Slash: The Autobiography

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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