It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [46]
He also believed in the band from day one.
“You guys are going to be huge,” he always said.
“Yeah, yeah, just take the pictures.”
We gave him a lot of shit when we did photo shoots.
Not only did we begin to sell out everywhere we played in early 1986, but the club owners suddenly loved us. The crowd we brought included punkers, rockers, and, best of all, lots of women. And they all drank. A lot. We broke the liquor-sales records at the Troubadour. Once you start doing that kind of business, people notice. And also, once you start headlining, you don’t have to sell tickets on your own anymore. There was no more paying to play.
A&R staff from major labels started to pop up at gigs, too. On Friday, February 28, we had the coveted headline slot at the Troubadour again, and at least a dozen record execs were rumored to be in the audience. Creepy manager types were oozing around, trying to get backstage to charm us. Having my nephew there came in handy that night.
Los Angeles was also a beacon for national and international touring acts, and now that we could fill clubs, we started to get offers to open shows for big artists. When my boyhood rock idol Johnny Thunders came to town in late March 1986, the promoters asked us to open both his shows. For me, this was a huge deal. Probably for Izzy, too. I had seen Johnny play a bunch of shows on the West Coast in the early 1980s, and had even gotten a chance to jam with him after a show in Portland. Of course, by 1986, I didn’t hold Thunders in quite as high regard as I once had—the romantic notion of a junked-up vagabond like Johnny had faded a bit for me with direct experience of heroin. I could even admit in hindsight that the chance to jam with him probably happened only because he had shot up a post-show speedball and was looking for anything to do, even if that meant jamming with some teenage straggler. But still. Sharing a bill with fucking Johnny Thunders! I was really looking forward to that first show at Fender’s Ballroom.
Unfortunately, one of the first things that happened when we got down to Fender’s for the show was that Johnny started to chat up Axl’s girlfriend Erin while we were onstage doing our sound check. Johnny also wanted to know where he could score some dope. Axl flipped out when he got wind that Johnny had hit on Erin, and began a tirade backstage. Axl could be intimidating when he started yelling and carrying on. Johnny spent the rest of the night hiding in his dressing room, jonesing for a fix. Whatever remnants of a romantic and swashbuckling image I had of Johnny Thunders disappeared that night.
During the weeks between that Troubadour show and the Thunders gig, the record-label frenzy to sign us peaked. We were having fun doing what we were doing, playing live all the time, courted by all the clubs, near hysteria at our shows, blowing the doors off places. We were in no rush to shift gears for the sake of a record deal. We knew we were good. And we had songs we liked. I was convinced we were too hard and too dirty ever to be huge. Yet everybody was in the hunt, or at least pretending to be, as industry people started falling over one another to talk to us.
Robert John had been haranguing us to approve some photos he had taken so that he could start to submit them to magazines as coverage began to spike. Slash and I finally agreed. One afternoon the two of us went with Robert to some girl’s apartment right on Hollywood Boulevard to look at his proofs. Robert explained we’d have to look at the contact sheets through a little magnifying glass shaped like a shot glass called a loupe.
When we arrived at the girl’s apartment, we were relieved that she had air-conditioning, as it was in the high nineties that day and we had walked there from the Gardner alley. Phillipe, the bus-driving drug dealer we knew from Gardner, came out of the back bedroom as we arrived. It was obvious that both he and the girl whose apartment this was were flying on crack. No big