It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [12]
I called Slash on the phone and talked to him. He had the same soft-spoken voice he has now. When he said the name of his band, I heard Rodker. Wow, I thought, that’s a really strange name for a band. I arranged to meet him and drummer Steven Adler at a 24-hour deli named Canter’s down on Fairfax.
“I’ll make sure we have the first booth on the left,” he said.
I told him I had blue hair and would be wearing a long black and red leather coat.
“Won’t be able to miss you, I guess,” he said.
One thing I’d already realized: folks from Seattle just plain looked different in those days. When bands like Black Flag or the Dead Kennedys came through Seattle, they would always comment on how different the crowd looked, but I had never thought much about it. Until now. In L.A., I decided to use this distinctive look to convince people checking IDs at the door to bars that I was not from the United States and thus spoke no English. When asked for ID, I would produce my sunglasses and a puzzled look. They must have thought I was Swedish or something, but, no shit, it worked more often than not. Now I was about to see the other side of the coin.
I headed to Canter’s in my pimp coat, as promised. This was a floor-length black leather coat with red trim. Originally it had a big red A for “anarchy” on the back, but I had taken a Sharpie marker and blacked it out when a Seattle band I was in disbanded. The band was called the Fartz and our logo included the anarchist A.
I walked in, looked at the first booth on the left, and saw all this fucking hair. Somehow I had expected these guys to look like Social Distortion. Instead, even though they appeared about my age, the dudes in Rodker had long hair and rocker chick girlfriends.
If the sight of two long-haired rockers from Hollywood was a shock for me, I could hardly imagine having to talk to them. Of course, with my short Day-Glo blue hair and long coat, I must have looked like a Martian to them, too. Both parties were a little surprised and curious when we first met face-to-face.
Slash’s long hair, it turned out, hid a shy introvert. He was cool, though. He had a bottle of vodka stashed under the table—he and Steven weren’t yet twenty-one, either, and this was as close as they could get to a bar. We drank vodka and ate bowls of Canter’s barley-bean soup. I still love that soup.
Club bouncers weren’t the only people confused by my Seattle punk look. Slash’s girlfriend got kind of smashed and leaned over and said, “Are you gay?”
“No, I’m not gay,” I told her, laughing.
“You have short hair—I think you’re gay. It’s okay, you can tell me. Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No,” I said, “I just moved here.”
“It’s okay, we’ll get you one.”
Steven Adler was really nice, and expressed himself with an infectious, almost childlike enthusiasm.
He said, “Listen, we’re going to be great—going to get the feet stompin’ and the hands clappin’.”
He still says that to this day when he climbs behind a drum kit and gets excited: going to get the feet stomping and the hands clapping.
We all went back to Slash’s place—he was living with his mom. It was obvious even on the acoustic guitar he played that first night that Slash was a special player. I was absolutely stunned by the raw, emotive power he so easily tapped. Slash was already in a league of his own and watching him play guitar was a “holy shit” moment.
Even so, I was afraid he and Steven were coming from a very different place musically than I was. Some of my fears reflected the way things had been in Seattle—long-haired guys there tended to be kind of behind the times. Long hair in Seattle meant kids from the suburbs or farming or logging towns. Long hair meant heavy metal. Those of us in the punk scene called guys like that “heshers.” We were city kids. We thought of ourselves as ahead of the curve. Of course, some of my fears about Slash and Steven were more