It's So Easy: And Other Lies (15 page)

We were also learning how to write lyrics, especially Izzy, Axl, and me. And as we developed songs, we put a lot of emphasis on anything that veered away from the main melody—we all felt that diverging from a good tune was only justifiable if the other part was just as good. That meant we rejected cookie-cutter songwriting that demanded bridges for bridges’ sake and strictly delineated between verses and choruses. Instead we only went places we really felt strongly about. There’s a reason the codas in songs like “Rocket Queen,” “Paradise City,” or “Patience” sound so distinctive—we didn’t feel compelled to add them; we were just so excited about certain ideas that, working together, day after day, we found ways to incorporate them. (We wrote “Sweet Child o’ Mine” later, and the “where do we go now” coda of that song actually was just sort of tacked on, which is one of the reasons we didn’t anticipate it being a hit—or even a single, for that matter.)

When we started to write the songs that would become
Appetite,
it was clear that Slash saw this as a chance to finally perfect his sense of melody on leads and his crunch when it came to riffage. Slash wrote and perfected those classic parts from some dark and beautiful place within himself. The shy introvert I’d first met had at last found the true medium to express himself.

I remember “My Michelle” coming together. Slash had a great riff, a typical Slash riff. It was a slinky, spidery thing, but he was playing it really fast at first. (His initial riff shows up, slowed down, in the intro of the recorded version—that brooding, eerie horror movie bit at the beginning.) While working on it together with the whole band—collaboration was the magic ingredient for almost all the songs—we hit on that
bomp, bad-a-dam, bad-a-dam
that kick-starts the song in its final version.

One of our signature songs from that period had an even longer gestation—part of it went back to the very first song I ever wrote. Now in L.A. seven years later, the main riff from that first song came back to me as we were putting together another tune about the hardscrabble lives we lived. As with “My Michelle,” one of Slash’s amazing chiming staccato riffs became the intro, and the main section of the song hurtled along atop the riff from my Vains song “The Fake,” now played on bass. Axl had some lyrical fragments he’d been working on since the Seattle trip, and we created an extended bridge around those—a dreamlike section echoing the words
when you’re high
devolved into a churning, nightmarish wash of sound out of which Axl howled, “Do you know where you are?”

We called the result “Welcome to the Jungle.”

We played the song live for the first time when we opened a show at the Troubadour on a Thursday night in late June 1985. Also on the bill was a band originally from San Francisco called Jetboy.

“Jungle” went over great, and from then on crowds would get agitated as soon as they heard Slash’s intro riff—it became one of our first calling cards. We also hit it off with Jetboy. I had an immediate connection with Jetboy bass player Todd Crew. He was so damn smart that I truly believe he had to drink to slow down the inflow of information to his brain. I also understood without asking that he was self-medicating some deep pain. But Todd was also fucking funny. He was always the life and light in a room. We quickly became best friends.

I hadn’t been in L.A. for even a year yet, and I was still very conscious of being away from home, away from my family and from my boyhood friends. It is difficult to describe how much this early friendship with Todd—which almost immediately became a hang-out-all-of-the-time kind of friendship—meant to me. Todd, together with the guys within Guns, formed part of a new foundation for me, like a family. And fuck, we had fun. Todd was a
heavy
drinker, often passing out at the most inopportune times. Clubs, apartments hallways, sidewalks … whatever.

It’s also difficult to express the level of excitement I felt as I saw the number of people who were into our music explode. Within a few months we went from playing to a handful of people to packing some of the coolest venues in town. When things are working and you’re seeing progress, it kicks major fucking ass. Especially since that progress was largely based on new songs we continued to write together.

The next time my brother Matt played with us—a few months after the time he looked out and saw an empty club—people knew the songs and were singing along. I could see the relief in Matt’s face.

Not that it was a completely steady upward trajectory. We still played a lot of random gigs. Shit, the night after we unveiled “Jungle” at the Troubadour, we played a UCLA frat house. We got $35 and free beer for that show. It was one of those spontaneous gigs—it was set up the same day we played. The students at the frat party weren’t sure what to make of us and hung back a little. Axl’s assless chaps may have had something to do with our tepid reception, too. Still, free beer.

Obviously we still had to work other jobs. Steven was the only one of us who was not working. He had been kicked out of his house when he was twelve and learned early how to make his way on the streets. But he was completely unselfish. If he scrounged up the money for a hamburger or a bag of Cheetos, he would share it with me or any of the other guys—no matter how hungry he was.

Slash worked at a newsstand at the corner of Melrose and Fairfax called Centerfold News. Lucky for us, the stand had a phone. Slash routinely left Centerfold’s phone number with bookers and club promoters. He would sometimes be on the phone his entire shift trying to get us gigs, calling people on the mailing list to sell tickets, spreading the word about shows. Slash was a natural-born salesman when it came to getting people to buy tickets to our shows. Eventually he got fired from the newsstand because he was on the phone so much.

I was still working for the mobsters of indeterminate East European origin transporting “office supplies.” At first, I found the guys who ran the company pretty intimidating. They were right out of central casting: heavy-looking features, unidentifiable accents and a clipped way of talking, tracksuits with pistols in the waists of their pants. The whole situation made me wary. But they were really cool to me, it was steady work, and after I’d been there for half a year I felt like part of the team.

Maybe that’s why I tried to get Izzy a job at the same company. He ended up in the one room where they really did sell office supplies over the phone. He came in late his third day, and one of the bosses took me aside.

“Mikey”—even my mom had called me Duff, but these guys used the name on my driver’s license, Michael—“Mikey, your friend … he no good. Your friend—he on drugs.”

Another guy who worked there with me was a white guy named Black Randy, who was in the L.A. punk band Black Randy and the Metro Squad. He was insane—shot speedballs all day at work. But somehow the bosses liked him enough to keep him around.

Black Randy loved our band. He always told us, “I’m going to manage your band and you’ll have the swagger of the New York Dolls and you’re going to shit on this town.”

He took the bus down to our rehearsal space and brought children’s Halloween costumes he wanted us to wear. He videotaped us, and videotaped himself shooting speedballs. I guess it goes without saying that he became our first manager. Obviously.

But Black Randy also had AIDS, and he died soon afterward.

After that, I called my brother Bruce, who was booking bands and DJs for a restaurant chain.

“Dude, do you know any managers?” I asked him.

“Yeah, I can call a buddy of mine,” he said.

He called me back. The guy wasn’t interested.

I had broken up with Kat and moved out of the El Cerrito apartment by then. Some nights I crashed at a girl’s place near our rehearsal space; some nights I spent at the space itself. The same was true for the other guys. We bounced around, hooked up with stripper friends—those girls always had apartments and money—or crashed in the alley off Gardner, where, as Izzy told a local paper a few months later, we lived “like rats in a box.” Each member of the band now existed solely to write and play, and almost all other concerns had melted away. In my case, this was one of the few periods of my life when I didn’t have a fixed address. It was an amazing rite of passage. The camaraderie within Guns N’ Roses deepened to a level so unquestioning and intense that it could only be compared to blood relationships; it was primordial. And as when the first creatures began to slither out of the primordial ooze, it could get messy.

The clap was absolutely rampant back then, and venereal diseases swept through the band members’ crotches while we were all living and fucking in such close proximity. Fortunately, since my last experience I’d gotten a tip from one of my brothers-in-law, who was a doctor. You could get dirt-cheap antibiotics—intended for use in aquariums—at pet stores. Turned out tetracycline wasn’t just good for tail rot and gill disease. It also did great with syphilis—and with no doctor visit, no expensive prescription, and no need to feign shame for the nuns at a free clinic, like I had to that time in Seattle.
*
Who needed health insurance when there were pet stores?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

We continued to expand our song list and started looking for headline gigs. By October 1985, we added “Paradise City” and “Rocket Queen” to our set list and headlined a show out in Reseda at a place called the Country Club. In November we headlined a show at the Troubadour with a national touring band we had always liked—Kix, from Maryland—opening for us. By the end of the year we had added “My Michelle” and “Night-rain” to our regular live repertoire.

An independent record label named Restless called us near the end of the year and asked us to come down to their office in Long Beach. There were some cool bands on Restless, and the label people were into our band. They were ahead of the curve—no other labels had contacted us at that point. Izzy bought a book about the music industry in preparation for the meeting. I remember looking through it. I could understand the sections I read, but there was a lot of shit to master. When we went to their office, they offered us something called a pressing and distribution deal, plus something like $30,000 toward recording costs. It was a simple two-page deal, and they explained the whole thing to us. Still, we thought, if they’re going to offer that, someone else will, too.

We left their office without signing. But we were nervous—had we just fucked ourselves? I thought of Sly Stone. I knew you could blow it.

Kim Fowley, the fabled manager, bullshit artist, and generally shady figure behind the success—or lack thereof, depending on how you want to look at it—of the Runaways, came knocking at the end of 1985, too. By the time I moved to Hollywood, the Runaways had come and gone, and Joan Jett, the Runaways’ guitarist and main songwriter, was a successful solo artist. But Kim Fowley was still trolling the gutters for the next rising stars. Once GN’R was up and running and writing songs and we were attracting a regular and growing audience, Kim set his sights on us. He wanted to manage our band.

One thing that we knew about ourselves by that point was that Guns was the best and most committed band that any of us had ever been in, and we had become very protective of it. Kim had a storied but checkered past; I had opened for Joan Jett when I was with the Fastbacks shortly before she became a household name with “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” and I knew the stories. We were dubious.

When Kim sensed that we were not going to let him manage us, he came at us from a different angle. He invited us to breakfast at Denny’s on Sunset. Slash, Axl, and I went. Kim said that he wanted to buy the publishing rights to our song “Welcome to the Jungle.” He had a contract with him and a traveler’s check for $10,000. To us, this was big money. But if Kim Fowley was offering this money to us now—if this one song was worth so much money to him—wouldn’t that mean we had something valuable? Shouldn’t we play this out a bit? I think in a weird way, we owed it to Kim that we eventually ended up keeping the publishing rights to our songs when we later signed our record deal. If Kim Fowley thought our music rights were worth something, then by God, they probably were. He could spot this stuff, and we knew it.

Kim intensified his efforts, coming to see us again a few weeks later to offer $50,000. But it didn’t matter. By that time we knew to hold on to anything that was ours. It was all we had and all we believed in.

Like Joan Jett and the Runaways, we were chasing a dream and the world was exciting and wild and fast. We avoided getting involved with people like Kim Fowley not because he wasn’t fascinating and smart, but because by 1985 we had heard lots of stories about bands that had been ripped off. Between what happened to the Runaways—they never really got the shot they deserved and lost control of their name and songs—and the financial straits the members of Aerosmith faced in the early 1980s despite their enormous success in the 1970s, we were familiar with the full spectrum of rock-and-roll pitfalls.

We could see the sharks beginning to circle us, and we were wary.