I met a ton of people at Seymour’s—including the Stones. After they played the L.A. Coliseum they came by for an after-after party at his place. I had seen the show that night; they played “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” so soulfully that I’ll never forget it. I managed to shake Ronnie Wood’s hand; I was fifteen and little did I know that he’d be one of my best friends later in life. In fact, my first son, London, was conceived in his house.
My other close friend, Mark Mansfield, has popped in and out of my life ever since we first met back in high school. Mark’s dad, Ken, was a record producer and his stepmom was a singer—his real mom lived in Santa Barbara, where he’d often go when he got in trouble—and he was constantly in trouble. Mark’s family lived in a very nice house above Sunset and Mark was a mini James Dean with a touch of Dennis Hopper. He’d try anything and he’d do anything that anyone ever dared him to do—and he’d do it with sheer enthusiasm and a smile on his face. Slowly but surely that attitude led him down a dark road: juvenile detention, rehab, and the like. Mark was the kind of guy who once called me at ten a.m. to tell me that he and a friend had just driven his friend’s mom’s car off the road somewhere along Mulholland. They’d stolen it out of the kid’s mom’s driveway since she was out of town and inevitably launched it off the shoulder, into the canyon. Luckily for them they landed it in a tree and were able to climb back up to street level. Needless to say, the next call I got from Mark was from exile at his mom’s house in Santa Barbara.
AS SOON AS I COULD STRING THREE chords together consistently and improvise a solo, I wanted to form a band. Steven was gone, he was off in the Valley, so I struck out on my own. I had tried to start a band at the very tail end of junior high but it hadn’t gone so well. I found a bass player and a drummer whose mom taught French at Fairfax High School. This was to be my first experience with a temperamental, tantrum-prone drummer; if he made one mistake, this kid would kick the entire kit over. Then we’d have to wait while he set it all back up. The bass player in that band was just awesome. His name was Albert, and we’d play Rainbow covers like “Stargazer.” Unfortunately, Albert got into a bike accident on Mulholland Drive and ended up in a coma for a month or so. He was in traction; he had pins in his neck and in both of his legs and braces holding his legs apart—all of it. He came to school looking like a big capital A, and he had no aspirations of playing bass at all anymore.
My first professional gig was at Al’s Bar, playing in a band with friends of my dad’s. My dad was very proud of my love of guitar and always bragged to his friends about me. I don’t know what, but something must have happened with their guitar player and Tony talked them into letting me play. I’m sure they were worried about whether or not I could do it. But I got up there and was able to handle it: it was all twelve-bar blues and standard blues-based covers like the Stones, which I had a feel for. I got free beers out of it, which is what made it truly professional.
There were a few guitar players in my circle of high school friends. I met a guy named Adam Greenberg who played drums and we found a guy named Ron Schneider who played bass and we became a trio dubbed Tidus Sloan. I still have no idea what that name means …I’m pretty sure that I got it off a guy named Phillip Davidson (who we’ll get to in just a little bit). One night when Phillip was mumbling incoherently I remember being really curious about whatever it was that he was saying.
“Tidus ally sloan te go home,” Phillip said. At least that’s what I heard.
“What?” I asked him.
“Tid us all de sloans to ghos hum,” he said. Or so I thought.
“Hey, Phillip, what are you trying to say?”
“I’m stelling you to tidus these sloans ta grow fome,” he said. “Tidus sloans to go home.”
“Okay, man,” I said. “Cool.”
I think he wanted me to tell all these girls in his house to go home, but I walked away from that situation thinking that Tidus Sloan, whatever the fuck that meant, was a pretty cool name for a band.
TIDUS SLOAN WAS A PURELY INSTRUMENTAL band because we never found a singer and I certainly wasn’t going to sing myself. Basically, I don’t have the personality to be a front man of any kind; it’s enough of an effort for me to get out there and talk to people at all. All I really want to do is play guitar and be left alone. In any case, Tidus Sloan played early Black Sabbath, early Rush, early Zeppelin, and early Deep Purple without vocals—we were retro before there was a retro.
Slash and Ron Schneider, two-thirds of Tidus Sloan.
We rehearsed in Adam’s garage, which drove his mom completely insane. She and the neighbors would complain constantly, which is understandable because we played much too loud for a residential neighborhood. His mom’s name was Shirley and I drew a cartoon in her honor: it was a woman in the doorway of a room screaming, “It’s too loud and I can’t stand the noise!” at the top of her lungs. The floor of the room in the picture is littered with beer cans and on the bed is a kid with long hair playing guitar, totally oblivious.
My caricature of Shirley became the inspiration for my first tattoo, though the figure that I had inked on my arm looks nothing like her—my version has Nikki Sixx hair and huge tits, while the real Shirley favored curlers and was old and fat—though also with big tits. I got that tattoo when I was sixteen; it’s on my right arm and it says Slash underneath it. Adam explained to me later that Shirley’s frequent outbursts were entirely my fault: I had just acquired a Talkbox from Mark Mansfield’s stepmom, which is a sound amplifier that allows a musician to modify the sound of whatever instrument is filtered through it by the movement of his mouth against a clear tube that’s attached to it. Apparently the sounds that I made reminded Shirley of her late husband, who died of throat cancer just a couple years previously. He’d had to speak through an artificial voice box and the sounds I was making were too similar for her to bear. Needless to say I stopped using the Talkbox at her house.
There were a few other guitar players and bands around my high school, like Tracii Guns and his band Pyrhus. I had a moment of envy when I first started playing guitar, before I owned an electric; Tracii had a black Les Paul (a real one) and a Peavy amp, and I’ll never forget how together I thought he was. We would check out each other’s bands at parties and there was definitely a competitive vibe about the whole thing.
In high school I started hanging out with whatever musicians I could find. There were a few guys my age and a few older, left-over Deep Purple dudes, who were irretrievably brain-dead and well past their expiration date to still be hanging out with kids from high school. The best of them was the aforementioned Phillip Davidson: not only did he unintentionally name my first band, but he had a Stratocaster, which was a very big deal, and his parents never seemed to be home. He lived in this beat-up house in Hancock Park that was overgrown with weeds and we’d just party over there all day and all night. We were teenagers throwing keg parties; no parents, just Phillip and his two stoner brothers.
I always wondered where his parents were; it was like the Peanuts cartoon, all kids, no authority figures. It was a mystery to me—I always thought that maybe his parents were coming home at any given moment, but they never did. I felt like the only one who was concerned; Phillip mentioned the existence of his parents, who owned the place, but they never seemed to materialize.