Array Slash - Slash

I RETURNED TO L.A. EXHAUSTED AND went straight to Renee’s stepmom’s house for some kind of family gathering. Her stepmom’s name was Dee, but everyone called her Ma, because she was a very sweet old lady of about seventy or so. Her house was cozy, with pictures of the family everywhere; it was just nice in every way. And in the middle of this quaint little gathering, a bindle of coke fell out of my pocket.

Before we’d set off on that last South American leg, Matt, Duff, and I spent a lot of our time out on the town doing blow. One of the nights before we left, we’d done as much as we had and I remember thinking that we’d bought more than we were going to do. I’d put that extra bindle in my jacket and forgotten about it. Actually, late that night, I tried to find it and couldn’t—I’d rummaged around in my jacket and jeans, and convinced that I’d dropped it somewhere along the way, I just went to sleep with Renee.

The moment I saw it on the floor, Renee saw it, too, and I immediately put my foot over it before Ma or anyone else noticed. Then I casually “checked” my shoe and picked it up. When we got home and started doing it, I realized that this thing had been in my jacket for the whole South American tour—I had actually brought coke into South America and back, which is ridiculous, because that is the last place where you need to bring your own coke.

It wasn’t my first time averting international disaster: the first time we’d toured South America, I was almost deported back to England: I didn’t have my U.S. or British passport and my work visa had expired. The entire band went through customs while I was detained by the authorities at LAX. The only person who stayed with me was my security guard, Ronnie. It didn’t look good: I was in the holding room surrounded by armed guards and I was wearing shorts, a leather jacket, a T-shirt, and a top hat. There was this one Asian-American customs officer really putting it to me, while his younger sidekick knew who I was, which only seemed to fuel his boss’s contempt for me. In the end we had to pay a hundred-dollar waiver to get me out and I didn’t have any money on me. Neither did Ronnie—so he went panhandling in the airport, at the arrivals terminal in LAX, to get it.

AMID ALL OF THE HIGH AND LOW POINTS, we did some amazing performances that, thinking back on it, rival all of the bands I looked up to as a kid. We had a very established chemistry and a dynamic that was priceless. We’d made history, but when it was over I was fried, and as hard as it was for me to admit it, I was glad to be home for the first time in my life. The controversy and the struggle to pull the tour off had gotten to me more than anything else: the chaos of that emotional roller coaster, with all of its instability, had worn me out. When I came home, I had to reacclimate, to say the least.

I’d sold the Walnut House and Renee and I had bought a place off of Mulholland Drive, where we tried to stop the wheels for a second, which once again was very hard for me to do. I installed a full-on reptile zoo over there; just a gazillion snakes and all kinds of stuff. I built a small studio over the garage, and when the nagging desire to work started to rear its head again, I began working on demos for songs that I’d written on the road.

I started hanging out with Matt and recording demos of that stuff just for fun, and Mike Inez from Alice in Chains and Gilby started to come around and play with us. The three of us just got into a groove of jamming and recording every night. We didn’t know what it was going to be. At some point I played it for Axl, who took a pronounced disinterest in it.

That was fine by me. I was writing for the hell of it, just doing music that was indicative of where I was at that moment. I hadn’t grasped the idea of doing a Guns record or what that might be going forward; I was just having a good time with no pressure whatsoever.

We recorded about twelve songs. I had just mixed the last of them the night of the Northridge earthquake in 1994. I’d finished at about four a.m., and I went downstairs to our bedroom. Renee was sleeping, the TV was on, and I put the DAT of the entire twelve demos for what would become Slash’s Snakepit on the nightstand and got into bed. The second I turned out the light, the earthquake hit. There was a TV in a cabinet that raised and lowered at the foot of the bed. At that moment it was up, and the TV was on, and as it was blasting up the bed between Renee and me it exploded, just as all the power in the house went out. The next five minutes were like Godzilla shaking the place. It took me a few moments to even realize just what was happening.

Renee’s cousin was staying with us at the time; it was his first time in L.A., and when we’d had lunch down on Melrose earlier that day, he asked me what earthquakes were like. In the confusion I thought about him. He was asleep down the hall in the office, next to a room full of venomous snakes. I got Renee out of bed, and got her to the doorway of our bedroom. She was so groggy that she opened the door into her head about three times before she thought to move out of the way. After I got her situated, I went down the hall and knocked on the door. There was a giant armoire in that room and Renee’s cousin was sleeping at the foot of it on the floor. I panicked and called out for him but there was no answer. I thought that he must be trapped under the armoire until finally he responded. Like his cousin, Greg banged his head a few times on the door getting out of there.

The house continued to shake as the three of us huddled in the doorway to our bedroom. Renee was between us, with no shirt on, and she was pretty well built. Despite what was going on around us, I still found that pretty funny. We rode out wave after wave; each of them felt like something was attacking the house. The noise was deafening: glass was breaking, furniture was being tossed around, our eight cats were howling, and the mountain-lion cub that we had in the bathroom was squealing like crazy.

We waited there for what felt like a few hours until the last aftershock died down. The damage was unbelievable. There were TVs dumped in the middle of pinball machines, our fridge had flown across the entire kitchen, the huge floor-to-ceiling windows in the front of the house were shattered.

I was most concerned about where my three cobras, Gila monsters, and the other venomous and potentially dangerous reptiles might be. I waited until it was light enough in the house to open the door to the room where they were kept because looking for venomous snakes in the dark isn’t a good idea. Somehow none of the tanks were broken and all of the snakes were okay.

The house was completely totaled and too much of a mess for us to handle, so we drove to the Four Seasons in Marina Del Rey and made plans to fly with Greg back to Chicago. We had our mountain lion, Curtis, with us; we snuck him into the Four Seasons in his cage and locked him in our bathroom. Like most of my animals, he was an orphan that I’d adopted and was raising in my home.

We cleaned up a bit and headed to the restaurant, and were waiting for the elevator when I turned around and saw Curtis, who had opened both the bathroom door and the door to the room and was following us to dinner. I realized that we had to deal with him immediately, so I called a friend who is an animal caretaker who picked him up and took him up to canyon country, where a friend of mine had a facility that housed exotic animals.

The next day we took off to Chicago, where we hung out with Renee’s uncle Bernie, who turned out to be a very cool guy… not someone who would kill me for cheating on his niece.

When we eventually returned to L.A. Renee and I decided to sell that house right away. It had to be torn down and rebuilt, so we leased a place and in the meantime I focused on recording. With Mike Clink producing, and Matt and Mike Inez playing, I properly recorded the demos we’d done. We found ourselves a singer—Eric Dover of Jellyfish—who fit the bill well enough at the time. He and I wrote lyrics for all twelve tracks and I think it’s pretty easy to tell which songs he wrote and which ones I wrote: all of my songs are directed at one person… though no one picked up on it at the time. I used that record as an opportunity to vent a lot of shit that I needed to get off my chest.