Slash

“So, Steven… what are you trying to say?”

Tom Mayhew discovered it eventually: Steven had a steep supply of coke piled up in that butter tray of his.

At this point, I really had no choice but to see that we were all unraveling. No matter how in control I felt I was or thought everyone else was, I realized that Steven was growing irretrievable. As soon as the band ended its stay in Chicago, Steven and I had less and less interaction; he was completely isolated once we got back to L.A. We were tight as a band gangwise, but during our two years on tour, Steve and I developed a distance between us as individuals that grew nothing but worse.

One of the few things we had in common as a band at the time, in Chicago though, was a shared interest in Faith No More’s album The Real Thing. It was the background music for that entire trip. It would be playing all the time on the different stereos in our apartments.

There is the background; in the end this is why I left. The last straw involved some girls that were brought back to our place one night. My girlfriend Megan had gone out and I was at home in bed. Late at night, I heard some commotion; the sound of a few people filing in and heading past my bedroom down to Axl’s room. Until then, Axl had spent most of his time in there alone, constantly on the phone. This night was clearly an occasion.

My room was at the front of the apartment, separated from Axl’s by our living room and a long railroad-style hallway. So I went down there to see what was going on; I found our security guard Earl, Tom Mayhew, Steve, and Axl hanging out with two happy-go-lucky Midwestern girls that they’d brought back.

We all hung out, and as it got later, it was suggested that the girls have sex with all of us. They were willing to blow everyone in the room, which seemed reasonable to me, but they didn’t want to fuck us. For whatever reason, that really pissed Axl off. The girls had a very intelligent rationale for their point of view, but Axl begged to differ. This debate continued for a moment, and it was pretty relaxed, but suddenly Axl exploded. He threw them out with such rage it was shocking. The way it went down was completely unnecessary. The coup de grace was that one of the girls’ dads was a prominent officer with the Chicago police, or so I was told. Later that morning I packed up my stuff and flew back to L.A. A few days later, I had Megan move out and join me.

GUNS WAS A BAND THAT MIGHT BREAK apart at any second; that was half of the excitement. When we had a common goal, that was less likely to happen. The more time we spent apart, as our communal, creative vibe became more a memory than a reality, our lack of communication and the disadvantage of not knowing what was truly going on with one another disabled any ability we might have had to deal with change.

At the creative level, things between us had changed drastically. Until Use Your Illusions I and II Guns wrote songs one way: start with an idea that anyone would come up with and then we’d collaborate. Axl is so prolific lyricwise and has such a heartfelt sense of melody that combined with Izzy’s songwriting skill and Duff and myself, creating great guitar parts was easy, and so we’d have amazing songs in no time. Izzy and Axl had such great chemistry because Axl knew how to transform one of Izzy’s simple structures into a perfect, well-rounded, melodically and lyrically rich song. A great example is “Patience”: Axl really elevated that song of Izzy’s into something else entirely. I have such a powerful sense of melody and riffs that I’d tie it all together. A lot of the time I would start the core writing of a song with a guitar hook that Duff would expand upon with a great bass line, or I’d come up with a bridge and chorus section that would inspire Axl to write incredible lyrical hooks.

^{Slash kicking back on a balcony with some toad venom.}

When Izzy and I brought a song to the band, usually some or all of the words were there, but when Axl sang them his way… it would really come together. Back then it was easy; but by 1990 we’d lost that communal inspiration to produce. The desire to get together and write songs is one thing: that’s like a day job. It’s quite another to be inspired by a mutual collaboration. That was the harshest reality for us to come to terms with. For the first time we had to work at it; all the same when we finally got down to it, it was great and it came quickly, but everything along the way was a complete fucking chore.

I WAS PRETTY DISILLUSIONED ABOUT the band when I got back to L.A. from Chicago. I moved back into the Walnut House, with Megan. I’m not quite sure what I was thinking because I hadn’t known her long, but there she was. Everyone else in the band, aside from Izzy, was still in Chicago, and after a day or so, they realized that I was gone. They started to trickle back, but in the end Axl stayed behind for about two weeks after I left. Considering that he was furious with me for ending our “creative reprieve” there, he didn’t spend that time writing down in our prepaid rehearsal space. From what I understand, he spent the time sleeping and threw a few more apartment-wrecking tantrums, as well as sending me berating messages, via management, usually Doug on a semiregular basis. Doug would call me as if he was Axl’s boy, and I can’t say I automatically trusted whatever he had to say, but I’d respond as honestly as possible and hoped he’d convey the truth about why I’d left to Axl. Regardless, Axl just stayed out there and sent messages to all of us for a while, I guess.

Guns was a band that might break apart at any second; that was half of the excitement.

Axl and I had a very interesting sort of love/hate relationship, and always did. Most of the time Axl and I were like fishing buddies who don’t have much to talk about unless they’re fishing. Then there were times when he and I had a great rapport, when he’d come to me to talk when he had a lot on his mind. For all of those periods, there were stretches when we were so obviously on opposite sides of some invisible fence that we didn’t communicate at all. During the months before we got to writing again, Axl and Erin were having very serious problems in their relationship and he and I had many deep talks about it. What they were going through was very serious: in fact, one time after Chicago I had to go over to Erin’s house to help defuse an argument they were having. Every couple has their inner workings, and if there is one thing I would never try to claim is that I understood the inner workings of theirs. Still, I was friends with both of them so I could help mediate. Despite all the shit going on with Guns, we were still bandmates and friends. If Axl ever needed me for something, I’d always be there.

MY RETALIATION WHEN I GET FRUSTRATED creatively is to be self-destructive with drugs. It’s my excuse to go down that path. It’s a common phenomenon for junkies. So shortly after I got back to L.A., considering the state of affairs with the band, when the opportunity presented itself, I was too eager to take advantage.

Megan and I had settled in; we were happy in our new home. She turned out to be quite the homemaker, and took to keeping the place up, cooking, and being domestic very naturally. She would go to bed early and get up and go to the gym and then clean up and make dinner. After a few weeks her friend Karen came out from Chicago and they spent a week shopping. That was the first day that I had to myself and I ran into a friend that I hadn’t seen in years: a chick from back in the El Compadre days. It’s this amazing Mexican restaurant on Sunset and Gardner, and when Guns was still coming up, Duff and I would hang out there constantly, holding court as if we owned the place: we’d bring chicks in there and they’d suck us off or fuck us under the table and just do all this crazy shit.

This old friend that I ran into used to cut hair—mine included—and mentioned that she still did so, but she also sold dope here and there—it was all the encouragement I needed. She came over later with a bag of clean rigs, and before I knew it, before Axl even got home, and before Megan and Karen returned from their tour of Melrose and Beverly Hills, I was back on smack with a vengeance again.

Megan was one of those chicks who dated the wrong guy and got dragged through the mill with me. She was pretty innocent; she might have thought she’d fallen in love, but I don’t think she had any idea of what she’d gotten into or what was going on with me once we returned to L.A. She’d met me when I was a complete drunk; and, as I’ve mentioned, to the naked eye, a clever heroin addict doesn’t act that much different, unless you count their drinks. Megan was so innocent that she didn’t pick up on the fact that I’d suddenly stopped consuming a half gallon of vodka per day, though, if anything, I was acting just as drunk—if not more so.

We continued a very sweet, very twisted, almost 1950s kind of relationship. She would tend to the house, then head to bed at ten or eleven p.m. and I’d stay up all night, downstairs in the living room, shooting up every few hours in the black bathroom. Some nights I’d write songs on the couch, some nights I’d just stare at the snakes. Before I noticed, it would be morning and Megan was up and we’d hang out and have a great time until I got tired. She never asked questions and we got along that way for a while, very happily. We had pet names for everything. Everything to her was either “cute” or “sweet,” and I was usually “sweetie.” Looking back on it, Megan sounded a