Welcome to My Jungle (17 page)

This backstage area was for all these VIPs. The room was filled with drinks and food for everyone. This is where I hung out the most, especially after I started dating Natasha, because you could really get in trouble in the third room.

Ah, the third room—the room with all the “talent.”

“Talent” was the term for all the beautiful women plucked out of the audience during the show. It was amazing how great our staff was in their ability to find all these beautiful women.

During one part of the tour, Stuart Bailey, Axl’s brother, was in charge of putting together the backstage party in the talent room. He put together theme parties and they were quite amazing. I remember there was a Vegas night where he had shipped in blackjack tables, craps tables, and dealers as well. I heard numbers flying around, and I do not know that this is a fact, but I heard that Stuart’s budget for these types of backstage parties was in the $100,000 per night range.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, that didn’t last too long.

But on the nights that $100,000 wasn’t spent on the room’s décor and theme, it was still the most popular room after a show. For it was not uncommon for people to misplace their clothing in this room, for people to get drunk in this room, for events to take place in this room that I will take to the grave because I’m just not part of the scene anymore.

But imagine what you think might go on backstage after a Guns N’ Roses concert, and multiply it by, oh, let’s just say ten, conservatively, and you’d still be short.

Here’s an example …

Indianapolis, Indiana.

Outside of Axl’s dressing room, maybe down the hall a little bit, there was parked an Indianapolis 500 race car. A real, authentic car that ran in the Indianapolis 500. We all got to sit in it before the show. Very cool.

After the show, the car was still there, yet something about the car was different this time.

Sitting on top of the car was one of the fans that someone invited backstage. She was a beautiful, petite girl, probably about twenty-three years old. And she was obviously a little tipsy. And she was also stark naked.

Although nudity is a common occurrence backstage, this was quite different. She was making love to the car. I’m not talking about caressing the car with her hands and kissing the side view mirrors. I’m talking about a full-on grind, complete with
ahhs
, and
ooohs
, and a couple of, “oh yeah, faster …”

No one told her to do this, no one was egging her on, she just felt compelled, I guess, to do this to the car. A crowd formed around the car, both men and women just staring in amazement. This went on for a few minutes until she had what appeared to be a full-on, honest-to-goodness, all-American orgasm. She then regained her composure, got dressed, and left, and we never saw her again.

It was by far the strangest thing I had seen on tour with Guns N’ Roses. And I saw some strange things.

THE BUENOS AIRES MCDONALD’S

I had been on the road for two years, and I was sick of eating room service food. Actually I was sick of paying room service prices. We stayed in five-star hotels all around the world, so I was done paying $24 for a plate of pasta, and $8 for some asparagus.

So I did what any good old, red-blooded American who was yearning for a fast-food fix would do. We were in Buenos Aires, and I needed to find the nearest McDonald’s restaurant.

Truth be told, we ate at McDonald’s a lot in foreign countries. The food was good in the hotels, but because of the five-star thing, the portions were miniscule. We were not small guys, and we were up eighteen to twenty hours a day. We needed to eat. There were times that we could head over to the venue and eat the meals provided by the promoters, but I hardly ever got to go there, because I was with Axl 24/7, and he always ordered room service. But Axl had enough money to order two lunches, and two dinners, and even though they were small portions, the two portions were enough for him. But that would cost about $60 to $70. McDonald’s? As you know, you can get about sixty cheeseburgers for that—enough to fill us up for a week.

I called the concierge downstairs of this beautiful five-star hotel in Buenos Aires, and asked the stuck-up man how close is the nearest McDonald’s.

Silence. I could feel his disdain for the question.

“Are you there?” I asked.

“McDonald’s, sir?”

So I condescended right back at him, “Yes, it’s a restaurant that sells hamburgers.”

“I’ll check, sir, please hold.” And just to piss me off he put me on hold for about three minutes.

He finally came back on the line and gave me the address. It was actually about three blocks from the hotel, straight down the street. I’m sure that he ate there once a week at least, but he was just too pompous to admit it.

I grabbed my wallet and headed out the door. I asked Axl if he wanted anything. He declined. I asked Robert if he wanted anything. He gave me his order, and I was off.

I very rarely left the hotel alone because of security reasons. Believe it or not, because I had long hair, people assumed I was with Guns N’ Roses in some capacity.

When Guns N’ Roses arrived in cities across middle America, or in cities in foreign countries, we stood out like sore thumbs. The long hair, the leather, we all just had a “look.” So, when we went to the mall, or to a restaurant, or to get a haircut, or even to the local tanning salon (yes I did that once or twice on the road), people looked at us, and formed small groups. Eventually, someone from the group would come over and ask, “Are you with Guns N’ Roses?” If she was a pretty girl, I answered accordingly. I know, awful, right? But I was a young, single guy then (before Natasha), so give me a break.

I looked outside the front of the hotel and there were thousands of fans standing outside to try to get a glimpse of Axl or Slash or Duff, Gilby, Dizzy Reed, or Matt, or anyone else for that matter. They were still there from the night before.

Fans in South America are awesome. They are very passionate about their favorite bands. And they will stand there for hours just to get a glimpse of their favorite bands.

Axl’s room and my room overlooked the front of the hotel where these fans were parked. The night before Axl and I and a few others would open my balcony doors, and Axl would step out onto the balcony and wave to the fans. We would then join him on the balcony and marvel at the thousands of people going crazy. Then we’d head back inside.

The rest of the night we had a ball opening the door just a crack, and hearing the fans go nuts. Then we would close the door—loud sigh. Open the door, loud roar. Close the door, big sigh. This was our entertainment for the evening.

Once in a while Axl would throw something down into the crowd, and the police hated that. It would cause a gigantic free-for-all. When we saw what happened when he threw a shirt, we stopped doing that because it looked like people were getting hurt.

I readied myself for my adventure to McDonald’s. I put my hair up under my baseball cap (my poor excuse for a disguise), and I walked out the front of the hotel. I walked head down, as inconspicuous as possible along the front of the hotel and around the area where the thousands of fans were standing.

Just when I thought no one had noticed that I might be with the band, two guys yelled something like, “Look over there.” And they were pointing to me.

At first I didn’t think much of it because they were kind of away from the crowd, but I did begin to walk a little faster. Looking back, that was the beginning of the end.

When I sped it up a little, it was a dead giveaway that I probably had something to do with the band. They started following me. Others saw them walking away from the crowd with a purpose, and they started following. Soon I could see out of the corner of my eye that this trickle effect was gaining momentum. So I started walking faster, and they started walking faster, which prompted more people to join in.

Within seconds, it became a race. I found myself running to McDonald’s, and they ran after me. I thought to myself to just stop right there and explain to them that I’m not in the band, but try telling that to more than fifty people. It’s impossible. And this had become way more than fifty people.

I arrived at the McDonald’s, asked for a manager, and tried to explain to him that if he didn’t let me go behind the counter in the next few seconds, I would be mauled by tons of people.

Thankfully, he understood and let me behind the counter just as the hundreds of fans arrived in the lobby. I headed back to the freezer so I’d be safe from the crowd.

I asked the manager of the McDonald’s to explain to the crowd, in their native language, that the guy in the freezer was not in the band, and that they should all leave. Well that didn’t work. No one believed him, and they figured while they were waiting they would grab a bite to eat.

This was the second to the last day of the tour. I had been through near plane crashes, drug searches, and weird strip clubs, and after all that I was going to be mauled to death, because these crazy people mistakenly thought I was in Guns N’ Roses.

Great.

I immediately called for backup on my walkie-talkie.

“Security?”

“This is Earl, go.”

“I’m about three blocks away, stuck in a McDonald’s. I need help.”

“What do you need help with?”

“Uh, hundreds of screaming fans who don’t speak English think I’m in the band, and I’m hiding in the freezer in the back of a McDonald’s.”

Silence.

I’m sure that Earl was in a hotel room with a bunch of the guys and they were cracking up.

“Get us some Big Macs.”

“Earl, I need you.”

Silence.

About twenty minutes later Earl and a few other guys showed up at the local Buenos Aires McDonald’s. They made their way through the crowd using their patented Guns N’ Roses parting-the-crowd techniques.

They were guided to the back of the restaurant, to the freezer, where I sat, freezing my ass off.

“Hey, rock star,” Earl quipped.

“Very funny.”

They all had a good laugh, and they escorted me out of the McDonald’s with people trying to grab and tear and pull. As we briskly walked through the crowd, I kept yelling to everyone, “I’m not in the band.”

That made them even crazier.

Here’s what I’ve learned about fans over the years: The fanatical ones will do almost anything to meet their favorite celebrity. They treat all the people that work for, or are friends with, the celebrity just as they would the celebrity, probably because they feel this is the closest they will ever get to actually meeting the celebrity.

I’ve had numerous fans ask me for my autograph pretty much everywhere we went. I would explain to them that they didn’t want my autograph because I wasn’t in the band. They’d say, “What do you do for the band?” I’d say, “I work with Axl.” They’d say, “Well, that’s good enough for me,” and would still want my autograph, and would still try to rip my shirt off.

Crazy.

I will never understand it, but it happened all the time. For all of us on the road, I do know that we were blessed to be able to work a really cool job, in a really cool industry. But I also know that I’m just a regular guy who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

YOUR GUN FOR A HAT?

On May 22, 1993, Guns N’ Roses launched the first part of their second European Tour in Tel Aviv, and it was touted, at the time, as the biggest music event ever held in Israel.

It certainly felt like it was. The whole city was buzzing about this show. Rumor had it that after the concert the local record company introduced the fourteen-year-old son of Israel’s most famous male solo artist to the band … and the boy fainted!

This was a huge event.

We arrived a day early, and I was able to do some rare sightseeing. I rarely got out of the hotel for long, but I arranged it prior to arriving in Israel because I really wanted to go to Jerusalem. I felt that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity so I asked Axl for the day off and he had no problem with it.

There were about six of us who went sightseeing in Jerusalem. The only band members with us were keyboard player Dizzy Reed and drummer Matt Sorum. Slash and Duff went with another group. I could have gone with them, but I would have spent most of the time protecting Slash from fans, as he was obviously one of the more recognized members of the band. We were the more low-key group, and except for the fact that we all had long hair, we were the more inconspicuous group.

Axl hung back at the hotel.

Normally we would take one of the limos into town, but again, we didn’t want to draw extra attention, so we all squeezed into a large taxi and headed to the Old City of Jerusalem.

When we arrived we were told that our legs must be covered, and that the top of our heads must be covered as well. Most of us were wearing shorts and no hat. I was wearing jeans and my Kansas City Chiefs hat. If I didn’t have my Chiefs hat, I would have had to have worn a yarmulke, and because I had jeans on I didn’t have to wear a long dress-looking thing like everyone else did.

First stop, the Wailing Wall, also known as the Western Wall. This place was amazing. One tradition is to place prayer notes into the wall on tiny pieces of paper that you crumple up and stick into the cracks of the wall. I put my prayer in there, and so far everything I wrote on that note has come true.

I am very blessed.

We also visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, located in the Christian Quarter of the Old City. It is said to be the place where Jesus was crucified, and where Jesus was buried.

As a Christian, I was spiritually moved the entire day. We went to see a few other places, and met some very cool people.

Specifically, I met a very cool Israeli soldier.

We were just walking around the area outside the Wailing Wall, just being American tourists. The entire area is guarded by armed soldiers, and they all seemed like they were very focused on doing their jobs.

A few of us waited for Sabrina, Axl’s masseuse, to come back from her area of the Wailing Wall. Women are not allowed to go to the area of the Wailing Wall that men are allowed to go and vice versa.