Canoga Park is over twenty miles from the Rainbow and I had absolutely no recollection of the drive. The next morning, when I woke up, I was still in my car, which was parked in front of Mom’s place. As my mom was leaving for work that morning, she was shocked at the sight of me and started banging on the windows of the car, where I had passed out in the front seat.
There was blood all over the seat, my face, and my clothes. It was the first time I had had my nose broken and the feeling was terrible. I couldn’t breathe and at first I had difficulty focusing my eyes on anything close up. I looked like Marcia Brady in the Brady Bunch episode where she got hit square in the nose by a football.
My mother knew just what to do. She muttered something about needing to fix it right away, and I was damned lucky I was under eighteen years old, because her health insurance policy still covered me. She rushed me to the hospital and got the doctors to look at it right away. Within twenty-four hours they had operated, and somewhere there’s a photo of me smiling from my hospital bed with my nose all taped up. Mom should have gotten a two-for-one rate, because it wouldn’t be long before I’d whack my schnoz again and need another nose job. That was just one part of my body that would be mangled and fixed repeatedly over the next twenty years. I’d like to thank all of the doctors, nurses, family, and friends who have carried me off the battlefield and treated me a lot better than I ever treated myself. It’s a miracle that I’m alive, but in my early teens I believed I was indestructible and probably didn’t even notice the self-abuse until my first overdose.
BACK TO THE SKINS
Gardner Park used to be a big empty storage warehouse where they held auto shows in the 1930s. I found a place to set up my drums there and would play for hours inside, where the acoustics produced a big John Bonham sound and the echo effect was like the intro to “Misty Mountain Hop,” massive, very awesome. The place had been deserted for years and grass had squeezed up through cracks in sections of the cement flooring. I could play, but the set would wobble; it was so unstable my cymbals would rock back and forth. I had two giant Asian gongs, more than three feet in diameter, an idea I ripped from Carmine Appice, who had the coolest setup when he played with Beck, Bogert, and Appice.
While I was practicing one afternoon, one of the gongs must have shifted because of the uneven flooring and came flying down. I looked up at exactly the worst moment and took the full brunt of thirty pounds of metal in the face. It knocked me clear off my stool and onto the hard floor. I took off my T-shirt and wrapped it around my head over my nose, then found myself back at the hospital getting my schnoz rebuilt again.
During this time I was working at the O’Neal Motorcycle Shop warehouse, where I printed the O’Neal logo and numbers on T-shirts for bike riders. The floor manager there was a guy named Mark Marshal, a cool guy and a great guitar player who looked like a musketeer with his goatee, long black hair, and long thin pointy nose. Eventually, I got fired from O’Neal for always being late. But by then, Mark and I had become good friends, and we agreed to form a band. So with a bass player, a guy I think was of Russian descent, we all got an apartment together. But even though we really wanted to start a band, our schedules didn’t allow us much time to get together.
I found another job, but we were all basically broke, living on nothing. I remember eating melted butter over steamed rice every day for a week. We didn’t even have soy sauce. No one’s going to go out and buy a bottle of soy sauce when you’re saving up for a Def Leppard concert.
In April ’83, Mark and I went to see Def Leppard at the L.A. Forum. Even though we were skimping and saving for weeks, we still didn’t have enough money for tickets, so we just went to the back entrance where the trucks went in. I have this great memory of hearing the song “Photograph” being performed. After the show, we just started helping the roadies load shit in the trucks, and the band came out and stopped by the first truck. They were standing right next to me.
I thought they were going to kick us out, so I figured, “Now or never, I gotta do this.” I said hi to Rick Allen and shook his hand, which at the time was definitely the biggest rush of my life. I didn’t get to see the show, but I got to meet Rick. I told him the story when we had dinner together years later.
Mark and I also saw a lot of cool bands at Chuck Landis’s Country Club in Reseda, which was right down the street from our apartment. We saw the Christian metal band Stryper there a couple of times. They were so hot, really had their shit together, and drew huge crowds. I borrowed a couple of moves from their drummer, Robert Sweet, who had this huge drum set and was set up sideways so you could see him playing.
“The Visual Timekeeper,” he called himself. He was the coolest-looking motherfucker up there. Their music was so loud and clear that they sounded like a studio recording; it was that perfect. Oz Fox was incredible, playing guitar and singing backups. They looked huge, like Kiss, larger than life, with matching yellow and black outfits. There must have been some serious cash put into their show. I saw them three times and I loved them. Hey, I was a fan.
We saw Joe Perry at the Country Club too, during the short time that he was not in Aerosmith. Coincidentally I remember, years later, Axl told me that the first concert he saw was Aerosmith during the same year when Jimmy Crespo was playing guitar, and Axl thought his solo was one of the best he ever heard. The band Rose Tattoo opened up the show, turning Axl on to them and inspiring him later to have our band perform the Rose Tattoo classic “Nice Boys.”
DIGGING DOWN DEEP
After a few months of living in that little hovel, I decided to move back in with Grandma. It was great going to all those concerts, but the band I had intended to put together with Mark and the other guy wasn’t really going anywhere. So there’s Slash and me, both back at our grandmothers’ places now, working at any odd job we could grab. This was another low point for me emotionally, but it spawned a kind of simmering desperation deep inside, a fierce, burning desire to get it the fuck together. Slash and I reunited, drifting rogue musicians in search of the ultimate band. There was a dire immediacy in our playing now, and for the first time, we practiced together regularly. We started to gel more, and it was in those lean days that our sound and style really started to come together musically. We jammed nonstop, loud and proud. We would make the gods hear us; we would make the gods sit up and take notice.
One evening we were walking in front of the Roxy when I spotted a flyer on the ground and picked it up. There are a million band flyers floating around Sunset at any one time, but this one caught my attention. It was for a band I hadn’t heard of called Rose, and they had a gig at Gazzarri’s the following Tuesday. The flyer featured a picture of two guys standing together. They definitely had the look, the right image that was so important to the local rock scene of the time.
Although I had never heard of them before, I immediately felt in my gut that they had superstar potential. I showed the flyer to Slash and right then I said, “I swear, if we get these guys and a cool bass player, we will have a kick-ass band!” Slash nodded slowly, I think initially just to blow it off, but then he smiled. At that moment I believe he knew I might have been onto something.
The next Tuesday we went to see Rose perform. We arrived at about six o’clock. There were a lot of bands playing, so there was anywhere between fifty and seventy-five of each band’s faithful listening during each set. The stage was sectioned off so there could be three bands’ gear onstage at any one time. The guys in Rose were on the stage-right end.
It was a long event, band after band, like twelve of them. Rose got to play only three songs. I learned that the guys featured on the flyer who caught my attention were vocalist Axl Rose and guitarist Izzy Stradlin, two childhood friends from Indiana. I thought they looked cool and that even their names were cool. They had a guy named Rob Gardner on drums with them, but I wasn’t that impressed with him.
The bass player’s name was DJ. I believe