1986.05.13 - Raji's, Los Angeles, USA

Howard Marks, our business manager, called me one afternoon and said he’d gotten a call from Tom Zutaut, an A&R man famous for siging Motley Crue. ‘Tom just signed this band,’ Howard said, ‘and wanted to know if you want to go check them out. They’re looking for a producer.’
Well, Gene was off making another movie. We weren’t going to work on the next record until the following year. Why not?
Howard came with me to meet the band—a bunch of young guys called Guns N’ Roses. We had arranged to meet them at an apartment their manager had rented for them near the corner of La Cienega and Fountain. I introduced bald, pot-bellied Howard as my bodyguard, as a joke; but after looking around for a few minutes, I could see why they didn’t get it.

Izzy was unconscious, with drool coming out of the side of his mouth. It wasn’t clear whether he was sleeping or dead—that’s how rough he looked. Duff and Steven were very nice, and Steven was just flowing about what a big KISS fan he was. I didn’t realize that the half-comatose, curly-headed lead guitar player who called himself Slash was what had become of the sweet kid I’d spoken to during the interviews before the recording of Creatures a few years earlier. Then Axl chatted with me and played a few songs on a crappy cassette player they had lying around.
When he played ‘Nightrain’ I thought it was really good, but I told him that maybe the chorus could be used a pre-chorus instead, and there could be another chorus added afterwards. That was the last time he ever spoke to me. Ever.
Slash roused himself, and he and I started talking about the Stones. I show him Keith’s five-string open-G tuning, which was the set-up Keith used to write all his stuff. I took a string off and retuned a guitar, and he thought it was very cool. I also offered to help Slash get in touch with people who could hook him up with some free guitars—we were sponsored by all sorts of instrument companies, and I figured a young guy like him could use some help getting equipment to record with.

That night, I went to see their gig at Raji’s, a little dive in Hollywood. I thought the song they had played for me were good, but they didn’t prepare me for seeing their band live. Guns N’ Roses were stupendous. I was shocked, given the collection of wastoids I’d seen earlier that afternoon, and I immediately realized I was witnessing true greatness.
I went to see them perform again at another club, called Gazzarri’s—it later became the Key Club. They weren’t happy with the guy mixing their sound, and Slash asked me out of the blue to help out. Decades later, Slash’s recollections of the night would be faulty at best. He liked to pretend I had dared to meddle with their sound. God forbid this guy from KISS would have anything to do with Guns—I mean, what could be worse than a guy from KISS, of all things? He also recalled that I had a blond trophy wife with me. But I wasn’t married and was in fact there with a short brunette named Holly Knight, who was a songwriter famous for ‘Love Is a Battlefield,” among other hits. There is obviously a reason why defense attorneys never want to put alcoholics or drug addicts on the witness stand.

That was years later of course. Immediately after my interactions with the band, I started to hear lots of stories Slash was saying behind my back—he called me gay, made fun of my clothes, all sorts of things designed to give himself some sort of rock credibility at my expense. This was years before his top hat, sunglasses, and dangling cigarette became a cartoon costume that he would continue to milk with the best of us for decades.

I didn’t wind up being involved with G’n’R’s album. No surprise there. The surprise came a few months later when Slash called me and wanted to follow up on my offer to help him get some free guitars.
‘You want me to help you get guitars after you went around saying all that shit about me behind my back?’
Slash got real quiet.
‘You know, one thing you’re going to have to learn is not to air your dirty laundry in public. Nice knowing you. Go fuck yourself.’