Slash

at all hours of the night. Hell House was so raucous that from a distance it appeared to be vibrating.

One of the regulars to be found at Hell House was Del James, a true oxymoron: he was a biker guy with tattoos and the whole thing, but he was a writer. Del was tight with all of us at one point but he became tighter with Axl as time went on. Axl really took to him, responding to his intellect and how Del patiently listened to Axl express himself deeply. They did a lot of writing together and I think they still do. Del ended up writing treatments for some of our videos, as well as having written the short story that inspired Axl to write “November Rain.”

During this bit of band downtime as we searched for a producer, we frequented Hell House a bit too much, but I was the only one vagrant enough to live there on and off as well. I even did a few early interviews there. When I read them I couldn’t believe how shocked the journalists were by the surroundings. To me there was nothing crazy about it at all.

She gave each and every one of us crabs.

MY OTHER MAIN SOCIAL SCENE, ASIDE from Hell House and the stripper complex across the street from Izzy and Steve, revolved around the ladies of the Seventh Veil, which is a strip club on Sunset that is still alive and kicking. I liked to shack up with a few of the girls who worked there who shared an apartment off Hollywood Boulevard where we’d usually drink ourselves senseless all night long. One of the girls in that scene was named Cameron. Every single one of us fucked her at one point or another, and Steven ended up dating her for a while, and across the board she gave each and every one of us crabs. It was ridiculous; we started to call her Craberon—to her face. I gave her the benefit of the doubt; I thought that maybe I’d picked up crabs over at Hell House or any of the other questionable places I chose to sleep at the time, but that wasn’t the case. Craberon had a nice little apartment of her own in West Hollywood and the one time I slept with her over there I got crabs there, too.

Another stripper worth mentioning is Adrianna Smith, the girl that both Axl and Steven dated and that Axl forever immortalized on our debut record… but we’ll get to all of that in just a little bit. My little universe over at the Seventh Veil was great: I’d show up around eleven p.m., gather some tip money from the girls, head down to the liquor store, stock up on Jim Beam (the poor man’s Jack Daniel’s), and have a party started for them back at their place when they got off work. As someone with no place of his own, it was the best setup I could imagine: a cool, reckless spot full of girls where I could get away with drinking or doing whatever else I wanted to do without anyone giving me a hard time.

In the back of my mind, I was aware that we were no closer to choosing a producer and that the inertia was destroying us. I was strung out, drinking, doing drugs when I could, with very little money—and the rest of us weren’t much better. I was back to relying on friends and living on couches and living the street life once again—but this was worse than the old days. Back then it was fun because the band and I were working toward something. Now it felt like we were too disorganized and fucked up to be anything other than vagrants and we’d “made it.” I knew deep inside that I needed to get my shit together, that I couldn’t last in the abyss much longer.

Around this time, our dealer Sammy got busted, and that was a real turning point. I was at Izzy and Steven’s that day and Izzy’s girlfriend Dezi had gone out to meet Sammy for us at one of his regularly scheduled spots where all of his clients came out of the woodwork to score. The cops had planned a sting, and when Dezi left and never came back we got worried. Much later on we got her phone call from jail. They’d taken in all of Sammy’s clients, and were going to spring her, but Sammy was not coming back for a long, long time. That was a big reality check for us; I remember Izzy and I desperately scouring the streets looking for some smack. It was a mess. I ended up going back to Yvonne’s and kicking there for the third time. I just stayed up for days and didn’t feel well, claiming I’d caught the flu again.

Meanwhile, Tom Zutaut was at his wit’s end. He called us into Geffen one day, we thought to discuss another handful of producers that he wanted us to meet. Once he got us in his office, he just stared at us for a while. I was nodding out, still a mess from drying out at Yvonne’s, and the rest of the guys looked rough as well.

“What the hell can I do for you?” he said. “Take a look at yourselves. Do you even think you’re capable of making a record?! You guys have to get it together! Get focused! Time is running out!”

His comments hung in the air, but they made an impression because slowly but surely, without making a big deal about it or even acknowledging it, we got ourselves together.

ALAN NIVEN AND TOM ZUTAUT HAD SENT every producer in town to meet us, and just when it seemed hopeless one finally stuck—Mike Clink. We did one session with him and recorded “Shadow of Your Love,” which was the best song in the set the first time I saw Hollywood Rose. Our version of it didn’t make the album, but it was eventually released on a Japanese EP.

In any case, when we listened back, it was all there: finally we heard ourselves on tape exactly the way we wanted to. It was just us, but refined; Clink had captured the essence of Guns N’ Roses. Finally all systems were go. We’d spent seven months in limbo, barely playing and intermittently recording with producers that weren’t right. It felt like an eternity; because the way we lived, a few months would have decimated a lesser band.

Mike Clink had what it took; he knew how to direct our energy into something productive. He knew how to capture our sound without losing its edge and he had the right kind of personality to get along with everyone. Clink’s secret was simple: he didn’t fuck with our sound—he worked hard to capture it perfectly, just as it was. It’s amazing that no one had thought of that. Clink had worked with Heart and Jefferson Starship, but what sold us was that he’d worked on UFO’s Lights Out. That record was a standout to all of us, because Michael Schenker’s guitar playing on it was both outstanding and sounded amazing.

I’ve always found that producers are the type of people who have all the answers to other people’s problems but never to their own. They’re the first to tell other people what to do, how to play, how to sound—all of it. They often don’t have their own identity, which makes them hard to respect. Mike was different, he was amiable, he was never intrusive, he was easygoing, quiet, and observant. And he knew who he was. Rather than make suggestions as if he knew better, he chose to take it all in. From the start we completely respected him.

We booked ourselves time at S.I.R. studios and with Mike at the board, the band felt free to be ourselves; at our very first preproduction session, we started writing what would later become “You Could Be Mine.” At another session, we started to work up “Perfect Crime,” which was something that Izzy brought in. We weren’t in there to write new material, but we were so comfortable that it just came to us.

We started to demo all of the songs that we were considering for Appetite, and went through them with Mike pretty much as we’d done them before with very few changes. The only creative shift that occurred was one of Alan’s suggestions actually. In “Welcome to the Jungle,” originally we repeated the section where Axl sings “When you’re high, you never want to come down.” Alan suggested taking one of them out. He was right. It made the song tighter. But aside from that, all of those songs were captured as they were in one or two takes. It’s a testament to how well things were going in the studio and how great a mood we were in. We never listened to suggestions—from anyone. But we were willing to give it a shot, and we found out that it worked. Alan was already managing Great White at the time; he also produced them and served as a cowriter. It’s a very good thing that none of us were aware of that at the time, because that session might not have gone so well and “Welcome to the Jungle” might have been a very different song. It never bothered me once we found out about Alan’s connection to Great White, but it had quite a negative, snowball effect among some of the other members of our band.

I can only imagine how ecstatic Tom was that Guns N’ Roses now had a real manager and a producer that we wanted to work with. It took a couple of years, but it finally looked like this group of lunatics that he’d convinced the label to believe in was actually going to turn out the way he’d promised we would.

Alan set us up in Rumbo Studio in Canoga Park, where Clink liked to work, to do our basic live tracks. Canoga Park was close to where Steven grew up in the Valley, which was a foreign country as far as I was concerned. I think that might have been the point—they thought keeping us out of Hollywood would force us to focus on recording. Alan rented us an apartment at the Oakwoods, which are these generic fully furnished complexes all over the world. He also rented us a van for transportation. For some reason, I can’t imagine why, I became the designated driver.

Mike hired some real professionals to help out his street rats: Porky, a famous guitar tech, and Jame-O, the drum tech. They’d done hundreds of records, total pros who were also fun-loving partiers. They were invaluable to us.

Recording a real album in a proper studio was new to us: we’d done demos in various locations around L.A.