Anthony Bozza - Slash - The Autobiography

I don’t remember how we met him, but there was one older guy who used to give us money for nothing. We’d just hang out and talk to him; I think he asked us to go to the store a couple of times. I definitely thought it was weird, but he wasn’t threatening enough to do anything a couple of thirteen-year-olds couldn’t handle. Besides, the extra pocket cash was worth it.

Steve had no inhibitions whatsoever, so he managed to acquire money on a regular basis in many ways, one of which was from Clarissa, a neighbor of mine in her mid-twenties who lived down the street. One day we saw her sitting on her porch when we passed by and Steven felt the inclination to say hi to her. They started talking and she invited us in; we hung out there for a while and then I decided to take off, but Steven said that he was going to stay there a little while longer. It turns out that he had sex with her that night and got money off her to boot. I have no idea how he did it, but I do know that he was with her four or five times more, and got money every single time. It was unbelievable to me; I was really envious.

But then again, Steven would always get involved in situations like that and they often didn’t have a happy ending. In this case, he was in the middle of screwing Clarissa when her gay roommate walked in on them. She threw Steven off her and he landed hard-on first on her bedroom floor, and that was the end of that.

Steven and I got by; I stole all the music and rock magazines that we needed. There weren’t too many other things that we cared to spend money on aside from Big Gulps and cigarettes, so we were in good shape. We’d walk up and down Sunset Boulevard, then Hollywood Boulevard from Sunset to Doheny, checking out rock posters in the many head shops or ducking into whichever souvenir or music store looked exciting to us. We’d just wander, taking in the animated reality going on down there. We used to hang out at place called Piece O’ Pizza for hours, playing Van Halen on the jukebox over and over. It was a ritual by then: Steven had played their first record for me a few months before. It was one of those moments where a new body of music totally overwhelmed me.

“You’ve got to hear this,” Steven said, all wide-eyed. “It’s this band Van Halen, they’re awesome!” I had my doubts because Steven and I didn’t always see eye to eye musically. He put the record on, and Eddie’s solo that sets off “Eruption” came shredding through the speakers. “Jesus Christ,” I said, “what the hell is that?”

It was a form of expression as satisfying and personal to me as art and drawing, but on a much deeper level.

I SAW MY FIRST REALLY BIG ROCK SHOW that year, too. It was the California World Music Festival at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum on April 8, 1979. There were 110,000 people there and the lineup was insane: there were a ton of bands, but the headliners were Ted Nugent, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, and Van Halen. Without a doubt, Van Halen crushed every other band who played that day, even Aerosmith. I guess it wasn’t hard: Aerosmith was so fucked up at the time that it was impossible for me to differentiate one song from another in their set. I was a fan, and the only track I recognized at all was “Seasons of Wither.”

Eventually Steve and I graduated to hanging around outside the Rainbow and the Starwood amid the whole pre-glam metal scene. Van Halen cut their teeth on that circuit and Mötley Crüe was about to do the same; aside from bands like that, there were the earliest traces of L.A. punk rock going around. There were always a ton of people outside the clubs and since I had access to drugs, I’d sell them not just for cash, but to get us closer to the scene. In junior high, I figured out a better method: I started making fake IDs, which served to actually get me inside the scene.

There was so much activity in West Hollywood and Hollywood at night: the whole homosexual scene—around a posh gay restaurant, the French Quarter, and gay bars like the Rusty Nail, among others smashed right up against the mostly hetero rock scene. That whole juxtaposition was bizarre to Steven and me. There were just so many freaks everywhere and we liked to take it all in, as strange and nonsensical as most of it was.

Steve and I got into all sorts of seemingly harmless trouble growing up. One night my dad took us to a party thrown by a group of his artist friends who lived in houses along a cul de sac up in Laurel Canyon. The host, my dad’s friend Alexis, made a vat of horrendously lethal punch that got everyone completely gassed. Growing up in the Valley, Steven had never seen a scene that cool: this was a group of artistically out-there post-hippie adults, so the combination of the crowd and the punch completely blew his mind. He and I could hold our liquor for thirteen-year-olds, but this stuff was way too advanced for us. I was so fried that I didn’t notice Steve slip out with the girl who lived in the guesthouse downstairs. He ended up fucking her, which turned out to not be such a cool thing: she was married and in her thirties. In my thirteen-year-old mind, she was a senior citizen. To me, Steve had just fucked an old lady …who also happened to be someone else’s old lady.

In the morning, I woke up on the floor with the taste of that punch in my mouth, feeling like an iron spike had been nailed through my head. I went home to my grandmother’s to sleep it off; Steven remained behind, opting to linger in bed downstairs. I was home for about ten minutes when my dad called to let me know that Steven should fear for his life. The woman he had spent the evening with had confessed and her husband was very unhappy about it. The man, according to my dad, planned to “throttle” Steven, which Tony assured me was a very real threat. When I didn’t seem to take him seriously, Dad told me that the guy had actually promised to kill Steven. In the end, nothing happened, so Steven got away with it but it was a clear indication of things to come. At thirteen, he had narrowed his life goals down to exactly two: fucking chicks and being in a rock band. I can’t fault him for his prescience.

In his thirteen-year-old musical wisdom, which (probably due to his advanced womanizing skills) I considered superior to mine, Steven had concluded that there were only three bands that mattered in rock and roll: Kiss, Boston, and Queen. Steven paid tribute to them every day, all day, when he should have been in school. His grandmother worked in a bakery and left the house at five a.m. each day; she had no idea that Steven rarely went to class. His day consisted of playing Kiss records turned up to ten, while bashing away at a little Wal-Mart electric guitar and amp, both turned up to ten as well. I’d go over and hang out with him, and he’d be yelling at me over all the noise, “Hey! We should start a band, you know!?”

Steven has such an open, carefree soul that his enthusiasm is tremendously contagious. I didn’t doubt his intention and drive; I was convinced immediately that it would happen. He had elected himself the guitar player, and we decided that I would play bass. When I listen to music now, after twenty-five years of playing, I can isolate all of the instruments; I can hear the key of the guitar and right away I can usually think of several ways to play the song. By the time I was thirteen, I had listened to rock and roll for years; I’d seen concerts and knew what instruments make up a rock band, but I had no idea which instrument made each sound in the music. I knew what a guitar was, but I had no idea of the differences between a guitar and a bass and Steven’s playing at the time didn’t enlighten me at all.

When he and I would walk around town, we used to pass a music school on Fairfax and Santa Monica called Fairfax Music School (today it’s a chiropractor’s office), so I figured that was a good place to learn to play bass. So one day I stopped in, walked up to the desk, and just said, “I want to play bass.” The receptionist introduced me to one of the teachers, a guy named Robert Wolin. When Robert came out to talk to me, he wasn’t exactly what I expected: he was a medium-sized white guy wearing Levi’s and a tucked-in plaid shirt. He had a bushy mustache, a five o’clock shadow, and unkempt shaggy brown hair—it had probably been a real haircut once, but it had gotten away from him. Needless to say, Robert didn’t look like a rock star at all.