Slash

He was a sweet guy, he loved to party, and he sat there on the side of the stage, watching the show more than helping run it behind the scenes. I’d say he probably changed five guitar strings the entire tour; he was able to swap them out okay, it was just that he didn’t get it done on any consistent or logical timetable. Thanks to Bill, I learned to play more carefully—I tried to never break a string because if I did, I never knew when I would get that guitar back. I only had two guitars on the road, so I’m not sure what was taking so much time. Needless to say, I had to replace Bill. All things considered, between our crew and our inexperience with touring on a professional level, our operation came off like the Bad News Bears.

THERE IS AN ESSENTIAL MOTIVE FOR touring that never dawned on us back then: we were completely ignorant that touring was intended to promote our record. We thought of it as all for the sake of playing. It was, to me, work for the sake of work, because without a tour, I’d have nowhere else to be. We were too into the experience to think of promoting our “product” day to day as we walked onstage, but Alan was trying to figure out how to market this thing, probably so he’d have something else to boast about as much as just making it succeed.

Alan wasn’t doing a good job, and neither was Geffen, because the one thing I was painfully aware of when we played every night was that nobody was aware of our record whatsoever. We felt as unheard of as any other band you’ve never heard of. So we kept it moving, we kept touring regardless of how we were received, and Alan and Tom Zutaut kept pumping Appetite. The only other option would have been to go home, and we had no intention of going home ever again if we could help it.

For an entire year, from August 1987 to sometime late in 1988, we didn’t see L.A. for more than a few days; we just bounced from tour to tour. Alan Niven booked us a tour across Europe opening for Aerosmith, with Faster Pussycat on the bill, that was to kick off a few days after The Cult tour ended. Aerosmith had just returned to rock and roll, and we couldn’t think of anyone we’d rather support. But it wasn’t meant to be this time—at the last minute Aerosmith canceled, so instead of going home, Alan sent us out there with Faster Pussycat and a great Japanese band called EZO to fulfill our obligations.

It was our first headlining tour; it began in Germany, at the Markthalle in Hamburg on September 29, 1987. It was great to headline, but we had a few issues. Faster Pussycat was one of those bands we hated from L.A.; they were exactly the kind of people we tried to avoid. The tour was also a bit of a culture shock: Hamburg still felt like it was a post–World War II casualty—the place had a pretty narrow viewpoint. It was a dark, industrial, sort of sour city that seemed, as a whole, as if they’d rather not have us there if they could help it. That kind of environment always inspired us to show our true colors more than usual, which didn’t go over well. Every time we’d walk into a restaurant, every head cranked around and the room got quiet. And when it did, we were all the more determined to order a bunch of drinks and smoke and carry on more than we ever would have done in the first place.

That tour was our first experience with Doug Goldstein, too, the new tour manager that Alan appointed to look after us. I remember we got in late at night—a full day after Faster Pussycat—and the next morning I got up and went to Doug’s room to collect our per diems before we set out sightseeing. All across Germany, and especially in Hamburg, there are outrageously graphic porno shops, usually in a very-easy-to-find, central location, and that is where we went. I was excited to no end—I’d never seen anything so obscene in my life. I was like a kid in a candy store, pulling these insane graphic magazines off the shelf—beastiality, pregnant women, just the most depraved things imaginable—holding them up for the other guys like, “Have you fucking seen this?”

We were staying in the same hotel as Faster Pussycat and we ran into them in the lobby and said hello before we took off that day. We were civil, I’ll say that, but not what I’d call friendly. Regardless, once we let them know that we were going to head out to see the city, Mark Michals, Pussycat’s drummer, insisted on coming along with us.

His band looked a little bit nervous. “No, no, stay here with us,” one of them said.

“No, that’s cool, I’m going to go,” Mark said.

“Really, you should really stay, we’re going to go out later,” another one said.

“Yeah, it’s cool, I’m going with these guys,” he said.

We did nothing to encourage him, let alone invite him. I even remember one of us blurting out, “No, stay with them,” but there he was tagging along with Izzy, Steve, Duff, and me for the day. Our first stop was lunch at Euro McDonald’s. I had become a huge McRib fan during the recording of Appetite, so that was the height of cuisine to me. I was happy to see the McRib on the menu in Hamburg, and to the naked eye, it looked like the real deal, but it wasn’t: instead of barbecue, it had some kind of anonymous brown sauce on it. There went my one meal for the day. The reason why we were so emaciated back then was that we never really ate anything.

In any case, we wandered around all afternoon, and when it got to be evening, we headed to the Reeperbahn, which is a street that is five straight blocks of brothels where no women are allowed—just like Amsterdam’s red-light district, every type of girl you can imagine is available. We were in heaven: we’d never seen anything like it and at the time we didn’t have friends in bands who had been around more than we had, so no crew of seasoned guys had told us anything about this place. I was tripping out. I think in the first fifteen minutes Steven blew his entire per diem on hookers. We were walking along when he suddenly disappeared into this subterranean garage, where there were all manner of prostitutes just hung out against columns under colored industrial-strength fluorescent lights.

It was getting later and this guy Mark was still trailing us. We left the Reeperbahn and went to some bar that was one of the places the Beatles played when they were starting out. Once again, we walked in there and we were the scourge of the earth, but we didn’t care; we drank Jack with one cube of ice per drink (because that’s all that they would put in the glass) until they closed. We walked back to the hotel and this guy was still with us—at that point we’d stopped talking to him altogether. It had been a long day, so I went to pass out in my bed while Mark did the same in the other bed—which was Duff’s. Now Izzy was always the Great Instigator: he could stir things up without getting involved, so he didn’t let this opportunity slide.

“Hey, Duff,” he said. “That guy is sleeping in your bed.”

“Yeah, he is, isn’t he,” Duff said.

“You gonna let him do that to you, man?” Izzy said. “Fuck that! He can’t do that to you.”

“No way! Fuck no, man!” Duff said.

“Who the fuck is that guy anyway, man?” Izzy said.

“Yeah, who the fuck does he think he is?” Duff said, now getting pretty heated. “Fuck that guy!”

They tried to wake him up pretty roughly, but Mark was out cold.

“I know what we should do, man,” Izzy said. “Let’s tape him up and put him down the elevator shaft.”

“Fuck yeah!” Duff said.

“We’ll put him down the elevator shaft. He can sleep on top of the elevator.”

They taped this guy up pretty good: his arms, his hands, his ankles, and his mouth were all totally bound. He was a medium-size guy, about 140 pounds, so they carried him off and got him to the elevator, and that’s when he woke up and started squealing like a stuck pig. They quickly abandoned the original plan and just threw him in the elevator and sent it down to the lobby. The hotel staff dealt with him from there. They got the tape off, and once he told them who he was, they went through the chain of command until they got in touch with his band, who had to come retrieve him because he had no room key, no ID, no money, no nothing. That was the last night I spoke to him; I just nodded at him for the rest of the tour. Come to think of it, that was the last we heard from any of them.

The next night we did the gig, the first one of our headlining tour, and it’s good that it didn’t set a precedent. The venue was on the water; it was this really industrial, dark room with benches and long tables on the sides. Everything in there was painted black—it was the blackest club I’ve ever seen and it just reeked of stale beer. On the walls were signatures and graffiti from every single heavy metal and thrash band who had been through there, which appeared to be many.

The audience was without a doubt the most lackluster crowd we had ever played to in our lives: as I recall, they were as cold and miserable as the weather. I remember that before we went on and the second we got off, the club played nothing but Metallica, nonstop. It was obvious that any American band, or any band at all, that didn’t sound like Metallica wasn’t going to go over. And I was right. We got through the show and the only thought going around in my mind when we finished was I would fucking hate to have to do this again