Читать книгу Slash: The Autobiography - Anthony Bozza - Страница 14

Institutional hallways are all the same, they’re just different colors. I’ve seen the inside of several rehab centers, some more upscale than others, but the clinical sobriety of their walls was identical. All of them were predominantly white and plastered with optimistic slogans like “It’s a journey, not a destination” and “One day at a time.” I found that last one ironic considering the road that Mackenzie Phillips has been down. The rooms were generic backdrops engineered to inspire hope in people from every walk of life, because, as those who have been there know, rehab is a more accurate cross section of society than jury duty. I never learned much from “group”; I didn’t really make any new buddies in rehab and I didn’t take advantage of multiple opportunities to make new drug connections either. After I’d spent days in bed with my body in purgatorial knots, unable to eat, speak, or think, I wasn’t up for small talk. To me, the communal aspect of rehab was forced—just like high school. And just like high school, I didn’t fit in. Neither institution taught me their intended lessons, but I learned something important from each of them. On my way back down their hallways toward the exit, I was confident that I left knowing exactly who I was.

I entered Fairfax High in 1979. It was an average American public high school—linoleum floors, rows of lockers, a courtyard, a few around-back spots where kids have snuck cigarettes and done drugs for years. It was painted a very institutionally neutral light gray color. There was a good spot to get high out by the football field, there was also a continuation school on the other side of campus called Walt Whitman, where all the real fuck-ups went, because they had to. That seemed like the end of the line, so although it was more interesting, even from afar, than the normal campus, I tried to stay away from that place as much as possible.

My best friend, Steven Adler, was shipped back to the Valley for high school, which was as far off as Spain in my mind. I did visit him out there a few times and it never failed to disappoint: it was flat, dry, hotter than it was at home, and exactly like a sitcom neighborhood. Everyone there seemed to cherish their identical lawns and identical lives. Even at a young age, I knew something was wrong with that place; beneath the normalcy, I could sense that those people were more fucked up than anyone in Hollywood. I felt bad for Steven, and once he was gone, I retreated further into my guitar world. I went to school, always registering as if I were there every day, but on average I’d attend my first three classes and spend the rest of my time on the bleachers playing guitar.

There was only one class that meant anything to me in high school; consequently, it’s also the only one in which I earned an A. It was a music theory course that I took freshman year called Harmony, taught by a guy named Dr. Hummel. The class reduced the elements of musical composition to their roots, defining the fundamentals in mathematical terms. I learned to write time signatures, chords, and chord structures, all by analyzing the underlying logic that binds them. We never played an instrument: our teacher used a piano as a tool to illustrate the theories, but that was all; the class was purely a study of theory. While I was terrible at math, I was good at this, so it was the one class I never missed. Every time I showed up, I felt like I already knew the lessons we learned. I never consciously applied any of it to the guitar, but I can’t help but think the knowledge of notation that I picked up seeped into my mind and aided my playing somehow. There was a cast of characters in this class: among others there was Sam, the piano virtuoso, a Jewish guy with tight curly hair, and Randy, who was a long-haired, Chinese, metal guy. Randy always wore a satin Aerosmith jacket and was of the opinion that Keith Richards and Pete Townshend sucked and Eddie Van Halen was God. We eventually became friends and I came to enjoy our daily debates as much as I enjoyed that class, because it was made up of mostly musicians discussing nothing other than music.

Other classes, meanwhile, didn’t go so well for me. There was one teacher who chose to make an example of me once when I fell asleep on my desk. I had an evening job at the time at the local movie theater, so I could have been tired; it’s more likely that I was just bored out of my mind, because the class was social studies. From what I understand, the teacher stopped everything to discuss the concept of stereotype with the class. He noted my long hair and the fact that I was asleep and, illustrating the meaning of the word stereotype, he concluded that I was a rock musician who probably had no greater aspirations in life than playing very loud music. He then woke me up and asked me a few pointed questions.

“So I take it you’re probably a musician, right?” he asked. “What do you play?”

“I play guitar,” I said.

“What kind of music do you play?”

“Rock and roll, I guess.”

“Is it loud?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty loud.”

“Notice, class, this young man is the perfect example of a stereotype.”

I am always grumpy when I first wake up, so this was more than I was willing to take. I got up, walked to the front of the class, flipped his desk over, and left. That incident, combined with a prior weed bust, spelled the end of my career at Fairfax High.

I LEARNED MORE ABOUT MY PEER GROUP at the unofficial high school recess where freshmen to seniors from Fairfax and other high schools gathered at the end of a long dirt road at the top of Fuller Drive, way up in the Hollywood Hills. It was called Fuller Estates; it’s not there anymore—now it’s just a curve on the hiking trail in Runyon Canyon. It was a teenage wasteland in the late seventies and early eighties, but before that it was much more interesting: in the 1920s, it was Errol Flynn’s mansion; it occupied a few acres at the top of that wide hill overlooking L.A. Between then and when I was a kid, it fell into serious decline, and by 1979 it was a ruin of a foundation; just a big concrete slab and an empty pool. By the time I saw it, the place was a statuesque wreck with an amazing view.

The song's bombastic, apocalyptic riff just consumed my entire body.

The crumbling concrete walls were a two-level maze that was a perfect, out-of-the-way spot for stoners of all ages. It was pitch-black there at night, far away from the glare of any streetlight. But somebody always had a radio. I was on acid up there the first time I ever heard Black Sabbath. I was out of my mind, staring into the black sky above Fuller Estates, tracing trails between the stars when someone nearby blasted “Iron Man.” I’m not sure that I can pinpoint how I felt; the song’s bombastic, apocalyptic riff just consumed my entire body.

That place and everyone there was straight out of a seventies teen movie. In fact, it was captured perfectly in Over the Edge, a film starring a young Matt Dillon, about a bunch of repressed, stoned, and out-of-control Texas teenagers who were ignored by their parents to the degree that they took their whole town hostage. In the film, as I bet it was for all of the kids who hung out up at Fuller, the characters’ parents had no idea as to what their kids were really up to. In its most aggressive and most realistic moments, that film was a true representation of teenage culture at the time: most kids’ parents either didn’t care enough to notice or naïvely thought they were doing the right thing by trusting their children and turning a blind eye.

WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL KIDS LOOKED a few different ways. The influence of spandex seeped in, thanks to Pat Benatar and David Lee Roth, and that trend left its colorful mark: girls wore tight, low-cut, neon body suits, and some guys weren’t far behind. I remember seeing Capezios when I was in junior high, but thank God, they were out by the time I was a freshman; although feathered hair was still standard for either sex. It was far too common and wasn’t cool by any means.

Another huge influence was the film American Gigolo, starring Richard Gere, which chronicled the downfall of a stylish Beverly Hills male escort. It was the worst thing that could have happened to Hollywood teenagers because every girl who saw it strove to re-create their personal version of that world. Suddenly, girls who were thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen tried to dress as if they were twenty-five and aspired to date well-dressed, much older guys. I never dialed into their psychology, but I watched more than a few girls I knew, as early as fifteen, start wearing too much makeup, doing blow, and dating nineteen-year-olds and twentysomethings. It was fucking pathetic and straight up sad. A lot of them became casualties of the scene before they even reached legal drinking age. After all, they had a huge head start, so it caught up to them before they even got out of the gate.

I DIDN’T LOOK LIKE ANY OF THE OTHER kids in school and my interests certainly set me apart. I have worn long hair, T-shirts, jeans, and Vans or Chuck Taylors since I first had a say in the matter. Once I was in high school, all I cared about was music and playing guitar; I never abided by the trends that swayed my peers, so I was a throw-back. It’s always been a paradox with me; I stood out but I didn’t crave or court obvious attention. All the same, I was used to not fitting in and wasn’t comfortable with anything else: I had changed schools so often that I was the perennial new guy—and probably, in the minds of my peers, the freaky new guy.

It didn’t help that to the naked eye, I wasn’t obviously anything: upper-, middle-, or lower-class; white, black, or otherwise. As I got older, and as my home address continued to change, I realized and understood why my mom so deeply pondered my school registration forms before checking one box or another: if I was listed as black in certain school districts I might be bused out of the zone to an inferior school when I otherwise might be enrolled in the better school down the street if I were a registered Caucasian. I never found a niche based on race in high school, and I’ve always been aware of my race only when it was an issue in the minds of others. I have been in many situations, back then and ever since, when I’ve noticed very “open-minded” individuals adjust their behavior because they were unsure of whether I was black or white. As a musician, I’ve always been amused that I’m both British and black; particularly because so many American musicians seem to aspire to be British while so many British musicians, in the sixties in particular, went to such great pains to be black. It was another way I wasn’t like anyone else, but I can count on one hand the confrontations I’ve had that were racially motivated; they occured once I was submerged in the very white universe of eighties metal. One time at the Rainbow I got into a fight with Chris Holmes from W.A.S.P. Duff overheard Chris saying that niggers shouldn’t play guitar. He didn’t say it to me, but it was obviously about me. As I remember, Duff told me about it later and the next time I saw Chris I went up to confront him and he took off running. Aside from insulting me, it’s one of the more ridiculous and untrue things a musician, of all people, could ever possibly say.

I FOUND MY OWN CIRCLE OF FRIENDS in high school, people who were all pretty unique, different from the rest of the student body. My closest friends, Matt and Mark, defined that period of my life. Matt Cassel is the son of Seymour Cassel, one of the greatest character actors of the past fifty years. Seymour has been in nearly two hundred films since the sixties, most notably those made with his close friend John Cassavetes. He’s been in too many films and TV shows to name; in recent years, director Wes Anderson has been his champion: he’s cast Seymour in Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Seymour is a Hollywood legend; he supported indie film making before it became an institution (his philosophy was that he’d play a role he connected with for the price of the plane ticket). He was also a figure in a hard-partying class of moviemaking royalty that included Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, Roman Polanski, and others.

I could show up at Matt’s house, sit in his room, and play guitar for hours, learning stuff off the records he had: Pat Travers’s Live, AC/DC’s newest, Back in Black; those albums provided hours and hours of riffs to learn. They lived right above Sunset on Kings Road, tucked behind the Riot Hyatt, next door to an A-frame house that is still there. There were porn movies being shot in that house all the time while Seymour was growing weed in the backyard of his place. The A-frame was a huge advantage to hanging at Matt’s: we’d wander over there and mix it up with the porn girls. It wasn’t appropriate, but they liked to get us teenage boys all fired up and frustrated by playing with each other.

Seymour had the best parties, and he had raised his kids well enough to trust them to hang out. My mom knew Seymour, but she never would have condoned the goings-on over there. At Seymour’s parties there was a lot of freedom and it was full-on. His kids, Matt and Dilynn, were so smart and independent that he didn’t have to worry: they’d already figured out who they were amid this crazy existence. Seymour’s wife, Betty, never came out of her bedroom; it was a dark and foreboding mystery to me as to what went on upstairs. Coupled with the fact that Seymour ruled the house with a bit of an iron fist, Matt allowed only a select few of his friends, of which I was one, into their world.

One day Seymour looked at me and bestowed upon me the nickname that resonated with him more than my proper name ever did. As I was passing from one room to another in his house, at a party, looking for the next whatever it was I was after, he touched me on the shoulder, fixed me with that affable gaze of his, and said, “Hey, Slash, where ya going? Where ya going, Slash? Huh?”

Obviously it stuck. My friends who hung at Seymour’s started calling me Slash back at school and soon enough that was the only name everyone knew me by. At the time, my friends and I just thought it was a cool name, but it wasn’t until years later that I caught up with Seymour and he explained it properly. I was on tour during Use Your Illusions, and happened to be in Paris, with my mom along, when Seymour was there, too. The three of us had lunch and he explained that the nickname embodied my sense of hustle, in every sense of the word. He was proud of the fact that I’d actually made a name for myself and that he’d been the one to give me that moniker. His reason for calling me Slash was that I never stood still for more than five minutes; he saw me as someone who was always working on his next scheme. He was right: I’ve always been coming or going more than I’ve ever stayed still. I am perpetually in motion, often saying good-bye while saying hello and Seymour summed that quality up in a word.

I met a ton of people at Seymour’s—including the Stones. After they played the L.A. Coliseum they came by for an after-after party at his place. I had seen the show that night; they played “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” so soulfully that I’ll never forget it. I managed to shake Ronnie Wood’s hand; I was fifteen and little did I know that he’d be one of my best friends later in life. In fact, my first son, London, was conceived in his house.

My other close friend, Mark Mansfield, has popped in and out of my life ever since we first met back in high school. Mark’s dad, Ken, was a record producer and his stepmom was a singer—his real mom lived in Santa Barbara, where he’d often go when he got in trouble—and he was constantly in trouble. Mark’s family lived in a very nice house above Sunset and Mark was a mini James Dean with a touch of Dennis Hopper. He’d try anything and he’d do anything that anyone ever dared him to do—and he’d do it with sheer enthusiasm and a smile on his face. Slowly but surely that attitude led him down a dark road: juvenile detention, rehab, and the like. Mark was the kind of guy who once called me at ten a.m. to tell me that he and a friend had just driven his friend’s mom’s car off the road somewhere along Mulholland. They’d stolen it out of the kid’s mom’s driveway since she was out of town and inevitably launched it off the shoulder, into the canyon. Luckily for them they landed it in a tree and were able to climb back up to street level. Needless to say, the next call I got from Mark was from exile at his mom’s house in Santa Barbara.

AS SOON AS I COULD STRING THREE chords together consistently and improvise a solo, I wanted to form a band. Steven was gone, he was off in the Valley, so I struck out on my own. I had tried to start a band at the very tail end of junior high but it hadn’t gone so well. I found a bass player and a drummer whose mom taught French at Fairfax High School. This was to be my first experience with a temperamental, tantrum-prone drummer; if he made one mistake, this kid would kick the entire kit over. Then we’d have to wait while he set it all back up. The bass player in that band was just awesome. His name was Albert, and we’d play Rainbow covers like “Stargazer.” Unfortunately, Albert got into a bike accident on Mulholland Drive and ended up in a coma for a month or so. He was in traction; he had pins in his neck and in both of his legs and braces holding his legs apart—all of it. He came to school looking like a big capital A, and he had no aspirations of playing bass at all anymore.

My first professional gig was at Al’s Bar, playing in a band with friends of my dad’s. My dad was very proud of my love of guitar and always bragged to his friends about me. I don’t know what, but something must have happened with their guitar player and Tony talked them into letting me play. I’m sure they were worried about whether or not I could do it. But I got up there and was able to handle it: it was all twelve-bar blues and standard blues-based covers like the Stones, which I had a feel for. I got free beers out of it, which is what made it truly professional.

There were a few guitar players in my circle of high school friends. I met a guy named Adam Greenberg who played drums and we found a guy named Ron Schneider who played bass and we became a trio dubbed Tidus Sloan. I still have no idea what that name means …I’m pretty sure that I got it off a guy named Phillip Davidson (who we’ll get to in just a little bit). One night when Phillip was mumbling incoherently I remember being really curious about whatever it was that he was saying.

“Tidus ally sloan te go home,” Phillip said. At least that’s what I heard.

“What?” I asked him.

“Tid us all de sloans to ghos hum,” he said. Or so I thought.

“Hey, Phillip, what are you trying to say?”

“I’m stelling you to tidus these sloans ta grow fome,” he said. “Tidus sloans to go home.”

“Okay, man,” I said. “Cool.”

I think he wanted me to tell all these girls in his house to go home, but I walked away from that situation thinking that Tidus Sloan, whatever the fuck that meant, was a pretty cool name for a band.

TIDUS SLOAN WAS A PURELY INSTRUMENTAL band because we never found a singer and I certainly wasn’t going to sing myself. Basically, I don’t have the personality to be a front man of any kind; it’s enough of an effort for me to get out there and talk to people at all. All I really want to do is play guitar and be left alone. In any case, Tidus Sloan played early Black Sabbath, early Rush, early Zeppelin, and early Deep Purple without vocals—we were retro before there was a retro.

Slash and Ron Schneider, two-thirds of Tidus Sloan.

We rehearsed in Adam’s garage, which drove his mom completely insane. She and the neighbors would complain constantly, which is understandable because we played much too loud for a residential neighborhood. His mom’s name was Shirley and I drew a cartoon in her honor: it was a woman in the doorway of a room screaming, “It’s too loud and I can’t stand the noise!” at the top of her lungs. The floor of the room in the picture is littered with beer cans and on the bed is a kid with long hair playing guitar, totally oblivious.

My caricature of Shirley became the inspiration for my first tattoo, though the figure that I had inked on my arm looks nothing like her—my version has Nikki Sixx hair and huge tits, while the real Shirley favored curlers and was old and fat—though also with big tits. I got that tattoo when I was sixteen; it’s on my right arm and it says Slash underneath it. Adam explained to me later that Shirley’s frequent outbursts were entirely my fault: I had just acquired a Talkbox from Mark Mansfield’s stepmom, which is a sound amplifier that allows a musician to modify the sound of whatever instrument is filtered through it by the movement of his mouth against a clear tube that’s attached to it. Apparently the sounds that I made reminded Shirley of her late husband, who died of throat cancer just a couple years previously. He’d had to speak through an artificial voice box and the sounds I was making were too similar for her to bear. Needless to say I stopped using the Talkbox at her house.

There were a few other guitar players and bands around my high school, like Tracii Guns and his band Pyrhus. I had a moment of envy when I first started playing guitar, before I owned an electric; Tracii had a black Les Paul (a real one) and a Peavy amp, and I’ll never forget how together I thought he was. We would check out each other’s bands at parties and there was definitely a competitive vibe about the whole thing.

In high school I started hanging out with whatever musicians I could find. There were a few guys my age and a few older, left-over Deep Purple dudes, who were irretrievably brain-dead and well past their expiration date to still be hanging out with kids from high school. The best of them was the aforementioned Phillip Davidson: not only did he unintentionally name my first band, but he had a Stratocaster, which was a very big deal, and his parents never seemed to be home. He lived in this beat-up house in Hancock Park that was overgrown with weeds and we’d just party over there all day and all night. We were teenagers throwing keg parties; no parents, just Phillip and his two stoner brothers.

I always wondered where his parents were; it was like the Peanuts cartoon, all kids, no authority figures. It was a mystery to me—I always thought that maybe his parents were coming home at any given moment, but they never did. I felt like the only one who was concerned; Phillip mentioned the existence of his parents, who owned the place, but they never seemed to materialize. There was nowhere they could be hiding either; this was a one-story house with three bedrooms. For all I knew, they could be buried in the backyard, and if they were no one would ever find them because the backyard was piled high with debris.

Phillip used to wander from room to room carrying his joint or cigarette or whatever combination of the two it was, while telling stories that were really long only because he talked really slow. He was a tall lanky guy with a true billy-goat goatee, long auburn hair, and freckles; and he was just stoned like really stoned. I mean, sometimes he would chuckle, but otherwise he was pretty expressionless. His eyes seemed perpetually closed—he was that kind of stoned.

Supposedly Phillip could play Hendrix and lots of stuff on that vintage Strat of his, but I never heard any of it. I never even heard him play anything at all. Whenever I was over there I only remember him putting Deep Purple records on the stereo. He was so burned out that it was just painful to hang out with this guy. I always see the best in people; it doesn’t matter what their fucking malfunction is. But Phillip? I waited in vain for something brilliant to happen, just that small spark in him to ignite a flame that nobody else might see. I waited for two straight years of junior high and never saw it. Nope, nothing. But, he did have a Stratocaster.

I do not like to combine cocaine and guitar.

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, TIDUS SLOAN was pretty functional for a high school band. We played our school amphitheater and plenty of rowdy high school parties, including my own birthday. When I turned sixteen, Mark Mansfield threw a party for me at his parents’ house in the Hollywood Hills and my band was all set to play. For my birthday, my girlfriend, Melissa, gave me a gram of coke and that night I learned a valuable lesson: I do not like to combine cocaine and guitar. I did a few lines just before we went on and I could hardly play a note; it was really embarrassing. It’s been the same the very few times since that I’ve made that mistake: nothing sounded right, I could not find the groove, and I really didn’t want to be playing at all. It felt like I had never played guitar before, or as awkward as the first time I tried to ski.

We did about three songs before I just quit. I learned early to save any kind of extracurriculars for after the show. I can drink and play, but I know my limit; and as for heroin, we’ll get into that later because that’s a whole other can of worms. I did, however, learn enough to know to never carry that kind of habit on the road.

The most extravagant Tidus Sloan gig was at a bat mitzvah deep in the middle of nowhere. Adam, Ron, and I were getting high at the La Brea Tar Pits one night and met some girl who offered us five hundred bucks to play her sister’s party. When she saw that we weren’t that interested, she started dropping the names of many famous people, her “family’s friends,” who were going to be there, Mick Jagger included. We remained skeptical, but over the course of the next few hours, she built this party up to be the biggest happening in L.A. So we packed our equipment and as many friends as we could into our friend Matt’s pickup truck and set off to play this gig. The party was at the family’s house, which was about two hours from Hollywood—about an hour and forty-five minutes further than we expected; it took so long that we didn’t even know where we were by the time we got there. The moment we turned into the driveway, I found it impossible to believe that this house was about to host L.A.’s most star-studded party of the year: it was a small, old-fashioned, grandparents’ home. There were clear vinyl slipcovers on the furniture, blue shag carpet in the living room, and family portraits and china displayed on the wall. For the space available, this place was way overfurnished.

We arrived the night before and slept in their guesthouse. It was a hospitable gesture but a horrible idea, and to tell you the truth, this very proper Jewish family looked truly shocked when we arrived. We set up our equipment that night on the veranda, where they’d set out the tables and chairs and a small stage, for the next day’s performance. Then we proceeded to get completely annihilated on the load of booze we’d brought with us. We consumed it privately and did our best to contain ourselves to the guesthouse, but unfortunately, we exhausted our supply and were obliged to break into the family’s house to acquire a few bottles of whatever was readily available. Those bottles happened to be the worst ones we could have gotten our hands on: mixing our vodka, and whiskey, with Manischewitz, and a bunch of liquors that were never meant to be downed straight from the bottle spelled the beginning of a very long weekend—for us, for our hosts, and for the many guests who showed up the following morning.

Over the course of the night, our band and our friends destroyed this family’s guesthouse to a degree that surpasses nearly every similar episode that I can remember Guns ever getting into. There was puke all over the bathtub; I was sitting on the bathroom sink with this girl when it broke off the wall—water sprayed everywhere until we closed the valve. It looked as if we’d vandalized the place on purpose, but most of it was just a side effect. I am happy to say that I did not commit the worst offense of all: barfing in the stew. This dish, which was a traditional recipe served at every bar and bat mitzvah in the family, had been left to simmer overnight in the guesthouse so it would be ready to eat the next day. At some point in the evening, one of our friends lifted the lid, vomited into the pot, and replaced the lid without telling anybody—or turning off the heat. I can’t tell you quite what it was like to wake up on the floor with a raging headache, broken glass stuck to my face, and the odor of warm vomit-infused stew clinging to the air.

Unfortunately the horror show continued for this poor family. We had drunk all of our booze and all of the booze we’d stolen from the main house the night before, so we started stealing booze from the outdoor bar first thing in the morning, as we began to rehearse. Later, when the relatives filed in for the afternoon’s celebration, we were playing pretty loud and no one knew what to do or say, though a few suggestions were made.

A very peppy, very short old lady came up to offer her constructive criticism.

“Hey, you, young man, it’s too loud!” she said, squinting up at us. “Do you think you could turn it down? Some of us are trying to have a conversation!”

Grandma was slick, she had Coke-bottle black-framed glasses and a designer suit and though she was short she had complete authority. She asked us if we knew any “familiar” songs and we did our best to accommodate her. We threw in all of the Deep Purple and Black Sabbath covers that we knew. They had a stage set up for us with chairs in front of it, but it was pretty clear that aside from a few six-and eight-year-olds, the entire party was plastered against the wall farthest from the stage. Actually, the guests were behaving as if it were raining outside, because when I looked up I realized that they’d packed themselves into the living room when there was no reason to flee the open air aside from the sounds of our set.

We’d completely freaked out the partygoers, so we tried to draw them in by slowing things down: we did a heavy-metal version of “Message in a Bottle.” That didn’t work, so we tried to play whatever other popular songs we knew; we played “Start Me Up,” over and over, without a singer. It was no use; our half-hour instrumental version of it didn’t get anyone out on the floor. Out of desperation we played Morris Albert’s “Feelings,” as interpreted by Jimi Hendrix. That didn’t do it either, so we made it our swan song and got the hell out of there.

IT MIGHT BE SURPRISING TO SOME, BUT even before I had a band, I started working regularly as early as possible to earn the money that I needed to pursue playing guitar. I’d had a paper route since ninth grade that was pretty extensive; I covered from Wilshire and La Brea down to Fairfax and Beverly. It was only Sundays; I’d have to be up at six a.m. unless I could convince my grandmother to drive me. I’d have two huge bags on either end of my handle bars, so leaning just a touch too much to either side spelled wipeout. I eventually upgraded my employment to a job at the Fairfax movie theater.

The amount of time I put into work and the amount of time I put into learning the guitar were simultaneous revelations to me: I finally knew why I was putting my nose to the grindstone. I guess it was the union of my parents’ influence: my dad’s creativity and my mom’s instinct to succeed. I might choose the hardest way to get wherever I want to go but I’m always determined enough to get there. That inner drive has helped me survive those moments when everything was against me and I’ve found myself on my own with nothing else to see me through.

Work was something that I focused on and did well whether I liked my job or not, because I was willing to work my ass off all night and day for the cash to support my passion. I got a job at Business Card Clocks, a small mail-order clock factory. From September through December each year, I would assemble clocks for a bunch of companies’ holiday gift baskets. I’d put an enlarged reproduction of their business card on a piece of masonite, insert a clock movement in the center, put a wooden frame around it, box it up, and that was that. I made thousands and thousands of these things. We were paid by the hour and I was the only person there who got crazy; I’d be there at six a.m., work all day, through the night, then I’d sleep there. I don’t think it was legal, but I didn’t care: I wanted to make as much money as I could during the season.

It was a great job that I kept for quite a few years, though it did eventually bite me in the ass: my boss, Larry, paid me by personal check, so I was never on the books at his company, and he never reported my salary to the IRS. Since I wasn’t on the books, I saw no reason to pay taxes on my earnings. But the very moment that I made money with Guns a few years later, the IRS came calling, demanding all of those back taxes, plus interest. I still can’t believe that of all the things I’ve done, the government nailed me for my job at a clock factory. I found out later how it went down: the IRS audited Larry and grilled him about a certain amount of money that couldn’t be accounted for over the course of a few years so he was forced to confess that it had been paid out to his employee, me. The IRS tracked me down and put a lien on my earnings, accounts, and assets: any money that I deposited in a bank would immediately be seized to cover my tax debt. At that point, I had been broke for too long to give it all up once I’d finally gotten it: rather than pay it off with my share of Guns’ first advance check, I had my cut consolidated into traveler’s checks, which I kept on me at all times. But we’ll get to all that in just a little bit.

Another job was at the Hollywood Music Store, an instrument and sheet music shop on Fairfax and Melrose. As much as I was trying to earn my keep while pursuing what I really wanted to be doing, there were so many what-the-fuck moments. Here’s one of them: there was a guy who used to come in and shred every day in the guitar section. He’d pick a “new” guitar off the wall, as if he’d never seen it before, and proceed to play it for hours. He’d tune it, shred on it, and just kind of hang out and play for what seemed like years. I’m sure there’s one in every music store.

WHEN I STARTED JUNIOR HIGH, THERE were so many great hard rock records for me to listen to and learn from: Cheap Trick, Van Halen, Ted Nugent, AC/DC, Aerosmith, and Queen were all in their prime. Unlike a lot of my guitar-playing peers I never strove to imitate Eddie Van Halen. He was the marquee lead player around, so everyone tried to play like he did, but nobody had his feel—and they didn’t seem to realize that. His sound was so personal, I couldn’t imagine coming close, or trying or even wanting to. I picked up a few of Eddie’s blues licks from listening to him, licks that no one registers as his signature style because I don’t think he’s ever properly appreciated for his great sense of rhythm and melody. So while everyone else practised their hammer-ons and listened to “Eruption,” I just listened to Van Halen. I’ve always enjoyed individualistic guitar players, from Stevie Ray Vaughn to Jeff Beck to Jonhny Winter to Albert King, and while I’ve learned from observing their technique, absorbing the passion of their playing has taught me so much more.

In any case, things had changed by the time I got to high school. By 1980, English punk had found its way to L.A. and had become something utterly ridiculous that had nothing to do with its roots. It was a swift, impossible-to-ignore fashion statement: suddenly every older kid I knew was wearing torn-up shirts, creepers, and wallet chains made of paper clips or safety pins. I never understood what the big deal was; it was just another superficial installment in the West Hollywood scene that revolved around the Rainbow, the Whisky, Club Lingere, and the Starwood.

I never considered L.A. punk worth listening to, because I didn’t consider it real. Around then the Germs were the big band, and they had many imitators, all of whom I thought couldn’t play and totally sucked. The only bands that I thought were worth anything were X and Fear—and that was it. I respected the fact that the core of punk, from a musician’s point of view, was about not being able to play very well, and not giving a shit about it. But I had a problem with the fact that everyone in the scene exploited that aesthetic for all the wrong reasons—there’s a difference between bad playing and deliberately playing badly for a reason.

Slash doing what he does best: playing constantly.

Coming out of London and New York, punk rock made an impression, and as much as it was misinterpreted in L.A., it did give birth to a bunch of great clubs, the Café de Grand being the best of them. That was the greatest venue at which to see true hardcore punk shows, but it wasn’t the only one—the Palladium put on great hardcore shows, too. I saw the Ramones there, and I’ll never forget it—it was as intense as surfing big waves. Other than a few exceptions, L.A. punk was as pathetic as the miles of poseurs lined up outside of the Starwood every weekend.

At that time, I had finally gotten to an age where I was the older kid. I had spent my life running around being the younger guy hanging with the older kids, getting into what they were into, always wanting to be a part of the cool stuff they were doing. Now I was that kid, and as far as I was concerned, the punk movement and this really horrible fashion thing that had followed it in the back door had ruined everything. I had just gotten old enough to appreciate and enjoy all the stuff that had gone on before that, and just as I had everything started to fucking suck.

From the time I was born up until 1980, everything was pretty stable. It was all sort of based on rock and roll, despite the pretty watered-down rock bands that came out: Foghat, Styx, Journey, REO Speedwagon, and many more. From ’79 and ’80 on, with the exception of Van Halen, everything went in a different direction, which instilled a whole different kind of rebellion, and what I was into more or less got phased out by trendiness.

I wanted to play guitar in a band that inspired that degree of devotion and excitement.

AFTER I WAS EXPELLED FROM FAIRFAX High for that social studies incident I found myself in high school limbo. Education has always been a priority for my mother; she let me live wherever I could, however I wanted, all summer long, as long as I agreed to move in with her, wherever she might be, come fall. She needed real assurance that I was going to school so nothing but my living under her roof would do. The summer after my expulsion, I enrolled for summer school at Hollywood High to try to earn the credits I needed to join Beverly Hills Unified High School with the rest of the class at the beginning of my sophomore year. But I also tried to get out of high school altogether by studying for and taking the proficiency exam. It didn’t go so well: during the first half hour I took a smoke break and never went back.

During this period, my mom finally left her boyfriend, “Boyfriend” the photographer. Once Boyfriend began to freebase away, literally, everything in the house (he eventually ended up bankrupt), my mom and my brother packed up and moved out suddenly. I wasn’t spending much time at home at the time, so I didn’t witness it all go down firsthand. But when I heard, I was relieved.

My mom, brother, and grandmother moved into an apartment together on Wilshire and La Cienega and, per Mom’s rules, I joined them there in the fall. Mom wanted me to graduate high school before I set out on whatever path I chose to follow, but I hadn’t left her much to work with. My grades, attendance, and behavior record were less than stellar, so she did her best: she got me enrolled as a continuation student at Beverly Hills High.

Continuation is where they put kids with “adjustment” problems: learning disorders, behavior issues, and those who don’t otherwise sync with the standard curriculum. Whereas at Fairfax I thought this was a situation to avoid, here it was perfect for me; I was allowed to work at my own pace, and I could set my hours to suit my new place in the workforce. I’d arrive at eight and leave at noon because I had two jobs at the time; aside from the Fairfax movie theater, the fall was high season at the clock factory.

My classmates in Continuation Education at Beverly Hills High were a real cast of characters. There were a couple of full-on Harley-Davidson biker chicks, one that was a behemoth, whose heavy-set, fortysomething, Hell’s Angels boyfriend picked her up every day. He’d arrive early and just sit there revving his engine; the other chick had her own Harley. There were also three Sunset Strip rocker chicks in class; their Aqua Net hair extended in every direction and their ripped-up T-shirts and spiked stiletto heels spoke for themselves. All three were attractive in their own way …they knew how to use lipstick and eye shadow, put it that way. I knew this other girl in class: her name was Desiree, the daughter of one of my dad’s friends, Norman Seiff, a well-known rock photographer. We were playmates when we were little and we used to play naughty with each other back then. I had a crush on her all those years ago and I had so many more reasons to have a crush on her when I saw her again: she sat a row in front of me and wore nothing but loose sleeveless shirts and no bra. She had grown into a hot buxom punk rocker, who was still as cute to me as she had been when we were seven.

There was other riffraff in that class as well; we were a diverse and outlandish enough group that we could have been collectible figurines: there was the surfer-stoner Jeff Spicoli guy, the hot teenage mom-slut, the plump brooding Goth, the sad Indian kid who worked the night shift at his parents’ 7-Eleven; all of us barely clinging to the fringe of high school society. Looking back, I’d like to know how every person in the classroom ended up there, at the otherwise ritzy Beverly Hills High, no less. We were sequestered together for the benefit of our “progressive” education in one classroom with one coed bathroom that doubled as our community smoking lounge. That is where I discovered why those three Sunset Strip rocker chicks looked like they did: they were the unofficial presidents of the Mötley Crüe fan club. They did free PR as well: they turned me on to Mötley during the first smoke break I shared with them.

I had known about Nikki Sixx, the bassist and creator of Mötley Crüe, since his first band, London, because Steven and I saw them play the Starwood one night when we managed to sneak in. London had true stage presence; combined with their low-budget pyrotechnics and Kiss-esque clothes, they were band enough to blow any teenage mind. I had no idea that Nikki had met Tommy and that they had found the other guys and evolved into Mötley Crüe; neither did I know that they were spearheading a movement that would displace L.A. punk overnight. Mötley didn’t look like Quiet Riot, Y&T, or any other Sunset Strip band of the day: they were as equally over the top but they weren’t quite like anyone else. They were so into their own thing that there was no way that anyone, aside from me I suppose, could have mistaken these three girls for anything other than Mötley Crüe fans.

There are moments in life that only time can properly frame; at best you know the snapshot is special when you take it, but most of the time only distance and perspective prove you right. I had one of those moments just before I ditched education altogether: it was the day Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee showed up outside of my school. Six years later I’d be doing lines with them off the flip-down meal trays on their private jet, but seeing them loitering outside Beverly Hills High is more memorable to me. They were wearing high-heeled boots, stretch pants, teased out hair, and makeup; they were smoking cigarettes; talking to girls in my high school parking lot. It was sort of surreal. I watched my newfound continuation friends, those three Mötley look-alike chicks, stare at the two of them with glazed doughnut eyes as Tommy and Nikki nonchalantly handed them posters to hang and flyers to hand out on the Strip announcing Mötley’s next show. I was in awe: not only did these chicks find this band so exciting that they chose to dress like them, they were also willing to be their volunteer street team. Nikki had given them copies of their new EP, Too Fast for Love, and their job was to convert all their friends into Mötley Crüe fans. It was like seeing Dracula set his disciples loose on Beverly Hills to suck the blood of virgins.

I was impressed and objectively envious: I could never be in a band that looked or sounded like Mötley Crüe, but I wanted what they had. I wanted to play guitar in a band that inspired that degree of devotion and excitement. I went to see Mötley that weekend at the Whisky …musically, it was just okay, but as a concert it was effective. It was memorable because of the full-on production: Vince lit Nikki’s thigh-high boots on fire and they set off a ton of mini flash pots. Tommy pounded away like he wanted to split his drum set in two, while Mick Mars shuffled around his side of the stage, hunched over like the walking dead. What affected me the most, though, was the audience: they were so die-hard that they sang every song and rocked out as if the band were headlining the L.A. Forum. It was obvious to me at least, that soon, Mötley would be doing just that. And in my mind, that meant only one thing: If they can do it on their own terms, why the fuck can’t I?