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Explaining those norms might or might not make a difference; you’d never know. Axl is superintelligent, yet at the same time he lives in a place where the logic that governs other people does not apply. He doesn’t ever realize what an inconvenience his choices might be for others. He means no harm; it’s just the way he is. It’s very hard to try to even explain it. He is as sincere as someone can possibly be, but it comes down to the fact that Axl, regardless of the world around him, insists on existing according to rules that hold true only in the universe that he has created around himself. That Alice Cooper show was a clear example: I remember being really angry and Izzy felt the same way that night. But as pissed off as we were, sitting there in that bathroom, discussing how we were determined to find a new singer, when he showed up, Axl still won us over. Slowly but surely, we found it in our hearts to just let it go. Of course it didn’t hurt that we’d been doing smack… we were so loaded that after a while none of the drama seemed to matter anyhow.

In any case, that was then and this certainly was now. Apparently, Alice had gotten a kick out of that performance of ours; I think he’d seen a bit of his younger self in us. Alice was supporting Raise Your Fist and Yell, and hadn’t had the best year: he’d almost been killed onstage when his famous guillotine stage prop malfunctioned and nearly decapitated him. Alice had cleaned up his act at the time, too, so aside from a few rowdy members of his band, we were the only obviously bad apples to be found on that outing. We set off on a leg of his U.S. tour with yet another entry-level, burned-out, unforgettable bus driver. This guy was a long-haired musician who liked to talk about the music he was always writing, and as much as he was “fun” to hang out with, he consistently did stuff that made life harder than it had to be for us. The biggest problem was that he always wanted to go out with us, so instead of parking the bus in one place and letting us find our way to wherever we wanted to go, he’d offer to take us there on the bus and inevitably got us lost on side streets. Needless to say, he didn’t last long.

When we first came on the tour Alice was superkind and supportive. He welcomed us on board with no agenda; there was no hierarchy and no bullshit. He genuinely liked our band and what we were about—and we completely looked up to him. We took lots of pictures with him, put it that way. It was an interesting transition: being around Mötley, we’d seen a large-scale production going on and a predictable performance every night. With Alice, it was the same at a whole new level. As much as we’d been fans for years, based on his records and lyrics and persona, it was something else to tour with him. He had a keyboard player, a weight-lifting behemoth of a guitar player, as well as Kip Winger on bass, another guitar player, and a drummer. He was backed up by a bunch of hired session guys and had all kinds of props, and it was interesting to watch how Alice interacted with all of it. He had an eight-piece band, backup singers, actors, costume changes, …it certainly was a show.

He also had a snake, which I was excited to see. But Alice wasn’t a snake collector; he didn’t have one at home, it was more of a prop as well. He did have a guy there to take care of it, a guy that wasn’t very knowledgeable about how to care for this poor boa constrictor as we traveled across the frozen Midwest, so I gave him some tips. Regardless, we kicked ass on that tour.

Because of the production, we were right up against the front of the stage, right up against the audience, and that was a catalyst. Those shows were dynamic, with minimal lighting and venues smaller than those on the Mötley tour; all in all, it was a huge and swift departure from where we’d just been. That was the one theme that characterized this time for us: we changed gears constantly. Drastic as they were, those changes forced us to learn a lot in a short amount of time. If we didn’t adapt we would fail; it was that simple. For a band stuck in its ways, it was good for us to be forced into all of these different situations with no warning.

WE WERE IN CENTRAL MICHIGAN IN some nowhere town; I was having a drink at the hotel bar when our tour manager told me that the gig was canceled because something had happened with Alice. A few hours later we learned that his father had died; and for the next few days we waited in the hotel bar wondering if the tour would go on. The second night of that vigil, Steven Adler completely lost it. Steven could get very emotional at the drop of a hat, and his way of showing it was complete and utter defiance. In this little town, there was a sports bar, a restaurant or two, the hotel, and no other distraction for miles. Duff was with him that night; they had gone out drinking and for some reason Steven got so worked up that he punched a street lamp. He broke his hand entirely and was sidelined for something like six weeks.

Alan had booked us four headlining dates back in L.A. that were to follow the Alice tour weeks and we realized that Steven wasn’t going to be out of his cast in time, so we put out the word that we needed a drummer to sit in for a few shows. Within a day, we hooked up with Fred Curry, the drummer for Cinderella, and he was great in a pinch. Fred learned all of the songs right away, and we rehearsed with him in the lobby of the hotel in Michigan; Izzy and Duff and I on our guitars while Fred played along on drum pads.

After a few days, we heard that Alice had canceled the tour, so we flew back to L.A. and prepared for the Perkins Palace shows. We were all resenting Steve at the time; we had no sympathy for the fact that he’d woken up the morning after the street-lamp incident with a cast on his arm, knowing he’d gotten too drunk and done something stupid. He’d fucked up—he had to deal with the consequences.

When we got back to L.A., Steven and I moved into the Franklin Apartments, furnished short-term units on Hollywood and Franklin, for the few nights before we did the four Perkins Palace shows in Pasadena and for a while after that. When I checked in, I had Sally in tow. She’d shown up at the Drury Hotel in Missouri—which we called the Dreary Hotel in Misery—with a green card and was all set to stay with me for a while. She is from Sheffield and is a real English girl, so she was out of her element immediately, touring with us, but she survived. She and I moved into a place right next door to Steven.

We had a few weeks before those four Perkins Palace shows went down in Pasadena, and as usual, given a few days freedom in L.A., I dove headlong into lunar activities. One of those nights Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield from Metallica came over and we did some outrageous partying. Sally was there and I remember that there was a girl that James wanted to fuck and I let him take her into my bedroom. They were in there for a while and I had to get in there to get something, so I crept in quietly and saw James head-fucking her. He was standing on the bed, ramming her head against the wall, moaning in that thunderous voice of his, just slamming away, and bellowing, “That’ll be fine! That’ll be fine! Yes! That’ll be fine!”

Steven, Sally, and I caroused extensively every single night. One time we went to the Cathouse, which had relocated to Highland and Melrose, and that night we ran into the infamous Mark Mansfield as well as Nikki Sixx. Our little group all got together: I was on an antiheroin kick for the moment, so I wasn’t interested, but Mark had some junk, and he, Steve, and Nikki wanted to get high. I wasn’t even privy—they left to head back to Steve’s place to go do it.