Young Guns

BEFORE THEIR RISE TO GLO^f, GUNS NrROSES CLAWED THEIR WAY UP FROM THE STREETS TO BRING REQKLESS ROCK AND ROLL BACK FROM THE DEAD

& lash and drummer Steven Adler-friends since attendin Hollywood's Fairfax High together-were still strugglin as a two-piece band with no prospects in the spring c 1985. "The main problem." Slash recalled, "was we ha this great little band, but wed never been able to find a singe Slash had played gigs with some other bands, too. but nothing ha worked out When bassist Duff McKagan called him and asked tr two to join Guns N' Roses for a series of opening slots Duff h£ lined up with a Seattle band he'd played in called the Fastback Slash accepted the offer-though in the back of his mind he saw the gigs as a way to eventually steal Axl Rose away from Guns rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin and add the singer to his own band. Slash said he "didnt want to work with Izzy at all I didn't want to work with any other guitar player, because I'd never done it be­fore. I couldn't be in control of what was happening, guitar-wise. What I had wanted was to get Axl away from Izzy. which was just fucking impossible. Then I got this call, and they said. Do you want to come and play with us?' At first I didn't want to do it. because Axl and I had been through some bad times pretty recently" About six months prior, in late 1984. Slash had played a few gigs

with Hollywood*ose-lzzy Stradlin and Axl Roses previous band-after its lead guitarist quit. Slash had also let Axl. who was essen­tially homeless at the time, crash at his grandmother's house. Axl slept in Slash's bed while Slash was working days at a newsstand. When Slash came home, he woke Axl up. and they went off to rehearsal. But one day there was a problem when his grandmother wanted to watch TV and asked Axl to remove himself from her sofa. Axl told the old lady to go fuck herself Slash heard about this, and on the way to rehearsal he suggested to Axl that he ought to apologize. Axl got a weird gleam in his eyes and began to rock back and forth in the passenger seat. Then he jumped out of the mov­ing car. which was doing about 40 miles an hour. He disappeared down a side street, and Slash didn't see him for a while. At their next gig together. Slash quit Hollywood Rose after Axl hit a rowdy fan with a beer bottle Then Slash and his girlfriend broke up for a while, and Slash found out that Axl had fucked her in his absence. Axl by then was an assistant manager at Tower Video on Sunset, so to make things up to Slash. Axl got him a job there. This lasted until Axl got fired for screening porn films in the store In the end Slash decided to join Guns N' Roses. "I did it and

began working with Izzy be^OseMJpfwas what was happening. It was the only band I could finfftrfPlhat^could actually relate to."

Steven Adler was much more pumped. "I said to Slash. If we get that singer and that guitar player, we'll make ourselves one kick-ass band"

The first rehearsal of the new band was at a studio in Silver Lake. Someone distracted Steven while Izzy and Duff hid all the extraneous drums from his kit. reducing an almost comical metal setup to more primitive punk-rock simplicity. Duff remembered. "The moment we fucking slammed into our first chord, there was something. And we all knew it."

At first Axl was just standing there holding a beer and leaning against an amp. listening to the groups sonic chemistry Then he started singing. Duff: "All of a sudden. Axl clicked. He was right in there, man. It took something for Axl to click, and it took some­thing else for Slash to click, but when they did. they really did"

"We were only 20 years old." Duff said, "but we already consid­ered ourselves real veterans It felt like. This is the band; this is it. This is what we've all been searching for."

Slash and Steven rehearsed with Axl, Izzy and Duff for only two

days. Guns N' Roses' first show with their new lineup took place at the Troubadour, opening for another un­signed band, on Thursday, June 6.1985. The flier fea­tured an early attempt at a band logo, with crossed Luger pistols flanked by what were supposed to be roses but looked more like cabbages Tracii Guns-previ-ously the band's eponymous lead guitarist-asked Izzy about the wisdom of keeping the old name of the group. Izzy told him they were fucking keeping Guns N' Roses-and besides. Izzy said, it didn't really matter; it was only a band name. The afternoon of the gig. Slash went over to Melrose

Avenue, lined with hip boutiques and secondhand clothing shops, and bought a black broad-brimmed crowned hat at Leathers 6 Treasures. It was a conscious visual homage to ]imi Hendrix and the antecedent to the top hat that would become his trademark. Only a few dozen people saw the debut of Guns N' Roses' new lineup, but those few never forgot it. Guns played louder than bombs. Axl teased and sprayed his hair way up and deployed his flamboyant new stage moves Izzy was in a white shirt and vest, a walking clone of Keith Richards, laying down skilled rhythm licks. Duff teetered in cowboy boots, anchoring the band with his bass, singing backup to Axis howls Slash-bare-chested, sweating pro-fusely-was alternately riffing and playing intricate solos, really showing off. Presiding over everything was Steven Adler on his drum riser, flailing with his sticks, his long blond ringlets shaking around his smiling face, looking like a kid in ecstasy under

the club's lone spotlight Steven provided a splashy

fc onstage visual foil-like a junior David Lee Roth-

J to Axl's menacing prowl around the stage.

¦ They played some Stones, some Sabbath.

Aerosmith's "Mama Kin." Rose Tattoo's "Nice

Boys" and Hollywood Rose songs. There was a

smattering of applause. The next day they packed

their gear into a rented van driven by two roadies and headed north to Seattle in a borrowed car. on the first Guns NT Roses tour. Their saga had now truly begun.

Their gear left town early in the day. and the Gun­ners started driving north shortly afterward with Duff at the .wheel The band was psyched. They were on the road at last. Izzy had been dreaming about being on tour since he was 12

years old. .After Seattle they were sup­posed to play shows in Portland, Eugene, Sacramento and San Francisco. These shows were decent $300-a-night gigs, their first out of town.

Two hours later, north of Fresno on California Highway 101, the car broke down. Duff pulled over. Smoke was seeping from under the hood. Around them was nothing but deserted farm­land and scrubby desert. This was before cell phones. Guns N' Roses were stranded on the highway.

Someone mentioned turning back and going home. Izzy said there was no fuck­ing way he was going back. He got his guitar case out of the trunk and stuck out his thumb. The rest followed, abandon­ing the still-smoking car, and they started walking north. No one picked them up. They were, Slash said, "dressed to the fucking hilt" in full rock regalia, ready to go onstage. The summer sun baked them in their leathers. They had no water. Ac­cording to Slash, he, Izzy and Steven were all using heroin, so one or more of diem were probably withdrawing from drugs. They waited for a ride. And waited.

Cars and trucks whizzed by contemp­tuously. Off came the jackets and stage gear. After many hours in the desert, as the sun was setting, a truck driver finally stopped. He said they could ride in the back of his empty 18-wheeler.

In the middle of the night the trucker dumped the groggy Gunners at an interstate exit. They were a sight, according to Duff: "Five guys in tight striped pants and boots in the middle of fucking Oregon." They kept hitching.

Izzy recalled that finally "two ex-hippie girls from San Francisco picked us up. First they passed us, but then they remembered back in the hippie days when no one would pick them up—so they came around again and stopped." The Guns were starving, weak from hunger, and asked the women if they had anything to eat. The one not driving produced some pot brownies, and they kept heading north—in a ganja coma.

About 40 hours after diey had left Hol­lywood, Guns N' Roses arrived in Seatde. The band was exhausted and dehydrated but just in time for their first gig. There was, however, no sign of their gear or their roadies. Guns N' Roses had to bor­row drums and amps from the Fastbacks. Duff was embarrassed. The poor bedrag­gled Gunners totally stank.

Izzy said, "We played. There were 10, maybe 20 people in the place. We hadn't rehearsed that much. We didn't get paid. It was downhill from there."

Actually they did get $50, plus food and drinks from the waitresses at the Omni Room, who took pity on them. And when they learned the van carrying their gear had broken down near Santa Barbara and wouldn't arrive, they were

informed by the Fastbacks' manager that the rest of their "tour" was canceled.

The band recuperated from what Slash called "that treacherous journey" at the McKagan family home. It was there Axl Rose started writing lyrics about the life they'd been living on the streets of Holly­wood—a hothouse of hardship and com­petition, a bohemian demimonde where the only decent meal came from a charity and the evening's high was a dollar bottle of cheap fortified wine like Night Train. The reality of Hollywood for Axl Rose was making love to an overweight, insecure band groupie from Nebraska so he could stay at her place long enough to get his clothes washed and take a shower. Axl's Hollywood was a heartless battleground, a place of high-risk, semidesperate fun and games, whose losers wound up back home in Bumfuck or ended up blue and dead, tied off on the bathroom floor. The song Axl began to write on what the band called the Hell Tour eventually became "Welcome to the Jungle."

Guns had no money and no way to get back to Hollywood. They were so far from home that even degenerate, polluted, quake-prone L.A. looked like Paradise City. Duff recalled, "Eventually we bummed a ride back to LA. with this chick who was a junkie. It was horrible. But the thing was, this is where die band bonded. We all stuck together." For the first time Duff thought, This is real.

Izzy: "From the day we got back to Hollywood, it was like, whatever goes down, you know, we were still united in this conflict against—against fucking everything! Guns N' Roses' motto from that day on has been "Fuck everybody." Fuck everybody before they fuck you. Fuck the whole fucking world—let's just keep moving."

Izzy thought the Hell Tour had been a test, a rite of passage for the band. They had suffered together. They had thirsted in the desert. It was fucking biblical. They could have died. They had sucked in Seattle and been rejected. They straggled back, a defeated pla­toon, dead broke. But then, after their humiliating adventure, after they had been on the road and eaten shit, the sleazy jungle of the Hollywood rock scene didn't seem so bad after all. It seemed instead like home.

Axl Rose was now finally convinced that Guns N' Roses were his band. A short while later he told an interviewer, "We went through so many different people. Guns ended up being the peo­ple we most believed in. We believed in each other. We were like a family."

After Seattle, Guns rehearsed for a few days in a semipro studio in the Silver Lake district that was owned by local musician Nicky Beat. According to

Slash, this was "where the whole band really came together" around Izzy's songs: "Think About You," "Don't Cry" and "Out ta Get Me." They also worked on the earliest parts of "Rocket Queen" and "Welcome to the Jungle."

Soon Izzy rented a moldy rehearsal space for his band—but with nowhere else to crash, most of the band started to live there as well. In Izzy's mind. Guns had actually moved up a notch in life.

The new headquarters was a small storage area, the size of a one-car garage, behind 7508 Sunset Boulevard. The rent was $400 a month. The dimensions of the space were roughly 12 feel by 12 feet, with just enough room for a couch (scrounged from a dead guy's stuff found on the street) and what meager gear they possessed. Izzy and the roadies stole some lumber from a nearby construction site and built a loft that had enough space for three malnourished rockers to sleep on.

Their storage space opened onto an alley that the city of Los Angeles offi­cially designated Lot Number 619. It was near the intersection of Sunset and Gardner, in a musical neighborhood that included the Guitar Center, various new and used instrument shops includ­ing Sam Ash and the Mesa/Boogie amp store, and various crucial support busi­nesses such as Sunset Strip Tattoo, the Sunset Grill, Mory's Pizza and El Com-padre's "Fine Mexican Cuisine." The neighborhood baked in the California sun under looming billboards, tower­ing royal palm trees and the arid, cone-shaped Hollywood Hills.

There was no bathroom, no shower, no kitchen and no air-conditioning, and the summer heat was stifling. Izzy described the place as "a fucking living hell." Slash hated it. Sometimes, to get away from the squalor, he slept down the road in the Tower Records parking lot. "I'd fuck girls," he told Rolling Stone, "just so I could stay at their place."

"We had zero money," Duff recalled, "but we could usually dig up a buck and go down to the liquor store for a bottle of Night Train wine that would fuck you up for a buck. Five dollars and we'd all be gone. We lived on this stuff."

"Our studio was basically a fucking uncomfortable prison cell," Slash said, "but God did we sound good in there. We're a loud fucking band, and we don't compromise the volume for anything." They'd pound away with a couple of Marshall amps in the tiny hovel and could be heard blocks away. "It was cool because all the fucking losers from Sun­set Boulevard and all the other bands would come over to hang out."

That's when Guns started to have

impromptu parties in the alley outside

their lair. Izzy ran his heroin enterprise

from the room, which the band decorated

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GUNS N' ROSES

(continued from page 58)

with posters, pinups, hard-core |X>m, tilers and whatever they could find. Their scene imme­diately attracted feral party girls, some of them extremely young, many dressed in the lacy corsets, tiny leather skirts and fishnet stcx'kings of the day. The girls in turn attracted guys in other bands and kids who wanted to look like they were in a band. Musicians, pimps, devi­ants, dope dealers and street-level artists and actors started hanging out. Some nights as the summer of 1985 wore on. noisy crowds of partying kids jammed into Lot Number 619 while duns rehearsed inside. Pretty soon all the drinking, drugging, smoking, whor­ing, fighting and extra-loud music began to attract the attention of the L.A. cops and

West Hollywood sher­iff's deputies. Young girls started claiming they'd been molested. Teenage kids from the Valley claimed they had been mugged, rolled, ripped off. Sirens pierced the sul­try summer evenings as ambulances arrived to pick up overdose cases. Guns N' Roses began to get a serious negative reputation in local police precincts.

"We sold drugs," Izzy later admitted. "We sold girls. If one of the guys was fucking a girl in our sleeping loft, we'd ransack her purse while he was doing her. We managed."

Axl agreed. "There was a lot of indoor and outdoor sex. There was sex in cars. People would show up at all hours, and we'd talk girls into climbing into our loft, and someone would hit the light and go, 'All right, everybody in the loft—get naked or leave. '

For every girl run through by the band, three more showed up the next night—rar­ing to go. The band had its own semireserved table at F.I Compadre cantina on Sunset. "We used to sit in the corner." Slash later whis­pered to journalist Mick Wall, "because it was the best spot to get a blow job under the table wilhoul anyone else in the room know ing. Or else we'd lake them in the toilets out back."

When exhausted or strung out, Izzy liked to crash in the cramped, narrow space between the back of the urine-soaked couch and the roach-infested wall of the building. A friend of the band remembered that Izzy would be lost in there for days. "You'd just see his head appear occasionally to check out what was going on. I'd say, 'Izzy, you okay, man?' He'd go, 'L h, yeah, then disappear again."

On Saturdays the Salvation Army gave

out free food to Hollywood"s homeless and indigent at its mission on Vine Street. Guns N' Roses were often there, lined up with the local bums, junkies, winos and tramps. DufT McKagan preferred the fare at Rage, a notorious Hollywood gay bar that had a five o'clock buffet. Guns N' Roses were regulars. They all loved Rage. "You got all the food you could eat for a dollar," Dull recalled. "You clenched your butt cheeks and ate. They had delicious fried squid!"

Axl: "At one point we had the band and four women living in this one room. The nearest bathroom had been destroyed by people throwing up. I used to shit in a box and throw it in the trash because the bath­room was so disgusting."

This whole scene is also where the legend­ary' street buzz about Guns N' Roses started.

People began to talk about the crazed, dan­gerous scene at Sunset and Gardner—a vile supermarket of sex and drugs and rock and roll, something down and dirty and alive. The band lived like swine, drank too much all the time, didn't practice safe sex, worried about AIDS, openly dealt dope. They'd go to clubs, get people to buy them drinks and act like assholes. "We'd go out at night," Axl said, "like, annihilated, pass out fliers and just make sure everyone in the fucking room knew that we were there."

Axl loved being down and out. He dug the romance of skid row. Five years later he reminisced. "F.very weekend the big­gest party in LA. was down at our place. We'd have ">()() kids packed in the alley, and our old roadie was selling cold beers for a buck out of the trunk of his car. It

was like a bar. Older people bought whis­key for younger ones. If there was a prob­lem with someone, they'd be escorted out. We'd fucking drag them down the alley by their hair, naked, and leave them in the street. We could do whatever we wanted, at least until the cops showed up."

"We were like a gang," Steven confirmed. "That's how we thought of ourselves. We play rock-and-roll music, and we will kick your ass."

The part people forget about Guns' famously decadent rehearsal space was that they did manage to actually rehearse there. Duff and Steven jammed together almost every day, playing along to funk numbers by Prince and Cameo—especially Cameo's "Word Up"—getting into hard-rock grooves that almost swung, an extreme rarity among

L.A. bands of the day. Duff would later say that "Rocket Queen" was mostly based on Cameo's groove.

Their booking agent, Vicky Ham­ilton, kept getting Guns into clubs as the opening act for other bands through the summer of 1985. On June 28 they played the Stardust Ballroom at Sunset and Wilton. In July they were working at Raji's, a dive on Hol-lyvvood Boulevard. Slash had snorted too much smack and was blowing chunks behind his amplifiers. They opened several limes for Poison, a band Guns criticized for being phony and self-consciously glam in all the wrong ways—they thought it gave the whole scene a bad image. Poison's singer, Brett Michaels, retaliated by dissing Guns onstage.

One time after Michaels had slagged Guns, Axl confronted

Poison backstage and told them, to their lace, that they sucked. Bassist Bobby Dall, whose band already had a record deal, replied. "Maybe tucking so. But you gotta suck some­times to make it in this business—and you guys will never make it at all.'

Guns opened the show lor some other bands at a Hollywood benefit for Jerry Lewis's jerry's Kids" campaign on August 30 at the Stardust. Poison headlined the show, which also featured Ruby Slippers, the Joneses and Mary Poppins. The next day Guns played the Roxy Theater on Sunset for the first time. The Roxy. along with the Whisky down the street, was the Strip's premier showcase, where visiting bands did clubsize concerts for fans and the music industry. Adrcnalized by this. Guns played loud and fast, with Slash running around the stage, his hair Hying,

a whirl of flop sweat and wicked-sounding power chords. People said it was the best show the band had yet played.

"Welcome to the Jungle," read CN'R's next flier, lor the band's show at the Troubadour on Friday, September 20. Axl's signature song was finished by then and was already causing girls to start screaming when Slash's guitar stutter began the set. The band's reputation was now exploding. By the time (inns went on, at 1 1 I'.m., the kids in the old folk club were packed together like goats.

Also in the house that night was Poison, about to start recording its first album. Look What the Cat Dragged In. Poison made the mis­take of taking Ric Browde, who was producing the record, to see Guns N' Roses that night.

Browde and Poison were already at odds over what the record should sound like. "It didn't help." Browde recalled later, "that the first night we started recording, Bobby Dall, Brett Michaels, CC DeVille and I went to see this unsigned band at the Troubadour, and they just blew me away." Later, after a few-drinks. "1 told Poison that no matter how-many records they sold they would never be as good as this unsigned band we'd just seen."

Guns N' Roses told people they just wanted to play music and have run and didn't care about a record deal. But then, like any band. Guns had to change their attitude about recording.

As their buzz kept surging, as people started lo see the balls-out authenticity of their presenta­tion, with Slash in full fury and Axl scream­ing on his knees until his face reddened with blood and the cords on his neck lightened like steel cable, the band members began to realize they couldn't move up out of the clubs until they signed a contract to make a record with one of the corporate labels of the day.

Guns played again on October 18 at Chuck Landis's Country Club in Reseda and then at Radio City's Halloween show in Anaheim. In mid-November fliers appeared announc­ing the next gig, at the Troubadour. Above the photo of Guns was a new Slash-designed logo. It was a crude rendering of crossed .44 Magnum revolvers, the famous death-dealing weapon of vigilante vengeance wielded by Clint Eastwood in the Dirty Htmy movies. The .44s in the logo are entwined by thorny rose briars running along their barrels.

The band's next shows were in January 1986. After an incandescent late-January gig at the Roxy, Guns mania started to surge with an unstoppable momentum. Nobody in Hollywood had ever seen such a feed­ing frenzy for an unsigned band before. Six months after wandering in the desert, and still now splitting their time living on the street with stints crashing at Vicky Hamil­ton's apartment. Guns N' Roses looked and sounded like the Next Big Thing.

Hamilton scheduled meals with record

people with expense accounts at all the best restaurants. Iz/y loved this. "We made them take us all out to dinner lor a few weeks. We'd order all this fd and drinks and (ell them. 'Okay, now talk.'" Guns \" Roses started eat­ing well for the first time in years. Suddenly it was filets of beef and the finest champagne, lobster flown in from Maine and trips to the WC: for gleaming rails of Peruvian blow.

Slash: "We kept getting invited to meet these idiots from the record companies." At one lunch with a label A&.-R rep. Slash described Guns as being a little like Aero­smith and Axl as being a little like Steven Tyler. "And the (hick goes, 'Steve who?' All of us just looked at each other." Slash broke the long silence, asking. "Can we have another round of these margaritasr"

The previous year David Geffen had signed the reformed and new ly sober Aero­smith—still supei heroes to Guns—and now Geffen, who watched MTV like everyone else in the business, wanted an L.A. metal band with big hair and snotty attitude. His A&R executives—including 25-year-old whiz Tom Zutaut. who'd been hired away from Elektra. where he had signed Motley Crue—began to tell Geffen about Guns.

Zutaut went to check out G.VR again on February 28 at the Troubadour. The fol­lowing Wednesday he invited the Gunners over to his house in Beachwood Canyon and played Aerosmith records for them all

night—Toys in the Attic, Rocks, Draw the IJne, Aerosmith Ijve. He was extremely knowledge­able about Aerosmith minutiae and secret lore—such as the fact that guitar gods Joe Perry and Brad Whitford had not played on the band's second album because the label considered their sound too raunchy. With Aerosmith beginning a comeback on Gefien, Zulaut told the (inns they should be on the label as well. It seemed logical to everyone.

"The next day,' Hamilton said, "they were like. 'We're signing with Gefien!' I said, 'Are you crazy? All these labels are killing each other over you. There's a feeding frenzy oul there.' Axl just looked at me and said. 'We're signing with Gefien.' It was a done deal."

The paperwork took a few weeks to hap­pen, during which time the band starved and went into serious debt with its drug suppliers. There were other problems, too: Slash didn't want his real name to appear on the contracts; Axl's real name was still Wil­liam Bruce Bailey, and the label wouldn't sign a deal or write checks to someone using a stage name. There were questions about outstanding warrants for Axl in Indiana for stud like grand theft auto, assault and bail jumping. It was a big expensive hassle, but the lawyers took care of all of it.

Guns were due to sign at the Geffen offices the morning of March 26. 1986. It was a beautiful spring morning, with bushes flowering and vegetation bright green up on the arid hillsides. Through the windows of Hamilton's apartment, with the smog not yet socked in for the day, the snow caps of the San Gabriel Mountains gleamed out to the east in the morning light.

But Axl's contact lenses were missing, making Guns N' Roses late to a crucial busi­ness meeting. Hamilton remembered, "Axl accused Slash ol taking them or misplacing them, and then he flipped out and left the house." Now it was someone else's problem. "Me and Slash just looked at each other, and he said, "We've got to find them.' I looked at the clock. David Geflen, Tom Zutaut and company president Eddie Rosenblatt were all waiting for us, and now we were an hour late. I'd had nightmares like this. So we went through all of the pockets of Axl's clothing and then found them on the floor."

Slash looked out a window ol Hamilton's place. Just down the hill, a hundred feet away. Axl was sitting cross-legged on top of the Whisky a Go Go in a meditative pose, facing away from (hem toward the Holly­wood Hills. The Whisky had been closed while the building was undergoing renova­tion. Axl had climbed the scaffolding.

They wen( out and managed to coax Axl down from the building. Hamilton had rented a limo. and they all piled in. They were two hours late, but the signing went ahead. Slash was identified as "Stash" on the contracts and on his check. Still, it was the rock-and-roll dream coming true for them. Corks were popped on gcxxl champagne.

Hamilton knew the truth: It was the end of GN'R as they had been—an authentic L.A. si reel band. Already she could see whal would be lost and what would hap­pen. She said she cried the day Guns N' Roses signed with Gellen Records.