“All right… okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
Duff and I had never said it, but the two of us had been consciously avoiding working with each other. We didn’t want to be pigeonholed, we didn’t want to be labeled: we didn’t want to resign ourselves to the compartment we’d be relegated to—an ex-Guns side project. At this point enough time had gone by, and even if it hadn’t, we’d experienced enough energy playing together again to know that we could get beyond any bullshit expectation that might be dumped on us.
Matt was in, too, and since Josh and Keith were interested in going for it, we started getting together a few days a week at their rehearsal space in North Hollywood. I wasn’t sure about them because I didn’t know them, but I was willing to give it a shot.
Keith and Josh brought in a couple of good songs that we worked on and Duff and I started making things up on the spot, just as naturally as we always did. The one thing I didn’t like about the space was that I couldn’t hear Josh singing at all. It started to worry me that after a few weeks, as we got more and more involved, I still had no idea what the whole band sounded like. I started making board tapes, and boy, was I surprised. When I played them back, I was shocked: Josh’s voice was just too linear and grating; it was a distraction from the music, not to mention just a tad off-key.
I am embarrassed to admit that I was willing to quit the band prematurely because of that. I assumed that Duff and Matt had been listening to the same tapes of our sessions that I had; and it’s my fault that I presumed that since no one was objecting to what we were doing, they were all fine with it.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I told Duff and Matt after rehearsal one day. “I’m done.”
“Hey! What are you talking about?” Duff asked.
“What’s wrong?” Matt asked.
“Have you listened to these sessions we’ve been doing?”
“No,” they both said.
“Well, you should.”
That night they did and the next day we were all on the same page.
Josh’s voice is perfect for Buckcherry, but it wasn’t musical enough for what we had in mind. I am happy to say that Buckcherry has gotten back together and their big single in 2006, “Crazy Bitch,” was one of the tracks we worked on during that period.
We let Josh know that we didn’t want to continue with him and it was all very amicable, but we weren’t quite sure how to handle it when Keith told us that he intended to keep working with us. Those two were writing partners, they were friends, and they were bandmates; we’d always thought of them as a package deal and assumed that Keith would split when Josh did.
“Fuck that,” he said. “I like what we’re doing here. I’m staying.”
There was only one problem: generally Keith just played whatever I played at the same time. There was no interplay and he had no sense of complementing what I played. So the sound we got with Keith was basically two Les Pauls playing identical licks. He hung around for two more weeks, we thought he might get the hint… but he didn’t, so we had to let him go. Again, I was happy to hear it when those guys re-formed Buckcherry.
MATT AND DUFF AND I STARTED REHEARSING and writing like crazy. I had my eyes and ears open for another guitar player and a singer. I had gone with Josh Todd to see Duff play with Loaded one night as part of Metal Shop, this weekly glam metal revue, at the Viper Room. I went in through the back door and it was as if I’d stepped into 1984. I saw people I hadn’t seen since then, and they looked exactly the same. I saw girls and guys from the different spots—the Troubadour, the Whiskey, the Rainbow—looking the way they did twenty years ago. There were a few guys from Faster Pussycat, L.A. Guns, and all the same chicks I knew from back then, all there as if they’d been caught in a time warp; everyone with the same clothes on, the same makeup on, seemingly doing the same shit. And of course, Gene Simmons was there having his picture taken with a crowd of girls. To top it all off, Ron Jeremy was there with a few porn chicks.
Duff had told me about the show earlier that day.
“Hey, man,” he said. “So the guy playing guitar in my band has alleged that he is like one of your best friends from junior high.”
“Oh yeah?” I had no idea who he might mean.
“Yeah, really,” he said. “His name is Dave Kirschner. He swears up and down that you were buds, I just wanted to let you know, he’s in my band.”
It was true, Dave and I were buddies in junior high and high school; he used to come to my Tidas Sloan shows before he even picked up a guitar. Dave is a supercool guy and I’d always thought the best of him all these years. The last time I saw him he was working at Tower Video when Guns N’ Roses was just taking off, at the time he had a pretty serious drinking habit going. He worked in the basement between the music and video shops, boxing and unloading the product, just drinking hard down there apparently. He’d gotten it together, however, and by that time he was fifteen years sober. I was kind of curious to see him again.
The overwhelming eighties vibe at Metal Shop got to me pretty quick that night, but I got the chance to say hello to Dave before I left. It was really good to see him. After Keith left, Duff suggested that Dave come down to jam, and I was all for it. We clicked instantly; Dave brought a cool vibe to what we were doing. There was no deliberation; that was it, it was a perfect fit. He brought a new dimension to the sound of the band as it was and an interesting guitar style that complemented mine as mine did his. The lineup was now Duff, Matt, Dave, and me, and the music was coming very naturally. We just had that age-old nagging problem: no singer. It is the story of my life, isn’t it?
For a group of seasoned, professional musicians you’d think that we’d have a clue of how to find a singer. No chance. We looked at one another with no idea of the proper process for a group like ours to find one.
“Should we put an ad in
“Man, I don’t know,” Duff said. “I
“This feels like the time that we first hooked up,” I said. “When Steven and I first met you and we had a band. We wrote some great shit but finding a singer was just impossible.”
“You’re right. We’re at square one,” Duff said. “That’s pretty sad, man. What the fuck? I guess we should put an ad in the paper.”
Before we did that, we thought it would be a good idea to make a list of every good living rock singer, regardless of whether they were in a band or not. Our list was pretty short: among others, there was Sebastian Bach, Ian Astbury, and Steve Jones. There was one other name that everyone in the band seemed keen on: Scott Weiland… but as far as we knew he was still in Stone Temple Pilots.
After we made our list and realized that almost everyone on it was otherwise accounted for, we did put an ad in
Our “project” started being reported on the radio, blogged about on the Internet; all of a sudden we’d generated a lot of attention just by trying to find ourselves a singer relatively on the down-low. We began receiving two hundred submissions a week from around the world, all of them pouring into my P.O. box. I’d show up to collect these huge boxes of shit, and the guys at the mailbox place, who’ve watched this band from that phase on out, have given me the knowing wink ever since.
I GOT A RANDOM CALL ONE DAY.
“Hello?”
“Hey, what are you doin’? It’s Izzy.”
“Hey, man, I’m good,” I said. “I’m actually going to rehearsal. I’ve been working with Duff and Matt and this guy Dave. We’ve got something really good going.”
“Hey, cool. I’ll come down.”
It was classic Izzy; he’s so elusive, he’ll pop up somewhere out of the blue, hang out intensely, then disappear for a couple of months. He came down to the studio with his guitar and amp and he brought a couple of demos. We jammed with him for two weeks and it was great: we wrote about twelve songs that would have been
