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By Root 979 0

to have something—anything—out on vinyl. (By the way, the crowd noise on that EP is from recordings of a 1970s rock festival called the Texxas Jam—we thought it would be funny to put a huge stadium crowd in the background at a time when we were lucky to be playing to a few hundred.) But the EP didn’t make a stir anywhere in the world. Except, we soon found out, in Britain. Unbeknownst to us, a cult following was building over there and was champing at the bit for any news about the band. When Kerrang! magazine sent a photographer over to Los Angeles to shoot us for a cover article in early 1987, we had been completely baffled. Kerrang! was the biggest rock magazine in the UK. We had received some local press coverage in L.A. at this point, but Kerrang!? We were half convinced somebody was playing a prank on us, but the photographer showed up and the article ran. Then a London concert promoter had contacted us and asked us to play the famous Marquee club in June, before the release of Appetite. Up to then, the only place I had been outside of the United States was Vancouver, Canada, to play punk-rock shows with my various Seattle bands when I was a teenager. So this was big news to me. Huge. Magnificent.

Kids in the UK would sort of latch onto one band and make a big deal out of it. In the mid-1980s, that band was Hanoi Rocks, an amazing group of Finns who had relocated to England and were writing some of the best and dirtiest rock on the planet. When Hanoi came to tour America in 1984, their drummer died in a car crash while making a booze run with Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe during a few days off in L.A. that December. I had just moved to Hollywood that fall, and Slash and I had tickets to the Hanoi Rocks gig that never happened because of the car accident. It was an incredibly sad moment in rock and roll, and Hanoi Rocks never recovered—they broke up soon after.

Flash-forward to our gig in the UK in June 1987. After the first Marquee gig sold out in record time, they added a second date. That sold out just as fast, so they added a third night. By the time we arrived in London, we were minor celebrities. We discovered we had become the “it” band the youth of England had been looking for to fill the void left by Hanoi Rocks. We stayed in a rent-by-the-week apartment because it was much cheaper than a hotel, and at times people would stop us on the street. They actually knew who we were! It was a weird sensation, even on such a small scale.

I learned to ride London’s subway system, the Tube, because there were great gigs every night we were there. Slash and I went out one night to see the Replacements and got so drunk that when we caught the Tube after the show, we ended up on a train heading the wrong way. When we arrived at the end of the line, there were no more trains running and we didn’t have anywhere near enough money to take a cab back. And anyway, we didn’t know the address where we were staying. We only knew how to get there from our local Tube stop. We ended up sloppily swinging at each other out of frustration before passing out in the train station.

The real reason we were there, of course, was to fucking rock. In that period of the band’s career—and with pent-up energy from half a year of virtually no gigs—nobody fucking rocked with as much purpose and sneer, or with the same level of recklessness and bad intentions. This is not me bragging; we were just firing on all cylinders. At sound check before the first show on June 19, 1987, we ran through a cover song. We played it just once, but somehow our feelings found a perfect vessel in this Bob Dylan song and our emotions just came pouring out. Todd Crew showed up unexpectedly that day—he was bumming around Europe on a Eurail pass he’d gotten for graduation but never used—and he told us he was blown away by the way we played the song.

When we walked to the Marquee that first night for the show itself, we were met by a crowd filling up the entire block in front of the club. We were absolutely amazed that all of these people had come to see us. Trusting Todd