Slash

tomorrow.

I was extremely apprehensive about how the rest of the tour was going to go—particularly since we had more than a few dates to do in Germany. We had a few days to go before the next gig, during which time my worry escalated. But once we got to Dusseldorf, an airier city with more trees and fewer bomb shelters, it was such a drastically different scene that I realized just how big and how diverse a country Germany is: the individual vibe of each city is unique.

AS WE MADE OUR WAY ACROSS EUROPE, the band started to get really tight; our spontaneous interaction was becoming really pro and playing was getting fun. We did most of the driving on our European tour in a sightseeing bus that we’d converted into a communal crash pad by removing most of the seats and filling the floor with cushions. Izzy had picked up a German girlfriend along the way and she brought a friend along that I started hooking up with. I always liked to find a girlfriend in each territory that we’d travel through; and since I already had my English girl, Sally, waiting for me, I had to end my German romance abruptly once the tour crossed the Channel. I told my German girl, literally the moment before I entered the room where Sally was waiting for me, that she had to go home immediately.

When I think of Europe, aside from the gigs, I remember spending most of my days off in and out of a variety of VD clinics. Back in L.A., I was dating a porno chick as well as this sweet little junkie jailbait girlfriend I had. Right after we’d shot the video for “Welcome to the Jungle,” I remember waking up and discovering these three weird little red marks on the left side of my stomach. At the time, AIDS had really kicked in and become a national health issue. It started a strange hysteria among rock musicians; everyone was alarmed but most of us still felt immune to the whole thing. We figured that no one needed to worry about it until David Lee Roth got it.

All the same, I had just read Time magazine’s cover story on AIDS and the pictures of HIV-related lesions looked exactly like the marks on my stomach to me. It was probably just psoriasis or an irritation, but I was convinced that between my porno chick and my junkie girlfriend that I’d caught it, because I hadn’t used protection with either of them. I remember walking up Melrose near San Vincente after leaving the junkie girlfriend’s place to go to a clinic for an AIDS test. I thought I was a goner; I was convinced that this European tour would be the only international tour I’d ever do before I died. Luckily, the test was negative.

It didn’t help that on top of that, I’d picked up venereal warts, probably from the porno chick—which intensified my AIDS terror. I’d been pretty promiscuous up to that point and never used protection, but I never thought anything more serious than crabs could happen to me. When these things showed up… I thought, What the fuck is this? I went to a clinic before we left and they tried to get rid of them a few times, but nothing worked; they kept coming back. When we started on the tour, they had gotten so painful that I couldn’t sleep on my stomach. I spent all of my time in and out of clinics in every country we went to, keeping these things at bay. I wanted to get rid of them permanently before I met up with Sally. Eventually I got them off properly so they didn’t return just before we got to the U.K.; Sally never knew a thing.

If I had to choose my favorite show of the tour, it was the Paradiso in Amsterdam. The venue is amazing; it is a dark, foreboding building that used to be a church. Inside the main hall are high ceilings, arches, and great acoustics. So many legends had played there, from the Sex Pistols to the Stones, so I was excited to do it. I remember Axl going off on old rock stars that night during the set: I don’t recall his exact words but the gist of it was that any older-generation rock star who felt that we were ripping them off was right—we were, but we were doing it better. I think he capped that speech off by telling Paul Stanley to suck his dick.

That show was so great that Izzy and I decided to celebrate by scoring some dope. We were in Amsterdam after all, where soft drugs are basically legal and hard drugs aren’t hard to find—at least that’s what we thought. We spent half the night looking for dealers, and eventually copped some smack that was so stepped on and weak that it wasn’t even worth the effort. Obviously we were pegged as tourists.

We took a ferry from Holland to England, and for the crew guys who had tour experience it was no big deal, but for us it was huge. You could smoke as much pot as you wanted until you got there. It was wild, all of the crew guys and the band smoking themselves to death, trying to consume the rest of whatever they’d bought in Amsterdam. There was a main bar area, and Axl got so high that he went to sleep on one of the couches there. We were the only ones in there when he did, but soon the place filled up, and all of the other passengers sat around him and kind of leaned on him. I remember opening the doors to the various cabins, where one or another of our crew, like Bill, my guitar tech, would be smoking every single last crumb of their weed so they wouldn’t have to throw it over the side before we got to England.

We ended the tour on October 8, 1987, in London and it was amazing. The band was really coming into its own; we’d had enough road time by then to know what we were doing. We had become comfortable as players: we knew one another well enough that we didn’t have to think much about what we were doing the moment we went on. Once you have that familiarity, you can improvise and build from there and make every show unique. The Hammersmith Odeon show was explosive; die-hard fans that I run into to this day tell me that it was the best show of ours they’ve ever seen. When a show really clicked, as we did that night, we would have a great interaction going between me and Izzy because we had that indescribable guitar relationship; or I could be in sync with the rhythm section, Duff and Steven; or there was the great interaction between Axl’s energy and my emotional interplay with him. It was just great energy as a whole—we’d throw it out at the crowd and they’d throw right back at us. It couldn’t have happened in a better venue: the Hammersmith Odeon is the famous room where everyone from Motorhead to The Who to Black Sabbath to the Beatles to Johnny Cash has played; and it’s where Bowie did his final gig as Ziggy Stardust in 1973.

WE RETURNED TO THE STATES AND landed in New York City and went directly to do MTV’s Headbangers Ball. Immediately afterward we’d have to get on the tour bus to do an overnight drive and meet up with Motley Crue to begin our stint opening for them. We’d flown all night, hadn’t showered, and were in no mood for the MTV experience. From the moment we entered the building at ten a.m., it was a huge clash between hungover, sweaty, unclean touring-in-the-same-clothes-for-weeks rock musicans and the corporate world of MTV. We got to reception and there was a Geffen representative waiting to meet us who was all smiles and bullshit gracious posturing. We got our little name tags, we filed through the turnstile into the elevator and into a room to wait; some green room with nothing in it but two couches and a table. There was no rider, no amenities, nothing in there at all. I had my bottle of Jack with me, of course, so I was fine.

It was obvious that we weren’t happy, so someone up there sent VJ Downtown Julie Brown in to say hello and keep us occupied for a minute. I got the feeling that it wasn’t her idea; she didn’t want to be in that room at all. She went through the paces but wasn’t anything close to her trademark bubbly self; she looked nervous and apprehensive. Clearly she had the worst precon ceptions of our band; for someone who lived in New York and was supposedly “downtown,” she turned my stomach. If I’d been further through my bottle of Jack, I probably would have shouted what I was thinking: Shut the fuck up already, we don’t want to be here either, but we all have to get through this day.

When we got on set, we met JJ Jackson, the host, and he was really cool. They had this big set, and somewhere along the line, we joked that we should destroy it on camera. That idea stuck, and among ourselves we decided that we were going to do just that. So we got into the interview, and Axl talked, answering all of JJ’s questions. I sat there quietly; the other guys were quiet, too. We waited until the show was just about over and then in ten seconds flat we totaled the set. I didn’t think about it at the time or again until a couple of weeks later when I saw the episode. We looked like savage zombies straight out of 28 Days Later. That was our first real exposure, our first step up from just having a video on MTV; that was us, inching our way into mainstream consciousness.

We left MTV, got on our bus, and the next day set off with Motley. It was surreal to follow up a week spent in a converted sightseeing bus headlining in Europe with a Midwestern tour of America supporting Motley Crue: they were touring Girls, Girls, Girls, were enjoying the apex of their popularity, and were a band who spared no expense. I had always liked Tommy from the moment I met him—he’s probably the most genuine, true-blue, heart-of-gold person to emerge from that scene. I always liked Nikki because he was the brains, the marketing, and ideas guy behind that band. I’d always respected his dedication and his passion to his vision and how he’d made it a reality. Motley was the only band from L.A. that came out of the glam metal scene that was 100 percent genuine. They might not have been the most original—after all, Nikki shamelessly lifted entire parts from other bands. But whether it was Kiss or any of their other influences, Motley wore those influences on their sleeves