Slash

by Slash

  At one point in my life I was so obsessed with heroin and opium and anything derived from poppies that I went to the library to study the culture and the science of them every day. I read what I found; from the textbooks that explained the chemical makeup of the drugs to the history books that chronicled the evolution of the Triads and the other Chinese gangs who ruled the trafficking and smuggling of it. I also read about all of my rock-star heroes…all junkies. All things considered, I did manage to come into that part of the drug culture without an image in mind that I was trying to portray or mimic. It was a simple contradiction that made complete sense to me: everyone in town was doing heroin, and because of that I wasn’t interested in it at all. But once I actually did it, I was very into it…I just felt no need to advertise my interest.

  The first and last rock-and-roll books that I ever read were loaded with heroin and drug use, and were much too sensational. I read Hammer of the Gods and No One Here Gets Out Alive, histories of Led Zeppelin and The Doors, respectively. They mention the drugs throughout, and I was so obsessed at the time that I read them for the drugs only; I wasn’t interested in whatever else they had to say. To me, those books were basically written for the authors’ own entertainment; they seemed inaccurate and full of shit. And after that I never read another rock-and-roll biography again.

  In that way I never did my “homework”; I never studied the lives of other junkies in rock and roll. But at the same time I didn’t have to: I got hip to Keith Richards and Eric Clapton and Ray Charles later on in life. I think that anyone who is a true junkie has an innate kinship with other junkies. Somehow I knew that we shared mutual interests; that addiction speaks to you. Without knowing it, you’re attracted to them.

  Heroin was novel to me then, it was an adventure, it was a private hideaway in my own body and mind. After I’d been through withdrawal and gotten clean more than once, the inescapable discomfort never discouraged me. I may have realized how crippling addiction was whenever I got clean, but after I was clean awhile, I’d reminisce about how much I loved to get high.

  IT HAD BEEN A WHILE AND I WAS ABOUT to discover it all again. It was 1989: We’d toured most of America, Canada, Europe, Japan, and Australia. We’d watched our album sit around and do nothing for a year before breaking the Top Ten and having a number one single; we’d shot three videos that became mainstays on MTV, a channel that helped us out, but that we didn’t care for. We performed at the American Music Awards, playing “Patience” with Don Henley on drums. We’d toured with our friends and heroes. Finally and suddenly we were the band that we’d always known we were…just better.

  When we landed in L.A. at the end of the Appetite tour, each of us, one by one, set off to rediscover whatever we’d left behind: Duff went home to his girl Mandy (whom he married in 1988), Steven headed to his chick’s place (whoever she was at that point), Doug took off to San Diego, Alan returned to Redondo Beach, Axl went to Erin’s, and soon enough Izzy and I were sitting there alone at LAX, with our brand-new Halliburton luggage and no particular place to go. Each of us became a boy in a bubble at that point. We had taken home enough money from touring and now money was starting to roll in off the sales of Appetite, so that the need to survive was no longer a motivation. Everyone was, I suppose, stopping to smell the roses; I’m just not sure that any of us knew how.

  Izzy made a call and we went over to a friend of Seymour Cassel’s who we’ll call “Bill.” We’d gotten a taste of smack again in Australia, so the craving was there by the time we got home. Besides, after two years of touring, subconsciously, we both felt that we deserved it. Anyway, Bill had a taste for drugs and always had plenty of every variety; he was also very generous.

  When you start to get famous at all, a few typical things start happening: in Hollywood, if you’re out at a bar, everyone wants to buy you a drink, you can get into any club; whether you like it or not, you are suddenly a figure on the nightlife circuit. When that started happening to us, there was nothing less interesting that I could have imagined doing with my time. That Hollywood scene was the same old shit, and the more recognizable I was, the less I liked it. The amount of “dudes” who wanted to “party with me” had quadrupled, so I became entirely insular. Even on the rare occasion when I wanted to go out, I found that the Hollywood scene we’d known was dead: the Cathouse was closed down and there was nothing else in L.A. that I found interesting at all.

  Everyone in the band needed time to decompress; looking back, it makes complete sense to me that I allowed myself to slip into that seductive heroin comfort zone. It was the one aspect of success and fame that wasn’t vapid to me; there was really nothing else. I didn’t want to go to strip clubs or look for hot chicks or otherwise exercise my newly found status. All I wanted to do was hang out at Bill’s and do drugs.

  The only stability that I’d enjoyed in my life up until then was the constant traveling, which was a contradiction not lost on me. I was twenty-three and I hadn’t had a stable life or home since I was thirteen; home for me was living with girlfriends or being on a bus with the band. I lived for playing my guitar and being on the road, plain and simple.

  Like I said, Bill wasn’t a real dealer, he just liked to get high casually. He always smoked heroin and he had lots of self-control about everything he did. Meanwhile I was the opposite: I had a fiendish, obsessive/compulsive attitude toward heroin and was always eager to get around it and get more of it. That first night over at Bill’s I didn’t have any gear to shoot it with, so we all smoked it. But I couldn’t wait to grab a bit and leave the next day in search of a rig. It turned out to be the start of a long and nightmarish obsession with heroin that lasted from 1989 through 1991.

  BILL’S PLACE WAS ON FRANKLIN AND Western in East Hollywood way off the beaten track; he and his wife and their friends were really cool. Izzy and I hung around there on a daily basis and fit in just fine. Bill never allowed shooting up at this place, so I would smoke a little there, pocket some for later, and shoot it up at my leisure when I cut out to do my errands or go to appointments.

  One of them was a photo shoot with Izzy for Guitar World with Glen La Ferman. We were both so high; we’d spent at least a week over at Bill’s. I remember that we showed up with our guitars, and that we passed out on the floor…not much else. It wasn’t on purpose; I’m not sure that were even aware that we’d done it. I just remember that afterward we went back to Bill’s.

  For the record, that shoot contained the famous picture of me that is in the Rainbow, where I’m laid out with my hat on the ground and a bottle of Stoli, my guitar, and the rest of it at my side. If you have decent vision and you take a look at Izzy and me in those frames, you will easily see how out there I was. I was high off the entire success of touring and we were both in search of the kind of excitement you will never find walking around Hollywood playing rock star. I was in search of someplace dark.

  Eventually Bill got arrested and was sentenced to thirty years to life for being caught three times with illegal drugs in large enough quantities that they qualified for “intent to sell.” In the end Bill served eleven years and got out. But at one point before his arrest, he was under surveillance from his phones to his home; every move was monitored. Two of the people who made regular appearances, of course, were Izzy and me, and Bill told me later that the cops were particularly curious about us. Supposedly they were willing to bargain with Bill if he dropped a dime on us because by then we were famous, to a degree. But Bill wouldn’t do that. God bless him.

  EVENTUALLY I DECIDED THAT, IN LIGHT of the band’s success, I should rent a place of my own. My apartment on Larrabee was the first that I’d ever had to myself, under my own name, and I was proud of that. It was just one room, a fully furnished, perfect studio, laid out exactly like a hotel room—and that’s exactly what I liked about it. Unfortunately, like every other apartment I’d lived in before then, I was pretty quickly evicted.

  I kept it up for a while; well, Ronnie Stalnaker did, actually—o
ne of his jobs was to keep drugs and trouble away from me and me from them. He’d regularly come through and clean the place up, probably as a way to see if I was behaving. I never did; it was much too fun of a challenge to figure out how to sneak my druggie friends into the apartment without Ronnie finding out. It was always a feat because Ronnie lived right next door.

  It wasn’t going to end well with Ronnie—he got a bit obsessive about his job and went a bit Single White Stalker—but at this point he’d done nothing but prove himself to be a very loyal bodyguard, despite all of my efforts to fuck with him. For example, one night, while we were on tour somewhere, I decided to end the evening by throwing my bottle of Jack into the TV set in my hotel room before I passed out. It exploded, of course, and Ronnie came in. We were a number of stories up, but Ronnie decided that we weren’t going to pay for that TV. He climbed out of my window, across the ledge of the building, and into an adjoining room, where he stole that TV and replaced it with the one I had broken. That is dedication.

  Another time when we were in Dallas, Duff and I had adjoining rooms connected by a door and we invited over too many friends with piles of coke. Our party lasted all that night and well into the next afternoon. Things got out of hand, of course, and a big glass coffee table got smashed, and I walked all over it barefoot and bled everywhere. At some point someone kicked the dividing door off the hinges and tipped the beds over and smashed all of the lamps. There were too many of us behaving badly for Ronnie to deal with, so he came up with a plan to get us out of the hotel without the management noticing. He somehow herded us into a service elevator and snuck us out of a loading dock and onto the bus. The hotel had heard all of the noise and was very aware of the party going on, but Ronnie had kept security out of there somehow for an hour or so. We thought we’d gotten away, until the cops pulled us over a few miles down the road at a convenience store where, if memory serves, I’d actually just stolen a bunch of candy.

  We were lined up against the side of the bus and taken in for trashing the hotel rooms. It was expensive and I can say in all honesty that it was the last time I’ve ever really destroyed a hotel room. Sure, I’ve been through a couple of TV sets and done a few other stupid things since, but that was the last time I engaged in total annihilation because I got the bill for that one.

  Ronnie was clearly dedicated but regardless, it wasn’t easy keeping my first apartment in shape. The first blow came when my younger brother, Albion, or “Ash,” stayed there while I was away on tour. Ash is a great graffiti artist, and when I returned, I found that he’d covered every wall with an amazing mural that I had no interest in having in my home. I was so pissed off but I only told him that what he’d done was “inconsiderate.” He was only sixteen after all. Since then Ash has gone on to form Conart, one of the most cutting-edge T-shirt companies around; the designs are based on his art.

  Ronnie painted over the mural, he cleaned up, he did everything else to keep us in there as tenants. That place was pretty simple: I had a microwave, I had a refrigerator full of the usual bachelor-pad supplies and condiments. There wasn’t much, but even so it all got beaten up pretty fast. After all, West Arkeen came by all of the time and the two of us got to smoking a lot of crack together. We’d hit the pipe and listen to music and slowly climb the walls. In those tweaked-out days I spent with West, I fully realized what a great guy and an awesome fucking mess he was. To complement his influence, I had another musician friend, Jay, whose place I went to a lot to get high on smack. All things considered, slowly, despite my financial resources, but surely my living conditions became as gritty as they’d been when I was living in a storage unit.

  I WENT THROUGH AN INTERESTING succession of girlfriends at this time; just a handful that I’d see over at my place, each on different nights. At some point during these months my manager had the brilliant idea of having me present some award to someone or other at the MTV Video Music Awards. I can’t even remember who we gave it to, but my copresenter was Traci Lords, the porn star, and Alan thought that it would be funny for me to be up there with her. Obviously he saw the advantage of the sensational aspect, which was not a bad idea at all.

  So Traci and I met backstage and we started talking and then we started dating immediately. She was really good-looking and a bit of a dichotomy—as I soon found out.

  I was in a strange place; I was mildly famous, I was infamous, but I was still stuck in a raggedy, heathen mentality in terms of my quality of life. At that time, I could have had $15 million in the bank, but I wouldn’t have changed my lifestyle at all; I didn’t have a car, I was happy to have my one-room apartment that looked like a generic hotel room, and needed nothing more—that was where my head was at. At the same time, I knew how to be a gentleman, which is entirely what Traci Lords expected on a date. So somehow we hit it off.

  But Traci didn’t want any part of being seen in public with me; if we ever went anywhere where anyone might be paying attention, she’d put me through this stupid ordeal where I’d have to come in after her and meet her inside, as if by accident. Obviously I was recognizable, so she always insisted that we scoot in some back alley entrance. Personally, I don’t think anyone who ever saw us gave a shit; it just made going out in public with her a huge pain in the ass. Call me naive but I didn’t get it; I had no idea who she was hiding from. From what I understood she wanted to keep a low profile because she didn’t want to be exposed as a groupie slut or one of the porno chicks that guys like me dated. I was never one of those guys who was judgmental about that stuff and never understood those who were; in fact, the only reason I knew her was that I’d seen her in this movie where she was bent over holding her ankles and she looked amazing. I truly appreciated that, so I figured everyone else appreciated that, too. I didn’t get her whole charade at all.

  At that point, Traci was done with porn and was working on her singing career as well as trying to cross over into regular movies. That was why she didn’t want to be seen as a porno actress fucking a rock star—she wanted to change all that. She had talked me into playing on one of her songs and coming to the studio somewhere in Vancouver where she was recording her album. All I can say is that she was hooked up with the least talented, shadiest “music producers” I’ve ever seen and I told her so. Nonetheless, I helped her out on a few tracks, but nothing was going to keep that whole album from being a joke.

  Everything we ever did together was very overly formal and very proper; it always seemed to me that she was living up to some idea of herself that wasn’t anywhere close to who she really was. Honestly, all that I wanted to do was get into her pants.

  Of course, once I started dating her, West brought over a copy of New Wave Hookers so we could check it out. It was very entertaining but somewhat of a tease because after a month of dating we still hadn’t slept together. Our “relationship” was starting to become more of a bother than it was worth.

  Traci had called me early one week to make plans and that same day West came by with a huge pile of crack. We stayed up for the next two days, and by the time Traci showed up to go out with me, West and I were crawling around on the carpet looking for rocks. I knew she was coming but I couldn’t help it: we were a mess, the only person that would have been okay with it would have been a crack whore. My place was a fucking pigsty on every level and it didn’t help that West was there like some resident pygmy: he was only about five four and had stringy blond hair that was really greasy after two days of smoking crack. West always had this permanent grin on his face that became more and more disturbing the more wasted he was. This particular afternoon he was so wasted that he openly leered at Traci. He was so high, that he thought nothing of going over to my bookshelves, retrieving New Wave Hookers, pointing to the cover, saying “That’s you, isn’t it! You’re Traci Lords!” He kept grinning at her.

  Now Traci was the kind of girl who was after a man who was going to provide her with the things she wanted in life: nice clothes, nice cars, a nice life. And while I could h
ave done that, I was nowhere near mature enough to realize that that is what most girls are after—especially girls like her. I didn’t see it that way at all back then, because the way I’d been living, I had barely paid attention to the finer things. But there she was in the middle of the afternoon, in a completely dark apartment that smelled like burning tires after our forty-eight-hour crack party. And there was West, short, shiny, and drooling. And there I was, too.

  Traci took a long slow look around. “I’ll be right back,” she said in her pouty little voice. “I forgot something in my car.”

  “Yeah, cool,” I said. “Then we’ll take off.” I was high, and not particularly aware of time passing, but I soon realized that she’d been gone far too long to ever be coming back.

  I was this lone guitar player with a snake, just doing my thing, shooting my scene.

  MY NEXT HOME WAS A HOUSE IZZY AND I rented up in the Hollywood Hills, and that lasted for about a month. It was partially furnished with all the basics that one might need—beds, a microwave, all of it. We had fun while we were there and I also managed to write a lot; I wrote “Coma,” and the two of us wrote “Locomotive” in that house; there was some creativity going on.

  Adam Day shacked up with us as well. He is the guitar tech that has been with me for nineteen years. Adam moved in and, as much as our professional relationship has thrived since, that was the last time he ever tried to live in close proximity to me.

  Around then we shot the videos for the Lies album, which was topping the charts, along with Appetite. We shot the “Patience” video in two places; one was the Record Plant, where we had actually recorded the songs; that is where we shot the footage of us playing live. The rest of it—the various band member scenes—were done at the Ambassador Hotel, where Bobby Kennedy was shot. At the time it was closed to the public but open for movie and video shoots.