It's So Easy: And Other Lies (6 page)

Slash, Steven, and I started playing together at a rehearsal space at the corner of Highland and Selma. The space cost five dollars an hour, fifteen if you wanted a PA. I spent a week jamming with them while sleeping in my car.

In the end, though, I was kind of bummed out by the rehearsal sessions. Slash’s talent notwithstanding, the way he and Steven were going about it was not my cup of tea. The songs they had, the sound of the guitar, Steven’s double-kick drum kit with all those rack toms and cymbals—it was all too conventional. They were working in a pre-existing mold. I was looking for people ready to create a new mold.

There was also no singer. It felt like a high school band, albeit one with an amazing guitar player. Having already been in a dozen bands and played with countless professional musicians, I considered myself a seasoned veteran. I could tell Slash and Steven had real aspirations—that they wanted more—but I didn’t move all the way to Los Angeles to play with people who were still trying to figure their shit out.

After about a week, I told them, “I don’t want to play with you, but I still want to be friends.”

“Oh, okay,” they said.

At that age, there wasn’t any weirdness—it was fine to be straight like that. I loved the two of them, but Road Crew wasn’t what I wanted to do at that point.

We did continue to hang out a lot together. A few weeks later, in October, Slash and Steven took me to an all-ages show at a West Hollywood club called the Troubadour to see L.A. Guns. The two of them had briefly played with the singer, Axl Rose, in a band called Hollywood Rose, which had already happened and died. Now Axl was with this other band, named for the guitar player, Tracii Guns. Tracii, it turned out, was a local hero. He had gone to the same high school as Slash and they had played in rival bands.

The Troubadour was a real rock club, and at this point in my life I had only been to one other rock club. Punk gigs in Seattle took place in completely different types of spaces—squats, basements of private houses, VFW halls rented out for the night. Things were clearly different here in L.A.

CHAPTER FOUR

My older brothers and sisters all listened to lots of rock and roll and many of them played guitar and sang. Musical instruments littered the house and the basement and the garage. As early as I can remember, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and the Sonics constantly blasted from our family living-room stereo, a Sanyo system my brother Mark had shipped back from Vietnam after his tour of duty.

I remember being captivated by
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The picture on the cover is what got my attention—the marching-band uniforms, all the faces. But then I started listening to the music. I listened to “Lovely Rita” over and over, fascinated with the way the words sounded, the exotic cadence. I was amazed how the lyrics managed to paint a picture in my mind. I listened to that song so many times that I even convinced myself that I had written it—for a girl I had a crush on in my kindergarten class. The music had the ability to conjure images in my head and help me drown out the tension and noise I was trying to avoid at my house.

Another older brother, Bruce, was in a rock band. He had long hair and a sheepskin rug in his room. He drove a convertible. And he had a beautiful Gretsch hollow-body, six-string guitar and a Les Paul Custom left-handed bass. Bruce was always playing gigs and coming home with stories that reinforced my romantic image of rock and roll. He would also take time to let me sit with him and bang on his guitars and ask him questions. It was a big deal for me; he is fourteen years older than me and I am sure I was a pest at times.

One day, Bruce asked me if I would play a gig with him. Me? What? I guess he hadn’t noticed I had yet to learn how to play an instrument. I told him sheepishly, thinking with despair as I did that my big chance was about to pass me by.

“Don’t worry about it,” Bruce said. “I’ll teach you how to play bass.”

All right!

Bruce and I are both left-handed, so learning to play that way came naturally. (It was only after Bruce moved out with his guitars that I was faced with the dilemma of having to relearn to play on a dusty right-handed guitar I found forgotten in a corner of my mom’s garage.) The first song I learned how to play was the Beatles’ “Birthday.” Your first song always remains a musical touchstone and this one not only taught me finger dexterity, but also included the rudiments of the whole blues major scale, a scale that I would use and use again in my later career in Guns N’ Roses.

From that day on, I realized how easy I found it to pick up songs by ear—any songs I wanted to learn. I think if I hadn’t been able to learn so quickly back then, I might have practiced a bit more and become a better technical guitar and bass player as a result. I guess we can all look back and see things in our lives that we could or should have done differently—and better—and that’s one for me. Still, learning to play other people’s music was only satisfying to a point. I felt there was more I could do, but I hadn’t the faintest idea how to write a song or start a band.

Then, in seventh grade, I spotted a homemade flyer for an underground punk concert. I didn’t really know what it meant to be anti-establishment—and I had no notion of the music industry or what it meant to operate outside it—but it was clear these bands were not part of the same system that produced glossy handbills for shows at the Paramount Theatre or the Kingdome. That same week, I happened to hear Iggy and the Stooges for the first time. Maybe the Stooges’ garagerock simplicity echoed the Sonics and Don and the Goodtimes records I loved to listen to as a little kid; whatever it was, the Stooges hit me like an earthquake—I wasn’t moving so much as being moved. The back of my legs felt weak, chills ran from the base of my neck down my spine, the world began to crumble leaving just this pounding music.

I experienced the most memorable dream of my life soon afterward, a dream that seemed to rewind and play over and over again in my mind for years. In the dream, I was singing in a band in a local church basement in front of all of my friends. I was possessed by the music, shrieking, snarling, grunting. There was no separation between the audience and the band, and everyone was jumping around as crazily as I was, dropping beer bottles and glasses, which smashed on the floor. I writhed around on the shards of glass yet felt no pain. I could hear and see exactly how rock should be: raw and fucked up with nothing held back, raw and fucked up with no boundaries left unbroken, raw and fucked up.

When I woke up the next morning, I went straight to the record store and bought my own copy of
Raw Power
by Iggy and the Stooges. My older siblings’ music had been supplanted by something all my own. It was called punk rock, and it was my thing now.

CHAPTER FIVE

I continued to get a lot of shifts at the Black Angus, the steak house in Northridge where my brother worked. Once I had socked away a few paychecks, I decided to rent an apartment. I headed straight for Hollywood and began my search for the perfect place. Well, the perfect place that I could afford. Okay, so I was looking for a cheap place.

One of the best spots I had found to sleep in my car was on Orchid Street, just up the hill from Franklin. It seemed natural to look in that area—though, of course, anywhere up the hill was out of the question because the higher up you went, the higher the rents were. One morning I woke up, left the Maverick parked in the shade of a wooded hillside block, and walked down toward Franklin in search of a bargain in the skeezy, treeless streets below.

Orchid went through to Hollywood Boulevard then, right behind Grauman’s Chinese Theatre—Mann’s at the time. That short block of Orchid between Franklin and Hollywood was one of the most drug-infested lanes in the city, visited nightly by dealers, hookers, and cops. The Chinese Theatre was a mess back then, too, full of creeps.

I saw an “apt for rent” sign in a window and ducked into the Amour Arms, an apartment building on that block behind the Chinese Theatre. The place available was a ground-floor studio apartment, one room with a hot plate and a little fridge. The window looked out onto an alley—there were alleys behind all the buildings in this part of Hollywood. The price was $240 per month.

When I told the woman who managed the place that I would take it, she said it was a Section 8 building. I said nothing.

Then she said, “Are you Section 8?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. These days I know it’s the designation for federally subsidized low-income housing. But back then I had no idea what it meant.

“Well, do you go to the music school?”

“No,” I said. In fact, not only did I not attend the school, I didn’t know about its existence until she mentioned it that very moment. I had to ask Slash about it later. Turned out just around the corner, above the wax museum on Hollywood Boulevard, the Musicians Institute trained shredders like Paul Gilbert of Mr. Big and John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

“Just say you do,” she said. “Say, ‘Yes, I do.’”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do go to the music school,” I said.

I got the apartment.

My first night there, a police chopper buzzed overhead, beaming its searchlight into the alley my window faced. My room was briefly as bright as midday and I heard a lot of rustling, running, and shouting outside. Helicopters—“ghetto birds,” as the other residents called them—circled over Hollywood all the time. And those searchlights shined into my window on a nightly basis as the cops chased people around the alleys of my new neighborhood.

The other thing I noticed that first night was an odd sensation when I first turned out the lights and flopped down on the mattress on the floor. It felt as if something were crawling on me. At first it was on one of my legs, then on my back. When I felt it on my face, I jumped up and turned on the lights. My bed—the entire apartment, in fact—was teeming with cockroaches. I went to war with rolled-up newspapers. I say newspapers plural because I had to throw away one after another as they became wet with bug guts after a dozen swats or so. I could never quite win that war, though, and soon I had to reconcile myself to falling asleep with those bugs crawling on me. Ah, the glamorous life of Hollywood.

Still, after living in an unfinished house in Seattle, crashing for a week in a San Francisco squat, and sleeping in my car and showering at my brother’s place, I finally had a place to call home. And anyway, cockroaches don’t bite.

A mother and her twenty-year-old daughter lived across the hall and they were always really nice to me. On weekends, a line of Marines up from boot camp in San Diego would form in front of their apartment and stream out into the lobby of the building. I was naive; I didn’t know to suspect anything. It took several weeks before I deduced that my neighbors had a little family business going as hookers.

Soon I was bringing girls home, cockroaches be damned. Once I even hosted the hostess of the Black Angus. She was definitely not used to vermin-infested apartments. But, as I found with other women who came over, she either didn’t notice or pretended not to notice. I guess it was, if not exactly romantic, at least an expected part of the rock-and-roll milieu—and everyone knew I was in L.A. to make music.

I also found a gig playing with the Michael McMahon band, a Tommy Tutone–like pop group with regular club gigs. It gave me a chance to work on my bass chops—and they even paid me. I was playing clubs and meeting people. I was observing, looking for my opening.

Things were going so well, in fact, that I began to have grand illusions of being there in L.A. for a reason. It steeled my resolve to find the right group of musicians with whom to push toward something special.

By then the local punk community knew I was in town, too. One day I picked up the phone at my apartment and the guitar player from the Mentors was on the line.

“Hey, Duff, it’s Sickie Wifebeater. El Duce wants you to join the Mentors.”

The Mentors called their music “rape rock.” El Duce was the drummer and sang. He played with dildos. Every song was about sodomy.