road, and his little comments here and there were all the reminders we needed that the Shangri-la of our tour bus was a mirage.

  McBob has been with Duff and me to this day—he is part of the Velvet Revolver crew—and after all this time one of the more entertaining aspects of having him around is his still endless supply of road stories. Many of them end with Mike landing himself in the hospital due to all sorts of ailments and injuries that are typically self-inflicted or an unforeseen effect of partying. One of the most memorable stories in his arsenal is about the time he got so drunk that he fell out of a car, skidded on his head down the pavement, and woke up in the hospital with a metal plate in his skull. Sometimes it sets off the metal detectors in airports. McBob was like Robert Shaw—Captain Quint—in Jaws, sitting there on the bow of The Orca dropping these heavy war stories on us like a one-man atom bomb.

  Our crew was rounded out by Bill Smith, my guitar tech, whom I soon realized was in it solely for the beer. He was a sweet guy, he loved to party, and he sat there on the side of the stage, watching the show more than helping run it behind the scenes. I’d say he probably changed five guitar strings the entire tour; he was able to swap them out okay, it was just that he didn’t get it done on any consistent or logical timetable. Thanks to Bill, I learned to play more carefully—I tried to never break a string because if I did, I never knew when I would get that guitar back. I only had two guitars on the road, so I’m not sure what was taking so much time. Needless to say, I had to replace Bill. All things considered, between our crew and our inexperience with touring on a professional level, our operation came off like the Bad News Bears.

  THERE IS AN ESSENTIAL MOTIVE FOR touring that never dawned on us back then: we were completely ignorant that touring was intended to promote our record. We thought of it as all for the sake of playing. It was, to me, work for the sake of work, because without a tour, I’d have nowhere else to be. We were too into the experience to think of promoting our “product” day to day as we walked onstage, but Alan was trying to figure out how to market this thing, probably so he’d have something else to boast about as much as just making it succeed.

  Alan wa
sn’t doing a good job, and neither was Geffen, because the one thing I was painfully aware of when we played every night was that nobody was aware of our record whatsoever. We felt as unheard of as any other band you’ve never heard of. So we kept it moving, we kept touring regardless of how we were received, and Alan and Tom Zutaut kept pumping Appetite. The only other option would have been to go home, and we had no intention of going home ever again if we could help it.

  For an entire year, from August 1987 to sometime late in 1988, we didn’t see L.A. for more than a few days; we just bounced from tour to tour. Alan Niven booked us a tour across Europe opening for Aerosmith, with Faster Pussycat on the bill, that was to kick off a few days after The Cult tour ended. Aerosmith had just returned to rock and roll, and we couldn’t think of anyone we’d rather support. But it wasn’t meant to be this time—at the last minute Aerosmith canceled, so instead of going home, Alan sent us out there with Faster Pussycat and a great Japanese band called EZO to fulfill our obligations.

  It was our first headlining tour; it began in Germany, at the Markthalle in Hamburg on September 29, 1987. It was great to headline, but we had a few issues. Faster Pussycat was one of those bands we hated from L.A.; they were exactly the kind of people we tried to avoid. The tour was also a bit of a culture shock: Hamburg still felt like it was a post–World War II casualty—the place had a pretty narrow viewpoint. It was a dark, industrial, sort of sour city that seemed, as a whole, as if they’d rather not have us there if they could help it. That kind of environment always inspired us to show our true colors more than usual, which didn’t go over well. Every time we’d walk into a restaurant, every head cranked around and the room got quiet. And when it did, we were all the more determined to order a bunch of drinks and smoke and carry on more than we ever would have done in the first place.

  That tour was our first experience with Doug Goldstein, too, the new tour manager that Alan appointed to look after us. I remember we got in late at night—a full day after Faster Pussycat—and the next morning I got up and went to Doug’s room to collect our per diems before we set out sightseeing. All across Germany, and especially in Hamburg, there are outrageously graphic porno shops, usually in a very-easy-to-find, central location, and that is where we went. I was excited to no end—I’d never seen anything so obscene in my life. I was like a kid in a candy store, pulling these insane graphic magazines off the shelf—beastiality, pregnant women, just the most depraved things imaginable—holding them up for the other guys like, “Have you fucking seen this?”

  We were staying in the same hotel as Faster Pussycat and we ran into them in the lobby and said hello before we took off that day. We were civil, I’ll say that, but not what I’d call friendly. Regardless, once we let them know that we were going to head out to see the city, Mark Michals, Pussycat’s drummer, insisted on coming along with us.

  His band looked a little bit nervous. “No, no, stay here with us,” one of them said.

  “No, that’s cool, I’m going to go,” Mark said.

  “Really, you should really stay, we’re going to go out later,” another one said.

  “Yeah, it’s cool, I’m going with these guys,” he said.

  We did nothing to encourage him, let alone invite him. I even remember one of us blurting out, “No, stay with them,” but there he was tagging along with Izzy, Steve, Duff, and me for the day. Our first stop was lunch at Euro McDonald’s. I had become a huge McRib fan during the recording of Appetite, so that was the height of cuisine to me. I was happy to see the McRib on the menu in Hamburg, and to the naked eye, it looked like the real deal, but it wasn’t: instead of barbecue, it had some kind of anonymous brown sauce on it. There went my one meal for the day. The reason why we were so emaciated back then was that we never really ate anything.

  In any case, we wandered around all afternoon, and when it got to be evening, we headed to the Reeperbahn, which is a street that is five straight blocks of brothels where no women are allowed—just like Amsterdam’s red-light district, every type of girl you can imagine is available. We were in heaven: we’d never seen anything like it and at the time we didn’t have friends in bands who had been around more than we had, so no crew of seasoned guys had told us anything about this place. I was tripping out. I think in the first fifteen minutes Steven blew his entire per diem on hookers. We were walking along when he suddenly disappeared into this subterranean garage, where there were all manner of prostitutes just hung out against columns under colored industrial-strength fluorescent lights.

  It was getting later and this guy Mark was still trailing us. We left the Reeperbahn and went to some bar that was one of the places the Beatles played when they were starting out. Once again, we walked in there and we were the scourge of the earth, but we didn’t care; we drank Jack with one cube of ice per drink (because that’s all that they would put in the glass) until they closed. We walked back to the hotel and this guy was still with us—at that point we’d stopped talking to him altogether. It had been a long day, so I went to pass out in my bed while Mark did the same in the other bed—which was Duff ’s. Now Izzy was always the Great Instigator: he could stir things up without getting involved, so he didn’t let this opportunity slide.

  “Hey, Duff,” he said. “That guy is sleeping in your bed.”

  “Yeah, he is, isn’t he,” Duff said.

  “You gonna let him do that to you, man?” Izzy said. “Fuck that! He can’t do that to you.”

  “No way! Fuck no, man!” Duff said.

  “Who the fuck is that guy anyway, man?” Izzy said.

  “Yeah, who the fuck does he think he is?” Duff said, now getting pretty heated. “Fuck that guy!”

  They tried to wake him up pretty roughly, but Mark was out cold.

  “I know what we should do, man,” Izzy said. “Let’s tape him up and put him down the elevator shaft.”

  “Fuck yeah!” Duff said.

  “We’ll put him down the elevator shaft. He can sleep on top of the elevator.”

  They taped this guy up pretty good: his arms, his hands, his ankles, and his mouth were all totally bound. He was a medium-size guy, about 140 pounds, so they carried him off and got him to the elevator, and that’s when he woke up and started squealing like a stuck pig. They quickly abandoned the original plan and just threw him in the elevator and sent it down to the lobby. The hotel staff dealt with him from there. They got the tape off, and once he told them who he was, they went through the chain of command until they got in touch with his band, who had to come retrieve him because he had no room key, no ID, no money, no nothing. That was the last night I spoke to him; I just nodded at him for the rest of the tour. Come to think of it, that was the last we heard from any of them.

  The next night we did the gig, the first one of our headlining tour, and it’s good that it didn’t set a precedent. The venue was on the water; it was this really industrial, dark room with benches and long tables on the sides. Everything in there was painted black—it was the blackest club I’ve ever seen and it just reeked of stale beer. On the walls were signatures and graffiti from every single heavy metal and thrash band who had been through there, which appeared to be many.

  The audience was without a doubt the most lackluster crowd we had ever played to in our lives: as I recall, they were as cold and miserable as the weather. I remember that before we went on and the second we got off, the club played nothing but Metallica, nonstop. It was obvious that any American band, or any band at all, that didn’t sound like Metallica wasn’t going to go over. And I was right. We got through the show and the only thought going around in my mind when we finished was I would fucking hate to have to do this again tomorrow.

  I was extremely apprehensive about how the rest of the tour was going to go—particularly since we had more than a few dates to do in Germany. We had a few days to go before the next gig, during which time my worry escalated. But once we got to Düsseldorf, an airier city with more trees and fewer bomb shelters, it wa
s such a drastically different scene that I realized just how big and how diverse a country Germany is: the individual vibe of each city is unique.

  AS WE MADE OUR WAY ACROSS EUROPE, the band started to get really tight; our spontaneous interaction was becoming really pro and playing was getting fun. We did most of the driving on our European tour in a sightseeing bus that we’d converted into a communal crash pad by removing most of the seats and filling the floor with cushions. Izzy had picked up a German girlfriend along the way and she brought a friend along that I started hooking up with. I always liked to find a girlfriend in each territory that we’d travel through; and since I already had my English girl, Sally, waiting for me, I had to end my German romance abruptly once the tour crossed the Channel. I told my German girl, literally the moment before I entered the room where Sally was waiting for me, that she had to go home immediately.

  When I think of Europe, aside from the gigs, I remember spending most of my days off in and out of a variety of VD clinics. Back in L.A., I was dating a porno chick as well as this sweet little junkie jailbait girlfriend I had. Right after we’d shot the video for “Welcome to the Jungle,” I remember waking up and discovering these three weird little red marks on the left side of my stomach. At the time, AIDS had really kicked in and become a national health issue. It started a strange hysteria among rock musicians; everyone was alarmed but most of us still felt immune to the whole thing. We figured that no one needed to worry about it until David Lee Roth got it.