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Randy’s tribute was at the Key Club on April 29, 2002. It was the first time that that many members of Guns had played together in years. We went on last and we just slammed the place. Steven Tyler came up and did “Mama Kin” with us. All in all it was a momentous evening. I was elated.

I was home with Perla the next day when Duff called.

“Hey, man,” he said. “That was great last night. Like
really
great.”

“Yeah, it was,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about it all morning.”

What I’d been thinking was that I’d been wasting time. I’d been tinkering around with other musicians; talented guys, sure, but none of them were right for me. I’d been looking for something when what I was after had been right in front of me the whole time.

“Duff, we should do something with this,” I said. “We would be stupid not to. Fuck all of the obvious Guns N’ Roses connotations.”

“All right…okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

Duff and I had never said it, but the two of us had been consciously avoiding working with each other. We didn’t want to be pigeonholed, we didn’t want to be labeled: we didn’t want to resign ourselves to the compartment we’d be relegated to—an ex-Guns side project. At this point enough time had gone by, and even if it hadn’t, we’d experienced enough energy playing together again to know that we could get beyond any bullshit expectation that might be dumped on us.

Matt was in, too, and since Josh and Keith were interested in going for it, we started getting together a few days a week at their rehearsal space in North Hollywood. I wasn’t sure about them because I didn’t know them, but I was willing to give it a shot.

Keith and Josh brought in a couple of good songs that we worked on and Duff and I started making things up on the spot, just as naturally as we always did. The one thing I didn’t like about the space was that I couldn’t hear Josh singing at all. It started to worry me that after a few weeks, as we got more and more involved, I still had no idea what the whole band sounded like. I started making board tapes, and boy, was I surprised. When I played them back, I was shocked: Josh’s voice was just too linear and grating; it was a distraction from the music, not to mention just a tad off-key.

I am embarrassed to admit that I was willing to quit the band prematurely because of that. I assumed that Duff and Matt had been listening to the same tapes of our sessions that I had; and it’s my fault that I presumed that since no one was objecting to what we were doing, they were all fine with it.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I told Duff and Matt after rehearsal one day. “I’m done.”

“Hey! What are you talking about?” Duff asked.

“What’s wrong?” Matt asked.

“Have you listened to these sessions we’ve been doing?”

“No,” they both said.

“Well, you should.”

That night they did and the next day we were all on the same page.

Josh’s voice is perfect for Buckcherry, but it wasn’t musical enough for
what we had in mind. I am happy to say that Buckcherry has gotten back together and their big single in 2006, “Crazy Bitch,” was one of the tracks we worked on during that period.

We let Josh know that we didn’t want to continue with him and it was all very amicable, but we weren’t quite sure how to handle it when Keith told us that he intended to keep working with us. Those two were writing partners, they were friends, and they were bandmates; we’d always thought of them as a package deal and assumed that Keith would split when Josh did.

“Fuck that,” he said. “I like what we’re doing here. I’m staying.”

There was only one problem: generally Keith just played whatever I played at the same time. There was no interplay and he had no sense of complementing what I played. So the sound we got with Keith was basically two Les Pauls playing identical licks. He hung around for two more weeks, we thought he might get the hint…but he didn’t, so we had to let him go. Again, I was happy to hear it when those guys re-formed Buckcherry.

MATT AND DUFF AND I STARTED REHEARSING
and writing like crazy. I had my eyes and ears open for another guitar player and a singer. I had gone with Josh Todd to see Duff play with Loaded one night as part of Metal Shop, this weekly glam metal revue, at the Viper Room. I went in through the back door and it was as if I’d stepped into 1984. I saw people I hadn’t seen since then, and they looked exactly the same. I saw girls and guys from the different spots—the Troubadour, the Whiskey, the Rainbow—looking the way they did twenty years ago. There were a few guys from Faster Pussycat, L.A. Guns, and all the same chicks I knew from back then, all there as if they’d been caught in a time warp; everyone with the same clothes on, the same makeup on, seemingly doing the same shit. And of course, Gene Simmons was there having his picture taken with a crowd of girls. To top it all off, Ron Jeremy was there with a few porn chicks.

Duff had told me about the show earlier that day.

“Hey, man,” he said. “So the guy playing guitar in my band has alleged that he is like one of your best friends from junior high.”

“Oh yeah?” I had no idea who he might mean.

“Yeah, really,” he said. “His name is Dave Kirschner. He swears up and down that you were buds, I just wanted to let you know, he’s in my band.”

It was true, Dave and I were buddies in junior high and high school; he used to come to my Tidas Sloan shows before he even picked up a guitar. Dave is a supercool guy and I’d always thought the best of him all these years. The last time I saw him he was working at Tower Video when Guns N’ Roses was just taking off, at the time he had a pretty serious drinking habit going. He worked in the basement between the music and video shops, boxing and unloading the product, just drinking hard down there apparently. He’d gotten it together, however, and by that time he was fifteen years sober. I was kind of curious to see him again.

The overwhelming eighties vibe at Metal Shop got to me pretty quick that night, but I got the chance to say hello to Dave before I left. It was really good to see him. After Keith left, Duff suggested that Dave come down to jam, and I was all for it. We clicked instantly; Dave brought a cool vibe to what we were doing. There was no deliberation; that was it, it was a perfect fit. He brought a new dimension to the sound of the band as it was and an interesting guitar style that complemented mine as mine did his. The lineup was now Duff, Matt, Dave, and me, and the music was coming very naturally. We just had that age-old nagging problem: no singer. It is the story of my life, isn’t it?

For a group of seasoned, professional musicians you’d think that we’d have a clue of how to find a singer. No chance. We looked at one another with no idea of the proper process for a group like ours to find one.

“Should we put an ad in
The Recycler
?” I asked at rehearsal one day.

“Man, I don’t know,” Duff said. “I
guess
so. We don’t know any singers.”

“This feels like the time that we first hooked up,” I said. “When Steven and I first met you and we had a band. We wrote some great shit but finding a singer was just impossible.”

“You’re right. We’re at square one,” Duff said. “That’s pretty sad, man. What the fuck? I guess we should put an ad in the paper.”

Before we did that, we thought it would be a good idea to make a list of every good living rock singer, regardless of whether they were in a band or not. Our list was pretty short: among others, there was Sebastian Bach,
Ian Astbury, and Steve Jones. There was one other name that everyone in the band seemed keen on: Scott Weiland…but as far as we knew he was still in Stone Temple Pilots.

After we made our list and realized that almost everyone on it was otherwise accounted for, we did put an ad in
The Recycler
as well as the
Music Connection
. We even went so far as to place an ad in the
Hollywood Reporter
. But the most significant thing we did was put a blurb on MTV.com. We could never have done that in the old days and perhaps I was naive about the impact that it would have. I soon learned my lesson: that one blurb set off a barrage of CD and cassette-tape demos sent our way. They arrived on a daily basis, as our little beginning of a band became public knowledge.

Our “project” started being reported on the radio, blogged about on the Internet; all of a sudden we’d generated a lot of attention just by trying to find ourselves a singer relatively on the down-low. We began receiving two hundred submissions a week from around the world, all of them pouring into my P.O. box. I’d show up to collect these huge boxes of shit, and the guys at the mailbox place, who’ve watched this band from that phase on out, have given me the knowing wink ever since.

I GOT A RANDOM CALL ONE DAY.

“Hello?”

“Hey, what are you doin’? It’s Izzy.”

“Hey, man, I’m good,” I said. “I’m actually going to rehearsal. I’ve been working with Duff and Matt and this guy Dave. We’ve got something really good going.”

“Hey, cool. I’ll come down.”

It was classic Izzy; he’s so elusive, he’ll pop up somewhere out of the blue, hang out intensely, then disappear for a couple of months. He came down to the studio with his guitar and amp and he brought a couple of demos. We jammed with him for two weeks and it was great: we wrote about twelve songs that would have been the best Guns N’ Roses record, hands down. We talked about the old days, we shared war stories; we laughed a lot and we had a really good time.

At the same time we continued the quest for a singer, which didn’t interest Izzy one bit. Whenever we brought it up, he wanted nothing to do with the conversation in any way; he wanted to distance himself as much as possible. He didn’t actually want to be in the band, if that’s what we intended; he just wanted to hang out. Discussing where to find a lead singer was too much for him. He was, in general, very anti–lead singer. I can’t imagine why.

The singer thing had been a problem for me in every band I’d ever joined, and I couldn’t believe that after all of this time, it plagued me still.

“I got an idea,” Izzy said at rehearsal one day. “Know what we should do? Duff and I will sing and we will just do a club tour in a van.”

He said it in Izzy’s way, which means that it was hard to tell if he was serious or kidding.

I was dead set on finding a solid front man regardless, because I was taking this project very seriously. I was getting sick of the fact that we weren’t getting out there and playing. I wasn’t going to let this situation go until it came to fruition. But I have to admit, I contemplated that idea…for a minute.

We called legendary A&R man John Kalodner to ask for his advice as far as singers went. John came down to see us rehearse and he thought that we were the best thing since sliced bread…but he told us that he didn’t know any good singers who were available.

Izzy suggested that we go track a few of the songs we had worked out at Rumbo, which we did. At the time I wondered what Izzy was thinking: in my mind, what we were doing with him was just fucking around and having a good time, with no expectation of where it was going. At the same time I was intent on pursuing this, as was Duff and Matt, so I wasn’t sure why Izzy would want to take it to the next level by suggesting the studio.

In any case, the songs we did together were great, and I wasn’t going to put an end to that. The three of us had also been listening to the demos that were trailing in. We’d found one that we were curious about: this guy named Kelly from Florida. We flew him out to try a vocal on a track or two, and as soon as he showed up in the studio, Izzy ducked out. There weren’t any hard feelings or anything, he just had to go and said his good-byes.

THAT SINGER KELLY DIDN’T WORK OUT
but he was a step in the right direction. Still, months went by without us getting any closer to finding the right match. I hoped to find a diamond in the rough, some unknown talent out there. I told Gilby, who at the time was hanging at Mates every day because he was producing a band called the Bronx. He thought we were crazy.

“You’re
never
gonna find a singer,” he said, smirking. “With the level you’re at, you just can’t do that. You can’t just look for raw talent; that’s nowhere near your level. There are only so many singers around who are even worth considering—and we know all of them!”

I wasn’t going to be discouraged; I persevered. We had endless tapes coming in and there had to be something of value in there—or so I thought. We rehearsed five days a week: three hours were spent writing and the last two every day were spent listening to the mountain of tapes that came in. We listened to
all of them
. It was grueling. More than that, it was discouraging. I am amazed that we actually stuck it out as a band at all: we held it together for ten months doing that. I’m not sure that I can explain how bleak it got. That is, after all, why we listened to those tapes
after
we rehearsed. Usually they were so bad that we’d need to sleep it off just to be able to start fresh again the next day.

Most of them were so bad that we assumed that they were taking the piss…but we were never quite sure. Too many were like some guy in Wyoming who lived in a garage sending us his very best imitation of Guns. There were too many tapes by singers who just loved Guns to an unhealthy degree. I wanted to ask a lot of them if they’d actually listened to what they had sent us or at least played it for someone else before they sent it, and if they had what that person thought of it.

There were endless examples of guys doing really bad versions of “Welcome to the Jungle”; there were too many people who considered themselves poets submitting dramatic lyrics on a variety of subjects. We got folksingers, we got thrash-metal singers, we got people who sent us recordings that were so poor that I swear to God they must have recorded them on the mike in their boom box.

I was driving through North Hollywood one day thinking about how strange this process was. At the same time I thought that it should be
documented, because I knew that it was going somewhere. I thought that I should talk to my friend Eric Luftglass, a producer at VH1 about it, but literally before that thought got more mature, he called me.