It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [52]
Part of the problem was that people didn’t really know where to put us—we didn’t fit comfortably into the sort of categories industry people dealt in. The knee jerk inclination was to shoehorn us in with Whitesnake, W.A.S.P., Autograph, Poison: heshers and poodles. We didn’t like the sound of those kinds of records. Most bands being signed at the time—Warrant, White Lion, BulletBoys, all that shit—fit the bill. We were different. Poison wasn’t playing alongside punk bands, that’s for sure. And we didn’t hang out with the types of people who formed bands like BulletBoys. (Like us, Jane’s Addiction didn’t fit in, but Nothing’s Shocking wouldn’t be released until almost two years later.) The guy who signed us really believed in us and tried to help us find the right producer, but we kept running up against the same attitude. Everyone wanted to take the edge off our music or to transform it into something they already understood.
The first candidate came in and said Steven needed more rack toms and china cymbals. We had worked so hard to get Steven down to a small drum kit and get that groove going. Next up was Paul Stanley of KISS, who wanted to produce our record, too. He came out to see us play at Raji’s, which was a grubby little place where a lot of underground bands played. We were surprised he showed up at such a dive, and we agreed to meet with him as a result. When he arrived at our rehearsal space to talk about his vision, he said he wanted to add double kick drums. Steven loved KISS, absolutely loved them, and for a member of KISS to suggest he revert to his teenage drum setup was something beyond his wildest dreams. “Yeah, yeah, great idea!” Izzy and I looked at each other, though, and we both had the same thought: This isn’t going to work. We didn’t tell Paul to his face that we didn’t want him to produce us, but it was over from the word go (or rather, the word double).
For a time we thought we could get Mutt Lange, the producer behind AC/DC’s Back in Black. But Mutt wanted $400,000 to walk into the room, plus a cut of the future earnings of the record. We had to pay for the studio and the producer out of our $250,000 advance, and we had already taken out $75,000. We weren’t going to borrow money to pay for a producer.
With these pressures mounting and the band still recovering from the feuds over various aspects of the signing process, Geffen asked us to stop playing live. By then we were doing gigs nearly every week, and sometimes more often than that. Those regular appearances were a chance to—depending on your mental state—channel everything into your performance or block everything out. Just as important, the transcendent experience of playing our songs for an audience was a way to regularly refresh the brotherly bonds of rock and roll that held us together. Now, just when we needed that most, Geffen pulled the rug out from under us. The rationale? We had to build mystique by dropping out of sight, putting a premium on our performances.
To say we didn’t see eye to eye with this decision is an understatement. We acquiesced at first, though we had some gigs already booked that we honored. Soon, though, we had to figure out ways to play—we just functioned best when we could get onstage regularly. And we got bored. So we began to play a bunch of shows as the Fargin Bastydges to get around the label’s injunction. We took the name from a scene in the movie Johnny Dangerously. It was an alias, not an alter ego: the set list and everything else was exactly the same as our normal Guns shows; it just allowed us to avoid fighting with Geffen. One of the shows we played was at Gazzarri’s, a venerable Hollywood dive we had always sort of wanted to play—just to say we had—but not the sort of place a band signed to a major label was supposed to play. But that was us. The industry had one set of priorities. We had our own.
We picked up another Fender