Reckless Road Guns 'n Roses and the Making of Appetite for Destruction Read online

VICKY HAMILTON It seemed like managing Guns N' Roses was a natural progression to what I was doing. I had just gone through something pretty gnarly with Poison, so I had to think about getting involved at that level again with a band. I was very much in the mix with the A&R people at that time. I shopped Poison, I worked with Motley Crue and Striper, so I was very familiar with the A&R people that were signing those types of bands. I booked some shows for Guns N' Roses at the Roxy and the Stardust Ballroom and I helped them facilitate the Troubadour shows. I kind of brought a higher quality of gig to the band. Guns N' Roses was unique to that time period and very exciting to me.

  MARC CANTER Los Angeles club audiences are notorious for their blasé, undemonstrative attitude. So when a band appears on the scene and not only begins to attract its own following, but excites club audiences into audible and visible displays of enthusiasm, word begins to get around. A buzz is born. That is when the guys in suits – the record label guys with the money – start checking things out. The buzz around Guns N' Roses was growing loud and clear around this time.

  ORIGINS OF NIGHTRAIN

  SLASH I remember; it was, Izzy, Axl, Steven and I walking around Hollywood and we started singing Nightrain and came up with the chorus. We put the song together in a couple days and it became the war cry for the band. Nightrain is immortalized by the actual song, but at the time the song was written, that's all we could afford to drink. We'd get bottles of Nightrain with the few pennies we had and go carousing Hollywood and the Strip. It became a way of life for the band during that period.

  RON SCHNEIDER Nightrain was the cheapest, nastiest bottle of wine you could buy. If you had two dollars, you got a bottle of Nightrain. The hangover you would get from that, oh my. You'd drink this one little bottle and you're flying. Then you're throwing up and you're sick as a dog the next day, all day long, going "Oh my God! Why did I do this?" It was a good cheap buzz. That's why all the winos on Skid Row still drink it. I can still taste that shit in my mouth. There was a liquor store right around the corner from the Gardner Street studio that sold Nightrain. There were actually two bands in that location. It was Guns N' Roses in the little room and next to them was Johnny and the Jaguars. It would either be up to us or up to them. We could never afford fifths of Jim Beam or Jack Daniels, just Nightrain.

  SLASH Nightrain was the commercially available, tangible product that we could afford at our expense. The other stuff was a little more complicated, but Nightrain was just a simple beverage that we could get with very little money and in great quantity and live on. I think at the time, since we couldn't afford booze and food, it had enough supplements that we could survive on it alone.

  DUFF We were living in the Gardner Street studio, this place where we had one little box of a room. We had no money, but we could dig up a buck to go down to this liquor store where they sold this great wine called Nightrain that would fuck you up for a dollar. Five dollars and you'd be gone. We lived off this stuff.

  STEVEN ADLER We wrote "Nightrain" walking on Sunset Boulevard, from the Rainbow and the Roxy, passing out flyers on our way down to the Troubadour, drinking it. We were all on the Nightrain. It was a dollar and nine cents for the bottle. It was all we could afford.

  By now the band was selling out L.A.'s premier clubs. This show at the Roxy, in fact, attracted a far-over-capacity crowd, and Tom Zutaut, the Geffen A&R guy who eventually signed them, arrived late and wasn't able to get in until their set was over.

  Act II

  Chapter 7: Songwriting

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  A Song, Out of Nowhere (2:17).

  Five hearts, five souls, five attitudes that just melded and formed together, just the way a rock and roll band should.

  STEVEN ADLER

  Studio walls, back covers of porno magazines, stained takeout menus and pizza boxes: these were all canvases that captured the lyrics of Guns N' Roses as they were being created. There was a natural flow to the way songs were written and spontaneity ruled. Steven drummed a beat on an ashtray, Slash took the cue and improvised a melody, Axl jumped in and belted out a verse.

  They were an unlikely fellowship -- the warrior, the prodigy, the recluse, the rebel and the clown -- that came together around a love of music and their desire to conquer the L.A. music scene. Their songs were honest, gritty and raw and were inspired by the ordeals they survived whether it was girlfriends, drugs or the streets of Hollywood.

  A tiny studio in Hollywood, on Gardner Street behind the Guitar Center, served as the nerve center for Guns N' Roses. There they rehearsed, slept, fought, partied and wrote music. The close quarters acted like a pressure cooker, forcing their creative collaboration and resulting in explosive music. However far each one of them strayed, they would always end up back at the studio.

  DUFF If you tore apart the songs on "Appetite" and asked who wrote what, I think you might get five different stories. You absolutely hear Izzy's influence, you hear Slash's guitar style, you hear the rhythm sections, and Axl coming in on top of it all that with his sort of fuck'em-all mentality. Everybody had their thing that they brought to the song. The writing process wasn't arduous or like pulling teeth, it was just something that happened. It was an extension of the five of us as a collective.

  SLASH The song writing process was a little bit more complex than I explain. I might write something with Duff, or I might write something with Axl. There was no set pattern to it. There was never any conscious conversation about song writing or ranging or anything about bridges or the middle-T as they call it or any of that crap! I always had a guitar with me, so I'd write riffs all the time and something would catch Axl's ear. Izzy had a song and he'd have some lyrics that went with it. Izzy was a great songwriter and he would get us started. There were so many different ways things came about. If something sounded good, then we embraced it and started to build on it; here's a riff, somebody else came with their part, someone else had another idea and -- bam -- that was the song. Whenever I got to the bridge section or the lead section, I heard the same thing I heard the first time we wrote the song, and I pretty much played whatever I felt. If I heard something different I might change it at the next gig; maybe a note here or something, or add something altogether that wasn't there when it first got written. But the structure and the melodies were all there from the get-go and that's been the mantra. Guns N' Roses' songs came together as a pretty spontaneous band. And when you think about it, the first record that we did, "Live Like a Suicide," which is the flipside of the "Lies" record, there was a couple original songs and a couple covers with no real set arrangement.

  DANNY BIRAL Slash is writing music and Axl is writing lyrics. They just sewed themselves together. We're not talking about the Beatles. I'm talking about really brilliant musicians like Slash trading all of their ideas in this community effort. Slash would just pluck away and come up with these great chords, build a melody out of it and then a song. He recorded it on some simple cassette tapes, gave it to Axl and Axl already had lyrics that he was trying to meld into Slash's melodies.

  CHRIS WEBER The song writing process was very organic. I'd come up with a riff and show it to Izzy, or visa versa. We'd create at least two or three parts: verse, chorus, bridge, etc. Then we'd record it on something crude like a tape recorder with a built in condenser microphone and hand the tape over to Axl.

  MARC CANTER There were words written on papers everywhere: Izzy would be writing lyrics, Duff would be writing lyrics, Axl would be writing lyrics. Someone picked up a guitar and started playing. Pretty soon there was a new song out of nowhere. And that's why the five guys lived in their studio together. Someone grabbed a guitar, started to play something and said, "Check out this song I wrote." It was typically torn apart in about five seconds by the other guys. So, it wasn't like one particular person was responsible for this, they all kind of put their thing into it. And even though somebody started t
he backbone of a particular song, it became an entirely different song by the time the band was finished with it. I remember it was either part of "Paradise City" or part of "My Michelle," but Slash just tweaked it a little bit and all of a sudden it became a different song.

  DUFF "My Michelle", for example, went through so many different phases as a song. It was all half-time for a while. We would just mess with little transitional parts. Bridges were a big thing for us. The bridge had to sound as good or better than any other part of the song or why have a bridge. We played different versions of songs throughout this time and we got it down pretty quick to the version of the song we wanted. But it wasn't until we played in front of people that we actually knew. One of us would have something in our mind, vocal-wise, and then we'd just go out and play it live. How did that work live to the crowd? Did they like that? All of our songs were really fed by the reaction we got from our audience, playing and trying out stuff during these club days.

  SLASH We just started writing because we were living together in this haphazard kind of existence, all five of us. So over time, everyday, there was a new idea of some sort and we'd just start working on it right away. And we'd throw the songs together quickly too. "Paradise City" took all of a couple hours to put together sitting in the back of a van. So everything came together fast, so that in time we had a lot of material as a result of that.

  MICHELLE YOUNG At their Gardner studio, Axl did a lot of knee slapping and snapping, hand slapping and singing tunes. He'd come up with something and ask me what I thought. Slash would break out in songs all the time.

  PAMELA MANNING I was in the rehearsal studio with Guns N' Roses when Axl brought in this old tape deck. I remember that rehearsal studio. It was somewhere down near Sunset Blvd. I remember Axl; he pressed this button on an old tape machine and said "you gotta listen to this." He pressed the button and it was a little recording of "Welcome to the Jungle" that he did and he says, "Now we're gonna rehearse it." He made them listen to it for a while and they got up and they rehearsed it. Axl just sang his head off. I remember seeing his face turn real red when he was singing. I was wondering if he was getting any breath. He was just giving it his all, which was awesome.

  This was a key night for the band. Tom Zutaut, A&R rep for Geffen Records saw the show and wanted to sign them.

  Act II

  Chapter 8: It's So Easy

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  We Were Wined and Dined (2:22).

  As the fan base for GNR grew in Hollywood, it was only a matter of time before record companies would court them. One gig after another saw greater hype and bigger audiences and they were selling-out shows. The buzz was out on the band and Tom Zutaut, an artist and repertoire representative (a.k.a. A&R Rep) at Geffen Records was already on their trail. He was hand picked by David Geffen to bring in the next big thing after signing some very successful bands a few years prior, including Motley Crue. Tom wasn't any ordinary A&R rep, he was intimate with rock n' roll, knew every style that was emerging, educated himself about bands all over the world and most importantly, he knew how to hang. Once A&R reps from other labels got wind that Tom Zutaut was scouting the band, the followed like a flock of birds.

  But, the band wouldn't settle for their first suitor. They had achieved the desirable position of courtship and they would play it out as long as they could. Free dinners, thousand dollar bar tabs and a variety of other "favors" were covered by industry suitors. But, when the fun was over, the band had to face serious issues such as creative control and compatibility. They weren't going to hand over their material and hard earned momentum to executives who wanted to bottle their sound and cash it in. They wanted a label that understood what their music was about and respected their demand for control. Whatever the outcome, they knew the balance was finally tipped in their favor and that the first steps toward a contract and a record were about to be taken. Of course, no one really knew what would happen when everyone was trying to please them.

  TOM ZUTAUT This story begins when I was shopping at a record store on Melrose Avenue called the Vinyl Fetish. They had all the cool imports from the UK and punk records and homemade records by new bands. The reason I met them, is because they were huge Motley Crue fans, and when I signed Motley Crue they contacted me and said, "we love this band and we want to put them in our window." And I was like, "Really! You guys are the hippest, coolest most underground record store in L.A. and you guys like the Crue." So we became friends after that.

  Four or five years after I signed the Crue, I would go in there every couple of weeks and stock up on British imports and underground punk records and stuff. One of the people that worked there said to me, "Hey, there's this new band in L.A. that are better than Motley Crue. You'll love 'em. You need to see 'em." And I said, "What are they called?" and they said "Guns N' Roses." The name rang to me. I loved the name. There was something about Guns N' Roses together that sounded interesting.

  So I was driving down Sunset Boulevard, and I saw one of Slash's hand drawn posters with the pistols and the roses and I thought to myself, "That is fuckin' cool, that is really cool." I stopped my jeep, I got out, and I ripped the poster down -- which probably wasn't good for their press campaign, but what the heck. I took the poster to my office and I looked at my assistant and I said, "You gotta find out when this band is playing and remind me. I really want to see them because the guys at the Vinyl Fetish have been telling me about this band and now there's this really cool poster with a great drawing on it and it just feels like something is going to happen."

  She told me later about a ten o'clock gig at the Roxy. I went to the Roxy at 9:30pm and all of a sudden they won't let me in. I was on the Guns N' Roses list, but Guns N' Roses had already played. And I was like, "what do you mean they already played? They're going on at 10!" It turned out that they had traded with the band that was supposed to open for them, so Guns N' Roses went on first. I had to buy my way in and I went backstage to look for Axl. I didn't see him, but I heard he was there somewhere. I found him in a corner and he was sitting by himself. Everyone was afraid to get near him. Here's this mysterious guy and people are afraid of him. So, I went back downstairs and watched this other band get onstage and play.

  Then, Axl gets onstage and sings a song with L.A. Guns. After that show he looked a bit more approachable. So I went up to him and I said, "Hey! I came to see you guys you play, but I missed the show and I didn't know you were going on at 8:00pm." He explained to me that they had traded and I asked him when they were playing their next show. And he said, "We're playing the Troubadour in a couple weeks." So, that was my introduction to Guns N' Roses.

  I told my secretary, "Look on this day, there is nothing more important than getting to the Troubadour an hour-and-a-half before the show, because I want to talk to the guys before the show." I went to the Troubadour, I went backstage to see Axl and Slash and the guys. I said, "Look, you won't see me after the concert because I won't be here after the show. There are a lot of people here and it's kind of crazy and you have to understand that when I go to a concert like this, lots of people like to watch and see if I like it or not. It gets really crazy. If you see me leave early, that's a good sign. If I hang out for the whole show, then that's probably a bad sign. So you won't see me after the show, but I'll call you."

  SLASH Guns basically caused enough mayhem in L.A. to get noticed, for one by Tom Zutaut. It was totally by word-of-mouth that he came down. He was genuinely impressed with the band and he had a background; he knew rock n' roll. He had a good ear for music and that's why he was the top A&R guy over at Geffen.

  TOM ZUTAUT I was fed up with all the other A&R people in the industry not using their own ears. Basically, they were watching and following me to see if I got excited about a band and then making competing offers. So with Guns N' Roses, I felt there was something vibing and I hadn't even seen them play. But
I saw Axl backstage; he had some kind of star charisma going on and he was unbelievable when he got onstage. I thought this guy could be a huge star, like a Jim Morrison kind of character. I had already felt that from seeing him backstage and then seeing him onstage for one song. I had a feeling about it. So rather than create some crazy situation where ten labels were after the band, I figured my best bet was to go in, make sure the rest of the band was as good as he is and then split. But I wanted the band to understand that, so they didn't feel disrespected.

  I'll never forget it. There were five or six A&R people lined up in the same spot. The band starts the set and people are looking for cotton and cigarette butts. It was literally the loudest show I had ever seen in an L.A. club. It was unbelievably loud. It was ear splitting. I was definitely feeling some pain in my ears, but I wasn't going to be a wimp and put cigarette butts in my ears or tissue paper or whatever, which a lot of people did. The kids loved it, but it was way too loud for the industry professionals. After about two songs, a bunch of people walked out. They didn't leave, they just were in pain because it was so loud. There were a bunch of A&R people standing by the door sort of half watching and half just being outside so they could spare their ears the decibels. And a guy that worked at Elektra Records at the time, which was my former label where I worked when I signed Motley Crue and Dokken and Metallica, was standing there. He replaced me so it was sort of ironic. As I was leaving, he looked at me and he said, "Tom, you're leaving early!" And I said, "Yeah. It's so friggin' loud in there and they're not that good," and I walked out. I thought that was pretty funny and I think he actually believed me. Although after I made an offer to the band he came in with a competing offer.