Appetite for dysfunction

SLASH

By Slash and Anthony Bozza

Harper Entertainment, 458 pages

Available at National Bookstore

I was never a Guns N’ Roses fan. Could be because their video for Sweet Child o’ Mine broke around the time I was working as a day counselor at a juvenile lockup facility back in the late ‘80s. The youth offenders would get all hyped up watching this video on MTV all day, in between trashing the foosball table and making elaborate plans to escape out their third-story windows by tying together bedsheets in the dead of night.

In short, I didn’t relate to the kids who liked Guns N’ Roses. But guitarist Slash always seemed a little different, a more genuine rock icon than others — notably his shrill bandmate, Axl Rose. He seemed like he might be a notch above the other clichéd rockers who dictate their memoirs.

In the bio Slash (cobbled into coherent sentences, presumably, by Anthony Bozza), we learn that Slash was born to a white British dad who was a painter and an African-American mom who did fashion design. Being the ’60s, the two located themselves in Laurel Canyon, where Slash was lucky enough to meet people like Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie and John Lennon on occasion; like any kid he later took up BMX bike racing, then shoplifting, before fixating on the guitar.

Half-black and half-white, Slash (born Saul Hudson) also collected snakes and dabbled in sex and drugs long before playing in Guns N’ Roses. He shoplifted his trademark top hat from a clothing store mannequin. Mostly, he wanted to play rock ‘n’ roll the good old ‘70s way: lots of long, blues-based solos. He also liked some L.A. punk, notably Fear and X, but found the other metal bands in his midst too caught up in makeup and teased hair. When he heard a tape of a screeching singer who was nevertheless in tune (Axl Rose), he felt a new kind of band was coming together.

Guns N’ Roses started as an offspring of L.A. Guns and Hollywood Rose (Axl’s band with guitarist Izzy Stradlin); Duff McKagan came in on bass and Slash’s ne’er-do-well buddy Steven Adler played drums. They took to rehearsing at Sunset Strip dives and played out when they could. Slash makes the sleaziness of his surroundings palpable in a visit with scene-maker and record producer Kim Fowley, who shows off his gold records while teenage girls shoot speed in his bathroom under harsh fluorescent lights. (“I remember thinking that of all the reasons why this scene was so very scummy, the lighting was worst of all.”)

Naturally, drugs, alcohol and excess play a big part in the proceedings; strippers are depicted as angels, attending to damaged rock gods; corporate suits and lawyers are evil minions, dispatched to destroy the purity of rock and roll. Yes, this is Slash’s vision, and it’s probably what makes Slash a fun, engaging read.  

Slash also comes up with good epigrams, most of them helpfully printed as bold pull quotes in his memoir. Stuff like:

• Being a rock star is the intersection of who you are and who you want to be.

• We did amazing, godlike things on stage every night.

• We figured no one needed to worry about AIDS until Dave Lee Roth got it.

And:

• I was pissed off at myself for having died.

Nearly dying is a recurring theme in Slash. From a recurring heroin habit to periods where he would drink a gallon of vodka a day, Slash definitely wears the “been there, done that” badge with panache. It was during the long furloughs between recording and touring that boredom set in and the demons came out to play. Walking through plate-glass windows and smashing through glass shower stalls becomes such a frequent activity in the book that I thought the editors had made a mistake in repeating incidents. After the band’s “Appetite for Destruction” album went through the roof, Slash went through a period of speedballing (mixing cocaine in heroin in potentially lethal doses). He started seeing “little translucent men” (kind of like the monster in Predator, only miniature versions) wandering around his hotel room in Arizona, toting machine guns and machetes. This sent him bugging, smashing through yet another glass shower door, and running naked through the resort covered in blood. David Bowie (of all people) tries to set Slash straight: “Listen to me. You are not in a good way if you are seeing things every day. You are at a low spiritual point… You are exposing yourself to the darker realms of your subconscious being. You are making yourself vulnerable to all kinds of negative energy.”

Slash’s response: “Okay, that’s cool. Yeah, I suppose that’s bad… Duly noted.”

As Guns N’ Roses got big, Slash got even bigger, guesting on his rock heroes’ tours (the Stones, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper) and even doing solos for Lenny Kravitz and Michael Jackson. He certainly did look the part: hair curls permanently shielding his eyes, top hat scrunched down, shirtless, toting a ‘59 Gibson Les Paul. But reading Slash, you end up believing it really was the music that mattered. “Finding guitar was like finding myself,” he writes. “It defined me, it gave me a purpose.” A good Slash solo is gutsy, grinding, full of blues intonations and always trying to tell you a story. It’s a narrative event. He may not be the flashiest or the fastest, but you know it’s Slash when you hear it.

Unfortunately, fame and fortune was a “careful what you wish for” thing with Guns N’ Roses. It became clear during the recording of “Use Your Illusion” that Axl Rose, who distanced himself from the band’s worst excesses, was seizing more control of the band. Rose fired managers and junkie drummer Adler got the axe. The joke at the time was: “You got fired? For drugs? From Guns N’ Roses???”

From Slash’s perspective, it was Rose’s elusiveness and desire for control that caused endless stalls in the studio and long delays before performing. But that was nothing compared to a new contract Rose came up with after the “Illusion” tour: Axl sought legal control over the name of the band, and the right to hire and fire members at will. It was too much for Slash, who finally threw in the towel; he left the band and formed Slash’s Snakepit and Velvet Revolver (with fellow estranged members of GN’R). He cleaned up, found a point of relative happiness, marriage and fatherhood, and despite feeling naïve about leaving Guns without all his legal ducks in a row, he doesn’t appear to look back a lot. 

Of course, Slash concedes Axl Rose probably has a totally different perspective on why the band crashed. We have yet to read the singer’s account, but Rose, after laboring on a follow-up to “Use Your Illusion” for a jaw-dropping 16 years, finally released “Chinese Democracy” last year with himself as the sole remaining GN’R member. But rock had apparently stopped holding its breath.

Back in 1988, director Penelope Spheeris made the documentary, The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. In it, members of Kiss, Poison, Faster Pussycat, W.A.S.P. and — in an appearance that foreshadowed his reality TV stardom years later — Ozzy Osbourne played themselves: caricatures of glam-rock excess on the Los Angeles/Hollywood scene. There were snickers aplenty, watching Ozzy pour orange juice and make himself breakfast.

Half a decade earlier, Spheeris had documented the L.A. punk scene in the classic Decline of Western Civilization, with equally excessive appearances by The Germs, Fear, X, Black Flag and other punk stalwarts. Much later, of course, she directed Wayne’s World.

I wonder if Spheeris knew what rough beast was waiting to be born, back in ’88, slouching somewhere between the two worlds of punk and metal at the corner of Sunset and Garner?