past East Hollywood, anything really
Axl and I became really good friends during this period because, for a while, he lived with my family and me. It wasn’t because we were soul mates or anything: Axl never had a place of his own back then; he just crashed wherever he could. When he lived with us, he’d spend his days sleeping in my subterranean room surrounded by my snakes and my cats while I was at work. When I got home, I’d wake him up and we’d go to rehearsal.
All the same, I learned a lot about Axl during that time. We talked about music and the things we thought were great; we’d listen to a particular song and dissect it, and it was clear that we had a lot in common in terms of our musical taste. We had a mutual respect for all the bands that had influenced me.
Axl also had an interest in talking about life, both his own and in the greater sense. I didn’t have a lot to say but I was always a good listener. So he told me about his family and the hard times he’d endured in Indiana; it was half a world away from anything I could comprehend. Axl impressed me then the way he always has: no matter what anyone might say about him, Axl Rose is brutally honest. His version of events might be singular, to say the least, but the truth is, he believes in what he says with more heart than anyone else I’ve ever met.
It shouldn’t be shocking to hear that it wasn’t always smooth sailing when Axl lived with my family. As I mentioned, my room was off the living room, down two flights of stairs, under the garage. For the most part, Axl kept to himself when I wasn’t there, but one morning after I’d left for work, apparently he wandered up and crashed out on the couch in the living room. In other households that might not have been that big of a deal, but in ours it was. My grandmother, Ola Sr., was our matriarch and that couch was the throne from which she watched her favorite TV shows every afternoon. When she arrived, right on time to enjoy her regularly scheduled programming, and found Axl there, sprawled out, Ola Sr. politely roused him. In her sweet, soft, old-lady voice she asked him to go back downstairs to my room, where he could sleep as long as he liked. For whatever reason, that didn’t go over well: from what I understand, Axl told my grandmother to fuck off then stormed downstairs to my room—at least that’s what my mom said.
My mom took me aside when I got home from work, and as easygoing as she is, she insisted that if Axl was going to live under her roof for even one more day, he needed to apologize to her mother and promise to never behave that way again. It was my duty to make it happen, which at the time I didn’t think was that big of a deal.
My mom used to loan me her green Datsun 510, and as Axl and I drove to rehearsal that evening, I mentioned, in the least confrontational way, that he should probably apologize to Ola Sr. for telling her to fuck off. I hadn’t known Axl long, but I already knew him well enough to understand that he was a sensitive, introspective person who endured serious mood swings, so I chose my words carefully and presented the issue in a very nonjudgmental, objective tone. Axl stared out the window as I spoke, then he started rocking back and forth in the passenger seat. We were driving on Santa Monica Boulevard, doing about forty miles an hour, when suddenly, he opened the car door and jumped out without a word. He stumbled, kind of hopped, and made it onto the sidewalk without falling. He steadied himself, then took off down a side street without looking back.
I was shocked; I did a U-turn and drove around in vain, looking for him for an hour. He didn’t show up back at my house that night and he didn’t come to rehearsal for four days. On the fifth day he appeared at the studio as if nothing had happened. He’d found somewhere else to crash and he never mentioned it again. It was pretty clear to me from that point forward that Axl had a few personality traits that set him very far apart from every other person I’d ever known.
THE LAST HOLLYWOOD ROSE GIG TOOK place at the Troubadour and it ended eventfully. It was an “off” night all around, basically a series of almost right moments. We went on late and everything sounded terrible, the crowd was rowdy and disengaged, and no matter how hard we tried, there was no turning the vibe around. Some heckler in the front row antagonized Axl and soon he’d had enough; he threw a glass at the guy or broke a bottle on his head—it doesn’t matter which, but it was a fitting expression of the pent-up frustration within the band that night. As I watched the altercation with this guy build throughout the set, it was such a big distraction during the show that I knew I was going to quit as soon as the set was done. Axl going after him was like affirmation from the universe.
It’s not like I hadn’t seen it coming: I wasn’t satisfied and the whole situation didn’t seem very stable. We’d had only a handful of gigs in the few months we’d been together and the lineup never felt quite right. By that point, it didn’t take much; and the bottle scene seemed uncalled for—it distracted from the music to say the least. Here we were, a fledgling band with enough internal issues trying to scratch out a name for ourselves, having to contend with incidents like that. It meant something to Axl, of course, but not everyone necessarily agreed with him. It was the way he felt and, seriously, if it was called for, fine, but sometimes you gotta pick your battles. Stopping the show to deal with this situation was a bit much. In the spirit of rock and roll, I had an appreciation for the full-on fuck-you, but as far as professionalism was concerned, it was an issue for me.
Axl is a dramatic kind of individual. Everything he says or does has a meaning, a theatrical place in his mind, in a blown-out-of-proportion kind of way. Little things become greatly exaggerated, so that interactions with people can become magnified into major issues. The bottom line is, he has his own way of looking at things. I am a pretty easygoing guy, so I’m told, so when Axl would fly off the handle, I never followed suit. I’d be like, “what?” and blow it off. There were such dramatic highs and lows and extreme mood swings that being close to him always felt like a roller-coaster ride. What I didn’t know then was that this would be a recurring theme.
In any event, I told everyone in Hollywood Rose that I quit as soon as we got offstage. The band split up after that and Axl and I parted ways for a while. He went on to join Tracii Guns in L.A. Guns, which soon became the earliest incarnation of Guns N’ Roses.
I went on to join a band called Black Sheep with Willie Bass, which was a rite of passage for a succession of talented musicians. Willie is a great front man; he’s a really tall black guy who sings and plays bass and he had a penchant for landing the hottest shredder guitar players of the day, one after the other. He’d had Paul Gilbert, a virtuoso, Yngwie Malmsteen type; Mitch Perry, who had played with Michael Schenker; and for a time, me. Shredding was not my forte—I could play fast, but I valued classic rock-and-roll, Chuck Berry–style playing over heavy metal showboating. I took the gig anyway, because, after Hollywood Rose, I realized that getting out there and being noticed was essential: it was a way to meet other players and learn about other opportunities in a fashion that suited my personality more than networking on the Strip.
I took the gig and played to about eight hundred people out at the Country Club in the Valley, and it was a particularly good show, I must say. It was also the first time I’d ever played to so many. I enjoyed the exposure, though I remember thinking that I’d played terribly. I found out later that Axl was there, but I had no idea at the time because he didn’t come up and say hello.
Black Sheep wasn’t really doing much by this point; after that one gig, we didn’t have any others booked; we’d just get together to rehearse now and again. My brief experience with them might not have been exactly what I wanted to do, but it did make me more public, so it seemed to me that if playing in a well-liked L.A. club band was winning me attention and putting my career on some kind of track, joining the biggest L.A. club band of the day might not be a bad idea at all.
Poison’s guitar player, Matt Smith, called me when he decided that he was going to leave the band. His wife was pregnant and they had decided to move back to Pennsylvania to start their family. Matt and I had friends in common and he’d invited me to a few of Poison’s parties. Matt was a good guy, he was down to earth—the least poisonous of the bunch. Matt knew that it wasn’t my thing at all, but he said that it was a good gig that paid well and I already knew the band was definitely in demand. I was pretty against it, but Matt talked me into trying out.
Poison rehearsed in a big flat way down in Venice on Washington and La Brea or something like that, which was plastered with posters… of themselves. I showed up to the audition wearing my typical uniform: jeans, T-shirt, and that day a pair of these really cool moccasins that I stole from the farmer’s market—they weren’t beaded, just really plain brown leather with short fringe around the ankle. I had learned four or five songs from a tape they’d given me and I just killed them when we ran through it all. They called me back for a second audition and I remember Bobby Dall, the bass player, looking me over as I played. The vibe was very different; there was a
