It's So Easy: And Other Lies (16 page)

On January 18, 1986, before our show at the Roxy, a friend ducked his head into the backstage area.

“This fucking gig is sold out!”

When we looked out at the crowd, we still saw the same faces. We knew most of the people in the audience, even after we started selling out venues like this. Del, West Arkeen, Marc Canter, and assorted girlfriends assembled backstage as usual. The big difference? One of my nephews stood in front of the backstage area as “security.”

There were no high fives. And yet I was proud of how far we had come. I had played some big gigs with Ten Minute Warning, and GN’R’s shows in early 1986 had that feeling. Except this was L.A., one of the biggest cities in the world. Still, the members of Guns never looked at one another and said, “Fuck yeah, we rocked it!” We celebrated that kind of stuff onstage—we would be better onstage than in rehearsal. We recognized that there were transcendent moments, but we didn’t need to talk about them. You have this silent relationship as players in a band; it takes all these parts and you have moments—whether it’s between a guitar player and singer, a bassist and drummer, or everyone together. And when you saw that look in the audience—people just blown away—that feedback from the crowd was enough. Especially since we were playing to a lot of the same people, we could see the looks on their faces and feel the electricity when we hit a new high.

Around this time a friend of Izzy’s named Robert John became our “official” band photographer. Robert had shot pictures of another L.A. band, W.A.S.P. His girlfriend, a dominatrix at some club in Hollywood, was the bondage girl in W.A.S.P’s horror-movie-style stage show. Nice girl. I liked her. Robert had come to one of our shows to hang out with Izzy and took a few shots of the band. They looked great, so we started having him shoot more and more for us.

He also believed in the band from day one.

“You guys are going to be huge,” he always said.

“Yeah, yeah, just take the pictures.”

We gave him a lot of shit when we did photo shoots.

Not only did we begin to sell out everywhere we played in early 1986, but the club owners suddenly
loved
us. The crowd we brought included punkers, rockers, and, best of all, lots of women. And they all drank. A lot. We broke the liquor-sales records at the Troubadour. Once you start doing that kind of business, people notice. And also, once you start headlining, you don’t have to sell tickets on your own anymore. There was no more paying to play.

A&R staff from major labels started to pop up at gigs, too. On Friday, February 28, we had the coveted headline slot at the Troubadour again, and at least a dozen record execs were rumored to be in the audience. Creepy manager types were oozing around, trying to get backstage to charm us. Having my nephew there came in handy that night.

Los Angeles was also a beacon for national and international touring acts, and now that we could fill clubs, we started to get offers to open shows for big artists. When my boyhood rock idol Johnny Thunders came to town in late March 1986, the promoters asked us to open both his shows. For me, this was a huge deal. Probably for Izzy, too. I had seen Johnny play a bunch of shows on the West Coast in the early 1980s, and had even gotten a chance to jam with him after a show in Portland. Of course, by 1986, I didn’t hold Thunders in quite as high regard as I once had—the romantic notion of a junked-up vagabond like Johnny had faded a bit for me with direct experience of heroin. I could even admit in hindsight that the chance to jam with him probably happened only because he had shot up a post-show speedball and was looking for anything to do, even if that meant jamming with some teenage straggler. But still. Sharing a bill with fucking Johnny Thunders! I was really looking forward to that first show at Fender’s Ballroom.

Unfortunately, one of the first things that happened when we got down to Fender’s for the show was that Johnny started to chat up Axl’s girlfriend Erin while we were onstage doing our sound check. Johnny also wanted to know where he could score some dope. Axl flipped out when he got wind that Johnny had hit on Erin, and began a tirade backstage. Axl could be intimidating when he started yelling and carrying on. Johnny spent the rest of the night hiding in his dressing room, jonesing for a fix. Whatever remnants of a romantic and swashbuckling image I had of Johnny Thunders disappeared that night.

During the weeks between that Troubadour show and the Thunders gig, the record-label frenzy to sign us peaked. We were having fun doing what we were doing, playing live all the time, courted by all the clubs, near hysteria at our shows, blowing the doors off places. We were in no rush to shift gears for the sake of a record deal. We knew we were good. And we had songs we liked. I was convinced we were too hard and too dirty ever to be huge. Yet everybody was in the hunt, or at least pretending to be, as industry people started falling over one another to talk to us.

Robert John had been haranguing us to approve some photos he had taken so that he could start to submit them to magazines as coverage began to spike. Slash and I finally agreed. One afternoon the two of us went with Robert to some girl’s apartment right on Hollywood Boulevard to look at his proofs. Robert explained we’d have to look at the contact sheets through a little magnifying glass shaped like a shot glass called a loupe.

When we arrived at the girl’s apartment, we were relieved that she had air-conditioning, as it was in the high nineties that day and we had walked there from the Gardner alley. Phillipe, the bus-driving drug dealer we knew from Gardner, came out of the back bedroom as we arrived. It was obvious that both he and the girl whose apartment this was were flying on crack. No big deal, we were used to this shit.

Slash and I were not exactly looking forward to going through this stack of proofs for Robert. It wasn’t a very rock-and-roll thing to do, but we grudgingly acknowledged that it was part of the deal for a working band. Now we saw there were hundreds of individual shots that we had to approve or deny. Right at that moment Phillipe offered me some crack.

Crack cocaine was one of those drugs I had always passed on when it was around. Between Seattle and then Hollywood, I saw a lot of people get addicted to the stuff and crack addiction wasn’t a pretty sight. But on this day, I decided to try it. I’m not sure why. I had been drinking; maybe I needed something to get me over the edge so I could look at this heap of photos. My first experiences with most drugs were the result of something as dumb as that. In the sixth grade I dropped acid for the first time because an older kid, one I looked up to, offered it to me on the way home from school. I didn’t want to embarrass myself, so I did it.

The crackling sound from the torched rock in its receptacle and the sight of the glass tube filling up with smoke that smelled both sweet and acidic was mesmerizing. I inhaled. The high I experienced from that first hit of crack was one of the most euphoric sixty seconds I had ever felt. My senses sharpened and I felt stronger than fucking Atlas. I found myself horny. I was filled with a powerful feeling that I could accomplish anything.

The resultant crash was just as extreme. It seized my whole body in an acute and all-encompassing craving.

“Hey, Phillipe! Set me up again, okay?”

He gave me a sizable rock and I dove headfirst into another hit.
Ahhhhh,
I thought,
this shit is good!

Crack accentuated everything in a good way. The features of the girl’s drab, cookie-cutter apartment suddenly became beautiful. The Formica-topped island that separated the kitchen from the living room suddenly took on architectural perfection, a use of space so logical and brilliant its beauty blew me away. What had at first glance looked like an ugly orange shag carpet was now as magnificent as a priceless Persian masterpiece in the window of an expensive Beverly Hills rug shop. The traffic I could hear outside on Hollywood Boulevard transformed from a noisy nuisance to a source of enchantment: I wondered where these people might be headed. Maybe some of them were on crack, too, and as happy and elated as I was!

I started to come down again but had another rock at the ready. No worries.

Slash was doing the same thing as me, and now we fought over the loupe to start the process of approving individual shots among the reams of photo sheets. We raced through the images, somehow doing it in tandem so that neither of us would have to wait around with nothing to do. God forbid. But alas, our rocks started to dwindle and finally disappear. Phillipe now wanted money if we chose to continue. Oh fuck, I didn’t have any money!

I bolted from the apartment. The impossibly hot sun singed my whole being as a ridiculous crash almost doubled me over with despair. All my muscles seemed to contract at once. I felt dark and used and stupid. The ten-block walk back to our Gardner storage space was one of the hardest physical challenges I had ever endured. Sluggish. Jonesing. Lonely. Depressed. Ugh.

For some reason, I stopped at a pay phone and did something really stupid—I called my mom. I tried to act cool and just see how she was doing, see what was going on with the family in Seattle. The truth was I wanted to hear the voice that always made me feel better as a small boy when I was sick with the flu or when jocks beat me up for being a “punk-rock faggot.” I knew she could tell something was wrong with me. The stench from the ghetto phone booth was making me dry-heave and it was impossible to see out of it because of graffiti that blackened the glass. Claustrophobia washed over me. I couldn’t breathe. I tried to keep my cool on the phone.

“No, Mom, I’m okay, just a little tired,” I said. “I might be coming down with something.” Yeah, I was coming down from fucking crack.

After I hung up the phone, I trudged the last few blocks to the rehearsal place. Normally I would be happy to see any of my bandmates or the few friends we had. This time I was hoping to find something—anything—that could help me take the edge off of the plummeting feeling I was going through. Pills, Night Train, maybe even some coke. Or all of those things together.

When I rounded the corner into our alleyway, the sun hit me dead straight in my eyes. I let out an audible groan of shock and pain. The door to our space was open a little bit and luckily Joe-Joe and Del were there with some Night Train. After gulping down an entire bottle by myself, I told those guys what I had been up to.

“Shit, dude,” said Joe-Joe when I had finished. “I have a little bit of money on me. I’ll go get some more booze.”

He took off down to the corner liquor store. That was the thing about our inner circle. We would do anything we could for one another. We did not judge one another. We just had one another’s backs.

I settled down a little bit after that first bottle. Being in our little rehearsal space helped, too—it was a safe haven. The dingy floor with the old brown carpet was filthy, but it was
our
filth. The amps that lined the wall were worn, but they were the only sure bet we had to be heard musically. These amps were
our
sound. The loft was only six feet high, so anything up there—whether it was a guitar case or a naked girl—was easily accessible. This was
our
refuge. And our friends were there for me.

Joe-Joe came back with a big paper grocery bag of alcoholic fortifications and my crack-cocaine crash faded into the past, just another experience to tally up. I would end up doing crack many more times, but I was never as ill-prepared as I was the first time with Phillipe.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Just as the record label frenzy around us was heating up, some fallout from our Gardner space partying hit us. The cops busted down our door one night looking for Axl. They wanted him to answer what turned out to be a bogus rape charge. Our days became numbered there at Gardner. Axl didn’t do the crime (or time), but the incident inspired a great song, “Out to Get Me,” which we quickly added to our sets in early 1986. You can hear the depth of our collective anguish in that song, shitting ourselves that the record labels might get wind of the situation and break off their courtship: “You can’t catch me, I’m fuckin’ innocent!”

Axl avoided the storage space for weeks—eluding capture until the charges were dropped—and the news didn’t get out that our singer was looking at jail time. Everybody took us out for meals—different management companies, all the labels. The swank restaurants where people had business lunches weren’t just a side of L.A. I hadn’t seen; they were a side of life I hadn’t ever experienced—well, except in the bowels of the establishments where I worked as a dishwasher and later a baker.

I called Kim from the Fastbacks after a few of these outings, trying to adjust to the idea of being pursued for a record contract.

“It’s weird,” I told her. “These guys, men in business suits, take us out for lunch. You can order anything you want.”

They didn’t take us to Spago. We weren’t worth that much, and we were also pretty filthy. I remember going to meet David Geffen at his office. As we were hanging out in the lobby, employees coming and going didn’t realize we were a band—they thought we were street people.