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Duff had told me about the show earlier that day.

“Hey, man,” he said. “So the guy playing guitar in my band has alleged that he is like one of your best friends from junior high.”

“Oh yeah?” I had no idea who he might mean.

“Yeah, really,” he said. “His name is Dave Kirschner. He swears up and down that you were buds, I just wanted to let you know, he’s in my band.”

It was true, Dave and I were buddies in junior high and high school; he used to come to my Tidas Sloan shows before he even picked up a guitar. Dave is a supercool guy and I’d always thought the best of him all these years. The last time I saw him he was working at Tower Video when Guns N’ Roses was just taking off, at the time he had a pretty serious drinking habit going. He worked in the basement between the music and video shops, boxing and unloading the product, just drinking hard down there apparently. He’d gotten it together, however, and by that time he was fifteen years sober. I was kind of curious to see him again.

The overwhelming eighties vibe at Metal Shop got to me pretty quick that night, but I got the chance to say hello to Dave before I left. It was really good to see him. After Keith left, Duff suggested that Dave come down to jam, and I was all for it. We clicked instantly; Dave brought a cool vibe to what we were doing. There was no deliberation; that was it, it was a perfect fit. He brought a new dimension to the sound of the band as it was and an interesting guitar style that complemented mine as mine did his. The lineup was now Duff, Matt, Dave, and me, and the music was coming very naturally. We just had that age-old nagging problem: no singer. It is the story of my life, isn’t it?

For a group of seasoned, professional musicians you’d think that we’d have a clue of how to find a singer. No chance. We looked at one another with no idea of the proper process for a group like ours to find one.

“Should we put an ad in The Recycler ?” I asked at rehearsal one day.

“Man, I don’t know,” Duff said. “I guess so. We don’t know any singers.”

“This feels like the time that we first hooked up,” I said. “When Steven and I first met you and we had a band. We wrote some great shit but finding a singer was just impossible.”

“You’re right. We’re at square one,” Duff said. “That’s pretty sad, man. What the fuck? I guess we should put an ad in the paper.”

Before we did that, we thought it would be a good idea to make a list of every good living rock singer, regardless of whether they were in a band or not. Our list was pretty short: among others, there was Sebastian Bach, Ian Astbury, and Steve Jones. There was one other name that everyone in the band seemed keen on: Scott Weiland… but as far as we knew he was still in Stone Temple Pilots.

After we made our list and realized that almost everyone on it was otherwise accounted for, we did put an ad in The Recycler as well as the Music Connection . We even went so far as to place an ad in the Hollywood Reporter . But the most significant thing we did was put a blurb on MTV.com. We could never have done that in the old days and perhaps I was naive about the impact that it would have. I soon learned my lesson: that one blurb set off a barrage of CD and cassette-tape demos sent our way. They arrived on a daily basis, as our little beginning of a band became public knowledge.

Our “project” started being reported on the radio, blogged about on the Internet; all of a sudden we’d generated a lot of attention just by trying to find ourselves a singer relatively on the down-low. We began receiving two hundred submissions a week from around the world, all of them pouring into my P.O. box. I’d show up to collect these huge boxes of shit, and the guys at the mailbox place, who’ve watched this band from that phase on out, have given me the knowing wink ever since.

I GOT A RANDOM CALL ONE DAY.

“Hello?”

“Hey, what are you doin’? It’s Izzy.”

“Hey, man, I’m good,” I said. “I’m actually going to rehearsal. I’ve been working with Duff and Matt and this guy Dave. We’ve got something really good going.”

“Hey, cool. I’ll come down.”

It was classic Izzy; he’s so elusive, he’ll pop up somewhere out of the blue, hang out intensely, then disappear for a couple of months. He came down to the studio with his guitar and amp and he brought a couple of demos. We jammed with him for two weeks and it was great: we wrote about twelve songs that would have been the best Guns N’ Roses record, hands down. We talked about the old days, we shared war stories; we laughed a lot and we had a really good time.

At the same time we continued the quest for a singer, which didn’t interest Izzy one bit. Whenever we brought it up, he wanted nothing to do with the conversation in any way; he wanted to distance himself as much as possible. He didn’t actually want to be in the band, if that’s what we intended; he just wanted to hang out. Discussing where to find a lead singer was too much for him. He was, in general, very anti–lead singer. I can’t imagine why.

The singer thing had been a problem for me in every band I’d ever joined, and I couldn’t believe that after all of this time, it plagued me still.

“I got an idea,” Izzy said at rehearsal one day. “Know what we should do? Duff and I will sing and we will just do a club tour in a van.”

He said it in Izzy’s way, which means that it was hard to tell if he was serious or kidding.

I was dead set on finding a solid front man regardless, because I was taking this project very seriously. I was getting sick of the fact that we weren’t getting out there and playing. I wasn’t going to let this situation go until it came to fruition. But I have to admit, I contemplated that idea… for a minute.

We called legendary A&R man John Kalodner to ask for his advice as far as singers went. John came down to see us rehearse and he thought that we were the best thing since sliced bread… but he told us that he didn’t know any good singers who were available.

Izzy suggested that we go track a few of the songs we had worked out at Rumbo, which we did. At the time I wondered what Izzy was thinking: in my mind, what we were doing with him was just fucking around and having a good time, with no expectation of where it was going. At the same time I was intent on pursuing this, as was Duff and Matt, so I wasn’t sure why Izzy would want to take it to the next level by suggesting the studio.

In any case, the songs we did together were great, and I wasn’t going to put an end to that. The three of us had also been listening to the demos that were trailing in. We’d found one that we were curious about: this guy named Kelly from Florida. We flew him out to try a vocal on a track or two, and as soon as he showed up in the studio, Izzy ducked out. There weren’t any hard feelings or anything, he just had to go and said his good-byes.

THAT SINGER KELLY DIDN’T WORK OUT but he was a step in the right direction. Still, months went by without us getting any closer to finding the right match. I hoped to find a diamond in the rough, some unknown talent out there. I told Gilby, who at the time was hanging at Mates every day because he was producing a band called the Bronx. He thought we were crazy.

“You’re never gonna find a singer,” he said, smirking. “With the level you’re at, you just can’t do that. You can’t just look for raw talent; that’s nowhere near your level. There are only so many singers around who are even worth considering—and we know all of them!”

I wasn’t going to be discouraged; I persevered. We had endless tapes coming in and there had to be something of value in there—or so I thought. We rehearsed five days a week: three hours were spent writing and the last two every day were spent listening to the mountain of tapes that came in. We listened to all of them . It was grueling. More than that, it was discouraging. I am amazed that we actually stuck it out as a band at all: we held it together for ten months doing that. I’m not sure that I can explain how bleak it got. That is, after all, why we listened to those tapes after we rehearsed. Usually they were so bad that we’d need to sleep it off just to be able to start fresh again the next day.