Slash disses the Valley! Scandalous!
As promised, I'm checking back with my initial review on what I've read so far of Slash's autobiography -- which I thought I'd read on Vicodin after wisdom teeth removal, but I kept falling asleep after a couple of pages. No disrespect to Slash (aka Saul Hudson), because the book is nothing short of intriguing. It's also so detailed that you could use it as a handbook to do a Guns N' Roses tour of L.A. -- the houses where they grew up, the pittance-wage jobs they held (which, for Slash, included a paper route that covered Wilshire and La Brea down to Fairfax and Beverly), the apartments where they crashed, the studios they jammed (and, er, partied) at.
On page 50, though, Slash disses da Valley when he talks about entering Fairfax High in 1979:
"My best friend, Steven Adler (later Guns N' Roses drummer), was shipped back to the Valley for high school, which was as far off as Spain in my mind. I did visit him out there a few times and it never failed to disappoint: it was flat, dry, hotter than it was at home, and exactly like a sitcom neighborhood. Everyone there seemed to cherish their identical lawns and identical lives. Even at a young age, I knew something was wrong with that place; beneath the normalcy, I could sense that these people were more f'd up than anyone in Hollywood."
Slash also doesn't set out to trash Axl Rose, but from the very start of GNR you can see what a self-centered, arrogant, disturbed problem he is. Slash relates an early story when Axl was asleep on Slash's grandmother's couch, and she gently asked Axl to go sleep in Slash's room so she could watch her afternoon TV shows, and Axl told Slash's grandmother to F-off. Then when Slash nicely tried to talk to Axl later about why that wasn't appropriate and why he should apologize:
"Axl stared out the window as I spoke, then he started rocking back and forth in the passenger seat. We were driving on Santa Monica Boulevard, doing about forty miles an hour, when suddenly, he opened the car door and jumped out without a word...He didn't show up back at my house that night and he didn't come to rehearsal for four days."