Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

Van Halen tribute that celebrates the band’s Roth era. Battery is a tribute to Metallica. Planet Earth are L.A. based Duran Duran clones. Bjorn Again claims to be Australia’s finest ABBA tribute. AC/DShe is an all-female AC/DC cover group from San Francisco. There are tributes to groups who never seemed that popular to begin with (Badfinger, Thin Lizzy, Dream Theater), and there are tributes to bands who are not altogether difficult to see for real (The Dave Matthews Band, Creed). And though rock critics deride Stone Temple Pilots and Oasis for ripping off other artists, drunk people in rural bars pay good money to see tribute bands rip off Stone Temple Pilots and Oasis as accurately as possible.

And being consciously derivative is not easy.

Trask and Dischner can talk for hours about the complexity of feeding their appetite for replication. Unlike starting a garage band, there are countless caveats that must be fulfilled when auditioning potential members for a tribute. This was especially obvious when Paradise City had to find a new person to play Slash, GNR’s signature lead guitarist. It is not enough to find a guy who plays the guitar well; your Slash needs to sound like Slash. He needs to play a Les Paul, and he needs to tune it like Slash. He needs to have long black hair that hangs in his face and a $75 top hat. Preferably, he should have a dark complexion, an emaciated physique, and a willingness to play shirtless. And if possible, he should drink Jack Daniel’s on stage.

The Slash in Paradise City fulfills about half of those requirements.

“Bobby is on thin ice right now, and he knows he’s on thin ice,” says Trask, referring to lead guitarist Bobby Young. “I mean, he’s an okay guy, and he’s a good guitar player. But we have ads out right now for a new Slash, and he knows that. I want someone who is transfixed with being Slash. We want someone who is as sick about Slash as I am about Axl.”

What’s ironic about Young’s shortcomings as Slash is that—in a traditional band—his job would likely be the most secure: He is clearly the most skilled musician in Paradise City, having received a degree from Cincinnati’s Conservatory of Music in 1987 (that was the same year GNR debuted with the album Appetite for Destruction). “I was classically trained, so I’m used to everything being built around minor chords,” he tells me. “But Slash plays almost everything in a major chord, and his soloing is very different than mine. It’s not in chromatic keys. I really thought I could learn all of these Guns N’ Roses songs in two days, but it took me almost two weeks.”

Unfortunately, Young can’t learn how to look like a mulatto ex-heroin addict, and this is the only occupation in America for which that is a job requirement. He only vaguely resembles Slash, and his band mates tease him about being akin to an Oompa Loompa from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. There’s a similar problem with Paradise City’s bassist; he’s portrayed by an affable, laidback blond named Spike, but Spike is built a little too much like a farmer. His shoulders are broad, and he actually looks more like Larry Bird than Duff McKagan. Amazingly, Spike is also partially deaf from playing heavy metal for so many years (he can’t hear certain frequencies, including feedback), but—somehow—that doesn’t pose a problem.

Visually, the rest of Paradise City succeeds at varying degrees. Drummer Rob “The Monster” Pohlman could pass for Steven Adler if Pohlman hadn’t just shaved his head and dyed his remaining locks orange, a move that completely baffles Dischner.[25] The fact that he hides behind a drum kit, however, substantially mitigates this problem. Trask is eight inches too tall, but he has the voice and—more importantly—the desire. He wills himself into Axlocity.

Dischner is the only Paradise City member who naturally looks like a GNR doppelganger. He’s also the guy who makes the trains run on time; he handles the money, coordinates the schedules, and generally keeps his bandmates from killing each other. All of these guys are friendly, but Dischner is the most relentlessly nice. He’s also mind-blowingly idiosyncratic. Prior to Paradise City, Dischner played in an Yngwie Malmsteen–influenced band called Premonition, a group whose entire existence was based on the premise that the Antichrist is Juan Carlos, the King of Spain.[26] To this day, Dischner adheres to this theory and claims it can be proven through biblical prophecy. He lives with his wife (an aspiring vampire novelist) in a small suburb of Cincinnati, and he peppers his conversation with a high-pitched, two-note laugh that sounds like “Wee Hee!” Over the next thirty-six hours, he will make that sound approximately four hundred times.

When we leave from Dischner’s house at 12:30 A.M., it has already been an incredibly long day for Trask. He awoke Friday morning at 2:00 A.M. at his home in Ravenna, Ohio, and immediately drove four hours to the outskirts of Cincinnati, where he spent the day cutting down a troublesome tree in Dischner’s front yard; Trask’s father runs a tree service in Northeast Ohio, so his son knows how to handle a chainsaw. After a brief afternoon nap, the band hooked up for a few hours of rehearsal before supper. Now it’s midnight, and Trask is preparing to drive the entire way to Virginia, nonstop. I have never met anyone who needs sleep less. Trask once drove twenty-two hours straight to Hayes, Kansas, and played a show immediately upon arrival. If the real Axl Rose had this kind of focus, Guns N’ Roses would have released fifteen albums by now.

There was a time when Paradise City had a tour bus, but they lost it last summer. This is not a euphemism; they literally can’t find it. It broke down on a trip to Kansas City, and they had to leave it in a Missouri garage to make it to the club on time. Somehow, they lost the business card of the garage and have never been able to recall its location. Dischner tells me this story three times before I realize he’s not joking.

“We drove back through Missouri a bunch of times, we put up a picture on our Web site, and we even called the Highway Patrol,” Dischner says. “But we lost the bus. And I guess there’s some law that states you only have thirty days to find your bus.”

As it is, the band is now traveling in two vehicles. Axl/Randy will pull the Haulmark trailer that contains their gear; he’ll drive the truck, I’ll ride shotgun, and Izzy/Paul will curl up in the extended cab. A friend of the band— some dude named Teddy—will follow in his Ford Mustang, which will also hold Slash/Bobby and Steven/Rob. The pickup box is covered with a topper, so Duff/Spike will lay back in the truck bed with Punky.

Trask and Dischner do not know who Punky is.

They’ve only met Punky a few times, and they don’t know his last name (or his real first name). They are told that Punky is friends with Teddy and Young, all of whom are evidently longtime running buddies. Young is thirty-six, which is a little older than Trask (twenty-eight), Dischner (thirty-one), and Pohlman (twenty-nine). Nobody knows how old Spike is and he refuses to say; a good guess might be forty.

Our last stop before hitting the highway is Spike’s home in Clifton, Ohio, a few scant miles from the site of Cincinnati’s recent race riots. Spike’s house is terrifying. It appears completely dilapidated, but—supposedly—it’s actually being renovated. The home contains a python, several large birds, two alligators in the bathtub, and the most bloodthirsty Rottweiler in North America (Dischner gives me four full minutes of instruction about how to safely walk past this animal). Spike deals exotic animals in his spare time; nobody but me seems to find this unusual.

At departure time, only 40 percent of the band is not under the influence of some kind of chemical. Twenty minutes into the trip, that percentage will fall to zero. Even before we get on the road, this Punky character looks drunk enough to die; amazingly, he’s just getting started. They’re all just getting started. Everyone is smoking pot, and it’s the second-strongest dope I’ve ever inhaled: I keep looking through the windshield, and the vehicle seems to be moving much faster than it should be. It feels like we’re driving down an extremely steep incline, but the earth remains flat. I am not the type who normally gets paranoid, but this is a bit disturbing. I’m trying very hard to act cool, but I start thinking too much; in order to relax, I smoke another half joint, which (of course) never works. I start imaging that we’re going to crash and that my death is going to be reported as some sort of predictable irony—I will forever be remembered as the guy who wrote a book about heavy metal bands who were mostly fake and then died while touring with a heavy metal band that was completely fake. I start having hallucinations of elk running out in front of the vehicle, and I notice that Trask isn’t even watching the road when he talks to me. Finally, I can’t take it anymore. I politely turn to Trask and Dischner and make the following announcement: “Okay—now, don’t take this the wrong way, because I’m probably just nuts, and I’m probably just too fucked up to know what’s going on, and I’m probably overreacting for no valid reason, and I hate to sound unreasonable or immature, and I don’t want to sound pretentious, but elks are prevalent. And perhaps this is out of line and I’m certainly open to debate on this issue, but I need to go on record and say that I am not 100 percent comfortable with the situation regarding this truck at the moment, because I have a feeling that we are all going to die.”

“Dude,” Trask tells me. “I totally wish I could trade bodies with you right now.”