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A long time ago someone had taught me that the best cure for a hangover was another drink—the hair of the dog that bit you. That became my philosophy, because it worked; the only problem was that during this period, the parties never seemed to stop, and so began a cycle. I woke up with a hangover every day, so I started every day with a fresh drink, and then drank through to the next party that night. In no time, the parties blurred: I was drinking all night into the next day and into the next night into the night after that. There really wasn’t a day when I took time off from drinking because there was generally a party to get to every day; it was all part of my daily routine.

We were a gang of heathens who thought we knew everything but in reality we knew nothing.

ON THE CULT TOUR, WE STAYED IN cheaper hotels than they did, but that didn’t stop us from wreaking havoc at theirs. Often, the night ended with Duff and me being kicked out either by the hotel staff or the band themselves, and being faced with the challenge of finding our way back to wherever the fuck our hotel was. One night I was so drunk that I passed out on a couch in the lobby of The Cult’s hotel and Duff left me there. I woke up at around five a.m. after just having wet myself in my sleep. To make matters worse, I didn’t have my hotel-room key and had no idea where we were staying. The staff at the hotel would not help me at all, probably because I was soaked in pee and smelled like a bar. I headed out into the Canadian cold; it was freezing, and I wandered around, just hoping I’d find my way. The only hotel that I could see once I got outside was a long walk away, but lucky for me it turned out to be ours. I was even luckier to be wearing my leather pants, because I wasn’t as frozen as I might have been. That’s a wonderful side effect of leather pants: when you pee yourself in them, they’re more forgiving than jeans.

I was just so excited to be on tour anywhere with an actual tour bus, no matter how shitty or unreliable it was. As a band, we were like the scrappy underdog team in a sports movie; we had inferior gear, and nothing but the clothes on our backs, but we had enough heart to win the championship—we were a rock-and-roll version of Slap Shot . We were even playing in hockey rinks in Canada: the tour started out in the eastern provinces and continued on to the West Coast, down into the American Pacific Northwest, south through California, then across Arizona and Texas into Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta region. It was a trek.

In Canada, nothing shocked us but we shocked everyone. Too often I felt like we were the Blues Brothers in that scene when they show up to play the redneck bar and they’re pummeled with beer bottles. We had the attitude to back it up whenever we found ourselves unexpectedly in a hostile environment, which was good… because a few times we did.

Even when we didn’t, all across Canada, we got weird looks wherever we showed up. We thought we were normal, but I could see pretty clearly that the way we carried ourselves was not normal to these people at all—or other people for that matter. We were a gang of heathens who thought we knew everything but in reality we knew nothing. I imagine that The Cult looked at us like a volatile piece of equipment: we were interesting to some of them because we had a unique timbre; but we were a machine that might crap out at any moment.

Cult singer Ian Astbury was really entertained by how explosive we were: he enjoyed it; in his mind, we were ferocious and really hungry and all of the qualities that seasoned rock people envy. He was right: we were all that and more—we were like an M80 in a Coke can. Cult guitarist Billy Duffy, on the other hand, just seemed like, “Yeah, whatever.” He either wasn’t interested or wasn’t buying it. In any case, more often than not, they’d stop by to take a look at our antics.

WE GOT UP THERE AND DID OUR GIGS every night on that tour, but the truth is that I never felt satisfied doing those shows. We had yet to become a solid touring entity; we weren’t seasoned pros just yet and that ate at me. It probably made us entertaining because we were so loose around the edges: we showed up with no experience; just the clothes on our backs, the gear on the stage, and a handful of songs to play for people who had never heard of us. I think we were the only ones who knew we had a record out.

We played hockey rinks, theaters, and a few small festival dates with a handful of bands on the bill. And as much as I was happy to be out there touring, which I thought was the greatest thing ever, I couldn’t get over the fact that it wasn’t quite as good as it should be. We never got there in my mind because our presence on a large stage just wasn’t up to par. But that’s just me being overly critical, which is definitely a part of my character. I was unable to write those gigs off like I imagine the Sex Pistols would have.

That said, it felt like a homecoming when The Cult tour arrived at the Long Beach Arena. I remember rolling in there late the night before and staring at the building, completely starstruck. I’d seen Ozzy, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Billy Idol, and countless others there and for so long, I’d thought playing there meant you’d arrived .

I’d even seen Ratt there against my will: as I mentioned, Yvonne had dated their singer, Stephen Pearcy, back when they were still called Mickey Ratt. When she and I were together, the group headlined there and she was still so proud of him that we had to go, even though he was a complete moron. She was thrilled that Ratt had made it from living together in one cheap apartment to headlining the Long Beach Arena. And now I had and I can’t lie; when we got that gig, I had a tremendous feeling of accomplishment. To a big touring band, in the grand scheme of things, playing to five thousand or so at the Long Beach Arena didn’t mean shit—but to us at the time, it was everything .

It was an appropriate homecoming, too. We pulled into the arena and parked the bus on the street outside of the hotel. Somehow we managed to pick up two girls who were right there on the sidewalk, and a couple of the guys took them into the back of the bus. Then we checked in to the hotel and I remember sipping my drink while looking out across the parking lot at the arena, where that building loomed on the horizon, larger than life. The next day our friends from L.A. came out, and when we went on, they gave us more attention than all of the Canadian crowds combined had done. It was great, we were home .

These were the type of any-band-anytime equal-opportunity groupies that were down to fuck everyone all the time.

WE TOOK TO THE TOURING ROUTINE PRETTY naturally; we were off to the races, right away. We were built for it; we went through the paces without trying too hard. When we got to Arizona, I believe it was, we experienced groupies for the first time; not the kind that wanted to fuck us because they were fans of ours—we’d already had our share of those back home. These were the type of any-band-anytime equal-opportunity groupies that were down to fuck everyone all the time.

Overall, groupies were usually between seventeen and twenty-two; if they were in their mid-twenties, they’d most likely been around the block a few times—maybe too many—and there were those older than that, which often involved some bizarre mother-daughter combos. But in a way, the groupies in the sticks were more understandable than the groupies in L.A.: culture was at a minimum where these girls lived, and they had devoted themselves to getting as big a piece of it as they could when it passed through town. It was almost respectable.

Whenever we weren’t performing, Axl holed up in the back lounge, resting his voice and sleeping. Sometimes when we’d have a day off, he’d sleep back there instead of checking in to the hotel. Still, he’d come out every so often to hang out with the rest of us and that was always cool. Everything was really good at this point—put it this way, we got on stage on time. The camaraderie was high; we were the perfect bunch of guys for touring together… not that I had anything else to compare it to. But we were all quite content.