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Every night we hung out at Smart Bar, which was very cool, but a much different rock scene than L.A. It was 1990, and that place was all about techno and industrial music like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. We didn’t really gel with people there, because we were clearly of a different variety, but we made a circle of friends anyway. We had dozens of chicks; it was a like a shooting gallery in that place, but eventually I settled on one. Her name was Megan; she was nineteen. Megan lived with her mom and younger brother in a nearby suburb and she was really exotic-looking, a heavy-chested, bubbly, sweet girl.

I began to settle into a cozy little relationship with her, and was getting used to the routine of jamming however long by day and hanging out with her all night. And that is when Axl showed up, which changed the dynamic immediately. Despite the resentment, we were so glad to see him that no one wanted to aggravate the situation by confronting him about his lateness. We started to work with him on the days that he actually came to rehearsal, but we were never quite sure which days those would be. If we’d decide that we’d all start jamming at four p.m. or six p.m., he might show up at eight or nine, or not at all. When he did come down, Axl generally tinkered around on the piano or sat and listened to some of the ideas we’d worked out. All things considered, we managed to produce a few good tunes: “Estranged,” “Bad Apples,” and “Garden of Eden.”

Over all, I found our time in Chicago to be a huge waste, which will always be a point of contention between Axl and I. He seemed to think that we were really getting somewhere and that I was the one who ruined it all. I might have felt differently if he’d been there the whole time, but after almost eight weeks—six of them without him—I felt we didn’t have enough material to show for it, and I was frustrated and unwilling to wait around to see if we’d get it going consistently. The vibe among us was just too dark and not conducive to real creativity. We were also being so frivolous with our money that I couldn’t ignore it: we had moved our entire operation to the Midwest and come up with nothing but a few complete songs and a handful of rudimentary ideas, many of which we’d brought out there with us.

I did try to stay the course once Axl got to town, but two incidents put an end to my time in the Windy City. The first was the night we came home after drinking to find a feast of Italian food on the sidewalk in front of our apartment. I got a bird’s-eye view of the mess because, as I recall, I had insisted on spending the entire night lying on the roof of the car whenever we drove from bar to bar. Our favorite Italian place was right on the corner and apparently Axl had unloaded the band’s entire dinner on a few people who had found out that we were living there and were heckling him from the street. (By the way, this was not the inspiration for the title of The Spaghetti Incident; that came from one of the complaints against the rest of us that Steven listed in his lawsuit—which we’ll get to—after he was fired. I’m not even sure what he claimed… something having to do with Axl throwing spaghetti at him, I believe. I guess that was a theme in those years.)

Anyway, after Axl chucked our dinner at the hecklers, he proceeded to trash the entire kitchen and break every glass item in the apartment. And, as we’d find out a few days later, sometime during his tantrum, Izzy arrived, having driven in from Indiana. He took one look at what was going on from down on the street and turned his car around and left immediately without even entering the building.

I suppose that the rest of us should have noticed that Axl was unhappy and acting out after that first incident, but by then we’d gotten to the point where we just let him do his thing and tuned it out. Who knows, maybe if we listened to what he wanted to do and just complied a bit more he wouldn’t have freaked out so hard. Still, who could fathom what he was unhappy about? He showed up with this very sort-of-bitter attitude that seemed to be coming from a very depressing place. But, to be honest, I was more worried about Steven than Axl by then: he was a huge problem; he was doing tons of blow and his performance had become irregular. I didn’t catch on at first; he kept his coke hidden in the refrigerator in the downstairs apartment where he lived.

We would be hanging out and sharing a bit of blow, but I couldn’t figure out how Steve was always that much more wasted. He’d just get this twinkle in his eye and say, “Hey man… butter tray,” and point at the fridge.

“Yeah, okay, Steve. Sure,” I’d say. I’d go to the refrigerator, fix myself a drink, and come back with nothing remarkable to report. I didn’t think he actually wanted me to look in the butter tray. He was that fucked up that I didn’t take it seriously.

“Did you see?” he’d ask, grinning wildly. He’d just keep pointing at the refrigerator and saying, “Butter tray.”

“Yeah, man, I saw it,” I’d say. “That’s a great refrigerator you’ve got there. Really nice butter tray, man.”

“Butter tray.”

“So, Steven… what are you trying to say?”

Tom Mayhew discovered it eventually: Steven had a steep supply of coke piled up in that butter tray of his.

At this point, I really had no choice but to see that we were all unraveling. No matter how in control I felt I was or thought everyone else was, I realized that Steven was growing irretrievable. As soon as the band ended its stay in Chicago, Steven and I had less and less interaction; he was completely isolated once we got back to L.A. We were tight as a band gangwise, but during our two years on tour, Steve and I developed a distance between us as individuals that grew nothing but worse.

One of the few things we had in common as a band at the time, in Chicago though, was a shared interest in Faith No More’s album The Real Thing . It was the background music for that entire trip. It would be playing all the time on the different stereos in our apartments.

There is the background; in the end this is why I left. The last straw involved some girls that were brought back to our place one night. My girlfriend Megan had gone out and I was at home in bed. Late at night, I heard some commotion; the sound of a few people filing in and heading past my bedroom down to Axl’s room. Until then, Axl had spent most of his time in there alone, constantly on the phone. This night was clearly an occasion.

My room was at the front of the apartment, separated from Axl’s by our living room and a long railroad-style hallway. So I went down there to see what was going on; I found our security guard Earl, Tom Mayhew, Steve, and Axl hanging out with two happy-go-lucky Midwestern girls that they’d brought back.

We all hung out, and as it got later, it was suggested that the girls have sex with all of us. They were willing to blow everyone in the room, which seemed reasonable to me, but they didn’t want to fuck us. For whatever reason, that really pissed Axl off. The girls had a very intelligent rationale for their point of view, but Axl begged to differ. This debate continued for a moment, and it was pretty relaxed, but suddenly Axl exploded. He threw them out with such rage it was shocking. The way it went down was completely unnecessary. The coup de grâce was that one of the girls’ dads was a prominent officer with the Chicago police, or so I was told. Later that morning I packed up my stuff and flew back to L.A. A few days later, I had Megan move out and join me.

GUNS WAS A BAND THAT MIGHT BREAK apart at any second; that was half of the excitement. When we had a common goal, that was less likely to happen. The more time we spent apart, as our communal, creative vibe became more a memory than a reality, our lack of communication and the disadvantage of not knowing what was truly going on with one another disabled any ability we might have had to deal with change.