Читать книгу Slash: The Autobiography - Anthony Bozza - Страница 12

Experiencing yourself out of context, divorced from your usual point of view, skews your perspective—it’s like hearing your voice on an answering machine. It’s almost like meeting a stranger; or discovering a talent you never knew you had. The first time I plucked a melody out on a guitar well enough that it sounded like the original was a bit like that. The more I learned to play guitar, the more I felt like a ventriloquist: I recognized my own creative voice filtered through those six strings, but it was also something else entirely. Notes and chords have become my second language and, more often than not, that vocabulary expresses what I feel when language fails me. The guitar is my conscience, too—whenever I’ve lost my way, it’s brought me back to center; whenever I forget, it reminds me why I’m here.

I owe it all to Steven Adler—he did it. He is the reason that I play guitar. We met one night at the Laurel Elementary playground when we were thirteen. As I remember it, he was skateboarding miserably. After a particularly hard fall, I rode over on my bike and helped him up and we were instantly inseparable.

Steven had grown up in the Valley with his mom, his stepdad, and his two brothers until his mom couldn’t take his bad behavior anymore and shipped him off to live with his grandparents in Hollywood. He lasted there for the remainder of junior high, summers included, before he was bused back to his mom to attend high school. Steven is special; he’s the kind of misfit that only a grandmother can love, but can’t live with.

Steven and I met the summer before eighth grade and hung out until high school, since I had just moved into my grandmother’s new condo in Hollywood, from my mom’s apartment in Hancock Park. Both of us were new to our school, Bancroft Junior High, as well as to the neighborhood. As long as I knew him, Steven never spent a full week’s worth of time in school out of any given month. I got by because I did well enough in my art, music, and English classes that my grade-point average was high enough to pass. I got As in art, English, and music because those were the only subjects that interested me. Apart from those I didn’t care for much else, and I cut class all the time. Since I had stolen a pad of absentee notices from the administration offices and forged my mom’s signature when I needed to, in the eyes of the administration, I was there much more often than I ever was. But the only reason I actually graduated junior high at all was due to a teachers’ strike during my final year. Our regular teachers were replaced by substitutes who were too easy for me to bullshit and charm. I don’t want to get into it, but on more than one occasion I recall playing my teacher’s favorite song on guitar for the entire class. Enough said.

To be honest, school wasn’t too bad: I had a whole circle of friends, including a girlfriend (who we’ll get to in just a little bit) and I partook liberally in every exercise that makes school enjoyable to stoners. Our crew met in the early morning before homeroom to snort locker room—a head-shop brand of amyl nitrite, a chemical whose fumes expand your blood vessels and lower your blood pressure and in the process give you a brief euphoric rush. After a few hits of locker room, we’d smoke a few cigarettes and at lunchtime reconvene in the courtyard to smoke a joint…. We did what we could to make the school day pleasant.

When I didn’t go to school, Steven and I spent the day wandering the greater Hollywood area with our heads in the clouds talking about music and hustling money. We did some offhand panhandling and odd jobs, like moving furniture for some of the random characters we’d meet. Hollywood has always been a weird place that attracts odd folks, but in the late seventies, with the strange turns culture had taken, from the letdown of the sixties revolution to the widespread use of drugs and loosened sexual mores, there were some really strange ones hanging around.

I don’t remember how we met him, but there was one older guy who used to give us money for nothing. We’d just hang out and talk to him; I think he asked us to go to the store a couple of times. I definitely thought it was weird, but he wasn’t threatening enough to do anything a couple of thirteen-year-olds couldn’t handle. Besides, the extra pocket cash was worth it.

Steve had no inhibitions whatsoever, so he managed to acquire money on a regular basis in many ways, one of which was from Clarissa, a neighbor of mine in her mid-twenties who lived down the street. One day we saw her sitting on her porch when we passed by and Steven felt the inclination to say hi to her. They started talking and she invited us in; we hung out there for a while and then I decided to take off, but Steven said that he was going to stay there a little while longer. It turns out that he had sex with her that night and got money off her to boot. I have no idea how he did it, but I do know that he was with her four or five times more, and got money every single time. It was unbelievable to me; I was really envious.

But then again, Steven would always get involved in situations like that and they often didn’t have a happy ending. In this case, he was in the middle of screwing Clarissa when her gay roommate walked in on them. She threw Steven off her and he landed hard-on first on her bedroom floor, and that was the end of that.

Steven and I got by; I stole all the music and rock magazines that we needed. There weren’t too many other things that we cared to spend money on aside from Big Gulps and cigarettes, so we were in good shape. We’d walk up and down Sunset Boulevard, then Hollywood Boulevard from Sunset to Doheny, checking out rock posters in the many head shops or ducking into whichever souvenir or music store looked exciting to us. We’d just wander, taking in the animated reality going on down there. We used to hang out at place called Piece O’ Pizza for hours, playing Van Halen on the jukebox over and over. It was a ritual by then: Steven had played their first record for me a few months before. It was one of those moments where a new body of music totally overwhelmed me.

“You’ve got to hear this,” Steven said, all wide-eyed. “It’s this band Van Halen, they’re awesome!” I had my doubts because Steven and I didn’t always see eye to eye musically. He put the record on, and Eddie’s solo that sets off “Eruption” came shredding through the speakers. “Jesus Christ,” I said, “what the hell is that?”

It was a form of expression as satisfying and personal to me as art and drawing, but on a much deeper level.

I SAW MY FIRST REALLY BIG ROCK SHOW that year, too. It was the California World Music Festival at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum on April 8, 1979. There were 110,000 people there and the lineup was insane: there were a ton of bands, but the headliners were Ted Nugent, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, and Van Halen. Without a doubt, Van Halen crushed every other band who played that day, even Aerosmith. I guess it wasn’t hard: Aerosmith was so fucked up at the time that it was impossible for me to differentiate one song from another in their set. I was a fan, and the only track I recognized at all was “Seasons of Wither.”

Eventually Steve and I graduated to hanging around outside the Rainbow and the Starwood amid the whole pre-glam metal scene. Van Halen cut their teeth on that circuit and Mötley Crüe was about to do the same; aside from bands like that, there were the earliest traces of L.A. punk rock going around. There were always a ton of people outside the clubs and since I had access to drugs, I’d sell them not just for cash, but to get us closer to the scene. In junior high, I figured out a better method: I started making fake IDs, which served to actually get me inside the scene.

There was so much activity in West Hollywood and Hollywood at night: the whole homosexual scene—around a posh gay restaurant, the French Quarter, and gay bars like the Rusty Nail, among others smashed right up against the mostly hetero rock scene. That whole juxtaposition was bizarre to Steven and me. There were just so many freaks everywhere and we liked to take it all in, as strange and nonsensical as most of it was.

Steve and I got into all sorts of seemingly harmless trouble growing up. One night my dad took us to a party thrown by a group of his artist friends who lived in houses along a cul de sac up in Laurel Canyon. The host, my dad’s friend Alexis, made a vat of horrendously lethal punch that got everyone completely gassed. Growing up in the Valley, Steven had never seen a scene that cool: this was a group of artistically out-there post-hippie adults, so the combination of the crowd and the punch completely blew his mind. He and I could hold our liquor for thirteen-year-olds, but this stuff was way too advanced for us. I was so fried that I didn’t notice Steve slip out with the girl who lived in the guesthouse downstairs. He ended up fucking her, which turned out to not be such a cool thing: she was married and in her thirties. In my thirteen-year-old mind, she was a senior citizen. To me, Steve had just fucked an old lady …who also happened to be someone else’s old lady.

In the morning, I woke up on the floor with the taste of that punch in my mouth, feeling like an iron spike had been nailed through my head. I went home to my grandmother’s to sleep it off; Steven remained behind, opting to linger in bed downstairs. I was home for about ten minutes when my dad called to let me know that Steven should fear for his life. The woman he had spent the evening with had confessed and her husband was very unhappy about it. The man, according to my dad, planned to “throttle” Steven, which Tony assured me was a very real threat. When I didn’t seem to take him seriously, Dad told me that the guy had actually promised to kill Steven. In the end, nothing happened, so Steven got away with it but it was a clear indication of things to come. At thirteen, he had narrowed his life goals down to exactly two: fucking chicks and being in a rock band. I can’t fault him for his prescience.

In his thirteen-year-old musical wisdom, which (probably due to his advanced womanizing skills) I considered superior to mine, Steven had concluded that there were only three bands that mattered in rock and roll: Kiss, Boston, and Queen. Steven paid tribute to them every day, all day, when he should have been in school. His grandmother worked in a bakery and left the house at five a.m. each day; she had no idea that Steven rarely went to class. His day consisted of playing Kiss records turned up to ten, while bashing away at a little Wal-Mart electric guitar and amp, both turned up to ten as well. I’d go over and hang out with him, and he’d be yelling at me over all the noise, “Hey! We should start a band, you know!?”

Steven has such an open, carefree soul that his enthusiasm is tremendously contagious. I didn’t doubt his intention and drive; I was convinced immediately that it would happen. He had elected himself the guitar player, and we decided that I would play bass. When I listen to music now, after twenty-five years of playing, I can isolate all of the instruments; I can hear the key of the guitar and right away I can usually think of several ways to play the song. By the time I was thirteen, I had listened to rock and roll for years; I’d seen concerts and knew what instruments make up a rock band, but I had no idea which instrument made each sound in the music. I knew what a guitar was, but I had no idea of the differences between a guitar and a bass and Steven’s playing at the time didn’t enlighten me at all.

When he and I would walk around town, we used to pass a music school on Fairfax and Santa Monica called Fairfax Music School (today it’s a chiropractor’s office), so I figured that was a good place to learn to play bass. So one day I stopped in, walked up to the desk, and just said, “I want to play bass.” The receptionist introduced me to one of the teachers, a guy named Robert Wolin. When Robert came out to talk to me, he wasn’t exactly what I expected: he was a medium-sized white guy wearing Levi’s and a tucked-in plaid shirt. He had a bushy mustache, a five o’clock shadow, and unkempt shaggy brown hair—it had probably been a real haircut once, but it had gotten away from him. Needless to say, Robert didn’t look like a rock star at all.

He did, however, patiently inform me that I’d need an actual bass of my own to take lessons, which was something I hadn’t considered. I asked my grandmother for help and she gave me an old flamenco guitar with one nylon string on it that she had packed away in a closet. When I met Robert again at the school, he took one look at my guitar and understood that he’d better start at the very beginning, because I had no idea that what I was holding wasn’t necessarily a bass. Robert put on the Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” picked up his guitar, and played along with the riff and the lead. And that’s when I heard the sound. Whatever Robert was doing, that was it. I stared at Robert’s guitar with total wonder. I started pointing at it.

“That’s what I want to do,” I told him. “That.”

Robert was really encouraging; he drew some chord charts for me, showed me proper fingering on his guitar, and tuned the one string I had. He also informed me that I should get the remaining five strings in the very near future. Guitar came into my life that suddenly and that innocently. There was no thought, no premeditation; it wasn’t part of a grand plan outside of playing in Steven’s fantasy band. Ten years later I would be, with all the perks that Steven had dreamed about: traveling the world, playing sold-out shows, and having more chicks at our disposal than we could handle …all thanks to that battered piece of wood my grandmother dug out of her closet.

Guitar replaced BMX as my main obsession literally overnight. It was unlike anything I’d ever done: it was a form of expression as satisfying and personal to me as art and drawing, but on a much deeper level. Being able to create the sound that had spoken to me in music ever since I can remember was more empowering than anything I’d ever known. The change was as instantaneous as turning on a light, and every bit as illuminating. I went home from music school and copied Robert’s methods, putting on my favorite songs and doing my best to play along. I did what I could with one string; after a few hours I could follow the key changes and mimic the melody of a few songs in the most remedial way. Tunes like Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4,” Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused,” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” can be played down the E string so I contented myself with those over and over again. Simply the understanding that I could mimic the songs on my stereo was enough to imprint the guitar on my reality forever.

I took lessons from Robert on my worn-out flamenco guitar throughout the summer before ninth grade—with all six strings in place, which, of course, he taught me how to tune. I was always amazed when he put on a record that he didn’t know and learned it on the spot in a few minutes. I set about achieving that ability for myself: like every overeager beginner, I tried to jump to that level straightaway and, like every good teacher, Robert forced me to master the fundamentals. He taught me basic major, minor, and blues scales and all of the standard chord positions. He’d also sketch chord charts to my favorite songs, such as “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Whole Lotta Love,” that I was to play as my reward once I’d done the week’s exercises. Usually I’d skip straight to the reward and when I showed up at the music school the next day, it was obvious to Robert that I hadn’t even touched my homework. Sometimes I liked to play as if I still had only one string. Every song I liked had a riff in it, so playing it all up and down one string was more fun until my fingers learned the proper form.

My BMX racing gear gathered dust in my closet. My friends wondered where I was at night. I saw Danny McCracken one day while I was riding back from music school, my guitar slung over my back. He asked me where I’d been and if I’d won any races lately. I told him that I was a guitar player now. He sized me up, looked at my worn-out six-string, and stared hard right into my eyes. “Oh yeah?” He had a very confused look on his face, as if he wasn’t sure what to make of what I’d told him. We sat there awkwardly in silence for a minute on our bikes then said our good-byes. It was the last time I ever saw him.

I respected my guitar teacher, Robert, but I naively and impatiently failed to see the direct line between the fundamentals he was teaching me and the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin songs that I wanted to play. It all came to a head soon enough, once I discovered my personal instruction manual, so to speak; it was a used book I found in a guitar store bargain bin called How to Play Rock Guitar. This book had all of the chord charts, tablature, and sample solos from greats like Eric Clapton, Johnny Winter, and Jimi Hendrix. It even came with a little floppy 45 that demonstrated the proper way to play what was in the book. I took that thing home and devoured it, and once I was capable of mimicking the sounds on that little record, I was soon improvising on my own, and then I was beside myself. Once I’d heard myself lay down patterns that sounded like rock-and-roll lead guitar it was as if I’d found the Holy Grail. That book changed my life; I still have my worn-out copy in a trunk somewhere and I’ve never seen another one before or since. I’ve looked for it plenty of times to no avail. I feel like it was the only copy left in the world and that it was there that day waiting specifically for me. That book gave me the skills I sought and once I’d begun to master them I quit music school forever.

I was now a “rock guitar player,” as far as I was concerned, so out of necessity, I borrowed one hundred bucks from my grandmother and bought an electric guitar. It was a very cheap Les Paul copy made by a company called Memphis Guitars. I was attracted to the shape, because most of my favorite players played Les Pauls—it epitomized rock guitar to me. That said, I didn’t know enough to even know who Les Paul was; I wasn’t acquainted with his sublime jazz playing and had no idea that he had pioneered the development of electric instruments, effects, and recording techniques. I didn’t know that his brand of solid body guitar would soon become my primary choice of instrument. And I had no idea at all that I’d enjoy the honor of sharing a stage with him many times, many years later. Nope, that day it was pretty basic; in my mind, that shape visually represented the sound I wanted to make.

FINDING GUITAR WAS LIKE FINDING MYSELF; it defined me, it gave me a purpose. It was a creative outlet that allowed me to understand myself. The turmoil of my adolescence was suddenly secondary; playing guitar gave me focus. I didn’t keep a journal; I couldn’t seem to vocalize my feelings in a constructive fashion, but the guitar gave me emotional clarity. I loved to draw; that was an activity that took my mind off things, but it wasn’t enough of a vehicle for me to completely express myself. I’ve always envied the artists who could express themselves through art, and only through the guitar have I come to understand what a wonderful release it is.

Practicing for hours wherever I found myself was liberating. Playing became a trance that soothed my soul: with my hands occupied and my mind engaged, I found peace. Once I got into a band, I found that the physical exertion of playing a show became my primary personal release; when I’m playing onstage I’m more at home in my own skin than at any other time in my life. There is a subconscious, emotional level that informs playing, and since I’m the kind of person who carries his baggage around internally, nothing has ever helped me tap into my feelings more.

Finding my voice through guitar at fifteen was, to me, revolutionary. It was a leap in my evolution; I can’t think of anything that made more of a difference in my life. The only moment that came close had occurred two years before when I first experienced the mystery of the opposite sex. Once I’d done it, I didn’t think that anything was better than sex …until I played guitar. And soon after that I found out that those two pursuits couldn’t coexist peacefully in my teenage world.

My first girlfriend was named Melissa. She was a cute, kind of chubby girl with great tits, who was one year younger than me. She was twelve and I was thirteen when we lost our virginity to each other. That isn’t shocking by today’s standards, when teens engage in very adult practices earlier than ever, but in 1978, she and I were ahead of the curve: most of our peers were still French kissing. We both inherently knew not to mess with a good thing, so we stayed together, on and off, for years. The first time we did anything was in the laundry room of her apartment building, which was on the first floor, in the back of the building. She jerked me off; it was a first for both of us. Eventually we moved it to the one-bedroom apartment that she shared with her mom, Carolyn. Unfortunately, the first time we did, Carolyn came home early, so I had to crawl through Melissa’s bedroom window with my pants around my ankles. Luckily the bushes were forgiving.

Things got hot and heavy between us pretty quickly; when her mom wasn’t home, we did it in Melissa’s bed, and when she was home, we did it on the couch after Carolyn passed out on Valium, hoping she wouldn’t wake up and catch us. Of course, trying to wait for Carolyn’s Valium to kick in wasn’t always easy. It was soon after Melissa and Carolyn moved upstairs to a two-bedroom that her mother resigned herself to what we were up to. She decided that it was better that we do it in her home than elsewhere and told us as much. According to Melissa and me, from our sexually ravenous, adolescent point of view, her mom was the coolest.

Caroyln smoked a ton of pot and was very open about it; she would roll us perfect joints and allowed me to stay with them, sleeping in Melissa’s room, for weeks at a time. Since we got together during the summer, my mom didn’t mind. Her mother didn’t work; she had a very nice, much older drug-dealer boyfriend who sold coke, pot, and acid, all of which he would give to us freely, provided we enjoyed it all in-house.

Their apartment building was on Edinburgh and Willoughby, about two blocks west of Fairfax and half a block south of Santa Monica Boulevard. The location was perfect—the Laurel Elementary School that my friends and I frequented was just down the street. That’s where Melissa and I met, actually. The playground was as much of a community as Melissa’s block was. Her neighborhood was an interesting cultural mishmash: young gay guys, older Jewish families, Russians, Armenians, and Middle Easterners lived alongside one another. There was a quaint, Leave It to Beaver quality to it, with everyone smiling and waving and saying hello, but there was also a very tangible tension.

On an average night, Melissa and I would get high and listen to music with her mom, then head across the street to visit Wes and Nate, the two gay guys who lived in the only house among the apartment buildings to be found in a six-block radius. They had a huge yard, probably about an acre, and a tall oak tree with a swing hanging from it on their lot. We’d smoke a joint with them, then proceed to the backyard, where we’d lie under the oak tree, staring at the stars.

I discovered so much contemporary music during that period, too. I mentioned that my parents played music all the time; it’s my fondest memory of childhood. I listen to all of it still, from the classical composers my dad favored to the sixties and early-seventies legends they both loved. That period was rock and roll’s most creative time. I’m constantly looking and rarely finding music that’s better. When I think I have, a closer inspection reveals it to be just another rehash of the originators. And then I find that I’d rather just listen to the Stones or Aerosmith or whatever it’s based on than listen any further.

But when I was thirteen, I wasn’t satisfied with my parents’ collection anymore. I sought out new sounds, and found an endless supply at Melissa’s house. That is where I was first exposed to Supertramp, Journey, Styx, April Wine, Foghat, and Genesis—none of which really suited my taste. But Melissa’s mom listened to a ton of Pink Floyd, which I knew from my mom, but given that Carolyn had such good pot, their music suddenly took on a whole new meaning. That apartment was paradise for a budding guitar player: getting stoned for free, discovering new tunes, and having sex with my girlfriend all night, all before I graduated junior high.

I don't think there's anything better than hearing your favorite band live

I SPENT THE REST OF EIGHTH GRADE and all of ninth grade touring Hollywood with Steven by day, playing guitar in my room, and sleeping with Melissa. I stole a chunky, Panasonic top-loading tape player at some point and carried it everywhere, soaking up music like Ted Nugent, Cheap Trick, Queen, Cream, and Edgar and Johnny Winter. I stole more cassettes each day, absorbing one band at a time. I would start with a band’s live album, because I believe that is the only way to determine whether or not any band is worth your attention. If they sounded good enough live, I’d steal their entire catalog. I also used live records to hear their greatest hits before I embarked on stealing their entire catalog—I was frugal. I still love live records; as a fan of rock music—and I still feel like a fan first—I don’t think there’s anything better than hearing your favorite band live. I still believe that the best representations of my favorite bands were captured on their live albums, whether we’re talking about Aerosmith’s Live Bootleg, the Who’s Live at Leeds, the Rolling Stones’ Get Your Ya Ya’s Out, or the Kinks’ Give the People What They Want. Much later, I was very proud when Guns N’ Roses put out Live Era; I think it captures some great moments.

ASIDE FROM MELISSA AND STEVEN, MY friends were much older than I was. I had met many of them through my bike gang and made many more along the way because I always had pot from one source or another. My mom was a pot smoker who was very liberal in her rearing: she preferred that I smoke pot under her supervision, rather than experiment out in the world. With all due respect to her, she had my best intentions in mind, but she didn’t realize that not only did I smoke at home under her watchful eye, but I also pinched a little of her weed (sometimes just the seeds) to smoke or sell when I went out. It was, without fail, the best way to ingratiate myself and I thank her for it.

The kids in the older circles I ran in had apartments, sold drugs, threw parties, and clearly thought nothing of entertaining minors. Aside from the obvious benefits, such an environment also allowed me to discover bands of the day that I would have otherwise missed. There were a bunch of surfer and skater guys I hung out with who turned me on to Devo, the Police, 999, and a few more radio-friendly New Wave bands. Among another clique that I hung with, a lanky black guy in his twenties named Kevin turned me on to the first Cars album during one of his parties.

Kevin was the older brother of one of my bike buddies, a guy named Keith who’d nicknamed me Solomon Grundy. I looked up to Keith because he always had the hottest girls from Fairfax High School chasing him around. When I was thirteen and fourteen and really into BMX, this guy was in the scene, but so cool that he always seemed to be about one step away from ditching it altogether for more sophisticated, adult pursuits. I’m still not sure why Keith called me Solomon Grundy.

In any case, Kevin’s musical taste was questionable. He was into disco, which was an interest we did not share, though I now realize that he was so inclined because it afforded him the opportunity to get as much trim as possible—so I respect him more for it now. It worked, too, because the girls in his circle and at his parties were hot and promiscuous, which was especially intriguing to me. That said, I didn’t expect to like the “cool new band” Kevin was going to play for me while we smoked a joint in his room at his party that night. I changed my mind midway through the first song, and by the time the second song was over I was a lifelong fan of Elliot Easton. Elliot was the soul of the Cars, and that first record of theirs won me over. In my opinion, the Cars were one of the few impactful groups that came along when New Wave took over the airwaves.

Just before I left the party that night, I heard a snippet of music that seriously grabbed my attention. Someone had put Aerosmith’s Rocks on the stereo and I caught only two songs, but that was enough. It had this really nasty alley cat vibe to it that I had never heard before. If lead guitar was the undiscovered voice that had resided within me, this was the record I’d waited my whole life to hear. I made sure to check out the album cover before I took off, so I’d know who it was. I remembered the name Aerosmith; four years before, in 1975, they had their only AM radio hit at the time with “Walk This Way.” I ran into the Rocks record again a week or two later …but at the most inopportune moment.

I must preface this next story by saying that relationships are never easy, especially when both parties’ bodies are young, inexperienced, and raging with hormones. Melissa and I really cared for each other, but we still broke up and made up often, usually as a result of my commitment to learning to play guitar overshadowing my commitment to spending time with her. At this particular point, we were apart and I had set my sights on someone we’ll call Laurie. She was a significantly older, very obviously out-of-my-league figure among my circle of friends. Laurie had incredible tits, long blond-brown hair, and wore really thin, strapped, low-cut tops. They were so sheer and loose that her chest was far too easy to see. Like me, Laurie was recently single: she’d broken up with Ricky, her very typical surfer boyfriend. I was determined to be with her; I didn’t care that she was four years older than me and wouldn’t give me the time of day. I knew I could do this. I kept talking to her and paying attention to her and finally got a dialogue going. She let her guard down and got to know me, and once she did, she seemed to forget that a few weeks before I was nothing but some much younger punk she didn’t care to notice. Finally she invited me over to hang out one night when her mom was going out of town.

I parked my bike on her lawn and followed her upstairs to her room. It was years ahead of my comprehension of cool and groovy at the time: she had scarves over the lamps, rock posters everywhere, her own stereo, and a ton of records. We got stoned and I intended to play it cool, so I flipped through her albums looking for something to impress her. I recognized Rocks from Kevin’s party a few weeks earlier and put it on, ignorant of the fact that it had been playing nonstop in my subconscious since the moment I heard those first two songs. Once the opening shrieks of “Back in the Saddle” filled the room, I was transfixed; I listened to the record over and over, crouched by the speakers, ignoring Laurie completely. I forgot about her altogether as well as whatever intricate plans I had for the evening. After a couple hours, she tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“I guess you should go home now.”

“Oh, yeah …Okay.”

Rocks is as powerful to me today as it was then: the screaming vocals, dirty guitars, and relentless grooves are bluesy rock and roll as it is meant to be played. There was something about the raw adolescence of Aerosmith that was perfectly in tune with my inner development at the time; that record just sounded the way I felt. After my missed opportunity with Laurie, I devoted myself to learning “Back in the Saddle.” I stole the cassette and an Aerosmith songbook and replayed the song until I knew the riffs. I learned a valuable lesson in the process: music books can’t teach you how to play properly. I’d sort of learned to read music, so I could tell that the notes in the songbook were not the same as those being played on the record. It made sense: I struggled for hours and still couldn’t play along properly. So I ditched the books and kept at it until I’d learned to figure it out by ear; and I figured out every other song I wanted to play that way forever after.

In the process of learning every lick of “Back in the Saddle,” I realized just how idiosyncratic Joe’s and Brad’s playing is, and how no one can ever really play like anyone else but themselves. Imitation should remain a stepping stone for a player to find his or her own voice, but it must never become his or her voice: no one should emulate their heroes to the point of note-for-note mimicry. Guitar is too personal of an expression for that; it should be exactly what it is—a singular extension of the player.

BY THE TIME MY LAST JUNIOR HIGH SUMMER drew to a close, I had created a world of my own design that was as consistent as my home life was irregular, because during this period, in the wake of their separation, my mom and dad each entered into very irregular relationships. I lived with each of them for short amounts of time, but neither situation felt quite right. I ended up mostly living with my grandmother in her condo in Hollywood while my little brother lived with my mom. Of course, most of the time I slept over at Melissa’s.

Following her relationship with David Bowie, my mom started dating a talented photographer we’ll call “Boyfriend.” They were together for about three years and eventually moved into an apartment on Cochran off Third, near La Brea, where I lived with them for a while. Boyfriend was probably ten years younger than Ola; when they met he was a star on the rise: I remember meeting Herb Ritts, Moshe Brakha, and a few other famous photographers and models at their place. My mom and Boyfriend had a pretty tumultuous relationship, during which she regressed into his assistant and put her career aside.

Boyfriend always had a darkroom in his bathroom, and toward the end of their relationship I discovered that he was freebasing cocaine in there all night long while “working.” It wasn’t always all bad over there, but once freebasing suddenly popped up in Boyfriend’s life, it proceeded to promptly halt his career—taking his relationship with my mom down with it. Boyfriend was tortured; he was miserable and misery loves company, so although I wasn’t fond of Boyfriend at all (and he knew it), he was determined to drag me along for the ride. We’d freebase together, then go out into the neighborhood and wander into other people’s garages. Usually we’d steal used furniture, old toys, and whatever odds and ends it seemed like the family had discarded. One of the items we found was a red couch that we carried all the way back to our house; we then spray-painted it black and put in the den. I can’t imagine what Ola thought when she woke up the next morning. I have no idea actually, because she never mentioned it. In any case, after our adventures, Boyfriend would keep at it, basing all morning and, I suppose, all day. I’d duck into my room by 7:30 a.m., pretend to sleep for an hour, then get up, say good morning to my mother, and head off to school as if I’d just had a good night’s sleep.

My mom had insisted that I live with her and Boyfriend because she disapproved of the conditions I’d been subjected to over at my dad’s place. Once my dad had acclimated to their separation, he got it together to rent an apartment where his friend Miles and a group of my parents’ mutual acquaintances lived. It seemed like everyone in that scene drank a lot, and my dad was dating a number of women, so my mother didn’t think it was a good environment for me. My dad dated a woman named Sonny on a regular basis during that period. Life had not been kind to Sonny; she’d lost her son in a horrible accident and though she was really sweet, she was really screwed up. She and my dad spent a lot of time together drinking and fucking. So for a while there, while I lived with Mom, I saw Dad only on weekends, but when I did, he always had something interesting waiting for me: some unusual dinosaur model or something more technical, like a remote controlled airplane that you had to build from scratch.

Later on, I saw more of him once he moved into an apartment on Sunset and Gardner, in a building of studio apartments with a shared bathroom. His art buddy Steve Douglas lived just down the hall. On the first floor was a guitar store, though at the time I hadn’t yet picked up the habit. My dad’s art studio filled the entire room, so he’d built a loft to sleep in on the far wall and I lived there with him for a while when I was in seventh grade, just after I got kicked out of John Burroughs Junior High for stealing a load of BMX bikes—but that is a story not worth telling. In any case, for that brief period I attended Le Conte Junior High, and since my dad didn’t drive, I walked the five miles to school and back each day.

I’m not quite sure what Dad or Steve did for money. Steve was an artist as well and as far as I could tell, all they did was spend their days drinking and their nights painting for their own benefit or talking about art. One of my more entertaining memories from that period involved Steve’s old-fashioned medicine bag full of vintage porn that he caught me looking at one day.

His place and our place were basically shared space, so it was entirely normal for me to wander down to his studio whenever I wanted to. One day he walked in and found me looking through his treasure chest of porn. “I’ll make you a deal, Saul,” he said. “If you manage to steal that bag out from under my nose, you can keep it. Think you’re up to it? I’m pretty quick; you’d better be good.” I just smiled at him; I’d already devised a plan to make it mine before he challenged me. I lived down the hall—compared to what I was already doing out in the world in terms of theft, this wasn’t much of a heist.

A couple of days later I went over to Steve’s place looking for my dad and at the time they were so engaged in conversation that they didn’t even notice that I’d come in. It was the perfect opportunity; I grabbed the bag, walked out, and stashed it up on the roof. Unfortunately it was a short-lived victory: my dad ordered me to give it back once Steve realized that it was gone. It’s too bad; those magazines were classics.

There were periods throughout my childhood when I insisted to my parents that they weren’t my parents, because I honestly believed that I’d been kidnapped. I also ran away a lot. One time when I was preparing to run away, my dad actually helped me pack my suitcase, which was a little plaid bag he’d bought me in England. He was so understanding about it and so helpful and kind that by doing so, he convinced me to stay. That kind of subtle reverse psychology is one of the traits of his that I hope I’ve inherited, because I’d like to use it on my kids.

I’D SAY MY BIGGEST ADVENTURE WAS the day I took off on my Big Wheel when I was six years old. At the time we lived at the top of Lookout Mountain Road and I rode it all the way down to Laurel Canyon, then all the way down Laurel Canyon to Sunset Boulevard, which, all in all, is just over two miles. I wasn’t lost, I had a plan: I was going to move into a toy store, and live there for the rest of my life. I guess I’ve always been determined. Sure, there were many times that I wanted to get away from home as a kid, but I have no regrets about how I was raised. If it had been any bit different, if I’d been born just one minute later, or been in the wrong place at the right time or vice versa, the life that I’ve lived and come to love would not exist. And that is a situation that I wouldn’t want to consider in the slightest.