It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [39]
Marc believed in our band from day one. His faith was such that, in addition to photographing us, he was willing to front us the money to buy the tickets that allowed us to get shows in the pay-to-play clubs. We paid him back once we sold the tickets. We were relentless about calling the names on our list. At first we had to hustle really hard just to pay Marc back, but we grew our fan base faster as a result; as our mailing list expanded, it was easier and easier to sell tickets to our shows. Of course, we also had to borrow money from Marc to buy stamps.
We made cool flyers and, in addition to sending them to people on our list, we posted them all over the city. We always posted flyers as a band, at night. The first time I discovered Night Train wine was on one of these epic nocturnal flyering campaigns—which were best accomplished while drinking from a brown paper bag. Afterward I was happy to find that the liquor store around the corner from our storage space also stocked it. At $1.29 a bottle, Night Train instantly became a band staple; we started piecing together the song “Nightrain” a week later while rehearsing before another flyer-posting outing.
Soon we decided to rent a makeshift rehearsal space. Even though we would have to come up with a monthly nut of a few hundred bucks, we would save money versus paying by the hour at other rehearsal spaces. (We rehearsed a lot of hours.) We felt we were now on a roll, and scraping the money together at the beginning of each month would allow us a lot more freedom, too: we could leave our gear set up all of the time instead of having to tear it down for the next band the way we had to at the per-hour rehearsal places. Still, given our limited resources, we had to improvise.
Half a block north of Sunset on Gardner was the mouth of a dead-end alleyway that ran east behind what was then the Guitar Center. Halfway down the alley, the slender lane opened into a tarmac lot behind a public elementary school. Along this lot, there were half a dozen doors to self-storage spaces used for various types of commerce. We found one for rent for four hundred dollars a month and knew it was our spot, though we’d have to fudge a little bit about what we planned to do in there. Once we finally jumped through all of the various hoops presented to us by the apprehensive landlord, we got the keys to our new rehearsal studio.
If Orchid Street was ground zero of Guns N’ Roses when Axl, Izzy, and I all lived there, the alleyway behind Gardner was where the whole thing came together once we had discovered we were a real band. We set up the garagelike, ten-by-fourteen structure as our gang headquarters—a place to rehearse, party, and, much of the time, to spend the night.
The storage space itself had a door and unadorned cinder-block walls. There was no bathroom, but for four hundred bucks a month, who expected a bathroom? And anyway, there was a latrine in the parking lot. There was also no a/c or heat, but there was electricity and we could make noise twenty-four hours a day.
We raided a nearby construction site for some two-by-fours and plywood that we used to install a ramshackle loft in our tiny new home. The loft added some dimension and much-needed sleeping space to the room. If you were to walk in the door, everything in the room would be to your left. First there was my bass amp, then Izzy’s Marshall half stack, then Steven’s drums, and then Slash’s guitar rig. This is also how we would set up onstage for each and every gig until Izzy left in 1991.
Our gear was all very old and beat-up, with the vinyl covers shredding off the cabinets and all. But in this room our shitty gear sounded magical, clear, and huge. We did not have a PA for Axl, so we basically improvised and made do. There is a photo out there somewhere that shows Axl screaming into my ear at the Gardner space. This was the only way that he could get his ideas across in that setting. Among the benefits of playing shows as frequently