I also bought a steel chain and a chunky little padlock and started to wear that around my neck. It was just like the one worn by Sid Vicious, the bass player in the Sex Pistols. I was determined to carry that torch—the punk-rock torch—regardless of where this major-label deal took us. Call it punk-rock guilt.
At the time we received our advance, I was crashing on and off with a girl in Hollywood. We all had a few girls with whom we could stay if we needed a break from the loft at the rehearsal space on Gardner—some were friends with benefits, some were just friends. Now, however, I put myself on a small stipend that could pay my rent—or half-rent, I should say—for about six months. Another friend of mine was looking to move to Hollywood from her parents’ house somewhere down in Orange County. She and I decided we could share a one-bedroom apartment we found on Crescent Heights just below Sunset. She would get the bedroom, and I would get the floor of the dining room, which I cordoned off with a sheet to create my little den of darkness. The finishing touch on my lush new lifestyle was to fill the refrigerator. I could afford to eat. This was major-label success!
Suddenly I didn’t need to keep my job anymore, either. I had $7,500 in an envelope in my boot. We were going to be entering a recording studio to make an album. We were going to tour. As at every job, the guys at this place knew I was a musician, and knew that was my thing. They had even come to a few shows—tracksuits and all—to see what it was all about. The problem was, I knew a lot of things about a business that wasn’t exactly run by the books. How do you quit a job like that? Was there a debriefing process for leaving a mob job? This eventuality had never crossed my mind in the year I worked there.
I went into the office of one of the bosses after we signed.
“We just signed our deal this morning and I don’t have to work anymore.”
His expression didn’t change for a second. He just sat there, looking blankly at me. I began to sweat. Was I going to have to give him a cut of the money in my boot?
Then his face slowly lightened, he took an unhurried breath, and he said, “You do good, Mikey, you do good.”
He wanted to know that the label wasn’t ripping us off. I let out a silent sigh of relief.
We played a celebratory gig at the Roxy, or rather two—an early show and a late show—on March 28, 1986. To be honest, the shows had been booked prior to our signing with Geffen. They were supposed to be label showcases. Events overtook our plan, however, so we took out full-page ads in the local music papers to announce the gigs: Geffen recording artists Guns N’ Roses, live at the Roxy. Everyone in Hollywood already knew, of course—we were throwing money around, buying rounds of drinks for friends.
We all had fresh tattoos at the Roxy shows, and people wanted to touch them. We felt like we ran the city that night. My old bosses even came. They stood out like sore thumbs in a room packed with Hollywood street trash like us, helping us celebrate our collective takeover. They sent a bottle of champagne to us backstage. I was touched by the gesture, and we thanked them during our first set.
The icing on the cake came a week later, when Guns rechristened the Whisky a Go Go on April 5; the legendary Sunset Strip venue was being converted back into a club after serving as a bank for a few years. The poster asked, WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU SAW A REAL ROCK N’ ROLL BAND AT THE WHISKY A GO GO? And, since it was assumed we’d be making a record soon and then be off to tour the world—or, as eventually was the case, one-horse towns in the Canadian rust belt—below that was written: THIS COULD BE YOUR LAST CHANCE.
Reopening the Whisky was sweet. It meant that somehow, despite the fact that nobody gave us the time of day on the Strip during the year it took us to find an audience for our idiosyncratic sound and style, we now embodied L.A. rock and roll to the extent that this legendary venue wanted to associate itself with us to restake its claim on the city’s musical landscape.
We had moved the dial at the club level. Now, could we do the same on record, on radio, on MTV? Fat chance.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
With a legal framework overlaying our brotherhood, a sudden expansion of free time, and wallets (or rather, boots) flush with cash, it was clear things were changing. One change I didn’t see coming: heroin use in the band started to expand. Certain guys you just don’t peg as the type to fall for the romantic image of the rock-and-roll junkie. Slash and I were really big drinkers—alcohol addicts, if you will. Of course, if you are easily addicted to one thing, then chances are pretty good you’ll be easily addicted to others. Bingo. Though he’d dabbled a bit in the past, after we signed our deal and were all relatively flush with dough, Slash got himself strung out. And then so did Steven Adler. He was smoking crack, too. I think Stevie was willing to try anything that might dull the memories of his nightmarish childhood. Poor fucker.
I knew I was an alcoholic and assumed I would address that problem at some unspecified point in the future. These were only shadowy thoughts, though, and I really had no plan as to how I would one day tackle it. Still, I was the most responsible guy in the band during this period. I drank every day, but I still drank mostly beer. I had also found this killer belt—a boxing championship belt decorated with Budweiser bottle caps. Like I was the heavyweight champion of fucking beer. Since it was Bud, Axl started introducing me at shows as Duff “King of Beers” McKagan.
Axl continued to drop out of sight for days on end as a result of his erratic moods. Sometimes it was as if he was on speed, bouncing off the walls; then he would sleep for three days. When he was around, he was a bundle of energy: we’re going to do this and that, and, oh, yeah, let’s write some lyrics. And we were like, yeah, we’re going to do those things but we can’t do them all at the same time, Axl. I was always aware of what a fundamentally different type of person he was from me—what a spectacle, I thought, what a figure—but we continued to get along great, and I loved his sense of conviction about the band.
As 1986 wore on, Slash, Steven, and Izzy were in a constant cycle of cleaning up and going back out on the dope. It was hard to watch sometimes, but we were young and they held it together for the most part for the sake of the band—nothing was more important to any of us.
Getting signed didn’t earn us entry into some special fraternity of Hollywood elite or anything like that, though we did meet Nikki Sixx one night. Tom Zutaut, the guy who signed us to Geffen, had signed Mötley Crüe while at his previous job at Elektra. We went to Nikki’s house and drank. At first we were like, Whoa, it must be amazing to make enough money from music to have a house! Then we got really fucked up.
For us to start making any money, much less enough to buy a house, we needed to make an album. To make an album, we needed a producer. We wanted somebody who would capture us in the studio in a way that was true to our live ferocity. We made a mixtape for Tom to try to express how we wanted the recordings to sound: Motörhead, the Saints, Fear, Bon Scott–era AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols. Copies of the tape ended up circulating through Geffen’s offices, but our search for the right person to produce us went nowhere.
Part of the problem was that people didn’t really know where to put us—we didn’t fit comfortably into the sort of categories industry people dealt in. The knee jerk inclination was to shoehorn us in with Whitesnake, W.A.S.P., Autograph, Poison: heshers and poodles. We didn’t like the sound of those kinds of records. Most bands being signed at the time—Warrant, White Lion, BulletBoys, all that shit—fit the bill. We were different. Poison wasn’t playing alongside punk bands, that’s for sure. And we didn’t hang out with the types of people who formed bands like BulletBoys. (Like us, Jane’s Addiction didn’t fit in, but Nothing’s Shocking wouldn’t be released until almost two years later.) The guy who signed us really believed in us and tried to help us find the right producer, but we kept running up against the same attitude. Everyone wanted to take the edge off our music or to transform it into something they already understood.
The first candidate came in and said Steven needed more
rack toms and china cymbals. We had worked so hard to get Steven down to a small drum kit and get that groove going. Next up was Paul Stanley of KISS, who wanted to produce our record, too. He came out to see us play at Raji’s, which was a grubby little place where a lot of underground bands played. We were surprised he showed up at such a dive, and we agreed to meet with him as a result. When he arrived at our rehearsal space to talk about his vision, he said he wanted to add double kick drums. Steven loved KISS, absolutely loved them, and for a member of KISS to suggest he revert to his teenage drum setup was something beyond his wildest dreams. “Yeah, yeah, great idea!” Izzy and I looked at each other, though, and we both had the same thought: This isn’t going to work. We didn’t tell Paul to his face that we didn’t want him to produce us, but it was over from the word go (or rather, the word double).
For a time we thought we could get Mutt Lange, the producer behind AC/DC’s Back in Black. But Mutt wanted $400,000 to walk into the room, plus a cut of the future earnings of the record. We had to pay for the studio and the producer out of our $250,000 advance, and we had already taken out $75,000. We weren’t going to borrow money to pay for a producer.
With these pressures mounting and the band still recovering from the feuds over various aspects of the signing process, Geffen asked us to stop playing live. By then we were doing gigs nearly every week, and sometimes more often than that. Those regular appearances were a chance to—depending on your mental state—channel everything into your performance or block everything out. Just as important, the transcendent experience of playing our songs for an audience was a way to regularly refresh the brotherly bonds of rock and roll that held us together. Now, just when we needed that most, Geffen pulled the rug out from under us. The rationale? We had to build mystique by dropping out of sight, putting a premium on our performances.
To say we didn’t see eye to eye with this decision is an understatement. We acquiesced at first, though we had some gigs already booked that we honored. Soon, though, we had to figure out ways to play—we just functioned best when we could get onstage regularly. And we got bored. So we began to play a bunch of shows as the Fargin Bastydges to get around the label’s injunction. We took the name from a scene in the movie Johnny Dangerously. It was an alias, not an alter ego: the set list and everything else was exactly the same as our normal Guns shows; it just allowed us to avoid fighting with Geffen. One of the shows we played was at Gazzarri’s, a venerable Hollywood dive we had always sort of wanted to play—just to say we had—but not the sort of place a band signed to a major label was supposed to play. But that was us. The industry had one set of priorities. We had our own.
We picked up another Fender’s gig at the end of July, playing—as Guns N’ Roses, that is—with Lords of the New Church, a punk supergroup featuring Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys and Brian James of the Damned. In hindsight, we might have seen the seeds of later trouble being sown at this show: Axl turned up so late we had to start without him.
We played at the Whisky again on August 23, a month after a “Farewell to Hollywood” show at the Troubadour. Still, it’s hard to imagine the label people were too upset, because we debuted two new songs in concert that night, “Sweet Child o’ Mine” and “Mr. Brownstone.”
We continued to take high-profile opening slots for national tours—I suppose Geffen saw those gigs as different from shows in a club milieu, as we were getting in front of new audiences. We played with Cheap Trick, Ted Nugent, and Alice Cooper. The night of the Alice Cooper gig, Axl showed up late again and then was unable to get into the venue. Izzy and I sang. At the time it was almost funny—though we were definitely pissed, too, and we absolutely trashed the dressing room. We traded some words with Axl when we found him in the parking lot afterward, but at the end of the day the situation lacked much in the way of consequences. We did the show, we got paid, and the crowd was there to see Alice anyway. That was that. For now.
Probably the most memorable show of this sort took place on Halloween, 1986. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were just starting their rise as a national act, and the Dickies were headlining a show at Ackerman Hall at UCLA, and we opened. We still had yet to enter the studio. We were feuding with Geffen about whether we had enough songs to warrant recording, and we still hadn’t found a producer we liked. We reached a compromise with the label to put out a limited edition “bootleg” EP, Live! Like a Suicide, and we had finished it just before this show. That night we felt like we were finally making some forward motion.
The Dickies were still a big draw then and, aside from Social Distortion, pretty much the last band standing from the original wave of L.A. punk rock. For me, the cool thing about this show was that Black Flag’s Henry Rollins watched our entire set from the wings of the stage and came up to us afterward and told us how much he liked our band. I considered him the most credible guy in rock, and he had a reputation as a guy who didn’t mince words. He definitely wouldn’t fawn over a band just for the sake of doing so. And we got the thumbs-up. Kick ass!
It turned out he had seen us once before. The year before, someone in Black Flag’s crew had dragged him to some Hollywood club to see a couple glam bands. Apparently we had opened the show. Rollins described the night in his journal, published years later as Art to Choke Hearts: “The opening band was called Guns and Roses and they blew the headliners off so hard it was pathetic.”
And then we met Mike Clink. He had produced a couple of Triumph records. I hated Triumph. But Clink loved GN’R and had seen us live a few times. He said he would come down and record us for nothing and convince us with his recording. When we got together, he said a cool thing about how the microphone picks up the sound and it goes through a cord and onto a tape—it was his way of saying he didn’t want to change us, couched in producer-philosophy speak. He did a playback and said, “This is how I think your record should sound.” And it was basically us live. And I immediately thought, That’s exactly right.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
With my favorite punk bands, the bass was the loudest thing and led the way. And now as Mike Clink started to produce the songs that would make up Appetite, the bass was the loudest, roundest thing on the recordings. It had a lot of space. And it wasn’t on the outside or underneath the way it was on a lot of records back then—Clink had it right in the middle.
We were pretty disciplined about the sessions, but outside the recording studio it was business as usual in our world—partying, fighting, getting into scraps with the police. Half the band slept at the studio sporadically because they still didn’t have beds anywhere else, though I was actually moving in the opposite direction on the personal front. After a period without an exclusive relationship, I started to see a girl named Mandy. She was in a band called the Lame Flames. By spring 1987, as Guns was finishing the record, Mandy and I moved in together. Our apartment became an oasis of stability not just for me and Mandy, but for people around me—like Todd Crew. His band, Jetboy, had just signed a major-label deal. Whenever people needed to find Todd—his band, their management, his family—they called my number. Now that I had an actual phone instead of having to use a pay phone, I was also able to call home a lot more. I talked to my mom frequently, excited to tell her about Mandy and the foundation I seemed to be building with her. For the first time since Stacy, I feel as if I am in a relationship with long-term potential, Mom. I talked to Big Jim a lot more, too. He had continued to write me, always managing to track down my latest address as I lived like a nomad during those two years since the trip up to Seattle for GN’R’s ill-fated shake-out tour. Jim confided in me during some of those long conversations that he was thinking of moving down to L.A. I was psyched at the prospect of having another solid friend around.
Once the Appetite sessions were over, we needed another outlet as we waited for all the peripheral stuff to get done—the record wouldn’t be released until July. Axl, Izzy, and Slash went to New York to sit in on the mixing process. I started playing rhythm guitar in a s
ide band called Drunk Fux, just screwing around with various friends.
One afternoon Todd was sitting in my apartment when my phone rang. Jetboy’s manager was on the line. I handed the phone to Todd. The conversation didn’t last long. Todd looked devastated as he hung up.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“They just kicked me out.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’m no longer the bass player in Jetboy. They fired me.”
“What? That’s all he said?”
“He said they decided I drink too much and hang out with the Guns N’ Roses guys too much.”
Todd was absolutely crestfallen. The payoff for several years of hard work had suddenly been jerked away from him at the last minute.
At the time I was royally pissed off at Jetboy. In essence, they fired Todd for being too fucked up. It ruined the camaraderie we had with that band. Unfortunately we would face a similarly heartbreaking situation within our own band in a few short years.
For the short term, Todd joined Drunk Fux, which now consisted of him on bass, me on rhythm guitar, Steven Adler on drums, Del singing, and West Arkeen on lead guitar.
Then I realized I hadn’t heard from Jim in quite a few days. I couldn’t seem to reach him, so I started calling a few other Seattle people to see what the story was. But then my phone rang. It was Jim’s girlfriend. She was crying. Jim had died of a heroin overdose. At first I didn’t understand. He wrote me letters. He sent me pictures. He was coming down to L.A. Now he was dead. Oh, god. My heart sank. It felt as if something inside me had been ripped out.