It's So Easy: And Other Lies (14 page)

The problem for us was getting together the initial balloon payment. Rich Hollywood parents could loan their kids’ bands money, but we didn’t have that cushion. That’s where Slash’s best friend Marc Canter came in—Marc was the unsung hero of GN’R. Without him, I don’t know how we would have done half the shit we did at the beginning.

Marc believed in our band from day one. His faith was such that, in addition to photographing us, he was willing to front us the money to buy the tickets that allowed us to get shows in the pay-to-play clubs. We paid him back once we sold the tickets. We were relentless about calling the names on our list. At first we had to hustle really hard just to pay Marc back, but we grew our fan base faster as a result; as our mailing list expanded, it was easier and easier to sell tickets to our shows. Of course, we also had to borrow money from Marc to buy stamps.

We made cool flyers and, in addition to sending them to people on our list, we posted them all over the city. We always posted flyers as a band, at night. The first time I discovered Night Train wine was on one of these epic nocturnal flyering campaigns—which were best accomplished while drinking from a brown paper bag. Afterward I was happy to find that the liquor store around the corner from our storage space also stocked it. At $1.29 a bottle, Night Train instantly became a band staple; we started piecing together the song “Nightrain” a week later while rehearsing before another flyer-posting outing.

Soon we decided to rent a makeshift rehearsal space. Even though we would have to come up with a monthly nut of a few hundred bucks, we would save money versus paying by the hour at other rehearsal spaces. (We rehearsed
a lot
of hours.) We felt we were now on a roll, and scraping the money together at the beginning of each month would allow us a lot more freedom, too: we could leave our gear set up all of the time instead of having to tear it down for the next band the way we had to at the per-hour rehearsal places. Still, given our limited resources, we had to improvise.

Half a block north of Sunset on Gardner was the mouth of a dead-end alleyway that ran east behind what was then the Guitar Center. Halfway down the alley, the slender lane opened into a tarmac lot behind a public elementary school. Along this lot, there were half a dozen doors to self-storage spaces used for various types of commerce. We found one for rent for four hundred dollars a month and knew it was our spot, though we’d have to fudge a little bit about what we planned to do in there. Once we finally jumped through all of the various hoops presented to us by the apprehensive landlord, we got the keys to our new rehearsal studio.

If Orchid Street was ground zero of Guns N’ Roses when Axl, Izzy, and I all lived there, the alleyway behind Gardner was where the whole thing came together once we had discovered we were a real band. We set up the garagelike, ten-by-fourteen structure as our gang headquarters—a place to rehearse, party, and, much of the time, to spend the night.

The storage space itself had a door and unadorned cinder-block walls. There was no bathroom, but for four hundred bucks a month, who expected a bathroom? And anyway, there was a latrine in the parking lot. There was also no a/c or heat, but there was electricity and we could make noise twenty-four hours a day.

We raided a nearby construction site for some two-by-fours and plywood that we used to install a ramshackle loft in our tiny new home. The loft added some dimension and much-needed sleeping space to the room. If you were to walk in the door, everything in the room would be to your left. First there was my bass amp, then Izzy’s Marshall half stack, then Steven’s drums, and then Slash’s guitar rig. This is also how we would set up onstage for each and every gig until Izzy left in 1991.

Our gear was all very old and beat-up, with the vinyl covers shredding off the cabinets and all. But in this room our shitty gear sounded magical, clear, and
huge.
We did not have a PA for Axl, so we basically improvised and made do. There is a photo out there somewhere that shows Axl screaming into my ear at the Gardner space. This was the only way that he could get his ideas across in that setting. Among the benefits of playing shows as frequently as possible was that it offered us our only chance to hear what Axl was singing.

It was funny having crappy gear and no PA and constantly looking at the back wall and dumpsters of the Hollywood Guitar Center all day. That place was a veritable toy store to those who could pay for the things in there—or had credit with the powers that be. It was like a sick joke to us. By the time we did finally get our record deal and the advance dough that came with it, I knew exactly what new gear I wanted to buy.

To the right of our space was another one being used by a band called Johnny and the Jaguars. The members had come out together from Denver. The unspoken truth in Hollywood back then was that if a band moved to town from another city as a unit, it never lasted. I suppose all the influences and amusements L.A. offered were just too divisive. You had to wade through a lot of new shit in Hollywood, and your life was going to take some turns. For five guys to experience all those turns at the same time and react in the same way was almost impossible. Sure enough, before long Johnny and the Jaguars broke up. The other thing about bands from out of town? They were usually awful. True to form, Johnny and the Jaguars were not a great band. But they were a nice bunch of guys, and we later tapped their keyboardist, Dizzy Reed, to join our touring band for the
Use Your Illusions
tour.

Just across Sunset, in a nondescript row of one-story buildings, stood El Compadre, a cheap Mexican restaurant that served strong margaritas. The interior was kept so dark you couldn’t see a thing when you stepped inside. You had to wait for your eyes to adjust before a dark bar appeared on the left and even darker vinyl banquettes and booths slowly swam into view on the right. No matter how long you let your eyes adjust, sufficient murkiness remained to allow for discreet blow jobs and drug use right at the booths. The Seventh Veil strip club was a few blocks down Sunset from El Compadre. The important thing about the Seventh Veil was the girls. That might sound obvious. But to us it was the girls, not the show and the venue. We spent a lot of time with off-work strippers, and a few began to dance onstage at our concerts.

Between us and the other bands, the alley began to attract a lot of drugs, booze, girls, and other musicians. Strippers from the neighborhood constantly came by the space, often bringing quaaludes, Valium, coke, or booze to share. I still avoided blow because of the effect I assumed it would have on my panic attacks, but to pills I didn’t always say no. As we started to play more gigs and met more people, word spread about our alleyway and it became a go-to after-hours party spot. This translated into more people hanging around the fringes of our scene. Among them was a guy named Phillipe, who drove a bus for the city as his regular job but sold crack on the side. He was older than we were. Phillipe was not a rocker per se, but he liked the fact that there were hot young girls around. He got them high and tried to take advantage of them—creepy stuff. He was emblematic of a certain element that orbited our band.

As more and more people showed up to party in our alley after the clubs closed on Friday and Saturday nights, we also started to sell beer by the can. We could buy cases of rotgut beer for $5.99—which was only twenty-five cents a can. We sold them for a buck a pop. That translated into major income, at least by our standards. Shit, we could make the rent on our space with income like that.

Not surprisingly, we started to run into trouble with the police—though oddly, it wasn’t the LAPD so much as the West Hollywood sheriffs, who would leave their jurisdiction to mess with us. Raids were difficult to escape because we were in a dead-end alley, after all, and there was no place to run. I remember the cops coming there and asking who was who, let’s see IDs, blah, blah, blah. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t much of a big deal. Izzy was smart about his dealing, and even the supposed complaints from girls were probably just ruses that were held over our heads to scare us—a response by the West Hollywood cops to getting an earful from parents of kids who showed up late and wasted after a night in our backyard. Of course at the time it all felt much more serious and sinister, and some of us would hide out for periods of time after the police turned up asking questions.

I had another run-in with the police on my way to work at six o’clock one morning. The brakes went out on the Maverick. I drifted into the intersection of Hollywood and Highland and caused a six-car pileup. The name tag on the cop who pulled up read
O’Malley;
I happened to be wearing a green sweatshirt one of my brothers had sent me—it read ireland across the chest. The drivers of the other cars—all Mexicans—were irate. Officer O’Malley looked at my sweatshirt, then at the other drivers.

“Ah, your brakes went out, what are you going to do? It’s not your fault.”

He let me walk.

After I totaled my car, I had to walk everywhere. Hollywood’s system of alleyways offered places to seal shady business deals, to hide out, or to pass out—and a lot of places for skeezy motherfuckers to come out of. Of course, now that we had our back-alley headquarters, we felt as though we
were
those motherfuckers. What could be skeezier than living in a storage space behind the Guitar Center? Well, I guess the food chain in Hollywood at the time was more limited than I realized, because I got jumped by four dudes while walking from work to the space one day. They had knives and wallet chains—before wallet chains were a cool accessory.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In 1985, AIDS was definitely starting to enter the national dialogue, but it didn’t yet occupy a prominent place in the heterosexual psyche. I never used a condom, not once. I was lucky. The scene in Hollywood was an orgy of shared needles, and shared girlfriends and boyfriends. Perhaps there has been no other time in recent history when the doors were so wide open. Everyone seemed to be living in and for the moment, and it seemed as if nothing was off-limits. Our Gardner storage space was at the epicenter of all that, the place where the members of Guns N’ Roses lived our reckless lives.

Three of my bandmates were using heroin at least occasionally by this point and Izzy was continuing to deal, but everybody put in the work. Even then, though, the singer’s personal issues were beginning to affect the band in a way that drug habits were not (at least not yet). Axl had intense emotional swings marked by periods of incredible energy followed by days on end when he would be overtaken by black moods and disappear—and miss rehearsals. Since I had suffered from panic attacks since I was seventeen, I knew all too well how crippling things like that could be. Axl and I talked together about it once in a while, and I told him about my panic attacks. I quickly realized that while each of us in the band had his own things to deal with, Axl’s was closest to mine—a sort of chemical imbalance that he had no more control over than I did over my panic attacks. After that, we had an understanding. Which made me much more comfortable with the situation: between growing up in a big family and playing team sports as a kid, I had found it important to come to understandings with the people around me.

Axl’s unpredictable mood swings also electrified him—a sense of impending danger hung in the air around him. I loved that trait in him. Artists are always trying to create a spark, but Axl was totally punk rock in my eyes because his fire could not be controlled. One minute the audience might be comfortably watching him light up the stage; the next instant he became a terrifying wildfire threatening to burn down not just the venue but the entire city. He was brazen and unapologetic and his edge helped sharpen the band’s identity and separate us from the pack.

We rehearsed at the space twice a day regardless of anything else going on in any of our lives. Many of the songs that made up
Appetite
and
Lies
—as well as more than a few from
Use Your Illusion
—came together in this back-alley lair. When any two or three of us were together, there were always song ideas percolating. Our disparate musical voices somehow managed to mesh. Axl was into Nazareth, Queen, and the Ramones. Slash was the Aerosmith guy. Izzy brought a no-pretense rock vibe—Stones, Faces, New York Dolls, Hanoi Rocks. Steven was a San Fernando Valley metal guy with a soft spot for the soaring harmonies of 1960s vocal music. I brought in more of the funkier, groove stuff and the punk-rock ferocity.

Another key was the way we could be completely open with one another while working on songs. Writing songs is a highly emotional thing. Working on them in a group exposes you to others. Either you hold back or you risk feeling vulnerable. But the closeness in our band fostered intimacy; we weren’t afraid to expose our ideas and to have the rest of the band tweak them, kick them around, repurpose them—or not. That comfort level helped us all work together to create great songs. And nobody was holding on to stuff for another day or another band, either. This was the band, this was the moment.