2021.10.12 - The First 50 Gigs - Episode 5: Bassist Steve Darrow talks about his time in the New Hollywood Rose

We continue the origin story of the Appetite lineup by following what Slash called “the incestuous revolving door of band and musicians.” Our guest Steve Darrow was the bass player for the New Hollywood Rose after Chris Weber and the Hollywood Rose broke up. Izzy and Axl started the New Hollywood Rose by recruiting Steve Darrow in 1984, as well as another guitar player and a drummer (can you guess who?). Izzy preferred only one guitar player in the band and left the New Hollywood Rose, joining London with Nadir D’ Priest.

In this episode, you’ll:

• Hear how Steve Darrow met Axl and Izzy and how their love of Hanoi Rocks, Aerosmith and mash up of metal bands shaped their sound.

• Watch the first time Axl, Slash and Steven Adler and Steve Darrow play together and how Steven Adler managed to get through his first live performance.

• Understand how the New Hollywood Rose look and sound evolved from metal to glam.

Subscribe to our Patreon Site to see the video version of this episode and the photographs Marc captured during the time this version of Hollywood Rose played: https://www.patreon.com/first50gigs_gnr



Transcript:

00:01
Did you and Izzy officially meet through a classified ad in the Recycler? Yeah, yeah. He was very like, let me tell you about what we're looking for. Do you have long hair? Do you have some black pants? How long have you been playing?

00:19
Welcome back to the first 50 gigs, Guns N' Roses, and the making of Appetite for Destruction. As with all of our guests in season one, Steve Darrow was there. He was there at the beginning, and met Izzy Stradlin and Axl Rose through an ad in the Recycler in the early 1980s, and eventually became one of the founding members of the new Hollywood Rose, a version of Hollywood Rose, and a precursor to LA Guns. Like so many musicians at the time,

00:47
Steve cycled in and out of bands in what Slash called an incestuous revolving door of players and bands. Steve, welcome to the show. Hello, nice to be here. Good to have you. And Mark, good to have you back as well as always. Of course, love to be here. Awesome. So Steve, let's talk about when you entered into this GNR origin story and maybe talk about meeting Izzy.

01:17
Basically Izzy was the first person I met out of those guys. We'd been in the same club, I'd seen this guy and he stood out just the way he looked. Fast forward a couple years from that, 84, 85, 86, there was like a thousand Izzy's in LA, but at that point there was only him. Did you and Izzy officially meet through a classified ad that Izzy had placed in the recycler? Yeah, yeah, before Craigslist and the internet,

01:47
There was silly little local newspapers where you could place a free ad. The Recycler just happened to be the LA version that sold everything. I was always looking for instruments and whatnot, so looking the musicians wanted. And it turns out, if you look at other people's backstories, like Motley Crew, Mick Mars through the Recycler. But anyways, it was a paper and it came out every Thursday and it was really cheap.

02:15
This one really popped out and it was, I could tell the way it was worded, it was like, you know, he used all of the adjectives. You know, it was all super glam and hair, makeup and Vogue magazine, Anoy Rocks and Motley Crue, blah, blah, blah. And you know, no one was really saying that. So I had to call these guys.

02:44
I called the number in the recycler and like I said, it was not directly like, hello? Hi, this is Jeff. It was like, I left a message and then I got it, waited a few days, didn't hear anything. I was still living with my mom in Pasadena at that point. So I think when by the time whoever returned my call from the...

03:06
week or so before that, she'd probably answered and wrote it down on a piece of paper for me and said, oh, call this number. So there's a bit of an old fashioned phone tag back then. So once I finally got on the phone with this person said their name is Jeff, and I still didn't know that it was this black haired guy with the leather jacket. He was very like, okay, no, let me tell you about what we're looking for. Do you have long hair? Do you have some black pants? How long have you been playing?

03:33
Do you like this band? Do you like that band? You know, do you like Aerosmith? Do you like Hanoi Rocks? Do you like New York Dolls? It took, like I said, it took a good number of phone calls before he actually said, you know, come on over to our apartment and, you know, we'll hang out. You guys finally connected and you and Izzy obviously found common ground with style and sound. You talked about, you know, the New York Dolls, you talked about Aerosmith. What were some other specific examples?

04:04
of the bands and the sounds that you both gravitated to that began to deepen your friendship and collaboration at that time. Basically Motley Crue and Wasp and Ratt and bands like that were the big thing at the time. But this was like the second generation of those types of strip bands that were just starting to get on MTV and whatnot.

04:29
So there was like that level of like, I kind of want to do something like that, but not quite the same because everyone wants to do that now. But I want to take elements of say what crew and WASP was doing, namely the dolls, uh, Alice Cooper, old Alice Cooper, uh, even some punk. And what about Hanoi Rocks? Well, like Hanoi Rocks was definitely like the password or the code word that it got sort of.

04:59
got you into that inner circle because at that point they were really, really new. You only really knew about them if you read the import rock magazines from Europe. What was it about Hanoi Rocks that resonated with everyone? At that point for Izzy especially, they were just sort of like the ultimate, they seemed like the ultimate next thing. You know, the next big thing.

05:27
had been exploited yet and there were little bits of everything that we had talked about before. There were a bit of a little more extreme and less heavy metal musically, but more makeup, more dolls, more trashy, less Van Halen, hearty, tan, California and more.

05:53
You know, cowboy boots, black hair, lots of bandanas, and lots of makeup.

06:01
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06:16
So when you were first hooked up with Izzy, let's just try to establish a timeline here. You know, the early bands that he was in, you know, range from the Naughty Women to the Adams to the Baby Slayer to Voodoo Church. Can you tell us anything about those? Were you around at that time? Okay, so my history before this was I had been playing drums mainly.

06:42
bands that were more in that scene, to be honest. It wasn't the Metal Sunset Strip scene at all. I mean, it was the more punk, post-punk into death rock that was what we called it before they called it Doth, which was the voodoo church and Naughty Women. And those were the, like I was saying when I'd seen Izzy around, the people that looked like that, that sort of hybrid of, you know.

07:09
Johnny Thunders meets Nikki Sixx meets Suzy Sue or something like that. You know, Voodoo Church was a band that I'd seen and even played gigs with. And I didn't know that Izzy was hooked up with these people at that time, because the funny thing is he never mentioned that. You started out playing drums and you started jamming with these guys playing drums and it sounds like there wasn't a match with you playing drums with them. Or they were looking for another style drummer. Yeah, exactly.

07:36
So you guys never really kind of got together in a band and then you joined Kerrydoll, played with Kerrydoll for a while, but then you switched to the bass and you got great at bass. And I think you were sharing a bill at a venue with Rose or Hollywood Rose at the time. Yeah, opening for Kerrydoll. And they saw you playing and they recruited you.

08:05
into Hollywood Rose. So can you tell us about that sequence of events? There's one particular show with Carey and it was crazy, you know, crazy shock rock show, high energy. It's hanging around afterwards and just before I had to carry my gear downstairs and like I said, as you feel, we're there for most of the night and it was towards the end of the night and I bumped into him, I was like, oh, what's going on with you guys? You know, what's going on with the band? You guys find, you know,

08:35
ultimate setup yet. And he goes, yeah, well, like, did you find a bass player ever? Cause I know that was like initially last time I talked to him. He goes, no, you're our new bass player. It's like as simple as that. I go, oh, hi, Ann. And I was kind of like cocky, like, well, okay. What do you have in mind? And literally, uh, the opening of the revolving doors of all this success to his band started happening. Yeah.

09:05
But you never actually played with Izzy and Axl because at that time, Hollywood Rose broke up and the new Hollywood Rose began. And the new Hollywood Rose had you, Axl, Slash and Steven Adler. So what happened during that transition? Again, this was one of those many times that, you know, there was these gray areas of bands when it wasn't just a straight, OK, this is this is Rose, this is Hollywood Rose, this is different people.

09:35
There was a time when it was going to be basically the same as, you know, Hollywood Rose. So what you're saying is that the Hollywood Rose at that time should have been Axl, Izzy, you, and Chris Webber? Basically. And the drummers were always sort of, well, we'll use this guy for a while, but we got another guy in mind. You know, it was always this sort of somewhat blurry. By the time that...

10:03
Dick came around, the whole lineup, it was someone had quit, someone had been fired. So, so when that fell apart, how did Stephen and Slash come into the picture? And what was that like for you now jamming with, you know, this new lead guitarist that wasn't Izzy and Stephen Adler? It was, it was great. It was different at first. And there was Mark, I don't know.

10:31
you remember but there was a time at Fortress of Programmer when we did the first and it was Izzy and it was Slash. Yeah what I remember is I remember seeing Rose or Hollywood Rose at Guzzari's and Chris Weber and Andre Trox were in the band and Slash met Axl that night and Izzy and they had a little meeting and it seemed like within a week

10:59
They were in the slash and Stephen were in the band and you were in the band, but under trucks was out and Izzy was there for like five seconds. Yeah. Maybe there was a half five seconds. There was a couple of jams where it was all of it. I remember being in the studio and I remember you were there and.

11:21
I just remember that. I vaguely remember whether or not Izzy was there or maybe he was there one day and not the next. I can't remember exactly. I'm pretty sure it was something like that because there was a time when... because Izzy was fine with the Slash idea. He wasn't 100% I think sold on it, but he was like, this guy's cool. I think that night, it was obviously...

11:46
kind of something happened between those guys. So at that point then, you know, you were saying, just tell me where to show up and I'll be there. Was that the new Hollywood Rose? It wasn't anything yet, but it's looking back on it, it's what you would call the new Hollywood Rose. And again, Izzy was there, and Slash was there, and me. And so it was basically...

12:13
the appetite lineup with me instead of Duff for that one day at least. Um, we jammed and then again, like Mark said, I think we had another jam. Few days later and Izzy seemed to have just not showed up. I don't want to skip over this point, um, that you just mentioned, which was, it was the appetite lineup with you instead of Duff. Let me say something. It was the appetite lineup.

12:40
with you instead of Duff. The only difference with Stephen was playing double bass drums. So it was a completely different dynamic. It was like a speed metal band, but not really speed metal. It was like a speed something band. It was just, it was double bass drums and it was loud and it was, you know, in your face. So the Guns N' Roses that Steve was in, that Steve Darrow was in, was not the Appetite that played, the Appetite lineup that played a year later.

13:08
Everything slowed down. A year later, everything was at like half time. The Hollywood Bros with the Appetite lineup, except for Duff, it didn't sound anything like the Guns N' Roses at their first gig at the Troubadour. Because like I said, everything has slowed down because of the double, they stole one of Stephen's bass drums. So it was a different dynamic. Same guys, but a different dynamic.

13:34
But Mark's right, I mean, musically, basically, even with Slash and Steve, it was basically starting where, you know, the Izzy tunes, which were all pretty fast and, you know, I mean, it was like if you took Motorhead and had Nazareth vocals or Steven Tyler vocals on top of that, you know, like speed band, which kind of probably hard for a lot of Guns N' Roses people to wrap their head around. But it was like...

14:05
I just want to riff on what you're saying really quickly, because I think there's this common belief that somehow these five guys met and their music was immediately great together, they dominated the Sunset Strip and they got signed and went off. What you're basically telling us is that there was just a lot of experimentation going on, there was a lot of versions of these different bands, there was a lot of musical styles that they were trying on and taking off.

14:32
It wasn't like there was some magic that just came together all of a sudden. There was a lot of iteration. To preview the full experience of the first 50 gigs video podcast that includes exclusive photos and videos from Mark's archive, check out the first 50 gigs YouTube channel. You'll find the link right here in our episode show notes.

15:01
So Stephen, at this point, you were rehearsing with all the guys, Izzy leaves and joins London, and then you and the new Hollywood Rose play about five gigs together. Most of them Mark documented, starting with June 16th at Madame Wong's West. What do you remember about the four or five gigs that you played together with Axl, Stephen and Slash? What I remember about the first gig the most, the Madame Wong's, was that oddly enough,

15:32
I think Steve Adler's, I want to say his first live show, he was all amped up, like even more amped up than usual and a little bit nervous. He didn't even know, like the sound man, that got him on, said to say, no dude, we need to put a microphone in your bass drums, both of them. You need to cut a hole so, you know, like you see everybody out there in pictures and they have holes put in their bass drum, you know, you gotta do that.

16:01
and he had to run around the block to let off some steam. Again, Mark was probably there and it was not a whole lot of other people in the audience besides our girlfriends and Mark. So this is the June 16th show, so what comes to mind? Probably the first thing people are gonna notice is, you know, you can see Slash's face, who's hair, which was the case back then.

16:25
No, no top hat yet. No Les Paul yet. His marshals he traded in for, um, Risen, which were local amp company made in Orange County, which were kind of new at the time. And a lot of people were switching over, uh, Montly crew included lead forward. Uh, Axel, obviously the next thing probably people notice is Axel's sort of Duran Duran type of suit. Which, uh,

16:56
I don't know what was the vibe that she was going for then. Could have been anywhere from Hanoi Rocks to Duran Duran to Mick Jagger or David Bowie that he was going for. The next one I see coming up is definitely a drum set that didn't get seen much in later years. Steve Satama double bass, lots of cymbals, two china cymbals, large drums.

17:25
He played all of them all the time. The first jam that me and Izzy and Axl had with No Base Player, me playing drums. That's pretty much exactly the same thing that Izzy was trying to reiterate by saying, well, you're not crying. You're not the right stylistic drummer for this. And Steve, when he came in, was blazing. He did fine at being that kind of drummer. Cream Magazine t-shirt, that was cool.

17:54
Axl had, and that was an original one, there was before there was fucking reissues of any of this stuff made. This was like almost old fashioned at the time. Like early 80s, this would have been kind of like, oh, Cream Magazine, wasn't that was so five years ago or something, but very cool boy, howdy t-shirt. And what was Cream Magazine? Cream Magazine was like the coolest American rock magazine of all time.

18:24
It wasn't Rolling Stone and it wasn't Circus and it wasn't any of these later magazines that you probably, people might remember from the 80s. Let's talk about what Slash was playing on and what kind of sound was coming out.

18:39
Well, he had gotten, always, this was like the newest, coolest custom PCB at Warlock at the time. Not cheap at all. Yeah, I believe he got that at Hollywood Music, which where Genghis Kohn is now, on, you know, just north of Malroska, Fairfax. And he worked there, so he must have, you know, taken a little bit out of his paycheck or put down layaway or whatever.

19:07
I do remember being like maybe $2,500 or something like that. It was a lot of money. Like someone in our financial situation should not have been able to own one of those guitars. And he did. And he had B.C. Rich's previous to that too, as you look at the old pictures of Rudd Crew and Ty Sloan and whatnot. He was playing like another nice old B.C. Rich, which was more of what Joe Perry played in the live bootleg days.

19:35
I remember even in another thing about the transition between the different roses and the Hollywood rose and whatnot. I mean, I remember even once Axel sort of took charge of this lineup, you know, it wasn't Izzy calling the shots and coming up with directions so much. It was, it was Axel's like idea. He's like, I want to kind of, you know, I want to do the same stuff we were always doing, but a little bit more street. You said something very interesting. You said that.

20:02
You know, Axl was beginning to call the shots here because Izzy wasn't around. Yeah, he always was Axl. Even if he wasn't, even if he was just doing what someone else came up with, he was always Axl. And he always had his ideas and his persona and stuff like that. It's just, I think it became more and more upfront. And same with Slash. You know, once Izzy was temporarily out, Slash had a lot more to do with coming up with different sounds.

20:31
and actually had more to do with like what to do, where to take the sound visually on stage. And it wasn't all that much different than the early days, but you could tell it was. I mean, just looking at the pictures, you can tell. So the next gig was at the Tribador on July 10th. Did you feel like there was a following that was growing for Hollywood Rose at that time? Not necessarily. You know, it was all just, like I said, it was all basically we were going through the

21:00
Every band in LA, especially at times like back then when there was thousands and thousands of bands, or hundreds at that point, you had to sort of work your way up no matter what. No matter how good you sounded or how good you looked or whatever, you had to pay your dues at these opening weeknights and playing to small crowds. Once you got into the troubadour and the whiskey and the Guzzari's, you had to get into the pay-to-play situation, which was basically...

21:30
Either you came up and if you were an unknown band, you either had to come up with $700, $800 cash and give them to them in advance. Tell me about what this is. It looks like some kind of signed contract from Doug Weston's Tribadour. And it says that Sunday through Thursday, there's a two drink minimum, $4.00 enforced at the box office. And that you need to include your client list.

22:00
but do not include any band or crew. And it tells you what order of appearance you're coming on and that any violation of the above rules may result in disqualification of payment and or further bookings. So what is this contract? These tickets that you had to sell in advance before the show basically generated cash for the club in case no one showed up. If you were a band that had no followers, if five people showed up.

22:29
paid five bucks to get in, you would still owe the club money. So basically, you had to pay for everything. You had to pay if you wanted a dressing room, that was an extra 30 bucks. If you wanted the guy, the troubadour to run your lights, that was an extra 20 bucks. If you wanted anything, it was like these add-ons back then. And same with the whiskey and Desirees and stuff after a certain point. Unless you were a well-established band that had your own contract, and they knew it was going to be a full house.

22:59
then you had your own set of rules. But we were, again, we were working up the ladder, like all the bands had to do. They had to work up, especially at the Troubadour. They had to play, you know, crappy nights, opening, then you'd play a crappy night, you'd play a higher up on the bill, like maybe the middle of the bill, and then you'd be like another crappy night a month later, headlining, and then you'd drop down to a weekend, but you'd drop down to like the opening band again.

23:28
And then you have to work up that ladder, which was just this constant struggle for local bands. Steve Derrick was saying that it was the first time Steven Adler played a real gig. Well, actually, it was the first time Slash played a real gig too, because before that, they had never, neither one of them had played at a real club. They only played at parties for, you know, at a rehearsal, a rehearsal party, but not an actual venue. So.

23:56
Yeah, it was fun for me to finally, you know, I had been shooting concerts for about, you know, two years before that, and whoever came through town, you know, anyone. And so to me, it was like, now I get to finally shoot them on a stage rather than at rehearsal or, you know, at a party. So it was more of a, it was like shooting a real band on stage. Mark did a really good job, not just being there. I mean, even

24:24
anyone being there with a camera would have been fine for documentation, but he did a really good job of actually, you know, making these photos look awesome. Whatever was happening on stage, that's what I was grabbing. So I was shooting the whole band. Yeah. And it was like, as if you were shooting, you know, ACDC or UFO or one of the bigger shows, paid a bunch of money and went to like a big place to, you know, it was like, it didn't look like a little.

24:51
crappy snapshot from the back of an empty room. Well, it's funny that you say that. At the Madame Wong's East June 28th gig, there was literally five people in the audience and it was their girlfriends. Yeah. And so, I believe Tracy Guns actually was at that gig too, but possibly. But still, it was like, you know, trying to shoot, make it look like it really was a concert. Yeah. And you know,

25:20
The band was playing like it was a full stadium. That was the fun of it. That was that was again, and you could tell like this shot right here that you have. I mean, this is a classic example. Like I said, if you didn't see a low ceiling on this little, you know, dingy club, I mean, this is like a punk rock club for all practical purposes. You know, I had played here with punk bands and stuff not too far before this. And sometimes there was a hundred people in that room. Sometimes there was four, you know, and it was a

25:50
Chinese restaurant, literally, by the day, and they turn it into a rock club at night to make some extra money, but you know, he did a good job and everyone was assuming the position and you know, doing like what they should have been doing. They didn't look like a scared young, novice band, you know, that was kind of like, what do we do? You know, I mean, everyone was like going through the motions like they were, they'd been doing it forever. And it's funny that it was both of those guys' first gigs too.

26:22
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26:37
I think for now, I'm more interested in spending time kind of wrapping up the Hollywood Rose story and understanding what led to its demise and the birth of LA Guns. Like I said, it wouldn't have been the first time that the band fell apart. It seemed to happen about every six weeks to two months or something, you know, the band would fall apart and it would get back together and sometimes it was fatal. Even once they solidified their lineup, there was times when it seemed like they weren't gonna make it to the next week, you know, as a band.

27:07
I was never really fired and I didn't quit. I figured it would be one of those things where, well, maybe they'll get back together again in a couple of months and I'll be playing with them and maybe they'll have somebody else. And it didn't happen that way. Because everyone was all over the place. No one was really like, Slash and Axel were still doing different things and trying to do different things. I think Slash was commiserating with other people like Duff and whatnot at that point. So there was the beginning of all this second wave of.

27:36
cross pollination so I think his idea was to get Slash and Axel and myself to play bass I mean we knew about Raz coming in and as Tracy we got closer Tracy and whatnot things were rolling along like each time I bumped into him there was something new that they had planned there was an EP and there was ads and there was videos and then we got a van and we got new gear so things were like really rapidly jumping up with them other things were happening too in these

28:06
parallel times when I sort of disappeared and Lizzy came back into the fold and then Tracy came into the fold. I actually ended up playing in a band with Tracy in New York, which was a very weird thing because he actually broke, he actually quit his own band, LA Guns, to go play with me in New York with this girl who was a penthouse pen who had basically the same type of a Hanoi Rocks, you know, New York Dolls band with her front.

28:36
Is there a part of you that goes, you know, I was really the bass player in Guns N' Roses at one time. It was the Appetite lineup, except I was in it instead of Duff. And does that have any meaning for you or any sting? Or was it like you were just moving through the motions as a young musician and you were on your own trajectory and probably would not have ended up in Guns N' Roses anyways?

29:06
Both, a little of both. We all knew that they were gonna be big and they deserved to be. Once that sort of post-Gefen, post-1986 era, then all of a sudden it was like looking back a few years and I was like, wow, that went quickly. That escalated quickly and how long is this gonna last? And that could have been me and I'm still living in a shitty apartment and I have no money. Just trying to get a band together out of the cycle and that kind of thing.

29:37
Even some of us were waiting for like, you know, oh, it's going to be huge for like one record or one year and then it's going to bottom out like a lot of these bands did and it just kept climbing and climbing and climbing so then it became this whole other stratosphere of level of ACDC and the Stones and bands like that that they looked up to, they became on that same level. And then that was an odd thing for me. But...

30:05
Again, knowing those guys from before and just hanging out, going to shows, shooting shit, throwing ice cubes at them on stage, them doing the same thing when I was playing in bands, they'd be in the audience, you know, kind of messing with you like friends do. It's just kind of the way Hollywood is. So you can either let it get to you or you can just go with it and go, wow, this is great, this is really happening.

30:35
It does bug me, but it doesn't bug me to the point that I'm losing sleep. There was those weird times when, you know, no matter who came to town, Slash or Axl or Izzy would jump up on stage with them. Remember that? Like, if Cheap Trick would play. Slash would be up there and say, Cheap Trick. If Iggy Pop would play, they'd be up there with Iggy Pop. Alice Cooper, you know, Aerosmith, and it was just like...

31:00
When did that happen? That was the parts that kind of got to me more than anything because I was like, those are all people that I wanted to be up on stage with and jam it with, you know? And then once Appetite came out, you know, they almost surpassed a lot of those bands that they were jumping up on stage with. And so they became their own sort of band that people wanted to jump up with Guns N' Roses, you know?

31:28
And that was a whole other thing to deal with. That's what was kind of like on my mind in those days more than anything. Well, Stephen, we appreciate your time and love having you on and love that kind of you were there and have your genetic fingerprints on this appetite lineup as well. And we're absolutely a part of this whole journey. So thanks for helping us to.

31:56
get related to that and to understand that time with you. Great.

32:03
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