felt somehow… different. I wasn’t sure what it was, aside from the fact that it wasn’t familiar. It was all fine, though, because I was in the
The girl’s apartment we were in was off Wilshire near downtown L.A. and we left her that morning without a worry in the world. The future looked bright even though we didn’t have any prospects at the time. As morning came over the city, we wandered all the way back up into Melrose in central Hollywood and that’s when I got the bright idea that we should go visit this girl I knew. She was a really attractive girl who went to Fairfax High who had a crush on me. Though I didn’t know her all that well, I did know that her mom was at work every day, so we went over to her place and hung out and listened to the Beatles all afternoon. She had a big girlie bed with a fluffy comforter and the sunlight came into her room in a certain way; the whole space was very airy and white and pink and soft.
Izzy and I got there and fell out and listened to music. I was in love with the song “Dear Prudence.” “Revolution” into “Dear Prudence” seemed to be everything that mattered in the world. “Norwegian Wood,” that was good, too. We hung out there for the better part of the day, then left. On the way home, whenever we stopped walking, I would fall into that blissful nodding state that heroin brings. I realized that the buzz I’d gotten had lasted the whole day long.
I was nineteen years old.
OUR REHEARSAL SPACE/MY AND AXL’S apartment was where the band headed with our stragglers in tow at the end of the night. It was where we’d go after we’d played a show and whatever club it was had cleared us out. As our fan base grew, this ritual became an unwise proposition that wasn’t going to end well but we engaged in it anyway. The Villas were deep enough into the cross section of Hollywood and downtown that no one but hookers and drug addicts were hanging around after dark—our neighbors were nine-to-five businesses on each side with the exception of the Gardner Elementary School right behind us, whose hours were more like eight to three. It was easy for fifty or more people to party all night, shooting smack, smoking pot, and breaking bottles against the wall without any trouble from the police. Soon that scene grew enough to fill our space, the alley, and the entire parking lot next to the building: people with liquor in brown paper bags could be found engaging in illegal and sordid activities, less than fifty yards off Sunset Boulevard at any hour of the night. We’d be up past dawn, but when the kids would start filing into the elementary school in the morning, usually we started to wind things down. Luckily there was no interaction between our scene and theirs, although their playground did end at the back of our “studio” building.
Another band used the storage/rehearsal space next door to us and we could never remember their name… oh, wait, they were called the Wild. Dizzy Reed was in that band playing keyboards, and that is how he and Axl met and became friends. The Wild were a typical rock band of the day that I never went to see; I also never paid much attention to how they played. I did, however, party with them. Our entire rehearsal-space life was a scene defined by these two bands partying all night, every night in a dingy part of town.
The level of debauchery, for our part at least, got pretty outrageous. I remember being up in the bunk one night after a show with Izzy and some girl. We were taking turns having sex with her, but Izzy wasn’t wearing protection, so when he pulled out, he fucking came on my leg, since I was right there on the other side of her. That definitely stopped me in my tracks. I sat up, looked over at him, and said, “Hey! Izzy… man. We’ve
A scene that out of bounds wasn’t going to last, and when it crashed it did so very dramatically. After one particular gig, as usual, our friends and whoever else was in the club came back to tear it up at our place well into the early morning. Now, most of the girls who chose to party in our alleyway until six or seven a.m. weren’t the sharpest pencils in the box; but this particular night one of them lost it completely. My memory of the events is hazy, but from what I remember she had sex with Axl up in the loft. Toward the end of the night, maybe as the drugs and booze wore off, she lost her mind and freaked out intensely. Axl told her to leave and tried throwing her out. I attempted to help mediate the situation to get her out quietly, but that wasn’t happening.
About a week later, Steven was there when the cops stormed in and turned the place upside down. They broke a few pieces of equipment searching for contraband and hassled anybody associated with us in any way; they threatened Steven with arrest if he didn’t tell them where to find Axl and me because we were wanted for allegedly raping that girl. Steven got in touch with us and warned us, so we stayed away from home for the rest of the day. I headed back there the next morning; it was raining and unseasonably cold, and I found Izzy when I got there, picking his way through the mess that the cops had left behind. I was completely puzzled because I hadn’t done a thing that I could think of—I hardly spoke to the girl in question that night, nor had anybody else.
It was a bad situation, so I took my cue and split; I grabbed a few things and headed off to hide out with Steven at his new girlfriend Monica’s apartment, which was within walking distance. Monica was a Swedish porn star who’d taken Steven in and I couldn’t have asked for a better place to lay low because we used to have
The girl’s parents had contacts in the LAPD, and intended to press charges to the fullest. Axl took off to Orange County and hid out at some girl’s place for a few weeks, while I stayed with Steven and Monica. For fear of arrest, we didn’t book gigs and maintained a low profile. The truth was, Axl had definitely had sex with the girl, but it had been consensual and no one had raped her. For my part I hadn’t even touched her! When we got our wits about us after a few weeks, we dealt with the situation through the proper channels.
Axl returned to L.A. and the two of us moved in with Vicky Hamilton and her roommate, Jennifer Perry, and Vicky hired a lawyer to handle our case. I’m sure Vicky regretted taking us in immediately: Axl and I took over the living room in her quaint one-bedroom apartment, and between the empty liquor bottles and the ceaseless parade of characters that seemed to trail along behind us wherever we went, overnight we converted it into a complete mess. Axl slept on the couch, I slept on the floor, and what was once a living room looked like a bomb had hit it. The kitchen was a fucking disaster; within a week there were dishes and trash piled a mile high. Luckily I’d convinced my ex-girlfriend Yvonne to watch my snake, Clyde, for a while. The case went to court, but somewhere along the line, the charges against me were dropped. Axl, however, did have to get himself a suit and face the judge, but once the testimony was given, the charges were dropped and that was it.
WE LOST WHAT SEEMED LIKE A YEAR OF our lives getting clear of that legal issue, because until then, every day had moved us forward with ferocious intensity. After that incident, we vacated our garage rehearsal space, and started playing out and working on new songs again. Our friends Danny and Joe were still in the picture; Danny’s green Oldsmobile was still our band transportation. Danny was a great guy with a James Dean haircut and a very cool, confident vibe. He and I became drug buddies, too: once I got into heroin, we would drive that green beast all over L.A. looking for smack.
Joe was our roadie and my guitar tech back then, though he was pretty lousy: I remember headlining at the Roxy and one of Joe’s duties was to bring me a slide during the solo section of “Rocket Queen,” but by the time he actually got the slide on my finger the solo was over. I was so pissed off that I physically kicked him offstage. But all was forgiven later on, because Joe was a loyal, true-blue kind of guy that anyone would want to keep around. Joe was always the one to back any of us up when things got sticky and dedication like that can’t be bought.
We weren’t at all like the other bands playing clubs on the strip; we generally didn’t care what they were doing. We did, however, as far as other bands went, have an unspoken disregard for Poison, because they were the biggest local band on the block and the epitome of everything that we hated about the L.A. music scene. We were scheduled to share a few bills with them at different points, early in our career, but each time something major went wrong. I believe once they didn’t show up at all and we were forced to play two sets to cover for them, and I think another time the promoter pulled the gig at the last minute because of some shady move on their part.
One of our more memorable gigs from this era was an outdoor festival called the Street Scene that took place on six or seven stages in downtown Los Angeles that occupied a circuit of city blocks. It was our first time playing it, I and it was 1983, and we were scheduled to open for Fear, the only L.A. punk band that I really cared about. We
