Array Slash - Slash

I think he wanted me to tell all these girls in his house to go home, but I walked away from that situation thinking that Tidus Sloan, whatever the fuck that meant, was a pretty cool name for a band.

TIDUS SLOAN WAS A PURELY INSTRUMENTAL band because we never found a singer and I certainly wasn’t going to sing myself. Basically, I don’t have the personality to be a front man of any kind; it’s enough of an effort for me to get out there and talk to people at all. All I really want to do is play guitar and be left alone. In any case, Tidus Sloan played early Black Sabbath, early Rush, early Zeppelin, and early Deep Purple without vocals—we were retro before there was a retro.

We rehearsed in Adam’s garage, which drove his mom completely insane. She and the neighbors would complain constantly, which is understandable because we played much too loud for a residential neighborhood. His mom’s name was Shirley and I drew a cartoon in her honor: it was a woman in the doorway of a room screaming, “It’s too loud and I can’t stand the noise!” at the top of her lungs. The floor of the room in the picture is littered with beer cans and on the bed is a kid with long hair playing guitar, totally oblivious.

My caricature of Shirley became the inspiration for my first tattoo, though the figure that I had inked on my arm looks nothing like her—my version has Nikki Sixx hair and huge tits, while the real Shirley favored curlers and was old and fat—though also with big tits. I got that tattoo when I was sixteen; it’s on my right arm and it says Slash underneath it. Adam explained to me later that Shirley’s frequent outbursts were entirely my fault: I had just acquired a Talkbox from Mark Mansfield’s stepmom, which is a sound amplifier that allows a musician to modify the sound of whatever instrument is filtered through it by the movement of his mouth against a clear tube that’s attached to it. Apparently the sounds that I made reminded Shirley of her late husband, who died of throat cancer just a couple years previously. He’d had to speak through an artificial voice box and the sounds I was making were too similar for her to bear. Needless to say I stopped using the Talkbox at her house.

There were a few other guitar players and bands around my high school, like Tracii Guns and his band Pyrhus. I had a moment of envy when I first started playing guitar, before I owned an electric; Tracii had a black Les Paul (a real one) and a Peavy amp, and I’ll never forget how together I thought he was. We would check out each other’s bands at parties and there was definitely a competitive vibe about the whole thing.

In high school I started hanging out with whatever musicians I could find. There were a few guys my age and a few older, left-over Deep Purple dudes, who were irretrievably brain-dead and well past their expiration date to still be hanging out with kids from high school. The best of them was the aforementioned Phillip Davidson: not only did he unintentionally name my first band, but he had a Stratocaster, which was a very big deal, and his parents never seemed to be home. He lived in this beat-up house in Hancock Park that was overgrown with weeds and we’d just party over there all day and all night. We were teenagers throwing keg parties; no parents, just Phillip and his two stoner brothers.

I always wondered where his parents were; it was like the Peanuts cartoon, all kids, no authority figures. It was a mystery to me—I always thought that maybe his parents were coming home at any given moment, but they never did. I felt like the only one who was concerned; Phillip mentioned the existence of his parents, who owned the place, but they never seemed to materialize. There was nowhere they could be hiding either; this was a one-story house with three bedrooms. For all I knew, they could be buried in the backyard, and if they were no one would ever find them because the backyard was piled high with debris.

Phillip used to wander from room to room carrying his joint or cigarette or whatever combination of the two it was, while telling stories that were really long only because he talked really slow . He was a tall lanky guy with a true billy-goat goatee, long auburn hair, and freckles; and he was just stoned like really stoned. I mean, sometimes he would chuckle, but otherwise he was pretty expressionless. His eyes seemed perpetually closed—he was that kind of stoned.

Supposedly Phillip could play Hendrix and lots of stuff on that vintage Strat of his, but I never heard any of it. I never even heard him play anything at all. Whenever I was over there I only remember him putting Deep Purple records on the stereo. He was so burned out that it was just painful to hang out with this guy. I always see the best in people; it doesn’t matter what their fucking malfunction is. But Phillip? I waited in vain for something brilliant to happen, just that small spark in him to ignite a flame that nobody else might see. I waited for two straight years of junior high and never saw it. Nope, nothing. But, he did have a Stratocaster.

I do not like to combine cocaine and guitar.

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, TIDUS SLOAN was pretty functional for a high school band. We played our school amphitheater and plenty of rowdy high school parties, including my own birthday. When I turned sixteen, Mark Mansfield threw a party for me at his parents’ house in the Hollywood Hills and my band was all set to play. For my birthday, my girlfriend, Melissa, gave me a gram of coke and that night I learned a valuable lesson: I do not like to combine cocaine and guitar. I did a few lines just before we went on and I could hardly play a note; it was really embarrassing. It’s been the same the very few times since that I’ve made that mistake: nothing sounded right, I could not find the groove, and I really didn’t want to be playing at all. It felt like I had never played guitar before, or as awkward as the first time I tried to ski.

We did about three songs before I just quit. I learned early to save any kind of extracurriculars for after the show. I can drink and play, but I know my limit; and as for heroin, we’ll get into that later because that’s a whole other can of worms. I did, however, learn enough to know to never carry that kind of habit on the road.

The most extravagant Tidus Sloan gig was at a bat mitzvah deep in the middle of nowhere. Adam, Ron, and I were getting high at the La Brea Tar Pits one night and met some girl who offered us five hundred bucks to play her sister’s party. When she saw that we weren’t that interested, she started dropping the names of many famous people, her “family’s friends,” who were going to be there, Mick Jagger included. We remained skeptical, but over the course of the next few hours, she built this party up to be the biggest happening in L.A. So we packed our equipment and as many friends as we could into our friend Matt’s pickup truck and set off to play this gig. The party was at the family’s house, which was about two hours from Hollywood—about an hour and forty-five minutes further than we expected; it took so long that we didn’t even know where we were by the time we got there. The moment we turned into the driveway, I found it impossible to believe that this house was about to host L.A.’s most star-studded party of the year: it was a small, old-fashioned, grandparents’ home. There were clear vinyl slipcovers on the furniture, blue shag carpet in the living room, and family portraits and china displayed on the wall. For the space available, this place was way overfurnished.