Slash
Slash with Anthony Bozza

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © 2007 by Dik Hayd International, LLC.

Slash and Anthony Bozza assert the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007257751

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2007 ISBN: 9780007481033

Version: 2018-08-23

To my loving family, for all their support through the good times and the bad

And to Guns N’ Roses fans everywhere, old and new; with out their undying loyalty and limitless patience, none of this would matter

Contents

Copyright

Introduction

1. Stoked

2. Twenty-Inch-High Hooligans

3. How to Play Rock-and-Roll Guitar

4. Education High

5. Least Likely to Succeed

6. You Learn to Live Like an Animal

7. Appetite for Dysfunction

8. Off to the Races

Photographic Insert

9. Don’t Try This at Home

10. Humpty Dumpty

11. Choose Your Illusion

12. Breakdown

13. Coming Up for Air

If Memory Serves

Photography Credits

About the Authors

Credits

About the Publisher

Having Considered All Things

It felt like a baseball bat to my chest, but one swung from the inside. Clear blue spots lit up the corners of my vision. It was abrupt, bloodless, silent violence. Nothing was visibly broken, nothing had changed to the naked eye, but the pain made my world stand still. I kept playing; I finished the song. The audience didn’t know that my heart had done a somersault just before the solo. My body had delivered its karmic retribution; reminding me, onstage, of how many times I’d intentionally served it up a similar loop-de-loop.

The jolt quickly became a dull ache that almost felt good. In any case, I felt more alive than I had a moment before, because I was more alive. The machine in my heart had reminded me of just how precious this life is. Its timing was impeccable: with a full house in front of me, while I played my guitar, I got the message loud and clear. I got it a few times that night. And I got it every time I was onstage for the rest of that tour, though I never knew when it was coming.

A doctor installed an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator in my heart when I was thirty-five. It’s a three-inch-long battery-powered generator that was inserted through an incision in my armpit. It constantly monitors my heart rate, delivering electroshocks whenever my heart beats too dangerously fast or slow. Fifteen years of overdrinking and drug abuse had swollen that organ to one beat short of exploding. When I was finally hospitalized, I was told I had six weeks to live. It’s been six years since then and this piece of machinery has saved my life more than a few times. I’ve enjoyed a convenient side effect that the doctor did not intend: when my indulgences have caused my heart to beat too dangerously slow, my defibrillator has popped off, keeping death from my door for one more day. It also shocks my heart into submission when it beats fast enough to court cardiac arrest.

It’s a good thing I got it adjusted before the first Velvet Revolver tour. I did that one sober for the most part; sober enough that the excitement of playing with a band I believed in to fans who believed in us moved me to my core. I hadn’t been that inspired in years. I ran all over the stage; I basked in our collective energy. My heart raced with excitement hard enough to trigger the machine inside me onstage every night. It wasn’t pleasant but I began to welcome those reminders. I saw them for what they were. Strange moments of alienated clarity, moments out of time that encapsulated a life’s worth of hard-won wisdom.

1
Stoked

I was born on July 23, 1965, in Stoke-on-Trent, England, the town where Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead was born twenty years before me. It was the year rock and roll as we know it became greater than the sum of its parts; the year a few isolated bands changed pop music forever. The Beatles released Rubber Soul that year and the Stones released Rolling Stones No. 2, the best of their collections of blues covers. There was a creative revolution afoot that has never been equaled and I’m proud to be a by-product of it.

My mom is an African American and my dad is English and white. They met in Paris in the sixties, fell in love, and had me. Their brand of interracial intercontinental communion wasn’t the norm; and neither was their boundless creativity. I thank them for being who they are. They exposed me to environments so rich and colorful and unique that what I experienced even while very young made a permanent impression on me. My parents treated me as an equal as soon as I could stand. And they taught me, on the fly, how to deal with whatever came my way in the only type of life I’ve ever known.

Tony Hudson and his sons, 1972. Slash looks exactly like his son London here.

My mom, Ola, was seventeen and my dad, Anthony (“Tony”), was twenty when they met. He was born a painter, and like painters historically do, he left his stuffy hometown to find himself in Paris. My mom was precocious and exuberant, young and beautiful; she’d left Los Angeles to see the world and make connections in fashion. When their journeys intersected they fell in love, then got married in England. And then I came along and they set about creating their life together.

My mom’s career as a costume designer started around 1966, and over the course of it, her clients included Flip Wilson, Ringo Starr, and John Lennon. She also worked for the Pointer Sisters, Helen Reddy, Linda Ronstadt, and James Taylor. Sylvester was one of her clients, too. He is no longer with us, but he was once a disco artist who was like the gay Sly Stone. He had a great voice and he was a supergood person in my eyes; he gave me a black-and-white rat that I named Mickey. Mickey was a badass. He never flinched when I fed rats to my snakes. He survived a fall from my bedroom window after he was tossed out by my younger brother, and was no worse for the wear when he showed up at our back door three days later. Mickey also survived the accidental removal of a section of his tail when the inner chassis of our sofa bed cut it off, as well as close to a year without food or water. We left him behind by mistake in an apartment that we used as storage space, and when we eventually popped in to pick up some boxes, Mickey came up to me congenially as if I’d been gone only a day, as if to say, “Hey! Where you been?”

Mickey was one of my more memorable pets. There have been many, from my mountain lion, Curtis, to the hundreds of snakes I’ve raised. Basically I am a self-taught zookeeper and I definitely relate to the animals I’ve lived with better than to most of the humans I’ve known. Those animals and I share a point of view that most people forget: at the end of the day life is about survival. Once that lesson is learned, earning the trust of an animal that might eat you in the wild is a defining and rewarding experience.

SOON AFTER I WAS BORN, MY MOTHER returned to L.A. to expand her business and to lay the financial foundation our family was built upon. My dad raised me in England at his parents’, Charles and Sybil Hudson’s, home for four years—and it wasn’t easy on him. I was a pretty intuitive kid, but I could not discern the depth of the tension there. My dad and his dad, Charles, from what I understand, had less than the best relationship. Tony was the middle of three sons, and he was every bit the middle child upstart. His younger brother, Ian, and his older brother, David, were much more in step with the family’s values. My dad went to art school; he was everything his father wasn’t. Tony was the sixties; and he stood up for his beliefs as wholeheartedly as his father condemned them. My grandfather Charles was a fireman from Stoke, a community that had somehow skated through history unchanged. Most residents of Stoke never leave; many, like my grandparents, had never ventured the hundred or so miles south to London. Tony’s unyielding vision of attending art school and making a living through painting was something Charles could not stomach. Their clash of opinion fueled constant arguments and often led to violent exchanges; Tony claims that Charles beat him senseless on a regular basis for most of his youth.

My grandfather was as consummately representative of 1950s Britain as his son was of the sixties. Charles wanted to see everything in its right place while Tony wanted to rearrange and repaint it all. I imagine that my grandfather was properly appalled when his son returned from Paris in love with a carefree black American. I wonder what he said when Tony told him that he intended to be married and raise their newborn child under their roof until he and my mom got their affairs in order. All things considered, I’m touched by how much diplomacy was displayed by the parties involved.

MY DAD TOOK ME TO LONDON AS SOON as I could handle the train ride. I was maybe two or three, but instinctively I knew how far away it was from Stoke’s unending miles of brown brick row houses and quaint families because my dad was into a bit of a bohemian scene. We’d crash on couches and not come back for days. There were Lava lamps and black lights, and the electric excitement of the open booths and artists along Portobello Road. My dad never considered himself a Beat, but he had absorbed that kind of lifestyle through osmosis. It was as if he had handpicked the highlights of that type of life: a love of adventure, hitting the road with nothing but the clothes on your back, finding shelter in apartments full of interesting people. My parents taught me a lot, but I learned their greatest lesson early—nothing else is quite like life on the road.

I remember the good things about England. I was the center of my grandparents’ attention. I went to school. I was in plays: The Twelve Days of Christmas; I was the lead in The Little Drummer Boy. I drew all the time. And once a week I watched The Avengers and The Thunderbirds. Television in late sixties England was extremely limited and reflected the post–World War II, Churchill view of the world of my grandparents’ generation. There were only three channels back then, and aside from the two hours a week that any of them played those two programs, all three played only the news. It’s no wonder that my parents’ generation threw themselves headfirst into the cultural shift that was afoot.

Once Tony and I joined Ola in Los Angeles, he never spoke to his parents again. They disappeared from my life quickly and I often missed them growing up. My mother encouraged my father to stay in touch but it made no difference; he had no interest. I didn’t see my English relatives again until Guns N’ Roses became well known. When we played Wembley Stadium in 1992, the Hudson clan came out in force: backstage before the show I witnessed one of my uncles, my cousin, and my grandfather, on his very first trip to London from Stoke, down every drop of liquor in our dressing room. Consumed in full, our booze rider in those days would have killed anyone but us.

MY FIRST MEMORY OF LOS ANGELES IS the Doors’ “Light My Fire” blasting from my parents’ turntable, every day, all day long. In the late sixties and early seventies L.A. was the place to be, especially for young Brits involved in the arts or music: there was ample creative work compared to the still-stodgy system in England and the weather was nothing but paradise compared to London’s rain and fog. Besides, deserting England for Yankee shores was the best way to flip off the system and your upbringing—and my dad was more than happy to do so.

My mother continued her work as a fashion designer while my father parlayed his natural artistic talent into graphic design. My mom had connections in the music industry so her husband was soon designing album covers. We lived off Laurel Canyon Boulevard in a very sixties community up at the top of Lookout Mountain Road. That area of Los Angeles has always been a creative haven because of the bohemian nature of the landscape. The houses are set right into the mountainside among lush foliage. They are bungalows with guesthouses and any odd number of structures that allow for very organic, communal living. There was a very cozy enclave of artists and musicians living up there when I was young: Joni Mitchell lived a few houses down from us. Jim Morrison lived behind the Canyon Store at that time, as did a young Glen Frey, who was just putting together the Eagles. It was the kind of atmosphere where everyone was connected: my mom designed Joni’s clothes while my dad designed her album covers. David Geffen was a close friend of ours, too, and I remember him well. He signed Guns N’ Roses years later, though when he did he didn’t know who I was—and I didn’t tell him. He called Ola at Christmas in 1987 and asked her how I was doing. “You should know how he’s doing,” she said, “you just put his band’s record out.”

AFTER A YEAR OR TWO IN LAUREL CANYON we moved south to an apartment on Doheny. I changed schools, and that is when I discovered just how differently the average kid lived. I never had a traditional “kid” room full of toys and primary colors. Our homes were never painted in common neutral tones. The essence of pot and incense usually hung in the air. The vibe was always bright, but the color scheme was always dark. It was fine with me, because I was never concerned with connecting with kids my age. I preferred the company of adults because my parents’ friends are still some of the most colorful characters I’ve ever known.

I listened to the radio 24/7, usually KHJ on the AM dial. I slept with it on. I did my schoolwork and got good grades, although my teacher said I had a short attention span and daydreamed all the time. The truth is, my passion was art. I loved the French Postimpressionist painter Henri Rousseau and, like him, I drew jungle scenes full of my favorite animals. My obsession with snakes started very early. The first time my mother took me to Big Sur, California, to visit a friend and camp up there, I was six years old and I spent hours in the woods catching snakes. I’d dig under every bush and tree until I’d filled an unused aquarium. Then I’d let them go.

That wasn’t the only excitement I experienced on that outing: my mom and her friend were similarly wild, carefree young women, who enjoyed racing my mom’s Volkswagen Bug along the twisting cliffside roads. I remember speeding along in the passenger seat scared stiff, looking out my window at the rocks and ocean that lay below, just inches past my door.

Slash used to be convinced that he was a dinosaur; then he entered his Mowgli phase.

The sight of a guitar still turns me on.

MY PARENTS’ RECORD COLLECTION WAS flawless. They listened to everything from Beethoven to Led Zeppelin and I continued to find undiscovered gems in their library well into my teens. I knew every artist of the day because my parents took me to concerts constantly, and since my mom took me to work with her often as well. At a very early age I was exposed to the inner workings of entertainment: I saw the inside of many recording studios and rehearsal spaces, as well as TV and film sets. I saw many of Joni Mitchell’s recording and rehearsal sessions; I also saw Flip Wilson (a comic who was huge then but whom time has forgotten) record his TV show. I saw Australian pop singer Helen Reddy rehearse and perform, and was there when Linda Ronstadt played the Troubador. Mom also took me along when she outfitted Bill Cosby for his stand-up gigs and made his wife a few one-off pieces; I remember going with her to see the Pointer Sisters. All of that was over the course of her career, but when we lived at that apartment on Doheny, her business was really taking off: Carly Simon came over to the house, soul singer Minne Ripperton as well. I met Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross. My mom tells me that I met John Lennon, too, but unfortunately I don’t remember that at all. I do remember meeting Ringo Starr: my mom designed the very Parliament-Funkadelic outfit that Ringo wore on the cover of his 1974 album, Goodnight Vienna. It was high-waisted and metallic gray with a white star in the middle of the chest.

Every backstage or soundstage scene that I saw with my mother worked some kind of strange magic on me. I had no idea what was going on, but I was fascinated by the machinations of performance back then and I still am now. A stage full of instruments awaiting a band is exciting to me. The sight of a guitar still turns me on. There is an unstated wonder in both of them: they hold the ability to transcend reality given the right set of players.

Slash and his brother, Albionn, at the La Brea Tar Pits.

MY BROTHER, ALBION, WAS BORN IN December 1972. That changed the dynamic of my family a bit; suddenly there was a new personality among us. It was cool to have a little brother, and I was glad to be one of his caretakers: I loved it when my parents would ask me to look after him.

But it wasn’t too long after that that I began to notice a greater change in our family. My parents weren’t the same when they were together and too often they were apart. Things started to get bad I think once we moved into the apartment on Doheny Drive and my mom’s business began to really succeed. Our address was 710 North Doheny, by the way, which is now a vacant lot where Christmas trees are sold in December. I should also mention that our next-door neighbor in that building was the original, self-proclaimed Black Elvis, who can be booked for parties in Las Vegas—if anyone’s interested.

Now that I’m older I can see some of the obvious issues that ate away at my parents’ relationship. My father never liked how close my mother was to her mother. It bruised his pride when his mother-in-law helped us financially, and he was never fond of her involvement in the family. His drinking didn’t help things: my dad used to like to drink—a lot. He was a stereotypically bad drinker: he was never violent, because my dad is much too smart and complicated to ever express himself through brute violence, but he had a bad temper under the influence. When he was drunk, he’d act out by making inappropriate comments at the expense of those in his presence. Needless to say, he burned many bridges that way.

I was only eight, but I should have known that something was really wrong. My parents never treated each other with anything but respect, but in the months before they split up, they completely avoided each other. My mom was out most nights and my dad spent those nights in the kitchen, somber and alone, drinking red wine and listening to the piano compositions of Erik Satie. When my mom was home, my dad and I went out on long walks.

He walked everywhere, in England and Los Angeles. In pre–Charles Manson L.A.—before the Manson clan murdered Sharon Tate and her friends—we also used to hitchhike everywhere. L.A. was innocent before that; those murders signified the end of the utopian ideals of the sixties Flower Power era.

My childhood memories of Tony are cinematic; all of them afternoons spent looking up at him, walking by his side. It was on one of those walks that we ended up at Fatburger, where he told me that he and Mom were separating. I was devastated; the only stability I’d known was done. I didn’t ask questions, I just stared at my hamburger. When my mom sat me down to explain the situation later that night, she pointed out the practical benefits: I’d have two houses to live in. I thought about that for a while, and it made sense in a way but it sounded like a lie; I nodded while she spoke but I stopped listening.

My parents’ separation was amicable yet awkward because they didn’t divorce until years later. They often lived within walking distance of each other and socialized in the same circle of friends. When they split up, my little brother was just two years old, so for obvious reasons they agreed that he should be in his mother’s care, but left me the option of living with either one of them so I chose to live with my mother. Ola supported us as best as she could, traveling constantly to wherever her work took her. Out of necessity, my brother and I were shuffled between my mom’s house and my grandmother’s home. My parents’ house had always been busy, interesting, and unconventional—but it had always been stable. Once their bond was broken, though, constant transition became the norm for me.

The separation was very hard on my father and I didn’t see him for quite a while. It was hard on all of us; it finally became reality to me once I saw my mother in the company of another man. That man was David Bowie.

IN 1975, MY MOTHER STARTED WORKING closely with David Bowie while he was recording Station to Station; she had been designing clothes for him since Young Americans. So when he signed on to star in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth my mom was hired to do the costumes for the film, which shot in New Mexico. Along the way, she and Bowie embarked on a semi-intense affair. Looking back on it now, it might not have been that big of a deal, but at the time, it was like watching an alien land in your backyard.

After my parents split up, my mom, my brother, and I moved into a house on Rangely Drive. It was a very cool house: the walls of the living room were sky blue and emblazoned with clouds. There was a piano, and my mom’s record collection took up an entire wall. It was inviting and cozy. Bowie came by often, with his wife, Angie, and their son, Zowie, in tow. The seventies were unique: it seemed entirely natural for Bowie to bring his wife and son to the home of his lover so that we might all hang out. At the time my mother practiced the same form of transcendental meditation that David did. They chanted before the shrine she maintained in the bedroom.

I accepted David once I got to know him because he’s smart, funny, and intensely creative. My experience of him offstage enriched my experience of him onstage. I went to see him with my mom at the L.A. Forum in 1975, and, as I have been so many times since, the moment he came out onstage, in character, I was captivated. His entire concert was the essence of performance. I saw the familiar elements of a man I’d gotten to know exaggerated to the extreme. He had reduced rock stardom to its roots: being a rock star is the intersection of who you are and who you want to be.

2
Twenty-Inch-High Hooligans

No one expects the rug to be yanked out from under them; life-changing events usually don’t announce themselves. While instinct and intuition can help provide some warning signs, they can do little to prepare you for the feeling of rootlessness that follows when fate flips your world upside down. Anger, confusion, sadness, and frustration are shaken up together inside you like a snow globe. It takes years for the emotional dust to settle as you do your best just to see through the storm.

My parents’ separation was the picture of an agreeable split. There were no fights or ugly behavior, no lawyers and no courts. Yet it still took me years to come to terms with the hurt. I lost a piece of who I was and had to redefine myself on my own terms. I learned a lot, but those lessons didn’t help me later on when the only other family I’d known disintegrated. I saw the signs that time, when Guns N’ Roses started to come apart at the seams. But even though I did the leaving that time, the same blizzard of feelings lay in wait for me, it was every bit as hard to find my way back to my path again.

When my parents got separated, I was transformed by the sudden change. Inside I was still a good kid, but on the outside I became a problem child. Expressing my emotions is still one of my weaknesses, and what I felt then defied words, so I followed my natural inclinations—I acted out drastically and became a bit of a disciplinary problem at school.

At home, my parents’ promise of a two-abode existence that wouldn’t change a thing hadn’t come to pass. I hardly saw my dad for the first year or so that they were apart, and when I did, it was intense and weird. As I mentioned, the divorce hit him hard and watching him adjust was difficult for me; for a while he couldn’t work at all. He lived meagerly and hung out among his artist friends. When I visited with him, I was along for the ride as he and his friends hung out, drank a lot of red wine, and discussed art and literature, the conversation typically turning to Picasso, my dad’s favorite artist. Dad and I would go on adventures, too, either to the library or the art museum, where we’d sit together and draw.

My mother was home less than ever; she worked constantly, traveling often to support my brother and me. We spent a lot of time with my grandmother Ola Sr., who was always our saving grace when Mom couldn’t make ends meet. We also spent time with my aunt and cousins who lived in greater South Central L.A. Their house was boisterous, filled with the energy of a lot of kids. Our visits there brought some regularity to our idea of family. But all things considered, I had a lot of time on my hands and I took advantage of it.

Once I was twelve, I grew up fast. I had sex, I drank, I smoked cigarettes, I did drugs, I stole, I got kicked out of school, and on a few occasions I would have gone to jail if I hadn’t been underage. I was acting out, making my life as intense and unstable as I felt inside. A trait that has always defined me really came into its own in this period: the intensity with which I pursue my interests. My primary passion, by the time I was twelve, had shifted from drawing to bicycle motocross.

In 1977, BMX racing was the newest extreme sport to follow the surfing and skateboarding craze of the late sixties. It already had a few bona fide stars, such as Stu Thompson and Scott Breithaupt; a few magazines, such as Bicycle Motocross Action and American Freestyler, and more semi-pro and pro competitions were popping up constantly. My grandmother bought me a Webco and I was hooked. I started winning races and was listed in a couple of the magazines as an up-and-coming rider in the thirteen to fourteen age category. I loved it; I was ready to go pro once I’d landed a sponsor, but something was missing. My feelings weren’t clear enough to me to vocalize just what BMX didn’t satisfy inside me. I’d know it when I found it a few years later.

After school, I hung out at bike shops and became part of a team riding for a store called Spokes and Stuff, where I began to collect a bunch of much older friends—some of the other older guys worked at Schwinn in Santa Monica. Ten or so of us would ride around Hollywood every night and all of us but two—they were brothers—came from disturbed or broken domestic situations of some kind. We found solace in one another’s company: our time spent together was the only regular companionship any of us could count on.

We would meet up every afternoon in Hollywood and ride everywhere from Culver City to the La Brea Tar Pits, treating the streets as our bike park. We’d jump off every sloped surface we could find, and whether it was midnight or the middle of rush hour, we always disrespected the pedestrians’ right of way. We were just scrappy kids on twenty-inch-high bikes, but multiplied by ten, in a pack, whizzing down the sidewalk at top speed, we were a force to be reckoned with. We’d jump onto a bus bench, sometimes while some poor stranger was sitting there, we’d hop fire hydrants, and we’d compete constantly to outdo one another. We were disillusioned teenagers trying to navigate difficult times in our lives, and we did so by bunny-hopping all over the sidewalks of L.A.

We’d ride this dirt track out in the Valley, by the youth center in Reseda. It was about fifteen miles away from Hollywood, which is an ambitious goal on a BMX bike. We used to hitch rides on bumpers over Laurel Canyon Boulevard to cut down on our travel time. It’s nothing I’d advise, but we treated passing cars like seats on a ski chairlift: we’d wait on the shoulder, then one by one we’d grab a car and ride it up the hill. Balancing a bike, even one with a low center of gravity, while holding on to a car driving thirty or forty miles an hour is thrilling but tricky on flat ground; attempting it on a series of tight uphill S curves like Laurel Canyon is something else. I’m still not sure how none of us were ever run over. It surprises me more to remember that I did that ride, both up and down hill, without brakes more often than not. In my mind, being the youngest meant that I had something to prove to my friends every time we rode: judging by the looks on their faces after some of my stunts, I succeeded. They might have been only teenagers but my friends weren’t easily impressed.

To tell you the truth, we were a gnarly little gang. One of them was Danny McCracken. He was sixteen; a strong, heavy, silent type, he was already a guy everyone instinctively knew not to fuck with. One night Danny and I stole a bike with bent forks and while he deliberately bunny-hopped it to break the forks and make us all laugh, he fell over the handle-bars and slashed his wrist wide open. I saw it coming and watched it as if in slow-motion as blood started squirting everywhere.

“Ahhh!” Danny shouted. Even in pain, Danny’s voice was oddly soft-spoken considering his size—kind of like Mike Tyson’s.

“Holy shit!”

“Fuck!”

“Danny’s fucked up!”

Danny lived just around the corner, so two of us held our hands over his wrist as blood kept squirting out between our fingers as we walked him home.

We got to his porch and rang the bell. His mom came to the door and we showed her Danny’s wrist. She looked at us unfazed, in disbelief.

“What the fuck do you want me to do about it?” she said, and slammed the door.

We didn’t know what to do; by this time Danny’s face was pale. We didn’t even know where the nearest hospital was. We walked him back down the street, blood still spurting all over us, and flagged down the first car we saw.

I stuck my head in the window. “Hey, my friend is bleeding to death, can you take him to the hospital?” I said hysterically. “He’s gonna die!” Luckily the lady driving was a nurse.

She put Danny in the front seat and we followed her car on our bikes. When he got to the emergency room, Danny didn’t have to wait; blood was pumping out of his wrist like a victim in a horror movie so they admitted him immediately, as the mob of people in the waiting room looked on, pissed. The doctors stitched up his wrist but that wasn’t the end of it: when he was released into the waiting room where we were waiting for him, he somehow popped one of his newly sewn stitches, sending a stream of blood skyward that left a trail across the ceiling, which freaked out and disgusted everyone in range. Needless to say, he was readmitted; his second round of sutures did the trick.

THE ONLY STABLE ONES IN OUR GANG were John and Mike, who we called the Cowabunga Brothers. They were stable for these reasons: they were from the Valley, where the typical American suburban life thrived, their parents were intact, they had sisters, and all of them lived together in a nice quaint house. But they weren’t the only pair of brothers: there were also Jeff and Chris Griffin; Jeff worked at Schwinn and Chris was his younger brother. Jeff was the most adult of our crew; he was eighteen and he had a job that he took seriously. These two weren’t as functional as the Cowabungas, because Chris tried desperately to be like his older brother and failed miserably. Those two had a hot sister named Tracey, who had dyed her hair black in response to the fact that her entire family was naturally blond. Tracey had this whole little Goth style going before Goth was even a scene.

And there was Jonathan Watts, who was the biggest head case among us. He was just insane; he would do anything, regardless of the bodily harm or potential incarceration that might befall him. I was only twelve, but even so, I knew enough about music and people to find it a bit odd that Jonathan and his dad were dedicated Jethro Tull fans. I mean, they worshipped Jethro Tull. I’m sorry to say that Jonathan is no longer with us; he died tragically of an overdose after he’d spent years as both a raging alcoholic and then a flag-waver for Alcoholics Anonymous. I lost touch with him way back, but I saw him again at an AA meeting that I was ordered to attend (we’ll get to all of that in just a little bit), after I was arrested one night in the late eighties. I couldn’t believe it; I walked into this meeting and was listening to all of these people speak and, after a while, realized that the guy leading the meeting, the one who was as gung ho about sobriety as Lieutenant Bill Kilgore, Robert Duval’s character in Apocalypse Now, had been about surfing, was none other than Jonathan Watts. Time is such a powerful catalyst for change; you never know how kindred souls will end up—or where they might see each other again.

Back then, those guys and I spent many an evening at Laurel Elementary School, making very creative use of their playground. It was a hangout for every Hollywood kid with a bike, a skateboard, some booze to drink, or some weed to smoke. The playground had two levels connected by long concrete ramps; it begged to be abused by skaters and bikers. We took full advantage of it by deconstructing the playground’s picnic tables to make them into jumps that linked the two levels. I’m not proud of our chronic destruction of public property, but riding down those two ramps and launching over the fence on my bike was a thrill that was well worth it. As delinquent as it was, it also drew creative types, many kids in Hollywood who went on to do great things hung out there. I remember Mike Balzary, better known as Flea, hanging out, playing his trumpet and graffiti artists putting up murals all the time. It wasn’t the right forum, but everyone there took pride in the scene we created. Unfortunately, the students and teachers of that school were left paying the bill and cleaning up the aftermath every morning.

Slash jumping out at the track on his Cook Bros. bike.

The principal unwisely decided to take matters into his own hands by lying in wait to confront us one night. It didn’t go over well; we kept taunting him, he got too worked up, and my friends and I got into it with him. It got out of hand so quickly that a passerby called the cops. Nothing scatters a pack of kids like the sound of a siren, so most of those present escaped. Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them. Another kid and I were the only two who were caught; we were handcuffed to the handrail in the front of the school, right on the street, on display for all to see. We were like two hogtied animals, going nowhere and none too happy about it. We refused to cooperate: we cracked wise, we gave them fake names, we did everything short of oinking at them and calling them pigs. They kept asking and did their best to scare us, but we refused to reveal our names and addresses, and since twelve-year-olds don’t carry ID, they were forced to let us go.

PUBERTY KICKED IN FOR ME AROUND thirteen, while I attended Bancroft Junior High in Hollywood. Whatever I was feeling about my family breaking up took a backseat to the intense surging of hormones. Sitting through a whole day of school seemed pointless, so I started to cut. I began smoking pot regularly and riding my bike intensely. I found it hard to control myself; I just wanted to do whatever I wanted to do at a moment’s notice. One night while my friends and I were scheming about how to break into Spokes and Stuff—the same bike store where we hung out—for what reason I can’t remember, I noticed a kid spying on us through the window of an apartment across the alley.

“What are you lookin’ at?” I yelled. “Don’t look at me!” Then I threw a brick through the kid’s window.

His parents called the cops, of course, and the duo that responded to the call chased my friends and me all over town for the rest of the night. We biked for our lives all over Hollywood and West Hollywood; we turned down one-way streets into on-coming traffic, we cut through alleys and through parks. They were as tenacious as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, Gene Hackman’s character in The French Connection; every time we turned a corner, they were there. Eventually we fled into the Hollywood Hills and hid in an out-of-the-way canyon like a pack of Wild West outlaws. And just the way it goes down in a cowboy movie, when we thought it was safe to leave the hideout and head back to the ranch, we were headed off at the pass by the same two deputies.

I assume it was because I was the smallest that they decided to chase me when my friends and I split up. I rode hard, all over the neighborhood, unable to shake them, until I finally sought refuge in an underground parking garage. I flew down a few levels, weaving between parked cars, hid in a dark corner, and lay on the ground, hoping they wouldn’t catch me. They had run down there on foot and by the time they got to my level I think they were over it. They vigilantly searched between the cars with their flashlights; about hundred feet away from me they turned back. I got lucky. This battle between my friends and the LAPD continued for the rest of the summer and it certainly wasn’t a constructive use of my time, but in my mind, at that point, that’s what I considered fun.

I was pretty good at keeping my affairs to myself even back then, but when I slipped up, my mother and grandmother were very forgiving. I was home as little as possible by the middle of junior high. In the summer of 1978, I had no idea that my grandmother was moving into a unit in a monstrous new complex that occupied an entire block between Kings Road and Santa Monica Boulevard, although I knew the building well because I’d been riding my bike through it since it was a construction site. My friends and I would get high and race one another through the hallways and down the stairwells, slamming doors in one another’s faces, jumping onto banisters, and leaving creatively shaped skid marks on the freshly painted walls. We were in the midst of doing so when I came screaming around a corner and nearly bowled over my mother and grandmother, who were carrying armloads of Ola Sr.’s belongings into her new apartment. I’ll never forget the look on my grandmother’s face; it was somewhere between shock and horror. I collected myself and shot a look over my shoulder, where I saw the last of my friends take a hard turn out of sight. I had one leg on the ground, one on a pedal, still thinking that I might get away.

“Saul?” Ola Sr. said, in her too-sweet, high-pitched grandmother voice. “Is that you?”

“Yes Grandma,” I said. “It’s me. How are you doing? My friends and I were just coming by to visit.”

That shit didn’t fly at all with my mom, but Ola Sr. was so glad to see me that Ola Jr. let me get away with it. In fact, it all worked out so well in the end that a few weeks later I moved into that very apartment, and that’s when my junior varsity exploits in Hollywood really began to take off. But we’ll get to all of that in just a little bit.

I’M NOT GOING TO OVERANALYZE WHAT became my other new interest—kleptomania—aside from saying that I was a pissed-off early adolescent. I stole what I thought I needed but couldn’t afford. I stole what I thought might make me happy; and sometimes I stole just to steal.

Tearing up the bike track out by the Youth Center in Reseda.

I stole a lot of books, because I’ve always loved to read; I stole a ton of cassettes, because I’ve always loved music. Cassettes, for those too young to have known them, had their disadvantages: the sound quality wore down, they got tangled in tape machines, and they melted in direct sunlight. But they were a breeze to lift. They are like a thinner pack of cigarettes, so an ambitious shoplifter could stuff a bands’ entire catalog in their clothes and walk away unnoticed.

At my worst, I’d steal as much as my clothes could hide, then dump my payload in the bushes and go steal more, sometimes at the same store. One afternoon I stole a few snakes from the Aquarium Stock Company, a pet store that I used to hang out in so much that once they got used to my presence I don’t think they’d ever considered that I’d steal from them. They weren’t complete suckers; I was there out of a true love for the animals they stocked—I just didn’t respect the store enough not to take a few home with me. I’d snatch snakes by wrapping them around my wrists and then putting my jacket on, making sure that they were nestled high enough on my forearm. One day I really went to town and took a load of them, which I stashed somewhere outside while I returned to the store to steal books that would teach me how to care for the rare snakes I’d just stolen.

On another occasion I lifted a Jackson’s chameleon, which isn’t exactly a subtle steal: they are the horned chameleons that measure about ten inches and feed on flies; they are as big as small iguanas and have those strange, protruding, pyramid-like eyes. I had a lot of balls when I was a kid—I just walked right out of the store with it, and it was a very expensive, exotic member of the pet store jungle. As I walked home with the little guy, I couldn’t come up with a story that would adequately explain his presence in my room to my mom. I decided that my only option was to let him live outside, on the vine-covered chain-link fence at the back of our yard, by our garbage cans. I’d stolen a book on Jackson’s chameleons, so I knew that they love to eat flies, and I couldn’t think of a better place for Old Jack to find flies than by the fence behind our garbage cans—because there were plenty to be had. It was an adventure finding him every day because he was so skilled at fading into his environment, as chameleons are known to do. It always took me some time to locate him and I loved the challenge. This arrangement lasted for about five months; after a while, he got better and better at hiding among the vines, until the day I just couldn’t find him at all. I went out there each afternoon for two months, but it was no use. I have no idea what happened to Old Jack, but considering the myriad possibilities that might have befallen him I hope that it ended well.

I’m very lucky not to have been caught for the majority of my shoplifting exploits, because they were pretty extensive. It got this stupid: on a dare, I lifted an inflated rubber raft from a sporting goods store. It took some planning but I pulled it off, and somehow I didn’t get caught.

It’s no big deal; I’ll reveal my “methods,” such as they were: the raft was hung on a wall near the back door of the store, near the hallway that ran right into the back alleyway. Once I managed to get that back door open without arousing suspicion, pulling the raft off the wall was easy. And once the raft was off the wall and on the floor, hidden from general view by some display of camping gear or whatever, I just waited for the right moment to carry it outside and walk it around the corner to where my friends were waiting for me. I didn’t even keep that raft. Once I’d proved that I’d pulled that dare off I dumped it one block away on someone’s front lawn.

I’m not proud of it, but all things considered, when I was ten miles from home with no money and my bike got a flat, I’m glad that it was easy for me to steal an inner tube from Toys “R” Us. Otherwise, I might have been out there hitching home into God only knows what kind of situations. Still, like anyone who repeatedly tempts fate, I must admit that however often you convince yourself that your actions are necessary when you know that they’re not quite right, they will catch up to you in the end.

In my case, in as much as we’re talking about shoplifting, in the end, I got nabbed at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, which was my parents’ favorite record shop. I remember that day all too clearly: it was one of those moments when I’d known something was wrong but embarked on the adventure anyway. I was fifteen, I think, and I remember thinking, as I parked my BMX bike outside, that I should be careful in this store in the future. That revelation didn’t help me in the short term: I greedily stuffed cassettes in my jacket, down my pants, and glutted my clothing so much that I thought I should probably buy a few albums just to throw the cashiers off. I believe I walked up to the counter with Cheap Trick’s Dream Police and Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, and after I was rung up, I was home free in my mind.

I was outside, straddling my bike, ready to jam when a hand clamped down hard on my shoulder. I denied everything but I was busted; they brought me up to the room above the store where they’d been watching me steal through the one-way window and they showed me the footage. They called my mom; I gave up all of the tapes in my pants and they arranged them on a table for her to see when she got there. I got away with a lot as a kid, but getting busted for shoplifting cassettes at the store my parents had frequented for so many years was an offense that meant more within the confines of our family than it did within the letter of the law. I’ll never forget Ola’s expression when she came up to that office above the store and found me sitting there with everything I’d stolen laid out before me. She didn’t say much, and she didn’t have to; it was clear to me that she was over thinking that I could do no wrong.

In the end, Tower didn’t press charges because all of the merchandise was recovered. They let me go on the condition that I would never set foot in their store again, most likely because some manager there recognized that my mom was a well-liked regular.

Of course, when I was hired at the very same store six years later in the video division, during every shift for the first six months, I was convinced that someone was going to remember that I’d been caught stealing and have me fired. I figured that any day now, someone would figure out that I had blatantly lied on my application form and presumed what I knew to be true: that what I did manage to lift until I was caught was worth more than a few months’ paychecks.

Usually we had weed, which was always a crowd pleaser

ALL OF THOSE PERMUTATIONS WERE going to work themselves out over the next eight years of my life, but only once I’d found a stable family of my own design.

In the vacuum that my family’s dissolution left in its wake, I made my own world. I’m lucky enough that, despite my age, during a period of testing my boundaries, I made one friend who has never been far from me, even when we’ve been worlds apart. He is still one of my closest confidants, which, after thirty years, says a fuck of a lot.

His name is Marc Canter; his family owns the famous L.A. institution Canter’s Deli on North Fairfax. The Canter family moved from New Jersey and opened the restaurant in the 1940s and it’s been a hub for show-business types ever since, because of the food and the fact that it’s open twenty-four hours. It’s only a half mile from the Sunset Strip, and in the sixties it became a haven for musicians and has remained so ever since. In the eighties, bands like Guns had many a late-night meal there. The Kibbitz Room, which is their bar and live music venue next door has hosted too many great nights of music to name. The Canters have been wonderful to me; they’ve employed me, they’ve sheltered me, and I can’t thank them enough.

I met Marc at Third Street Elementary School, but we didn’t really become friends until I almost stole his mini bike in fifth grade.

Our friendship was solidified from the start. He and I hung out in Hancock Park, which was next to the affluent neighborhood where he lived. We used to go down to the ruins of the Pan Pacific Theater, which is where the Grove shopping center is today. The Pan Pacific was an amazing relic; it had been a glamorous 1940s movie palace, with an arched ceiling and huge screen that showed news reels and defined a generation’s worth of cinematic culture. In my day, it was still beautiful: the green Art Deco arches were still intact, though the rest was reduced to rubble. Next to the lot was a public library and a park with a basketball court and a pool. Like Laurel Elementary, it was a meeting point for kids aged twelve to eighteen, who, for one reason or another, found their way out at night.

My friends and I were the young ones on the scene; there were chicks so far out of our league that we couldn’t even count the ways—though we did anyway. There were flunkies and dropouts, many of whom lived in the ruins of the theater and subsisted on the food they stole from the farmers’ market that took place next door twice a week. Marc and I were fascinated; we gained acceptance among them because usually we had weed, which was always a crowd pleaser. Meeting Marc triggered a change in me; he was my first best friend—he was someone who understood me when I felt no one else did. Neither of us have had lives that one might call normal, but I’m proud to say that we’re just as close as we were then. That is my definition of family. A friend still knows you as well as they used to even if you haven’t seen them in years. A true friend is there when you need him; they’re not around just on holidays and weekends.

I found that out firsthand a few years later. When I barely had money to eat, I didn’t care, so long as I had money to promote Guns N’ Roses. And when I didn’t have money to print flyers or even buy myself guitar strings, Marc Canter was there for me. He’d front me the cash to take care of whatever needed to be done. I paid him back once I was able, once Guns got signed, but I never forgot that Canter was there for me when I was down and out.

3
How to Play Rock-and-Roll Guitar

Experiencing yourself out of context, divorced from your usual point of view, skews your perspective—it’s like hearing your voice on an answering machine. It’s almost like meeting a stranger; or discovering a talent you never knew you had. The first time I plucked a melody out on a guitar well enough that it sounded like the original was a bit like that. The more I learned to play guitar, the more I felt like a ventriloquist: I recognized my own creative voice filtered through those six strings, but it was also something else entirely. Notes and chords have become my second language and, more often than not, that vocabulary expresses what I feel when language fails me. The guitar is my conscience, too—whenever I’ve lost my way, it’s brought me back to center; whenever I forget, it reminds me why I’m here.

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 was a senior citizen. To me, Steve had just fucked an old lady …who also happened to be someone else’s old lady.

In the morning, I woke up on the floor with the taste of that punch in my mouth, feeling like an iron spike had been nailed through my head. I went home to my grandmother’s to sleep it off; Steven remained behind, opting to linger in bed downstairs. I was home for about ten minutes when my dad called to let me know that Steven should fear for his life. The woman he had spent the evening with had confessed and her husband was very unhappy about it. The man, according to my dad, planned to “throttle” Steven, which Tony assured me was a very real threat. When I didn’t seem to take him seriously, Dad told me that the guy had actually promised to kill Steven. In the end, nothing happened, so Steven got away with it but it was a clear indication of things to come. At thirteen, he had narrowed his life goals down to exactly two: fucking chicks and being in a rock band. I can’t fault him for his prescience.

In his thirteen-year-old musical wisdom, which (probably due to his advanced womanizing skills) I considered superior to mine, Steven had concluded that there were only three bands that mattered in rock and roll: Kiss, Boston, and Queen. Steven paid tribute to them every day, all day, when he should have been in school. His grandmother worked in a bakery and left the house at five a.m. each day; she had no idea that Steven rarely went to class. His day consisted of playing Kiss records turned up to ten, while bashing away at a little Wal-Mart electric guitar and amp, both turned up to ten as well. I’d go over and hang out with him, and he’d be yelling at me over all the noise, “Hey! We should start a band, you know!?”

Steven has such an open, carefree soul that his enthusiasm is tremendously contagious. I didn’t doubt his intention and drive; I was convinced immediately that it would happen. He had elected himself the guitar player, and we decided that I would play bass. When I listen to music now, after twenty-five years of playing, I can isolate all of the instruments; I can hear the key of the guitar and right away I can usually think of several ways to play the song. By the time I was thirteen, I had listened to rock and roll for years; I’d seen concerts and knew what instruments make up a rock band, but I had no idea which instrument made each sound in the music. I knew what a guitar was, but I had no idea of the differences between a guitar and a bass and Steven’s playing at the time didn’t enlighten me at all.

When he and I would walk around town, we used to pass a music school on Fairfax and Santa Monica called Fairfax Music School (today it’s a chiropractor’s office), so I figured that was a good place to learn to play bass. So one day I stopped in, walked up to the desk, and just said, “I want to play bass.” The receptionist introduced me to one of the teachers, a guy named Robert Wolin. When Robert came out to talk to me, he wasn’t exactly what I expected: he was a medium-sized white guy wearing Levi’s and a tucked-in plaid shirt. He had a bushy mustache, a five o’clock shadow, and unkempt shaggy brown hair—it had probably been a real haircut once, but it had gotten away from him. Needless to say, Robert didn’t look like a rock star at all.

He did, however, patiently inform me that I’d need an actual bass of my own to take lessons, which was something I hadn’t considered. I asked my grandmother for help and she gave me an old flamenco guitar with one nylon string on it that she had packed away in a closet. When I met Robert again at the school, he took one look at my guitar and understood that he’d better start at the very beginning, because I had no idea that what I was holding wasn’t necessarily a bass. Robert put on the Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” picked up his guitar, and played along with the riff and the lead. And that’s when I heard the sound. Whatever Robert was doing, that was it. I stared at Robert’s guitar with total wonder. I started pointing at it.

“That’s what I want to do,” I told him. “That.”

Robert was really encouraging; he drew some chord charts for me, showed me proper fingering on his guitar, and tuned the one string I had. He also informed me that I should get the remaining five strings in the very near future. Guitar came into my life that suddenly and that innocently. There was no thought, no premeditation; it wasn’t part of a grand plan outside of playing in Steven’s fantasy band. Ten years later I would be, with all the perks that Steven had dreamed about: traveling the world, playing sold-out shows, and having more chicks at our disposal than we could handle …all thanks to that battered piece of wood my grandmother dug out of her closet.

Guitar replaced BMX as my main obsession literally overnight. It was unlike anything I’d ever done: it was a form of expression as satisfying and personal to me as art and drawing, but on a much deeper level. Being able to create the sound that had spoken to me in music ever since I can remember was more empowering than anything I’d ever known. The change was as instantaneous as turning on a light, and every bit as illuminating. I went home from music school and copied Robert’s methods, putting on my favorite songs and doing my best to play along. I did what I could with one string; after a few hours I could follow the key changes and mimic the melody of a few songs in the most remedial way. Tunes like Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4,” Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused,” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” can be played down the E string so I contented myself with those over and over again. Simply the understanding that I could mimic the songs on my stereo was enough to imprint the guitar on my reality forever.

I took lessons from Robert on my worn-out flamenco guitar throughout the summer before ninth grade—with all six strings in place, which, of course, he taught me how to tune. I was always amazed when he put on a record that he didn’t know and learned it on the spot in a few minutes. I set about achieving that ability for myself: like every overeager beginner, I tried to jump to that level straightaway and, like every good teacher, Robert forced me to master the fundamentals. He taught me basic major, minor, and blues scales and all of the standard chord positions. He’d also sketch chord charts to my favorite songs, such as “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Whole Lotta Love,” that I was to play as my reward once I’d done the week’s exercises. Usually I’d skip straight to the reward and when I showed up at the music school the next day, it was obvious to Robert that I hadn’t even touched my homework. Sometimes I liked to play as if I still had only one string. Every song I liked had a riff in it, so playing it all up and down one string was more fun until my fingers learned the proper form.

My BMX racing gear gathered dust in my closet. My friends wondered where I was at night. I saw Danny McCracken one day while I was riding back from music school, my guitar slung over my back. He asked me where I’d been and if I’d won any races lately. I told him that I was a guitar player now. He sized me up, looked at my worn-out six-string, and stared hard right into my eyes. “Oh yeah?” He had a very confused look on his face, as if he wasn’t sure what to make of what I’d told him. We sat there awkwardly in silence for a minute on our bikes then said our good-byes. It was the last time I ever saw him.

I respected my guitar teacher, Robert, but I naively and impatiently failed to see the direct line between the fundamentals he was teaching me and the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin songs that I wanted to play. It all came to a head soon enough, once I discovered my personal instruction manual, so to speak; it was a used book I found in a guitar store bargain bin called How to Play Rock Guitar. This book had all of the chord charts, tablature, and sample solos from greats like Eric Clapton, Johnny Winter, and Jimi Hendrix. It even came with a little floppy 45 that demonstrated the proper way to play what was in the book. I took that thing home and devoured it, and once I was capable of mimicking the sounds on that little record, I was soon improvising on my own, and then I was beside myself. Once I’d heard myself lay down patterns that sounded like rock-and-roll lead guitar it was as if I’d found the Holy Grail. That book changed my life; I still have my worn-out copy in a trunk somewhere and I’ve never seen another one before or since. I’ve looked for it plenty of times to no avail. I feel like it was the only copy left in the world and that it was there that day waiting specifically for me. That book gave me the skills I sought and once I’d begun to master them I quit music school forever.

I was now a “rock guitar player,” as far as I was concerned, so out of necessity, I borrowed one hundred bucks from my grandmother and bought an electric guitar. It was a very cheap Les Paul copy made by a company called Memphis Guitars. I was attracted to the shape, because most of my favorite players played Les Pauls—it epitomized rock guitar to me. That said, I didn’t know enough to even know who Les Paul was; I wasn’t acquainted with his sublime jazz playing and had no idea that he had pioneered the development of electric instruments, effects, and recording techniques. I didn’t know that his brand of solid body guitar would soon become my primary choice of instrument. And I had no idea at all that I’d enjoy the honor of sharing a stage with him many times, many years later. Nope, that day it was pretty basic; in my mind, that shape visually represented the sound I wanted to make.

FINDING GUITAR WAS LIKE FINDING MYSELF; it defined me, it gave me a purpose. It was a creative outlet that allowed me to understand myself. The turmoil of my adolescence was suddenly secondary; playing guitar gave me focus. I didn’t keep a journal; I couldn’t seem to vocalize my feelings in a constructive fashion, but the guitar gave me emotional clarity. I loved to draw; that was an activity that took my mind off things, but it wasn’t enough of a vehicle for me to completely express myself. I’ve always envied the artists who could express themselves through art, and only through the guitar have I come to understand what a wonderful release it is.

Practicing for hours wherever I found myself was liberating. Playing became a trance that soothed my soul: with my hands occupied and my mind engaged, I found peace. Once I got into a band, I found that the physical exertion of playing a show became my primary personal release; when I’m playing onstage I’m more at home in my own skin than at any other time in my life. There is a subconscious, emotional level that informs playing, and since I’m the kind of person who carries his baggage around internally, nothing has ever helped me tap into my feelings more.

Finding my voice through guitar at fifteen was, to me, revolutionary. It was a leap in my evolution; I can’t think of anything that made more of a difference in my life. The only moment that came close had occurred two years before when I first experienced the mystery of the opposite sex. Once I’d done it, I didn’t think that anything was better than sex …until I played guitar. And soon after that I found out that those two pursuits couldn’t coexist peacefully in my teenage world.

My first girlfriend was named Melissa. She was a cute, kind of chubby girl with great tits, who was one year younger than me. She was twelve and I was thirteen when we lost our virginity to each other. That isn’t shocking by today’s standards, when teens engage in very adult practices earlier than ever, but in 1978, she and I were ahead of the curve: most of our peers were still French kissing. We both inherently knew not to mess with a good thing, so we stayed together, on and off, for years. The first time we did anything was in the laundry room of her apartment building, which was on the first floor, in the back of the building. She jerked me off; it was a first for both of us. Eventually we moved it to the one-bedroom apartment that she shared with her mom, Carolyn. Unfortunately, the first time we did, Carolyn came home early, so I had to crawl through Melissa’s bedroom window with my pants around my ankles. Luckily the bushes were forgiving.

Things got hot and heavy between us pretty quickly; when her mom wasn’t home, we did it in Melissa’s bed, and when she was home, we did it on the couch after Carolyn passed out on Valium, hoping she wouldn’t wake up and catch us. Of course, trying to wait for Carolyn’s Valium to kick in wasn’t always easy. It was soon after Melissa and Carolyn moved upstairs to a two-bedroom that her mother resigned herself to what we were up to. She decided that it was better that we do it in her home than elsewhere and told us as much. According to Melissa and me, from our sexually ravenous, adolescent point of view, her mom was the coolest.

Caroyln smoked a ton of pot and was very open about it; she would roll us perfect joints and allowed me to stay with them, sleeping in Melissa’s room, for weeks at a time. Since we got together during the summer, my mom didn’t mind. Her mother didn’t work; she had a very nice, much older drug-dealer boyfriend who sold coke, pot, and acid, all of which he would give to us freely, provided we enjoyed it all in-house.

Their apartment building was on Edinburgh and Willoughby, about two blocks west of Fairfax and half a block south of Santa Monica Boulevard. The location was perfect—the Laurel Elementary School that my friends and I frequented was just down the street. That’s where Melissa and I met, actually. The playground was as much of a community as Melissa’s block was. Her neighborhood was an interesting cultural mishmash: young gay guys, older Jewish families, Russians, Armenians, and Middle Easterners lived alongside one another. There was a quaint, Leave It to Beaver quality to it, with everyone smiling and waving and saying hello, but there was also a very tangible tension.

On an average night, Melissa and I would get high and listen to music with her mom, then head across the street to visit Wes and Nate, the two gay guys who lived in the only house among the apartment buildings to be found in a six-block radius. They had a huge yard, probably about an acre, and a tall oak tree with a swing hanging from it on their lot. We’d smoke a joint with them, then proceed to the backyard, where we’d lie under the oak tree, staring at the stars.

I discovered so much contemporary music during that period, too. I mentioned that my parents played music all the time; it’s my fondest memory of childhood. I listen to all of it still, from the classical composers my dad favored to the sixties and early-seventies legends they both loved. That period was rock and roll’s most creative time. I’m constantly looking and rarely finding music that’s better. When I think I have, a closer inspection reveals it to be just another rehash of the originators. And then I find that I’d rather just listen to the Stones or Aerosmith or whatever it’s based on than listen any further.

But when I was thirteen, I wasn’t satisfied with my parents’ collection anymore. I sought out new sounds, and found an endless supply at Melissa’s house. That is where I was first exposed to Supertramp, Journey, Styx, April Wine, Foghat, and Genesis—none of which really suited my taste. But Melissa’s mom listened to a ton of Pink Floyd, which I knew from my mom, but given that Carolyn had such good pot, their music suddenly took on a whole new meaning. That apartment was paradise for a budding guitar player: getting stoned for free, discovering new tunes, and having sex with my girlfriend all night, all before I graduated junior high.

I don't think there's anything better than hearing your favorite band live

I SPENT THE REST OF EIGHTH GRADE and all of ninth grade touring Hollywood with Steven by day, playing guitar in my room, and sleeping with Melissa. I stole a chunky, Panasonic top-loading tape player at some point and carried it everywhere, soaking up music like Ted Nugent, Cheap Trick, Queen, Cream, and Edgar and Johnny Winter. I stole more cassettes each day, absorbing one band at a time. I would start with a band’s live album, because I believe that is the only way to determine whether or not any band is worth your attention. If they sounded good enough live, I’d steal their entire catalog. I also used live records to hear their greatest hits before I embarked on stealing their entire catalog—I was frugal. I still love live records; as a fan of rock music—and I still feel like a fan first—I don’t think there’s anything better than hearing your favorite band live. I still believe that the best representations of my favorite bands were captured on their live albums, whether we’re talking about Aerosmith’s Live Bootleg, the Who’s Live at Leeds, the Rolling Stones’ Get Your Ya Ya’s Out, or the Kinks’ Give the People What They Want. Much later, I was very proud when Guns N’ Roses put out Live Era; I think it captures some great moments.

ASIDE FROM MELISSA AND STEVEN, MY friends were much older than I was. I had met many of them through my bike gang and made many more along the way because I always had pot from one source or another. My mom was a pot smoker who was very liberal in her rearing: she preferred that I smoke pot under her supervision, rather than experiment out in the world. With all due respect to her, she had my best intentions in mind, but she didn’t realize that not only did I smoke at home under her watchful eye, but I also pinched a little of her weed (sometimes just the seeds) to smoke or sell when I went out. It was, without fail, the best way to ingratiate myself and I thank her for it.

The kids in the older circles I ran in had apartments, sold drugs, threw parties, and clearly thought nothing of entertaining minors. Aside from the obvious benefits, such an environment also allowed me to discover bands of the day that I would have otherwise missed. There were a bunch of surfer and skater guys I hung out with who turned me on to Devo, the Police, 999, and a few more radio-friendly New Wave bands. Among another clique that I hung with, a lanky black guy in his twenties named Kevin turned me on to the first Cars album during one of his parties.

Kevin was the older brother of one of my bike buddies, a guy named Keith who’d nicknamed me Solomon Grundy. I looked up to Keith because he always had the hottest girls from Fairfax High School chasing him around. When I was thirteen and fourteen and really into BMX, this guy was in the scene, but so cool that he always seemed to be about one step away from ditching it altogether for more sophisticated, adult pursuits. I’m still not sure why Keith called me Solomon Grundy.

In any case, Kevin’s musical taste was questionable. He was into disco, which was an interest we did not share, though I now realize that he was so inclined because it afforded him the opportunity to get as much trim as possible—so I respect him more for it now. It worked, too, because the girls in his circle and at his parties were hot and promiscuous, which was especially intriguing to me. That said, I didn’t expect to like the “cool new band” Kevin was going to play for me while we smoked a joint in his room at his party that night. I changed my mind midway through the first song, and by the time the second song was over I was a lifelong fan of Elliot Easton. Elliot was the soul of the Cars, and that first record of theirs won me over. In my opinion, the Cars were one of the few impactful groups that came along when New Wave took over the airwaves.

Just before I left the party that night, I heard a snippet of music that seriously grabbed my attention. Someone had put Aerosmith’s Rocks on the stereo and I caught only two songs, but that was enough. It had this really nasty alley cat vibe to it that I had never heard before. If lead guitar was the undiscovered voice that had resided within me, this was the record I’d waited my whole life to hear. I made sure to check out the album cover before I took off, so I’d know who it was. I remembered the name Aerosmith; four years before, in 1975, they had their only AM radio hit at the time with “Walk This Way.” I ran into the Rocks record again a week or two later …but at the most inopportune moment.

I must preface this next story by saying that relationships are never easy, especially when both parties’ bodies are young, inexperienced, and raging with hormones. Melissa and I really cared for each other, but we still broke up and made up often, usually as a result of my commitment to learning to play guitar overshadowing my commitment to spending time with her. At this particular point, we were apart and I had set my sights on someone we’ll call Laurie. She was a significantly older, very obviously out-of-my-league figure among my circle of friends. Laurie had incredible tits, long blond-brown hair, and wore really thin, strapped, low-cut tops. They were so sheer and loose that her chest was far too easy to see. Like me, Laurie was recently single: she’d broken up with Ricky, her very typical surfer boyfriend. I was determined to be with her; I didn’t care that she was four years older than me and wouldn’t give me the time of day. I knew I could do this. I kept talking to her and paying attention to her and finally got a dialogue going. She let her guard down and got to know me, and once she did, she seemed to forget that a few weeks before I was nothing but some much younger punk she didn’t care to notice. Finally she invited me over to hang out one night when her mom was going out of town.

I parked my bike on her lawn and followed her upstairs to her room. It was years ahead of my comprehension of cool and groovy at the time: she had scarves over the lamps, rock posters everywhere, her own stereo, and a ton of records. We got stoned and I intended to play it cool, so I flipped through her albums looking for something to impress her. I recognized Rocks from Kevin’s party a few weeks earlier and put it on, ignorant of the fact that it had been playing nonstop in my subconscious since the moment I heard those first two songs. Once the opening shrieks of “Back in the Saddle” filled the room, I was transfixed; I listened to the record over and over, crouched by the speakers, ignoring Laurie completely. I forgot about her altogether as well as whatever intricate plans I had for the evening. After a couple hours, she tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“I guess you should go home now.”

“Oh, yeah …Okay.”

Rocks is as powerful to me today as it was then: the screaming vocals, dirty guitars, and relentless grooves are bluesy rock and roll as it is meant to be played. There was something about the raw adolescence of Aerosmith that was perfectly in tune with my inner development at the time; that record just sounded the way I felt. After my missed opportunity with Laurie, I devoted myself to learning “Back in the Saddle.” I stole the cassette and an Aerosmith songbook and replayed the song until I knew the riffs. I learned a valuable lesson in the process: music books can’t teach you how to play properly. I’d sort of learned to read music, so I could tell that the notes in the songbook were not the same as those being played on the record. It made sense: I struggled for hours and still couldn’t play along properly. So I ditched the books and kept at it until I’d learned to figure it out by ear; and I figured out every other song I wanted to play that way forever after.

In the process of learning every lick of “Back in the Saddle,” I realized just how idiosyncratic Joe’s and Brad’s playing is, and how no one can ever really play like anyone else but themselves. Imitation should remain a stepping stone for a player to find his or her own voice, but it must never become his or her voice: no one should emulate their heroes to the point of note-for-note mimicry. Guitar is too personal of an expression for that; it should be exactly what it is—a singular extension of the player.

BY THE TIME MY LAST JUNIOR HIGH SUMMER drew to a close, I had created a world of my own design that was as consistent as my home life was irregular, because during this period, in the wake of their separation, my mom and dad each entered into very irregular relationships. I lived with each of them for short amounts of time, but neither situation felt quite right. I ended up mostly living with my grandmother in her condo in Hollywood while my little brother lived with my mom. Of course, most of the time I slept over at Melissa’s.

Following her relationship with David Bowie, my mom started dating a talented photographer we’ll call “Boyfriend.” They were together for about three years and eventually moved into an apartment on Cochran off Third, near La Brea, where I lived with them for a while. Boyfriend was probably ten years younger than Ola; when they met he was a star on the rise: I remember meeting Herb Ritts, Moshe Brakha, and a few other famous photographers and models at their place. My mom and Boyfriend had a pretty tumultuous relationship, during which she regressed into his assistant and put her career aside.

Boyfriend always had a darkroom in his bathroom, and toward the end of their relationship I discovered that he was freebasing cocaine in there all night long while “working.” It wasn’t always all bad over there, but once freebasing suddenly popped up in Boyfriend’s life, it proceeded to promptly halt his career—taking his relationship with my mom down with it. Boyfriend was tortured; he was miserable and misery loves company, so although I wasn’t fond of Boyfriend at all (and he knew it), he was determined to drag me along for the ride. We’d freebase together, then go out into the neighborhood and wander into other people’s garages. Usually we’d steal used furniture, old toys, and whatever odds and ends it seemed like the family had discarded. One of the items we found was a red couch that we carried all the way back to our house; we then spray-painted it black and put in the den. I can’t imagine what Ola thought when she woke up the next morning. I have no idea actually, because she never mentioned it. In any case, after our adventures, Boyfriend would keep at it, basing all morning and, I suppose, all day. I’d duck into my room by 7:30 a.m., pretend to sleep for an hour, then get up, say good morning to my mother, and head off to school as if I’d just had a good night’s sleep.

My mom had insisted that I live with her and Boyfriend because she disapproved of the conditions I’d been subjected to over at my dad’s place. Once my dad had acclimated to their separation, he got it together to rent an apartment where his friend Miles and a group of my parents’ mutual acquaintances lived. It seemed like everyone in that scene drank a lot, and my dad was dating a number of women, so my mother didn’t think it was a good environment for me. My dad dated a woman named Sonny on a regular basis during that period. Life had not been kind to Sonny; she’d lost her son in a horrible accident and though she was really sweet, she was really screwed up. She and my dad spent a lot of time together drinking and fucking. So for a while there, while I lived with Mom, I saw Dad only on weekends, but when I did, he always had something interesting waiting for me: some unusual dinosaur model or something more technical, like a remote controlled airplane that you had to build from scratch.

Later on, I saw more of him once he moved into an apartment on Sunset and Gardner, in a building of studio apartments with a shared bathroom. His art buddy Steve Douglas lived just down the hall. On the first floor was a guitar store, though at the time I hadn’t yet picked up the habit. My dad’s art studio filled the entire room, so he’d built a loft to sleep in on the far wall and I lived there with him for a while when I was in seventh grade, just after I got kicked out of John Burroughs Junior High for stealing a load of BMX bikes—but that is a story not worth telling. In any case, for that brief period I attended Le Conte Junior High, and since my dad didn’t drive, I walked the five miles to school and back each day.

I’m not quite sure what Dad or Steve did for money. Steve was an artist as well and as far as I could tell, all they did was spend their days drinking and their nights painting for their own benefit or talking about art. One of my more entertaining memories from that period involved Steve’s old-fashioned medicine bag full of vintage porn that he caught me looking at one day.

His place and our place were basically shared space, so it was entirely normal for me to wander down to his studio whenever I wanted to. One day he walked in and found me looking through his treasure chest of porn. “I’ll make you a deal, Saul,” he said. “If you manage to steal that bag out from under my nose, you can keep it. Think you’re up to it? I’m pretty quick; you’d better be good.” I just smiled at him; I’d already devised a plan to make it mine before he challenged me. I lived down the hall—compared to what I was already doing out in the world in terms of theft, this wasn’t much of a heist.

A couple of days later I went over to Steve’s place looking for my dad and at the time they were so engaged in conversation that they didn’t even notice that I’d come in. It was the perfect opportunity; I grabbed the bag, walked out, and stashed it up on the roof. Unfortunately it was a short-lived victory: my dad ordered me to give it back once Steve realized that it was gone. It’s too bad; those magazines were classics.

There were periods throughout my childhood when I insisted to my parents that they weren’t my parents, because I honestly believed that I’d been kidnapped. I also ran away a lot. One time when I was preparing to run away, my dad actually helped me pack my suitcase, which was a little plaid bag he’d bought me in England. He was so understanding about it and so helpful and kind that by doing so, he convinced me to stay. That kind of subtle reverse psychology is one of the traits of his that I hope I’ve inherited, because I’d like to use it on my kids.

I’D SAY MY BIGGEST ADVENTURE WAS the day I took off on my Big Wheel when I was six years old. At the time we lived at the top of Lookout Mountain Road and I rode it all the way down to Laurel Canyon, then all the way down Laurel Canyon to Sunset Boulevard, which, all in all, is just over two miles. I wasn’t lost, I had a plan: I was going to move into a toy store, and live there for the rest of my life. I guess I’ve always been determined. Sure, there were many times that I wanted to get away from home as a kid, but I have no regrets about how I was raised. If it had been any bit different, if I’d been born just one minute later, or been in the wrong place at the right time or vice versa, the life that I’ve lived and come to love would not exist. And that is a situation that I wouldn’t want to consider in the slightest.

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