My Appetite For Destruction (12 page)

They were totally sweet women with some sweet weed. I remember chatting with them: “Oh, you lovely ladies. My kind of girls.” I was in the backseat leaning forward with my arms around them. They took us to Portland. Then Duff’s friend Greg drove down from Seattle, picked us up, and took us to the Gorilla Gardens, the filthy dive bar where we were to do the show that night.

When we got there, we walked right onto the stage, and just in the nick of time. We didn’t have time to grab a beer, smoke a joint, or put on makeup. Although we were still at the stage where we’d tease our hair up to God and slap on the eye shadow, heavy eyeliner, and lipstick for our stage performances, there just wasn’t a minute to spare. Later I’ll get into how I put an end to the whole tedious makeup routine. Most fortunately, we were able to use the previous band’s equipment. We just went on, jacked in, and played our songs.

We opened with “Reckless Life,” then did “Shadow of Your Love,” “Move to the City,” “Anything Goes,” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and closed with “Heartbreak Hotel,” which was Axl’s choice. Axl often warmed up his voice with an Elvis cover and was a big Elvis fan going back to his days growing up in the Midwest. “Heartbreak” got the biggest response; “thankyouverymuch,” King. And although we didn’t exactly bring down the house, we got decent applause and were all smiles after the show, feeling that for the most part, it went over pretty well.

Afterward we had drinks with Duff’s friends, and a nicer, more gracious bunch of partiers you’d be hard-pressed to find. Duff was very popular around the Seattle area; everyone knew and liked him. His buddy Greg invited us back to his place. I walked in the house and I was like, “Oh, yeah.” I was in heaven. He had at least fifty plants growing in his basement, the best pot I had ever smelled, and at the time, it was the best weed I’d ever toked. Greg, his girlfriend Jill, and I just smoked out.

Greg’s girlfriend made us a big spaghetti dinner, and then we smoked some more. The next day she gave us a ride, not to the state line, not to San Francisco, but all the way back to L.A. Thank you, Jill, that was so incredibly cool of you.

When we hit town, word got back to us through Duff’s network of friends that Jo Jo and Danny had fixed their car. The drums and the gear were safe. All in all, it was a miracle. We had hitchhiked up the whole West Coast with no gear and no money, and although we missed the other two gigs Duff had lined up, we pulled off the main booking in Seattle and not one of us ever complained.

That trip was the acid test, the mondo bondo epoxy that sealed our fate as the original Guns N’ Roses. Ever since that trip we stuck together like we were one creature. It was as if we had set up this ridiculously irrational initiation ceremony, one that no sane person could have tolerated. Because that’s what
GNR
had to be all about. We
never
did anything the sane, sensible way. We never went by the rules and never conformed to an accepted path to success. The way we came up with our songs, insisted on total artistic freedom, the way we practiced and played—no one did it like we did.

It was “Break the mold to make the mold.” We all fed upon the same primal gut drive to take that road trip. After that experience, we knew that we were the only guys on the planet who could make this band happen!

O
ur behavior was to foster an “us against them” attitude, and that approach served
GNR
well, driving us to make rock with an immediacy and ferocity that no one had ever attained. Once back in L.A., we found ourselves totally motivated. We really bore down and practiced all the time. We started rehearsing at this guy Nikki B’s place. His house was by the L.A. zoo. It was a dumpy dwelling in an industrial area literally plopped in the middle of nowhere. There was a junkyard on one side, and on the other side was a big warehouse under construction. Danny or Jo Jo would drive us to practice every day. That was our rehearsal spot for a while. Then Nikki B joined Tracii Guns in his new band, L.A. Guns, and we had to find another place to jam.

Our minds were blown when they recruited singer Phil Lewis. Phil was a Brit who was in a band called Girl. They had two albums out in the earlier eighties, and their guitarist, Phil Collen, went on to join Def Leppard. Things were definitely getting hot for Tracii. And you know what? Good for Tracii.

A
fter we returned from the Seattle trip, our first show was again at the Troubadour. Shortly after that we played Madame Wong’s. With Nikki B’s no longer an option, we started rehearsing at a studio behind the Guitar Center on the Sunset Strip.

That’s where Slash came up with what we all thought was this awesome riff. He said he created it to limber up his fingers, get them loose before playing. He sort of made fun of it, saying that in his head it sounded like the notes you’d play for circus music, the kind you hear on one of those tinny pipe organs. If you’ve ever listened to the organ opening on George Harrison’s “It’s Johnny’s Birthday,” you know the sound I’m talking about.

I told Slash he was overlooking the enormous potential of that lick: “That’s a great fucking riff, dude. We have to figure out a way to get that into a song.” Artists have taken segments of music only meant for limbering up and transformed them into hit songs. Edgar Winter did it with a simple percussion exercise that ended up becoming his hit “Frankenstein.”

So Slash molded the riff, and today we know it as the intro for “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” What I loved was that Slash truly displayed his brilliance by not just using it as the intro but finding a way to thread that riff throughout, using it as the backbone of the entire song.

At this point, however, we could count on one hand the number of rehearsals Axl had been to. He didn’t have a PA system back then so he never went to the studio to sing. Sometimes, he would sit just outside the studio door and sing along, but usually we would just give him a tape of our rehearsals and he would go off with it somewhere. Many times we would do a show without any idea how Axl was going to sing on one of our new songs. We’d been around, and we’d never heard of another group that could operate this way. But like I said, it was becoming more and more obvious that
GNR
didn’t do things like other bands, and the birth of “Sweet Child” was just one example.

Later, Axl told me that when he first heard the “Sweet Child” riff, he didn’t need to be in the same room with us; he could have heard it over a phone on the other side of the globe. He’d listen to a cassette over and over again until he worked it way down to the marrow. He wrote lyrics in his little hovel upstairs and actually preferred it that way. Axl really seemed to like keeping to himself, not because he was stuck-up, or shy, or because he needed a better PA system, but because it was his way, his own thing. We managed to see enough of each other and were playing gigs two to three times a month at that point.

After we got back from Seattle, Duff, Slash, and I started hanging out all the time. Axl was a loner who wrote killer lyrics about who we were and how we lived and what we were experiencing at the time, and Izzy, well, “Izzy’s just Izzy,” I’d say, and we’d all nod. Izzy ended up popping in about half the time. Again, there was no pattern, no agenda.

W
e had adopted a permanent hangout. We called it the Hell House, as it was this old dilapidated shack occupied by Axl’s friends West Arkeen and Del James, a biker. It was located at Santa Monica and Poinsettia, right by Gardner Street. We rented it for around $600 a month. Well, we never actually paid a dime, but somebody must have been chipping in.

Now, West Arkeen was a real character. Axl hooked up with him through some chick. It was as if everybody met somebody through a chick they were fucking, wanted to fuck, or had fucked. That’s how we ended up at the Hell House, through a fun-loving, cross-pollinated chain of people. We were going there every day, so we agreed that since we were there all the time, we might as well make maximum use of it. Hell House became the band’s official headquarters.

We hung out, partied, puked, and passed out there. It was our preferred crash pad. It was there that Axl had his friend Bill Engell design a now famous tattoo for him, a cross that featured five skulls, caricatures of each member of the band. Slash gave Bill a hard time because he couldn’t re-create Slash’s curly fro and Slash’s skull ended up having straight hair.

The regulars at the Hell House included Duff, Slash, Izzy most nights, and me. Jo Jo, Raz, Danny, Dizzy, Del, and West were there almost all the time. Axl liked writing songs with West. He liked kicking it while West played guitar. I was there all the time, literally spending whole days and nights. There were always random people crashed out on the floor. It was a never-ending revolving door of derelicts, a hilarious party scene.

Out of this drunken wasteland everyone kind of spontaneously formed a fun jam band called the Drunk Fux. Many different people were in that band, including Tommy Lee and Lemmy. It was just a jam thing really, and we played some free benefit shows around L.A. Maybe one day we can get Mötley Crüe, Mötorhead, and
GNR
to reunite the Drunk Fux, the ultimate superband of the eighties.

Axl, West, and Del had their own little clique that wasn’t really part of the Drunk Fux, and I couldn’t have given less of a fuck about it. I don’t mean that as a slight to Axl. I just wasn’t into pining away at not being asked into his elite crew. I got along with everyone and was always laughing, having the time of my life.

I
always thought Axl was a totally cool asshole. I knew that he was a fucking star, a truly great performer. But I was also aware that at times, he could be an insecure prick. As long as he wasn’t fucking with me, however, we were cool. That’s how it was. Then he pulled the first of a series of fucked-up shit that he did to me over the years.

I remember Axl was staying with Jo Jo at his apartment. I stopped by to hang out a bit. I just opened the door and Axl jumped up and lunged at me. The place wasn’t that big so he only had to take two steps.

It happened so fast, I was like, “Huh?” He hauled off and kicked me in the balls. I could tolerate a lot of bullshit from Axl because he had some really unfortunate hang-ups, but getting my nuts cracked was the last thing I expected. I doubled over from the pain, and my eyes teared up. Then, when I was finally able to breathe, I just yelled, “Fuck you!” and left. It was the weirdest goddamn thing. But ultimately I let it go. At the time I felt I had to.

My older brother, Kenny, would do shit like that to me too growing up, so I didn’t take it too much to heart. I went back to Izzy’s place and told him about it. He was surprised and just said, “I don’t know, dude.” That was the law of the Axl; you never knew why. I never did anything against him. Any chick he liked I wouldn’t fuck, although some made it clear they wanted me. If Axl was interested, I figured it was his girl. I could respect that because in the end, I didn’t care and everyone knew how insanely fucked up he was around women.

I became more frustrated with Axl’s actions over the next year. Axl’s behavior became seriously unpredictable. He was getting into fights, often starting shit at the Hell House with random people who came by to party, so they just learned to give him lots of room. Some of the uglier incidents were just hushed up, because, well, it was Axl. Axl had only one rule for himself: there are no rules.

Duff loved walking into some random club just as everyone was looking for a party or something to do after-hours. He’d invite them all back to the Hell House until they were pouring out into the streets. We would just shake it up and by four a.m., there would be a hundred people milling around.

And we were pretty resourceful once the girls got there. When one of the guys would be fucking some chick, one of the other guys would go through her purse and take like five or ten bucks. We would never steal all her money, just a small amount, because we really needed it. But the Hell House could have also been called the Shit House. After a year of constant abuse . . . well, you get the picture. Plus, the cops were starting to come by all the time. By the second year, more than half the parties we had there were busted up.

So I went into my need-a-little-space, time-to-regroup-and-preserve-my-sanity mode again. Across the street from the Hell House was a duplex, which had two little apartments on one floor. My friends Julie and Tracey lived there. Julie would later appear in our “Welcome to the Jungle” video. She’s the girl who catches Axl’s attention in the beginning, wearing fishnet stockings walking down the city street. She’s also seen lying next to me on the bed.

So I rented a room from her, and talk about a totally cool landlord. The room was just their washroom, where there was an outlet, a splash sink, and hot and cold water faucets where you could hook up a washer and dryer. I put a piece of wood over the sink, and I put my TV on top of there. I even tapped into the building’s cable, which was kind of cool for me because I never had cable before.

I had a futon mattress that didn’t fit flat riding up on part of the wall. I had a blanket and a couple of pillows. There was a private door on the side where the driveway was. I’d go in and out whenever I wanted to. But more important I had a steady place to get away, sleep, and fuck.

There were three girls I loved having over regularly. One in particular, Adriana Smith, was a hot Native American chick with a hard body and such a pretty face. Izzy introduced me to her and we became close. She was in a gang of crazy biker chicks.

Then there was Gabby, or “GabaGabaHey.” She was a short, hot rocker who could jam all night. And finally Adriana Barbour, a cute, timid Valley girl who could drink any man under the table. They worked at the Seventh Veil gentlemen’s club on Sunset. Their apartment was right above a pool where we would get so fucking drunk. We named ourselves the Naked Skydivers from Hell, and we would jump from the balcony into the pool. We somehow avoided getting killed during one of our many insane diving stunts.