2021.07.31 - The First 50 Gigs - Episode 0: Series Introduction (Marc Canter)

Transcript:

Jason Porath: Were you conscious that you were documenting history?

Marc Canter: Well, you know, I have a lot of stories and little tidbits of information that if I don't get them out there, they die with me.

JP: Welcome to the first 50 gigs, Guns N' Roses and the Making of Appetite for Destruction, a first-hand account of the origin story of Guns N' Roses, their rise on the Sunset Strip, and the making of Appetite for Destruction. I'm Jason Porath. I'm your host. I'm also the co-author of Reckless Road, and I've been working with Mark Canter to help bring his archive to life for fans around the world. As many of you know, Mark Canter was Slash's best friend and was known as the sixth member of the band during the early days. He was there and he witnessed it all and he documented the entire thing, starting with Slash's Garage Bands in 1981 and eventually following the original Appetite lineup from 1985 to 1987. Photographing and recording every single gig GN'R played as they dominated the Sunset Strip, wrote Appetite for Destruction and became the most successful rock band of the late 1980s. So let's get to it. Season one will trace the individual threads that led to the first Troubadour show of the Appetite lineup. This includes Slash's garage bands, Titus Sloan and Road Crew, as well as Hollywood Rose, LA Guns, and the original Guns N' Roses. So it's going to be a packed season. And because we've chosen this video podcast format, we're going to have the time to explore every aspect of the story and not leave any stones unturned.

JP: All right, so Mark, we're gonna start at the beginning here. People know that you supported the band. You've done enough interviews and of course we published Reckless Road. So they know who you are. We have this opportunity on this podcast to go a little deeper and let's talk a little bit about you and your family background and what Canters is to Los Angeles as one of the icons and also a place that is, you know, critical to the music scene in Los Angeles, especially during that time.

MC: So, yes, I'm Mark Canter. I'm third generation of the Canter family. ["The Music Show Theme"] It's been around since really 1924 in Jersey City, New Jersey. There were two locations there. My grandfather moved to Los Angeles with a couple of his brothers and started Canter Brothers in Boyle Heights. In the mid-60s, it really became like a counter-cultural place for the hippies. And to make a long story short, everybody from A to Z was there hanging out, eating, you know, mamas and papas, and you know, Bob Dylan. Basically, you know, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Doors, you know, especially like after they'd play a gig on the Sunset Strip.

JP: I'm going to assume that at that time, that area was already a place where the arts was happening in Los Angeles. So it wasn't necessarily a big leap that a lot of musicians would start frequenting the deli. You know, Slash mentioned that he played many late nights at Canter's in the Kibitz Room. So can you tell us what the Kibitz room is?

MC: Well, the Kibitz Room was actually a candy store that was part of the building that we bought in 1959. It was adjacent to the restaurant. And in the late 80s, we started up music again in the Kibitz Room. It had that living room atmosphere of just a fun party. You had everybody, Anthony Kiedis from the Chili Peppers, and Jackson Browne came and once played with Melissa Etheridge. The Spin Doctors had some time there, but Elliot Easton from the Cars. I'm gonna go name people forever, but Fiona Apple, they just keep popping in my head. But what happened was Slash, this was I believe in 1992, it was right around the time of the MTV Music Awards. And you know, Slash walks in and picks up this green strat that's like $200 strat that somebody, one of the musicians was playing, plugged into a cheap crappy amp. And they played a couple covers and you know, he had fun. And he was really happy he said he needed that because at that time they only played you know stadiums and it was like a good reality check brought him back to earth so he played there another time I don't know a couple months later he came back and did it again so I believe there's only really two times he played there.

JP: Right, but Canters was still central to the GN'R origin story so you know you fed them you gave them jobs they met each other there you know there's great story of how a few of them met there. So I think Canter's seems to be this place that they always returned to during that time.

JP: You're listening to the first 50 gigs. In this 2007 interview for Reckless Road, Slash talks about his history with Marc.

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Slash (2007): Duff came out from Seattle and answered an ad I had in the paper and again, I'm, you know, in relationship to Marc. I met Duff here at Canters and Steven and I, you know, that was our first meeting was here at Canters.

JP: How did you go from being Slash's friend, who you recognized that he had talent, that was unusual talent, and you wanted to document that, to the sixth member, or the honorary sixth member of the band?

MC: I met Slash during the fifth grade, and we became friends pretty quickly. And, you know, I just noticed a lot of special things about him and his artwork, later on in his motocross, bicycle motocross racing. He was already playing guitar and we were both into the same bands and I just knew, instinctively knew that he was gonna be good on that guitar. He had a little Sun amp and he was playing a BC Rich Mockingbird and right away I noticed that he had a controlled feedback and a thick sound and you know, you got chills down your spine when he would, you know, improvise a solo or play blues and just go at it. I kinda sorta made it my goal to document what he was doing and make sure he got to the next level. And that's pretty much what you're gonna find where we're talking about now, how it all came together.

Slash (2007): Marc Canter and I have known each other since the fifth grade, third street elementary school. How we got to be friends back then, I can't really remember.

MC: You tried to steal my minibike.

Slash: There's no particular... I tried to steal his mini bike. [laughs] Okay, I guess I tried to steal his mini-bike. [talking to Marc] Any other things you want to throw in? That's not gonna work.

MC: Go, go, go, go.

Slash: Okay. You know, we just, we did fifth grade, sixth grade, then seventh grade, then junior high school, and all that stuff, and we're just really good friends, you know, throughout, you know, all the way up until now. But back then, it was definitely a lot of like hanging out, and going to school, ditching a lot of school. We always had a camera around. So now it all makes sense.

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JP: Let's dive a little deeper into your role in the story. You know, you gave us the background on your friendship with Slash. Were you conscious that you were documenting history or were you just following your passion?

MC: I was passionate about collector and I understood what that meant. I started actually collecting Slash before he played, literally, because I was saving his artwork. And when we were riding bikes, I would lay down on the grass and let him fly over me and grab pictures and stuff like that. But once he started playing guitar, everything shifted because yes, I'm still gonna document it because it's good and it's special. But also at the same time, I understood the importance of he is going to make it one way or the other. And somebody is gonna wanna know about this.

MC: June 4th, 1982 was the first time I shot Slash playing guitar and that was at Fairfax High School. I shot one roll of film and I blew the roll off before they finished the first song. It was outdoors so it's not like you gotta fight the lighting or wait for the lighting to change. It was very easy, I just wish I brought more film. In fact, he used my guitar, he had it on stage for backup, and of course he broke a string and he used it for the last song, but I ran out of film so I didn't get to capture it.

JP: At some point you started following Axl as well. Now, did you start following Axl before Slash played in Hollywood Rose.

MC: I met Axl the same time Slash did. Steven and Slash were looking for a band to join or have other musicians join their band, singer, they were looking for a singer and a bass player at the time. And Rose was playing, I don't know if they were Rose or Hollywood Rose at the time, I think they were Hollywood Rose. They had a gig at Gazzarri's that was like a Battle of the Bands so it was like a dollar to get in and they only played three songs. I literally, I went there with Slash and Steven and we saw Axl and Izzy was on stage too at that time. We saw them perform and it was just, Axl was mesmerizing, Izzy was running around and it was just really good rock and roll. And after the gig, we met Axl and Axl and Slash spoke and Slash jammed a little bit in his mother's basement. And the next day Slash was in the band. So that's when I met Axl and we hung out a lot. We would go to movies, we'd go to dinner, whatever. I went to rehearsals. That band lasted a few months and then it fell apart. But when Axl joined LA Guns, he called me to see if I would shoot them at the Troubadour a couple of times, because he liked the work that I did with Hollywood Rose.

JP: And I remember you had to hide that fact from Slash, right?

MC: I did because it was kind of. You know, Axl was now in Tracii's band, Tracii Guns' band, and Tracii and Slash were sort of rivals in junior high and high school. I mean, they were friends, but rivals at the same time. So, you know, if I'm helping Axl and Tracii, then I'm kind of betraying Slash a little bit.

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You're listening to the first 50 gigs, Guns N' Roses, and the making of Appetite for Destruction with Mark Canter and Jason Porath.

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JP: How did your relationship with them change when they became international stars?

MC: Well the relationship didn't change at all. They knew that there's a very small handful of people, very small, that when things just got too much they could always go back and, "Hey, ask Canter, what does he think?" Because they knew I would give, you know, I cut through the bullshit. I'm going to tell them I have nothing to lose, nothing to gain. I wouldn't, you know, yes them to death. And, "Oh, this is great, blah, blah, blah." I tell them what it was, you know.

JP: I mean, it's well documented that friction started building between the band members, you know, into the early 90s. And there was a tug of war of the direction, maybe, that they wanted to go in. But, you know, what role did you play during that time? You know, did you feel like you were in the middle of a family that was breaking up?

MC: I did. When that whole thing happened in the mid-90s. It really was like '94, '95 when that started to fall apart, '96. And I was one of the only, may have been one of two people that still communicated with both sides. So I was always very neutral. I was just like...

JP: But were you trying to, you know, were you trying to mend the fences? Were you trying to be the person in the middle trying to get them back, you know, talking and...

MC: I didn't do too much back, later on I tried a huge intervention, but at that time, no. At that time I would hear what one said and what the other one said and I would tell them both what the other one said, but they still wouldn't agree.

JP: And after the band finally broke up in the mid 90s, it sounds like you maintained a relationship individually with Slash and Axl and maybe Steven and Duff and Izzy as well, but... Tell me about that period from the mid 90s, maybe into the early 2000s.

MC: Nothing really changed for me at all. I was going to see Axl, the musicians that he was playing with. And I went to Rio to see that. I flew to Vegas a couple of times to see, on New Year's Eve to see him play and with the new Guns N' Roses band. My relationship with Axl got put on hold in probably 2007. And a lot of it was communication, trying to get Axl to realize that Slash and him could work together. They just need to work it out through family therapists or something like that. Because I definitely knew they needed to take a break, but there was a certain amount of time where the break ended and it was time to now say hello again or work together in some kind of fashion, or at least not be enemies. That's where that still stays.

JP: You mentioned 2007. So that was around the time that we were producing Reckless Road. And I don't know if it was Axl or I don't know if it was Slash, but somebody said that, you know, they just want to bury Appetite. They don't want to live their life through that one album. You know, they want to bury it and do something new. So was there conflict in releasing this tome of your archive, you know, that brought their brand back to the Appetite days.

MC: Well, yeah, there was, and it wasn't with Slash, it was with Axl, but at that time, Axl was trying to get his Chinese Democracy record out, and, you know, well, he wanted to focus on the new band, but I don't think he quite understood that there is no new band without the history of the old band. My time was really, I didn't document Use Your Illusions other than a few gigs I went to. Appetite For Destruction, I documented pretty much every gig they went to, at least 50 gigs in Los Angeles. So at the time, Axl wasn't thrilled with Slash and he wasn't thrilled with anything that Slash was involved in, which would be the old material. So naturally I knew he wouldn't be like patting me on the back saying, "Oh, good job." I mean, he knew I put the book together in 1993, 1994. I even asked his permission for it. And he said, "Yes." And when I was done, he looked at it. I put everything on artboards. So I blew the photos up, real photos, no computer, to the size I wanted them and even shrunk flyers down and kind of rearranged it on artboards and pasted it down. And I was very meticulous about it, incorporating what they said in between the songs, because most people might think that's useless, but a lot of people want to know what they said between the songs, the first time they ever played their favorite song. For instance in Rocket Queen, he said, "This is the new one, it's for Barbie. It isn't much, but it's the best I could do. This song's called Rocket Queen." It just gives you goosebumps knowing that's what was said the first time it was played.

MC: How I shot the show, you'd see them, they come out with jackets on, and then like the next song, they take their jackets off because it's getting hot on stage, and then like towards the end of the show, they have no shirts on. So I even laid the photos out in that order, so as you turn the pages, the show is moving forward. Axl was really happy with the end product in 1994. And the only issue is that I didn't find, I didn't get the book put out, which then went through a whole other set of editing and your involvement and the cast of characters and everything else that took place in 2006-2007. But at the time when I put it together, I was just trying to give all the detail, and then after I figured once the publisher gets it like, you know, designed, I'll go back in and I'll give this extra content that needs, the little putting the flower on top of the cake, by giving that little more information that wasn't in the gigs.

JP: I was working for Enhanced Books, and you're right, it was the system whereby you would get a page for page companion copy of a photography, you know, fixed layout based books. And on each page online in this flash player, you would be able to kind of see extras, whether it was audio or video and really enhance that book. Soon after the book came out, Enhanced Books fell apart. And you know, we had a real problem at that time because we didn't know what to do. Should we make a documentary? You know, what do we do with all these hours of interview footage and all that stuff? We still wanted to somehow move forward with this multimedia version of the book. And that's when I had the idea to create an app. And at that time, the app environment was just beginning. It was 2010. And we partnered with a company called Vook, and we retold the story in app forum. And it really actually defined storytelling on the apps at that time. It was something new and we had all this great material and it did very well and it was a very exciting moment in the history of the project. And then, you know, that kind of faded away and we had the app and we had the book and, you know, things pretty much went quiet for a long time. But you and I always talked about that we never really realized, you know, the vision that we had for this project with all of your content, with the great stories that we have. And recently when you know, coronavirus hit and we all had some more time to think about things. You know, we came up with this idea to create this limited series podcast and videocast that unpacks all the moments that you captured during that time and allow those guests to come back and talk about their experiences, but really open up your archive even more than the book did and to expose a lot of things that weren't seen, episode by episode. So what people can expect from this series moving forward is really a play by play story of this entire origin story of GN'R and the making of Appetite. You're going to have the ability to watch it on video, listen to on your favorite podcast player. But also when you go to our web posts, you're going to find all of the archive stuff that you've provided, you know, that fits in with the story that we're telling in that episode. So this is going to be, I think, the definitive history. It's going to be the most comprehensive collection of material and stories. And this is something that will live on as that lightning in a bottle period that you captured for GN'R.

MC: Well, you know, I have a lot of stories and little little tidbits of information that if I don't get them out there, they die with me.

JP: And it's not only you. I mean, you know, we're going to have many of the guests on this show that appeared in the book that are going to have the breathing room to tell some of the deeper stories that that people may not know. And that's the beauty of I think this this new format is that we're able to to tell this story in a way where it's more accessible to people. You know, they don't have to buy a book. They can just tune in and hear the entirety of the story.

JP: I do want to talk about the recordings, Marc. A lot of the fans so far have asked us about, they just want to see what you captured. They just want to hear the original recordings. Now, you recorded about 40 hours of audio, about 20 hours of video. You captured numerous gigs on the Sunset trip, even before and during, while they were discovered, that nobody's ever seen. These things have never seen the light of day. A lot of fans are like, "Just open up your archive, Mark. We just want to see everything. What are you holding back on?" And I think it's important for people to understand and what's involved with copyright law and what the band has to say about releasing this material. So there are certain rights, there's current law that protects music and the band has a say whether this music comes out or not. I would imagine Universal Music Group has a say. And even though you did the recordings, it doesn't mean that you have the right to play them in any way that you want. And I think the fans need to understand that there's music law in place to protect the artists. And we just can't do anything we want with it. And we're gonna respect the wishes of the band and the wishes of Universal Music Group. That said, we will be able to surface a lot of the videos that you took, it just won't be with the music. But fans can expect to see a lot of these early video clips alongside of our stories. And I think that's something that they're absolutely going to love and appreciate. And it's things that they've never seen before.

MC: I see it as Reckless Road is a treasure trove for any Guns N' Roses fan. What we're doing now is more than a treasure trove. It's an encyclopedia. It gives you all the details, not just a glimpse at it. What's really exciting about what we're doing now with these podcasts is, a lot of cool stories have come up that I remember. A lot of cool stories have come up from people that we've talked to that are gonna be guests on the podcast, stories that I didn't even know about. And I'm really excited to get these stories out to the fans.

JP: Great, Marc. Well, thank you very much. And we look forward to the next episode with you. And this was a great kickoff to the journey we're about to take for the fans.

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