Slash

In the same vein as “Paradise,” there is an innocent quality to that song; it’s a nursery rhyme almost, a cute melody sung by kids on a playground… sinister kids whose playground is a seedy back alley.

That song really got all of us fired up. I don’t remember if we got to it later that night back at the rehearsal garage or the next morning, but within a day, we had it all worked out. Axl got the lyrics down, we smoothed out all of the parts and that was it. We tested it out at our next club date and it worked. It really worked. That song has a rhythm to it in the verses that from the start always made me go crazy. The first time we played it, even, I just started jumping up and down—I couldn’t help it. When we had our huge stage much later on, I’d run the length of it, jump off the amplifiers, and lose it just about every single time we played it. I’m not sure why, but no other song we’ve ever played live made me move like that.

There was one more classic that we wrote back there in that garage: “My Michelle.” The music originated there, I think over the course of a few afternoons. I believe Izzy and I came up with the basic structure, and then, as usual, Duff came through with exactly what the song needed to evolve. In any case, I didn’t write the words, but I definitely know what they’re about. The subject of the song is Michelle Young, who was friends with my first girlfriend, Melissa. I knew the both of them all through junior high, well before Guns was even an idea, let alone a reality.

The thing is, because of friends of mine like Mark Mansfield and Ron Schneider who were still close to me and part of the music scene to a degree, at the time, many of my old friends became involved in the Guns N’ Roses universe once it got going. Because of our common friends, I reestablished connections with people I hadn’t seen since I’d left school, and many of them got sucked into our world—for better, and mostly for worse.

Michelle was one of them; even when we were kids she was always a nut case. When she started frequenting our circles, she ended up hooking up with Axl and they had a brief romantic interlude. He wrote those lyrics about her life, which tells the facts of her upbringing verbatim. Her dad was definitely involved in the porn business and her mom was a pill popper and drug addict who eventually committed suicide. But having my former school friend with whom I’d shared cigarettes in the bathroom back in junior high become the subject of one of our more intense songs was something else. I asked Axl about it one day, because I couldn’t imagine the Michelle I knew being happy about having her story made public.

“Hey, Axl,” I said to him at rehearsal after we’d run through the song, “don’t you think Michelle is going to be offended?”

“Why would she?” he said. “It’s all fucking true.”

“Yeah it is, but I don’t know if it’s going to be cool if you say all those things. Can’t you change it a bit?”

“No,” he said. “It’s the truth. Even if she doesn’t like it, I’m going to do it anyway.”

I expected the worst; even though we had nothing to sue for, I expected Michelle to come after us in some way. I at least expected her to hate the song and be mortified by having her business hung out there like that. I was very, very wrong: from the moment we played that song live through to when we recorded it for our album, Michelle loved the attention it brought her. Back then it was the best thing that ever happened to her. But like so many of our friends that were drawn into the dark circle of Guns N’ Roses, she came in one way and went out another. Most of them ended up either going to jail or rehab or both (or worse), but I’m happy to say that she’s among those who turned their lives around before it was too late. More than a few of our friends eventually moved to Minneapolis… maybe that had something to do with it.

“Rocket Queen” was inspired by a riff I came up with when I first met Duff. It was one of the more complicated arrangements on what became our album, mostly because we had to integrate the riff with Axl’s more melodic chorus. The song is based on our mutual friend Barbie, who even at eighteen had a notorious reputation. She was a drug addict and a queen of the underground scene back then. She’d eventually become a madam, but Axl was infatuated with her at the time. I hear she has managed to survive after all these years.

I was pulled under, I passed out cold, and fell off the chair and woke up sprawled across the floor hours later at daybreak

IT WAS DURING THIS PERIOD OF WRITING and rehearsing at the Sunset and Gardner Hotel and Villas that I started to notice something different about Steven. He would show up to rehearsal a little too elastic; he seemed like he was drunk but he wasn’t drinking anything. I couldn’t quite figure it out because his playing was fine, so I was intrigued. Steven was dating a girl who lived with a roommate on Gardner just down the street from our rehearsal space. I started to go over there with him every night after we were done practicing and found it to be a pretty heavy scene: it was like time stopped when you walked through the door; everything moved very, very slowly.

I got to know Steve’s girlfriend and her roommate, a girl so whacked out that it broke my heart. I have to admit, I also thought she was cute, so I started seeing her, and though I was aware that she was on something, I wasn’t aware of what it was. I’d go over there with Steven after rehearsal and the four of us would listen to the Stones’ Goats Head Soup all night long while I watched them nodding off all over the place. It finally dawned on me that heroin might be the catalyst for everybody’s subdued state. At first, none of them did it in front of me, so I figured it out later rather than sooner. But even if they had, I wouldn’t have tried it because at that point heroin had no appeal to me. I didn’t know much about it, and what I saw didn’t make me want to try it at all. Why would it?

The roommate was one of those useless L.A. stories: she was eighteen or nineteen; a rich girl who had taken her family’s money and done everything in her power to throw it in their face. In the process she’d fucked herself up pretty good, and she’d complain to no end about how her life was a shambles and how it was all her family’s fault. Her solution was to piss and moan until she couldn’t take it anymore, then get high and seek solace in nodding out, which, needless to say, got in the way of her limited, yet planned efforts to repair her situation. This movie came complete with the early-morning scene where her mother arrives unannounced to confront her and of course I made the mistake of getting in the middle of their horrible argument.

I didn’t say much, but her mother was convinced that I was the cause of her daughter’s condition. The truth is that I was the only one in her scene not on heroin. Her mother left that day hating me and leaving her daughter behind, but eventually she won out: that girl soon disappeared. After that, Steven’s girlfriend moved out, too, and neither of us ever saw either of them again.

Up until I watched Steven and the girls do it and eventually did it myself, all that I knew of heroin were the antidrug movies I’d seen in school and the plot of The French Connection, which centered on Popeye Doyle’s maniacal efforts to stop the import of a French cartel’s huge shipment of it. At that point I had no idea that all of my heroes were on heroin. But I’d soon find out. It crept into my life like ivy up a wall.

Izzy and I were at Nicky Beat’s rehearsal studio back in 1984, when I first chased the dragon with him, sucking up the smoke that rose from the foil through a straw as we heated it up. All it left me feeling was queasy and not very high at all. I didn’t get the instant buzz, so I lost interest in it quick; feeling sick was not my idea of a good time. Izzy was cool; he could smoke it and get complete satisfaction that way.

A few months later I mainlined for the first time and that was all she wrote; after that, I’d never do it any other way than straight into my bloodstream. I was just like every other cheap-thrill user; I wanted it fast and I wanted it now. I’ve never been able to get high doing it any other way than with a needle. If I can’t, I’d rather not bother; it’s a waste of drugs, a waste of time, and a conscious decision to be inefficient. I had tried to do it the way it is supposed to be done; the ancient civilized method of chasing the dragon according to Chinese custom, but that didn’t work for me. The Chinese were cool, collected, and composed about heroin, in the same way they were about opium. The intravenous method was developed much later, in the West, once people began using morphine recreationally. Needles were sought out for the instant gratification factor and that is what street people were after. In America, in the cowboy days of the Wild West, more women did it than men, all of them using needles, most of them hookers and barmaids.

One night really can change your life and this was the night that changed mine. I’ve thought about this a lot and I’m sure that it was probably because of all the Jim Beam I drank. We were in some chick’s apartment I ended up at with Izzy. I was at her vanity table, in her bathroom; it was very dimly lit, very druggy. She tied me off, loaded it up, shot it… and a wave engulfed me from somewhere deep within my stomach. I got this huge rush and that was all that I remembered. I was pulled under, I passed out cold, and fell off the chair and woke up sprawled across the floor hours later at daybreak. It took me a second to figure out what had happened: there was a bottle of Jim Beam next to me that I’d been drinking and for a moment I forgot altogether that’d I’d done heroin.

I looked through the doorway and saw Izzy and the girl asleep in the bed and that was when I realized that I