“Notice, class, this young man is the perfect example of a stereotype.”
I am always grumpy when I first wake up, so this was more than I was willing to take. I got up, walked to the front of the class, flipped his desk over, and left. That incident, combined with a prior weed bust, spelled the end of my career at Fairfax High.
I LEARNED MORE ABOUT MY PEER GROUP at the unofficial high school recess where freshmen to seniors from Fairfax and other high schools gathered at the end of a long dirt road at the top of Fuller Drive, way up in the Hollywood Hills. It was called Fuller Estates; it’s not there anymore—now it’s just a curve on the hiking trail in Runyon Canyon. It was a teenage wasteland in the late seventies and early eighties, but before that it was much more interesting: in the 1920s, it was Errol Flynn’s mansion; it occupied a few acres at the top of that wide hill overlooking L.A. Between then and when I was a kid, it fell into serious decline, and by 1979 it was a ruin of a foundation; just a big concrete slab and an empty pool. By the time I saw it, the place was a statuesque wreck with an amazing view.
The song's bombastic, apocalyptic riff just consumed my entire body.
The crumbling concrete walls were a two-level maze that was a perfect, out-of-the-way spot for stoners of all ages. It was pitch-black there at night, far away from the glare of any streetlight. But somebody always had a radio. I was on acid up there the first time I ever heard Black Sabbath. I was out of my mind, staring into the black sky above Fuller Estates, tracing trails between the stars when someone nearby blasted “Iron Man.” I’m not sure that I can pinpoint how I felt; the song’s bombastic, apocalyptic riff just consumed my entire body.
That place and everyone there was straight out of a seventies teen movie. In fact, it was captured perfectly in Over the Edge, a film starring a young Matt Dillon, about a bunch of repressed, stoned, and out-of-control Texas teenagers who were ignored by their parents to the degree that they took their whole town hostage. In the film, as I bet it was for all of the kids who hung out up at Fuller, the characters’ parents had no idea as to what their kids were really up to. In its most aggressive and most realistic moments, that film was a true representation of teenage culture at the time: most kids’ parents either didn’t care enough to notice or naïvely thought they were doing the right thing by trusting their children and turning a blind eye.
WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL KIDS LOOKED a few different ways. The influence of spandex seeped in, thanks to Pat Benatar and David Lee Roth, and that trend left its colorful mark: girls wore tight, low-cut, neon body suits, and some guys weren’t far behind. I remember seeing Capezios when I was in junior high, but thank God, they were out by the time I was a freshman; although feathered hair was still standard for either sex. It was far too common and wasn’t cool by any means.
Another huge influence was the film American Gigolo, starring Richard Gere, which chronicled the downfall of a stylish Beverly Hills male escort. It was the worst thing that could have happened to Hollywood teenagers because every girl who saw it strove to re-create their personal version of that world. Suddenly, girls who were thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen tried to dress as if they were twenty-five and aspired to date well-dressed, much older guys. I never dialed into their psychology, but I watched more than a few girls I knew, as early as fifteen, start wearing too much makeup, doing blow, and dating nineteen-year-olds and twentysomethings. It was fucking pathetic and straight up sad. A lot of them became casualties of the scene before they even reached legal drinking age. After all, they had a huge head start, so it caught up to them before they even got out of the gate.
I DIDN’T LOOK LIKE ANY OF THE OTHER kids in school and my interests certainly set me apart. I have worn long hair, T-shirts, jeans, and Vans or Chuck Taylors since I first had a say in the matter. Once I was in high school, all I cared about was music and playing guitar; I never abided by the trends that swayed my peers, so I was a throw-back. It’s always been a paradox with me; I stood out but I didn’t crave or court obvious attention. All the same, I was used to not fitting in and wasn’t comfortable with anything else: I had changed schools so often that I was the perennial new guy—and probably, in the minds of my peers, the freaky new guy.
It didn’t help that to the naked eye, I wasn’t obviously anything: upper-, middle-, or lower-class; white, black, or otherwise. As I got older, and as my home address continued to change, I realized and understood why my mom so deeply pondered my school registration forms before checking one box or another: if I was listed as black in certain school districts I might be bused out of the zone to an inferior school when I otherwise might be enrolled in the better school down the street if I were a registered Caucasian. I never found a niche based on race in high school, and I’ve always been aware of my race only when it was an issue in the minds of others. I have been in many situations, back then and ever since, when I’ve noticed very “open-minded” individuals adjust their behavior because they were unsure of whether I was black or white. As a musician, I’ve always been amused that I’m both British and black; particularly because so many American musicians seem to aspire to be British while so many British musicians, in the sixties in particular, went to such great pains to be black. It was another way I wasn’t like anyone else, but I can count on one hand the confrontations I’ve had that were racially motivated; they occured once I was submerged in the very white universe of eighties metal. One time at the Rainbow I got into a fight with Chris Holmes from W.A.S.P. Duff overheard Chris saying that niggers shouldn’t play guitar. He didn’t say it to me, but it was obviously about me. As I remember, Duff told me about it later and the next time I saw Chris I went up to confront him and he took off running. Aside from insulting me, it’s one of the more ridiculous and untrue things a musician, of all people, could ever possibly say.
I FOUND MY OWN CIRCLE OF FRIENDS in high school, people who were all pretty unique, different from the rest of the student body. My closest friends, Matt and Mark, defined that period of my life. Matt Cassel is the son of Seymour Cassel, one of the greatest character actors of the past fifty years. Seymour has been in nearly two hundred films since the sixties, most notably those made with his close friend John Cassavetes. He’s been in too many films and TV shows to name; in recent years, director Wes Anderson has been his champion: he’s cast Seymour in Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Seymour is a Hollywood legend; he supported indie film making before it became an institution (his philosophy was that he’d play a role he connected with for the price of the plane ticket). He was also a figure in a hard-partying class of moviemaking royalty that included Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, Roman Polanski, and others.
I could show up at Matt’s house, sit in his room, and play guitar for hours, learning stuff off the records he had: Pat Travers’s Live, AC/DC’s newest, Back in Black; those albums provided hours and hours of riffs to learn. They lived right above Sunset on Kings Road, tucked behind the Riot Hyatt, next door to an A-frame house that is still there. There were porn movies being shot in that house all the time while Seymour was growing weed in the backyard of his place. The A-frame was a huge advantage to hanging at Matt’s: we’d wander over there and mix it up with the porn girls. It wasn’t appropriate, but they liked to get us teenage boys all fired up and frustrated by playing with each other.
Seymour had the best parties, and he had raised his kids well enough to trust them to hang out. My mom knew Seymour, but she never would have condoned the goings-on over there. At Seymour’s parties there was a lot of freedom and it was full-on. His kids, Matt and Dilynn, were so smart and independent that he didn’t have to worry: they’d already figured out who they were amid this crazy existence. Seymour’s wife, Betty, never came out of her bedroom; it was a dark and foreboding mystery to me as to what went on upstairs. Coupled with the fact that Seymour ruled the house with a bit of an iron fist, Matt allowed only a select few of his friends, of which I was one, into their world.
One day Seymour looked at me and bestowed upon me the nickname that resonated with him more than my proper name ever did. As I was passing from one room to another in his house, at a party, looking for the next whatever it was I was after, he touched me on the shoulder, fixed me with that affable gaze of his, and said, “Hey, Slash, where ya going? Where ya going, Slash? Huh?”
Obviously