Slash

attendance.

I’ve learned that it is essential for everybody to be present at all times—our producer Brendan O’Brien insisted on it during the writing of Velvet Revolver’s last album, Libertad. Everyone in Guns was focused at this point—even Axl—but we didn’t have very good group skills and had no idea at all how to govern our work situation. The desire was there, but we needed regulation. If one of us didn’t show up, we’d work anyway, which was one of many things that held us back from getting it together properly. For one thing, Duff and I were intent on drinking all the time and considered that normal because it never interfered with work, but we were so ferocious about it outside of rehearsal that it was off-putting to Izzy. He couldn’t be around that kind of behavior then and he’s like that to this day. We weren’t aware of it at the time, and even if we were, we might not have cared—all we knew was that he wasn’t showing up to work and we couldn’t accept that. I’m sure Axl had his reason for doing things his way, too. But we didn’t have a good line of communication among us about any of these issues, so the end result was serious misunderstanding. Since these points of interest were simply never discussed, since there was never a conversation about how to adjust our game plan to take everyone’s needs into account, we kept doing things the way we had in the past, which considering that we’d all changed caused us serious internal tension.

Instead of coming up with a new method to account for our issues, all of the problems just snowballed. This was when a good manager might have turned the situation around, but we didn’t have one. Throughout this process, Doug and our management were useless; they didn’t seem to want to take the time to deal. Alan was still in charge, and Doug was our day-to-day man, and he wasn’t doing anything but enabling us. Their attitude was that we were supposed to know how to do this shit ourselves. And we did; we accomplished creatively left to our own devices… but only when we were living together as one, living five similar lives. Now that we’d become a band who had to set up shop, and we were coming from different perspectives, that dynamic was gone. There is no one to blame; we did the best we could.

We’d had to get going without Axl there, and we found his absence disrespectful, and that disrespect built up into such great animosity that when he did finally show up, the rest of us were pretty resentful. We were an out- of-control band with some some semblance of integrity who had lost their ability to properly channel it all: for the life of us, we just could not get on the same page. We also made no effort to pursue the adult way of handling things. I wouldn’t call it innocence or naivete looking back, but we all played a hand in mixing the pot. None of us stood back and took a moment to ask one another or ourselves, “How do we do this? How can we get everyone together and working and satisfied?” We needed to be clearheaded about it; if one thing didn’t work, we’d need to keep trying. But we didn’t do that. Outside of the fact that our management didn’t care to take the lead, the biggest catalyst to the demise of the band was the lack of communication among the members.

Admittedly, I was pigheaded; I didn’t want to always feel like I was bending over backward. I thought of us as equals, and I was making a conscientious effort to get things going, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to understand what Axl was expecting, or the patience to sit down and talk it out with him. As with any relationship, when someone lands on your bad side, it gets hard to be empathetic. My guard by then was way up. With all of that going on, it was much easier to just enjoy the summertime in Chicago because the bars were mighty inviting.

In our plentiful free time, Duff and I also did our personal best to stay in shape. I had one of my BMX bikes out there and I used to ride it between the apartment and the rehearsal space, bunny-hopping over everything in sight, riding on the sidewalk. It was a good workout. Some days Duff and I even went to the gym, usually just after our morning vodkas. We’d go down to one of those big public YMCAs with our security guard, Earl, to pump iron. We’d be down there in our jeans, doing sets between cigarette breaks—it was invigorating. We’d usually cool down afterward with cocktails at a sports bar. It didn’t matter how big we were back home or how many records we’d sold or the shows we’d played; in Chicago, we were nobodys. We were just a couple of regular Joes to our fellow bar patrons; and there is not a bigger haven for regular Joes in America than the sports bars of North Clark Street.

Every night we hung out at Smart Bar, which was very cool, but a much different rock scene than L.A. It was 1990, and that place was all about techno and industrial music like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. We didn’t really gel with people there, because we were clearly of a different variety, but we made a circle of friends anyway. We had dozens of chicks; it was a like a shooting gallery in that place, but eventually I settled on one. Her name was Megan; she was nineteen. Megan lived with her mom and younger brother in a nearby suburb and she was really exotic-looking, a heavy-chested, bubbly, sweet girl.

I began to settle into a cozy little relationship with her, and was getting used to the routine of jamming however long by day and hanging out with her all night. And that is when Axl showed up, which changed the dynamic immediately. Despite the resentment, we were so glad to see him that no one wanted to aggravate the situation by confronting him about his lateness. We started to work with him on the days that he actually came to rehearsal, but we were never quite sure which days those would be. If we’d decide that we’d all start jamming at four p.m. or six p.m., he might show up at eight or nine, or not at all. When he did come down, Axl generally tinkered around on the piano or sat and listened to some of the ideas we’d worked out. All things considered, we managed to produce a few good tunes: “Estranged,” “Bad Apples,” and “Garden of Eden.”

Over all, I found our time in Chicago to be a huge waste, which will always be a point of contention between Axl and I. He seemed to think that we were really getting somewhere and that I was the one who ruined it all. I might have felt differently if he’d been there the whole time, but after almost eight weeks—six of them without him—I felt we didn’t have enough material to show for it, and I was frustrated and unwilling to wait around to see if we’d get it going consistently. The vibe among us was just too dark and not conducive to real creativity. We were also being so frivolous with our money that I couldn’t ignore it: we had moved our entire operation to the Midwest and come up with nothing but a few complete songs and a handful of rudimentary ideas, many of which we’d brought out there with us.

I did try to stay the course once Axl got to town, but two incidents put an end to my time in the Windy City. The first was the night we came home after drinking to find a feast of Italian food on the sidewalk in front of our apartment. I got a bird’s-eye view of the mess because, as I recall, I had insisted on spending the entire night lying on the roof of the car whenever we drove from bar to bar. Our favorite Italian place was right on the corner and apparently Axl had unloaded the band’s entire dinner on a few people who had found out that we were living there and were heckling him from the street. (By the way, this was not the inspiration for the title of The Spaghetti Incident; that came from one of the complaints against the rest of us that Steven listed in his lawsuit—which we’ll get to—after he was fired. I’m not even sure what he claimed… something having to do with Axl throwing spaghetti at him, I believe. I guess that was a theme in those years.)

Anyway, after Axl chucked our dinner at the hecklers, he proceeded to trash the entire kitchen and break every glass item in the apartment. And, as we’d find out a few days later, sometime during his tantrum, Izzy arrived, having driven in from Indiana. He took one look at what was going on from down on the street and turned his car around and left immediately without even entering the building.

I suppose that the rest of us should have noticed that Axl was unhappy and acting out after that first incident, but by then we’d gotten to the point where we just let him do his thing and tuned it out. Who knows, maybe if we listened to what he wanted to do and just complied a bit more he wouldn’t have freaked out so hard. Still, who could fathom what he was unhappy about? He showed up with this very sort-of-bitter attitude that seemed to be coming from a very depressing place. But, to be honest, I was more worried about Steven than Axl by then: he was a huge problem; he was doing tons of blow and his performance had become irregular. I didn’t catch on at first; he kept his coke hidden in the refrigerator in the downstairs apartment where he lived.

We would be hanging out and sharing a bit of blow, but I couldn’t figure out how Steve was always that much more wasted. He’d just get this twinkle in his eye and say, “Hey man… butter tray,” and point at the fridge.

“Yeah, okay, Steve. Sure,” I’d say. I’d go to the refrigerator, fix myself a drink, and come back with nothing remarkable to report. I didn’t think he actually wanted me to look in the butter tray. He was that fucked up that I didn’t take it seriously.

“Did you see?” he’d ask, grinning wildly. He’d just keep pointing at the refrigerator and saying, “Butter tray.”

“Yeah, man, I saw it,” I’d say. “That’s a great refrigerator you’ve got there. Really nice butter tray, man.”

“Butter tray.”