“Well, the music really isn’t well represented in the demo, guys,” he’d say. “You really have to hear the songs properly produced.”
Tom knew, as well as I did, that the music was
At the time Izzy was still living in his apartment and Duff was now living with this Hungarian girl, Katerina (whom he’d later marry), in an apartment on Hollywood Boulevard, coincidentally, next door to Sly Stone. I guess you could say that he and Duff had a tight neighborly relationship: Sly used to come by Duff’s place unannounced to smoke PCP, crack, or a mix of the two, alone, in Duff’s bathroom and then just leave. That blew our fucking minds. Apparently he did that all the time, but most of us didn’t see it because we never really hung out at Duff’s place— his girl wasn’t the type to host a bunch of guys sitting around the living room. But I used to meet Duff over there before rehearsal, so I did witness it once.
There was a knock at the door, Duff opened it up, and there was Sly.
“Hey, man,” he muttered because he never remembered Duff’s name. “Is it cool if I use your bathroom?”
“Oh yeah, sure,” Duff said.
And that was it. Duff said that Sly might be in there anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.
Duff also made the acquaintance of West Arkeen while he lived in that building. The only place I knew West to live on a regular basis back then was in his beat-up El Camino. I think at that point he was parking it outside of Duff’s building, so he was a tenant by extension. I was introduced to him through Duff and he became friends with the band; much more so with Axl than with me or the rest of us at first. At that point especially I was wary of meeting new people because all manner of riffraff had started to hang around us, so I was standoffish to newcomers. It takes a lot for me to trust someone, though after a while, West and I became friends.
West was a guitar player from San Diego and a consummate party guy who became more of a fixture than the average friend of the band: he even cowrote some of our songs like “It’s So Easy” and “Yesterdays” with Duff and “Bad Obsession” and “The Garden” with Axl. Duff and West would hang out and write songs and I would join them sometimes, but West and Axl got really tight. In addition to writing with Guns, he cowrote songs for Duff’s and Izzy’s solo projects and all of us contributed to his project, the Outpatience, in the late nineties, just before he died of an overdose.
West was a hard-drinking, hard-living good-times guy, so he fit in with us just fine. He was the kind of character who was so secure in his own skin and content with his own existence that if you weren’t nice to him, he’d still be amiable to you; that’s probably why he won me over in the end. For better or for worse, West was the guy who introduced the rest of us to what was then called speed and what is now called crystal meth. Speed was his thing; he always had a lot of it, he had major connections to it down in San Diego, and everyone in his orbit was always on it.
Eventually West somehow got the money together to rent a nice house in the Hollywood Hills; it was three stories, right on a cliff, tucked away in the trees. He lived there with “Laurie” and “Patricia,” these two speed- demon chicks that might have been attractive if they weren’t so strung out. Laurie somehow held down a job in the film industry and drove a nice Suzuki jeep, while Patricia never seemed to work, but she always seemed to have money. I could never get my head around how they maintained some appearance of a normal life, with a house, money in the bank, and all that—all while doing speed with the utmost abandon. But then again, I didn’t know much about speed then.
I used to crash there whenever I had nowhere to crash, and as West became closer to all of us, there was one thing I could never figure out: how he, too, always had money. Especially as things got crazier for us, West became the only thing like a friend that our band had in the world. He was the only one that always came through when any of us needed anything; for a long time he literally was the only one we could trust.
AS SOON AS WE GOT OUR ADVANCE money, we collectively managed to do one practical thing, which was to rent an apartment. We got turned down by almost every management office we approached because it’s not like we had good credit—or credit at all. But finally we found a place on the southeast corner of La Cienega and Fountain; a two-bedroom, two-bathroom, ground-floor apartment. We actually got a bit domestic for a moment and went out and rented some furniture—two beds and a kitchen dinette set. We rounded out the decor with a couch we found in the alley behind the building and a TV that Steven’s mom donated to our cause. When we first moved in, Steve’s mom also kicked us off with some groceries. It was the only time that we ever had them—for maybe a week, if you opened our fridge it actually looked like somebody lived there.
Steve and Izzy shared a room, and Axl and I shared a room, and that apartment is still there; I drive by it all the time—it’s the space with the big bay window on the first floor overlooking the intersection. When we first rented it, Izzy was still living with his girlfriend Dezi on Orange Avenue and Duff and Katerina were on Hollywood Boulevard, but mutual interests dictated that Izzy spend much of his time over at our place. Following some sort of domestic dispute, he became a full-time resident for a while.
To me, our place was deluxe; I even relocated my anaconda, Clyde, from Yvonne’s to join me there. Unfortunately, moving out of our garage into an ostensibly nicer apartment didn’t curtail our debauched delinquency; we ended up getting evicted after the three months we’d paid for—and never got our security deposit back. It didn’t work out as efficiently as planned, but being in the same place was more or less a step toward organized productivity as a band.
Everything was great until we got evicted, as far as I was concerned. We’d just gotten some money and I tried to be as frugal as I could in the smack-buying department, just making it stretch as far as it could go. In spite of my efforts, our place became a real shooting gallery: we’d cop down in East L.A. and it seemed like there was an endless supply in the street. Mark Mansfield came by one night, and unbeknownst to each other, we’d both become junkies, so it was
The label had rented us a rehearsal space at a place called Dean Chamberlain’s over in Hollywood, where Jane’s Addiction rehearsed as well. We’d roll in there every day at about two or three in the afternoon and play for about four hours. This little box was about eight feet by twenty feet, just very narrow and long, and was lit up by unpleasantly bright, hospital-strength fluorescent lights. Basically it was like rehearsing in a 7-Eleven.
Ironically, one of the first songs we worked up there was “Mr. Brownstone,” a track that was conceived under much dimmer circumstances. Izzy, his girlfriend Dezi, and I were up at their apartment one night when we came up with it. They had a little dinette set that we’d sit around cooking up our shit and then we’d just jam. We were sitting there complaining, as junkies do, about our dealers, as well as just complaining about being junkies, and that’s where that song came from. It basically described a day in the life for us at the time. Izzy had a cool idea, he came up with the riff, and we started improvising the lyrics. Dezi considers herself a cowriter on that track and for the record she did come up with maybe a noun here, perhaps a conjunction there. When we had it all together, we wrote the words down on a grocery bag. We brought it down to the Fountain apartment and played it for Axl and he reworked the lyrics a bit before the band worked on it at our next rehearsal. Axl could always take a simple Izzy melody and turn it into something fantastic, and that is just one of a few examples.
Tom Zutaut was eager to find us a producer and to get us on the road to recording—little did he know how long that road would be. The first candidate he sent our way was Tom Werman, who was a big fucking deal. Werman had recently produced Motley Crue’s
But he couldn’t handle us. We never even got to properly meet him. He came to our rehearsal space and we were playing “Mr. Brownstone,” at jet-engine decibel levels. Izzy and I had just gotten brand-new Mesa Boogie stacks and I was playing a new guitar: it was a Les Paul that had belonged to seventies blues guitarist Steve Hunter. I’d traded my BC Rich for it at Albert and Howie Huberman’s place, Guitars R Us. That store was an institution for every L.A. musician who couldn’t afford Guitar Center, it was
