It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [11]
“Dude, you know I’m coming down there?”
“Yeah, I heard,” he said. “Where you going to go?”
“I dunno, Hollywood. Any openings at the Black Angus?” Matt was paying his way through school working as a cook at a steak house out in the valley. He played trombone and wanted to become a music teacher.
“Maybe,” he said.
“I have a reference from Lake Union Café,” I said. That was the name of the restaurant where I’d been working for the past two years in Seattle.
“I might be able to get you something,” Matt said.
“How do I get there?”
“Take 5 to the 405 and get off at the Roscoe Boulevard exit. Go west on Roscoe until you hit Corbin Avenue. Make a right. The restaurant is at 9145 Corbin.”
I drove straight there and started a shift as a prep chef that same night, September 14, 1984.
At the end of the shift, I figured I’d go check out my new home: Hollywood. I asked for directions.
“Well, it’s about twenty-five miles …”
What? Where the hell was I? I thought this was Los Angeles?
“You go down to Ventura and make a left. Follow that all the way to Laurel Canyon—you’ll need to take that over the mountain …”
Huh? A canyon that went over a mountain? How could that be?
I set off, keeping an eye out for anything resembling mountains. I saw plenty of hills, but no mountains. Eventually I found Laurel Canyon—a road that went up a hill and then … Los Angeles! From the top of the hill, I could see that the downtown was no bigger than Seattle, but that the twinkling lights of densely packed low-rise neighborhoods went on forever—the city stretched as far as I could see.
I stayed with my brother a few nights during the first couple weeks in town. But his place was just so far from Hollywood, which to an outsider like me seemed the center of the L.A. music scene. With the added drive time from all the traffic, my brother’s place—and the Black Angus—might as well have been in another city entirely. Besides, I couldn’t just show up and take over his apartment.
So on many nights I slept in my car in the Hollywood Hills. The cops didn’t cruise the nice tree-lined streets perched up above Franklin Avenue.
The luster of that year’s summer Olympics had worn off, and the police presence had virtually vacated central Hollywood since the end of the games, leaving the floodgates wide open for criminals and thugs and general unwatched anarchy. Gang activity was in high gear then, too. Crack was sold all over Hollywood. I landed in the middle of all of that—with a bass I was still learning to play.
Still, I had confidence in my social skills and in the belief that I had a lot to offer. I felt punk rock was basically in its death throes by 1984. The first two waves were done—the original punk bands and then the hardcore bands. Whatever happened next, the people my age—who had been through the punk scene and come out the other end looking for a new direction—were going to be the ones to do it. The future was resting on our shoulders. I was looking to find other guys out there like me, interested in trying to create the next paradigm. I was sure I was going to play an important and vital part in whatever musical innovation would be next. This was not conceit on my part, it was excitement.
With all of this going through my head, an ad in a free local music paper called the Recycler caught my eye during that first week in L.A. It was a want ad for a band seeking a bass player. The name to call was Slash. With a name like that, I assumed he must be a punk-rock guy like me. And if we had similar backgrounds, maybe he was also looking toward the horizon musically.
As far as I could tell, there was really no discernible rock scene in Los Angeles in the fall of 1984—only the palpable hangover of a once-thriving punk movement, a thriving but really bad heavy-metal scene, and something called “cow punk.” This was basically punk-rock dudes in plaid shirts trying to play Patsy Cline songs with their fat girlfriends singing.
Slash’s ad had