My Appetite For Destruction (15 page)

One night she introduced us to Tom Zutaut and Theresa Ensenat of Geffen Records. We could sense these people were the big guns by the way they conducted themselves. They took us to dinner. I think it was at Wolfgang Puck’s on Sunset. It was very unusual for all of us to be in agreement but somehow this pair won over the entire band. After we were guaranteed absolute and complete creative control over our music and image, we knew that this was the way to go.

Tom was a very cool guy. He was all about giving us major freedom. It wasn’t like “We’ll only change this” or “Do it like this and you’re in.” That’s why we liked him. Other labels pretended to go along with us but always tried to tack on some bullshit clause at the end. They wanted to control us and just make us some puppet band.

So we kind of knew we were going to go with Geffen early on, but—and this shows our playful mind-set at the time—there were still a few labels that hadn’t taken us out to dinner yet. So we told Tom we needed a little time to think about it.

It might seem silly, but when you’re flat broke all the time, getting free drinks is a big deal. We’d be at the table in a fancy restaurant and someone would yell for the waitress: “Cocktails.” Then everyone would yell, “Cocktails!” Duff liked screwdrivers, Axl would get some fruity mixed drink, Slash liked vodka cranberries, and Izzy was strictly a wino. I liked Jägermeister, but I also liked beer or Jack and Coke, anything that would get you buzzed and tasted good.

A
t one of the dinners with a record rep, we went to new lows. We were beyond drunk, joking around about who was getting the most head and some other lewd and rude topics. Evidently things got completely out of control, to the point that they wanted to boot us out of the place. I remember the singer from Chicago, Peter Cetera, was having dinner next to us, and he just stopped eating, looking completely disgusted. Somebody shouted our traditional demand for cocktails but it came out wrong: “Cocks and snacktails.” We all burst out laughing. Then we compared cock sizes.

Eventually we got all the labels to wine and dine us: Sony, Elektra, and Warner. At one point, Megaforce was interested, and Rick Rubin wanted us too, but our minds were made up. We were just jerking these other record companies off in order to run up massive bar tabs.

O
n the night of March 24, 1986, Tom Zutaut came over to Vicki’s to have a meeting with us. It was a beautiful evening, so we headed up to the roof. Tom went over his offer again, breaking every detail down for us, as simply (for our muddled minds) and clearly as possible. We pretended to give it some thought although we had already made our decision. We let Vicki give him the news that we would sign with Geffen the following day.

I usually woke up early, and the day we signed was no different. I was bouncing off the walls while the other guys were just waking up. They were much cooler about it. “Stevie, relax, calm down,” they said. Oh yeah, how silly of me. I shot back: “We’re only about to make our dreams come true.” I guess I was always the kid in the band.

It was a sunny day, and everyone was together walking toward the Geffen building except Axl, who was nowhere to be found. We looked for him for over an hour and finally someone, probably Vicki, spotted Axl. He was on the roof of the Whisky! He was sitting in the lotus position, as if he was meditating. Classic Axl: “Look at me, look at me, watch me be different, watch me bust your balls by making us all late for the biggest moment in our lives.”

Some photographer was walking with us as we made our way to the Geffen building, snapping away as we walked inside. We entered the main door, passed the secretary, who apparently was expecting us, and walked right up to Tom’s floor. Tom and Theresa were there and on the desk in front of them the papers were already neatly laid out. We each had like ten things to sign. Vicki had a lawyer look over everything beforehand, so we had no worries. I had been waiting for this day all my life. We signed the papers and we each got an advance of $7,500. We went out and got drinks, had dinner, then everybody went five different ways and did their own thing, armed, for the first time, with more than a couple of bucks in our jeans.

Later we went to Guitar Center and bought equipment. We were offered wholesale deals on everything. I could have bought a bitchin’ new set of drums for $1,200 bucks but I didn’t really care to. After years of barely scratching by, I just couldn’t shift gears like that and start blowing money. Besides, I had my own drum set and I was happy with it. I just added one more crash, the only piece of equipment I bought with my advance. Oh yeah, and I also bought a big bag of high-grade bud, then shoved the rest of my advance in my jeans.

J
ust after we got signed, we booked a show at Gazzarri’s as the Fargin’ Bastarges. We got that name from the movie
Johnny Dangerously
starring Michael Keaton. The bad guys in the movie always talked like that, mangling expressions: “You friggin’ ice-holes. You fargin’ bastage! You cork soaker!” Even though we were booked under an alias, the show was packed. The timing was great because the club had been closed down for a while due to a riot there. We happened to play the night it reopened, May 31.

We were in the parking lot when we saw Kelly Nickels from L.A. Guns walking around, shuffling aimlessly like a kid who lost his mother. The band was going into the club from the back and I said, “Dude, what’s happenin’?”

“Oh, I just came into town. I wanna see the show but it’s sold out.”

“Come in with me,” I said, and he happily joined us. That night was an epic show. Armed with the Geffen contract, we knew we were on our way. So we bore down and played our songs with an intensity that went beyond what anyone was doing on the Strip at the time. Extended solos, long jams, and fucking loud—we were getting a reputation for being the loudest band ever (although the Who had made that immortal claim while we were still filling diapers, and a little later Slade took a swipe, a fucking great,
loud
band).

We were going to be huge and we never had to compromise. We did it all our way. We never had to sell our own tickets. We never sat around after shows to push our shirts or anything. That was the sort of stuff Poison was about, because they really were all about the business: buy our CD, buy our ball cap, buy our condoms. Not us. We just wanted to play music. We were so much cooler, and the kids knew it and responded.

Tom had the idea for us to go in the studio and record an EP under our own label, Uzi Suicide, which was actually financed by Geffen. The idea was pretty novel at the time, although everyone does it now. Our whole deal with Geffen was kept pretty hush-hush. Before he signed us Tom had even gone around telling all the A&R people he knew that he thought we sucked. But that’s how Geffen operated, out of the box and pretty slippery. So they thought by making it seem that we financed a record on our own, it would contribute to our authenticity, the all-important street cred. As long as we could get our music out there, without anyone fucking with it, we went along.

Geffen wanted to put out the live album quickly and get people even more excited about us. It would also get us warmed up to record our full-length album. Honestly, we always had the idea to do a live record. Growing up our favorite records were live records: Kiss’s
Alive!,
Judas Priest’s
Unleashed in the East,
Cheap Trick’s
At Budokan,
and the massive
Frampton Comes Alive!

F
rampton and I are a lot alike when it comes to performing. He’s always smiling, always happy, working the crowd, reaching out to his fans. Look what
Comes Alive!
did for Frampton. He slaved for years with his band Frampton’s Camel, putting out four studio albums with some incredible songs. But
Comes Alive!
put him out there and over the top. I think it’s the biggest-selling double live album of all time.

Songs like “Do You Feel Like We Do?” and “It’s a Plain Shame” were studio gems recorded by Peter like five years earlier. But when people heard them on
Comes Alive!
they flipped. Those tunes were made to be played live and loud. They were suddenly reborn and hugely popular. That’s definitely one of the greatest live albums ever recorded. And if you listen to “Paradise” or “Jungle” on our later
Live Era,
you get the same rush, a realization: “So that’s the way it’s supposed to sound!”

Live albums transcend. They bring the full potential of a song to the audience. The way the crowd noise swells when Frampton slams into his first solo on “Something’s Happening” gives you chills. To hear that same kind of intensity out of Frampton, you have to go back to the live album he did before
Comes Alive!,
and that was
Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore,
when he was still just a teenager playing with Steve Marriott and Humble Pie.

T
he idea was to have a “live” record with thousands of people screaming in the background, thereby making us sound as popular as, or maybe more popular than, we actually were. So yes, we knew from the start that they were going to add an audience. We were cool with it. Just so long as it sounded right. We didn’t want this album to sound tinny or cheesy. Geffen’s engineers told us there would be too much shit involved (i.e., it would cost too much) to actually record a live record, so we were told to create the live audience effects in the studio. Although I’ll admit to being a little upset about the authenticity of it all, I ultimately felt it was okay because many of the live records we loved so much as kids weren’t really live either.

They told me that was the case with
Comes Alive!
I was floored to find out that the only thing that was actually live on that album was the drums. Also, on Priest’s
Unleashed,
Rob Halford actually recorded the vocals at Ringo Starr’s house. I couldn’t believe it. So we were learning the game and rolled with it, just so long as they kept their word and, as I said, didn’t fuck with the songs. It was a bit of a tightrope for us, because we wanted to get our sound out there; we wanted them to know we were in it to win it, but we didn’t want to completely bow to their direction.

Recording time was booked at Pasha Studios. Pasha was right next to Paramount Studios near Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Spencer Proffer was hired to produce and it was his studio. Quiet Riot’s
Metal Health
was recorded there, and that album was huge
.
We recorded the four songs, and I swear, I think we recorded “Shadow of Your Love” there too. Come to think of it, we may actually have done six songs during the session.

One thing always bugged me about the very beginning of the record. The count-in to “Reckless Life” is my very
first
hit on the drums. It’s the high hat and cowbell. When I hit the cowbell the stick
slid off.
So my first recorded note is muted, it’s not all there.

In the beginning of “Mama Kin” we added the sound of firecrackers. If you listen closely, before the song starts, while Axl is saying, “This is a song about your fucking mother!” you can hear them going off:
crack-boom cracka-boom bam-boom!
We actually lit the firecrackers in the studio. We set them up in the recording booth, lit the fuse, and had them covered by a bucket. Of course the bucket was miked and it came out sounding huge. After we finished the songs, Spencer added the audience. He used archived tapes of live performances by Dio and Quiet Riot and mixed the cheers in. Spencer had been in the business a lot of years, and I really dug working with him. He had a lot of great stories, and I couldn’t get enough of hearing them. He had done so much; I was very impressed. He worked with a lot of my idols, musical artists from the sixties and seventies. Plus he was a great human being and it was easy to work with him.

Every day around noon we would break for lunch and go to Astro Burger on Melrose, home of the best burgers in L.A. Then back to the studio, where the whole recording process took two or three days. We were all in the same soundproof room and we actually recorded those songs together to give it a “live” feel, instead of each performer laying down a separate track, then assembling the tune. The only stuff they overdubbed was the backing vocals. If you listen closely to “Nice Boys,” you can hear Axl singing backup to his own vocals.

The record came out,
KNAC
put “Mama Kin” and “Reckless Life” in regular rotation, and it was an incredible thrill to hear my band on the radio. I experienced the most joyful, natural buzz from this. A movie that was released in 1989,
American Ninja 3,
featured “Move to the City” on its soundtrack, but I’ve never seen it.

We were at Vicki’s when she came in with the first shipment of our record. It felt like Christmas morning. We just watched as she opened the box packed with EPs. It was about the size of the boxes that hold ten reams of paper in a stationery store. It was a feeling just like the one I had when Slash and I heard
GNR
on the radio for the first time. I experienced many fantastic firsts in my life at this time. The child in me couldn’t get enough, as every morning smiled down with the promise of more and more artistic highs.

The cover featured a close-up shot of Axl and Duff. It was such a cool picture, the lighting, their expressions; I thought it was perfect. Everyone in my family bought a copy. Our very good friend Marc Canter bought a couple. The first store that I walked into and actually saw the record on display was Vinyl Fetish on Melrose. The owner, Joseph Brooks, was a close friend of the band and, like a lot of locals who had charted our rise, shared in our accomplishment.