Slash (24 page)

We got over to England and stayed in two apartments, Axl and Izzy and Alan in one and Duff and Steven and I in the other. We had a tour manager named Colin and we got there a week before our shows to rehearse and do some press. We were staying in Kensington High Street, which was too far from the twenty-four-hour culture of Soho. It was not at all a rock-and-roll neighborhood; it was very proper with nothing to do but drink in the pub on the corner, which of course we did. It reminded me of the time we spent in Canoga Park: we explored everything and found nothing that was quite our scene. Except in London no one paid attention to us.

Todd Crew and Del James met us out there, which elevated the tempo considerably. Todd had tickets to Paris that his parents had given him for his college graduation. Looks can be deceiving: to the naked eye he was a
burnout, but Todd was a college grad and was very well schooled. He’d never taken that trip, so he and Del used those tickets, just two long-haired American rock-and-roll guys totally lost in France living their version of
European Vacation
. After a couple of days they took the ferry over and then the train and crashed out at our place. They were unruly Americans trying to navigate Paris to London via ferries, cabs, and rail. Del used to call people like me and him “lugheads.” I can’t even imagine how those two lugheads ever made it.

Our average day in London consisted of rehearsal, after which we might go to one of the clothing shops in the area because that was all that there was to do. One time my guitar tech Johnny took me to a really nice guitar store. He made a big deal out of me: I was Slash, the guitar player for Guns N’ Roses, the next great American rock band from Los Angeles. While he was schmoozing the owner I lay down on the floor to get comfortable, and passed out cold. They had to carry me out. Apparently that incident made a big impression on the English press and kick-started a handful of nicknames—“Slash Crash” and “Slashed” (as in pissed or drunk) were a couple. It established my “legendary” reputation there. I can’t imagine why.

Once our friends from home arrived, we did carouse more intensely. We’d drink in every pub we saw, rehearse for a few hours, then drink in every other pub we saw until the pubs closed. We weren’t nearly as rambunctious or destructive as we were in say, the Valley, because there wasn’t much that we could have possibly done to bring life into Kensington High Street. Just walking down the street, looking at the manicured parks and gardens, was quite sobering at any time of day. Our rehearsal space had the same cold London environment. In a clinical room or neighborhood like that, you don’t feel right busting things up: it encourages you to drink responsibly and behave politely.

Once we ventured to Soho and beyond, however, we found our peers. One night Duff and I were motivated to see a band (I can’t remember at all who) at Town and Country, which was a converted coach house way out in East London. We were smashed when we got there and we were more smashed when we left, and we had never stopped to consider that we’d be more or less stranded after the show. The trains had stopped running and I’m sure there was a bus, but we
knew nothing about that. We started walking, just trying to make sense of which way was up, looking in vain for a cab. And of course it started to rain.

I was not happy about our situation at all, and apparently I became such a belligerent ass that right then, on some street miles from where we had to go, Duff found it necessary to straighten me out. We didn’t get in a fistfight exactly but there were definitely words exchanged. I don’t know how we got home, I don’t remember passing out; after our “altercation” I remember nothing. We did get back to the apartment somehow where Del lay in wait. Del was fond of taking pictures whenever one of our friends ended up in a compromised position, so I’ve learned through visual evidence that I slept through most of the next morning on my hands and knees with my boots on and my head buried in the corner of the couch. My top hat had been reduced to a complete puddle by the rain, but I’d held on to it—it was sitting there in a heap beside me. I wasn’t happy about that at all—for the rest of the trip. I was like a beaten puppy: “What? No top hat?”

One of our weirder excursions in the week leading up to our gigs took place on a Sunday, which no one bothered to tell us was off license, meaning no liquor stores, pubs, or grocers were allowed to sell booze. Of course you can always find the odd lawbreaker, but that day we had our work cut out for us, because no one was feeling kind to our cause in the proper lanes of Kensington High Street. As we wandered around looking for an open pub, we amassed a few odd stragglers. One of them was a weird young girl who was a rock fan, and was really shy but was somehow…off. She latched on to us and began to follow us wherever we went. No one was really talking or interacting with her much—she just hung around. We weren’t sure if she was a runaway, a groupie, homeless, or emotionally disturbed, but by the end of the night it was clear that she intended to stay wherever we were staying, because it didn’t seem like she had anywhere else to go. She was harmless enough, so we let it happen. Between Del and Todd and the rest of us, our flat was full of people sleeping on the floor, crashed out wherever. I was passed out on the floor myself and I remember that this girl was across the room before I lost consciousness. But sometime during the night, I woke to find that she had unzipped my pants and was sucking my dick. I acted like I was still asleep but I must admit that I didn’t stop her because it was pretty good. In the morning she was gone and we never saw her again.

WE REHEARSED AT JOHN HENRY’S, A
famous studio where everybody who is anybody has done the same. It’s the eqivalent of S.I.R. in L.A., but with an English sensibility—it’s just a bit more “proper.” It was very cool, because lining the hallways were road cases that said motörhead, iron maiden, and thin lizzy. The place had an amazing vibe. We chose to spend our per diems, which were a few pounds a piece, at the pub, so we’d raid the little café at the studio for as many coffees, Danish, and sandwiches as we could stand. We’d get bags of crisps at the corner shops for a few pence and fill up on those before drinking the rest of our money at the pub around the corner.

Our three shows were at the Marquee Club, the famous little sweatbox where everyone from The Who to David Bowie to the Sex Pistols had played. On show days we sound-checked there, then Duff and I spent the evening drinking outside on the street with the curious locals who had come to see us. After a week in Kensington High Street, we were starved for any taste of the rock-and-roll culture that we were used to. I’m not sure if it was that afternoon or after that first show, but hanging out like that I managed to land myself a girlfriend named Sally, who was a hot “Page Three” girl at the time. “Page Three” is a fixture of the English newspaper
The Sun
that features aspiring swimsuit and lingerie models each day, because, they are, after all, newsworthy. I was infatuated with Sally immediately. She made the rest of the English trip much more fun because she also knew where to go. We hung out at a couple of stable Soho rock-and-roll spots. One of them was the Intrepid Fox, where I nailed Phill Magg, the front man of UFO, with a shot glass. I don’t remember why.

I also hung out with my hero, Lemmy Kilmister. The entire band met Mötorhead that trip and that made our journey perfect.

Those Marquee shows were loud and hell-bent; what I remember, I remember fondly. We did AC/DC’s “Whole Lotta Rosie” and Aerosmith’s “Mama Kin,” and all of our original stuff. One of those nights was also the first time that we ever played “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which we put together at sound check on a whim. I’d always loved that song and loved that live version—it was much more raw than what ended up on
Use Your
Illusion
. Those shows went over well enough that, from the start, we were never even considered part of the same league of L.A. hair metal bands who had come through England. We were seen as something else, which was what we’d been saying all along. Finally, it felt like we’d been justified.

AFTER THAT TRIP, WE RETURNED TO L.A.
to put the finishing touches on the album. Axl had brought us a print of a Robert Williams painting that we all agreed should be the cover—it’s a manic scene of a robot about to avenge a girl who has just been raped by eating her attacker. We thought it was perfect; we even adopted the title of the painting as the title of the album:
Appetite for Destruction
.

Everything was great, the album went out as planned with the Williams print on the cover, and no one had a problem with it. That was until Tipper Gore and her lobbying group the PMRC got ahold of it. They were very effective at censoring music at the time, but we didn’t care—we welcomed as much controversy as Tipper could dish out.

Our wish was granted: Geffen got so many complaints that our album was banned before it was ever even properly stocked at the national chains. We were told that most retail stores wouldn’t carry it and most others required that we wrap the album in a brown paper bag unless the cover was changed. Faced with selling nothing now that we finally had something to sell, in a rare moment of common sense, we decided to compromise and agreed to redesign the cover: the Williams print was put on the sleeve inside. A guy we knew at Hell House did a painting of the five of us, as skulls, on a cross, which was
incredible
so we used it for the cover, and Axl had it tattooed on his arm as well. It was a cool enough design that as much as we were unhappy about eating crow, we ended up with something new that we loved. A first edition of that original cover is a collector’s item by the way.

Since I have some illustration skills, I had always been very involved in the design of the band’s art and posters. I remember the day when I took out a bunch of
Guns
&
Ammo
–type magazines back when I had my newsstand job and flipped through them until I found the perfect gun to copy for our logo. I took the picture home with me; at first I wasn’t sure how to tie it all together. I was living over at Yvonne’s and one night, after she and
her mom had gone to sleep, I was sitting up at their kitchen table and it came to me. I took out that picture of the gun and drew it freehand, then I drew another one of them crossed with roses underneath. That simple design stuck; it became the logo for the band.

Anyway, once we agreed on the new cover design, I wanted to go to New York to oversee the new album art layout as well as to meet with our merchandiser about our T-shirts and our new booking agent, Bill Elson at ICM. It was going to be a very busy trip.

At the time I was “dating” a porn actress, Lois Ayres, whose work I appreciated, and while the shocking nature of her performance might have deterred other suitors, I was intrigued by it. We got together somehow or another in L.A. and I had been crashing at her place for a while. When I was scheduled to go to New York, it just so happened that she was scheduled to go as well because she had a few feature performances to do at a couple of strip clubs in Times Square. She had a room booked for her at the Mil-ford Plaza on Eighth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street so I crashed with her when I arrived.

My second morning there, I was awoken at seven a.m.

Ring! Ring!

Ring! Ring!

I picked up the phone and hung it up.

Ring! Ring!

Ring! Ring!

Obviously it wasn’t going away.

“Yeah? What?” I shouted.

“Hello, sir, there is a Todd Crew here to see you,” the voice said. “Is it okay to send him up?”

“Uh…yeah…sure,” I said hesitantly. I had no idea what Todd could possibly want at seven a.m., in New York, no less.

Apparently he’d come out on a last-minute invitation from an actor friend because he’d needed to get out of L.A. fast, for his own good: he and Girl had split up, which was a
major
deal—those two had been together for years and were more or less one person. He’d also been fired by his band, who hated the fact that he hung out with us so much. He was soon replaced by Hanoi Rocks’ Sam Yaffa with little to no discussion. At that
point they’d not only kicked him out, but they’d kept all of his gear and were refusing to give it back. So Todd was not in a good way to say the least. He arrived at my door already fucking drunk, with a full liter of what we liked to call Toad Venom in one hand: vodka and orange juice disguised in a 7UP bottle. I had an entire day of meetings all across town, beginning at ten a.m., but I could see that Todd needed tending to. Girl wasn’t taking his calls, he didn’t have a band, and there was no way that I was leaving him alone.

I had no choice; I took him to all of my meetings, which was quite the endeavor. They were all within a few long midtown blocks of one another, which was fine with me; I’d planned to go to each of them on foot—it was a long way to go, but I was actually looking forward to it. It was one of those oppressively hot New York July days and Todd insisted that I first take him to a Western Union about ten blocks out of my way to pick up some money. He was so distraught that I agreed, and to this day I wish I hadn’t: if I had refused to go to Western Union with him, it might have ended differently because he wouldn’t have had any money on him.

We proceed to the street to get on our way and, as I said, Todd was already fucking wasted: he’d start to fall over every time we stopped at a traffic light. I was holding him but he was half a foot taller than me and just big all around. I’d try to lead him down the street and he’d collapse in the middle of the intersection while a crowd of people darting to work at eight a.m. forked around him where he fell. We got to the Western Union one step at a time like that, then we got his money, and got up to my first meeting at Geffen about ten minutes late.

I left Todd in the lobby and I’m sure whoever the secretary was that day still remembers him. He passed out cold on the couch the minute he hit the air-conditioning, so I left him there, this big, snoring long-haired tattooed guy, who scared everyone unlucky enough to be waiting in the lobby that day. When it was time for me to go, it took two assistants to get Todd into the elevator. Sleep had helped him a little, but not much. Still, somehow, I maneuvered him through the streets and got to the rest of my appointments on time: one was at Brokum to discuss the T-shirts and the other was at ICM. All the while I dragged a drunk bass player along with me, treating it like he was the invisible elephant in the room no one talked about.
He was like the cop in
Up in Smoke,
trying to give directions on the highway with the hot dog stuffed in his face.