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When we did score, Izzy and I wrote a lot because back then heroin was a great catalyst for us. I thought it was the coolest of all the drugs because it made me feel really at ease with everything; it melted away my inhibitions and insecurities. On smack, I was cool and confident so collaborating was easy. As soon as we’d get high, Izzy and I would start jamming and working out ideas, just trading riffs and chords back and forth. Something always seemed to come out of it naturally, it seemed so inspired.

I HAVE A WAY OF SITTING DOWN WITH the guitar and coming up with these hard-to-play riffs; they’re unorthodox fingerings of simple melodies. It’s my way of getting into playing or finding something interesting to do as opposed to just practicing scales. To this day, I still do it; rather than doing obvious “exercises,” I invent runs of my own design that both loosen up my fingers and keep my ears engaged, because if practicing doesn’t sound good, why bother with it at all.

That is what I was doing one night as Izzy sat down on the floor to join me.

“Hey, what is that?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just fucking around.”

“Keep doing it.”

He came up with some chords and since Duff was there, he came up with a bass line, as Steven planned out his drum beat. Within an hour my little guitar exercise had become something else.

Axl didn’t leave his room that night, but he was just as much a part of the creative process as the rest of us: he sat up there and listened to everything we were doing and was inspired to write lyrics that were complete by the next afternoon. They became an ode to his girlfriend and future first wife, Erin Everly, daughter of Don Everly of the Everly Brothers.

We’d found a rehearsal studio in Burbank called Burbank Studios, which was nothing more than a big warehouse owned by this old Asian couple, which is where we really started to work on the preproduction for Appetite, perfecting the songs we’d already demoed. At our next session, we worked our new song into a complete movement: we wrote a bridge, added a guitar solo, and so it became “Sweet Child o’ Mine.”

That was all fine and well, but we still didn’t have a producer. Tom came up with the idea to try out Spencer Proffer, who’d worked with Tina Turner, Quiet Riot, and W.A.S.P., who Axl liked a lot back in the day, so we went for it. We took our gear down to Pasha Studios, which was where Spencer operated out of at the time and we agreed to work on “Sweet Child” together as a test. Spencer was a great guy; he was actually the one who suggested that the song needed a dramatic breakdown before its ultimate finale. He was right… but we had no idea what we wanted to do there. All of us sat around the control room, listening to it over and over, devoid of a clue.

“Where do we go?” Axl said, more to himself than the rest of us. “Where do we go now?… Where do we go ?”

“Hey,” Spencer said, turning the music down. “Why don’t you just try singing that?”

And so became that dramatic breakdown.

We worked up a solid demo of “Sweet Child,” and worked with Spencer on demos for about half the tunes on Appetite, but by the end of the process we just didn’t feel confident that he was the producer for us, so our quest continued.

IT WASN’T LOOKING GOOD—I’M SURE Tom was at his wit’s end, but right at the breaking point, we found a manager. Technically, we were supposed to be managed by Stiefel and company, whose house we were living in, but since neither Tom nor we had any interaction with them, we continued to take meetings with potential managers. The one that stuck to the wall so to speak was Alan Niven, a guy who knew right away what he was walking into by working with us.

Izzy and I met Alan at a bar and I could barely keep my eyes open sitting there on my stool, but that didn’t seem to bother Alan at all. From the start he thrived on the reckless energy of our band and was excited to get us over the initial hump that had stalled us on our way to recording and touring and becoming a professional entity. I was very jaded and, as I mentioned, I was very paranoid about anyone who aimed to get inside our circle. But I respected Alan before I even met him: he was the architect behind the Sex Pistols’ signing with EMI so I knew that he had skills. He was a charming, raffish New Zealander who took to Izzy right off the bat and knew that we were worth the effort. Alan didn’t try to exert his will in the creative arena—he left that to us—he just did what he did best: marketing and management; that was his forte.

Alan met everyone while we were still working with Spencer down at Pasha and listened to all of the demos we’d done and decided that we should take those takes, add a live audience track, and release it all as a live EP. He thought it was essential for us to get some product out while we still had a strong buzz in the industry; it would keep the excitement alive while we recorded our full-length album.

We came up with the idea of releasing the EP on our own label, which we insisted was financed by Geffen. It would appear to be a “live” EP on an “indie” label but in truth it wouldn’t be either. We called the label Uzi Suicide and the EP Live Like a Suicide . It was untouched demos of four songs we’d been playing since our first rehearsal: Aerosmith’s “Mama Kin,” Rose Tattoo’s “Nice Boys,” and two of our own, “Move to the City” and “Reckless Life.” They’re raw I guess, but if you ask me they still sound pretty fucking good.

So now we had a manager and now we had half an album of “live” tracks and Zutaut was happy. He believed the EP would attract eligible producers. It definitely got us noticed: I remember leaving Alan’s house in Redondo Beach with Duff and hearing “Move to the City” played on KNEC, this great heavy metal station out of Long Beach. The EP was a clear indication of our aesthetic, not to mention our lifestyle, and as it had always been, there weren’t too many easy-to-find like-minded souls. To say the least, it took a few dry runs to find the right guy.

IT WAS AGREED THAT PLAYING A FEW gigs would keep us visible and keep us from losing momentum. I, for one, knew that if there wasn’t any concrete work commitment on the horizon, it was likely that I’d treat every day like a vacation. We went back up to San Francisco to open for Jetboy at the Stone, followed by a gig two nights later opening for Ted Nugent at the Santa Monica Civic Center.

At the time we were still living at the Stiefel house officially, though once we chose Alan as our manager, we began to vacate in anticipation of letting Stiefel know the bad news. Axl moved back to Erin’s, I don’t know where Steven was staying, and Duff was where he’d always been, so Izzy and I became the only full-time residents, living in comfortable squalor in the downstairs back bedroom. It was a gypsylike scene; our friend Danny crashed there much of the time, too, amid the sparsely appointed rooms.

Finding dope in L.A. had become difficult suddenly, so Danny and I scoured the streets regularly looking to score. One of those nights we got lucky and managed to pick up a sizable amount. We were elated; we drove back to the house and stashed it all in a gun-shaped lighter of mine. We hid it in my drawer because the next morning we were off to San Francisco. I saw no reason to bring any along, because in San Francisco, I’d never had a problem scoring top-grade China White.

We packed all the gear in the van we’d rented; Danny and Izzy and I drove up in Danny’s car, and when we got there, Izzy and I went straight to someone’s apartment, where we planned to score our shit. The dealer didn’t get there before the show, so we went and did the gig, which was a blur because all that I could think about was getting my smack afterward. The rest of the band packed up, Danny included, and headed back to L.A., while Izzy and I offered to drive Danny’s car back ourselves because we wanted to score. We went back to the apartment and waited around for the shit to show up. We waited… we waited… we waited… nothing. At that point, we were getting jumpy, and when the dealer finally showed up it was crap—just useless. We looked at each other, both realizing that we were a fuck of a long way from home, and we didn’t have much time before we turned into pumpkins.