but I wanted what they had. I wanted to play guitar in a band that inspired that degree of devotion and excitement. I went to see Motley that weekend at the Whisky… musically, it was just okay, but as a concert it was
5. Least Likely to Succeed
Once you’ve lived a little you will find that whatever you send out into the world comes back to you one way or another. It may be today, tomorrow, or years from now, but it happens; usually when you least expect it, usually in a form that’s pretty different from the original. Those coincidental moments that change your life seem random at the time, but I don’t think they are. At least that’s how it’s worked out in my life. And I know I’m not the only one.
I hadn’t seen Marc Canter in about a year, for no other reason than that we’d each been busy doing other things. In the interim, he’d undergone a metamorphosis: when I’d seen him last, he was a music fan and was just beginning to take on a role in running the family business at Canter’s Deli. He was by no means a total “rock guy”—that was more my angle, if broad strokes were drawn. When we reconnected, Marc was someone else entirely: he was a sterling specimen of the obsessed, die-hard rock devotee. I wouldn’t have called it in a million years, but he’d dedicated his entire life to Aerosmith. He’d transformed his room into a wall-to-wall shrine: his Aerosmith posters were a continuous collage that looked like wallpaper, he had cataloged copies of every magazine that they’d ever appeared in, he maintained an orderly gallery, in plastic sleeves, of signed photographs, and he had amassed enough rare foreign vinyl and bootleg concert cassettes to open a record store.
Marc definitely didn’t dress the part; he looked like no more than a rock fan with a taste for Aerosmith T- shirts, because he never let his fandom go so far as to inspire sartorial homage to Steven or Joe. It did, however, inspire stalking, stealing, trespassing, and a few other mildly illegal pursuits in the name of the cause. Marc had also gotten himself in with the local ticket-scalping community somehow: he’d buy a load of tickets for a show, then trade among the scalpers until he had bartered his way up to the perfect pair of floor seats. It was all a big game to him; he was like a kid trading baseball cards, but come showtime, he was the kid who walked away with the rarest cards up for grabs.
Once Marc had his seats sorted out, his little operation was just getting going. He’d sneak in a very nice, professional-grade camera and a collection of lenses by taking the whole apparatus apart and stashing the individual pieces in his pants, the arms of his jacket, and wherever else they fit. He never got caught; and he just caught amazing live shots of Aerosmith. The only problem was that he got into Aerosmith a little too late: when he started really digging them they broke up.
A cornerstone of Marc’s collection of Aerosmith memorabilia was an empty bag of Doritos and a small Ziploc bag full of cigarette butts that he’d snatched from Joe Perry’s hotel room at the Sunset Marquis. Apparently he’d staked the place out and managed to get in there after Joe checked out and before housekeeping showed up. Joe hadn’t even played a show or anything the night before—at that point, he had quit the band actually. I thought it was a little weird, Aerosmith wasn’t even
That picture taught me a lesson that’s been stated by the wise and otherwise throughout history: whatever you put out into the world comes back to you one way or another. In this instance, that picture came back to me literally and brought with it just what I’d been looking for.
The next time I saw the drawing I was at an impasse: I had been struggling unsuccessfully to get a band together amid a music scene that didn’t speak to me at all. I wanted the spoils that I watched lesser players enjoy, but if that meant changing as much as I’d have to, I wasn’t having that—I tried but I found that I was incapable of too much compromise. I won’t lie now that retrospect is on my side and claim that deep down I knew it would all come together fine. It didn’t look like it was going that way at all, but it didn’t keep me from doing the only thing I could do: I did what felt right, and somehow, I got lucky. I found four other dysfunctional like-minded souls.
I was working in the Hollywood Music Store the day a slinky guy dressed like Johnny Thunders came up to me. He was wearing tight black jeans, creepers, dyed black hair, and pink socks. He had a copy of my Aerosmith drawing in his hand that a mutual friend had given him: apparently prints of it had been made and circulated. This guy had been inspired enough to seek me out, especially when he heard that I was a lead guitar player.
“Hey, man, are you the guy who drew this?” he asked a bit impatiently. “I dig it. It’s fuckin’ cool.”
“Yeah, I did,” I said. “Thanks.”
“What’s your name?”
“I’m Slash.”
“Hey. I’m Izzy Stradlin.”
We didn’t talk for long; Izzy has always been the kind of guy with somewhere else that he needed to be. But we made a plan to hang out later on, and when he came by my house that night, he brought me a tape of his band. It couldn’t have sounded worse: the tape was the cheapest type around, and their rehearsal had been recorded through the built-in mike in a boom box that had been placed on the floor. It sounded like they were playing deep inside a jet engine. But through the static din, way in the background, I heard something intriguing, that I believed to be their singer’s voice. It was hard to make out and his squeal was so high-pitched that I thought it might be a technical flaw in the tape. It sounded like the squeak that a cassette makes just before the tape snaps—except it was in key.
AFTER MY INCOMPLETE STINT AT HIGH school, I lived with my mother and grandmother in a house on Melrose and La Cienega in a small basement room off the garage. It was perfect for me; if need be, I could slip out of the street-level window undetected at any time of day or night. I had my snakes and my cats down there; I could also play guitar whenever I liked without bothering anyone. As soon as I dropped out of school, I agreed to pay my mother rent.
As I mentioned, I held several day jobs while trying to put together or get into a band that I believed in amid the quagmire of the L.A. metal scene. Around this time, I worked for a while at Canter’s Deli in a job that Marc basically invented for me. I worked alone upstairs in the banquet room, which wasn’t suited for a banquet at all—it was more or less where they stored all kinds of shit that they didn’t necessarily need. I didn’t realize the humor in that back then.
My job involved comparing the waitstaff’s checks with the corresponding cashier’s receipts so that Marc could quickly and easily figure out who was stealing. It was so easy; a job that the biggest idiot could do. And it came with perks: I’d eat pastrami sandwiches and drink Cokes the whole time, while putting those papers in two piles, basically. My job did have its place: through my sorting, Marc caught more than a few staffers who had probably been robbing his family for years.
After I left, Marc willed my job to Ron Schneider, my bass player in Tidus Sloan. Our band still played together sometimes, but we weren’t taking things to the next level in any way—without a singer, we weren’t going to ever gig on the Strip.
My job at the Hollywood Music Store was one of a few that I saw as stepping-stones to playing guitar professionally, full-time; I wasn’t in it for the fame and girls, I wanted it for a much simpler reason: there wasn’t anything else in the world that I enjoyed more. At the music store I was a salesclerk who sold—and played—every guitar on the floor, but that was by no means my only area of expertise. I also sold all kinds of shit that I knew
