It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [40]
It was funny having crappy gear and no PA and constantly looking at the back wall and dumpsters of the Hollywood Guitar Center all day. That place was a veritable toy store to those who could pay for the things in there—or had credit with the powers that be. It was like a sick joke to us. By the time we did finally get our record deal and the advance dough that came with it, I knew exactly what new gear I wanted to buy.
To the right of our space was another one being used by a band called Johnny and the Jaguars. The members had come out together from Denver. The unspoken truth in Hollywood back then was that if a band moved to town from another city as a unit, it never lasted. I suppose all the influences and amusements L.A. offered were just too divisive. You had to wade through a lot of new shit in Hollywood, and your life was going to take some turns. For five guys to experience all those turns at the same time and react in the same way was almost impossible. Sure enough, before long Johnny and the Jaguars broke up. The other thing about bands from out of town? They were usually awful. True to form, Johnny and the Jaguars were not a great band. But they were a nice bunch of guys, and we later tapped their keyboardist, Dizzy Reed, to join our touring band for the Use Your Illusions tour.
Just across Sunset, in a nondescript row of one-story buildings, stood El Compadre, a cheap Mexican restaurant that served strong margaritas. The interior was kept so dark you couldn’t see a thing when you stepped inside. You had to wait for your eyes to adjust before a dark bar appeared on the left and even darker vinyl banquettes and booths slowly swam into view on the right. No matter how long you let your eyes adjust, sufficient murkiness remained to allow for discreet blow jobs and drug use right at the booths. The Seventh Veil strip club was a few blocks down Sunset from El Compadre. The important thing about the Seventh Veil was the girls. That might sound obvious. But to us it was the girls, not the show and the venue. We spent a lot of time with off-work strippers, and a few began to dance onstage at our concerts.
Between us and the other bands, the alley began to attract a lot of drugs, booze, girls, and other musicians. Strippers from the neighborhood constantly came by the space, often bringing quaaludes, Valium, coke, or booze to share. I still avoided blow because of the effect I assumed it would have on my panic attacks, but to pills I didn’t always say no. As we started to play more gigs and met more people, word spread about our alleyway and it became a go-to after-hours party spot. This translated into more people hanging around the fringes of our scene. Among them was a guy named Phillipe, who drove a bus for the city as his regular job but sold crack on the side. He was older than we were. Phillipe was not a rocker per se, but he liked the fact that there were hot young girls around. He got them high and tried to take advantage of them—creepy stuff. He was emblematic of a certain element that orbited our band.
As more and more people showed up to party in our alley after the clubs closed on Friday and Saturday nights, we also started to sell beer by the can. We could buy cases of rotgut beer for $5.99—which was only twenty-five cents a can. We sold them for a buck a pop. That translated into major income, at least by our standards. Shit, we could make the rent on our space with income like that.
Not surprisingly, we started to run into trouble with the police—though oddly, it wasn’t the LAPD so much as the West Hollywood sheriffs, who would leave their jurisdiction to mess with us. Raids were difficult to escape because we were in a dead-end alley, after all, and there was no place to run. I remember the cops coming there and asking who was who, let’s see IDs, blah, blah, blah. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t much of a big deal. Izzy was smart about his dealing, and even the supposed complaints from girls were probably just ruses