The New York Times-20080127-Welcome to the Jungle- -Review-

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Welcome to the Jungle; [Review]

Full Text (898  words)[Author Affiliation] Alan Light is the author of The Skills to Pay the Bills: The Story of the Beastie Boys.

SLASH

By Slash with Anthony Bozza.

Illustrated. 458 pp. HarperEntertainment/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.95.

THE HEROIN DIARIES

A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star.

By Nikki Sixx with Ian Gittins.

Illustrated. 413 pp. VH1/MTV Books/Pocket Books. $32.50.

Most rock biographies are about getting to the Good Part. There's typically a bit of slogging through the star's unhappy childhood, the revelation of music's true power and a hard-fought rise to the top before the litany of debauchery and depravity begins -- the part that fans actually want to read.

Trash classics of the genre like the Led Zeppelin epic Hammer of the Gods and No One Here Gets Out Alive, the Jim Morrison saga, established a formula that Behind the Music would turn into a cliche. (The recent trend of more literary rock memoirs turns this construct on its head; Sting's Broken Music scarcely mentions the Police, while Bob Dylan's Chronicles skips the mid-'60s, his most celebrated period.)

The publication of Slash, the autobiography of the top-hatted lead guitarist of Guns N' Roses and Velvet Revolver, and The Heroin Diaries, by the Motley Crue bass player and songwriter Nikki Sixx, presents a new model for the rock bio: these books are both pretty much all Good Part. Sixx reprints his journals from a year spent in the darkest depths of drug addiction, while Slash's wild childhood essentially made him a rock star as a toddler.

Slash was born Saul Hudson in England in 1965. His father was a white British graphic artist; his mother, a black American costume designer. He grew up in the nonstop bohemian playground of '70s Los Angeles, hanging around Joni Mitchell and David Geffen. After his parents broke up, his mother dated David Bowie, who taught Slash that being a rock star is the intersection of who you are and who you want to be. Soon enough, his young adulthood was dominated by BMX racing and shoplifting, before he discovered the guitar and fell in with the scuzzy street rats who would become Guns N' Roses, the greatest hard rock band of its era.

Guns N' Roses brought back old-school dirt and danger at a time when most pop music had become MTV-friendly, all candy-colored and blow-dried. Slash doesn't have much to say about the making of the band's monster 1987 album, Appetite for Destruction (the music just came easily, it seems), but he has plenty to say about its own increasing appetites for sex, booze and drugs.

When we weren't being transcendent, he writes, we specialized in self-inflicted disaster. He developed heroin and alcohol dependencies, as did other band members, and he notes that they also took down a lot of not-so-innocent bystanders. People would get attracted to our ... weird life and just get it wrong and drown in our riptide.

The book, written with Anthony Bozza, has a shadow presence. That would be G N' R's notoriously eccentric frontman, Axl Rose, who eventually took sole control of the band's name and disappeared a decade ago. Not that Slash offers much insight into Rose's behavior. Axl is superintelligent, yet at the same time he lives in a place where the logic that governs other people does not apply, he says. I won't pretend to understand what was going on with him then, now or ever. He is also too diplomatic to mention the controversy surrounding Rose's use of racist and homophobic slurs in the song One in a Million -- which, especially given his own background, seems worth addressing.

Slash comes across as a nice guy with a proclivity, sometimes toxic, for getting into trouble. He maintains good humor about even his most serious problems, occasionally offering some words to live by. That's a wonderful side effect of leather pants: when you urinate in them, they're more forgiving than jeans.

But if Slash reveals new lows to rock 'n' roll's dark side, The Heroin Diaries, written with Ian Gittins, is something far bleaker. The book is made up of Sixx's diaries from 1986-87 -- when Motley Crue's glam-metal was at its peak of popularity and his drug habit was at its worst -- answered by a chorus looking back 20 years later. Sixx says his intention in publishing this material is to turn people away from drugs. It's certainly true that nothing makes narcotics less alluring than the real-time rantings of an addict; night after night, the perversity ends with him hiding in a closet, surrounded by firearms, convinced that someone is coming to get him.

Sixx (born Frank Feranna in California in 1958) is obviously smart and funny, and self-aware enough to endlessly replay the ways in which my heart is broken from my childhood. So as the joyless horror continues ad nauseam, you keep wondering why he can't just stop. But as the band's former manager, Doc McGhee (himself later convicted on drug-trafficking charges), describes the attempts at intervention, Eventually, when somebody is obnoxious all the time, you get numb to it. As bratty and self-destructive as Sixx was, it's still heartbreaking when he writes, I'm thinking about going to rehab, but I have too much to do right now. It's almost enough to put a reader off his craving for the Good Part.

[Illustration]PHOTO: Slash, 2005. (PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVE HOGAN/GETTY IMAGES)