Slash

the best Guns N’ Roses record, hands down. We talked about the old days, we shared war stories; we laughed a lot and we had a really good time.

At the same time we continued the quest for a singer, which didn’t interest Izzy one bit. Whenever we brought it up, he wanted nothing to do with the conversation in any way; he wanted to distance himself as much as possible. He didn’t actually want to be in the band, if that’s what we intended; he just wanted to hang out. Discussing where to find a lead singer was too much for him. He was, in general, very anti–lead singer. I can’t imagine why.

The singer thing had been a problem for me in every band I’d ever joined, and I couldn’t believe that after all of this time, it plagued me still.

“I got an idea,” Izzy said at rehearsal one day. “Know what we should do? Duff and I will sing and we will just do a club tour in a van.”

He said it in Izzy’s way, which means that it was hard to tell if he was serious or kidding.

I was dead set on finding a solid front man regardless, because I was taking this project very seriously. I was getting sick of the fact that we weren’t getting out there and playing. I wasn’t going to let this situation go until it came to fruition. But I have to admit, I contemplated that idea… for a minute.

We called legendary A&R man John Kalodner to ask for his advice as far as singers went. John came down to see us rehearse and he thought that we were the best thing since sliced bread… but he told us that he didn’t know any good singers who were available.

Izzy suggested that we go track a few of the songs we had worked out at Rumbo, which we did. At the time I wondered what Izzy was thinking: in my mind, what we were doing with him was just fucking around and having a good time, with no expectation of where it was going. At the same time I was intent on pursuing this, as was Duff and Matt, so I wasn’t sure why Izzy would want to take it to the next level by suggesting the studio.

In any case, the songs we did together were great, and I wasn’t going to put an end to that. The three of us had also been listening to the demos that were trailing in. We’d found one that we were curious about: this guy named Kelly from Florida. We flew him out to try a vocal on a track or two, and as soon as he showed up in the studio, Izzy ducked out. There weren’t any hard feelings or anything, he just had to go and said his good-byes.

THAT SINGER KELLY DIDN’T WORK OUT but he was a step in the right direction. Still, months went by without us getting any closer to finding the right match. I hoped to find a diamond in the rough, some unknown talent out there. I told Gilby, who at the time was hanging at Mates every day because he was producing a band called the Bronx. He thought we were crazy.

“You’re never gonna find a singer,” he said, smirking. “With the level you’re at, you just can’t do that. You can’t just look for raw talent; that’s nowhere near your level. There are only so many singers around who are even worth considering—and we know all of them!”

I wasn’t going to be discouraged; I persevered. We had endless tapes coming in and there had to be something of value in there—or so I thought. We rehearsed five days a week: three hours were spent writing and the last two every day were spent listening to the mountain of tapes that came in. We listened to all of them. It was grueling. More than that, it was discouraging. I am amazed that we actually stuck it out as a band at all: we held it together for ten months doing that. I’m not sure that I can explain how bleak it got. That is, after all, why we listened to those tapes after we rehearsed. Usually they were so bad that we’d need to sleep it off just to be able to start fresh again the next day.

Most of them were so bad that we assumed that they were taking the piss… but we were never quite sure. Too many were like some guy in Wyoming who lived in a garage sending us his very best imitation of Guns. There were too many tapes by singers who just loved Guns to an unhealthy degree. I wanted to ask a lot of them if they’d actually listened to what they had sent us or at least played it for someone else before they sent it, and if they had what that person thought of it.

There were endless examples of guys doing really bad versions of “Welcome to the Jungle”; there were too many people who considered themselves poets submitting dramatic lyrics on a variety of subjects. We got folksingers, we got thrash-metal singers, we got people who sent us recordings that were so poor that I swear to God they must have recorded them on the mike in their boom box.

I was driving through North Hollywood one day thinking about how strange this process was. At the same time I thought that it should be documented, because I knew that it was going somewhere. I thought that I should talk to my friend Eric Luftglass, a producer at VH1 about it, but literally before that thought got more mature, he called me.

“Hey Slash, Eric Luftglass. I hear that you and Duff and Matt are putting together a band and looking for a singer,” he said.

“Yeah, do you know anyone?” I said.

“That’s funny! No, but I wanted to know if you’d be interested in having us document your search for a VH1 special. It would be a great launchpad for the band. Hey, do you guys have a name?”

“No, we haven’t gotten there yet. We’re still stuck on the singer part. But wait, I swear, I was just thinking that I should call you to let you know about all of this.”

Eric sent a pair of camera guys down to Mates and we weren’t sure about how it would work. We decided to reserve judgment until we met them. They were both named Alex and they’d recently shot the Aerosmith episode of Behind the Music, which I’d enjoyed. We started hanging out with them and it was cool; they started to get casual behind-the-scenes footage of us. We had gotten some interesting demos that were pretty good; most of them were done with talented singers who were just not the right style for what we were looking for but they were good nonetheless. I estimate that one out of every two hundred demos we listened to was someone that intrigued us enough to have them come in to the studio. One of those was this guy named Steve from England who was pretty good. He was in a band called Little Hell, but I might be wrong about that. His band was almost punk rock with lots of attitude and sarcasm in the lyrics. We had him come out and he ended up on our VH1 special but nothing happened as far as his joining the band.

By this time about eight months had gone by since we decided to do this thing and we were starting to get weathered. It didn’t help much when some bigwig at VH1 who had seen the footage of our show came down to the studio to tell us to “turn up the drama.” The reality of us behind the scenes apparently wasn’t cutting it, so we fought with the producers from that point on. In the end, the footage they captured of a few of the singers was made to look way more dramatic than it actually was. Unfortunately, our time with Sebastian Bach became the main theme of that program.

Among the professional singers we knew, Ian Astbury of the Cult came down to check out what we were doing (off camera); Sebastian Bach was also a contender, but that was never really considered as a possibility. We rehearsed with Sebastian for a while and even had him come into the studio to put vocals on a few tracks. At the time he was singing in a production of Jesus Christ Superstar and it was great to see this whole new professional side of Sebastian. Nonetheless, it didn’t work out; it sounded too much like the sum of our parts, not like anything new—it was Skid Roses.

And throughout it all, Scott Weiland’s name kept coming up. Everyone in the band knew him one way or another, except for me. Dave had been in a band called Electric Love Hog that had opened for STP, and Matt had been in rehab with Scott. Duff’s wife, Susan, was friends with Scott’s wife, Mary. I just thought he was a great singer, and he’d always been on my mind for this band. He was the one vocalist that I knew had the kind of voice that would serve what we were going to do: he had a John Lennon-ish quality, a little bit of Jim Morrison, and a touch of almost David Bowie. He was the best singer to come out in a long time in my opinion.

Since everyone else knew him, I told Duff to call him up. He did and he asked Scott if he’d like to hear some of our demos. Scott was into it, so we got four tracks together, got them recorded, and I brought them down personally to his apartment. At the time he was living on Blackburn, ironically, just a few doors down from where I’d lived with my dad for a while when I was a kid. That night he was doing a show with STP, so I left the CD on his doorstep and the rest of us waited eagerly for his call.

A week later he called us, and as positive as he was about the music and what he thought we were doing, he was honest about the fact that STP was still together. They were having their problems, but Scott was straightforward about the fact that he intended to stick it out and see where it was going.

“Listen,” I said. “I don’t want to try to drive a wedge between you and your band.”

We left it at that. And Duff, Matt, Dave, and I went back to the tape pile…