SEBASTIAN BACH After the success of Skid Row we felt freedom. I was fucking twenty-one, I had bought an incredible house, and I had all these platinum records from the first album on my wall. I said to myself, “Hey dude, now you’ve got to do that again!” It was like, “I’m not losing my fucking house. I want more platinum records!”
SCOTTI HILL There was a lot of anticipation for Slave to the Grind.
SEBASTIAN BACH “Youth Gone Wild” was a hit song, and “Piece of Me” was a video hit on MTV, but our giant smash hits were “18 and Life” and “I Remember You.” Which … we considered them ballads. We were young and full of piss and vinegar, and we didn’t want to be known as a ballad band. So we went as heavy as we could for the next record.
DAVE “SNAKE” SABO I remember Jason Flom saying to me about Slave to the Grind, “It’s one of my favorite albums ever. But you’re gonna lose half your audience.” And I was like, “What?” He goes, “I’m not telling you that you should write one, but there’s not an ‘I Remember You’ on there. So you’re gonna lose a lot of the females.”
JASON FLOM That first album was obviously great. And the second one was even better. Although ultimately it didn’t sell as well because it didn’t really have songs for girls.
SEBASTIAN BACH I remember walking into Atlantic the week before Slave to the Grind came out, and I went to Ahmet Ertegun’s office. He goes, “Hey, Sebastian! It sure looks like we’re going to sell a lot of copies…” I say, “Yeah.” He goes, “The first week, anyways.”
SCOTTI HILL People were anticipating it, so everybody got it as soon as it came out. And there it was: number one. I wasn’t expecting that. It was an awesome feeling. I remember waking up in a hotel and having our tour manager come in, going, “Slave to the Grind is the number one album on Billboard.” It was like, “Holy shit!”
RACHEL BOLAN The beginning of the Slave to the Grind tour is when we went out with Guns N’ Roses on their Use Your Illusion tour. And neither of our albums were out yet. I was never really a Guns fan but I had fun on that tour.
DUFF MCKAGAN They’d just done that second record and it was a little harder, right? Like, “Monkey Business” and all that stuff. I think they wanted to get out from under the shadow of Jon Bon Jovi. So they were going through their own thing. And they were good guys. Baz is hilarious. They were fun to tour with.
SEBASTIAN BACH Was there ever a moment when we pushed it too far? The first thing that comes to mind is the night that we played with Guns in Toronto, at CNE [Grandstand]. We had to drive back to America after, and we had so much blow that we had to fucking do it all. I’m not going to tell you who did it with me, but we were on the bus, we get near the Canadian border and we still have so much that we have to throw it out. But we don’t want to throw it out. So we went to a go-kart track. And I was so fucking high that I thought it would be a good idea to go in the opposite direction from everybody else on the track. I thought that would be hilarious. So I was flooring my go-kart with parents with their kids coming the opposite way. At, like, eleven in the morning. That was a moment that I never repeated in my life and never will. But that was a moment.
RACHEL BOLAN Izzy Stradlin was there for most of the tour. He wasn’t there for the whole time we were out though, ’cause Gilby [Clarke] came in at some point. But Izzy was clean. I remember when we played in Toronto, it was an outdoor gig, and he had his own bus with a trailer filled with different BMX bikes and stuff.
SCOTTI HILL He had go-karts, dune buggies, motorcycles, all kinds of shit.
RACHEL BOLAN I walked by him and he was washing this trials bike that he must have been riding somewhere earlier that day. I was fascinated by those things. So I went up to him, like, “Dude, you’ve got a trials bike!”
DUFF MCKAGAN He entered some trials contest in Kentucky and won. He was doing all kinds of cool shit.
RACHEL BOLAN And Izzy was the quiet guy. He never really hung. But we got to talking, and we talked for about an hour. Very cool. Then I go into the dressing room later and I see Duff and I’m like, “Izzy’s a really cool dude! We talked for an hour.” Duff looks at me and asks, “How long?” “Like an hour.” And he goes, “Dude, I don’t think over the past year Izzy has talked to us collectively as a band for an hour!”
ALAN NIVEN Izzy went through a terrible period of cocaine excess. Tin foil went up on the windows. He triple-locked his door. He wouldn’t talk to anybody. He wouldn’t come out. What’s that saying about the road of excess? It leads to the palace of wisdom? That’s if you don’t end up in the fucking ditch on the fucking way. And believe you me, vehicles left the road quite frequently. But Izzy found wisdom. He got sober.
SCOTTI HILL We were at the St. Louis show for the riot. That was fucking crazy.
RACHEL BOLAN We were backstage and we heard Guns stop playing. But you couldn’t really hear anything going on yet. Then their tour manager came in and he tapped me on the shoulder and he said, “Get your guys, get on your bus, and get the fuck out of here.” And I’m thinking, “Oh, no. What did somebody say?” But he had a look of urgency on his face and he goes, “Do it now!” The buses were already started.
SCOTTI HILL Our bus was actually moving when I jumped on. The door was open and we were all jumping in while it was rolling. Got a quick head count and then, boom! Pedal to the metal.
RACHEL BOLAN We’re peeling out and we see just cop car after cop car coming in the other direction. Then we’re on the highway and I look out the windshield of our bus and I go, “Is that Izzy’s bus in front of us?”’Cause I saw the trailer with all the motocross stickers on it. And the bus driver goes, “Yeah.”
SCOTTI HILL I think we drove to Illinois—the next gig might have been there. We checked in to a hotel and went to sleep. We turned on CNN the next morning and it was like, “Holy fuck!”
RACHEL BOLAN CNN’s showing a map of the United States and then it zooms in on Missouri. And over St. Louis it has, like, a cartoon explosion. A kapow! type of thing. And it says, RIOT AT GUNS N’ ROSES CONCERT.
SKY MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER 1991 At a St. Louis stadium Axl Rose jumped into the audience to snatch a camera from a fan, sparking off a riot that caused $200,000 worth of damage and injured more than 60 people.
ROB AFFUSO Things started to spiral out of control with us when we were touring with Guns N’ Roses and Sebastian started hanging out with Axl. Sebastian would watch Axl and listen to his words and, you know, one day he comes into rehearsal and it’s, “Well, this ain’t a fucking song until I say it’s a song!” Guess where he heard that from? But the thing you have to remember is, Axl Rose owns Guns N’ Roses, right? Sebastian Bach did not own Skid Row. He’s one-fifth of the team.
LONN FRIEND (editor, RIP Magazine; journalist; author, Life on Planet Rock, Sweet Demotion) Sebastian called my office during Slave to the Grind and he said, “Dude, I wanna be on the cover of RIP holding a broken bottle.” And I said, “Okay.” He wanted to be shot that way because he believed they had made a truly heavy record and he didn’t want a pinup photo on the cover. I went, “I can accommodate that sensibility.”
SCOTTI HILL I can remember doing a RIP magazine photo shoot in L.A. and Lonn put on the Nevermind record. I don’t think any of us had heard Nirvana. Maybe Rachel had. I was like, “Wow, this is fucking cool!” Didn’t think anything of it and went on with life after that.
LONN FRIEND I said, “I want you guys to listen to this fuckin’ record.” And Sebastian lost his mind. He goes, “We gotta take these guys out on tour with us!”
DAVE “SNAKE” SABO We reached out to Nirvana to tour with us after the Guns N’ Roses tour. And they declined because they said that we were homophobic. True story.
DANNY GOLDBERG (manager, Nirvana) I don’t remember Kurt saying anything about Skid Row, or the name ever coming up. I definitely remember him talking about Axl Rose. But you know, I’m sure he wouldn’t have opened for somebody who made an anti-gay statement.
DAVE “SNAKE” SABO This was before we got Pantera.
SCOTTI HILL I remember one particular day we were on a tour break and I was painting my kitchen and listening to WSOU. And “Cowboys from Hell” came on. I had never heard Pantera before. And I was like, “What the fuck is this? This is nuts.” I came back to the band and told them about it: “Listen to this. These fucking guys are incredible.” One thing led to another and we wound up touring together.
SEBASTIAN BACH At the time when we hired Pantera it wasn’t like we were throwing down the gauntlet. They were unknown. We hadn’t even seen them live. Their album Vulgar Display of Power didn’t come out until about a month into the tour.
DAVE “SNAKE” SABO I think it was pretty amazing that Dime [“Dimebag” Darrell, Pantera guitarist] and Phil [Anselmo, Pantera singer] and those guys even agreed to go out on the road with us. Because most people perceived us as a hair band. We got away from that a little bit with the Guns N’ Roses tour and the Slave to the Grind record, but you don’t know if people’s opinions are really changed or not.
SCOTTI HILL And the partying with those guys was another level. People would say, “Didn’t you get bad hangovers?” But after a while it’s like, your whole life is a bad hangover.
DAVE “SNAKE” SABO You’d be up until five in the morning drinking Black Tooth Grins [Crown Royal and Seagram’s 7 with Coke] and everything that you could get your hands on. I remember one night in the Midwest we came back to our shitty motel and Dime’s door is open and him and Vinnie [Paul, Pantera drummer] and the guys have chicken wire and papier-mâché all over the place. The room is completely ruined. They’re making these giant pot leafs, five or six feet high, and the plan is they’re gonna wheel these things out onstage on dollies. And then Phil’s gonna have a joint that’s, like, three feet long, with a smoke bomb at the end of it so it’s billowing out smoke. And they did it! It was the fucking funniest thing.
SEBASTIAN BACH Some nights they were very, very hard to follow. But they were one of the first great bands of the ’90s and so it was cool to watch them get big right before our eyes.
DAVE “SNAKE” SABO A lot of our fans got eaten up along the way. A lot of those young girls that were standing there in front of the stage waiting for Sebastian to come out were shocked when they had to sit through Pantera—and the mosh pit that came along with them. The general admission shows were fucking crazy.
RACHEL BOLAN And our demographic changed drastically. We went probably from 65 percent women at the shows to, like, 35 percent.