My Appetite For Destruction (18 page)

Drummer Boys. Fred Coury sits in for me (note the broken hand).
(David Plastik)

Pug in My Pants. Me with my dog Shadow.

Meatloaf Concert. Caro and I snuggle before a

concert outside Las Vegas.

Appetite for Confection. My wife, Carolina, and I gather at a favorite lunch spot in the Valley with friends Steve Sprite (
far right
) and Lawrence Spagnola.
(Morgan Saint John)

Alice N’ Adler. Opening for Alice Cooper, October 23, 1986. This was the night Axl got held up and we played without him.
(Marc Canter)

Axl didn’t think it was fair to split royalties evenly five ways on our songs. He believed he was entitled to more than the rest of us. The other guys were smart. They just stared at the floor. No one said a fucking thing. I don’t know if Axl intimidated them or if they just knew that silence was the best way to deal with his ego. Well, I couldn’t just shut the fuck up about it. The reason I wouldn’t dummy up was I was so outraged.

So right off the bat, I was like, “Screw you, I was here from the beginning, I worked on putting those songs together just as much as you.” I had no trouble standing up to Axl because I was right. So now there’s this deadly silence again, and it’s obvious that it’s become a big fucking deal. Still, no one else is saying anything, so rather than get into a big argument, I proposed what I thought was a fair offer: “Considering Axl
did
write most of the lyrics, which is a huge fucking part, I’ll give you five percent of my twenty percent.”

Axl shot me this look not of thanks, not of appreciation, but of arrogance and triumph. It was like he expected it. So I looked around the room because what I expected was for everyone else to follow suit and ante up too, but the room went dead quiet again. I looked around and everyone kind of started talking about other stuff. The matter was over, settled, done. Axl was happy and I was like, “Fuck!”

So it went 25 percent to Axl, 20 percent for each of the other guys, and 15 percent for me. The entire ordeal lasted only a couple of minutes. As long as Axl got more than everybody else he was a happy pig in shit. And at this point we were all trained to feel that as long as Axl wasn’t being pissy, as long as Axl was content, then we should all be happy. He got away with more than the rest of us combined. Like climbing up on the roof of the Whisky the day we signed. If that was anyone else from the band, we would have climbed up there and thrown him off, but not our Axl.

We didn’t know that Axl had a medical condition, manic depression, at the time. We just knew that dealing with Axl was tricky, that he was a moody motherfucker, and that you had to be prepared for craziness. One day he’d be hugging you and the next day kicking you in the balls. But Axl did some loving things for me that surpass anything the other guys ever did for me, so who am I to praise or condemn? I love the guy to this day, I honestly do. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to lie to you about the way he was.

A
xl could get very uptight, while I was usually the opposite. People told me I was always easygoing. I got along with everyone and he didn’t. Fact is, Axl had trouble getting along with himself. Axl was always living in his own little high-class snobby world, or at least he was in his twisted little mind.

I remember at this one show, he left after the first song because the monitors (the small speakers that face toward the musicians onstage so they can hear what they’re playing) sucked. So he just split. As he stormed off the stage, he walked right by me. I shouted, “Why don’t you come to sound check? Then you’d know what the monitors are going to sound like. You could even get it straightened out before the show.” But no, that was asking too much.

Axl stood up thousands of fans without a second thought. One thing I’ve always respected is
GNR
fans, the most faithful, dedicated, fanatical audiences in the world. Unfortunately, Axl didn’t feel this way, and after we became famous, he kind of took the
GNR
fans for granted.

Whether it was monitors or royalties, I was the only one in the band to call Axl out on his shit. Later that night we were in a bar and he’s sitting away from the band with his latest bunch of “friends,” who were lately shaping up to be B-list actors and wannabe models. He’s shoving his smokes into a fancy cigarette holder, and he’s looking fucking ridiculous. The other guys wanted me to leave it alone, but I couldn’t, so I stood up and said, “Look at you, you pathetic little stuck-up motherfucker.”

Axl just laughed at me: “Ha. Stevie, you’re funny.”

I go, “Motherfucker, what the fuck’s wrong with you? You can’t just leave us onstage and take off like that.”

Axl just whispered something into the nearest ear, and all his sycophant friends tittered away.

When Axl was ridiculously late for a recording session or blew off an important gig, I felt I had to call him out on it. The other guys knew better than to draw the wrath of Axl, I guess. They would just look the other way and stow their feelings. But there were times when Axl treated me with twice the respect that anyone else in the band did, and I think it was because I was real with him. Somewhere in the depths of that tortured soul, he appreciated that. But eventually I would pay dearly for standing up to Axl, because I became the guy with the bull’s-eye on his back.

Now, Izzy avoided hanging with crowds, preferring to be on his own. But he was respectful. He would go off with a woman and just chill out, surfacing when he was needed again. Duff, Slash, and I, well, we were always together. The three of us had a blast every time we went out. We were just born to party together.

A
t this point, we started moving around so much, it really was just a blur. For a while we were staying in the house with Alan Niven in Los Feliz, by the observatory in Griffith Park. Duff’s friends from Seattle and Axl’s friends from Indiana ended up staying there for a while too. Then we moved to Manhattan Beach because Tom Zutaut lived there. He gave us a white van to commute in, and Slash was always designated driver. Of course, it wasn’t long before our designated drunkard wrecked our ride. Good thing no one got hurt.

The time came for us to start recording at Rumbo Studios in Canoga Park. It was right next to the Winnetka Animal Hospital. It was close to my mom’s house, and she cooked us lunch almost every day. One thing about Mom, she just couldn’t stay mad at me for extended periods of time. I certainly took advantage of it, because I remember those meals came in handy. Mom brought us pasta, sandwiches, and salads, very tasty stuff. Then she’d ask if we needed anything and the guys would hint about running low on cigarettes, so she bought a few cartons for them. Then they went too far and gave her their laundry. And you know what? She even washed and ironed our clothes for us.

When we started working on
Appetite
we were in a hotel in Manhattan Beach, which was like a forty-five-minute drive to Rumbo. I have no idea why we were so far from the studio. One day my little brother came along with my mom to Rumbo. The band Heart happened to be recording their new album on the other side of the building. Their guitarist, Nancy Wilson, gorgeous and known the world over for her incredible songs, came by to say hi.

Nancy was very gracious. She lifted Jamie onto her lap and was very sweet to him. My little brother was smooth for a ten-year-old. He had the biggest smile on his face that day and soaked up every minute of it.

A
round this time our producer Mike Clink came up to me suggesting I change my drum setup. With all due respect, that’s kind of like someone coming up to you with suggestions for changing your internal organs . . . you just don’t fuck with what works. But I wanted to be a team player and when he got me a china cymbal and a second tom I was like, “Ah, what the hell,” and reluctantly agreed. But the trouble with giving an inch is what happens next. They’re not happy and they demand more. Maybe that’s why it’s better to be a miserable prick to people; they don’t mess with you as much.

Mike asked me to change “Anything Goes” and that really hit a nerve.

“Fuck you, don’t tell us how to write songs.” I got so pissed because you don’t meddle with the music. I pouted, stomped around, and behaved like a real dick. Where did this guy get off?

But I can’t stay mad at people, and I couldn’t in this case particularly since I knew in my heart that Mike was coming from a good place. So we tried his idea, and to my surprise, it came out great. My resistance had just been from a deep-seated desire to guard our songs, and no one messes with GNR’s tunes. But I will be the first to admit when I’m wrong or out of line, and after we worked it out, I looked Mike straight in the eye and said, “I am so sorry.”

Mike’s change happens right when Axl starts singing the first verse. It was initially at a slower time, and his idea made it faster, and like I said, better. So we started tweaking other things, like the chord changes at the end of “Rocket Queen.” Also he had the idea to add a vintage Moog synthesizer to the beginning of “Paradise City” and again, that ended up sounding great. Those are the only changes I can recall that he made to the songs. At the time, “Mr. Brownstone,” “It’s So Easy,” and “Sweet Child O’ Mine” were our newest songs, and we worked our asses off on them in the studio.

“Mr. Brownstone” was a thinly veiled warning from Axl to all of us, including himself. We all saw how drugs had been granted a permanent
VIP
laminate in our lives, but we also believed we were indestructible. Although we were arrogant bastards, we respected (and feared) heroin’s ability to weasel its way further into our lives, demanding increasingly bigger chunks of our daily routines.

So we did what we usually did with something that had become a part of us: we wrote about it. Same with the groupie scene, which was getting ridiculously out of control. We could just shove a fishing net out the window of any club and pull in choice catch after choice catch. The girl game lost its appeal; there was no longer a challenge to scoring the choicest snapper, and again, we chose to write about it: “It’s So Easy.” It was understood that Axl had final say over the lyrics, but we could all contribute, and at that point we all wanted to contribute.