Slash

the bar, between my legs, onto the floor, and tried to hide it. I don’t remember that at all, but I do remember doing what I always liked to do when I was drunk—wrestle some guy who was much bigger than me. In this case it was Nikki, whom I tackled, bar stool and all, out of nowhere. Nikki is pretty tall, and at that time he was pretty heavy, too, so he ended up turning it around: he slammed me on my back and sat on me. Once I was sedated, they took me upstairs and put me to bed in Tommy’s drum tech Spidy’s bed. I woke up there the next morning completely unable to turn my head; I was in the worst pain I’d ever felt in my entire life. I managed to limp to my room and called Doug, our road manager, to tell him that I needed a doctor right away. Apparently I’d dislocated four vertebrae in my neck.

I could barely play because supporting the weight of my guitar across my shoulder was excruciating. I spent the next few weeks just standing in one place onstage with my top hat pulled down as far as it would go. The vertebrae that were injured were too far up and too close to the base of my skull to have a chiropractor put them back in line. So I had my first experience with acupuncture and that proved to be very helpful; I got it before every single show and a few times a week for a few months afterward. Until the swelling subsided, I walked around like a rusted Tin Man.

That wasn’t the only painful experience to come out of that night. Apparently, after I passed out, Tommy and Nikki made me the subject of a photo shoot: they took a picture of my face, with Tommy’s balls dangling above it, and the next morning made copies of it, had them laminated, and passed them out to everyone on the tour. I think the photo even became the official image for their All Access passes. I’d been tea-bagged for all the world to see.

Never before or since did Guns have that kind of a relationship with a band we toured with. And never was there the same level of debauchery going on. Motley was the only group around with a like-minded self-destructive mentality, combined with a raging sense of competition and one-upsmanship. That entire tour we tried to outdo each other on every level and it made the shows that much better. The only thing I’ve experienced that came close was when Skid Row opened for Guns N’ Roses years later, and as much as I hate to admit it, I think with Sebastian Bach on board, we took it all a little bit further.

Motley did have a great finale in store for us: they honored the age-old tradition of punking the opening band’s set the last night of the tour. Their crew kept it secret, and we really had no idea what was coming. As we launched into our last song, twenty pounds of flour fell from the rafters, and as cool as we might have thought we were, in an instant we looked ridiculous. It took me weeks to get that shit out of the crannies of my guitar.

All of it was definitely a learning experience. Motley were at the top of their game and were a well-oiled machine, but I’ll never forget the look of terror in their manager Doc McGee’s eyes whenever I ran into him. He was dealing with a band on the edge: on that tour, at the end of every single night, Tommy was usually so fucked up that he looked like he was on the brink of dying. My last memory of that whole experience was watching Doug wheel Tommy through the airport in a baggage cart to catch their flight. Tommy was completely passed out at the time; he was a heap of lanky limbs that hung over the side with his head leaning all the way forward, his chin bobbing against his chest.

AFTER WE WRAPPED THE MOTLEY TOUR, it was slim pickings—there weren’t too many appropriate outlets for an act like ours. But there was one perfect fit—Alice Cooper. It seemed like a marriage made in heaven. We’d done a show with Alice back in 1986 in Santa Barbara that, if it were another artist of his stature, would have disqualified us immediately. When we did that show, we were supposed to do the hour-long ride out there together, but Axl insisted on driving with his girlfriend Erin at the very last minute. We were all against it, as was Alan, but Axl convinced him that there was nothing to worry about. We got to the gig; Axl was nowhere to be found, but was apparently on his way. It came time to take the stage—no Axl—so Izzy and Duffy and Steve and I got out there and started playing without him. Izzy and Duff sang “Whole Lot of Rosie” by AC/DC and a few other covers. We were opening for Alice Cooper but basically that set was a drunken jam fit for a bar—except we were in an arena. It got so bad that at one point we asked the audience to sing lead and then asked if there was a lead singer in the house. We were friends with the crowd for a minute, but that quickly changed; we ended up insulting them and throwing things at them. It was ridiculous.

We stayed up there for the allotted amount of time and then retreated from a totally embarrassing disaster. We got out of there immediately and drove back to Hollywood, so pissed that we talked about kicking Axl out of the band that night and looking for a new singer. Izzy and I went right to West’s house and I was upset enough to use smack again; as we got high in the bathroom, Izzy and I talked about the fucked-up show and what we were going to do about it. It wasn’t the first time we’d had these talks; I’d say that the subject of firing Axl came up six times, very seriously, in the life cycle of the band. Izzy and I were in the middle of really strategizing how to do it when Axl showed up. He came into the bathroom and sat down on the bathtub and he started talking.

The amazing thing about Axl is that he didn’t understand, in situations like this one, that he had done anything wrong; it wasn’t within his frame of reference. He walked into that bathroom believing he had no reason to apologize as far as I could tell. All the same, he spoke at length and as much as the conversation left the subject of his absence at the gig, he did make a type of very vague apology. And when he did, he also explained, with much more passion than he lent to the apology, why he’d done what he did. His reasoning for his actions was so involved that all that I came away with was the impression that he was totally unaware of the implications of his no-show and what had transpired in his absence that he literally didn’t get it at all. There are certain protocols that Axl just didn’t heed; since he’s not in the same mind space as other people, the accepted norms just don’t occur to him.

Explaining those norms might or might not make a difference; you’d never know. Axl is superintelligent, yet at the same time he lives in a place where the logic that governs other people does not apply. He doesn’t ever realize what an inconvenience his choices might be for others. He means no harm; it’s just the way he is. It’s very hard to try to even explain it. He is as sincere as someone can possibly be, but it comes down to the fact that Axl, regardless of the world around him, insists on existing according to rules that hold true only in the universe that he has created around himself. That Alice Cooper show was a clear example: I remember being really angry and Izzy felt the same way that night. But as pissed off as we were, sitting there in that bathroom, discussing how we were determined to find a new singer, when he showed up, Axl still won us over. Slowly but surely, we found it in our hearts to just let it go. Of course it didn’t hurt that we’d been doing smack… we were so loaded that after a while none of the drama seemed to matter anyhow.

In any case, that was then and this certainly was now. Apparently, Alice had gotten a kick out of that performance of ours; I think he’d seen a bit of his younger self in us. Alice was supporting Raise Your Fist and Yell, and hadn’t had the best year: he’d almost been killed onstage when his famous guillotine stage prop malfunctioned and nearly decapitated him. Alice had cleaned up his act at the time, too, so aside from a few rowdy members of his band, we were the only obviously bad apples to be found on that outing. We set off on a leg of his U.S. tour with yet another entry-level, burned-out, unforgettable bus driver. This guy was a long-haired musician who liked to talk about the music he was always writing, and as much as he was “fun” to hang out with, he consistently did stuff that made life harder than it had to be for us. The biggest problem was that he always wanted to go out with us, so instead of parking the bus in one place and letting us find our way to wherever we wanted to go, he’d offer to take us there on the bus and inevitably got us lost on side streets. Needless to say, he didn’t last long.

When we first came on the tour Alice was superkind and supportive. He welcomed us on board with no agenda; there was no hierarchy and no bullshit. He genuinely liked our band and what we were about—and we completely looked up to him. We took lots of pictures with him, put it that way. It was an interesting transition: being around Motley, we’d seen a large-scale production going on and a predictable performance every night. With Alice, it was the same at a whole new level. As much as we’d been fans for years, based on his records and lyrics and persona, it was something else to tour with him. He had a keyboard player, a weight-lifting behemoth of a guitar player, as well as Kip Winger on bass, another guitar player, and a drummer. He was backed up by a bunch of hired session guys and had all kinds of props, and it was interesting to watch how Alice interacted with all of it. He had an eight-piece band, backup singers, actors, costume changes, …it certainly was a show.

^{Slash has had the thrill of sharing the stage many times with Alice Cooper over the years.}

He also had a snake, which I was excited to see. But Alice wasn’t a snake collector; he didn’t have one at