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We didn’t have to confront him at all; he had a serious scare one night that set him straight. Whatever it was, Izzy got too shook up to even talk about it. He just called his dad, who came out from Indiana, and took him back home, and that’s how and where Izzy got clean. He’s been clean ever since.

The rest of us continued to work, and once we had some material and were communicating with Axl again, he let us know that he and Izzy wanted to write the next album in Indiana. I couldn’t imagine why; both of them had left Indiana as soon as they could to come to L.A. and they never seemed too fond of the idea of going back. In any case, our situation was so unpredictable that I wasn’t going to move to a wheat field with no guarantee that we’d even get anything done. Their whole intention was to get away from the distractions of L.A. and I respected that; Axl wanted us to go somewhere where we could have our privacy to focus on writing. I wanted to do the same, but at least be in a major metropolitan area, so in the end we agreed on Chicago. It was close enough to Indiana that Izzy could join us when he felt ready, or go back there easily if he felt like his sobriety was threatened.

Doug Goldstein and I went to Chicago to scope out where we would live and rehearse. We chose the Cabaret Metro, the famous rock club on the north side of the city: it’s a concert space that houses a separate club called the Smart Bar in the basement, and also has a theater upstairs. It was perfect; we took over the theater and when we were done for the day, the coolest bar in the city was waiting for us downstairs. We rented out a two-unit, brown brick apartment building a few miles down the road on Clark Street, right by the elevated train, to live in.

We all moved out there, with our techs, Adam Day and Tom Mayhew; our production manager; and our new security guard, Earl. Duff, Steven, and the crew guys moved in downstairs, and Axl, Izzy, Earl, and I lived upstairs. That was fine by me because I had the place to myself for the most part—it took Axl more than a month to join us, and Izzy was there for less than an hour. It takes Axl an indeterminate amount of time to decide what he is going to do from the inception of an idea to the point of carrying it out, which always keeps things interesting. All in all what we were doing wasn’t business as usual for us, but it was a start.

For a while, it didn’t matter to me that we’d just relocated the entire band in order to satisfy the only two guys who weren’t there because by then Duff and I were such enthusiastically social boozers that the miles of bars along North Clark Street were a new playground for us—all within walking distance. My personal consumption at that point was a half-gallon bottle of Stoli per day, plus whatever I consumed when I was out at night. I’d wake up in the morning and fill a Solo cup 85 percent full with vodka, ice, and a bit of cranberry juice. I called it breakfast of champions. Duff was in the same league, though I believe that he made a fresh drink, packed with ice, before he went to bed and left it next to his pillow; that way the ice would keep it cold enough while he slept that it would still be nice and fresh first thing in the morning.

I’d sit on the floor sipping my breakfast and watching TV each day until the rest of the guys were ready to go rehearse. We’d jam at the Metro for most of the afternoon, sometime into the evening, and then spend the rest of the night in and out of bars. We were more or less hanging out and writing riffs here and bits of songs there. When we were working we were focused, but we could never complete any of our ideas without all of the players in attendance.

I’ve learned that it is essential for everybody to be present at all times—our producer Brendan O’Brien insisted on it during the writing of Velvet Revolver’s last album, Libertad . Everyone in Guns was focused at this point—even Axl—but we didn’t have very good group skills and had no idea at all how to govern our work situation. The desire was there, but we needed regulation . If one of us didn’t show up, we’d work anyway, which was one of many things that held us back from getting it together properly. For one thing, Duff and I were intent on drinking all the time and considered that normal because it never interfered with work, but we were so ferocious about it outside of rehearsal that it was off-putting to Izzy. He couldn’t be around that kind of behavior then and he’s like that to this day. We weren’t aware of it at the time, and even if we were, we might not have cared—all we knew was that he wasn’t showing up to work and we couldn’t accept that. I’m sure Axl had his reason for doing things his way, too. But we didn’t have a good line of communication among us about any of these issues, so the end result was serious misunderstanding. Since these points of interest were simply never discussed, since there was never a conversation about how to adjust our game plan to take everyone’s needs into account, we kept doing things the way we had in the past, which considering that we’d all changed caused us serious internal tension.

Instead of coming up with a new method to account for our issues, all of the problems just snowballed. This was when a good manager might have turned the situation around, but we didn’t have one. Throughout this process, Doug and our management were useless; they didn’t seem to want to take the time to deal. Alan was still in charge, and Doug was our day-to-day man, and he wasn’t doing anything but enabling us. Their attitude was that we were supposed to know how to do this shit ourselves. And we did; we accomplished creatively left to our own devices… but only when we were living together as one, living five similar lives. Now that we’d become a band who had to set up shop, and we were coming from different perspectives, that dynamic was gone. There is no one to blame; we did the best we could.

We’d had to get going without Axl there, and we found his absence disrespectful, and that disrespect built up into such great animosity that when he did finally show up, the rest of us were pretty resentful. We were an out-of-control band with some some semblance of integrity who had lost their ability to properly channel it all: for the life of us, we just could not get on the same page. We also made no effort to pursue the adult way of handling things. I wouldn’t call it innocence or naïveté looking back, but we all played a hand in mixing the pot. None of us stood back and took a moment to ask one another or ourselves, “How do we do this? How can we get everyone together and working and satisfied?” We needed to be clearheaded about it; if one thing didn’t work, we’d need to keep trying. But we didn’t do that. Outside of the fact that our management didn’t care to take the lead, the biggest catalyst to the demise of the band was the lack of communication among the members.

Admittedly, I was pigheaded; I didn’t want to always feel like I was bending over backward. I thought of us as equals, and I was making a conscientious effort to get things going, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to understand what Axl was expecting, or the patience to sit down and talk it out with him. As with any relationship, when someone lands on your bad side, it gets hard to be empathetic. My guard by then was way up. With all of that going on, it was much easier to just enjoy the summertime in Chicago because the bars were mighty inviting.

In our plentiful free time, Duff and I also did our personal best to stay in shape. I had one of my BMX bikes out there and I used to ride it between the apartment and the rehearsal space, bunny-hopping over everything in sight, riding on the sidewalk. It was a good workout. Some days Duff and I even went to the gym, usually just after our morning vodkas. We’d go down to one of those big public YMCAs with our security guard, Earl, to pump iron. We’d be down there in our jeans, doing sets between cigarette breaks—it was invigorating. We’d usually cool down afterward with cocktails at a sports bar. It didn’t matter how big we were back home or how many records we’d sold or the shows we’d played; in Chicago, we were nobodys. We were just a couple of regular Joes to our fellow bar patrons; and there is not a bigger haven for regular Joes in America than the sports bars of North Clark Street.