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stems twisting around the barrels.
    Slash was an eccentric guy. He had a snake in his room.
    “She’s really sweet,” he told me.
    I didn’t say anything, but in my mind I was going, Hmm, a snake, sweet?
    Still, he was cool. If nothing else, I thought, he’s a genius guitar player—and I like him. And perhaps most important, I now knew where Slash lived and I knew how to get there. Given the fact that I didn’t know anyone else in town, this was key to our remaining friends. I met a lot of people in those first few weeks, but many I never ran into a second time. Now I could find Slash whenever I wanted.
    As an added bonus I also liked Slash’s mom. She was great to me. She called my mom to let her know I was all right. Later she would call me at the Black Angus to make sure things were going okay. She became a surrogate mother during those initial weeks in L.A. (She ended up continuing in that role for years, in fact.)
    Slash, Steven, and I started playing together at a rehearsal space at the corner of Highland and Selma. The space cost five dollars an hour, fifteen if you wanted a PA. I spent a week jamming with them while sleeping in my car.
    In the end, though, I was kind of bummed out by the rehearsal sessions. Slash’s talent notwithstanding, the way he and Steven were going about it was not my cup of tea. The songs they had, the sound of the guitar, Steven’s double-kick drum kit with all those rack toms and cymbals—it was all too conventional. They were working in a pre-existing mold. I was looking for people ready to create a new mold.
    There was also no singer. It felt like a high school band, albeit one with an amazing guitar player. Having already been in a dozen bands and played with countless professional musicians, I considered myself a seasoned veteran. I could tell Slash and Steven had real aspirations—that they wanted more—but I didn’t move all the way to Los Angeles to play with people who were still trying to figure their shit out.
    After about a week, I told them, “I don’t want to play with you, but I still want to be friends.”
    “Oh, okay,” they said.
    At that age, there wasn’t any weirdness—it was fine to be straight like that. I loved the two of them, but Road Crew wasn’t what I wanted to do at that point.
    We did continue to hang out a lot together. A few weeks later, in October, Slash and Steven took me to an all-ages show at a West Hollywood club called the Troubadour to see L.A. Guns. The two of them had briefly played with the singer, Axl Rose, in a band called Hollywood Rose, which had already happened and died. Now Axl was with this other band, named for the guitar player, Tracii Guns. Tracii, it turned out, was a local hero. He had gone to the same high school as Slash and they had played in rival bands.
    The Troubadour was a real rock club, and at this point in my life I had only been to one other rock club. Punk gigs in Seattle took place in completely different types of spaces—squats, basements of private houses, VFW halls rented out for the night. Things were clearly different here in L.A.

CHAPTER FOUR
     

     
    My older brothers and sisters all listened to lots of rock and roll and many of them played guitar and sang. Musical instruments littered the house and the basement and the garage. As early as I can remember, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and the Sonics constantly blasted from our family living-room stereo, a Sanyo system my brother Mark had shipped back from Vietnam after his tour of duty.
    I remember being captivated by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The picture on the cover is what got my attention—the marching-band uniforms, all the faces. But then I started listening to the music. I listened to “Lovely Rita” over and over, fascinated with the way the words sounded, the exotic cadence. I was amazed how the lyrics managed to paint a picture in my mind. I listened to that song so many times that I even convinced