Читать книгу My Appetite for Destruction: Sex & Drugs & Guns ‘N’ Roses - Steven Adler - Страница 53

Gardner Park used to be a big empty storage warehouse where they held auto shows in the 1930s. I found a place to set up my drums there and would play for hours inside, where the acoustics produced a big John Bonham sound and the echo effect was like the intro to “Misty Mountain Hop,” massive, very awesome. The place had been deserted for years and grass had squeezed up through cracks in sections of the cement flooring. I could play, but the set would wobble; it was so unstable my cymbals would rock back and forth. I had two giant Asian gongs, more than three feet in diameter, an idea I ripped from Carmine Appice, who had the coolest setup when he played with Beck, Bogert, and Appice.

While I was practicing one afternoon, one of the gongs must have shifted because of the uneven flooring and came flying down. I looked up at exactly the worst moment and took the full brunt of thirty pounds of metal in the face. It knocked me clear off my stool and onto the hard floor. I took off my T-shirt and wrapped it around my head over my nose, then found myself back at the hospital getting my schnoz rebuilt again.

During this time I was working at the O’Neal Motorcycle Shop warehouse, where I printed the O’Neal logo and numbers on T-shirts for bike riders. The floor manager there was a guy named Mark Marshal, a cool guy and a great guitar player who looked like a musketeer with his goatee, long black hair, and long thin pointy nose. Eventually, I got fired from O’Neal for always being late. But by then, Mark and I had become good friends, and we agreed to form a band. So with a bass player, a guy I think was of Russian descent, we all got an apartment together. But even though we really wanted to start a band, our schedules didn’t allow us much time to get together.

I found another job, but we were all basically broke, living on nothing. I remember eating melted butter over steamed rice every day for a week. We didn’t even have soy sauce. No one’s going to go out and buy a bottle of soy sauce when you’re saving up for a Def Leppard concert.

In April ’83, Mark and I went to see Def Leppard at the L.A. Forum. Even though we were skimping and saving for weeks, we still didn’t have enough money for tickets, so we just went to the back entrance where the trucks went in. I have this great memory of hearing the song “Photograph” being performed. After the show, we just started helping the roadies load shit in the trucks, and the band came out and stopped by the first truck. They were standing right next to me.

I thought they were going to kick us out, so I figured, “Now or never, I gotta do this.” I said hi to Rick Allen and shook his hand, which at the time was definitely the biggest rush of my life. I didn’t get to see the show, but I got to meet Rick. I told him the story when we had dinner together years later.

Mark and I also saw a lot of cool bands at Chuck Landis’s Country Club in Reseda, which was right down the street from our apartment. We saw the Christian metal band Stryper there a couple of times. They were so hot, really had their shit together, and drew huge crowds. I borrowed a couple of moves from their drummer, Robert Sweet, who had this huge drum set and was set up sideways so you could see him playing.

“The Visual Timekeeper,” he called himself. He was the coolest-looking motherfucker up there. Their music was so loud and clear that they sounded like a studio recording; it was that perfect. Oz Fox was incredible, playing guitar and singing backups. They looked huge, like Kiss, larger than life, with matching yellow and black outfits. There must have been some serious cash put into their show. I saw them three times and I loved them. Hey, I was a fan.

We saw Joe Perry at the Country Club too, during the short time that he was not in Aerosmith. Coincidentally I remember, years later, Axl told me that the first concert he saw was Aerosmith during the same year when Jimmy Crespo was playing guitar, and Axl thought his solo was one of the best he ever heard. The band Rose Tattoo opened up the show, turning Axl on to them and inspiring him later to have our band perform the Rose Tattoo classic “Nice Boys.”