It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [44]
Black Randy loved our band. He always told us, “I’m going to manage your band and you’ll have the swagger of the New York Dolls and you’re going to shit on this town.”
He took the bus down to our rehearsal space and brought children’s Halloween costumes he wanted us to wear. He videotaped us, and videotaped himself shooting speedballs. I guess it goes without saying that he became our first manager. Obviously.
But Black Randy also had AIDS, and he died soon afterward.
After that, I called my brother Bruce, who was booking bands and DJs for a restaurant chain.
“Dude, do you know any managers?” I asked him.
“Yeah, I can call a buddy of mine,” he said.
He called me back. The guy wasn’t interested.
I had broken up with Kat and moved out of the El Cerrito apartment by then. Some nights I crashed at a girl’s place near our rehearsal space; some nights I spent at the space itself. The same was true for the other guys. We bounced around, hooked up with stripper friends—those girls always had apartments and money—or crashed in the alley off Gardner, where, as Izzy told a local paper a few months later, we lived “like rats in a box.” Each member of the band now existed solely to write and play, and almost all other concerns had melted away. In my case, this was one of the few periods of my life when I didn’t have a fixed address. It was an amazing rite of passage. The camaraderie within Guns N’ Roses deepened to a level so unquestioning and intense that it could only be compared to blood relationships; it was primordial. And as when the first creatures began to slither out of the primordial ooze, it could get messy.
The clap was absolutely rampant back then, and venereal diseases swept through the band members’ crotches while we were all living and fucking in such close proximity. Fortunately, since my last experience I’d gotten a tip from one of my brothers-in-law, who was a doctor. You could get dirt-cheap antibiotics—intended for use in aquariums—at pet stores. Turned out tetracycline wasn’t just good for tail rot and gill disease. It also did great with syphilis—and with no doctor visit, no expensive prescription, and no need to feign shame for the nuns at a free clinic, like I had to that time in Seattle.* Who needed health insurance when there were pet stores?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
We continued to expand our song list and started looking for headline gigs. By October 1985, we added “Paradise City” and “Rocket Queen” to our set list and headlined a show out in Reseda at a place called the Country Club. In November we headlined a show at the Troubadour with a national touring band we had always liked—Kix, from Maryland—opening for us. By the end of the year we had added “My Michelle” and “Night-rain” to our regular live repertoire.
An independent record label named Restless called us near the end of the year and asked us to come down to their office in Long Beach. There were some cool bands on Restless, and the label people were into our band. They were ahead of the curve—no other labels had contacted us at that point. Izzy bought a book about the music industry in preparation for the meeting. I remember looking through it. I could understand the sections I read, but there was a lot of shit to master. When we went to their office, they offered us something called a pressing and distribution deal, plus something like $30,000 toward recording costs. It was a simple two-page deal, and they explained the whole thing to us. Still, we thought, if they’re going to offer that, someone else will, too.
We left their office without signing. But we were nervous—had we just fucked ourselves? I thought of Sly Stone. I knew you could blow it.
Kim Fowley, the fabled manager, bullshit artist, and generally shady figure behind the success—or lack thereof, depending on how you want to look at it—of the Runaways, came knocking at the end of 1985, too. By the time I moved to Hollywood, the Runaways had come and gone, and Joan Jett, the Runaways’ guitarist and main songwriter, was a successful solo artist. But Kim Fowley