With every show that we played, we made more fans—and usually a few new enemies. It didn’t matter; as we drew bigger crowds, it was easier to get gigs. Our fans, from the start, were always a mixed bag: we had punks, we had metalheads, we had stoners, we had psychos, the odd weirdo, and a few lost souls. They were never an easily identified or quantifiable commodity …in fact, after all of these years, I am still at a loss for a simple phrase that puts a bow on them—which is fine by me. Guns’ die-hard fans were, I suppose, kindred spirits; misfits who’d made their outcast status their stance.
Once our profile started to grow on the local level, we hooked up with Vicky Hamilton, a manager who’d helped both Mötley Crüe and Poison in their early days. Vicky was a five-foot nine-inch overweight platinum blonde with a whiny voice who just believed in us and proved it by promoting us for free. I liked Vicky a lot—she was very sincere and meant well; she helped me get posters for our shows printed, took out ads in the L.A. Weekly, and dealt with the promoters at our gigs. I worked alongside her doing everything I could to further our cause; with her help, everything began to really take off.
We started playing at least once a week, and as our exposure increased, so did the need to get some new clothes—my three T-shirts, my loaner leather jacket, one pair of jeans, and one pair of leather pants weren’t gonna cut it. I decided that I had to do something about it the afternoon before we played our first Saturday-night headlining slot at the Whisky.
I didn’t have the financial means to make much happen, so I wandered the shops in Hollywood looking for odds and ends. I stole a concho belt from a place called Leathers and Treasures that was black and silver, just like the one Jim Morrison always wore. I planned on wearing it with my jeans or my pair of leather pants (which I’d found in the Dumpster of my grandmother’s old apartment complex) and continued browsing the various shops. I found something interesting in a place called Retail Slut. There was no way that I could afford it, and for the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure how I could steal it—but I knew I had to have it.
A large black top hat doesn’t easily fit under your shirt, though I’ve had so many stolen from me over the years that someone has worked out an effective technique that I don’t know about. In any case, I’m still not sure if the staff noticed and, if they did, whether or not they cared as I blatantly snatched that top hat off the mannequin and casually walked out of the store and never looked back. I don’t know what it was; the hat just spoke to me.
Once I got back to the apartment I was living in at the time, I realized my new “purchases” would best serve each other by becoming one: I cut the belt to fit the top hat and was happy with the way it looked. I was even happier to discover that with my new accessory pulled down as far as it could go, I could see everything but no one could really see me. Some might say that a guitarist hides behind his instrument anyway, but my hat added an impenetrable comfort. And while I never thought it was original, it was mine—a trademark that became an indelible part of my image.
WHEN GUNS FIRST GOT GOING I WAS working at a newsstand on Fairfax and Melrose. I lived with my on-again, off-again girlfriend Yvonne full-time until she got sick of me, at which point we broke up once more, leaving me nowhere to live. My former manager at the newsstand, Alison, let me crash in her living room and pay her half of the rent. She was a very handsome reggae chick with an apartment on Fairfax and Olympic who was taking college classes at night. Alison was attractive, but I always thought that either she was a little old for me or that I was a little young for her; either way, we never had that kind of relationship. We got along very well, and when she left the newsstand for a better job, I was lucky enough to inherit her position.
Alison always treated me like the cute stray she’d taken in, and I did little to prove her wrong. As her tenant, I didn’t take up much space. My worldly possessions were my guitar, a black trunk full of rock magazines, cassettes, an alarm clock, some pictures, and whatever clothes I owned or had been given by friends and girlfriends. And there was my snake, Clyde, in his cage.
Anyway, the newsstand job came to an abrupt end in the summer of ’85 when a local rock station, KNEC, threw a party out in Griffith Park, complete with free charter buses that departed from the Hyatt on the Sunset Strip. I headed over there after work with two pints of Jack Daniel’s in my jeans, not giving a shit that I was expected to open the newsstand up at five the next morning. It was a pretty debauched summer night as I recall; people passed bottles and joints as the bus made its way across town. There were plenty of local characters and musicians on board, and when we got there, music playing and a barbecue. The grass was full of people engaged in everything.
I got so fucked up that night that I brought a girl back to Alison’s place and was fucking her on the living-room floor when Alison came home and caught us. She didn’t need to say anything—her expression told me that she wasn’t too pleased. I stayed up with this girl anyway until it was time for me to go to work. By the time I got her dressed and on her way, I was already late and my boss, Jake, had called. I was in the doghouse already because I used the phone at the newsstand to conduct band business so often that he’d started calling during my shifts to catch me in the act, which proved to be difficult. Those were the days before call waiting and I was on the phone constantly so it took Jake hours to get through just to yell at me. Needless to say he was pretty pissed off about opening up for me that day.
“Yeah, Jake, I’m sorry,” I mumbled, still pretty drunk when he called for the second time. “I know I’m late, I got held up. But I’m on my way.”
“Oh, you’re on your way?” he asked.
“Yeah, Jake, I’ll be there really soon.”
“No you won’t,” he said. “Don’t bother. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.”
I paused for a minute and let that sink in. “You know, Jake, that’s probably a good idea.”
AT THAT TIME DUFF AND IZZY STILL lived across the street from each other on Orange Avenue. Duff had a working-class-musician mentality like mine—until the band really got going, he didn’t feel right if he didn’t have a job, even if his job was morally suspect. He did phone sales or phone theft, depending on your point of view: Duff worked as a telemarketer for one of those firms that promise people a prize of some kind if they agree to pay a small fee “in order to redeem it.” I had a similar job before I got my job in the clock factory: I’d call people all day, promising them a Jacuzzi or a tropical vacation if they’d just “confirm” their credit-card number to cover their “eligibility fee.” It was a nasty, cutthroat gig and I got out the day before it was raided by the police.
Axl and Steven would do anything not to work a regular job, so they got by on the street, or via their girlfriends’ handouts. Though, as I recall, on occasion Axl and I took jobs together as extras on movie sets. We were in a few crowd shots at the L.A. Sports Arena for a Michael Keaton movie called Touch and Go where he played a hockey player. We didn’t care as much for the camera time as we did getting fed and making money for doing nothing: we’d show up in the morning, get our meal ticket, then find somewhere to sleep behind the bleachers where we wouldn’t be found. We’d wake up when they called for lunch to eat with the rest of the crowd, then sleep until it was time to clock out and collect our hundred-dollar check.
I liked being the industry’s least industrious extra as often as possible: I found absolutely nothing wrong with free lunch and an afternoon of being paid to sleep. I looked forward to the same when I was scouted by a casting director for the film Sid and Nancy. Unbeknownst to any of us, the same casting director in various locales, scouted every single member of Guns N’ Roses individually. All of us showed up to the first day of casting, like, “Hey …what are you doing here?”
It wasn’t much fun; actually, it was like jury duty: there was a pen full of extras, but all five of us were chosen to be in the same concert scene, where “the Sex Pistols” are playing some small club. The shoot required showing up early in the morning, for three consecutive days, with the usual promise of a meal ticket and