We watched as Steven set up both of his silver-blue bass drums and loosened up with a few typical double-bass fills at rehearsal the next day. His aesthetic touchstones were off, but it wasn’t an insurmountable problem. It was a situation rectified in a typically Guns fashion: when Steven ducked out to take a piss, Izzy and Duff hid one of his bass drums, a floor tom, and some small rack toms. Steven returned, sat down, and started counting in the next song before he realized what was missing.
“Hey, where’s my other bass drum?” he asked, looking around as if he’d dropped them on the way to the bathroom or something. “I came here with two …and my other drums?
“Don’t worry about it, man. You don’t need them, just count off the song,” Izzy said.
Steven never got his extra bass drum back and it was the best thing that ever happened to him. Of the five of us, he was the most conventionally contemporary, which, all things considered, lent a key element to our sound—but we weren’t going to let him hammer that point home all night long. We bullied him into being a straight-ahead, 4/4 rock-and-roll drummer, which complemented and easily locked in with Duff ’s bass style, while allowing Izzy and me the freedom to mesh blues-driven rock and roll with the neurotic edge of first-generation punk. Not to mention what Axl’s lyrics and delivery brought to it. Axl had a unique voice; it was brilliant in range and tone, but even though it was often intense and in your face, it had an amazingly soulful, bluesy quality to it because he had a choir background from singing in church when he was in grade school.
By the end of his tryout, Steven was hired and the original Guns N’ Roses lineup was locked and loaded. Duff had booked the tour; all that we needed was wheels. Anyone who knows a musician well, successful or otherwise, knows this: generally, they are adept at “borrowing” from their friends. It took one phone call and very minor convincing for us to enlist our friends Danny and Joe, whose car and loyalty we made use of very regularly. To sweeten the deal, we christened Danny our tour manager and Joe our roadie and the next morning drove Danny’s weathered green tank of an Oldsmobile out to the Valley to pick up a U-Haul trailer that we filled with the amps, guitars, and drum kit.
Seven of us packed into this mid-seventies Olds and set out on what I don’t think anyone but Duff realized was a trip of over a thousand miles. We were outside of Fresno, two hundred miles from L.A. and two hundred short of Sacramento, when the car broke down. Danny wasn’t the type of guy to have splurged for AAA, so luckily we broke down within pushing distance of a gas station, where we discovered that it would take four days to get the necessary parts to fix a beast that old. At that rate, we wouldn’t make any of the shows.
Our enthusiasm was too great to allow for delays or thoughts of practicality, so we told Danny and Joe to stay with the car and gear until it was repaired and to meet us in Portland (about seven hundred fifty miles away), at one of the gigs on the route. From there, we decided we’d drive to Seattle together (about a hundred and seventy-five miles farther) to play the final show of our tour with our own gear. There was a brief moment when Danny and Joe campaigned for us to remain in Fresno together until the car was back on the road, but neither that nor the obvious option of turning back were ever considered seriously. We hadn’t even considered how to get from one gig to the next, let alone that we might not find amps and drums ready to borrow when we got there. We really didn’t give a shit about any of that; the five of us didn’t hesitate—we hit the highway to start hitchhiking.
We gave Danny and Joe whatever money we could spare to pay for the car—probably about twenty bucks—and walked up the on-ramp to the highway, guitar cases in hand. A few hours without so much as one vehicle even slowing down to check us out didn’t dent our confidence. We remained proactive, testing the efficiency of the various hitchhiking configurations available to us: five guys with no visible luggage; two guys hitching and three guys hidden in the bushes; one guy with a guitar case; just Axl and Izzy; just Izzy and me; just Axl and me; just Steven alone, waving and grinning; just Duff alone. Nothing seemed to work; the people of Fresno weren’t having us in any way, shape, or form.
It took about six hours for our kind of misfit to come along; a trucker willing to take all of us on board, stuffed into the front seat and the small bench behind it in his cab. It was close quarters, made even closer by the guitar cases and the sheer intensity of this guy’s speed habit. He shared his stash with us sparingly, which made his endless stories of life on the road more digestible: the five of us were all pretty cynical and sarcastic, so in the beginning we were thoroughly amused by this guy’s insanity. As that night, the next day, and the day after that came screaming down the road at us through the windshield, there wasn’t anyplace else I thought I’d rather be. When we’d pull over at rest stops so this guy could sleep for a while in the back of his cab—which was a consistently inconsistent amount of time lasting anywhere from an hour to half a day—we’d crash on park benches, write songs as the sun came up, or just walk around kicking trash at squirrels.
After a couple of days of this, our chauffeur started to smell particularly pungent and his formerly affable, strung-out chatter seemed to turn darkly weird. We were soon collectively disenchanted. He informed us that he planned to take a detour to pick up more speed from “his old lady,” who I guess drove out to meet him at regular spots on his route to keep him juiced up. It didn’t look like the situation was bound to improve. The next time he pulled into a rest stop to take one of his endless naps, we were way too bored and broke to stick it out any longer. We decided to explore our options by hitting the blacktop to again look for a ride, figuring that if worse came to worst, the speed demon in the semi would find us and pick us up again whenever he woke up. He probably wouldn’t even think we’d ditched him.
Our prospects weren’t plentiful, because, among the five of us, not one of us bore an iota of mainstream appeal, from Duff ’s red-and-black leather trench coat to our black leather jackets, long hair, and a few days of road grime. I have no idea how long we waited, but eventually we hailed a ride from two chicks in a pickup truck with a shell. They drove us to the outskirts of Portland, and once we got within the city limits, all was well—Duff ’s friend Donner from Seattle had sent someone to get us who informed us that Danny and Joe had called ahead: apparently the car was too unreliable to make the trip so they had headed back to L.A. It’s not like we cared; we were forging on, even though we’d missed every single gig along the way. It didn’t matter to us so long as we had a shot at making our final show of the tour—it was scheduled to take place in Seattle, and what was meant to be our last gig became the first Guns N’ Roses show that ever was.
Arriving in Seattle was especially victorious both because we’d actually made it (that last drive came off with no problems), and also because Donner’s house was the closest thing I have ever seen to Animal House. The day we rolled in, they threw a barbecue in our honor that, as far as I could tell, never seemed to end—it was as raging when we dragged ourselves out of there as it had been when everyone first cheered the five strangers from L.A. who came through their door. There was an endless supply of pot, a ton of booze, and people sleeping, tripping, or fucking in every corner. It was a fitting Guns N’ Roses after-show party …that started before our first show.
We arrived at Donner’s house a handful of hours before we were supposed to be onstage. We had nothing but our guitars, so we really needed to find ourselves equipment. As I said, before moving to L.A., Duff had played in legendary Seattle punk bands, so he could pull in some favors: he gave Lulu Gargiulo of the Fastbacks a call, and she came through for us by loaning us their drum kit and amps. She personally made the first Guns N’ Roses show possible. And I’d like to thank her right now once again.
The club was called Gorilla Gardens, which was the epitome of a punk-rock shit hole: it was dank and dirty and smelled of stale beer. It was situated right on the water, on an industrial wharf that lent it a vaguely maritime feel, but not in a picturesque, wooden dock manner at all. That place was at the end of a concrete slab; it was the kind of setting where deals get made in East Coast gangster movies, and on top