I owe it all to Steven Adler—he did it. He is the reason that I play guitar. We met one night at the Laurel Elementary playground when we were thirteen. As I remember it, he was skateboarding miserably. After a particularly hard fall, I rode over on my bike and helped him up and we were instantly inseparable.
Steven had grown up in the Valley with his mom, his stepdad, and his two brothers until his mom couldn’t take his bad behavior anymore and shipped him off to live with his grandparents in Hollywood. He lasted there for the remainder of junior high, summers included, before he was bused back to his mom to attend high school. Steven is special; he’s the kind of misfit that only a grandmother can love, but can’t live with.
Steven and I met the summer before eighth grade and hung out until high school, since I had just moved into my grandmother’s new condo in Hollywood, from my mom’s apartment in Hancock Park. Both of us were new to our school, Bancroft Junior High, as well as to the neighborhood. As long as I knew him, Steven never spent a full week’s worth of time in school out of any given month. I got by because I did well enough in my art, music, and English classes that my grade-point average was high enough to pass. I got As in art, English, and music because those were the only subjects that interested me. Apart from those I didn’t care for much else, and I cut class all the time. Since I had stolen a pad of absentee notices from the administration offices and forged my mom’s signature when I needed to, in the eyes of the administration, I was there much more often than I ever was. But the only reason I actually graduated junior high at all was due to a teachers’ strike during my final year. Our regular teachers were replaced by substitutes who were too easy for me to bullshit and charm. I don’t want to get into it, but on more than one occasion I recall playing my teacher’s favorite song on guitar for the entire class. Enough said.
To be honest, school wasn’t too bad: I had a whole circle of friends, including a girlfriend (who we’ll get to in just a little bit) and I partook liberally in every exercise that makes school enjoyable to stoners. Our crew met in the early morning before homeroom to snort locker room—a head-shop brand of amyl nitrite, a chemical whose fumes expand your blood vessels and lower your blood pressure and in the process give you a brief euphoric rush. After a few hits of locker room, we’d smoke a few cigarettes and at lunchtime reconvene in the courtyard to smoke a joint…. We did what we could to make the school day pleasant.
When I didn’t go to school, Steven and I spent the day wandering the greater Hollywood area with our heads in the clouds talking about music and hustling money. We did some offhand panhandling and odd jobs, like moving furniture for some of the random characters we’d meet. Hollywood has always been a weird place that attracts odd folks, but in the late seventies, with the strange turns culture had taken, from the letdown of the sixties revolution to the widespread use of drugs and loosened sexual mores, there were some really strange ones hanging around.
I don’t remember how we met him, but there was one older guy who used to give us money for nothing. We’d just hang out and talk to him; I think he asked us to go to the store a couple of times. I definitely thought it was weird, but he wasn’t threatening enough to do anything a couple of thirteen-year-olds couldn’t handle. Besides, the extra pocket cash was worth it.
Steve had no inhibitions whatsoever, so he managed to acquire money on a regular basis in many ways, one of which was from Clarissa, a neighbor of mine in her mid-twenties who lived down the street. One day we saw her sitting on her porch when we passed by and Steven felt the inclination to say hi to her. They started talking and she invited us in; we hung out there for a while and then I decided to take off, but Steven said that he was going to stay there a little while longer. It turns out that he had sex with her that night and got money off her to boot. I have no idea how he did it, but I do know that he was with her four or five times more, and got money every single time. It was unbelievable to me; I was really envious.
But then again, Steven would always get involved in situations like that and they often didn’t have a happy ending. In this case, he was in the middle of screwing Clarissa when her gay roommate walked in on them. She threw Steven off her and he landed hard-on first on her bedroom floor, and that was the end of that.
Steven and I got by; I stole all the music and rock magazines that we needed. There weren’t too many other things that we cared to spend money on aside from Big Gulps and cigarettes, so we were in good shape. We’d walk up and down Sunset Boulevard, then Hollywood Boulevard from Sunset to Doheny, checking out rock posters in the many head shops or ducking into whichever souvenir or music store looked exciting to us. We’d just wander, taking in the animated reality going on down there. We used to hang out at place called Piece O’ Pizza for hours, playing Van Halen on the jukebox over and over. It was a ritual by then: Steven had played their first record for me a few months before. It was one of those moments where a new body of music totally overwhelmed me.
“You’ve got to hear this,” Steven said, all wide-eyed. “It’s this band Van Halen, they’re awesome!” I had my doubts because Steven and I didn’t always see eye to eye musically. He put the record on, and Eddie’s solo that sets off “Eruption” came shredding through the speakers. “Jesus Christ,” I said, “what the hell is that?”
It was a form of expression as satisfying and personal to me as art and drawing, but on a much deeper level.
I SAW MY FIRST REALLY BIG ROCK SHOW that year, too. It was the California World Music Festival at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum on April 8, 1979. There were 110,000 people there and the lineup was insane: there were a ton of bands, but the headliners were Ted Nugent, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, and Van Halen. Without a doubt, Van Halen crushed every other band who played that day, even Aerosmith. I guess it wasn’t hard: Aerosmith was so fucked up at the time that it was impossible for me to differentiate one song from another in their set. I was a fan, and the only track I recognized at all was “Seasons of Wither.”
Eventually Steve and I graduated to hanging around outside the Rainbow and the Starwood amid the whole pre-glam metal scene. Van Halen cut their teeth on that circuit and Mötley Crüe was about to do the same; aside from bands like that, there were the earliest traces of L.A. punk rock going around. There were always a ton of people outside the clubs and since I had access to drugs, I’d sell them not just for cash, but to get us closer to the scene. In junior high, I figured out a better method: I started making fake IDs, which served to actually get me inside the scene.
There was so much activity in West Hollywood and Hollywood at night: the whole homosexual scene—around a posh gay restaurant, the French Quarter, and gay bars like the Rusty Nail, among others smashed right up against the mostly hetero rock scene. That whole juxtaposition was bizarre to Steven and me. There were just so many freaks everywhere and we liked to take it all in, as strange and nonsensical as most of it was.
Steve and I got into all sorts of seemingly harmless trouble growing up. One night my dad took us to a party thrown by a group of his artist friends who lived in houses along a cul de sac up in Laurel Canyon. The host, my dad’s friend Alexis, made a vat of horrendously lethal punch that got everyone completely gassed. Growing up in the Valley, Steven had never seen a scene that cool: this was a group of artistically out-there post-hippie adults, so the combination of the crowd and the punch completely blew his mind. He and I could hold our liquor for thirteen-year-olds, but this stuff was way too advanced for us. I was so fried that I didn’t notice Steve slip out with the girl who lived in the guesthouse downstairs. He ended up fucking her, which turned out to not be such a cool thing: she was married and in her thirties. In my thirteen-year-old mind, she