2020.07.09 - Eric McKenna Project - Interview with Sid Riggs

The GN'R related parts are from 13:35 to 24:30 minute mark and a small mention again at 53:23 minute mark.



Transcript of the relevant parts:

Eric McKenna: Let's go back to your move to Los Angeles in '85. Just, and I realize, there was a lot of debauchery and craziness in LA in the music scene in that era. But can you speak even generally about what you saw? Was it as crazy as most rock and roll fans always heard it was?

Sid Riggs: Yeah, it was all that and then some. And I was in a band that was called The Wild, not The Mild. And that band lived up to its name. I'm really happy that I got to live there and I was in a band that was in the, you know, in that scene where all these great bands came out of. My band did really well there as well, but even one of the guys in my band, Dizzy Reed, he got plucked and joined Guns N' Roses. You know, my band had, we'd gotten demo deals and we'd never quite got signed, but we had worked our way up through the club ranks and we're playing, headlining on the weekends on the Sunset Strip like you are supposed to try to do. And it was, yeah, it was crazy. It's hard to explain too, because the Sunset Strip is only about two blocks long. And on the weekends, on just one side of the street from the Whiskey, to Gil Turner's at Doheny, that's about maybe three blocks. You know, there's the Whiskey, there's the Roxy, there's the Rainbow, there's the Gazzaris, and on just one side of the street on the weekends, there would be probably five or 10,000 people. On just one side of the street, on the side where the clubs are. There's no one on the other side of the street. And it was just so many people, and it's all rocker people, you know, 80s hair metal people. And so you have your flyers, there's 10,000 people there that you're gonna hand out flyers to, and you're gonna meet people, and you're gonna hustle your band, and then you play there. And a lot of parties afterwards, and a lot of madness ensued, like you would expect from the legends that are there. But in that time period, my band, we were just broke out rocker dudes, and we weren't gonna get jobs, so we scraped up whatever money we could and we rented this little rehearsal studio. It was 11 feet by 19 feet. And all, we had all of our gear in it and all the guys on our band, we all slept in it. Just like little dudes and like guys in a coffin side by side. We would all have to decide, "Okay, it's time to go to bed now." We would all just lay down on the floor and we had a pickup truck out in the parking lot. We kept all of sleeping bags and mats in, and so we called it the "sleepest gear". So every night at some point we had all to say, "Yeah, I guess it's time to pull out the sleepist gear," and we'll lay it out in our little rows and we'll go to sleep until the morning.

EM: That's nuts.

SR: Yeah, and we had no bathroom, no shower, so to use the restroom you had to go to the Denny's around the corner. And to shower you had to go find someone's house that could let you use their shower. And we were in that studio, this little 11 by 19 foot studio, playing, you know, practicing and partying and bringing people over there and going crazy, until a studio next store, the next store on the other side of the wall was a bigger studio. It was about the size of a two car garage. And man, we thought, if at any time we can move into that studio, that's going to be like a mansion, it's going to be amazing. And eventually we did. We get to move into this studio next door. We could sleep anywhere we wanted. We had a couch in there. But then our studio, our old one was vacant. And a young and not yet signed Guns N' Roses moved into the studio next door to us.

EM: That's incredible.

SR: Yeah, so they were our next door neighbors. So Guns N' Roses... that's how Dizzy Reed eventually gets plucked in joins Guns N' Roses because we met them back then. In fact, when we found out that GN'R, this new band, GN'R, was gonna be our next-door neighbors, we were out at the Troubadour handing out flyers for our show at the Troubadour, and I saw Izzy Stradlin, he was handing out flyers for Guns N' Roses to play at the Troubadour, and I said, "Hey, you're in Guns N' Roses, right?" He said, "Yeah," you know, "We're gonna be your next-door neighbors," and you know a friend of ours has a keg of beer, which nobody has kegs of beer in Hollywood. We just happened to have a keg of beer. So I said to Izzy, "Hey, why don't we, after your show, your show is before ours, after your show, why don't we just bring everybody back from your show over to the studios, we've got a keg of beer, and we'll have an after party?" And he's kind of looked at me perplexed, and he goes, "You guys are gonna throw us a kegger?" Because he's from Indiana, so he knew what that meant. And I'm like, "Yeah, I guess we are." And so we got along pretty well right off the bat. And then clearly they blew up and the rest is history.

EM: That's amazing.

SR: So that was kind of fun.

EM: Did you see the Crue when you were around the time the Crue broke?

SR: They had already broke.

EM: Earlier.

SR: Yeah, they broke when I was still in high school. So they broke in like '81 or '82.

EM: That early? So it was, I don't know, they were done with the LA scene by what? Like '83 or '84, I guess.

SR: Well, they were still playing, you know, they were, you know, Girls, Girls, Girls, and all that stuff was coming out then, they were still around.

EM: They were more of an arena rock band.

SR: Yeah, arena rock band for sure. You'd see them around at the Rainbow Music Hall. Not the Rainbow Music Hall, the Rainbow Bar and Grill, you'd see them around. Because, you know, everybody lives there. So you see people.

EM: Did you ever see Lemmy sit in there?

SR: 100 times, I hung out with him a bunch of times. He was so personable. He'd just be playing video games and then we me and Dizzy, you know when Dizzy finally was in Guns N' Roses, and we were... Backstory, he and I moved to Los Angeles together. So we were like best friends. We were thick as thieves and like we could finish each other's sentences. And so one night he and I were out and we ended up hanging out, we went over to Lemmy's house and you know, we're-

EM: That was an interesting apartment.

SR: Yeah, not much. I was expecting so much more.

EM: Right, everybody says that.

SR: Yeah, but yeah, I saw Lemmy a bunch of times. And eventually, when he, Dizzy, joined GN'R, that band that I was in, The Wild, it basically broke up because it needed to have the five guys that were the band. Without one of the key guys, it really wasn't the same band anymore. So that's when I kind of went out. I was like, you know, getting enough for other different bands and stuff. And eventually I joined a band called Johnny Crash on their second record. They had already done a first record. It was well received and their drummer needed to be replaced. When I came in, I was the second drummer in a band called Johnny Crash. And that band had finished the record. It was getting ready to come out. It was on WTG CBS records. But right at that time Nirvana drops.

EM: Yeah. And destroyed everything.

SR: And Johnny Crash was a rock band. And like the Seattle bomb hit LA and all the bands that had record deals that were like rock bands, old school rock bands, they all got dropped and my band, the band I was in, Johnny Crash, got dropped. So I wasn't in a band with a record deal anymore. And then I don't know how many years later it was, probably not that long, but at one point, the band Guns N' Roses, they had toured the Use Your Illusion tours, you know, like football stadiums with Metallica opening up for them, you know, all over the world. They'd been touring for like three or four years and they were done touring. And Slash had a band called Snakepit and it was out on tour. Matt and Duff had a band called Neurotic Outsiders and it was out on tour. And Gilby was no longer in the band. So there was nobody doing anything for Guns N' Roses. And Axl reached out to Dizzy and he said, "Hey Dizzy, put Sid on salary, have him come down to The Complex," which is where they practiced, the place called The Complex. It's this giant 5,000 square foot sound stage with like all the GN'R gear there. And so he said-

EM: That didn't suck.

SR: No, it didn't suck at all. It was pretty fun. But he said, "Have him come down there. I want you guys to just write stuff for the benefit of Guns N' Roses." And I was never in Guns N' Roses. Like I have to say that, I have to caveat that. Some people will read into what I'm saying. I was never in Guns N' Roses.

EM: Is that clearly?

SR: Repeat after me. I was merely in a songwriting team that wrote music for the benefit of Guns N' Roses. So anybody who misquotes me, fuck off.

EM: Fair enough.

SR: But I did that for a year and a half. It was so much fun. We just would just jam and there was no, we weren't trying to write the next Appetite for Destruction. We were just... Axl just said, "Man, somebody please be creative for the benefit of Guns N' Roses," because everyone else was out doing all this shit.

EM: Right, right, right.

SR: And so I did that for a year and a half. We would just, you know, it was me and Dizzy and this guy, Paul Huge on guitar, and we would just jam. We'd just go down to this giant sound stage with all this gear and just start playing. You know, Paul might start playing a guitar riff and I'd jump in, or I'd start playing a drum beat and they would jump in, or Dizzy would start playing, and we would just jam off the cuff for 45 minutes or an hour, and we had an engineer there recording the whole thing. And once, we would kind of peter out, like any jam kind of peters out, and we kind of stop, and then we go over and listen to what we just did for the last 45 minutes or an hour. We'd just listen back, and we'd order some lunch, listen. We'd be listening, "Yeah, cool, cool," "whatever," "yeah, yeah," and they're like, "Oh wow! That's really cool right there." And then we would make notes, "At 18 minutes and 32 seconds," you know, "rad riff on Thursday." We would just like take notes and we would just listen to it and then we would piece these songs together. Something from Thursday with this thing from Tuesday and those two things together, they would eventually make songs. And everything was born out of just jamming, which was so much fun. It was amazing. It was so cool to just get to play with no agenda, with good musicians and just like-

EM: Cause that usually doesn't happen. Usually cause studio time is very expensive.

SR: Totally.

EM: And you need to go in there with some kind of idea to quote unquote, knock it out, right?

SR: Yeah, and usually like, you know, a guitar player or the singers, they sit at home, you know, in their bedroom, they write a song, then they come to rehearsal, "Hey, I've got a song, check it out. Here's how it goes," you know, "add your shit to it." Or, "You play this and you play that." It's very rarely, literally born out of just riffing out of thin air. It doesn't normally happen that way. Some bands do. And I think you can kind of hear it when it does. But yeah, so that was amazingly fun.

EM: I bet.

SR: Yeah. And because I knew that I'm not in Guns N' Roses, I need to find a band for myself, a legit band, because that situation that I was doing there, it was going to have a lifespan. It was going to end.

[...]

[Talking about drug use as described in rock biographies]

SR: I am for sure lucky to be having this conversation with you because I was out of my mind.

EM: Mid-80s in Los Angeles on the strip.

SR: Yeah, I mean, people dropping... a lot of people dying of heroin overdoses. And so, I bet it's right. I hear people talking about Guns N' Roses books and stuff like that, "I heard a story on that Guns N' Roses book. It doesn't even sound real." And they all tell me this story, I'm like, "Yeah, that's totally real." Literally I was there. I saw that happen. And so, you know, these stories that people don't believe are true, at least in in the context of that, like, yeah, I was there, I saw that.

Transcribed this.