Face the Music: A Life Exposed (36 page)

When I wrote songs like “Heaven’s On Fire” or “Tears Are Falling,” it was because I had to. I was the one doing the work, and I enjoyed getting the credit I deserved. During the height of MTV’s popularity, I became a sort of eighties pretty boy—though it was certainly a different time, and with feathered earrings, rouge, and pink gloves (courtesy of Van Halen’s stylist, whom we hired), I looked as much like a drag queen as anything else. Let’s just say the criteria for what was considered attractive was a little different during the hair band era.

I had a few girlfriends during those years, but for the most part, relationships were still just about companionship and sex. I didn’t want exclusivity and didn’t expect it from women. I just wanted to have a good time.

I had things sorted out so that even when we were off the road, I was never alone. I split my time between New York and L.A., renting apartments out there or living at hotels like the Sunset Marquis. L.A. was the place I went to indulge in what always started as carefree excess with women; when those relationships inevitably got too complicated, I would go back to New York.

Despite the newfound attention through KISS music videos, I wasn’t comfortable being a public figure all the time. With his movie career in mind, Gene sought to surround himself with the most famous people possible; I came in a distant second in that department. It was fun to read about who I was involved with in the gossip magazines—but it wasn’t so much fun to read about a break-up. Once, I peered over the shoulder of a woman who was reading an article in the
Star
in which the actress Lisa Hartman explained why she would never marry singer Paul Stanley. I could have done without that stuff.

The kind of people who lived in the tabloids considered themselves only as important as the amount of press they got. That was how they defined themselves. When I was around people like that, in addition to dealing with my own shit, I had to deal with somebody else’s shit—like how hurt they were that their segment on
Access Hollywood
wasn’t longer.

One woman I dated in L.A. worried that her house was too far east—on the eastern edge of Beverly Hills rather than smack-dab in the middle. Another one apologized that she lived in the Valley rather than on the Hollywood side of the hills. I spent time in those superficial circles, but I knew that I didn’t want to live in them.

None of the relationships was leading anywhere, but they did stave off the loneliness. One night late in the year we played a show in New Jersey before heading home to New York. A
Penthouse
Pet I knew came backstage after the show and said, “I have a Christmas present for you.”

I said, “I’ll give you a ride back to the city in my limo.”

Once on the highway she undid my jeans and gave me my present. Then she lifted her head and said, “Merry Christmas.”

Hey, what about Hanukkah?

As far as my sexual exploits, during the seventies I had paddled around the pool, so to speak; during the eighties I was doing backflips in it. I went to a party one night at the Playboy Mansion, and as soon as I walked in the door I found myself standing in front of a Playmate of the Year whom I had seen in the magazine and thought was incredibly hot. We spoke for a few minutes, and then she said, “Do you want to leave?”

“Sure,” I said, half-wondering what would happen if she were to reply, “Then why don’t you get the fuck out of here?”

Instead, she said, “Let’s go.”

We continued the festivities at her place.

My class at the High School of Music & Art set up a fifteenth reunion that year, too—the class of 1970. I had missed my tenth reunion because of the tour in Australia just after Eric Carr joined the band, so I wasn’t going to miss the fifteenth. More than seeing how everyone’s lives had turned out, I knew I wanted to rub my success in their faces.

The woman I was seeing in New York at the time was—surprise!—a
Playboy
centerfold. I thought about taking her to the reunion, but then I thought about that date I’d had back then—with the coolest girl in school, Victoria. The date where I ended up talking to Victoria’s dad as she went off to bed. The date that resulted in the hottest chick in class snickering at me for the rest of high school. I decided I would go to the reunion by myself. I told my bunny I’d give her a call once I got the lay of the land at the reunion. What I didn’t tell her was that I sort of hoped I could finally bang my failed conquest.

I had a suntan earned at the Sunset Marquis, and I wore a sharp, tailored blue silk suit. I couldn’t wait to see all these people who had considered me the least likely to accomplish anything.

The event was held at the school, and when I walked in, all I could think was that everybody was too big for the furniture. The atmosphere was surprisingly somber, and most of the people had not aged well. I still pictured them all as young people, full of vitality and dreams and aspirations, and here they were looking like they were at a Halloween party dressed as old people. They looked old and broken.

Fifteen years later, Victoria had short mousy hair and was wearing clunky orthopedic-style shoes and a frumpy skirt—she wasn’t so hot anymore. At first I felt a brief jolt of vindication at seeing her like that, thinking of the way she had never let me live down the folly of our one date. But then I wished she could have looked as good as she had fifteen years before. This was just depressing.

Another guy there had been a real Adonis in high school—handsome, with long curly hair, and a great voice. He could howl like Robert Plant and carried himself that way. Now he was pasty and bald as a billiard ball. The best-looking guy in school didn’t necessarily remain the best looking, and me, the guy nobody thought would ever win a race, turned out to be a marathoner.

The whole thing was uncomfortable and disappointing. I left quickly and picked up my waiting girlfriend and went out for a nice dinner.

I had found no joy in rubbing my success in people’s faces. And I never wanted to go to another reunion.

A
sylum
sold nearly as well as
Animalize,
but the band started to peter out again after the album was released, and by early 1986 we were off the road again for about a year.

Howard Marks, our business manager, called me one afternoon and said he’d gotten a call from Tom Zutaut, an A&R man famous for signing Mötley Crüe. “Tom just signed this band,” Howard said, “and wanted to know if you want to go check them out. They’re looking for a producer.”

Well, Gene was off making another movie. We weren’t going to work on the next record until the following year. Why not?

Howard came with me to meet the band—a bunch of young guys called Guns N’ Roses. We had arranged to meet them at an apartment their manager had rented for them near the corner of La Cienega and Fountain. I introduced bald, pot-bellied Howard as my bodyguard, as a joke; but after looking around for a few minutes, I could see why they didn’t get it.

Izzy was unconscious, with drool coming out of the side of his mouth. It wasn’t clear whether he was sleeping or dead—that’s how rough he looked. Duff and Steven were very nice, and Steven was just glowing about what a big KISS fan he was. I didn’t realize that the half-comatose, curly-headed lead guitar player who called himself Slash was what had become of the sweet kid I’d spoken to during the interviews before the recording of
Creatures
a few years earlier. Then Axl chatted with me and played a few songs on a crappy cassette player they had lying around.

When he played “Nightrain” I thought it was really good, but I told him that maybe the chorus could be used as a pre-chorus instead, and there could be another chorus added afterwards. That was the last time he ever spoke to me. Ever.

Slash roused himself, and he and I started talking about the Stones. I showed him Keith’s five-string open-G tuning, which was the set-up Keith used to write all his stuff. I took a string off and retuned a guitar, and he thought it was very cool. I also offered to help Slash get in touch with people who could hook him up with some free guitars—we were sponsored by all sorts of instrument companies, and I figured a young guy like him could use some help getting equipment to record with.

That night, I went to see their gig at Raji’s, a little dive in Hollywood. I thought the songs they had played for me were good, but they didn’t prepare me for seeing the band live. Guns N’ Roses were stupendous. I was
shocked,
given the collection of wastoids I’d seen earlier that afternoon, and I immediately realized I was witnessing true greatness.

I went to see them perform again at another club, called Gazzarri’s—it later became the Key Club. They weren’t happy with the guy mixing their sound, and Slash asked me out of the blue to help out. Decades later, Slash’s recollections of the night would be faulty at best. He liked to pretend I had
dared
to meddle with their sound. God forbid this guy from KISS would have anything to do with Guns—I mean, what could be worse than a guy from KISS, of all things? He also recalled that I had a blond trophy wife with me. But I wasn’t married and was in fact there with a short brunette named Holly Knight, who was a songwriter famous for “Love Is a Battlefield,” among other hits. There is obviously a reason why defense attorneys never want to put alcoholics or drug addicts on the witness stand.

That was years later, of course. Immediately after my interactions with the band, I started to hear lots of stories Slash was saying behind my back—he called me gay, made fun of my clothes, all sorts of things designed to give himself some sort of rock credibility at my expense. This was years before his top hat, sunglasses, and dangling cigarette became a cartoon costume that he would continue to milk with the best of us for decades.

I didn’t wind up being involved with G’n’R’s album. No surprise there. The surprise came a few months later when Slash called me and wanted to follow up on my offer to help him get some free guitars.

“You want me to help you get guitars after you went around saying all that shit about me behind my back?”

Slash got real quiet.

“You know, one thing you’re going to have to learn is not to air your dirty laundry in public. Nice knowing you. Go fuck yourself.”

F
ive-string open-G tuning wasn’t the only thing I learned from Keith Richards. When I ran into him in person, he told me he’d been offered the chance to buy anything he wanted from our storage space in New York—part of a warehouse where we kept old stage sets and equipment, all the makeup-era outfits, lots of instruments, all sorts of things.

“Yeah, mate,” he laughed. “Could’ve bought the lot of it.”

At first, I simply didn’t understand. Was this the legendary English sense of humor? Was it some misremembered anecdote he’d somehow mangled? But the more I thought about it, the more worried I got. Now that he mentioned it, I had noticed things disappearing. Several times I’d gone to the warehouse to grab guitars I wanted to use, only to come up empty. Once, it was a guitar that I had stashed there only a week before. I
knew
it had to be there.

The solution to the mystery was depressing: Bill Aucoin, who somehow still had keys to the warehouse, was secretly selling our stuff out the back door. By then, he had spiraled so far down that he was couch surfing from one friend’s place to another. His last client, Billy Idol, had left him. When Billy Idol abandoned you for your drug use in the 1980s, let’s just say it must have been bad. So we relocated. We had a few things torched or cut down for scrap—like the stage set from the
Animalize
tour—but we moved most of it first to New Jersey and later to L.A.

Bill’s activities soon turned out to be the least of our worries, however. I still lived in a one-bedroom apartment and had only one car, but Howard Marks started saying I needed to tighten my belt. He told me I had to cut back on the money I was giving my parents. That raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

It wasn’t that I expected tour money when we weren’t on tour. But what about all the money that had been invested on our behalf? Where was that?

I’m not living ostentatiously. I’m not living some ridiculous lifestyle.

Something tells me HE’s making too much money.

Eventually, I said it straight out: “If anybody’s going to get less money, it should be you.” That didn’t go over so well.

The music industry has never been kind to artists. In the case of our business managers, I didn’t want to believe they had acted in bad faith. But certainly, some decisions had been made that smelled pretty bad once I started sniffing around.

The big wakeup call came from an odd source: my therapist, Dr. Jesse Hilsen. I started talking about my misgivings and all the things being said about my finances, and he started asking questions—about my earnings, about retirement accounts—none of which, embarrassingly, I could answer. I wasn’t supposed to show our financial statements to anyone—which, again, should have been a red flag—but Dr. Hilsen agreed to have a look at some of them.

And what he asked after examining some statements was a shock: “Do you know that you owe the IRS millions of dollars?”

“What!?”

“Yeah, and it’s overdue and they’ve given notice that they’re going to come after you.”

“How is this possible?”

Howard had been like a family member. I had always trusted him. Our long relationship represented an increasingly rare instance of stability with the band. Now I had uncovered many examples of highly questionable judgment. I didn’t want to nitpick over legality—the point was that a lot of decisions had been made that clearly weren’t in my or the band’s best interests—decisions that wouldn’t have been made the same way if our business managers had been making them about their own money. There were investments with people who just happened to be associated with them and our attorneys. There were tax shelters that had gone awry and never been addressed. There were reckless decisions. A lot of it smacked of the same sort of cronyism I’d seen elsewhere inside the music business, and I had always thought we were immune to it because of Howard. Now I wanted to spit at him. It was a huge betrayal.