STEPHEN PEARCY In ’83, ’84, we would walk down the Strip and it was like twenty-four-hour Sodom and Gomorrah Mardi Gras, you know? Then new bands started coming in and they got into their own thing. And the next thing that made the scene in L.A. was Guns N’ Roses. That’s when people went, “Oh, there’s some different shit coming out. These hair metal guys aren’t gonna hold up to this!” Well, yeah we could. And we did. For many, many years. It’s just that it was such a strange thing that took everybody by surprise.
CHRIS WEBER Before there was Guns N’ Roses, even before there was L.A. Guns, Tracii had his band and we all went to Fairfax.
ROB GARDNER (drummer, Pyrrhus, L.A. Guns, Hollywood Rose, Guns N’ Roses) I met Tracii in electronics class at Fairfax High soon after I moved to L.A. I grew up in Westchester, New York, and I went to school with Matt Dillon—we lived down the street from his family. Then I was new at Fairfax, but Tracii and I got to talking and then we started playing together.
TRACII GUNS We started our band, which was called Pyrrhus.
CHRIS WEBER Slash’s band was Tidus Sloan.
ROB GARDNER Tracii, Chris Weber, Slash, and I all went to the same school. We all knew each other.
TRACII GUNS Slash and I actually used to walk to Bancroft Junior High School together. And it was all about the guitar for us. Later on at Fairfax he turned me on to Randy Rhoads because he saw Ozzy play in L.A., and the next morning I was waiting outside electronics class and he couldn’t wait to tell me about it. He goes, “You know that picture on the Starwood of that band Quiet Riot? Well, the blond guy, he plays guitar for Ozzy now and he’s going to be your favorite guitar player.” I was like, “Yeah, right. Whatever…”
CHRIS WEBER Slash was Saul Hudson back then. I remember him and Tracii, they played some guitar-offs at Fairfax, at one of the little showcase rooms that was connected to the school. They had this dueling banjos thing for electric guitars. It was actually pretty fucking cool. But I don’t know how much they were friends at that point.
ROB GARDNER Over the years I think it was a case of “I’m getting pretty good.” “Oh, I’m getting pretty good.” Then you start playing in bands and people start watching and all the kids have different opinions. “I like this guy better.” “Well, I like this guy better.”
TRACII GUNS I never really saw it that way. I think we both really encouraged each other. If anything, it was maybe just a natural kind of healthy competition. But Slash would come over to my house and my mom, who was a pedal steel player, would always approve of his guitar playing. She would say, “You know, he’s really bluesy…” “Yeah, Mom, I know.” And she would tell me, “You should be more bluesy.” “No, Mom, I’m into metal!”
MARC CANTER (owner, Canter’s Deli; Slash’s Childhood Friend) I met Slash in the fifth grade because he saw my motorbike parked outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken and he was thinking about stealing it. And then he said to himself, “Instead of trying to steal it, why don’t I just say, ‘Hey, can I ride it?’” And that’s what happened.
Then in the summer of tenth grade we bumped into each other. He told me he was in a band, and that same day I went with him after school to his rehearsal. This was Tidus Sloan. And I watched him play Black Sabbath’s “Heaven and Hell” on a B.C. Rich Mockingbird through a Sunn amp. The tone he was getting would’ve blown Tony Iommi away. It was so rich and so thick and so heavy. And of course, he nailed the guitar solo. So, long before Guns N’ Roses, long before Hollywood Rose, I knew he was going to make his living playing the guitar.
ROB GARDNER Slash’s band and our band were two of the more popular bands at Fairfax. But we always got along. We’d do backyard parties, just your typical high school kind of stuff. I don’t remember how it went down but we played a party at a studio.
TRACII GUNS What it was actually was that Ron Schneider, who we all called Schneidy, he played bass in Slash’s band and he said to me, “Hey, Slash wants to do this New Year’s Eve party. We can all go there and jam.”
MARC CANTER Slash had an idea of renting out a rehearsal studio downtown [in L.A.] called Curly Joe’s, and charging three dollars to get in. And then he booked everyone he knew. He knew Tracii and Pyrrhus, and he knew Josh, who was the guitar player in Warrant at that time. None of these bands had ever played the Troubadour yet. They were all just high school bands that knew each other. And they were all bands that made it eventually, with different lineups.
JOSH LEWIS (guitarist, Warrant; Solo Artist) Slash was a few years older than me but we both went to Fairfax. All the Chili Peppers went there, too. Talk about rock ’n’ roll high school … But Slash asked us to play this New Year’s Eve party at Curly Joe’s, this was ’83 going into ’84, and it was our first gig as Warrant. Pyrrhus played second, and Slash’s band, which had been called Tidus Sloan but had just changed their name to Road Crew, played third.
MARC CANTER If you think about it, that night in 1983 you’re seeing L.A. Guns, Warrant, and part of Guns N’ Roses.
TRACII GUNS I mean, man, we were like fifteen years old. I still had braces on!
ROB GARDNER Tracii’s dad had a plumbing shop over in the Valley, so we used to go over there and play after the shop closed. And then we’d also play at my house. We started writing songs, just me and him, and then we added a bass player.
TRACII GUNS The bass player was my friend Dani Tull, who also went to Fairfax, and then we got Mike Jagosz, who somehow Rob Gardner knew, to sing. We would ditch school and go to Mike Jagosz’s house and play Risk and then rehearse and try to not get caught for ditching school.
ROB GARDNER Mike had a garage that was soundproofed. And his brother, Dave Jagosz, had a band called Shire that would play in there, and then we would play in there, too.
TRACII GUNS I went to see Shire play at the Roosevelt Hotel, and this guy Izzy was their new bass player. He had on a pink leather jacket and white cowboy boots, with dyed black hair. I could relate to that right away. I just figured he was a Mötley Crüe fan. So right after they got done playing I walked up and said, “Hey man, I’m Tracii.” He said, “I’m Izzy.” And it’s like, “Okay, cool. We’re buddies now!”
ROB GARDNER Back then he wasn’t calling himself Izzy Stradlin yet. He was Jeff Bell, actually. He got rid of the “Is” [Stradlin was born Jeffrey Isbell] and just called himself Jeff Bell.
TRACII GUNS When I was about sixteen, Izzy moved into my mom’s house and lived with us for, like, a year. And we always agreed that we liked Aerosmith and the Stones and the band Accept, but he turned me on to a lot of other stuff, like Hanoi Rocks and Girl with Phil Lewis … this kind of alternative rock scene. And I don’t mean alternative music. I mean just the alternative to mainstream metal.
CHRIS WEBER I was looking for a band and Tracii introduced me to Izzy. I think I wanted to play with Tracii, but he said, “No, I’m sort of a one-guitar-player dude.” But one night I was at the Rainbow, and Tracii was there with Izzy. They were outside in Tracii’s dad’s truck. Everybody that was under twenty-one kind of hung out in the Rainbow parking lot.
TRACII GUNS The Rainbow and the Rainbow parking lot were two different things. Inside the Rainbow was for scary people. The parking lot at one thirty a.m. was for nice rocker people!
KATHERINE TURMAN I started going to the Rainbow constantly when I was also sixteen or seventeen. We wouldn’t even go to the Rainbow—we would go for the Rainbow parking lot. Then everyone hooks up or goes to an after-party.
CHRIS WEBER There’d be a couple hundred people finding someone to go home with, whatever. Everybody was just kind of easy and drunk. It wasn’t a big deal, you know? HIV really wasn’t around in that way yet.
But that night Tracii had probably said something about me to Izzy, like, “I wanna introduce you to this guitar player, his parents have a pad here, he’s got gear…” Probably something that would’ve been pretty attractive to Izzy, who didn’t have enough money to buy a drink at times. So Izzy and I meet, and he was talking about bands I hadn’t even heard of, like Hanoi Rocks. I was like, “Yeah, whatever, that’s great. Judas Priest and Rush and Zeppelin!” But he brought a different sensibility to it. It was like, here was somebody who seemed like they knew what they were doing. And he looked great.
IZZY STRADLIN (bassist, Shire; Guitarist, Hollywood Rose, Guns N’ Roses) I was seventeen when I came out to California … I grew up in Florida and moved with my mom to Lafayette, Indiana. I started pissing around with a drum set, met Axl, and we hung out a lot. It was nowhere. We decided to put a band together. It was a bad time, being there. The people, the girls, it was so backward. The girls didn’t even know how to dress when they went to gigs! So the prospects were absolutely zilch. Axl and I were into anything that had a hard, loud beat. I think that’s how we managed with all that was comin’ down.
TRACII GUNS Izzy would always tell me, “You’ve gotta meet my friend Axl.” Or, you know, Bill at the time. He would say, “You guys are gonna get along great. He can scream that way you like it and he’s into Nazareth.” He kept telling me he was into Nazareth. And I was like, “Yeah! I like Nazareth!”
IZZY STRADLIN The first thing I remember about Axl, this is before I knew him—is the first day of class, eighth or ninth grade, I’m sitting in the class and I hear this noise going on in front, and I see these fucking books flying past, and I hear this yelling, and there’s this scuffle and then I see him, Axl, and this teacher bouncing off a door jamb. And then he was gone, down the hall, with a whole bunch of teachers running after him. That was the first thing. I’ll never forget that.
BILLY ROWE (guitarist, Jetboy) Jetboy started to go to L.A. in ’83, when I was still in high school. A friend of ours was super into W.A.S.P., but they hadn’t played San Francisco yet. This is pre the first record. So one time we tagged along with her to see W.A.S.P. at the Troubadour. And there was this dude standing outside who had the look that we were all about, that rock ’n’ roll trashy punk look. He was wearing all black, he was wearing the creepers, he had a black leather jacket that he had spray-painted pink with shoe polish. He just had that look that I connected with, that Hanoi Rocks look. And it was Izzy. And we started hanging out. We used to all hang out at Chris’ parents’ house.
CHRIS WEBER So I brought Izzy up to my house, I know that my mom called him Jeff, and we started to write some songs together. I don’t remember exactly when this was, but I know that [Aerosmith’s] Rock in a Hard Place was out, because I was really inspired by “Jailbait” for [the Hollywood Rose and eventual Guns N’ Roses song] “Anything Goes.” In the very beginning, me and Izzy were listening to that.
BILLY ROWE One album that Izzy used to listen to a lot was Restless and Wild by Accept. And if you listen to a lot of those songs on that record, especially “Fast as a Shark,” you’ll hear where Hollywood Rose and Guns N’ Roses probably got things like “Reckless Life.” And Axl had that whole Udo [Dirkschneider, Accept singer] vibe. You never read this stuff, though.
CHRIS WEBER In any case, we wrote some songs, and the way I remember it is that Izzy said, “You know, my buddy’s out here, he’s a singer and I want him to sing for us.” It kind of just became apparent that this guy Bill Bailey was going to be our singer.
TRACII GUNS For maybe six months, it was just, “This guy, Bill, you know, he’s the man. And he’s coming back and we’re going to put the band together, we’re going to be like Hanoi Rocks.” I was like, “Great!”
CHRIS WEBER Axl had already been in L.A. with a band called Rapid Fire, but then I think he went home to Indiana for a little bit.
IZZY STRADLIN He came out like three times before he stayed.
TRACII GUNS So finally Axl came back out from Indiana, but he was staying with Izzy’s ex-girlfriend, Jane, which was kind of a weird living situation because Izzy was living at my place. It was bizarre.
CHRIS WEBER You could tell that Izzy and Axl were on this sort of voyage together. That’s what it looked like from the outside. I never really felt like I had that same relationship with them. Maybe it’s because I’m from Los Angeles and they grew up in Lafayette.
LAURA REINJOHN Izzy and I picked up Axl at the bus station downtown, and we drove him back to the apartment he was staying at on Whitley. I cut his hair for the first time. He had this long red hair when he got here.
CHRIS WEBER One day Izzy brought me over to where Axl was living, on Whitley just north of Franklin. It was an old apartment with sort of a sliding elevator door gate. So we go up to the top and just sort of walk along the roof. And as I’m looking out over the rooftop I see this really white guy just laying out in the sun. It was a burning hot day and I just remember he was very white. And Izzy is like, “This is Bill!”
ROB GARDNER And then they did Hollywood Rose.
CHRIS WEBER The first band name was AXL. I don’t know who came up with it. It wasn’t me. Probably Axl. But you know, he wasn’t calling himself Axl yet. I don’t think I ever called him Axl the whole time I was in a band with him. He was always Bill. So it was me, Izzy, and Bill, but then there was a small falling out and I remember Izzy telling him, “Look, let’s get the band back together.” But he said, “We have to change the name. I’m not gonna play under the name AXL anymore.”
So then we were called Rose, but we would go to import record stores and we saw that there were other bands in other countries called Rose. So we changed it to Hollywood Rose. We would go back and forth between the names. It’s very Spiñal Tap.