Inside the Horrific Guns N’ Roses ‘Hell House’
By: Cuepoint Selections
Tags: Rock, Drugs, Sex, Featured Rock, Music

It started out as a rehearsal space. They had been getting by using a room in Silver Lake owned by Nicky Beat, a Strip-scene drummer who’d spent about ten minutes in LA Guns. “Nicky wasn’t necessarily seedy,” Slash recalled. “But he had a lot of seedy friends…” Guns N’ Roses connected with various of those — the “underbelly” as Slash called it — and some would follow them back to the Hell House. Their lives were chaotic and becoming more so, and yet the chaos fired them. In the Hell House they wrote and worked up most of the songs that would appear on Appetite for Destruction, plus a few that would hold over for Use Your Illusion, too. Izzy had the riffs for “Think About You” and “Out ta Get Me”; Slash had the opening chords and riff to “Welcome to the Jungle.” “That song, if anything,’ Slash explained, “was the first real tune that the band wrote together…”

Duff and Steven spent many hours jamming along to rock and funk, forging their groove, and the rhythm of “Rocket Queen” came from one of those extended jams. And they wrote quickly. “Out ta Get Me” and “Welcome to the Jungle” took little more than an afternoon to assemble. When they got to the Hell House, the fierce work ethic continued. “We rehearsed a lot of hours,” Duff recalled. In the small concrete space with their amps turned up, “our shitty gear sounded magical, clear and huge.”

G N’ R on the porch of the Hell House [photo: onthisveryspot.com]

They had no PA and played so loud Axl would have to scream lyrics and vocal melodies into his bandmates’ ears in order to get his ideas across. Axl and Slash were the first to become permanent residents in the garage. Izzy, Duff and Steven had girlfriends that they were living with, but they still spent most of their waking hours there. As the band began to establish itself as one of the best new acts on the Strip, they dragged others towards the Hell House too.

There was West Arkeen, a musician neighbour of Duff’s, cut from the same cloth as the band and ultimately close enough to Axl to co-write “Yesterdays,” “The Garden” and “Bad Obsession,” as well as “It’s So Easy”; Del James, a biker turned writer and a pal of West’s, who began to hang with Axl and wrote short stories that were adapted for various lyrics and ideas, most notably the video for “November Rain”; Todd Crew, who played bass in another Strip band called Jetboy; Robert John, a photographer and friend of Axl’s whose work would become synonymous with the band’s early years; Jack Lue, another photographer, closer to Slash; Slash’s friends Mark Manfield and Ron Schneider; Duff ’s Seattle pal Eddy, who quickly tapped into Izzy’s heroin supply and was exiled back to Washington State; Marc Canter, still a true Guns believer who was to have a key, if unsung, role in Guns’ development during the Hell House era; Vicky Hamilton, a promoter and would-be manager with an eye for talent — she had booked early shows for Mötley Crüe and Poison — and the key to those precious slots at the Troubadour that Guns had begun to covet while they schlepped their wares at Madam Wong's (a Chinese restaurant) and the Stardust Ballroom (miles from West Hollywood); plus a revolving cast of bands that got to know of Guns N’ Roses as the new noise on Sunset (literally — the rehearsals were audible from ten blocks away): musical misfits like Faster Pussycat, Redd Kross, London, the rest of Jetboy and a stack of others, followed of course by girls who liked guys in bands, and then guys who liked girls that liked guys in bands, an ever-growing scene that centred around the Hell House and a cheap, dark Mexican restaurant across Sunset called El Compadre, and the Seventh Veil strip club, where the band became friendly enough with the girls to start having them come and dance on stage with them.

Live at the Troubadour, 1985 [photo: Marc Canter / Getty]

The scene itself fuelled creativity, sparked songs: when the entire band went to visit Lizzie Grey, who lived on Palm Avenue, an infamous street that ran between Sunset and Santa Monica (Slash: “more than a few sleazy chicks lived there, a few junkie girls we knew lived there…”), Lizzie passed around a bottle of cheap fortified wine called Night Train, a formidably alcoholic brew known for its ability to get the very broke very blasted very quickly. They began screaming the words “I’m on the night train” as they walked up Palm Avenue, with Axl extemporising along. The next morning back at the Hell House, they nailed the entire thing, words and music.

One of the regular visitors to the Hell House, Slash’s childhood buddy Marc Canter, recalled seeing the band work on that early material. “A lot of the songs would start with some idea from Izzy like ‘My Michelle’ — the spooky intro part of ‘Michelle’ was total Izzy but without Slash we wouldn’t have gotten the harder riff that followed it. Axl would hear these unfinished songs and just know exactly how to work within them. Duff and Steven would then make the songs truly swing and really flesh them out with their ideas. You could say as some have that Axl was the most important, [but] if you took any one of those guys out of the equation it would have drastically changed all of those songs. It was truly a democracy in the beginning, at that time in 1985 or 1986 they were all on the exact same page.”

All of the lyrics came from real-life situations or people. “My Michelle” was named after Michelle Young, who went to school with Slash and Steven and was a friend of Slash’s first serious girlfriend, Melissa. Michelle had a brief fling with Axl, who then immortalised her early life in the brutal opening couplets: “Your daddy works in porno / Now your mummy’s not around / She used to love her heroin / But now she’s underground.”

The idea, ironically, had come from Michelle herself, who’d once remarked to Axl how wonderful it would be to have someone write a song about her, after listening to “Your Song” by Elton John with him. “We were driving to a show I think it was,” she described in 2014, “and that song came on and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s such a beautiful song! I wish someone would write a song like that about me.’ And then, lo and behold, came ‘My Song,’” she laughed.

It wasn’t so funny, though, she admitted, the first time she heard the lyrics. “I heard it when I was at my dad’s house. I was in my bedroom [when] Axl called. He would always call me and sing me new songs. He would play this drumbeat on his knee and sing and snap to me on the phone whenever he had a new song, he would call me and sing a little and ask my opinion of it.” This time, though, she didn’t know what to say. “I was so out of it at the time, I was always high back then so when I heard it and heard the lyrics I was like, ‘Oh, it’s fine, it’s cool… do whatever you want.’” She laughed again then added, “I didn’t really honestly think that the album was going to be that huge or even that that song was gonna be on their album for that matter.”

According to Slash, writing in his memoir, “Michelle loved the attention it brought her. Back then it was the best thing that had happened to her. But like so many of our friends that were drawn into the dark circle of Guns N’ Roses, she came in one way and went out another. Most of them ended up going to jail or rehab or both (or worse).” According to Michelle, though, “when the song came out I can say it was never a blessing, it was always a curse, let’s just say”