Slash

out of my system. They were biting their nails the whole time but if Zutaut or anyone else had voiced their concerns, I would have told them the truth: I had no intention of quitting Guns N’ Roses. As pissed off as I was, I always thought that I’d go back, after some time off, when the time was right.

So Geffen released and supported It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere. They publicized it, and they gave us financial tour support… until they didn’t. As I mentioned, once Axl informed the label (or so I was told) that he was ready to begin writing sessions for the next Guns record, my leash was yanked and I was ordered to come home because the way they saw it I’d sold one million records and they’d turned a profit and didn’t need me out there supporting it anymore. The funny thing was that even after all these years, I still never looked at touring as album promotion—to me it was still just an excuse to play.

I landed in L.A. and settled into the new home that Renee and I had rented above Sunset Plaza, in West Hollywood. I’d moved all of the snakes over there and we’d been there awhile, just renting month to month indefinitely. I might have been married but I didn’t have the married homeowner mentality at that point. I knew that I was “supposed to” own a house, but I really couldn’t get my head around the concept. I had leased a place for a decent price right above Sunset that had everything I needed. It was my hang pad: I had my snakes, I had Renee, I had my pinball machines—it was a great bachelor pad… for my wife and me.

So I got into town loathing what I had to do because in the back of my mind I knew it was going to be so many things, none of them easy. Doug had set us up at a studio called the Complex, which we later dubbed the Compound. I went down there and Axl had already set up shop. The place had a big rehearsal room and an insane amount of outboard gear—literally a room full of synths—as well as an arsenal of Pro Tools recording rigs that Axl had rented. Axl and I hadn’t spoken directly at all since my return, either by phone or face-to-face: I got my working orders from Doug. I showed up at the scheduled time and I found my tech, Adam Day; Duff’s tech, McBob; Duff, Dizzy Reed, and Matt and Paul Huge. Axl was nowhere in sight. I got down there that first night around eight p.m.

My immediate thought was that this scene, which was supposed to be our band, reminded me way too much of recording for Michael Jackson on Dangerous. When I’d done those sessions for him, I was blown away by how much money was going down the toilet: there was rented equipment everywhere, and I was told that he had multiple studios identically set up around the country, booked, incurring day rates, in case he was inspired to record there at any given moment.

I’m a frugal guy, so that didn’t appeal to me at all. I found that kind of recording environment to be a waste and I found Michael’s scene to be way out of control. When I showed up to record, the staff was as hospitable and robotic as a bunch of bellboys at a five-star hotel.

“So what would you like to play on?” I remember some guy asking me.

“What do you mean?”

“We have a wide selection of guitars here,” the guy said. “Which would you like to use?”

“I brought my own,” I said. “I’d like to play on that.”

That whole thing was a disjointed and cold musical scenario. The last place I ever expected to encounter that vibe again was at my band’s writing/rehearsing/recording sessions. I can put up with a million and one things, but the one thing I can’t stomach is a lack of integrity. At the first whiff of bullshit, I get wary. And what I walked into had me worried.

There were rows and rows of Pro Tools servers and gear. Which was a clear indication that Axl and I had very different ideas of how to do this record. I was open to using Pro Tools, to trying new things—but everyone had to be on the same page and in the same room to explore new ideas. The band managed to do a little bit of jamming and come up with some things. A couple of the ideas I had come up with Axl apparently liked and they were recorded onto Pro Tools and stored for him to work on later.

We’d show up at different times every evening, but by eight p.m. generally everyone in the band would be there. Then we’d wait for Axl, who, when he did come, arrived much, much later. That was the norm; it was a dark, miserable atmosphere that lacked direction of any kind. I hung out for a bit; but after a few days I chose to spend my evenings at the strip bar around the corner, with orders for the engineers to call me if Axl decided to arrive.

A DECADE AFTER WE’D FIRST GOTTEN the band together, every single thing that I knew to be Guns N’ Roses had changed. We’d lost Steven, we’d lost Izzy, and while we’d gained Matt, we’d gained and lost Gilby. Duff was the only element of the original back line that remained the same; he was my friend, the only one I could count on. But he was sober now; in May 1994, he suffered a near-fatal episode when his pancreas almost exploded. Years of heavy drinking had taken their toll, and if Duff didn’t get sober, he’d die. We were still tight, and things were basically the same, but we didn’t tip bottles together anymore. He was really striving to keep things together in a way, keeping Matt in the loop because, after all, Matt wasn’t sure how the process of songwriting to recording worked within GN’R. Duff was the only anchor at that point, while I was fraying at the seams.

Drinking to me was still a fun, recreational activity to be indulged in every day, though I had started to drink to medicate more than just for fun. There wasn’t much of a social scene for Guns outside of the studio anyway, so from the moment I reentered the band, I was pretty much on my own. My consumption was excessive, but I still functioned like a normal person—a normal person with a pure internal alcohol level diluted only by their blood. I had worked long and hard to get myself in shape that way. I’d had to, because drinking was the only thing that satisfied me and subdued all of the issues that I would have had to otherwise deal with, in the band and in my life, if I ever let myself get back to normal for a while.

^{Slash and Axl discussing something backstage on the Illusion tour. Note the half gallon of vodka stashed in Slash’s stomach.}

All the focus was on trying to get things working again. Amid the least creative atmosphere I’d ever experienced in the history of the band, we somehow finally got stuff going. My memories of it are hazy at best because I did everything I could to forget. I do remember going down to the studio and rehearsing without direction. I just had too much animosity blocking my creativity. One of the few times I actually spoke with Axl about how it was going, it was pretty clear that we were coming from very different places. I was trying to get through to him once again about how working with Huge was a chore and a creative dead end in my opinion.

“You don’t have to be friends to make a record,” Axl said.

“Maybe not,” I said, “but you do need to have some kind of mutual respect, you know.”

We might as well have been talking about the two of us. The negativity was so all-consuming that I couldn’t concentrate and I couldn’t focus on writing. There was so much bitter stuff nagging at me that remaining calm and tranquil enough to enjoy playing was next to impossible. So I preoccupied myself with being drunk all the time and tried to push through whatever it was that we were doing.

Axl asked Zakk Wylde to come down to rehearse with us as well as Paul Huge. He probably thought I’d like that idea because Zakk was a friend of mine and I respected him as a guitarist, but that really didn’t seem like the answer to me. I brought up the option of rehiring Gilby, and that idea was flatly rejected. There were endless messages sent back and forth, through Doug Goldstein, about Axl’s wants, needs, and ideas on what we should be doing. The only way that I regularly “talked” to Axl was through Doug at that point. Axl would give Doug a message and Doug would have to massage the words in order to relate it to me. Then I’d give him a message and he’d pass it along to Axl after massaging it appropriately, and so it went, back and forth. At times I’d call Axl but most of the time he wouldn’t pick up or ever return my call. And when he did show up at rehearsal, he never sang. My memory of that time is so vague, because so little jamming happened. I must say, though, that the gear was set up nice. All things considered, those sessions cost too much for a lot of uneventful, depressing sitting around.

As pissed as I was to have been called home to do nothing, my responsible side kicked in and I was determined to get something out of it despite the fact that my heart was in my boots. I wasn’t sure what to expect from Zakk Wyld but I hoped for the best. He’s a great guy; I remember that I met him at the Sunset Marquis the night he got hired to be Ozzy’s guitar player years before. We hung out in his room celebrating until I left him passed out in the bathtub. Zakk’s personality is like Steven Adler’s times ten: he doesn’t mince words and isn’t scared of confrontation. I couldn’t see him and Axl lasting more than a week. But aside from that, when we jammed down at the Complex, it didn’t make any sense to me. It wasn’t the two-guitar-player team that GN’R really was.