Slash

brown paper bag in her purse. She was the one who introduced me to vodka, actually; before I met her, I drank nothing but whiskey.

No one remotely resembling a musician came into Canter’s for a long while and the girls were definitely drunk when Duff did show up. I think the four of us were debating what he might look like when this bone-skinny, six- foot-plus guy with short spiked blond hair rolled in wearing a Sid Vicious–style chain and padlock around his neck, combat boots, and a red-and-black leather trench coat in spite of the seventy-five-degree weather. No one had predicted that. I kicked Steven and hushed the girls.

“Check it out,” I said. “This has to be him.”

Duff had been in a series of punk-rock bands in Seattle: the seminal but mostly overlooked outfit the Fartz, for whom he’d played guitar, the legendary pre-grunge power quartet the Fastbacks (drums), and a few others. Just before moving down to L.A., he had taken up bass. Duff was as musically versatile as he was driven: he didn’t leave Seattle because he wasn’t creatively satisfied; he left Seattle because he knew that the scene (at that time, at least) was a losing proposition and he wanted to make it. He knew that Los Angeles was the West Coast music capital, so without a plan and with no friends waiting to take him in, he packed up his beat-up red Chevy Nova and drove down to L.A. to make a name for himself. I respected him immediately for his devotion: he and I shared a similar work ethic. It established a kinship between us right away that hasn’t faltered at all over all of these years.

“So you’re Slash,” Duff said as he squeezed himself in beside me in our booth at Canter’s. “You’re not what I expected at all.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “Well, what were you expecting?”

“With a name like Slash, I thought you’d be much scarier, man,” he said. Steven and the girls and all laughed. “I’m not even kidding, I expected you to be some kind of punk-rock psychopath with a name like that.”

“Oh yeah?” I said smirking. We shared a laugh.

If that hadn’t broken the ice, my girlfriend Yvonne made sure to smash it a few minutes later. We’d sort of settled into small talk: Duff was getting to know us and vice versa, when, apropos of nothing, Yvonne leaned across me and put her hand on Duff’s shoulder.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” she said, louder than necessary.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

“Are you gay? I’m just curious.”

For the first time in hours our table was silent. What can I say, I’ve always been attracted to outspoken women.

“No,” Duff said. “I’m definitely not gay.”

After that exchange faded the five of us went upstairs, piled into the bathroom, and broke out the vodka. And not long after that, we formed a band right then and there, and once again spent the next month or so looking for a singer. We auditioned Ron Reyes, better known as Chavo Pederast, when he was the front man for Black Flag for a few months back in 1979. There were a few other characters in there as well, but as usual, we couldn’t find the right guy. All things considered, we wrote some really cool material: we came up with the main riff to the song that later became “Rocket Queen,” and a few more great ideas.

Despite the creativity flowing between the three of us, I began to get really frustrated with Steven. He never kept up with the dedicated work ethic that Duff and I shared; though he maintained twice the social schedule. It was so aggravating to watch him expend his energy on partying when we had so much to do. At the time, it was obvious that should we find the right singer, we would really have a band that was worth something. The problem was, we didn’t have a singer, but Steven was behaving as if we’d already been signed by a major label. In the end I was the one who broke up the band; I told Duff it just wasn’t working and I broke off with Steven in every way for a while, too. Duff went on to greener pastures: coincidentally, when he’d moved to Los Angeles he got an apartment on Orange Avenue, directly across the street from Izzy. Soon enough, those two ran into each other on the street, and that was that; Duff became a player in the L.A. Guns/Hollywood Rose universe.

THOSE WERE THE ONLY TWO BANDS COMING up behind Motley Crue that were worthy of note—L.A. Guns and Hollywood Rose, each of which were revolving-door outfits that shared a number of local players to an incestuous degree. L.A. Guns was founded by Tracii Guns, who had gone to Fairfax High with me—that band was nothing but a tighter, harder version of the sleazy blues shredding he played at keg parties back then.

Hollywood Rose was something else. I met up with Steven just after he’d seen them, and as he described their high-pitched singer, a guy who could tear the roof off, I realized that for once, Steven wasn’t exaggerating. I didn’t put it together that I’d already heard this guy, probably because I’d heard him on what is most likely the shittiest, low-fi recording of a live band that had ever been made.

Steve and I went to see Hollywood Rose at Gazarri’s and it was the first time that I beheld, hands down, the best singer in Hollywood at the time: W. Axl Rose. Much like the tape, the show was nothing more than an amateur garage band doing their best, but they had an amazing sense of reckless abandon and unbridled energy. At least two of them did: apart from Izzy and Axl, the band was pretty nondescript, but those two friends from Lafayette, Indiana, had an ominous presence about them. Izzy kept doing knee slides all over the stage and Axl screamed his fucking heart out—their performance was blistering. Axl’s voice drew me in immediately; it was so versatile, and underneath his impossibly high-pitched shrieking, the bluesy natural rhythm he had was riveting.

As I said, Hollywood Rose (like L.A. Guns) was a revolving-door band whose players all knew one another and were always coming or going. Bass player Steve Darrow worked with Izzy delivering the L.A. Weekly during the afternoon, so they were tight, but Axl didn’t seem to like guitar player Chris Webber for whatever reason. Axl apparently up and fired Chris without telling anyone else and somehow Steven heard that they were holding auditions for guitar players the next day.

It’s all as vague and illogical to me now as it was then, but Steven convinced me to show up at their rehearsal space, which was a room in some hovel called Fortress on Selma and Highland. That place was the epitome of ratty Hollywood punk, because only punk rockers would have thought to trash it so extensively. Rock guys don’t trash things until they’ve made it and are older; only punks do that out of the gate. I’m not sure what color it was originally, but the carpet at Fortress had turned a sick yellow brown, not only on the floor, but all the way up the walls and ceiling, where it had been installed to dampen the noise. Every corner was disgusting; the entire room was a lice-infested cube.

I started rehearsing with them and it was going fine—until Izzy took off during the second song. Now I know that bolting is Izzy’s defense mechanism when he thinks things aren’t quite right: he never makes a show of it, he just slips out and won’t look back. Apparently Izzy had no idea what I was doing there that day and understandably didn’t like it that Axl had fired Chris Webber without consulting, or even informing, him.

Eventually, a while later after we’d become good friends, I asked Izzy about it. Izzy always maintained an aura of cool; he was never ruffled, he never let that guard down. But when I asked him about this, he leveled a deathly serious gaze at me, so I had no doubt that he was sincere.

“It’s pretty fucking simple,” he said. “I just don’t like being dictated to under any circumstances.”

In any case, he split. I’d been dragged into the middle of that situation, entirely clueless to it. After Izzy left, there was a short, awkward moment… and then we just started playing again.

I didn’t even know that there was another concentric circle of tension around the move to bring me in: Tracii Guns had been vying for that gig. He’d been trying to recruit Axl and Izzy into a band for quite a while. I can’t imagine that he was excited to hear that they’d chosen me over him. I had no idea about any of this, and even if I had I would have ignored all of it anyway. Finally, finally, I was in a band with a great singer—or a singer at all.

^{Slash in Hollywood Rose, bassist Steve Darrow is at left. Slash is playing the voice box.}

Axl had been brainstorming on how to put together the right band, and he thought Izzy and I would make a great pairing, but since they’d never actually discussed it before he put it in motion, I was in but Izzy was gone. Hollywood Rose, as I knew it, was Axl, Steve Darrow, Steve Adler, and me. We booked gigs at Madame Wong’s East and West and rehearsed in a studio called Shamrock on Santa Monica Boulevard between Western and Gower. That place was an incredible scene, where just about anything might happen; considering that it was located way