They put the magazines down in front of me at the cashier. Guns N’ Roses was on the cover of Rolling Stone. I vaguely remembered being interviewed for a Rolling Stone article during the Aerosmith tour, and someone probably told me the magazine had changed its mind and decided to put us on the cover instead of Aerosmith, which had been the original plan. But somewhere along the line, I must have forgotten.
Being out in public meant hysteria from then on.
Once Appetite topped the charts, the label packaged the acoustic tracks we had recorded along with our old Live! Like a Suicide EP for what became Lies—which came out at the end of 1988 and joined Appetite in the top five just a few weeks after we were on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Axl’s lyrics in “One in a Million” immediately caught attention. The press labeled us things like David Duke’s house band; I heard that the KKK—or some faction of the Klan, at least—started using the song as a war cry. I stood by my original interpretation of the song and of Axl’s intentions. Art gets misunderstood all the time. Still, I found myself uncomfortable as a result of this particular misunderstanding. I had always looked up to my oldest brother-in-law, Dexter, who was married to my sister Carol. Dexter was a black man with a Black Panther tattoo on his left forearm, and having him in the family meant I never distinguished between black skin and white skin as a child. Carol and Dexter’s kids—two nephews and a niece of mine—were half-black. Or was it half-white? And they were very close in age to me; we had all grown up together. Now I worried what they might think of me and my band with all the controversy swirling around the song.
Prior to the release of Lies, David Geffen, the head of our label, had arranged for us to play a charity gig to benefit AIDS research in New York. Axl had used another slur in his lyrics for “One in a Million,” too: “faggots.” Again I felt he had used this word as an indictment of the attitude behind such statements, not an endorsement of them. Even so, the plug was pulled on our charity appearance as protest mounted.
We were happy to get away from the controversy and finish 1988 by headlining our first-ever shows in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. When we left Japan, the promoter gave each of us a nice camera as a thank-you gift. I had never before flown home with something I hadn’t taken with me. The first two times we came back from England, we didn’t have enough money to buy anything. So obviously I didn’t have to declare anything and fill out any customs forms. This time I had the camera, but I didn’t know to declare it—it was a gift, after all. When we returned home the third week of December, our port of entry to the United States was the airport in Honolulu, Hawaii. It will come as no surprise that a young, scruffy (and in my case, of course, plastered) bunch of rock-and-rollers didn’t get waved through the express lane at customs. As a customs official went through my bag, he pulled out the new camera. He asked where I got it.
Still in the vodka-induced haze that was mandatory for me to be able to fly, I just assumed the best thing to do was to pretend it was mine all along. “Got it in L.A.,” I told the officer.
Then he opened it up and started examining the writing on the camera body. “Hang on,” he said. “This is Japanese.”
When it became clear that U.S. Customs was going to confiscate my camera, I hoisted it up and viciously smashed it on the ground as hard as I could. Twenty-five years later I’m still trying to get that incident cleared from my passport file.
Mandy and I went back to Seattle for Christmas that year. I had fucked up my thumb at the end of our Asian tour. Freak accident. My bass tech, McBob, had been diagnosed with cancer and had to go home for treatment. I took the replacement tech, Scott, to a dinner in Sydney, where we were awarded an Australian gold record. I had a couple of gold records already, so I gave this one to Scott. We went to high-five and my thumb caught on his hand awkwardly. It started swelling up as the night went on, and I had to duct-tape the pick to my hand for the last two gigs of the Asian tour because I couldn’t hold it. In Seattle, my brother-in-law, a doctor, reconnected the ligaments. I had a cast on when I flew back to L.A.
There’s no way to prepare for how strange and claustrophobic it makes you feel to be constantly recognized. There’s no training for it. One day you can pop into the grocery store to pick up a pack of smokes; the next there is hysteria as soon as you walk through the door. In theory, my world and future were opening up, and the money and fame represented seemingly limitless opportunities. In practice, my world felt as though it was shrinking, as there were fewer and fewer places I could go without attracting attention and having to function in front of an audience. I began to feel like a zoo animal: king of the jungle, stuck in a cage.
At first I didn’t know how to deal with that—I simply lived a public life. It never occurred to me to try to distinguish between a private life and a public one. I didn’t know how to do both. I was all public all the time. Still, the sense of being in a fishbowl was unnerving. If I’d had any wits about me, I would have bought a house back in Seattle and just maintained an apartment in L.A. That would have been common sense, but no. It was about our band, it was about our gang; we had to go out and conquer and kill it every night. Even in our town. We had houses in the hills now but lived like we were still crashing in the alleyway off Gardner, still fighting to keep our fingernails dug into the bottom rung of society’s ladder. If that meant scrapes and bar fights, so be it. If that meant using my cast as a weapon, so be it. That’s just the way we were.
In my wife, I thought I had a tether to a more normal life. I looked to my older brothers and sisters’ stable marriages as examples. I had always held a very romantic and idealized vision of what love and marriage should look and feel like, right down to smiling children and a white picket fence. Mandy and I set up the new house for the perfect domestic life we anticipated. We bought a dog named Chloe, a gentle yellow Lab. We even put in a picture-perfect brick walkway in front of the house to give it a more idyllic look. I laid it myself.
But what should have been a source of stability didn’t work out that way. In fact, it was almost as though the moment we got married our relationship completely changed. Once I was home, it quickly spiraled downward. I suppose if I’d been more coldly analytical about it, I could have seen the marriage wasn’t going to last. But I couldn’t believe it could turn so sour so quickly. For now I clung to her, to us—or rather to what we had been for the year prior to our wedding.
Anyway, not to worry, I always had my band to fall back on. Guns N’ Roses was still the most important thing in the lives of us five members. At least in my mind I chose to see it that way. Somehow, though, while we were off the road in 1989, we began splitting at the seams.
Our new houses provided sanctuaries away from the other members of the band—something we had never known in the four years since we had started rocking, writing, and reveling together. We had a bit of money now and ample and easy access to any and all types of vice. With Izzy and Slash, smack returned with a vengeance. And it turned out Steven hadn’t been joking about wanting nothing more in life than a bag of good weed and a big ball of crack—except now, with more than enough money to realize his dream, he added heroin to the mix. At the same time word was getting back to me that people were whispering in Axl’s ear, saying all the ass-kissing clichés: You’re the guy, you’re the basis of the band’s success. That’s a cancer for any band.
Still, I never doubted our bonds would hold. Sure, Slash started jamming with Dave Mustaine from Megadeth and there were rumors that they were talking about starting a new and separate band. I, for one, recognized this as an expression of his frustration with the directionless path that GN’R was on. Nothing more. Slash just wanted Guns to get back to being a gang of dudes who hung out together all the time. As equals. With no bullshit. But there was no communication.
I went up to Axl’s condo on a few occasions and the two of us discussed how worried we were about our comrades.
“What are we going to do?” he asked.
I h
ad no answer. We talked, but all we could do was hope they would find it in themselves to pull back and get into the swing of things as far as the band was concerned. We never thought of rehab or interventions back then.
We wanted to begin writing for our next full-length release. Everyone in the band had seen Lies as just a stopgap move. Then it, too, had gone to number one and “Patience” became a hit in the spring of 1989 just as we were trying to figure out our next move. Guns already had ideas for some new songs—in toying with riffs and ideas at sound checks in late 1988, we had created a skeletal version of “Civil War” and now Axl and I were writing lyrics for it. Memories of marching with my mother as a child provided the inspiration for one section: “Did you wear the black armband / When they shot the man / Who said peace could last forever?”
In the summer of 1989, it was decided the band would relocate to Chicago to start writing our follow-up record. Part of the idea was to recapture the hothouse effect the Gardner space had provided as the songs for Appetite had come together. There, we were always together in close proximity, for hours, even days, at a time. Now that we all had houses and cars and separate lives, that aspect of the process was impossible to re-create in L.A. Moving in together in Chicago was an attempt to re-create it, though I didn’t like the idea of going away. I had already pulled up roots once with my move from Seattle a few years earlier, and I had just bought my first house and even had a dog and something that resembled a home life in L.A. But I didn’t voice any opposition. Chicago was Axl’s idea. He wanted to be closer to his roots in Lafayette, Indiana. It was the last vestige of a romantic notion he had of going back to Indiana and leading a normal life. In the spirit of band unity, we bowed to Axl’s wishes.
I knew absolutely no one in Chicago.
This would be interesting.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Slash, Steven, and I arrived in Chicago first. Our work ethic always pushed us to get things rolling. We wanted to be sure everything was up and running. I assumed Axl would follow after us shortly—after all, we were here at his insistence. The likelihood of Izzy’s participation in our heartland experiment was less clear. He had recently been arrested for, um, disrupting a flight. By pissing in the galley. So he was taking a stab at getting sober. And, yeah, well, there were also the urine tests he had to take as a result of the arrest. It was understandable at the time that he might not want to be around the rest of us too much.
The first thing we had to do was find a place for the whole band and a couple of our techs to live. We also had a security guy—in our management’s eyes, it was probably to protect the public from our antics and not the other way around. Then we had to find a place where we could rehearse and write.
We found two apartments above an Italian restaurant across the street from a church off Clark Street. For our rehearsal spot, we rented an empty old theater—Top Note Theater—above the rock club Metro. Unbeknownst to me then, some regulars at the Metro were also tightly linked into the city’s drug chain.
After two weeks in Chicago, Axl was still a no-show. Slash, Steven, and I started to get a little resentful. I mean, what the fuck? Here we were in a city in which we had no interest, no friends—and no singer. We were fucking pissed off. I started to drink harder.
One night I was so fucked up that somebody pulled me aside and said, “Here, do a little coke and you’ll sober right up.” And there you go, that was the secret potion. I had been looking at coke the wrong way. I never wanted to be that guy—the asshole coke guy. But now I realized coke wasn’t an end in itself, or didn’t have to be; it was a means to an end, a tool. I didn’t have to become a coke guy to make use of it. Coke just allowed me to pursue my favored mind-altering regimen—vodka—harder and for longer periods of time. That guy I could be. I started to drink more and more, and now I, too, tapped into the drug connection available to us via the club downstairs.
On top of that, a Chicago newspaper did a piece about the band living there in town, writing songs for a record, and even revealed the street where we were living and the location where we were rehearsing. Perhaps the lone advantage Chicago could have offered was anonymity, and now kids came to seek us out from all over the place with the hope of getting a glimpse of us or even partying with the band now tagged as the most dangerous in the world. This was not good.
We did get some work done. We finished “Civil War” and wrote “Get in the Ring” and “Pretty Tied Up,” to name a few. We were still prolific songwriters in our creative prime at that point, and even with just three of us there, we were a locomotive.
Unfortunately this was also the point at which Steven really started to go overboard with his cocaine and heroin intake. I was nothing close to sober then, but I maintained a line I would not cross—which meant, first and foremost, that I would not let my work suffer. Also over the line: putting my life in jeopardy, putting someone else’s life in jeopardy, getting arrested. Slash maintained a similar line—especially when it came to rehearsing and playing live shows. And Slash and I had an unwritten pact to keep an eye out for each other and to make sure these lines were never crossed. In Chicago, Steven started to become frightening even to us, a couple of guys not accustomed to getting spooked when it came to intoxicants.
Ever since the band had started, there had been some vague animosity between Axl and Steven. This happens in bands. All bands. I could never quite figure out what these two guys had against each other, but the longer Axl continued not to show, the more Steven began to vent to me and Slash about him. I understood where Steven was coming from, but I was always more of a solution-based type of person. Getting pissed off and throwing food across a room or whatever never made much sense to me. Between Steven’s cocaine intake and his ever-more-vitriolic rhetoric, the situation in Chicago was becoming worrisome. Another drink, please.
In the daytime, I would try to do somewhat healthy and normal things to offset the nightly pollutants I was pouring down my gullet. I joined a gym, but really remember going only once. Health clubs were definitely not in my comfort zone back then. No, I would just go out for a run from time to time, or even go across the street to the church lawn and throw a football around with whatever kids were hanging out there. I grew up in a huge family with scores of nephews and nieces, and tossing a ball with some kids offered a comforting, familiar respite from the drugs, drink, and drama.
One day, while I was tossing a ball around with a couple of kids and their parents, four unmarked police cars came careening down the street and screeched to a halt on the sidewalk in front of us. The detectives jumped out of their cars, screaming and yelling for me to get on the ground facedown. I complied. Now, I did have an open container of beer, but still, I thought this show of force was slightly excessive for drinking in public—even if it was technically on church grounds. Whoa, they take this stuff seriously in Chicago, I thought to myself.
It was muggy and I wasn’t wearing a shirt. The cops kept looking at my back. I have a ton of old acne scars on my back and I assumed these guys had never seen acne scars like mine. Kind of rude to stare, though, right?
Big Earl, our new security guy, came bursting out of our apartment and started to quarrel with the cops about the exact reason they had me in cuffs and were now throwing me in the back of one of their cars.
“Get the fuck back, sir,” came the answer.
Earl yelled to me that he would get right down to the station and bail me out. I resigned myself to an afternoon in the pokey. That’s when it got a little interesting.
As we were driving, the cops continued to look at my back. They were also looking at me with a stare that expressed some serious disdain. The threat of violence hung in the air. Wow! Drinking in public is really frowned upon here, I thought. Then suddenly they pulled the car over and a cop told me to get out. I looked up and down the street for someone who might witness the beating they were about to put on me. But the cop walked around behind me and uncuffed me.
They said that they wer
e sorry. They’d picked up the wrong guy.
“Wrong guy for what?” I barked.
Apparently, there was a child molester in the area who fit my description—except he had an identifying tattoo on his back. My scars had looked like tattoos to these guys from afar, and they thought they’d found their man.
I started to scream at the assembled officers: the kids on the church lawn were probably scared shitless and now thought I was some kind of bad guy. I was indignant. The cops went from being apologetic to bristling at me again in an instant. They told me that they could still take me to jail for an open container and would be more than happy to do so. I suppressed my anger and shut my mouth. They let me go and I walked all the way back home.
Axl did finally show up in Chicago. It was too little too late. He got there, got into a fight with a girl we had befriended, and trashed the place where we were living. That happened the day Izzy showed up. Already nervous because of his court-mandated sobriety, Izzy came upstairs, took one look at all of the damage Axl had just wrought (not to mention the various powders all over the place), and hightailed it the fuck out of there. He would still send in riffs and ideas for Use Your Illusion and didn’t officially quit until 1991, but his day-to-day involvement with the band pretty much died that day.
When the dust settled, Slash, Steven, and I sat down. The three of us agreed that enough was enough. We were out of there.
I felt used and foolish about going out to Chicago for so long and in the end getting dusted by Axl. Up to then I had not wavered in how I perceived us—as a band and a family and a gang. But this trip solidified some of the flimsy walls that had begun to go up between various parties in our unit. Sure, we were young, wild, and somewhat dumb, but this ill-conceived trip cast a dark cloud over the band—and additional clouds on the horizon were soon to render things darker still.