Slash

David was there with my mom, sitting at a table near the front, and apparently Axl was convinced that backstage before the gig, David had been hitting on Erin Everly. It was such a ridiculous notion that afterward my mom asked me what the fuck was wrong with Axl. It was an uncomfortable situation, but I just blew it off and tried to focus on the positive. That evening was captured for posterity in the video for “It’s So Easy,” which was never accepted by MTV or aired in the States because we refused to edit out the profanity in the song.

We were booked into the Hotel Bonaventure for the four nights of the Stones shows and that’s where I was the morning before the first one when I got the call that Axl wasn’t going to do the gigs. His reasoning was that Steven and I were on smack. We were… but that was beside the point; we were opening for The Stones. Somehow we coerced him into doing the first show, and it was a disaster.

“Enjoy the show,” Axl said when we took the stage, “because it’s going to be our last one. There are too many of us dancing with Mr. Brownstone.”

I was so pissed off about that and he was so pissed at me for being a junkie that I spent the better half of the show facing my amps. Nothing was together that night, the band sounded horrible. In my state of mind I walked offstage, got right into my limo, and went to get high in my room.

The next day, Doug told me that Axl would play the remaining shows as long as I apologized, onstage, to the audience, for being a junkie. That was a pretty hard pill to swallow. In retrospect, I understand why Axl singled me out rather than Steven. I am the stronger of the two of us and Axl relied on me more. My presence was important to him; he felt that I was a link in the band that couldn’t afford to be out of control. Still, I didn’t think a public gesture was necessary. When you’re high, you’re arrogant and there was no way I was going to take the blame in that way. I didn’t think that smack was causing the problems in the band and even if it was, now was not the time to make an issue of it.

But I had to do something. So when the time came, I walked out there, and rather than apologize, I went into some banter about heroin and what it can do to you and how we’d been around the block a few times, how I’d done my time with the seductive beast. It was more amusing than anything else, because I didn’t want to bring the audience down at all. I have a way of mumbling when I talk anyway, so I think the mention of “the reality of drugs” and whatever else I said came off as an apology enough. We did a long intro to “Mr. Brownstone” as I spoke, so from an audience perspective, it seemed like an impromptu introduction to the song.

Whatever it was and wasn’t, once Doug told Axl that I did it (because he refused to leave the dressing room until I did), Axl was pleased and the vibe of the whole band turned around as he walked out onstage and we launched into “Mr. Brownstone.” Suddenly our camaraderie returned; once those personal issues were handled, we were able to focus on the playing.

That second show was fine, and the third was even better—we really got it all down by then. The fourth show was fucking amazing—we were at our best. Those dates were an experience, to say the least. They are renowned on the bootleg circuit and anyone that was there remembers them very well: even on the nights that we were off, they were nonetheless entertaining.

The Stones watched us for all four nights I’ve been told, because we reminded them of themselves back in the day. Not that I spent any time hanging with them. I was too strung out. Despite whatever I’d said onstage, all I cared about was getting my fix as soon as possible once the last chord was played. I did it in the parking lot usually; I couldn’t wait to get to the hotel. As much as I was inspired by those shows, I started to look at the band and writing our album as something I’d get to “once I got clean.” It’s a famous junkie mantra.

To get the drugs I needed during those four nights, I once had to leave the hotel to drive into Hollywood and wait for my smack, then go back downtown for the gig. You can be on such a level—playing the Coliseum—but if you’re a junkie you also exist in this scrungy reality of copping your shit in the street, grassroots style. You do it and then go back to your other reality.

I didn’t want that to happen again, so for the third gig, I gave this dealer we’ll call “Bobby” backstage passes so that he could come down and bring me my shit… and see the show. I was backstage waiting for him to show up, and as it got close to showtime I started to feel ill. The clock was ticking and I was at the point where I was unable to play; I was full of anxiety because if he didn’t get there in time then I wouldn’t be able to go onstage. I was waiting, I was beeping him, and I was trying to keep up appearances. I was beeping him. He was not answering. Literally ten minutes before we went on, Bobby showed up. I locked myself in the bathroom in the trailer we called a dressing room and I got high and breathed a sigh of relief. It was not good. Axl had every reason to make the point he did—that kind of existence just couldn’t work at the level we were at. When you’re that caught up in heroin it’s not about the music anymore. I had forgotten that. Steven was in an equally bad place, but until I got clean again, I didn’t have any idea of what was going on with him at all.

DRUGS STOOD BETWEEN WHERE WE’D been and where we had to go; and since the Stones shows had established a functional creative rapport within the band again, we set about tackling the issue as best we could. Doug thought that he could pull off a soft intervention with Steven by taking him on vacation to an exclusive golf resort in Arizona. Steven was excited by what the band had just done, so, at least in theory, he wanted to get his act together. He agreed that a week away from L.A. chilling by the pool, in the desert, was all that he needed.

I was a more complicated animal: suggesting rehab wasn’t going to go over well, and neither was being looked after. Actually, no one could tell me shit at the time; they had to trust that I was going to get it together on my own. And I fully intended to; I thought about how to go about it over the course of many nights spent high up in the Walnut House. I had a doctor prescribe me Buprinex, which is an opiate blocker. He’d get me bottles of that and syringes. It was a very expensive treatment, but this guy was kind of a Dr. Feelgood; not the type of guy who had a real legitimate practice to speak of.

I brought all of that with me the night that I spontaneously decided to join Doug and Steven in Arizona. It made complete sense at the time: the Arizona sun was a great place to begin scaling back my habit. I told Megan that I had some band shit to do and that I’d be back in four days. I booked my flight, I called a limo, and I called a drug dealer that I knew who was located on the way to the airport. I had it all figured out: I copped enough coke and heroin, and packed all the Buprinex to get me through a nice mellow long weekend at a golf resort.

I hadn’t called Doug or Steven to let them know I was coming, so when I landed there that night, I was on my own. There wasn’t much going on around town, but I didn’t care.

“Hey, how far is this place?” I asked the limo driver.

“About forty-five minutes, sir,” he said.

“Okay. Listen, can you stop off somewhere to get me some silverware?” I asked. “I’ve got some food back here that I really want to eat.”

The driver drove for about twenty minutes and stopped at a Denny’s. He came out and handed me a knife and a fork, wrapped in a napkin. Great, I thought.

“Hey,” I said. “Listen, is there anywhere else we can stop? I need a full set of silverware.”

After another fifteen minutes we stopped again and this time I got the spoon. I promptly put up the divider between the driver and me, got my drugs out, and cooked up my meal.

I did my fix and relaxed while we drove to the hotel. The scrappy underbrush of the Arizona landscape suddenly looked much more inviting and the tinted glass made it look even more lush.

When we got to the resort, the Venetian, I took my one-man party into my room. It wasn’t the kind of place that I was used to, because it didn’t look like a hotel: it was a collection of bungalows along a beautifully manicured golf course… a lot like that place Doug took me to in Hawaii, come to think of it. My room was great: there were these sheer white curtains around the bed, a small adobe-style fireplace, and a bathroom with a glass-enclosed shower—it was like a well-appointed spa. It was so relaxing that I could think of no better therapy than shooting coke and smack all night to soothe my soul.

I soon forgot that the shit I brought was meant to last me four days—I was acting as if I had something to celebrate. Within hours I was out of heroin. It’s a common problem for junkies: when you’re high, you’re in a nice contented state, everything is good and mellow, and that’s when you make your plans; that’s when you figure out how much dope you need. Then you start doing your dope and everything changes. You reposition everything as you’re going; you find reasons why you can and should do a hit right now. And once you’ve done that, you find a reason why you should just finish what you have because, hey, you won’t need it later.