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I liked being the industry’s least industrious extra as often as possible: I found absolutely nothing wrong with free lunch and an afternoon of being paid to sleep. I looked forward to the same when I was scouted by a casting director for the film
Sid and Nancy
. Unbeknownst to any of us, the same casting director in various locales, scouted every single member of Guns N’ Roses individually. All of us showed up to the first day of casting, like, “Hey…what are you doing here?”

It wasn’t much fun; actually, it was like jury duty: there was a pen full of extras, but all five of us were chosen to be in the same concert scene, where “the Sex Pistols” are playing some small club. The shoot required showing up early in the morning, for three consecutive days, with the usual promise of a meal ticket and a hundred bucks each day. A three-day com
mitment was too much for the other guys. In the end, I was the only one of us pathetic enough to show up for the duration.

Fuck them, I had a blast; for three days, they shot these “Sex Pistols” concert scenes at the Starwood, a club that I knew inside and out. I’d show up in the morning, clock in and get my meal ticket, then disappear into the bowels of the Starwood and get drunk on Jim Beam all by myself. While the other extras were doing their part playing audience members down on the floor in front of the stage, I watched the proceedings from a hidden corner of the mezzanine—and got paid the same wage.

AS GUNS BECAME A CLUB BAND TO BE
reckoned with, a few ridiculous L.A. managers started to circle us like sharks, claiming that they had what it took to make us stars. At this point we had amicably and temporarily parted ways with Vicky Hamilton, so we were open to offers, but most of those that we got were just retarded. One of the more convincing examples of how low those types will go and what would be in store for us should we make that mistake came courtesy of Kim Fowley, the infamous character who managed the Runaways the way Phil Spector managed the Ronettes; basically just a legalized form of indentured servitude. Kim gave us his best lines, but the moment he talked about taking a percentage of our publishing and making a long-term creative commitment to him, it was clear what he had in mind. His bullshit and demeanor spoke for themselves because Kim was too odd of a guy to fake it.

I liked him nonetheless and was happy to hang out and be entertained by him—as long as he didn’t get too close. The rest of us were the same kind of animal: willing to take advantage of everything someone might have to offer without making any promises we’d have to keep. Axl would hang out as long as the conversation was worthwhile because Axl is a good talker. Steven was there if there were chicks involved. And I was willing to consume all of the free Denny’s meals, cigarettes, drinks, and drugs in exchange for the conversation I had to put up with. Once the factors that had drawn us in were exhausted, one by one, we’d make our exit.

Kim introduced us to a guy named Dave Liebert, who was Alice Cooper’s tour manager for a time and had worked with Parliament-
Funkadelic, only God knows when, and those two were intent on signing us as a team, and taking us for all we were worth. Kim took me over to Dave’s house to meet him one night and I remember Dave showing us his gold records. His attitude was “Hey, kid, this could be you.” I assume he intended to entice me further by inviting two girls over, who were young enough to be his daughters, that spent the night shooting speed in the bathroom. Dave dragged me in there at one point and it seemed like these chicks had no idea what they were doing. They were so inept that I wanted to grab the needle and inject them myself. Dave was into it and, in the unbearable fluorescent light of that bathroom, stripped down to his underwear and fooled around with these girls—who were nineteen at best—and invited me to join in. I remember thinking that of all the reasons why this scene was so very scummy, the lighting was worst of all. The thought of this guy managing our band and Kim Fowley with his collection of prehistoric gold records made it nearly impossible not to just laugh hysterically right in his face. It would have been professional suicide before we ever had something to lose. We’d never stand a chance if the management was as debaucherous as the band, anyway.

AS GUNS KEPT REHEARSING, WRITING,
and gigging, working to define who we were, I started going out more. Suddenly there were actually bands I wanted to see because finally the scene was changing: there were bands like Red Kross who were a glam band, but were gritty, and at the other end of the spectrum, there were bands like Jane’s Addiction who were great and that I related to but I wasn’t on the same page with. We played shows with some of those more obscure, arty bands—I remember a gig at the Stardust Ballroom—but they never quite came off right. We weren’t considered hip by the bands in that scene, because they thought of us as a glam outfit from the Troubadour side of town more than we ever really were. What those bands didn’t know is that we were probably darker and more sinister than they were. Nor did they realize that we could not fucking stand our peers on the other side of town.

In fact, as our popularity grew, we began to wage war with the bands on “our” side of town. We never went out of our way to fuck with them, but
after a while everybody we played with was scared of us because Axl got a reputation for being volatile and flying off the handle at any given moment. I’d been out with him several nights where we got into these fucking major fights with total strangers for no real reason that I can recall. As far as Axl was concerned, there definitely was a good reason for it, but as far as I could tell, we were just fighting people in the street—literally in the street—because someone had looked at him the wrong way or said the wrong thing. Although I must admit…it was a hell of a lot of fun.

I’d say that my life lost all trace of a stable, “regular” existence once I was fired from my job at the newsstand. As I mentioned earlier, I’d been living with Alison, my former manager at that job, literally renting space on her living-room floor, but once I got fired, her charity and my regular paycheck dried up. With nowhere to live, I packed up my snake, my guitar, and my black trunk and moved into Guns’ rehearsal space, where Axl and I soon became permanent residents. Izzy, Steven, and Duff had girlfriends that they crashed with—Izzy and Duff even had apartments of their own. Axl and I were the only two with nowhere else to go.

Our rehearsal “studio” was pretty raw; it was one of three storage units in a building off Sunset and Gardner that were meant to house boxes or cars, not people. The front door was a corrugated aluminum roll-up like the kind you find on a cheap garage, the floor was sealed concrete, and we were the only renters who chose to make our fifteen-by-twenty-foot space into a residence. The building came complete with a communal bathroom about fifty yards away, but most often, I preferred to piss in the bushes across the alley from our “foyer.” We called the place the Sunset and Gardner Hotel and Villas.

Our rehearsal space had no business masquerading as a living space because it wasn’t even meant to be a rehearsal space—it was barely even a decent storage space.

Eventually, Izzy decided that at the least, Axl and I should have a proper bed, so one day, he and Steven found some two-by-fours and built a makeshift queen-size loft over the drum kit. It was as welcome an innovation as the flush toilet had been in eighteenth-century England. We had one other implement that made our band “apartment” more of a home—a charcoal hibachi grill that one of us either stole or bought. I never used it, because
as much as I appreciate fine cuisine, I’ve never been bothered to try my hand at it, but somehow Steven and Izzy could turn out very decent meals on that thing.

We were industrious about writing songs and rehearsing every day in there, but since Axl and I lived there full-time, our practice space soon became an out-of-the-way, off-the-map late-night destination with no house rules. On a typical night, one of us would be getting laid in the loft or out in the open, another one of us might be passed out between an amp and the drum kit, and usually assorted friends were drinking and doing drugs in the alley until the sun came up. We wrote a lot of good songs in that garage, inspired by our surroundings. “Night Train,” “My Michelle,” and “Rocket Queen” among them.

“Night Train” was pieced together from a few different moments. I remember first working on the main riff of that song with Izzy, sitting there on the dank floor of that place, just before I moved out of Alison’s. We didn’t know where the song was going and we didn’t have any kind of subject in mind, but the groove was so right and we locked in and felt it out. I remember feeling a bit off and the next day I came down with a bad case of strep throat. I was laid up sick on Alison’s couch for two days but in the interim, Izzy played Duff what we’d done and Duff worked on it, filling out the groove and making our riffs into a proper instrumental.

None of us had any words in mind for this piece of music, but we were very inspired by it and it floated around in the band’s consciousness until it found the appropriate vessel, which happened to be a celebration of our favorite drink, Night Train.

One night we were walking up Palm Avenue, which was an infamous street in our world because more than a few sleazy chicks lived there, a few junkie girls we knew lived there, and so did Lizzy Grey, the guitarist in London. We spent a lot of time on that block in those days, because we knew a few too many characters in that neighborhood, so every time we found ourselves walking over there we knew it was the start of something. That night we were sharing a bottle of Night Train, a “wine” that is about 18 percent strong and back then could be bought for less than two bucks a bottle. It is the cheapest low-rent wine that money could buy and we drank it like crazy whenever no one else was paying. It might not sound like much,
but it’s definitely a trip; unless you’ve tried it, you probably won’t understand why we found ourselves improvising lyrics in its honor as we wandered up Palm Ave.

I can’t remember who started it, but someone burst out with the chorus: “I’m on the Night Train!” We all joined in and kept going as Axl improvised all of the lines in between: “Bottoms up!” “Fill my cup!” “Love that stuff!” and “I’m ready to crash and burn!”

It came to us in one of those amazing moments, just like “Paradise City.” “Night Train” was an anthem that we came up with on the spot, not even knowing how much it really captured us as we were at that moment in time. In the same vein as “Paradise,” there is an innocent quality to that song; it’s a nursery rhyme almost, a cute melody sung by kids on a playground…sinister kids whose playground is a seedy back alley.

That song really got all of us fired up. I don’t remember if we got to it later that night back at the rehearsal garage or the next morning, but within a day, we had it all worked out. Axl got the lyrics down, we smoothed out all of the parts and that was it. We tested it out at our next club date and it worked. It
really
worked. That song has a rhythm to it in the verses that from the start always made me go crazy. The first time we played it, even, I just started jumping up and down—I couldn’t help it. When we had our huge stage much later on, I’d run the length of it, jump off the amplifiers, and lose it just about every single time we played it. I’m not sure why, but no other song we’ve ever played live made me move like that.

There was one more classic that we wrote back there in that garage: “My Michelle.” The music originated there, I think over the course of a few afternoons. I believe Izzy and I came up with the basic structure, and then, as usual, Duff came through with exactly what the song needed to evolve. In any case, I didn’t write the words, but I definitely know what they’re about. The subject of the song is Michelle Young, who was friends with my first girlfriend, Melissa. I knew the both of them all through junior high, well before Guns was even an idea, let alone a reality.

The thing is, because of friends of mine like Mark Mansfield and Ron Schneider who were still close to me and part of the music scene to a degree, at the time, many of my old friends became involved in the Guns N’ Roses universe once it got going. Because of our common friends, I reestablished
connections with people I hadn’t seen since I’d left school, and many of them got sucked into our world—for better, and mostly for worse.

Michelle was one of them; even when we were kids she was always a nut case. When she started frequenting our circles, she ended up hooking up with Axl and they had a brief romantic interlude. He wrote those lyrics about her life, which tells the facts of her upbringing verbatim. Her dad was definitely involved in the porn business and her mom was a pill popper and drug addict who eventually committed suicide. But having my former school friend with whom I’d shared cigarettes in the bathroom back in junior high become the subject of one of our more intense songs was something else. I asked Axl about it one day, because I couldn’t imagine the Michelle I knew being happy about having her story made public.

“Hey, Axl,” I said to him at rehearsal after we’d run through the song, “don’t you think Michelle is going to be offended?”

“Why would she?” he said. “It’s all fucking true.”

“Yeah it is, but I don’t know if it’s going to be cool if you say all those things. Can’t you change it a bit?”

“No,” he said. “It’s the truth. Even if she doesn’t like it, I’m going to do it anyway.”

I expected the worst; even though we had nothing to sue for, I expected Michelle to come after us in some way. I at least expected her to hate the song and be mortified by having her business hung out there like that. I was very, very wrong: from the moment we played that song live through to when we recorded it for our album, Michelle loved the attention it brought her. Back then it was the best thing that ever happened to her. But like so many of our friends that were drawn into the dark circle of Guns N’ Roses, she came in one way and went out another. Most of them ended up either going to jail or rehab or both (or worse), but I’m happy to say that she’s among those who turned their lives around before it was too late. More than a few of our friends eventually moved to Minneapolis…maybe that had something to do with it.