Slash

by Slash

  I’D DONE EVERYTHING IN MY POWER from the day we got together to make Guns N’ Roses the best band in the world. I’d put my heart and soul into everything we did and I regret none of my contributions in the least. We did things other bands only dream of; in just a few years, we surpassed goals that took bands like the Stones decades to achieve. I don’t like to brag, but if you research it at all, you’ll see that what we did in the time frame we did it is something unsurpassed in the history of rock and roll.

  After working to make that band all that it could be for the better part of my life, saying good-bye to the institution I helped build was as alien as being launched into space. But once I’d done it, a weight was lifted from my shoulders and the lead was out of my shoes. It was like decompressing after a deepwater dive. The day I made my decision, I woke up early and called the powers that be to deliver the news, and went back to sleep. I don’t remember anything else of that day aside from the fact that when I woke up again I was refreshed. I felt as if I’d just slept for a week. Later that night I called Duff, Matt, and Adam Day and let them know. Duff accepted my decision without any question, and Matt wasn’t surprised either. I was satisfied but it was bittersweet; I had never really given up before in my life.

  I enjoyed a period of peace for a while. I started to go out and just jam whenever I had the chance. My attorneys asked me if I wanted to sue for damages and just go after as much stuff as possible, and I said no, in good faith. I can’t get into it; aside from saying that they were trying to protect my rights and I probably should have listened, the truth is, I was in denial about just how mercurial and untrustworthy the relationship between the Guns institution and me had become. I didn’t see it as such, but when you leave a company you have to protect your interests. At the time I still had a silly amount of trust in what Guns meant to me, so I didn’t dwell on it. And to this day there are still issues that remain to be resolved that cause me grief.

  All things considered, I stand by my decision, and I stand by the way I did it. Even my dad had told me earlier on, when I was in a state of duress, “Don’t go down with the ship.” I consider leaving GN’R one of the smartest decisions I’ve ever made. There’s no doubt that if I’d stayed with the band under those circumstances I’d surely be dead by now because of too much unnecessary drama. I definitely would have found junk again or it would have found me. If I knew then what I know now, had I been more experienced and more self-protective and more suspicious of the players involved—and I’m not even talking about Axl so much as the people he hired to guide him through this—it might have been handled differently. He hired people who had nothing but making money off of him in mind. If it had been otherwise, or if he and I had been able to discuss it face-to-face, there might have been a greater degree of preservation in regard to our mutual interests as a band. But I don’t believe in “ifs.”

  It just wasn’t meant to be. The road that Axl chose to travel forced me away. And once I left, Duff was next—he split of his own accord less than a year later. Not too long after that, Matt got fired. Apparently, he stood up for me when I was slandered at rehearsal and that was the end of him.

  By 1998, Axl was the only one of the original five still in the “band” he’d legally arranged to be able to call Guns N’ Roses. By then, Izzy had released a handful of solo albums and toured the world and Gilby had done the same. Duff had formed a new band and put out two records, and I had, too: my second incarnation of Snakepit was alive and well. Matt, for his part, had rejoined the Cult, recorded a record, and was on tour. Steven was crippled by drug addiction, but Axl didn’t have that excuse. I found it morbidly ironic that, out of all of us, the one guy who’d basically browbeat and pressured us into submission into retaining the name had done nothing much with it whatsoever at that point.

  IN 1996 IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING MY last days win GN’R, I did everything I could to stay inspired by music. It was the best way for me to cure my disillusionment with what had become of my band. I toured the world with players as skilled and diverse as could be and I learned as much as I could from all of them. I went to Japan for two weeks with Nile Rodgers and the original lineup of Chic—and that was one hell of a musical education.

  I have all the respect in the world for Nile; we had worked together on the soundtrack for Beverly Hills Cop III, so when he called me to go out on tour with Chic, there was no way I was turning him down. He had gathered all of the original players: Omar Akeem, Bernie Worrell, Bernard Edwards, and at least one of the original background singers. They had Stevie Winwood, Simon Le Bon, Sister Sledge, and me out with them for the duration, making cameo appearances during their set.

  At rehearsal down at S.I.R. in NYC, during one of the jams I did a dive bomb kind of thing with my Les Paul (this is where that aforementioned crack happened), which is when you push the back of a guitar’s head stock forward while pushing the lower part of the neck, where the neck and the body meet, inward instead of using a tremolo bar. I snapped the neck of my guitar, which flew up and hit me square in the face. It felt like I’d been smashed with a baseball bat: when it popped it sounded like an M-80 and it put a huge hole in my top lip. Someone was videotaping the session that day and I’d love to see an instant replay of that. The wound it left behind was the size of a nickel.

  The sound alone caused everyone to stop playing and turn my way. And there I was with one half of my guitar in one hand, the other half in the other, with blood pouring down my chin, neck, and chest. I was dazed; they were all pointing at me and I had no idea what they were talking about. Being that I was in NYC, it was either wait for three hours to be seen by an ER doctor—or not. I opted to go back to the Paramount Hotel, where I sat at the Whiskey Bar with a bag of ice on my face and a bottle of Jack in front of me until I got on the plane with everyone else the next day.

  Meanwhile, Adam took my guitar to a repairman to see if it could be fixed, and when I saw him on the way to the gate he told me that his buddy had managed to glue it back together.

  “I did my best,” he said. He looked pretty tired. “It’s kind of a Frankenstein but it looks like it’s going to work.”

  I’d like to take a moment to let Adam Day, my tech for the past nineteen years, know right now just how much I love him. There had been many times before that I’d felt as much, and many times since, but I’d like to give him the credit he deserves for doing what he did in this instance. That thing had broken to the point of no return, at least I thought so, but he stayed up all night getting it fixed, and to his credit, from that point forward, that guitar has sounded better than it ever did before.

  THAT JAPANESE TOUR WAS JUST GREAT; every show was an event. The band was an amazing group of players, so it was a real learning experience and a lot of fun. I had a fling with one of the backup singers who was really hot. The very last night of the tour I was sitting with her and a few other girls in the balcony of this club celebrating. Bernard Edwards was there with us hanging out, but he was tired and left us a bit early; security escorted him to his room.

  The next morning he was found dead on his couch as a result of severe pneumonia. When I got the call it was one of the most surreal moments of my life. “I was just with him a few hours ago!” I said. I really looked up to Bernard as a musician and a person. He was the coolest, smoothest, most gentle guy. He’d been a good friend, taking me under his wing during that tour, which was wild considering that I was a stranger in a strange land, jamming with all of these seasoned session pros, and Bernard didn’t even know that much about me or my music. On that tour he didn’t seem like he had any health issues or anything wrong with him at all; he just died peacefully in his sleep. It was a huge shock for Nile because Bernard was his writing partner and closest friend, and they’d just repaired their friendship after a long split. They had just gotten the band back together; they had all of these plans to record and embark on a new phase. Nile was in shock. Everyone was: we left one another in Japan and saw one another again at Bernard’s
funeral in Connecticut.

  I CONTINUED TO FIND INSPIRATION BY pushing myself to do projects outside of my expected range, one of them being the music for the soundtrack to the Quentin Tarantino–produced film Curdled. When Miramax asked me asked me to do it, I immediately agreed because I’m such a big fan of his. The movie is great; it’s about a cleanup crew that comes in after forensics has finished gathering evidence to clean up crime scenes. They find themselves cleaning up after a serial killer who targets rich women, and one of them—this perfectly nice girl—becomes obsessed with the killer and begins keeping a scrapbook of his murders. It gets a lot more intense from there.

  I met Quentin and he told me all about the movie and I started writing music that was inspired by the film’s main character, Gabriella, and the actress who played her, Angela Jones. Angela appears to be Latin, but she’s a white girl from Pittsburgh and I’d had a crush on her since the moment I saw her in Pulp Fiction: she played the cabdriver who drove Bruce Willis to the hotel after the fight. I put hours into working out the music, which is instrumental, all acoustic, eclectic, and flamenco influenced. I recorded the instrumental stuff with Jed Leiber, who is a great engineer I know from L.A.

  I flew out to New York, where Nile Rodgers produced the electric version of a few tracks. Then he and I flew out to Spain to have this major Spanish star, Martha Sanchez, do vocals. She is basically the Spanish Madonna, and it was clear to me that Nile had spent all of this money to get her involved just so that he could be with her. It was fine by me; I had a great time hanging out in Madrid. Martha took us to all of these speakeasy-type bars in these grottoes and ancient wine cellars deep below the city. In every single one of them, there would be the best flamenco guitar players—I learned a lot from jamming with them.

  I showed up for the wrap party in Miami and quickly became friends with Quentin, Angela, and a few other people. She and I started seeing each other back in L.A.; that went on for months. Basically it was composed of doing it in her car. We’d meet at a restaurant and we’d do it in her car. We’d talk on the phone and meet up and we’d do it in her car.

  I CONTINUED JAMMING WHENEVER AN opportunity presented itself, just trying to sort out what to do next. I had my hands full anyway, because while I was out sowing my wild oats, my marriage was falling apart. It was hardly sudden: even when I was in L.A. I was barely living at home. And now that I was done obsessing over Guns N’ Roses, I was obsessing over what to do next.

  When I traveled I never brought Renee along, and I was never faithful on the road. We did go to Ireland together to visit Ronnie Wood and his family for a while. There were parts of my lifestyle with Renee that I appreciated. She was an aspiring actress and I respected that, yet at the same time she couldn’t seem to get a break and her career really wasn’t going where she wanted it to. I think she was frustrated because I had already established myself. I’d cemented a foot in the door. None of that really mattered to Renee anyway, or so it seemed, because I wasn’t from the kind of band that played the kind of music she was into. Come to think of it, I don’t even think she knew the magnitude of what we were doing. She probably thought it was pretty childish.

  As our relationship began to erode, Renee started hanging around the lowest echelon of Hollywood actor scumbags, partying a bit too much. At the same time I was doing my thing, completely oblivious to my commitments as a husband.

  After I’d been paid by the insurance company for the house that had been totaled in the earthquake, we shopped for a new one and found it in Beverly Hills on Roxbury Drive. It was a big expensive Spanish-style structure built in the 1920s and now in foreclosure. It also had a basement, which is rare in L.A. The house definitely had an aura; it was run-down, and in the basement there was a big disco ball hanging from the ceiling. I fell in love with it. On the third floor next to the master bedroom, there was this extra room that was stark white that seemed like it had been a darkroom: there were long, thin drawers to store photos and on each was an embossed black-and-white label with girls’ names like “Candy,” “Monica,” and “Michelle.”

  We bought it immediately. It excited me that it had probably seen a few illicit photo shoots, and I can only imagine what kind of parties had gone down in that basement. All that mattered to me was that it had a basement—the perfect place for a recording studio. I got to work on that immediately and it was the first time that I took a “spare no expense” approach to something I wanted—it was the first time I’d really played with my money. I let Renee do whatever she wanted to the house, and we pissed money away on it in every way. The Roxbury house should have been great—it had a recording studio, lots of rooms, Jäger and Guinness on tap, pinball machines and arcade games, a pool table, etc. It was in a nice area of Beverly Hills, but none of that meant anything to me, so I wasn’t really happy. The Snakepit II was coming together, yet still I was drinking deadly amounts of alcohol and dabbling with heroin, Ectasy, and cocaine. I felt sort of empty and lost. Renee loved the house, but I rarely slept at home; instead, I spent an unhealthy amount of time sleeping around.

  I spent most of my time hanging out at the Sunset Marquis, running away from everything. I was completely weightless after Guns N’ Roses; I entered a phase of just spending my time and money at the hotel pool, chasing girls, drinking at the bar all day, and distancing myself however I could from anything in my life that I considered a nuisance. If John Lennon had his lost weekend, I had my lost year.

  My security guard, Ronnie, took care of things at the house. Meanwhile I continued my infidelity tour of L.A. and soon enough I got sloppy. I attended a few high-profile events where I shouldn’t have been misbehaving, so people were finding out—and so was Renee. Overall, it was a fun period without any sense of direction, though my desire to play guitar remained the same; I just needed to channel my energy into that.

  Slash and Perla during their courtship, on vacation in Palm Springs.

  I WAS HANGING OUT IN THE BAR AT THE Sunset Marquis one night when Perla walked in with a few of her girlfriends, all of them looking like trouble. She was a sight for sore eyes, I must say. She looked amazing. We talked and laughed for a while and I realized at that moment that I was in it. She gave me her address and the following night I showed up where she was living over by the Hollywood Bowl. She had a fresh vodka waiting for me, and that was it: I don’t think I left her place for a week, and after I got up one morning and fed her cats, we were inseparable from that point on. Perla had a whole set of friends who weren’t so much in the rock-and-roll scene but were every bit as edgy and new to me. It was like a vacation being with her—new faces, new places. It was like I’d finally gotten far enough away from my life to relax. I had finally met a girl who could party as much as I could, if not harder. But she was sharp and very much in control and I had a lot respect for her. She was beautiful, intelligent, and classy, but also very streetwise—and Cuban to boot. Needless to say, I was in love.

  Perla and I were in bed on something like our tenth day together when she fixed me with a serious look. “You’re married, you know,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah!” I said, kind of laughing it off. “You’re right. I forgot about that.”

  The truth was, I had forgotten. I didn’t feel married at all, and since I’d hooked up with Perla, marriage seemed like something I’d done in another life. It was almost like leaving Guns N’ Roses: I’d essentially checked out long before I officially left.

  The next time I saw Renee she confronted me about what I’d been doing and was shocked to hear that I had no desire to work anything out—I just wanted a divorce. The next time I came home one night, I found a guy in bed with her and I told them not to get up; I’d let myself out. Despite her objections, I had insisted that she sign a prenup—maybe my overdose had something to do with forcing the issue. All of it was taken care of pretty quickly, and once it was, we never saw each other again. In retrospect, it’s kind of interesting that I suddenly had disconnected with the two most long-term, cl
osest relationships I had had up to that point, just a matter of months apart.

  ONCE I WAS DIVORCED, PERLA AND I set off on a crazy, very exciting, and tumultuous relationship. Tumultuous because unlike any of the other girls I’d been around, she was very passionate about the obligations of a relationship and took it very seriously—she was not fucking around. So there was a bit of a clash between my ideals and hers, which made our relationhip much spicier. We forged on. Besides, this all made for a very intense sex life, so I really wasn’t going anywhere.

  When Perla and I started seriously seeing each other, she introduced me to her mom, who is a colorful individual from Cuba. She came to the States the old-fashioned way, on a boat after Castro came to power. I liked her immediately, a sweet but tough lady who, like her daughter, is a very streetwise and observant soul. She liked me from the beginning, mostly because her daughter liked me—she is one of those people whose trust you have to earn. I met Perla’s father a couple years later in Miami. He was in his early seventies, a tall, gaunt fellow who didn’t speak much English. We hit it off right away. He was sort of like a tough Cuban cowboy with a checkered past. Perla and I took him to Disney World the day I met him. The morning before we went to the park, at about 8 a.m., he popped us a couple cold Heinekens from the fridge. He and I sat in comfortable silence watching TV together, since neither one of us spoke the other’s language, until we had to leave for the park. We shared a camaraderie and a silent understanding of each other from that moment on. Unfortunately, he died a year or so later of heart disease. I wish I had been able to have spent more time with him.

  She also introduced me to a lot of people with whom I’d become very close friends with, Charlie Sheen and Robert Evans among them, plus a whole slew of other people who may not be as high-profile but are just as cool. We spent most nights going out, socializing, and I was jamming in clubs at least three or four nights a week. I was finally starting to feel a renewed sense of musical inspiration.