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But he couldn’t handle us. We never even got to properly meet him. He came to our rehearsal space and we were playing “Mr. Brownstone,” at jet-engine decibel levels. Izzy and I had just gotten brand-new Mesa Boogie stacks and I was playing a new guitar: it was a Les Paul that had belonged to seventies blues guitarist Steve Hunter. I’d traded my BC Rich for it at Albert and Howie Huberman’s place, Guitars R Us. That store was an institution for every L.A. musician who couldn’t afford Guitar Center, it was the musician’s pawnshop. It was where I got rid of all of my shit and got new stuff. Or, when the money dried up, it was where I sold my equipment for cash to score more smack.

In any case, we were playing “Mr. Brownstone” so brutally loud that Werman walked out immediately. He came in with his assistant, paused in the doorway, then turned around and disappeared. We finished the song and I went to the door to see if they were outside and found an empty street.

“I guess it must have been a little too loud,” I said to the other guys.

We shrugged it off, but I was bummed because I thought we sounded great. Then again I was used to people not getting it.

Guns was the type of snarling beast that thrived in pits like that.

The most well-known figure that considered working with us was Paul Stanley of Kiss, who was looking for the right band to launch a side gig behind the mixing board. Izzy, Duff, and I couldn’t have cared less; we told Zutaut that we had no idea what Paul Stanley could bring to the equation. Steven, of course, was beside himself—Kiss were his heroes, so we figured we’d let Steven have his jollies and agreed to the meeting. The process began with Paul coming down to our apartment to “discuss music.” By this time heroin had become a daily thing, so when Paul arrived, Izzy and I were doing all that we could to keep from nodding out; just barely keeping it together enough so that it wasn’t obvious… or so we thought. Izzy and I parked ourselves on the couch, and since we didn’t have a chair in the living room, Paul sat on the floor next to Steven and Axl.

“First things first,” he said. “I wanna rewrite ‘Welcome to the Jungle.’” According to Paul, the song had real potential, but it lacked an impactful structure. What it needed was a chorus that was more memorable, more singsong, more anthemic—in a word, more like a Kiss song.

“ Ugh ,” I grunted under my breath. As far as I was concerned, that was the end of our relationship. He was the epitome of the guy with the nice clothes, the trophy wife, and the nice car “stooping” to our level to tell us what to do. I didn’t take kindly to that.

Paul was persistent, though. We saw him again not long afterward when we played a showcase that Geffen had set up. Basically, Tom arranged it because we needed to play a gig, so it was this industry-only, invite-only “concert.” It took place at Gazzari’s (today it’s the Key Club), which was a venue that we’d never, ever played on the circuit because it was totally against everything we stood for. It was so glam and gay that there were radio ads for it where the owner, Bill Gazzari, proclaimed in his thick East Coast accent, “All my bands got foxy guys in ’em! If they don’t got foxy guys, they don’t play on my stage.” Gazzari’s was where the really plastic glam metal could be found. And we definitely weren’t trying to be foxy. The only time I’d ever even been in there aside from this gig was to see Hollywood Rose back in the day.

Anyway, Paul Stanley attended that show, and he actually bullied the sound engineer into allowing him to man the soundboard and control the mix. We didn’t find out until later, but when we did, I cringed at the thought: Paul Stanley had mixed Guns N’ Roses—at Gazzari’s. Really, how much more cliché could it get? I do remember that we got paid, because I remember counting and dividing our money and saying to Izzy, “I gotta go cop!” That was all that I cared about at the time—and that’s what I did; I took off out of there to meet up with my dealer friend.

Paul still wanted to win us over, so he insisted on coming to our next gig, which we knew once and for all would show him who we really were and what our producer needed to capture. It was a week later, at Raji’s, which was a total dive, probably a twenty-by-twenty-foot room that reeked of beer and piss with a PA that sounded like an outdated console permanently in the red. The stage was a foot high, packed against the farthest wall from the door; the bathrooms were more disgusting than CBGB’s. In other words, it was Guns N’ Roses’ natural habitat. I think in Paul’s mind, he was coming down to prove to us once and for all that he understood where we were coming from. He was going to “hang out” on our “turf,” because, after all, he and Kiss had played dives back in the day. His intentions were good, but I can’t help but think that pretty quickly he realized that where we were coming from was somewhere he hadn’t seen in a long, long time. Guns was the type of snarling beast that thrived in pits like that.

That show was fucking amazing: it was as dirty, muddy, shoddy, and teetering on chaos as Guns ever was in my mind. It was as honest and true as Guns N’ Roses ever got, because

I did a big hit of smack before we went on, which, mixed with the liquor I had already been drinking, made my stomach so rotten that I’d turn around and blow chunks over the back of my amps every five minutes. I had a new guitar tech, Jason, who had to keep jumping out of the way to avoid getting coated. The overwhelming heat in there didn’t help the situation much. The show was so rambunctious, the audience so full of unruly diehards, that Axl ended up getting into a fight with some guy in the front row—he might have smashed him in the head with the base of his mike stand. The whole show was a fucking riot; there was so much energy packed into that tiny little overheated box of a room. It was fucking awesome. There’s a picture of that gig on the inside sleeve of Appetite for Destruction .

I can’t imagine where he stood during the show, but Paul Stanley materialized after the set with his blond-bombshell girlfriend/wife, each of them in outfits that probably cost more than the market value of the entire building. There wasn’t a dressing room at Raji’s; there was a hallway between the side of the stage and the back door with a small set of stairs, where our entire band sat down after we were through playing. Paul and his girlfriend/ wife were so out of place but they tried to sit there with us anyway. We were sweaty and gnarly, and after puking about eight times onstage, I was doing my best not to lose it all over him as he said to me, with his Ivana Trump lady on his arm, “Hmm, well, that was interesting .”

The next day we made it official: I told Tom to let Paul know that we were going to continue our quest for a producer, thank you very much. I’m sorry to say that not long afterward, I retold this story to the L.A. Weekly with an excessive degree of attitude directed at Paul. I meant no harm; I was so enthusiastic about what we were doing that to me everyone who didn’t get it was just wrong . I didn’t even remember insulting Paul publicly and therefore had no qualms about calling him a month or two later to ask for a favor. We’d begun recording, at that point, but I’d pawned my best guitars for dope and I hoped that he would be able to hook me up with some studio-worthy gear via his sponsorship deal with BC Rich.

“Hey, Paul, it’s Slash,” I said. “It’s been a while. How are you, man?”

“I’m good,” he said.

“Hey, listen, I know you’ve got that deal with BC Rich. Do you think you can get me some guitars?”