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It’s tough to be the kind of person who hangs around the edgier fringes of society if you’re not a musician or someone who has a purpose being there. Everyone else is a disposable player out there in the void on the scene. Most of the girls who dated us back then were these innocent chicks whose lives were changed forever after one of us came into it for however long it lasted. We were like a vacuum back then that sucked people up and spit them out; a ton of people around us fell by the wayside that way. Some people died, not because of anything we did to them, but as a side effect of being too close to the flame. People would get attracted to our fucked-up weird life and just get it wrong and drown in our riptide.

STEVEN AND DUFF PURCHASED HOMES
close to my new place, just over Mulholland Drive, on the Valley side of Laurel Canyon. They were on opposite ends of the same street. As I mentioned, Steven was building his version of domesticity with some chick, and Duff and his future wife, Mandy, were settling into their home life together. Duff was always very good at maintaining a household; he never fell into the transient kind of lifestyle that I did. I might have lived less than two miles from those guys, but I didn’t see them too often; if they’d been drug dealers, I’m sure that I would have.

All things considered, I realized that I had to clean up a bit before we’d be able to get rehearsing again. Duff didn’t want to write with me when I was high and I couldn’t blame him for that. When there was a bit of a drug drought in L.A., and it became a huge pain in the ass, my subconscious trigger of needing to play superseded my drug craving. I just locked myself up in my house and with the help of Dr. Stoli and his assistants I got through my withdrawal.

Once I got off the smack, Duff and I got reacquainted and we scheduled rehearsals. At that point we did so without any confirmation from Axl.

The only messages I got from him came officially through management via Doug Goldstein, who spoke with Axl on a regular basis.

It didn’t matter that we weren’t all there; Steven and Duff and I started jamming at Mates, our go-to spot. Izzy wasn’t quite up to joining us: he’d spent a bit too much time around Bill’s house and was on a path as dark as mine. He came to rehearsal every so often, but we never waited for him. At least we were trying to be productive; I have no idea what Axl was up to at the time because we didn’t speak, probably because a few of us were chemically out of control.

Drinking excessively became the thing again for me. I would drive home from rehearsal totally plastered, passing people on the wrong side while going up Laurel Canyon. I’d be doing ninety miles an hour in my little Honda CRX; I would have died easily if I’d hit anything. I’m thankful that I didn’t hurt anybody, get arrested, or die—someone is watching out for me, given how often I’ve come close to death and made it back alive.

One particularly outstanding night I turned off Laurel Canyon onto Kirkwood, the street that led to my street, Walnut Drive. There was a guy stopped at the corner of Walnut who was preparing to make a left onto Kirkwood. He was way too far over, in my lane; and in my mind he was in my
way
. Rather than stop or slow down, I just plowed into his car—on purpose.

I tried to back up and take off, but our cars were stuck together; I’d smashed him on the driver’s side by the rear wheel and my car’s front end was attached to his car. At that point it dawned on me that I probably shouldn’t have done that.

I sat there trying to back up and split; I pulled my bumper to pieces because it was severely mashed into this guy’s car. As I was doing so, he got out and walked up to my window.

“So?”
I asked, and stared at him for a minute, squinting.

The guy reeked of booze; he was completely wasted and now totally confused by me.

“You’re fucking
drunk,
” he said, his speech a little slurry.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “
You’re
fucking drunk.”

I lit up a cigarette as he and I slowly came to the realization that both of us were pretty fucked up to the degree that police involvement was a bad idea.

“Do you have insurance?” the guy asked. “I don’t.”

“Listen…I can’t afford to get in trouble with the law,” I said.

“Let’s pretend this didn’t happen,” he said.

“Fine by me.”

We managed to pry our cars apart; that guy bolted and I drove up my little hill as fast as I could. I put the car in the garage and sat there for a moment. My heart pounded as the reality of what could have happened sunk in. I had a much-needed moment of clarity: the repercussions of that misadventure would have halted everything for me.

It didn’t take a clairvoyant to see that if we would ever be a band again, Izzy and Duff, Steven and I, would need to write some music and get Axl interested and back in the mix. We had a few songs going but we had to keep up the pace and stay focused. We were already almost there: it was becoming exciting again; the original hunger was returning and the fire was alive. We wanted to make Guns music our top priority.

We kept rehearsing, and once we’d gotten a few songs all together, we went over to Izzy’s place on Valley Vista and Sepulveda in the Valley to do some writing and see where his head was. It didn’t take me long to figure it out: I was in the bathroom over there taking a leak when I noticed the two-inch-thick layer of dust in his shower and bathtub. That thing hadn’t been used for weeks—Izzy was that far gone. Even Axl showed up that day, and regardless we started working on a song that became “Pretty Tied Up.” I remember that Izzy had taken a cymbal and a broomstick and some strings and had made a sitar out of it. Needless to say…Izzy was pretty fucking high.

We didn’t have to confront him at all; he had a serious scare one night that set him straight. Whatever it was, Izzy got too shook up to even talk about it. He just called his dad, who came out from Indiana, and took him back home, and that’s how and where Izzy got clean. He’s been clean ever since.

The rest of us continued to work, and once we had some material and were communicating with Axl again, he let us know that he and Izzy wanted to write the next album in Indiana. I couldn’t imagine why; both of them had left Indiana as soon as they could to come to L.A. and they never seemed too fond of the idea of going back. In any case, our situation was so unpredictable that I wasn’t going to move to a wheat field with no guarantee that
we’d even get anything done. Their whole intention was to get away from the distractions of L.A. and I respected that; Axl wanted us to go somewhere where we could have our privacy to focus on writing. I wanted to do the same, but at least be in a major metropolitan area, so in the end we agreed on Chicago. It was close enough to Indiana that Izzy could join us when he felt ready, or go back there easily if he felt like his sobriety was threatened.

Doug Goldstein and I went to Chicago to scope out where we would live and rehearse. We chose the Cabaret Metro, the famous rock club on the north side of the city: it’s a concert space that houses a separate club called the Smart Bar in the basement, and also has a theater upstairs. It was perfect; we took over the theater and when we were done for the day, the coolest bar in the city was waiting for us downstairs. We rented out a two-unit, brown brick apartment building a few miles down the road on Clark Street, right by the elevated train, to live in.

We all moved out there, with our techs, Adam Day and Tom Mayhew; our production manager; and our new security guard, Earl. Duff, Steven, and the crew guys moved in downstairs, and Axl, Izzy, Earl, and I lived upstairs. That was fine by me because I had the place to myself for the most part—it took Axl more than a month to join us, and Izzy was there for less than an hour. It takes Axl an indeterminate amount of time to decide what he is going to do from the inception of an idea to the point of carrying it out, which always keeps things interesting. All in all what we were doing wasn’t business as usual for us, but it was a start.

For a while, it didn’t matter to me that we’d just relocated the entire band in order to satisfy the only two guys who weren’t there because by then Duff and I were such enthusiastically social boozers that the miles of bars along North Clark Street were a new playground for us—all within walking distance. My personal consumption at that point was a half-gallon bottle of Stoli per day, plus whatever I consumed when I was out at night. I’d wake up in the morning and fill a Solo cup 85 percent full with vodka, ice, and a bit of cranberry juice. I called it breakfast of champions. Duff was in the same league, though I believe that he made a fresh drink, packed with ice, before he went to bed and left it next to his pillow; that way the ice would keep it cold enough while he slept that it would still be nice and fresh first thing in the morning.

I’d sit on the floor sipping my breakfast and watching TV each day until the rest of the guys were ready to go rehearse. We’d jam at the Metro for most of the afternoon, sometime into the evening, and then spend the rest of the night in and out of bars. We were more or less hanging out and writing riffs here and bits of songs there. When we were working we were focused, but we could never complete any of our ideas without all of the players in attendance.

I’ve learned that it is essential for everybody to be present at all times—our producer Brendan O’Brien insisted on it during the writing of Velvet Revolver’s last album,
Libertad
. Everyone in Guns was focused at this point—even Axl—but we didn’t have very good group skills and had no idea at all how to govern our work situation. The desire was there, but we needed
regulation
. If one of us didn’t show up, we’d work anyway, which was one of many things that held us back from getting it together properly. For one thing, Duff and I were intent on drinking all the time and considered that normal because it never interfered with work, but we were so ferocious about it outside of rehearsal that it was off-putting to Izzy. He couldn’t be around that kind of behavior then and he’s like that to this day. We weren’t aware of it at the time, and even if we were, we might not have cared—all we knew was that he wasn’t showing up to work and we couldn’t accept that. I’m sure Axl had his reason for doing things his way, too. But we didn’t have a good line of communication among us about any of these issues, so the end result was serious misunderstanding. Since these points of interest were simply never discussed, since there was never a conversation about how to adjust our game plan to take everyone’s needs into account, we kept doing things the way we had in the past, which considering that we’d all changed caused us serious internal tension.

Instead of coming up with a new method to account for our issues, all of the problems just snowballed. This was when a good manager might have turned the situation around, but we didn’t have one. Throughout this process, Doug and our management were useless; they didn’t seem to want to take the time to deal. Alan was still in charge, and Doug was our day-to-day man, and he wasn’t doing anything but enabling us. Their attitude was that we were supposed to know how to do this shit ourselves. And we did; we accomplished creatively left to our own devices…but only when
we were living together as one, living five similar lives. Now that we’d become a band who had to set up shop, and we were coming from different perspectives, that dynamic was gone. There is no one to blame; we did the best we could.

We’d had to get going without Axl there, and we found his absence disrespectful, and that disrespect built up into such great animosity that when he did finally show up, the rest of us were pretty resentful. We were an out-of-control band with some some semblance of integrity who had lost their ability to properly channel it all: for the life of us, we just could not get on the same page. We also made no effort to pursue the adult way of handling things. I wouldn’t call it innocence or naïveté looking back, but we all played a hand in mixing the pot. None of us stood back and took a moment to ask one another or ourselves, “How do we do this? How can we get everyone together and working and satisfied?” We needed to be clearheaded about it; if one thing didn’t work, we’d need to keep trying. But we didn’t do that. Outside of the fact that our management didn’t care to take the lead, the biggest catalyst to the demise of the band was the lack of communication among the members.

Admittedly, I was pigheaded; I didn’t want to always feel like I was bending over backward. I thought of us as equals, and I was making a conscientious effort to get things going, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to understand what Axl was expecting, or the patience to sit down and talk it out with him. As with any relationship, when someone lands on your bad side, it gets hard to be empathetic. My guard by then was
way
up. With all of that going on, it was much easier to just enjoy the summertime in Chicago because the bars were mighty inviting.

In our plentiful free time, Duff and I also did our personal best to stay in shape. I had one of my BMX bikes out there and I used to ride it between the apartment and the rehearsal space, bunny-hopping over everything in sight, riding on the sidewalk. It was a good workout. Some days Duff and I even went to the gym, usually just after our morning vodkas. We’d go down to one of those big public YMCAs with our security guard, Earl, to pump iron. We’d be down there in our jeans, doing sets between cigarette breaks—it was invigorating. We’d usually cool down afterward with cocktails at a sports bar. It didn’t matter how big we were back home or how
many records we’d sold or the shows we’d played; in Chicago, we were nobodys. We were just a couple of regular Joes to our fellow bar patrons; and there is not a bigger haven for regular Joes in America than the sports bars of North Clark Street.

Every night we hung out at Smart Bar, which was very cool, but a much different rock scene than L.A. It was 1990, and that place was all about techno and industrial music like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. We didn’t really gel with people there, because we were clearly of a different variety, but we made a circle of friends anyway. We had dozens of chicks; it was a like a shooting gallery in that place, but eventually I settled on one. Her name was Megan; she was nineteen. Megan lived with her mom and younger brother in a nearby suburb and she was really exotic-looking, a heavy-chested, bubbly, sweet girl.