Array Slash - Slash

The tour started in July and lasted for two months, and I couldn’t have been happier about supporting one of the bands that meant so much to me. Aerosmith’s new album, Permanent Vacation, was the first that was written by outside songwriters and contained the first hits that the band had enjoyed in years, but as much as I didn’t think that the use of songwriters was particularly cool, I was happy to see them resurrected from the dead.

The first night of the Aerosmith tour was tumultuous: it started in Illinois, and while the rest of us showed up early enough to watch them sound-check, Axl was missing in action until half an hour before showtime. I remember Steven Tyler coming up to me and saying, “Hey… so where’s your singer?” It’s become a recurring punch line; it’s his standard greeting whenever he sees me. Axl showed up at the very last minute, which obviously caused tension to be high all around, but we played well enough to make up for it.

We played Giants Stadium on that tour, with Deep Purple on the bill. That stadium is so huge and we had so much room on that stage that we could really run around; we were always good at that. We did a forty-five-minute set and we played “Paradise City” twice because we were shooting it for a video. The crowd just freaked. That stadium can hold eighty thousand, and even though it wasn’t completely full, we’d never played to a crowd that large. The energy was incredible. It was one of those moments when I truly realized how popular we were becoming in the “real” world. It was a moment of clarity.

I remember sound-checking that day; I walked out into the middle of the arena, this huge expanse, and played my guitar, just for a while, to take it all in. We’d walked into so many situations since that first gig in Seattle, and that same chemistry and energy was still there. If anything, we were stadium-worthy from the start; we had an irrefutable way of doing things that needed very little adjusment once we made the leap to a grand scale.

We came offstage and I was on cloud nine, so I went onto our bus and celebrated with about five lines of coke and a few deep tumblers of Jack Daniel’s. Literally the minute after I’d finished my last line, Gene Kirkland, a photographer I knew, burst in and said that he was there to shoot Joe Perry for the cover of Rip Magazine and Joe had requested that I be a part of it. The coke was really hitting me and the Jack wasn’t helping much; I felt like Frosty the Snowman.

I told Gene that I’d be there in a few and pounded as much Jack as I could stomach, then I tore the bus apart searching in vain for my sunglasses. I checked myself in the mirror, took a few deep breaths, and headed outside as nonchalantly as possible. I strolled over to Joe trying not to twitch, hoping that my smile looked more relaxed than it felt. Coke makes you paranoid and this particular batch was some speedy New Jersey, stepped-on Sopranos coke so it was hard to hide the effects. I’d met Joe before but I did not want to be around him all coked up. Every time I see the resulting picture of us, I have to laugh, because anyone who knows me at all knows that I never smile like that or ever hold myself quite so stiffly. Somehow I managed to keep my jaw in line but it wanted to swing like a barn door in the wind.

We did a pretty good job of behaving ourselves that tour, but Steven Tyler was convinced that we were high out of our minds all of the time. He was so inquisitive about what we were up to and what we’d done the night before. He’d come over to us every afternoon and say, in that rhythmic, rapid-fire delivery of his, “What’d you do last night? You get high? You fuck some girls?” It got hard to live up to his expectations.

The only near disaster that we had with Aerosmith was at a venue somewhere in the Midwest. There was a long drive from the hotel to the venue, Axl was running late, and the first car was full, so I decided to wait for him. The other guys got there fine, but we got totally stuck in a line of cars heading into the venue on a two-lane highway. We were fucked, just crawling along, and the clock was ticking. Axl was cool but I was completely anxious. We somehow managed to get a police escort and make it with five minutes to spare. I remember walking into the dressing room, throwing on a new shirt, and running up to the stage. I passed Joe Perry in the hallway and he was standing there with one leg out the way he does, just watching me, with this slight grin as if to say, “Ha-ha. This time you made it.”

In hindsight, it was clear that despite Aerosmith’s radio hits, we were soon the main attraction. It happened very fast for us, thanks to MTV’s chronic rotation of “Sweet Child o’ Mine”: within a few weeks of the single’s release in early June, it hit number one and we became the most popular band in the nation. We heard things from management, but it didn’t sink in with me until Rolling Stone showed up on tour: they’d sent a writer out to do a cover story on Aerosmith, but after a few days of watching the crowds’ reaction and seeing us play live, the magazine opted to put us on the cover instead. By the end of the tour, we were absolutely fucking huge, generating the kind of excitement that pretty much baffled me night after night.

That said, we were still a scrappy group of gypsies without a clue, so Aerosmith’s manager, Tim Collins, sent us off with a parting gift that we desperately needed: luggage. They gave each of us an aluminum Halliburton suitcase that I still have today. Tim realized that we were each the type who might stay on the road for ten more years without a proper suitcase—and he wasn’t wrong. I remember how grateful and excited I was to have it; I ran over to Joe and Steven’s dressing room and thanked them from the bottom of my heart. They looked at me like I was crazy; now I realize that they probably had no idea that management had sent us a gift at all.

WE SHOT HALF OF OUR THIRD VIDEO during our tour with Aerosmith. The live footage seen in “Paradise City” was captured in two locations; the first was Giants Stadium in New Jersey and the second was at the Monsters of Rock Festival at Castle Donnington in the English Midlands a month later on August 20, 1988. By the time we got to Donnington, “Sweet Child” and “Welcome to the Jungle” had charted around the world and our album had broken the Top Ten. At that show we experienced a frenzied reaction like nothing we’d seen before. The festival broke attendance records that year, surpassing the hundred-thousand mark. There couldn’t have been a better place for us to record live footage… except for the fact that two people were trampled to death at the front of the stage during our set.

The audience was crazy, just this sea of surging people. Axl stopped the set a number of times in an effort to control the crowd, but there was no calming them down. We had no idea that anyone was actually hurt let alone killed; after we’d done the gig and were celebrating in a nearby pub, Alan came in completely distraught and gave us the news. It was horrible; none of us knew what to do: something that had been a cause for celebration a moment before had become a tragedy. It was the first of many strange, surreal, and contradictory times.

LESS THAN A MONTH LATER, GUNS PERFORMED “Welcome to the Jungle” at the MTV Video Music Awards and took home the Best New Artist Award. I’d like to know where that trophy is today; I think I left it in a cab, which, now that I think about it, is as much as it deserved. Then on September 24, 1988—nearly a year and month, to the day, after its release— Appetite for Destruction began a three-week sit-in at the very top of Billboard ’s album chart. And so began our reign of terror. The truth is, all we ever cared to do was top the bullshit hair metal bands that enjoyed undue success for their subpar existence. We—well, I at least—never wanted to be Madonna; that kind of pop-star reality had nothing to do with what our band was about, according to me. But before I knew it, that’s where we landed almost overnight.