Slash: The Autobiography

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

“Are you gay? I’m just curious.”

For the first time in hours our table was silent. What can I say, I’ve always been attracted to outspoken women.

“No,” Duff said. “I’m definitely not gay.”

After that exchange faded the five of us went upstairs, piled into the bathroom, and broke out the vodka. And not long after that, we formed a band right then and there, and once again spent the next month or so looking for a singer. We auditioned Ron Reyes, better known as Chavo Pederast, when he was the front man for Black Flag for a few months back in 1979. There were a few other characters in there as well, but as usual, we couldn’t find the right guy. All things considered, we wrote some really cool material: we came up with the main riff to the song that later became “Rocket Queen,” and a few more great ideas.

Despite the creativity flowing between the three of us, I began to get really frustrated with Steven. He never kept up with the dedicated work ethic that Duff and I shared; though he maintained twice the social schedule. It was so aggravating to watch him expend his energy on partying when we had so much to do. At the time, it was obvious that should we find the right singer, we would really have a band that was worth something. The problem was, we didn’t have a singer, but Steven was behaving as if we’d already been signed by a major label. In the end I was the one who broke up the band; I told Duff it just wasn’t working and I broke off with Steven in every way for a while, too. Duff went on to greener pastures: coincidentally, when he’d moved to Los Angeles he got an apartment on Orange Avenue, directly across the street from Izzy. Soon enough, those two ran into each other on the street, and that was that; Duff became a player in the L.A. Guns/Hollywood Rose universe.

THOSE WERE THE ONLY TWO BANDS COMING up behind Mötley Crüe that were worthy of note—L.A. Guns and Hollywood Rose, each of which were revolving-door outfits that shared a number of local players to an incestuous degree. L.A. Guns was founded by Tracii Guns, who had gone to Fairfax High with me—that band was nothing but a tighter, harder version of the sleazy blues shredding he played at keg parties back then.

Hollywood Rose was something else. I met up with Steven just after he’d seen them, and as he described their high-pitched singer, a guy who could tear the roof off, I realized that for once, Steven wasn’t exaggerating. I didn’t put it together that I’d already heard this guy, probably because I’d heard him on what is most likely the shittiest, low-fi recording of a live band that had ever been made.

Steve and I went to see Hollywood Rose at Gazarri’s and it was the first time that I beheld, hands down, the best singer in Hollywood at the time: W. Axl Rose. Much like the tape, the show was nothing more than an amateur garage band doing their best, but they had an amazing sense of reckless abandon and unbridled energy. At least two of them did: apart from Izzy and Axl, the band was pretty nondescript, but those two friends from Lafayette, Indiana, had an ominous presence about them. Izzy kept doing knee slides all over the stage and Axl screamed his fucking heart out—their performance was blistering. Axl’s voice drew me in immediately; it was so versatile, and underneath his impossibly high-pitched shrieking, the bluesy natural rhythm he had was riveting.

As I said, Hollywood Rose (like L.A. Guns) was a revolving-door band whose players all knew one another and were always coming or going. Bass player Steve Darrow worked with Izzy delivering the L.A. Weekly during the afternoon, so they were tight, but Axl didn’t seem to like guitar player Chris Webber for whatever reason. Axl apparently up and fired Chris without telling anyone else and somehow Steven heard that they were holding auditions for guitar players the next day.

It’s all as vague and illogical to me now as it was then, but Steven convinced me to show up at their rehearsal space, which was a room in some hovel called Fortress on Selma and Highland. That place was the epitome of ratty Hollywood punk, because only punk rockers would have thought to trash it so extensively. Rock guys don’t trash things until they’ve made it and are older; only punks do that out of the gate. I’m not sure what color it was originally, but the carpet at Fortress had turned a sick yellow brown, not only on the floor, but all the way up the walls and ceiling, where it had been installed to dampen the noise. Every corner was disgusting; the entire room was a lice-infested cube.

I started rehearsing with them and it was going fine—until Izzy took off during the second song. Now I know that bolting is Izzy’s defense mechanism when he thinks things aren’t quite right: he never makes a show of it, he just slips out and won’t look back. Apparently Izzy had no idea what I was doing there that day and understandably didn’t like it that Axl had fired Chris Webber without consulting, or even informing, him.

Eventually, a while later after we’d become good friends, I asked Izzy about it. Izzy always maintained an aura of cool; he was never ruffled, he never let that guard down. But when I asked him about this, he leveled a deathly serious gaze at me, so I had no doubt that he was sincere.

“It’s pretty fucking simple,” he said. “I just don’t like being dictated to under any circumstances.”

In any case, he split. I’d been dragged into the middle of that situation, entirely clueless to it. After Izzy left, there was a short, awkward moment …and then we just started playing again.

I didn’t even know that there was another concentric circle of tension around the move to bring me in: Tracii Guns had been vying for that gig. He’d been trying to recruit Axl and Izzy into a band for quite a while. I can’t imagine that he was excited to hear that they’d chosen me over him. I had no idea about any of this, and even if I had I would have ignored all of it anyway. Finally, finally, I was in a band with a great singer—or a singer at all.

Slash in Hollywood Rose, bassist Steve Darrow is at left. Slash is playing the voice box.

Axl had been brainstorming on how to put together the right band, and he thought Izzy and I would make a great pairing, but since they’d never actually discussed it before he put it in motion, I was in but Izzy was gone. Hollywood Rose, as I knew it, was Axl, Steve Darrow, Steve Adler, and me. We booked gigs at Madame Wong’s East and West and rehearsed in a studio called Shamrock on Santa Monica Boulevard between Western and Gower. That place was an incredible scene, where just about anything might happen; considering that it was located way past East Hollywood, anything really could happen without arousing the authorities. There were three studios in the complex and the owners threw insane parties every weekend, where it was always balls to the wall.

Axl and I became really good friends during this period because, for a while, he lived with my family and me. It wasn’t because we were soul mates or anything: Axl never had a place of his own back then; he just crashed wherever he could. When he lived with us, he’d spend his days sleeping in my subterranean room surrounded by my snakes and my cats while I was at work. When I got home, I’d wake him up and we’d go to rehearsal.

All the same, I learned a lot about Axl during that time. We talked about music and the things we thought were great; we’d listen to a particular song and dissect it, and it was clear that we had a lot in common in terms of our musical taste. We had a mutual respect for all the bands that had influenced me.

Axl also had an interest in talking about life, both his own and in the greater sense. I didn’t have a lot to say but I was always a good listener. So he told me about his family and the hard times he’d endured in Indiana; it was half a world away from anything I could comprehend. Axl impressed me then the way he always has: no matter what anyone might say about him, Axl Rose is brutally honest. His version of events might be singular, to say the least, but the truth is, he believes in what he says with more heart than anyone else I’ve ever met.

It shouldn’t be shocking to hear that it wasn’t always smooth sailing when Axl lived with my family. As I mentioned, my room was off the living room, down two flights of stairs, under the garage. For the most part, Axl kept to himself when I wasn’t there, but one morning after I’d left for work, apparently he wandered up and crashed out on the couch in the living room. In other households that might not have been that big of a deal, but in ours it was. My grandmother, Ola Sr., was our matriarch and that couch was the throne from which she watched her favorite TV shows every afternoon. When she arrived, right on time to enjoy her regularly scheduled programming, and found Axl there, sprawled out, Ola Sr. politely roused him. In her sweet, soft, old-lady voice she asked him to go back downstairs to my room, where he could sleep as long as he liked. For whatever reason, that didn’t go over well: from what I understand, Axl told my grandmother to fuck off then stormed downstairs to my room—at least that’s what my mom said.

My mom took me aside when I got home from work, and as easygoing as she is, she insisted that if Axl was going to live under her roof for even one more day, he needed to apologize to her mother and promise to never behave that way again. It was my duty to make it happen, which at the time I didn’t think was that big of a deal.

My mom used to loan me her green Datsun 510, and as Axl and I drove to rehearsal that evening, I mentioned, in the least confrontational way, that he should probably apologize to Ola Sr. for telling her to fuck off. I hadn’t known Axl long, but I already knew him well enough to understand that he was a sensitive, introspective person who endured serious mood swings, so I chose my words carefully and presented the issue in a very nonjudgmental, objective tone. Axl stared out the window as I spoke, then he started rocking back and forth in the passenger seat. We were driving on Santa Monica Boulevard, doing about forty miles an hour, when suddenly, he opened the car door and jumped out without a word. He stumbled, kind of hopped, and made it onto the sidewalk without falling. He steadied himself, then took off down a side street without looking back.

I was shocked; I did a U-turn and drove around in vain, looking for him for an hour. He didn’t show up back at my house that night and he didn’t come to rehearsal for four days. On the fifth day he appeared at the studio as if nothing had happened. He’d found somewhere else to crash and he never mentioned it again. It was pretty clear to me from that point forward that Axl had a few personality traits that set him very far apart from every other person I’d ever known.

THE LAST HOLLYWOOD ROSE GIG TOOK place at the Troubadour and it ended eventfully. It was an “off” night all around, basically a series of almost right moments. We went on late and everything sounded terrible, the crowd was rowdy and disengaged, and no matter how hard we tried, there was no turning the vibe around. Some heckler in the front row antagonized Axl and soon he’d had enough; he threw a glass at the guy or broke a bottle on his head—it doesn’t matter which, but it was a fitting expression of the pent-up frustration within the band that night. As I watched the altercation with this guy build throughout the set, it was such a big distraction during the show that I knew I was going to quit as soon as the set was done. Axl going after him was like affirmation from the universe.

It’s not like I hadn’t seen it coming: I wasn’t satisfied and the whole situation didn’t seem very stable. We’d had only a handful of gigs in the few months we’d been together and the lineup never felt quite right. By that point, it didn’t take much; and the bottle scene seemed uncalled for—it distracted from the music to say the least. Here we were, a fledgling band with enough internal issues trying to scratch out a name for ourselves, having to contend with incidents like that. It meant something to Axl, of course, but not everyone necessarily agreed with him. It was the way he felt and, seriously, if it was called for, fine, but sometimes you gotta pick your battles. Stopping the show to deal with this situation was a bit much. In the spirit of rock and roll, I had an appreciation for the full-on fuck-you, but as far as professionalism was concerned, it was an issue for me.

Axl is a dramatic kind of individual. Everything he says or does has a meaning, a theatrical place in his mind, in a blown-out-of-proportion kind of way. Little things become greatly exaggerated, so that interactions with people can become magnified into major issues. The bottom line is, he has his own way of looking at things. I am a pretty easygoing guy, so I’m told, so when Axl would fly off the handle, I never followed suit. I’d be like, “what?” and blow it off. There were such dramatic highs and lows and extreme mood swings that being close to him always felt like a roller-coaster ride. What I didn’t know then was that this would be a recurring theme.

In any event, I told everyone in Hollywood Rose that I quit as soon as we got offstage. The band split up after that and Axl and I parted ways for a while. He went on to join Tracii Guns in L.A. Guns, which soon became the earliest incarnation of Guns N’ Roses.

Slash on the circuit, 1985.

I went on to join a band called Black Sheep with Willie Bass, which was a rite of passage for a succession of talented musicians. Willie is a great front man; he’s a really tall black guy who sings and plays bass and he had a penchant for landing the hottest shredder guitar players of the day, one after the other. He’d had Paul Gilbert, a virtuoso, Yngwie Malmsteen type; Mitch Perry, who had played with Michael Schenker; and for a time, me. Shredding was not my forte—I could play fast, but I valued classic rock-and-roll, Chuck Berry–style playing over heavy metal showboating. I took the gig anyway, because, after Hollywood Rose, I realized that getting out there and being noticed was essential: it was a way to meet other players and learn about other opportunities in a fashion that suited my personality more than networking on the Strip.

I took the gig and played to about eight hundred people out at the Country Club in the Valley, and it was a particularly good show, I must say. It was also the first time I’d ever played to so many. I enjoyed the exposure, though I remember thinking that I’d played terribly. I found out later that Axl was there, but I had no idea at the time because he didn’t come up and say hello.

Black Sheep wasn’t really doing much by this point; after that one gig, we didn’t have any others booked; we’d just get together to rehearse now and again. My brief experience with them might not have been exactly what I wanted to do, but it did make me more public, so it seemed to me that if playing in a well-liked L.A. club band was winning me attention and putting my career on some kind of track, joining the biggest L.A. club band of the day might not be a bad idea at all.

Poison’s guitar player, Matt Smith, called me when he decided that he was going to leave the band. His wife was pregnant and they had decided to move back to Pennsylvania to start their family. Matt and I had friends in common and he’d invited me to a few of Poison’s parties. Matt was a good guy, he was down to earth—the least poisonous of the bunch. Matt knew that it wasn’t my thing at all, but he said that it was a good gig that paid well and I already knew the band was definitely in demand. I was pretty against it, but Matt talked me into trying out.

Poison rehearsed in a big flat way down in Venice on Washington and La Brea or something like that, which was plastered with posters …of themselves. I showed up to the audition wearing my typical uniform: jeans, T-shirt, and that day a pair of these really cool moccasins that I stole from the farmer’s market—they weren’t beaded, just really plain brown leather with short fringe around the ankle. I had learned four or five songs from a tape they’d given me and I just killed them when we ran through it all. They called me back for a second audition and I remember Bobby Dall, the bass player, looking me over as I played. The vibe was very different; there was a tangible attention to detail.

“So, like, what do you wear?” he asked me. “You don’t wear those shoes onstage, do you?”

“I haven’t given it much thought, to tell you the truth,” I said. He looked concerned and confused.

I was one of three that they were deciding on, and I saw another guy at the callback that day. He had platinum-blond hair, a sparkly white leather jacket, and full makeup, complete with frosted pink lipstick. I got one look at him on the way out and knew that he’d get the gig. He did, of course—it was C.C. Deville. I had played the shit out of Poison’s material, but that was the one and only way that I was a perfect fit for what they were all about.

Nobody ever complained because they were shocked speechless.

IN 1984, AXL HELPED ME GET A JOB AT Tower Video and when he did it was bittersweet to see him again. When Hollywood Rose broke up, it wasn’t exactly acrimonious but in the interim, another source of contention had come between us: Axl had hooked up with my then ex Yvonne.

I had met Yvonne through Marc Canter at a Ratt concert, where they were playing with Yngwie Malmsteen, at the Hollywood Palladium. She’d actually been Ratt front man Stephen Pearcy’s girlfriend at one time. We went out to a late-night dinner afterward at this place the Beverly Hills Café that was one of Marc’s favorite spots and that’s where we got eyes for each other. We started dating after that. Yvonne was really cool—she was the person who turned me on to Hanoi Rocks and front man Mike Monroe, which was a band that I definitely appreciated. They were an influence on Guns N’ Roses and are still an undervalued rock-and-roll institution as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, Yvonne and I dated for a while, but during one of those spells where we took some time off from each other, Axl fucked her. I was not happy about that at all, but I can’t say that I was surprised because it was obvious that he always had a thing for her. When she and I got back together, of course she had to tell me about it, under the guise of “being honest,” when the real motivation was probably revenge for my dumping her.

I called Axl at his job at Tower Video to confront him. I was just pissed.

“You fucked Yvonne,” I said. “What kind of cheap shot is that?”

I have to give Axl credit—he was honest and didn’t try to weasel his way out of it. He told me that of course he did but that at the time I wasn’t fucking her, so what did it matter? I didn’t see it quite the same way, so things escalated from there until he invited me to try and kick his ass. I was going to go up there and duke it out but I let it go. Needless to say, it took some time to defuse the animosity. And one day, after hearing I was looking for a job, he told me about an opening at Tower as a peacemaking gesture. Axl always chose to patch things up with grand gestures.

Tower Video was located directly across the street from the Tower Records where I’d been busted shoplifting a few years earlier. Axl was living with one of the managers, and once I’d joined the ranks it didn’t take me long to figure out that I was now one of a truly loony cast of colorful characters; I imagine that we were the most ludicrous and utterly negligent staff that any Tower location has ever employed. There were also some great, senile alcoholics who worked at the Tower Classical next door.

Every night at about eight o’clock, after the general manager for records and video left for the night, those of us in video would stock up at the liquor store across the street, throw porno movies on the store’s video system, and just drink. We’d put our friends’ bands on the stereo and generally ignore every customer that wandered in.

It wasn’t anything that the security cameras picked up because we didn’t have vodka bottles next to the cash register, so it went on unnoticed for a long time—I imagine, though, that if those tapes were viewed, we’d come off as lazy and unhelpful. We’d mix our cocktails back in the office and walk around with them in plastic Solo cups; we’d be ringing up any purchases with one hand around a screwdriver. I’m sure the customers knew what we were up to the moment we breathed on them, but nobody ever complained because they were shocked speechless. All things considered, we were way too scary for most people; they just got out of there as quickly as they could.

Unfortunately, one of the tighter-assed managers caught on to us and when he did, Axl took the fall: he was fired for the antics that we were all guilty of. Even then, I knew why: Axl has the kind of presence and star power that threatens authority figures; they see someone like Axl as nothing but a “ringleader.”

MY MEMORY IS HAZY ON THE VARIOUS events that led to the forming of Guns N’ Roses, because, to be honest, for most of it I wasn’t there. I’m not here to present the academic history of the band or set straight every misconception; I can only speak of my experience. In any case, sometime in early 1985, Axl and Tracii Guns started putting a band together; they brought in Ole Bench and Rob Gardner, who’d played bass and drums, respectively, in L.A. Guns. Not too long after that, Izzy joined their group and that is when Axl opted to change the name to Guns N’ Roses for obvious reasons. Tracii had finally gotten his dream situation—as I said, he’d been after Axl and Izzy to be in a band with him for a while. They did a few gigs, they wrote a few songs—in that order.