Here Today... Gone To Hell!

Before the recording of Use Your Illusion, had the
idea to leave the band already come to your mind?

Yes, that'd had to cross my mind several times. But I
didn't think of it every day. It's true that,
sometimes, the situation was grotesque: Axl left the
stage after the second song, and I said to myself:
"Pfff...We look like idiots!" But the idea to leave
wasn't deeply anchored in me. Music continued to unite
us. Slash, Steven, Duff and I lived very close to each
other geographically and we played a lot. So I wanted
to make another record, which we did: it was a double
or a triple, I don't know anymore (EDITOR'S NOTE:
there Izzy is again, perfectly serious while declaring
that!)...

What was the last straw, which made you leave the
band?

After the first part of the Use Your Illusion tour,
Axl wanted to make me sign a contract which put me
aside a little, which meant that I was less paid. I
couldn't believe it. This contract came from a guy who
I grew up with. We'd always taken Guns N' Roses as a
friends' thing and, at one go, roughly, the singer
said to me: "now, we're doing business." Why was I
going to continue? Where was the fun? That was the
last straw, but there'd been antecedents which had
made me flip: during our first concert in London
(EDITOR'S NOTE: Donnington), kids died during the
show. What the fuck is that? Is that rock 'n' roll?
It's to have fun and then read in the newspaper of an
airport that kids died during your concert? It's fun
to play in stadiums every evening and to start a riot
in Saint Louis because the singer threw a fit? You
really manage at some point to say to yourself: "none
of this is funny anymore." Axl didn't do his job of
frontman anymore. And, besides, the others were
totally smashed, I didn't even manage to make them
learn covers: we would have been able to pass the time
when Axl leaves the scene, to entertain the kids.
Instead we came up with a drum solo. What's more
annoying than a drum solo?

I imagine that you were his closest friend in group
given that you'd both grown up in Lafayette. You
couln't manage to reason with him?

When he began to gain some money and to get laid, he
wasn't controllable any more. Everybody was too
wasted. I still managed to control myself, but I saw
Steven, Slash and Duff literally killing themselves
before my eyes. I don't even know any more if Steven
was still in the group in fact: what was that bullshit
anyway? A musician is fired from Guns N' Roses because
he's on drugs while the group spent all of their time
on that? I stopped everything a year before leaving
the band. So, during this year, I attended the
spectacle of my friends killing themselves. I didn't
want to be an accomplice to that, I didn't want to
wake up one day next to Slash's corpse telling myself
that indirectly, I'd participated in it. And so, I
left.

But you returned to help carry out some shows a little
later when Gilby Clarke broke his hand...

It's simple. I'd returned to Indiana, I lived
peacefully, and one day, Axl called me. He asked me
whether, effectively, I could help them on some
concerts. I asked where these shows would take place,
and it answered in Istanbul, in Athens, in London...
you think that I hesitated (laughter)?! I love to
travel and see new countries! Besides, Alan Niven, my
manager, who was also that of Guns in the beginning,
explained to me that the band still owed me some
money. He advised me to accept to make them pay what
they still owed me. It's only afterwards that I
realized that Alan was going to get 20% of this sum
(laughter)! I did these shows and I didn't enjoy
myself a lot because Duff and Slash were always still
wasted. I don't want to pretend I'm a saint, 'cause I
did everything, but when you're clean, there's nothing
funny about seeing your friends like that.

While being surrounded by stoned guys, how did you
manage to stop?

I was helped a lot by the police! I was on probation
during one year in Los Angeles because I pissed in
aisle of a plane! I had to go to see a psychologist
every week, and, constantly, I could be controlled by
the cops, namely that they could check my urine to see
if I'd been drinking or taking drugs. And if you get
it all wrong, if they discover that you've fucked up,
you go directly to jail for quite some time. I didn't
want that. So I had to stop. Steven Tyler of Aerosmith
also me helped a lot during this period: he told me
his stories, and if, on the base, that can be funny,
at the bottom, it's more flippant than the other
matter. [?]

     By the start of 1989, Izzy and the band were off the road at last but now a new reality began to dawn. "We'd stopped hanging out together - me, Duff, Slash, all of us. Isolated in small apartments somewhere. The drugs and drinking and stuff was a big part of the isolation. It was like self-imposed and it became worse. It all just got worse..."

     Through it all, however, he kept up a dialogue with Steven Tyler. "I had a lot of conversations with Steven. Mainly, he would tell me really fucking scary drug stories - shit like locking himself in a bathroom and filling in all the tile cracks with toothpaste. And seeing worms... I thought, whoah, I'll never get that bad!

     "Then another half-a-year went by and I found myself driving down the 101 freeway in LA and I'm seeing snow, cos I've been up for like days, doing coke. Oh, man... And then that fuckin' worm thing came up! I was staying with this coke dealer. I'd been up for five fucking days, and I was out in his garage, for what reason I'll never know. And I pulled open this drawer of nuts and screws, and sure enough, man, they were turning into maggots! I thought, I gotta get the fuck out of here..."

     But if Tyler had been influential in getting Izzy to at least think about getting straight, it was one, now infamous incident, that really forced the issue: when he was arrested on a domestic US flight from LA to Phoenix for urinating in the aisle of the First Class section. "Ah, I was drunk, man. Then waking up in jail... Not cool, man," he says with an embarrassed grin.

     Because it happened in "federal airspace", the US authorities were rather less amused. Taking into consideration a prior arrest for marijuana possession, Izzy was put on probation for a year and - irony of ironies - subjected to random urine tests. Now he really had to stop: the law demanded it. "Suddenly, I can't use drugs anymore, or I'm going to jail. Wow..." It was 1990 and suddenly the band's enforced lay-off had an unforseen positive side. With the time and the motive to clean up his act properly, Izzy went into rehab and began receiving professional counseling.

     What really made him stop, though he thinks now, "was I wanted to. Cos I figured at some point your heart's just gonna pop, or your mind's gonna snap, right? Eventually, that shit will kill ya, and it does. It kills people all the time. Once I got maybe like a week of sobriety, like going a week without a drink, I thought, oh god, if I can just keep this up..."

     The biggest test for the newly sober guitarist was returning to the band. "I'd come in for rehearsals for 'Use Your Illusion' and there's one of the guys on the road case with a big line of coke. 'Hey, Iz - you want some coke?' Ah, no thanks, I just got back from my probation officer, you know? To get sober is really [tough] but to do it like that, in a situation where everybody's still using..."

     Nevertheless, he persisted for about a year. Recording wasn't so bad - remarkably, basic tracks for both 'Use Your Illusion' albums took less than two weeks, he says. It was going back out on the road that did for him in the end. "The shows were completely erratic. I never knew whether we'd be able to finish the show from day-to-day, cos [Axl] would walk off..."

     They say that in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king, but for Izzy, returning to the road with Guns N' Roses, in 1991, was "a nightmare." Axl's 'mood swings' had become so regular. "I said to Duff and Slash, we gotta learn a cover song or something, for when [Axl} leaves the stage. They were like, 'Ah, let's have another beer...' They didn't care."

     The lowest point was the notorious riot that ensued halfway through a show in St. Louis in 1991, after Axl first dived into the crowd and then refused to continue the show because someone in the audience had taken a picture. Possibly the most unsavory incident in the band's crazed, incident-driven career, as Izzy says now: "When something like that happens, you can't help but think bac to Donington [in 1988, when two fans were trampled to death in the rush for the stage at the start of GN'R's set]. What's to stop us from having some more people trampled - because the singer doesn't like something? Like, what's the point? What are we getting at here?"

     Travelling in his own trailer-truck from gig to gig while the others flew - no longer able merely to lose himself in the illusion - Izzy knew it was only a matter of time before he bailed out completely. Steven had already gone - hypocritically bumped out of the band for failing to deal with his own drug problems. Things just weren't the same anymore. "The music had taken a back seat, there was nothing new coming from us. We didn't sit around and play accoustic guitars anymore. It was like, oh, time to go on - where's the singer? The singer walked off? Now what do we do?

     "We'd started out as a garage band and it became like a huge band, which was fine. But everything was so magnified... Drug addictions, personalities... it just became... too much. Plus, my friends, these guys... I'm basically watching them kill themselves. Not so much Axl, but Slash and Duff, man - these guys were on my top ten list of guys that might die this week. And I'm thinking, you know what, I just don't want to be part of it. It didn't feel like it was good."

what "spooked" him enough to kick it

Didn't he also wake up in a hospital at one point?

/jarmo

I've never heard anything about a hospital, but he did say that there was one time where he was overdosing and suddenly he woke up gasping for air - his respiratory system was beginning to shut down. He said he's got a couple of close calls like that.

Official Izzy bio ain't never gonna happen. In 2004 there was an unofficial bio made called Dust N'

It was Axl.  ;D


It was the fame of the heroin addiction and the fear of death. When Izzy woke up in New York with EKG pads all over his body and doesn't know how they got there, and knows, 'I think I OD'd last night and made it back home' - that was pretty much it. Before that he was pulling away, but that was the end.

Axl Speaks
Rolling Stone, January 2000 (http://www.heretodaygonetohell.com/articles/showarticle.php?articleid=30)

Why do you say there will never be an official Izzy bio?? Did he ever say that?? ???