Slash (6 page)

I must preface this next story by saying that relationships are never easy, especially when both parties’ bodies are young, inexperienced, and raging with hormones. Melissa and I really cared for each other, but we still broke
up and made up often, usually as a result of my commitment to learning to play guitar overshadowing my commitment to spending time with her. At this particular point, we were apart and I had set my sights on someone we’ll call Laurie. She was a significantly older, very obviously out-of-my-league figure among my circle of friends. Laurie had incredible tits, long blond-brown hair, and wore really thin, strapped, low-cut tops. They were so sheer and loose that her chest was far too easy to see. Like me, Laurie was recently single: she’d broken up with Ricky, her very typical surfer boyfriend. I was determined to be with her; I didn’t care that she was four years older than me and wouldn’t give me the time of day. I knew I could do this. I kept talking to her and paying attention to her and finally got a dialogue going. She let her guard down and got to know me, and once she did, she seemed to forget that a few weeks before I was nothing but some much younger punk she didn’t care to notice. Finally she invited me over to hang out one night when her mom was going out of town.

I parked my bike on her lawn and followed her upstairs to her room. It was years ahead of my comprehension of cool and groovy at the time: she had scarves over the lamps, rock posters everywhere, her own stereo, and a ton of records. We got stoned and I intended to play it cool, so I flipped through her albums looking for something to impress her. I recognized
Rocks
from Kevin’s party a few weeks earlier and put it on, ignorant of the fact that it had been playing nonstop in my subconscious since the moment I heard those first two songs. Once the opening shrieks of “Back in the Saddle” filled the room, I was transfixed; I listened to the record over and over, crouched by the speakers, ignoring Laurie completely. I forgot about her altogether as well as whatever intricate plans I had for the evening. After a couple hours, she tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“I guess you should go home now.”

“Oh, yeah…Okay.”

Rocks
is as powerful to me today as it was then: the screaming vocals, dirty guitars, and relentless grooves are bluesy rock and roll as it is meant to be played. There was something about the raw adolescence of Aerosmith that was perfectly in tune with my inner development at the time; that
record just sounded the way I felt. After my missed opportunity with Laurie, I devoted myself to learning “Back in the Saddle.” I stole the cassette and an Aerosmith songbook and replayed the song until I knew the riffs. I learned a valuable lesson in the process: music books can’t teach you how to play properly. I’d sort of learned to read music, so I could tell that the notes in the songbook were not the same as those being played on the record. It made sense: I struggled for hours and still couldn’t play along properly. So I ditched the books and kept at it until I’d learned to figure it out by ear; and I figured out every other song I wanted to play that way forever after.

In the process of learning every lick of “Back in the Saddle,” I realized just how idiosyncratic Joe’s and Brad’s playing is, and how no one can ever really play like anyone else but themselves. Imitation should remain a stepping stone for a player to find his or her own voice, but it must never
become
his or her voice: no one should emulate their heroes to the point of note-for-note mimicry. Guitar is too personal of an expression for that; it should be exactly what it is—a singular extension of the player.

BY THE TIME MY LAST JUNIOR HIGH SUMMER
drew to a close, I had created a world of my own design that was as consistent as my home life was irregular, because during this period, in the wake of their separation, my mom and dad each entered into very irregular relationships. I lived with each of them for short amounts of time, but neither situation felt quite right. I ended up mostly living with my grandmother in her condo in Hollywood while my little brother lived with my mom. Of course, most of the time I slept over at Melissa’s.

Following her relationship with David Bowie, my mom started dating a talented photographer we’ll call “Boyfriend.” They were together for about three years and eventually moved into an apartment on Cochran off Third, near La Brea, where I lived with them for a while. Boyfriend was probably ten years younger than Ola; when they met he was a star on the rise: I remember meeting Herb Ritts, Moshe Brakha, and a few other famous photographers and models at their place. My mom and Boyfriend had a
pretty tumultuous relationship, during which she regressed into his assistant and put her career aside.

Boyfriend always had a darkroom in his bathroom, and toward the end of their relationship I discovered that he was freebasing cocaine in there all night long while “working.” It wasn’t always all bad over there, but once freebasing suddenly popped up in Boyfriend’s life, it proceeded to promptly halt his career—taking his relationship with my mom down with it. Boyfriend was tortured; he was miserable and misery loves company, so although I wasn’t fond of Boyfriend at all (and he knew it), he was determined to drag me along for the ride. We’d freebase together, then go out into the neighborhood and wander into other people’s garages. Usually we’d steal used furniture, old toys, and whatever odds and ends it seemed like the family had discarded. One of the items we found was a red couch that we carried all the way back to our house; we then spray-painted it black and put in the den. I can’t imagine what Ola thought when she woke up the next morning. I have no idea actually, because she never mentioned it. In any case, after our adventures, Boyfriend would keep at it, basing all morning and, I suppose, all day. I’d duck into my room by 7:30 a.m., pretend to sleep for an hour, then get up, say good morning to my mother, and head off to school as if I’d just had a good night’s sleep.

My mom had insisted that I live with her and Boyfriend because she disapproved of the conditions I’d been subjected to over at my dad’s place. Once my dad had acclimated to their separation, he got it together to rent an apartment where his friend Miles and a group of my parents’ mutual acquaintances lived. It seemed like everyone in that scene drank a lot, and my dad was dating a number of women, so my mother didn’t think it was a good environment for me. My dad dated a woman named Sonny on a regular basis during that period. Life had not been kind to Sonny; she’d lost her son in a horrible accident and though she was really sweet, she was really screwed up. She and my dad spent a lot of time together drinking and fucking. So for a while there, while I lived with Mom, I saw Dad only on weekends, but when I did, he always had something interesting waiting for me: some unusual dinosaur model or something more technical, like a remote controlled airplane that you had to build from scratch.

Later on, I saw more of him once he moved into an apartment on Sunset and Gardner, in a building of studio apartments with a shared bathroom. His art buddy Steve Douglas lived just down the hall. On the first floor was a guitar store, though at the time I hadn’t yet picked up the habit. My dad’s art studio filled the entire room, so he’d built a loft to sleep in on the far wall and I lived there with him for a while when I was in seventh grade, just after I got kicked out of John Burroughs Junior High for stealing a load of BMX bikes—but that is a story not worth telling. In any case, for that brief period I attended Le Conte Junior High, and since my dad didn’t drive, I walked the five miles to school and back each day.

I’m not quite sure what Dad or Steve did for money. Steve was an artist as well and as far as I could tell, all they did was spend their days drinking and their nights painting for their own benefit or talking about art. One of my more entertaining memories from that period involved Steve’s old-fashioned medicine bag full of vintage porn that he caught me looking at one day.

His place and our place were basically shared space, so it was entirely normal for me to wander down to his studio whenever I wanted to. One day he walked in and found me looking through his treasure chest of porn. “I’ll make you a deal, Saul,” he said. “If you manage to steal that bag out from under my nose, you can keep it. Think you’re up to it? I’m pretty quick; you’d better be good.” I just smiled at him; I’d already devised a plan to make it mine before he challenged me. I lived down the hall—compared to what I was already doing out in the world in terms of theft, this wasn’t much of a heist.

A couple of days later I went over to Steve’s place looking for my dad and at the time they were so engaged in conversation that they didn’t even notice that I’d come in. It was the perfect opportunity; I grabbed the bag, walked out, and stashed it up on the roof. Unfortunately it was a short-lived victory: my dad ordered me to give it back once Steve realized that it was gone. It’s too bad; those magazines were classics.

There were periods throughout my childhood when I insisted to my parents that they weren’t my parents, because I honestly believed that I’d been kidnapped. I also ran away a lot. One time when I was preparing to run away, my dad actually helped me pack my suitcase, which was a little plaid bag he’d bought me in England. He was so understanding about it
and so helpful and kind that by doing so, he convinced me to stay. That kind of subtle reverse psychology is one of the traits of his that I hope I’ve inherited, because I’d like to use it on my kids.

I’D SAY MY BIGGEST ADVENTURE WAS
the day I took off on my Big Wheel when I was six years old. At the time we lived at the top of Lookout Mountain Road and I rode it all the way down to Laurel Canyon, then all the way down Laurel Canyon to Sunset Boulevard, which, all in all, is just over two miles. I wasn’t lost, I had a plan: I was going to move into a toy store, and live there for the rest of my life. I guess I’ve always been determined. Sure, there were many times that I wanted to get away from home as a kid, but I have no regrets about how I was raised. If it had been any bit different, if I’d been born just one minute later, or been in the wrong place at the right time or vice versa, the life that I’ve lived and come to love would not exist. And that is a situation that I wouldn’t want to consider in the slightest.

Institutional hallways are all the same, they’re just different colors. I’ve seen the inside of several rehab centers, some more upscale than others, but the clinical sobriety of their walls was identical. All of them were predominantly white and plastered with optimistic slogans like “It’s a journey, not a destination” and “One day at a time.” I found that last one ironic considering the road that Mackenzie Phillips has been down. The rooms were generic backdrops engineered to inspire hope in people from every walk of life, because, as those who have been there know, rehab is a more accurate cross section of society than jury duty. I never learned much from “group”; I didn’t really make any new buddies in rehab and I didn’t take advantage of multiple opportunities to make new drug connections either. After I’d spent days in bed with my body in purgatorial knots, unable to eat, speak, or think, I wasn’t up for small talk. To me, the communal aspect of rehab was forced—just like high school. And just like high school, I didn’t fit in. Neither institution taught me their intended lessons, but I learned something important from each of them. On my way back down their hallways toward the exit, I was confident that I left knowing exactly who I was.

I
entered Fairfax High in 1979. It was an average American public high school—linoleum floors, rows of lockers, a courtyard, a few around-back spots where kids have snuck cigarettes and done drugs for years. It was painted a very institutionally neutral light gray color. There was a good spot to get high out by the football field, there was also a continuation school on the other side of campus called Walt Whitman, where all the real fuck-ups went, because they had to. That seemed like the end of the line, so although it was more interesting, even from afar, than the normal campus, I tried to stay away from that place as much as possible.

My best friend, Steven Adler, was shipped back to the Valley for high school, which was as far off as Spain in my mind. I did visit him out there a few times and it never failed to disappoint: it was flat, dry, hotter than it was at home, and exactly like a sitcom neighborhood. Everyone there seemed to cherish their identical lawns and identical lives. Even at a young age, I knew something was wrong with that place; beneath the normalcy, I could sense that those people were more fucked up than anyone in Hollywood. I felt bad for Steven, and once he was gone, I retreated further into my guitar world. I went to school, always registering as if I were there every day, but on average I’d attend my first three classes and spend the rest of my time on the bleachers playing guitar.

There was only one class that meant anything to me in high school; consequently, it’s also the only one in which I earned an A. It was a music theory course that I took freshman year called Harmony, taught by a guy named Dr. Hummel. The class reduced the elements of musical composition to their roots, defining the fundamentals in mathematical terms. I learned to write time signatures, chords, and chord structures, all by analyzing the underlying logic that binds them. We never played an instrument: our teacher used a piano as a tool to illustrate the theories, but that was all; the class was purely a study of theory. While I was terrible at math, I was good at this, so it was the one class I never missed. Every time I showed up, I felt like I already knew the lessons we learned. I never consciously applied any of it to the guitar, but I can’t help but think the knowledge of notation that
I picked up seeped into my mind and aided my playing somehow. There was a cast of characters in this class: among others there was Sam, the piano virtuoso, a Jewish guy with tight curly hair, and Randy, who was a long-haired, Chinese, metal guy. Randy always wore a satin Aerosmith jacket and was of the opinion that Keith Richards and Pete Townshend sucked and Eddie Van Halen was
God
. We eventually became friends and I came to enjoy our daily debates as much as I enjoyed that class, because it was made up of mostly musicians discussing nothing other than music.

Other classes, meanwhile, didn’t go so well for me. There was one teacher who chose to make an example of me once when I fell asleep on my desk. I had an evening job at the time at the local movie theater, so I could have been tired; it’s more likely that I was just bored out of my mind, because the class was social studies. From what I understand, the teacher stopped everything to discuss the concept of stereotype with the class. He noted my long hair and the fact that I was asleep and, illustrating the meaning of the word
stereotype,
he concluded that I was a rock musician who probably had no greater aspirations in life than playing very loud music. He then woke me up and asked me a few pointed questions.

“So I take it you’re probably a musician, right?” he asked. “What do you play?”

“I play guitar,” I said.

“What kind of music do you play?”

“Rock and roll, I guess.”

“Is it loud?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty loud.”

“Notice, class, this young man is the
perfect
example of a stereotype.”

I am always grumpy when I first wake up, so this was more than I was willing to take. I got up, walked to the front of the class, flipped his desk over, and left. That incident, combined with a prior weed bust, spelled the end of my career at Fairfax High.

I LEARNED MORE ABOUT MY PEER GROUP
at the unofficial high school recess where freshmen to seniors from Fairfax and other high schools gathered at the end of a long dirt road at the
top of Fuller Drive, way up in the Hollywood Hills. It was called Fuller Estates; it’s not there anymore—now it’s just a curve on the hiking trail in Runyon Canyon. It was a teenage wasteland in the late seventies and early eighties, but before that it was much more interesting: in the 1920s, it was Errol Flynn’s mansion; it occupied a few acres at the top of that wide hill overlooking L.A. Between then and when I was a kid, it fell into serious decline, and by 1979 it was a ruin of a foundation; just a big concrete slab and an empty pool. By the time I saw it, the place was a statuesque wreck with an amazing view.

The song's bombastic, apocalyptic riff just consumed my entire body.

The crumbling concrete walls were a two-level maze that was a perfect, out-of-the-way spot for stoners of all ages. It was pitch-black there at night, far away from the glare of any streetlight. But somebody always had a radio. I was on acid up there the first time I ever heard Black Sabbath. I was out of my mind, staring into the black sky above Fuller Estates, tracing trails between the stars when someone nearby blasted “Iron Man.” I’m not sure that I can pinpoint how I felt; the song’s bombastic, apocalyptic riff just consumed my entire body.

That place and everyone there was straight out of a seventies teen movie. In fact, it was captured perfectly in
Over the Edge
, a film starring a young Matt Dillon, about a bunch of repressed, stoned, and out-of-control Texas teenagers who were ignored by their parents to the degree that they took their whole town hostage. In the film, as I bet it was for all of the kids who hung out up at Fuller, the characters’ parents had no idea as to what their kids were really up to. In its most aggressive and most realistic moments, that film was a true representation of teenage culture at the time: most kids’ parents either didn’t care enough to notice or naïvely thought they were doing the right thing by trusting their children and turning a blind eye.

WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL KIDS LOOKED
a few different ways. The influence of spandex seeped in, thanks to Pat Benatar and David Lee Roth, and that trend left its colorful mark: girls wore tight, low-cut, neon body suits, and some guys weren’t far behind. I remember seeing Capezios when I was in junior high, but thank God, they were out by the time I was a freshman; although feathered hair was still standard for either sex. It was far too common and wasn’t cool by any means.

Another huge influence was the film
American Gigolo
, starring Richard Gere, which chronicled the downfall of a stylish Beverly Hills male escort. It was the worst thing that could have happened to Hollywood teenagers because every girl who saw it strove to re-create their personal version of that world. Suddenly, girls who were thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen tried to dress as if they were twenty-five and aspired to date well-dressed, much older guys. I never dialed into their psychology, but I watched more than a few girls I knew, as early as fifteen, start wearing too much makeup, doing blow, and dating nineteen-year-olds and twentysomethings. It was fucking pathetic and straight up sad. A lot of them became casualties of the scene before they even reached legal drinking age. After all, they had a huge head start, so it caught up to them before they even got out of the gate.

I DIDN’T LOOK LIKE ANY OF THE OTHER
kids in school and my interests certainly set me apart. I have worn long hair, T-shirts, jeans, and Vans or Chuck Taylors since I first had a say in the matter. Once I was in high school, all I cared about was music and playing guitar; I never abided by the trends that swayed my peers, so I was a throw-back. It’s always been a paradox with me; I stood out but I didn’t crave or court obvious attention. All the same, I was used to not fitting in and wasn’t comfortable with anything else: I had changed schools so often that I was the perennial new guy—and probably, in the minds of my peers, the freaky new guy.

It didn’t help that to the naked eye, I wasn’t obviously anything: upper-, middle-, or lower-class; white, black, or otherwise. As I got older, and as my
home address continued to change, I realized and understood why my mom so deeply pondered my school registration forms before checking one box or another: if I was listed as black in certain school districts I might be bused out of the zone to an inferior school when I otherwise might be enrolled in the better school down the street if I were a registered Caucasian. I never found a niche based on race in high school, and I’ve always been aware of my race only when it was an issue in the minds of others. I have been in many situations, back then and ever since, when I’ve noticed very “open-minded” individuals adjust their behavior because they were unsure of whether I was black or white. As a musician, I’ve always been amused that I’m both British
and
black; particularly because so many American musicians seem to aspire to be British while so many British musicans, in the sixties in particular, went to such great pains to be black. It was another way I wasn’t like anyone else, but I can count on one hand the confrontations I’ve had that were racially motivated; they occured once I was submerged in the very white universe of eighties metal. One time at the Rainbow I got into a fight with Chris Holmes from W.A.S.P. Duff overheard Chris saying that niggers shouldn’t play guitar. He didn’t say it to me, but it was obviously about me. As I remember, Duff told me about it later and the next time I saw Chris I went up to confront him and he took off running. Aside from insulting me, it’s one of the more ridiculous and untrue things a musician, of all people, could ever possibly say.

I FOUND MY OWN CIRCLE OF FRIENDS
in high school, people who were all pretty unique, different from the rest of the student body. My closest friends, Matt and Mark, defined that period of my life. Matt Cassel is the son of Seymour Cassel, one of the greatest character actors of the past fifty years. Seymour has been in nearly two hundred films since the sixties, most notably those made with his close friend John Cassavetes. He’s been in too many films and TV shows to name; in recent years, director Wes Anderson has been his champion: he’s cast Seymour in
Rushmore
,
The Royal Tenenbaums
, and
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
. Seymour is a Hollywood legend; he supported indie film making before it became an institution (his philosophy was that he’d play
a role he connected with for the price of the plane ticket). He was also a figure in a hard-partying class of moviemaking royalty that included Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, Roman Polanski, and others.

I could show up at Matt’s house, sit in his room, and play guitar for hours, learning stuff off the records he had: Pat Travers’s
Live
, AC/DC’s newest,
Back in Black
; those albums provided hours and hours of riffs to learn. They lived right above Sunset on Kings Road, tucked behind the Riot Hyatt, next door to an A-frame house that is still there. There were porn movies being shot in that house all the time while Seymour was growing weed in the backyard of his place. The A-frame was a huge advantage to hanging at Matt’s: we’d wander over there and mix it up with the porn girls. It wasn’t appropriate, but they liked to get us teenage boys all fired up and frustrated by playing with each other.

Seymour had the best parties, and he had raised his kids well enough to trust them to hang out. My mom knew Seymour, but she never would have condoned the goings-on over there. At Seymour’s parties there was a lot of freedom and it was full-on. His kids, Matt and Dilynn, were so smart and independent that he didn’t have to worry: they’d already figured out who they were amid this crazy existence. Seymour’s wife, Betty, never came out of her bedroom; it was a dark and foreboding mystery to me as to what went on upstairs. Coupled with the fact that Seymour ruled the house with a bit of an iron fist, Matt allowed only a select few of his friends, of which I was one, into their world.

One day Seymour looked at me and bestowed upon me the nickname that resonated with him more than my proper name ever did. As I was passing from one room to another in his house, at a party, looking for the next whatever it was I was after, he touched me on the shoulder, fixed me with that affable gaze of his, and said, “Hey, Slash, where ya going? Where ya going, Slash? Huh?”

Obviously it stuck. My friends who hung at Seymour’s started calling me Slash back at school and soon enough that was the only name everyone knew me by. At the time, my friends and I just thought it was a cool name, but it wasn’t until years later that I caught up with Seymour and he explained it properly. I was on tour during
Use Your Illusions
, and happened to be in Paris, with my mom along, when Seymour was there, too. The three of us
had lunch and he explained that the nickname embodied my sense of hustle, in every sense of the word. He was proud of the fact that I’d actually made a name for myself and that he’d been the one to give me that moniker. His reason for calling me Slash was that I never stood still for more than five minutes; he saw me as someone who was always working on his next scheme. He was right: I’ve always been coming or going more than I’ve ever stayed still. I am perpetually in motion, often saying good-bye while saying hello and Seymour summed that quality up in a word.