Slash

and the EP Live Like a Suicide. It was untouched demos of four songs we’d been playing since our first rehearsal: Aerosmith’s “Mama Kin,” Rose Tattoo’s “Nice Boys,” and two of our own, “Move to the City” and “Reckless Life.” They’re raw I guess, but if you ask me they still sound pretty fucking good.

^{Playing the Troubadour circa 1986.}

So now we had a manager and now we had half an album of “live” tracks and Zutaut was happy. He believed the EP would attract eligible producers. It definitely got us noticed: I remember leaving Alan’s house in Redondo Beach with Duff and hearing “Move to the City” played on KNEC, this great heavy metal station out of Long Beach. The EP was a clear indication of our aesthetic, not to mention our lifestyle, and as it had always been, there weren’t too many easy-to-find like-minded souls. To say the least, it took a few dry runs to find the right guy.

IT WAS AGREED THAT PLAYING A FEW gigs would keep us visible and keep us from losing momentum. I, for one, knew that if there wasn’t any concrete work commitment on the horizon, it was likely that I’d treat every day like a vacation. We went back up to San Francisco to open for Jetboy at the Stone, followed by a gig two nights later opening for Ted Nugent at the Santa Monica Civic Center.

At the time we were still living at the Stiefel house officially, though once we chose Alan as our manager, we began to vacate in anticipation of letting Stiefel know the bad news. Axl moved back to Erin’s, I don’t know where Steven was staying, and Duff was where he’d always been, so Izzy and I became the only full-time residents, living in comfortable squalor in the downstairs back bedroom. It was a gypsylike scene; our friend Danny crashed there much of the time, too, amid the sparsely appointed rooms.

Finding dope in L.A. had become difficult suddenly, so Danny and I scoured the streets regularly looking to score. One of those nights we got lucky and managed to pick up a sizable amount. We were elated; we drove back to the house and stashed it all in a gun-shaped lighter of mine. We hid it in my drawer because the next morning we were off to San Francisco. I saw no reason to bring any along, because in San Francisco, I’d never had a problem scoring top-grade China White.

We packed all the gear in the van we’d rented; Danny and Izzy and I drove up in Danny’s car, and when we got there, Izzy and I went straight to someone’s apartment, where we planned to score our shit. The dealer didn’t get there before the show, so we went and did the gig, which was a blur because all that I could think about was getting my smack afterward. The rest of the band packed up, Danny included, and headed back to L.A., while Izzy and I offered to drive Danny’s car back ourselves because we wanted to score. We went back to the apartment and waited around for the shit to show up. We waited… we waited… we waited… nothing. At that point, we were getting jumpy, and when the dealer finally showed up it was crap—just useless. We looked at each other, both realizing that we were a fuck of a long way from home, and we didn’t have much time before we turned into pumpkins.

It was well into the next morning when we hit the road, but we knew that, at the very least, I had a bunch of shit stashed back at the house. All was well, we were making good time… until we ran out of gas. We lost a good hour there what with hitching to the gas station and back. Once we got on our way again, speeding to make up for lost time, as the itchiness stalked us, we got a flat tire. Changing a tire is never fun, but when your internal clock is counting down the seconds to your demise, it’s something else altogether.

We finally got home that night, thinking that we were cool and all was well. There’s a dope camaraderie that kicks in between junkies who are about to get high together, and as Izzy and I headed into the house, we were the greatest friends, just as tight as can be; all arm in arm and laughing about everything we’d just been through getting there. We went into my room, I opened up my stash drawer… and discovered that all my shit was gone.

Then I called Danny.

“Hey,” I said. “Didn’t I stash my shit in my lighter?”

“Yeah,” he said innocently.

“It’s gone.”

“No way.”

“I can’t find it.”

“That really sucks.”

“Get over here and help me!”

Izzy and Danny and I proceeded to tear the bedroom apart, then the rest of the house. I knew that I had put it there and I knew that Danny was the only one there with me when I did, but I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“Man, you know what?” Danny said after we’d exhausted every possible stash spot. He shook his head. “I hid it. I hid it when I was high. I’m going to try to remember where… let me think.”

After Danny thought about it long and hard, he came up with a few corners we hadn’t checked; a few wild goose chases. Then he went home again, leaving Izzy and me with the impossible task of trying to hook up with Sammy, our Persian dealer—our only dealer at the time. It was not looking good: we beeped Sammy every ten minutes and he never called back.

The next morning, Izzy’s girlfriend Dezi came over and she could tell that the situation was dire: we’d been up all night, we’d driven from San Francisco, we’d been paging dealers unsuccessfully all day, and we had to open for Ted Nugent in a few hours. Izzy and I were tripping out, nothing was happening, we had no one else to call, and we were wrecked. We were starting to jones pretty hard; we were like vampires out of Blackula, just rolling around on the ground and going to the bathroom to puke every five minutes.

Our show with Ted Nugent was all the way down in Santa Monica, at seven-thirty p.m. Sammy was not calling us back, so we had to figure out how we were going to get something in our system—anything at all—to make us human enough to make the show. We were in no condition to perform, let alone even drive ourselves to the gig. In desperation, Dezi called her friend Melissa, who lived up in Hollywood, in Izzy’s old apartment. She had heard from Sammy and was going to meet him shortly.

That was enough to motivate us: we drove over there somehow and hung out waiting for Melissa to return with our drugs. It looked like we might have taken care of one problem, but at the same time, it was around five p.m. and we were about an hour from the gig. Finally she returned, Izzy and I got our shit, we did all that, and what a relief that was. Fuck! We were once again functional. We had barely enough time to join our band, who were waiting for us so that we could play our first arena, to a sold-out crowd of three thousand.

We hightailed it over there. We had no artists or parking lot passes on us, and after the night we’d had, we looked like scabs off the street. We left Dezi to park the car and climbed the fence at the back of the arena for lack of a better plan. In the process I got caught on the chain links and the button of my jeans popped off, so I spent the rest of the night making sure my zipper didn’t go all the way down leaving me hanging out there, because I’ve never been the type to wear underwear.

Izzy and I somehow snuck into the loading area and made it up to the backstage area, and as we started down the hallway toward the stage I saw Gene Simmons. He was standing at the other end giving us a foreboding stare, which is something he is very good at doing. I had no idea why he was there, but it added to the surreal quality of the last twenty-four hours. Izzy and I got to the dressing room with less than ten minutes to spare. The guys may have been annoyed at first, but they were soon relieved. Disaster averted… we took one look in the mirror and headed to the stage.

And that was the first time we ever played “Sweet Child o’ Mine” live. I hadn’t at all mastered the signature riff to the degree that I could execute it on a whim, but I pulled it off anyway and the band as a whole played it really well. The whole set was good, and we had a collection of friends there: Yvonne, Marc Canter, and a few more of my “normal” friends. Even better, right after we got offstage, Izzy got beeped back from Sammy, who was going to meet us at the Stiefel house. Yvonne and her friends were there backstage, and at the time she and I were together again and the whole intervention incident was bygones. She didn’t know exactly where I was in terms of drugs—and I didn’t feel the need to tell her.

She was just there being a very supportive girlfriend, cheering her boyfriend on at his first big gig at a live arena. All things considered, she was letting me do my thing. Of course she wanted to celebrate afterward, which was a problem. I couldn’t wait to get out of there and get home to do drugs, but I didn’t want her to know so I tried