Slash Quotes
"I was born on July 23, 1965, in Stoke-on-Trent, England, the town where Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead was born twenty years before me."
"My mom is an African American and my dad is English and white. They met in Paris in the sixties, fell in love, and had me."
"Mickey was a badass. He never flinched when I fed rats to my snakes."
"Basically, I am a self-taught zookeeper and I definitely relate to the animals I’ve lived with better than to most of the humans I’ve known."
"My parents treated me as an equal as soon as I could stand. And they taught me, on the fly, how to deal with whatever came my way in the only type of life I’ve ever known."
"Their clash of opinion fueled constant arguments and often led to violent exchanges; Tony claims that Charles beat him senseless on a regular basis for most of his youth."
"I remember the good things about England. I was the center of my grandparents’ attention."
"MY FIRST MEMORY OF LOS ANGELES IS the Doors’ 'Light My Fire' blasting from my parents’ turntable, every day, all day long."
"The sight of a guitar still turns me on."
"When my parents got separated, I was transformed by the sudden change."
"At home, my parents’ promise of a two-abode existence that wouldn’t change a thing hadn’t come to pass."
"I did my schoolwork and got good grades, although my teacher said I had a short attention span and daydreamed all the time."
"We’d jump off every sloped surface we could find, and whether it was midnight or the middle of rush hour, we always disrespected the pedestrians’ right of way."
"I was pretty good at keeping my affairs to myself even back then, but when I slipped up, my mother and grandmother were very forgiving."
"I didn’t keep a journal; I couldn’t seem to vocalize my feelings in a constructive fashion, but the guitar gave me emotional clarity."
"Nothing scatters a pack of kids like the sound of a siren, so most of those present escaped. Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them."
"It was a creative outlet that allowed me to understand myself."
"I saw the inside of several rehab centers, some more upscale than others, but the clinical sobriety of their walls was identical."
"I was a throw-back. It’s always been a paradox with me; I stood out but I didn’t crave or court obvious attention."
"That arrangement lasted for about five months; after a while, he got better and better at hiding among the vines, until the day I just couldn’t find him at all."
"I could show up at Matt’s house, sit in his room, and play guitar for hours, learning stuff off the records he had."
"Seymour had the best parties, and he had raised his kids well enough to trust them to hang out."
"One day Seymour looked at me and bestowed upon me the nickname that resonated with him more than my proper name ever did."
"I met a ton of people at Seymour’s—including the Stones."
"My first professional gig was at Al’s Bar, playing in a band with friends of my dad’s."
"I didn’t like to combine cocaine and guitar."
"At that time, I had finally gotten to an age where I was the older kid."
"I wanted to play guitar in a band that inspired that degree of devotion and excitement."
"Once you’ve lived a little you will find that whatever you send out into the world comes back to you one way or another."
"I was working in the Hollywood Music Store the day a slinky guy dressed like Johnny Thunders came up to me."
"We rehearsed in Adam’s garage, which drove his mom completely insane."
"I always wondered where his parents were; it was like the Peanuts cartoon, all kids, no authority figures."
"I liked my job in the music store, but it was a voyeuristic purgatory."
"I learned early to save any kind of extracurriculars for after the show."
"I thought to myself just how hard it must be to be a girl."
"It was a great job that I kept for quite a few years, though it did eventually bite me in the ass."
"I was impressed and objectively envious: I could never be in a band that looked or sounded like Mötley Crüe, but I wanted what they had."
"We were passionate, with a common goal and a very distinct sense of integrity."
"It was a situation rectified in a typically Guns fashion: when Steven ducked out to take a piss, Izzy and Duff hid one of his bass drums, a floor tom, and some small rack toms."
"I’m not sure how, but somehow that experience didn’t scar me enough to desert the notion of getting a job at Cherokee."
"The club was called Gorilla Gardens, which was the epitome of a punk-rock shit hole: it was dank and dirty and smelled of stale beer."
"That night we were a raw interpretation of what the band was; once the nervous energy subsided, at least for me, we’d reached the end of the set."
"We blocked the door and held him hostage until he finally coughed up $100 of our cash."
"I remember lying with my body half on the bed, my head hung over the end of the pull-out couch so far that the top of it was against the floor."
"I didn’t realize it until years later, but that trip cemented us as a band more than we knew; our commitments were tested on that journey."
"It makes sense that Guns’ first show took place in Seattle because as much as L.A. was our address, we had as much in common with the average 'L.A.' band as Seattle’s weather has with Southern California’s."
"That would have been a sick twist of fate: the band dying together after we’d just gotten together."
"We seemed to share this common knowledge and a kind of secret language back then; it was as if we all already knew what the other guy was going to bring into rehearsal and had already written the perfect part to move the song along."
"Our main influences were Aerosmith, especially for me, and then there was T. Rex, Hanoi Rocks, and the New York Dolls."
"We thrived on being out of place and took every gig we were offered."
"Our fans, from the start, were always a mixed bag: we had punks, we had metalheads, we had stoners, we had psychos, the odd weirdo, and a few lost souls."
"Once our profile started to grow on the local level, we hooked up with Vicky Hamilton, a manager who’d helped both Mötley Crüe and Poison in their early days."
"As soon as we got up and did our set, the crowd was neither hostile nor gracious."
"I was so stoned that I thought I’d found the best position in the world that a body might ever be in."
"We started playing at least once a week, and as our exposure increased, so did the need to get some new clothes."
"Within an hour my little guitar exercise had become something else."
"Axl didn’t leave his room that night, but he was just as much a part of the creative process as the rest of us."
"At our next session, we worked our new song into a complete movement."
"We worked up a solid demo of 'Sweet Child,' and worked with Spencer on demos for about half the tunes on Appetite."
"It was essential for us to get some product out while we still had a strong buzz in the industry."
"We never listened to suggestions—from anyone."
"It was a hell of a wake-up call: not only had I come face-to-face with the realities of the voracious lifestyle I lived, but I also learned that by living so overtly I would always be an easy target."
"We were a gang of heathens who thought we knew everything but in reality we knew nothing."
"Cult guitarist Billy Duffy, on the other hand, just seemed like, 'Yeah, whatever.' He either wasn’t interested or wasn’t buying it."
"We were built for it; we went through the paces without trying too hard."
"I remember rolling in there late the night before and staring at the building, completely starstruck."
"To a big touring band, in the grand scheme of things, playing to five thousand or so at the Long Beach Arena didn’t mean shit—but to us at the time, it was everything."
"I was unable to write those gigs off like I imagine the Sex Pistols would have."
"We showed up with no experience; just the clothes on our backs, the gear on the stage, and a handful of songs to play for people who had never heard of us."
"I’ve always been that way and I still am. It is why I don’t have any memorabilia to speak of: I don’t have gold and platinum records, only the guitars that mean something to me."
"Once you have that familiarity, you can improvise and build from there and make every show unique."
"I could barely play because supporting the weight of my guitar across my shoulder was excruciating."
"It was the one aspect of success and fame that wasn’t vapid to me; there was really nothing else."
"We were an out-of-control band with some semblance of integrity who had lost their ability to properly channel it all."
"As with any relationship, when someone lands on your bad side, it gets hard to be empathetic."
"In our plentiful free time, Duff and I also did our personal best to stay in shape."
"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."
"Every night we hung out at Smart Bar, which was very cool, but a much different rock scene than L.A."
"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."
"GUNS WAS A BAND THAT MIGHT BREAK apart at any second; that was half of the excitement."
"I WAS PRETTY DISILLUSIONED ABOUT the band when I got back to L.A. from Chicago."
"My RETALIATION WHEN I GET FRUSTRATED creatively is to be self-destructive with drugs."
"The act of shooting up always turned me on."
"When we started this band, our future depended on our uncompromising unity."
"You’d be surprised how quickly you forget what’s important when you’ve suddenly got everything you’d never thought you’d have."
"It was good to have Izzy, Axl, Duff, and me in the same room again. And more or less sober."
"I couldn’t deny the fact that kicking Steven out of Guns N’ Roses for drug abuse was kind of ridiculous and excessively harsh."
"I’ve always had to do things my way; I’ve gotten high my way, I’ve gotten clean my way, I’ve been in and out of relationships my way."
"I was drawn to Axl like everyone else is because he is such an amazing singer and performer and has such powerful all-around charisma."
"We did amazing things every single night that were godlike."
"He’s a brilliant lyricist and such a really tortured artist that he won me over because my mentality has always been to root for the underdog—and that was such a major part of his brilliance."
"We had a five-hour go-kart rally arranged for us in West London."
"It’s not like a band has to cater to their audience or feel as if they are at their mercy, but it is a band’s job to play for the people who have bought tickets to see them."
"It was a strange moment. Izzy’s departure happened so quietly, with no fanfare, and no media awareness."
"I was emotionally needy and I don’t know if she sensed that, but under the gun, I folded."
"We were an unreal band with an unreal singer; Axl was just amazing."
"That whole tour was stadium after stadium."
"We had ramps, little stages over the amps for the girls, a keyboard area, and a piano that came from under the floor for Axl."
"No one would bring it up, but it was obvious that we were all thinking about it."
"I think somewhere in his mind he thought it was cool to keep people waiting, as if it just served to build anticipation rather than create frustration."