Slash (58 page)

My manager at that time and now is Carl Stubner, and while I was in Vegas he called me. We talked about a few things, and though I didn’t realize it in the moment, he was listening carefully, trying to gauge where I was at. I don’t remember what I was talking about but suddenly he interrupted me.

“Hey,” he said. “Be honest with me. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, man,” I said, lying. “I’m fine. Why?”

“Listen to me…I’m not going to tell you how to live your life and I’m not here to be a cop. I just want to know if you’re okay. Because if you’re not, I am here for you. But you have to be
honest
with me.”

“I’m fine, really…Yeah, I’m fine.”

I did the gig, I met my drug buddy, I came home to L.A. and knew I was too fucked up to be around Perla, who had come home entirely clean and sober, let alone be around our children. I did the only thing that made sense to me: I checked myself in to a West Hollywood hotel, and I scheduled the day that I would check myself in to rehab. Until that morning I intended to finish up the drugs I’d bought right there in my room or wherever they might lead me. Perla and everyone else was worried about me. But she was patient and tolerant and that is why we love each other the way we do.

I wasn’t fine. But I was almost ready to admit it. I knew that my debauchery needed to end. I had planned to get some space from my wife and from my band after I’d allowed myself those predetermined four months to let it all hang out; I knew I was in need of some solace and quiet. And I got it. This time rehab turned out to be really good for me, because this time I surrendered. First I kicked the drugs, then I cleared my head and did some work on figuring out why I liked to put myself in the same position over and over again. Early in the morning of July 3, 2006, I checked into rehab. I did a full thirty days, I fully surrendered…I learned more about myself than I had ever thought was possible. And as of this writing, I’ve been sober ever since.

ONCE I WAS BACK ON TRACK, THE BAND
got back on track and we got down to recording and writing our second record,
Libertad
. It was a different experience; we were different people exploring new ideas, united by our camaraderie. There was a freedom to the whole thing that was refreshing; it was as if we’d truly grown, or maybe just grown comfortable with who we are as a band.

We’d started working with Rick Rubin back before I got sober; actually I believe it was before and after my Oxy binge. We were excited to do so for obvious reasons—Rick’s track record is legendary. But it didn’t really work out: Rick has his methods; he has his crew there to do the producing and engineering and every few days he pops in to see how it’s going. Usually he’s got a few bands set up like that around town.

That really didn’t work for us. Rick would listen to a bit of what we were doing and tell us to take one part of a song and combine it with something else that he’d heard that he liked. We also got jealous of the fact that he was spreading his focus around, doing four albums at once. It felt like he was always leaving us to see another one of his concubines, and when he was there we didn’t really connect—he sat back and let us go. Under those conditions it felt like this record would take us a year or more to complete.

We broke it off with Rick and moved our operation to Scott’s studio, Lavish. Scott suggested that we give it a go with Brendan O’Brien, who had done most of STP’s records. I’d only known him in that capacity. I liked him well enough when I talked to him on the phone and so we had him come in and everything just seemed to fall into place. Brendan liked working fast and hard and he insisted that every member of the band be present for every session. I think that is one of the best pieces of advice I could ever give to any band.

If one of us didn’t show up on time, Brendan refused to work until everyone was present, which both whipped us into shape pretty good and motivated us to be there. But he brought more than just discipline to the equation, he brought a musicality that stems from the fact that he plays guitar, bass, and drums. At any given moment he could play along with us and it really helped the process. With someone that informed, we progressed very quickly.

OUR SESSIONS WERE CONSISTENT; EVERYONE
was there, everyone contributed, and everyone appreciated what each player was doing. I didn’t think it was possible, but the chemistry that came out of that mutual participation surpassed the first Guns sessions. Everyone was so inspired and everything we did, every experiment even, was very musical. We were playing great, Scott was singing great, and what we ended up using as the final tracks on the album were, for the most part, the first or second live takes of each song. That record is what happens when you pair a really good rock-and-roll band who loves what they’re doing with a producer who really understands them and knows exactly what he’s doing.

Every day I’m glad I found the strength to take the high road.

PERLA AND I ARE BOTH ALL CLEANED
up now and we’re really happy. July 2007 will be my one-year anniversary, and I’ve gotten more done this past year than in the two years before that combined. You only get so many karmic “Get Out of Jail Free” passes; you’re bound to run out eventually. So far I’ve been extremely lucky, so I’m not taking any more chances. A junkie has only two options, and I’ve got a long list of friends on both sides of the fence. They can get clean or they can get dead, and every day I’m glad I found the strength to take the high road.

I
’ve been asked more than a few times why I decided to do this book at all and here’s why: A few people who know me well kept telling me that I should do it—and finally I agreed with them. I was very reluctant to share my life in any way, particularly in a medium open to public consumption, most of all because I regarded a memoir as something you do when you’ve got no career left to speak of. That isn’t the case for me, and even if it were, I wouldn’t have much interest in that. It’s not natural to regard your life objectively, but once I did, I realized that my story up until now made for something pretty entertaining. I also realized that if I didn’t get it all down now, there was a very good chance that I’d forget it all. In the end I realized that this book would serve another purpose: it would put one era of my career to rest and signify the start of the rest of it.

I’d like to make one more thing pretty clear, because this is another question that haunts me almost every day, usually because it’s asked by people who don’t know me at all. I’d like to state, very simply once more why I chose not to continue on with Guns N’ Roses so that no one feels the need to ask me this ever again when they see me on the street. Here it goes: 1) the constant disrespect for all involved by going on late for no good reason night after night after night, 2) the legal manipulation that Axl forced on us, from demanding ownership of the name to downgrading us, contractually, to hired hands, and 3) losing Izzy and Steven, who were such an integral part of the band’s sound and personality…without them, the band no longer had its original chemistry.

My departure had nothing to do with artistic differences, as many people claim to know. It was not as simple as “Axl wanted synths and Slash was old-school.” It had nothing to do with Axl wanting to go digital and Slash staying analog. To think that dissolving the kind of band and the kind of musical chemistry we had over something so trivial is just asinine. It’s true, I am old-school, and I do like keeping it simple—but I’ve never been close-minded. If anything, I was more than flexible and willing to try any kind of recording technique or explore any new sound, so long as I was doing so on an equal playing field with musicians that
worked together toward a common goal. I would have hung in there with Axl through an industrial record or whatever else he wanted to try if the creative vibe between us was positive. My flexibility is the only thing that kept me in the band as long as it did—that’s how a team works. Unfortunately, we stopped being a team somewhere along the way.

As for the rest of how it all played out, I learned, looking back on it all, that the people Axl hired to “represent his interests” through all of the band’s undoing could have been a bit smarter than they were. Maybe intelligence has nothing to do with it: had they cared enough about him and about Guns N’ Roses as a band to have advised him to pursue any other path than the one he did this story may have had a different ending. Anyone could have foreseen the lack of positive outcome that lay ahead on the road Axl chose to go down. But then again, maybe that is how he wanted it

MY BEST FRIEND MARC CANTER IS
putting out a book that is the visual accompaniment to all that you read here. Here’s a guy who way back when I was living at my mom’s house, before junior high, always had an Instamatic in his hand and was snapping pictures. Marc came to as many of my gigs in high school, in Hollywood, and once I was in Guns as he could possibly get to. His ever-present camera was just part of Marc. I never thought anything of it and never thought that any of those pictures would ever be seen again. I never thought that a side effect of that hobby of his would be a pretty extensive and intimate chronology of everything Guns N’ Roses did prior to 1988. All of it was just sitting around Marc’s house all these years—until now. It is now a book of pictures called
Reckless Road
. I never would have expected my childhood buddy to be capable of such shots.

BEFORE I WRAP THIS THING UP I HAVE
something important to say about my parents. In the retelling of my childhood, I emphasized the negative over the positive, because the negative aspects of how my family evolved ended up informing my decisions as a kid more than any of the positive ones did. The negative is what explains where
I turned in my youth. But what was lost in my re-creation was how my parents’ positive influences taught me to be the person I am.

My parents were such a prominent, encouraging influence on me as a child during the years when I strove to find out who I was going to be. I couldn’t have asked for better guides because they are, truly, two of the most creative people that I’ve ever met—and at this point I’ve met many. Both of them are amazingly talented, and though they didn’t ultimately prove to be the right match for each other, they did see beyond their differences to raise their children in a unique and informed fashion. The way they brought my brother and me up was unconventional but infused with love and discipline that never veered into being overly domineering.

I LIVE SO MUCH IN THE MOMENT THAT
I’ve never daydreamed about the future beyond tomorrow. I’ve never related to those people who plan their lives five years down the line. As much as those types think they have control of their reality, I beg to disagree, because how much can anyone really “plan” what is going to happen to them beyond the next twenty-four hours? Its not that I don’t care what happens five years from now, its just that the next twenty-four hours is the stepping-stone to getting there.

I’ve found that just
being
, day to day, just waiting to see what comes, and going from there is the only way to grow. It’s informed how I’ve dealt with Velvet Revolver in nothing but the best respect: we have come so far in so short a time. Whenever we’re onstage, it’s at once so familiar and exciting that it seems like our first show even though it’s our thousandth. I’m consumed with what we’re doing, I’m proud of the record we made in
Libertad
, and I feel that we’re in a place where we are just now capable of tapping into what this band is really capable of.

At the time of this writing, our second record is just a few weeks old, but I can’t wait to see where our next record is going to go. We’re lucky; we stumbled upon something that is just beginning to evolve and it’s doing so in such a positive way. As this book comes to a close, Velvet Revolver is about to embark on our first headlining tour of arenas and sheds. We got to that level by the end of our two-year promotion of
Contraband,
but this
is different: we’re starting where we ended, and from there we can only build a bigger beast.

I’m happier than I’ve ever been musically. This band writes creative, earnest, complex rock and roll. It’s not quite ironic, but as far as I’m concerned, it sure is funny that I found my future by revisiting my past. After looking around and ignoring the obvious so as to avoid anything that seemed like a revisitation, I ended up locking in with the guys I’d spent the better part of my career and my life with. And once we did, the past became an afterthought. And the present has been better than it has ever been.

As for the future, aside from playing in Velvet Revolver, at some point I want to do a record with all the players I’ve played with and admired over the years. I have a list of them, which is long. At this point, all that I know is that I plan to call it “Slash and Friends.” I’m actually looking at my wish list of collaborators right now and no, I’m not going to tell you who is on it.

I’M HAPPY TO SAY THAT I KNOW FOR A
fact that as of summer 2007, Steven Adler is doing better. I’ve been helping him help himself to get off of crack, smack, and Jägermeister, which has been a compound addiction that has been ruining his life for the past quarter century. Counting from before he was ousted from GN’R, this is the longest that he’s ever been clean. He has some pretty good people around him now and I’m happy to report that he seems genuinely happy.

Ron Schneider, my bass player in Tidas Sloan, is working with Steven as a tech/moral supporter. It’s funny how things come full circle, even when you think your circle has expanded infinitesimally. At the same time, hearing about Ron’s situation, I couldn’t help but realize that almost everybody that hung around a lot with Guns N’ Roses ended up becoming a junkie at one time or another.

WHEN YOU REVIEW YOUR LIFE LIKE THIS,
it’s strange; there have been parts that I’ve looked at as if I wasn’t there—I’ve read a few of these stories as if for the first time. But more than anything
you gain perspective; this kind of exercise isn’t easy, but in the long run it’s a really good idea.

It’s a good thing to truly understand how and why I’m the same yet different than I’ve always been. It’s as if my personality remains but my wisdom has grown. If there’s one thing that made my bullshit recede, it’s fatherhood. The reality that I was going to be someone’s dad didn’t kick in until I found myself staring at the assembly instructions for a crib. We’d just finished painting our guest room and there I was having to assemble this thing. There was no going back. And as much as I freaked out at that moment, after that I didn’t
want
to go back. If anything I ran toward it, not away: I let myself be consumed with baby stuff, which is great, because I enjoy it.

All things considered, it came very naturally. Once I’d gotten the crib together, I knew it was real; I knew that we were going
in
. By the time that Perla and London and I were photographed for the cover of some baby magazine whose name I can’t remember, I was totally into it. That photo shoot wasn’t the cover of
Creem
or
Rolling Stone,
but I was pretty excited—we’d hit the big time on the baby circuit. And I was just as proud.

Being a parent has its moments where you find yourself doing what you are doing, but with this new little person who has integrated themselves into your life who’s just…
there.
Kids become a part of your everyday existence so instinctually and so naturally that before you know it they’re there…and you can’t remember what life was like when they weren’t.

My boys are three and five and I’ve started catching myself, at least once or twice a day, realizing how fast they are changing and growing. It’s a constant reality check. How can it not be? When your four-year-old stands in front of you defiantly and argues like you’re both equals, how can you not ask yourself “Is this
happening
? Am I negotiating with a four-year-old?” I wouldn’t have it any other way: Perla and I made beautiful kids, and our personalities are so strong in them that it’s entertaining to us. They are definitely a product of their parents…. In fact they’re a mirror of their parents: they are both defiant yet sweet.

Slash and Velvet Revolver in Santa Barbara, September 2007.