Читать книгу My Appetite for Destruction: Sex & Drugs & Guns ‘N’ Roses - Steven Adler - Страница 29

The first time we actually performed a song, we were at some black guy’s house, a kid we met at the Granada Hills music store. He played the drums, his brother played guitar, and they performed the Beatles’ “Day Tripper” for us. I closely watched him play, sort of learning from his movements.

They let Saul and me have a go at it. For the first time I actually played on a real drum set. From watching the guys play, we mimicked what they did and played as best we could. We made some kind of whacked-out sound. But for kids who had no idea what they were doing, the seeds were there. We were born rockers.

Although Saul had just started playing guitar, he was really amazing from the very beginning. Saul was also writing kick-ass original songs, cool ones that had great hooks. In comparison, I wasn’t very good on the drums. That wasn’t going to stop us though. After that jam, Saul and I were all psyched to come up with a name for our band. After kicking a few around, one of us just blurted out “Road Crew.” It’s like when Robert Plant wrote the lyrics to “Stairway to Heaven,” and he said that two-thirds of that song just poured out of him in like twenty minutes. He felt like he was channeling more than writing, and that’s how we felt with “Road Crew.” It was just sitting there in the cosmic realm, waiting for one of us to pluck it out.

God, we loved that name. It summed up our warrior attitude about bringing great rock ’n’ roll to the masses. That was going to be our thing. Taking music from the streets to the streets. And when you think about our later success with GNR, that’s what helped us click with our fans. They immediately recognized that this was their music, their own street brand of rock ’n’ roll.