Slash

by Slash

  WE DID A MINI-TOUR SHORTLY AFTER that: it was something that Alan booked to keep up our momentum. We played a theater in Phoenix with TSOL, and I remember that when I arrived there, everyone in our camp was happy and relieved to see me. I was suntanned, and Doug was very proud; according to him, he’d taken me down to Hawaii and straightened me out. I found that pretty funny.

  We did the first gig and it was fine, but the second night Axl didn’t show up: he refused to leave his room. I don’t know how intensely Doug and Alan tried to get him out of there, and I still don’t understand why he wouldn’t come out, but it was a serious blow to morale in my mind. We in the band were beside ourselves; we were headlining and we couldn’t just forgive this. There aren’t too many reasons to miss going onstage—if there’s a death in the family, or you’re dead yourself, or sick or at best deathly ill, it’s excusable. Aside from that you crawl onstage if you have to. It set off a chain reaction—the floodgates of dysfunction were open from that point.

  Steven found someone who was holding in Phoenix and I got loaded, he got loaded; I’m not sure what Izzy and Duff were doing, but Steve and I were three sheets to the wind. All that I remember of that night was that our hotel seemed cavernous; the distance from my room to Steven’s seemed like six miles. That hotel was dark and moody: there were a significant number of people who had gotten rooms there strictly to party after going to the show and they were in full swing, so there was a sinister, druggy vibe hanging about the place.

  As the sun came up, Doug and Alan called a band meeting over breakfast. Duff, Izzy, Steven, and I filed into whatever restaurant and sat down with Alan and he delivered us the business. He told us that we were on the verge of ruining everything we’d worked so hard to achieve. It took all of my strength just to keep my head up for two seconds while Alan went on about how we couldn’t go on like this. We made a point of expressing our disappointment with Axl’s disregard and the fact that he didn’t even show up for the meeting. But we also knew that we couldn’t go out and just get a new singer. It seemed like Alan was with us and was going to talk to him. It didn’t make a difference, of course.

  We returned to L.A. and canceled the rest of our tour. Next up: opening for Aerosmith. The controlled environment of being an opening band seemed like it would be good for us at the time. Their manager, Tim Collins, had spearheaded their sobriety and the band had spent millions getting themselves cleaned up and into a sober universe. And they’d hired an opening band that was falling apart at the seams. I can only imagine the lies that Alan came up with about how great we were doing to close that deal.

  Steven Tyler, Slash, and Joe Perry.

  Tom Zutaut, Alan Niven, and Doug Goldstein were read the riot act about endangering Aerosmith’s sobriety by Tim Collins and we then met with him as well. We showed up to his hotel room in L.A., where we ordered about $1,000 worth of booze from room service when he went to the bathroom. As they wheeled in this huge cart of drinks and food, Tim didn’t say anything, he just smirked.

  “Sorry, man,” I said. “We were hungry…and thirsty.”

  It was our way of showing him that we weren’t willing to relinquish our lifestyle, but we were open to following a few essential guidelines. All alcoholic drinks would be consumed in unmarked cups and all bottles of booze would be kept out of sight, and of course no mention would be made of heroin or cocaine. That wasn’t a problem: it was never hard to lie when we were holding drugs because none of us were ever the sharing kind.

  The tour started in July and lasted for two months, and I couldn’t have been happier about supporting one of the bands that meant so much to me. Aerosmith’s new album, Permanent Vacation, was the first that was written by outside songwriters and contained the first hits that the band had enjoyed in years, but as much as I didn’t think that the use of songwriters was particularly cool, I was happy to see them resurrected from the dead.

  The first night of the Aerosmith tour was tumultuous: it started in Illinois, and while the rest of us showed up early enough to watch them sound-check, Axl was missing in action until half an hour before showtime. I remember Steven Tyler coming up to me and saying, “Hey…so where’s your singer?” It’s become a recurring punch line; it’s his standard greeting whenever he sees me. Axl showed up at the very last minute, which obviously caused tension to be high all around, but we played well enough to make up for it.

  We played Giants Stadium on that tour, with Deep Purple on the bill. That stadium is so huge and we had so much room on that stage that we could really run around; we were always good at that. We did a forty-five-minute set and we played “Paradise City” twice because we were shooting it for a video. The crowd just freaked. That stadium can hold eighty thousand, and even though it wasn’t completely full, we’d never played to a crowd that large. The energy was incredible. It was one of those moments when I truly realized how popular we were becoming in the “real” world. It was a moment of clarity.

  I remember sound-checking that day; I walked out into the middle of the arena, this huge expanse, and played my guitar, just for a while, to take it all in. We’d walked into so many situations since that first gig in Seattle, and that same chemistry and energy was still there. If anything, we were stadium-worthy from the start; we had an irrefutable way of doing things that needed very little adjusment once we made the leap to a grand scale.

  We came offstage and I was on cloud nine, so I went onto our bus and celebrated with about five lines of coke and a few deep tumblers of Jack Daniel’s. Literally the minute after I’d finished my last line, Gene Kirkland, a photographer I knew, burst in and said that he was there to shoot Joe Perry for the cover of Rip Magazine and Joe had requested that I be a part of it. The coke was really hitting me and the Jack wasn’t helping much; I felt like Frosty the Snowman.

  Slash pretends he didn’t just do three grams of blow. Joe Perry knows Slash just did three grams of blow. Note Slash’s clenched jaw and stiff arms.

  I told Gene that I’d be there in a few and pounded as much Jack as I could stomach, then I tore the bus apart searching in vain for my sunglasses. I checked myself in the mirror, took a few deep breaths, and headed outside as nonchalantly as possible. I strolled over to Joe trying not to twitch, hoping that my smile looked more relaxed than it felt. Coke makes you paranoid and this particular batch was some speedy New Jersey, stepped-on Sopranos coke so it was hard to hide the effects. I’d met Joe before but I did not want to be around him all coked up. Every time I see the resulting picture of us, I have to laugh, because anyone who knows me at all knows that I never smile like that or ever hold myself quite so stiffly. Somehow I managed to keep my jaw in line but it wanted to swing like a barn door in the wind.

  We did a pretty good job of behaving ourselves that tour, but Steven Tyler was convinced that we were high out of our minds all of the time. He was so inquisitive about what we were up to and what we’d done the night before. He’d come over to us every afternoon and say, in that rhythmic, rapid-fire delivery of his, “What’d you do last night? You get high? You fuck some girls?” It got hard to live up to his expectations.

  The only near disaster that we had with Aerosmith was at a venue somewhere in the Midwest. There was a long drive from the hotel to the venue, Axl was running late, and the first car was full, so I decided to wait for him. The other guys got there fine, but we got totally stuck in a line of cars heading into the venue on a two-lane highway. We were fucked, just crawling along, and the clock was ticking. Axl was cool but I was completely anxious. We somehow managed to get a police escort and make it with five minutes to spare. I remember walking into the dressing room, throwing on a new shirt, and running up to the stage. I passed Joe Perry in the hallway and he was standing there with one leg out the way he does, just watching me, with this slight grin as if to say, “Ha-ha. This time you made it.”

  In hindsight, it was clear that despite Aerosmith’s radio hits, we were soon the main attraction. It happened very fast for us, thanks
to MTV’s chronic rotation of “Sweet Child o’ Mine”: within a few weeks of the single’s release in early June, it hit number one and we became the most popular band in the nation. We heard things from management, but it didn’t sink in with me until Rolling Stone showed up on tour: they’d sent a writer out to do a cover story on Aerosmith, but after a few days of watching the crowds’ reaction and seeing us play live, the magazine opted to put us on the cover instead. By the end of the tour, we were absolutely fucking huge, generating the kind of excitement that pretty much baffled me night after night.

  That said, we were still a scrappy group of gypsies without a clue, so Aerosmith’s manager, Tim Collins, sent us off with a parting gift that we desperately needed: luggage. They gave each of us an aluminum Halliburton suitcase that I still have today. Tim realized that we were each the type who might stay on the road for ten more years without a proper suitcase—and he wasn’t wrong. I remember how grateful and excited I was to have it; I ran over to Joe and Steven’s dressing room and thanked them from the bottom of my heart. They looked at me like I was crazy; now I realize that they probably had no idea that management had sent us a gift at all.

  WE SHOT HALF OF OUR THIRD VIDEO during our tour with Aerosmith. The live footage seen in “Paradise City” was captured in two locations; the first was Giants Stadium in New Jersey and the second was at the Monsters of Rock Festival at Castle Donnington in the English Midlands a month later on August 20, 1988. By the time we got to Donnington, “Sweet Child” and “Welcome to the Jungle” had charted around the world and our album had broken the Top Ten. At that show we experienced a frenzied reaction like nothing we’d seen before. The festival broke attendance records that year, surpassing the hundred-thousand mark. There couldn’t have been a better place for us to record live footage…except for the fact that two people were trampled to death at the front of the stage during our set.

  The audience was crazy, just this sea of surging people. Axl stopped the set a number of times in an effort to control the crowd, but there was no calming them down. We had no idea that anyone was actually hurt let alone killed; after we’d done the gig and were celebrating in a nearby pub, Alan came in completely distraught and gave us the news. It was horrible; none of us knew what to do: something that had been a cause for celebration a moment before had become a tragedy. It was the first of many strange, surreal, and contradictory times.

  LESS THAN A MONTH LATER, GUNS PERFORMED “Welcome to the Jungle” at the MTV Video Music Awards and took home the Best New Artist Award. I’d like to know where that trophy is today; I think I left it in a cab, which, now that I think about it, is as much as it deserved. Then on September 24, 1988—nearly a year and month, to the day, after its release—Appetite for Destruction began a three-week sit-in at the very top of Billboard’s album chart. And so began our reign of terror. The truth is, all we ever cared to do was top the bullshit hair metal bands that enjoyed undue success for their subpar existence. We—well, I at least—never wanted to be Madonna; that kind of pop-star reality had nothing to do with what our band was about, according to me. But before I knew it, that’s where we landed almost overnight.

  After nurturing us through making the record, then waiting a year for it to take off, Tom Zutaut wasn’t going to let this upswing lose momentum: he convinced us to package the acoustic recordings we’d just done with the Live! Like a Suicide album and release it immediately. We called it G N’ R Lies and it was released on November 29, 1988. The album hit the top five a week after it was released, and suddenly this band that Geffen had nearly dropped was breaking records: we were the only act to have two albums in the top five at the same time during the entire 1980s.

  We had broken in America and the U.K. already, so Alan booked us on a tour of Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, where the record was just starting to take off. Japan was such a culture shock; the first morning that I woke up there and looked out of my window, and all of the Japanese toys and every Godzilla movie that I’d been a fan of suddenly took on a whole new meaning. Izzy had it worse than I did: he’d gotten really strung out the week before we left, so to get through the ten-hour flight without a hitch, he took a bunch of time-release Valium the moment we got on the plane. He slept all the way there and was so out of it that we had to carry him through immigration. We did our best to hold him up the whole way through the process, but it didn’t seem like he was going to make it.

  When he woke up in his hotel room, he had no idea at all where he was, so he called the front desk, unsure if any of us were even in the same hotel. They transferred him to Steven’s room.

  “Hey man, it’s Izzy,” he said. “Uh…where am I?”

  “Hey man!” Steven said. “You’re in Japan!”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, man! We’re in Japan!”

  “Get the fuck out of here,” Izzy said. “No way.”

  “Yeah, man, look out your fuckin’ window!

  Like every other hard-rock or heavy metal band that plays Japan, we hung out in Roppongi—we stayed at the Roppongi Prince Hotel, actually. Between the watered-down drinks and the bad blow, I burned out on it immediately because I had no idea where else to go. I stayed locked in my room for most of that tour, a room that I should mention was about ten feet by ten feet, but just so incredibly efficient. There was the language barrier, of course, but above and beyond that, I couldn’t deal with the Beatle-mania element of Japanese music fans. They met us at the airport, they followed us to our hotel, and they pretty much waited in the lobby or hotel hallway in case any of us thought about leaving. I was flattered, but I thought it was pretty strange. The few times I cared to go out, I was escorted to the Hard Rock and a few other clubs, and found no reason to make that effort again: the pseudo–dance club/rock scene full of exported American models did nothing for me at all. Luckily, I did run into a girl that I knew from L.A., and that made things more bearable. Otherwise, my memories of that tour come down to three things: sticky rice, sake, and Jack Daniel’s.

  We did five dates total and took the bullet train to the shows outside Tokyo. Our promoter throughout Japan was Mr. Udo, who was famous for handling all of the big hard-rock acts in those days; he saw the rowdiest of bands from Van Halen to Mötley safely through his country without a casualty. As is customary, Mr. Udo hosted a dinner for us, which included executives from our Japanese record label and important promoters—who, we were told, were members of the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia. We were instructed not to show our tattoos that night because our Yakuza hosts would be offended: in Japan, tattoos carry much more weight than they do elsewhere, and tattooing is elemental to Yakuza culture. Of course we didn’t listen: Axl wore short sleeves and I took off my jacket and rolled up the sleeves of my T-shirt without thinking about it. The dinner ended up being very pleasant, and Mr. Udo gave each of us cameras as a parting gift at the end of the meal. Those cameras were a kind gesture that turned out to be a problem in the end: none of us were savvy enough to declare them as gifts when we passed through customs, so the Japanese authorities detained us when they found them. Some of us, at least: I’d lost mine by the time we got to the airport, and I think Steven had as well. Duff somehow got through, but the other guys got held up. After an hour of questioning, Izzy made the camera a moot issue by smashing it in front of the guards. Axl, however, did not, and he was searched to the maximum degree; I believe he was strip searched—everything. In any case, we missed our flight waiting for him.

  Our next stop was Australia; we did a short tour that hit Syndey and Melbourne, and since our record was just barely cracking their consciousness, we resuscitated a few covers, like “Marseilles” by the Angels and “Nice Boys Don’t Play Rock ’n’ Roll,” which is by one of Australia’s greatest rock bands, Rose Tattoo. We made a point of getting in touch with them and arranging to meet, and I must say that the leader of their band, Angry Anderson, was everything I thought he’d be. Angry had more tattoos than anyone I’d ever seen, and he was every bit as rea
l and honest as I’d hoped for.

  By this time, we were showing signs of wear and tear from the physical demands of excessive touring. It was taking its toll. We’d also been spoiled by the sheer enthusiasm of the crowds in America, so Australia was a little bit of a letdown when we needed a lift. The chicks were standoffish and independent. They weren’t clambering all over themselves to meet us the way they did everywhere else. At this point, heroin started to rear its ugly head again: Izzy and I ran into someone who had some and we copped a little. We soon discovered that there is a long-standing heroin culture in Australia. We kept it together, though, just a taste here and there, so it didn’t evolve into another full-time habit.

  We did manage to get the most out of it and did some good writing while we were there. “Civil War” was an instrumental that I had written just before we took off for Japan. Axl started writing lyrics to it and we worked it up into a proper song at sound check in Melbourne, first the beginning part then the heavy section. That song came together very quickly.

  After our five dates in Australia, we popped over to New Zealand, and at that point I realized that I was completely burned out. It had been two long years on the road. At the same time I didn’t want to go back home because I had nowhere to go.

  When we got back to L.A., I treated myself to a rare indulgence: a guitar. Somehow this collector got in touch with our management because he wanted to sell me Joe Perry’s 1959 Les Paul—the tobacco-colored sunburst he’d been photographed with countless times. Joe’s ex-wife had sold it back when he was still on drugs and they had come upon tough times. And this was it—the guy had pictures of it and all the documentation. I knew that guitar well—Joe was holding it in the Aerosmith poster I had on my wall growing up. It had a distinctive nick in it; this was the real deal.