Biography - N.I.R.

Steven Adler had an early interest in music, and since a family outing to Magic Mountain where Kiss were performing, he had an obsession over Kiss.¹ In school he became friends with Slash, who then went by the name Saul Hudson, and the two of them started hanging out. Steven described their life at the time to Classic Rock in 2000: "We'd ditch school nearly every day. Me and Slash would walk up and down Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, and each day we had this thing where we'd take a different type of alcohol, and we'd walk up and down, and what we'd be talkin' about was how we'd be living when we were rock and roll stars, it was like this dream that I always knew would come true. We'd go out and meet chicks- older women- who would take us back to their Beverly Hills homes. They'd give us booze, coke, they'd feed us, really. All we had to do was fuck them. Occasionally a guy would pick me up. In return for a blowjob, I'd get a little dope and maybe 30 or 40 bucks." ²
   Steven had a guitar, but he thought it too complicated, so he started playing drums.³ He and Slash, who had started playing guitar when Steven tried to play along to Kiss' "Alive" album, started the band Road Crew. Then it was the "band-switching-circus" that eventually led to the forming of the classic Guns N' Roses line-up being formed in the summer of 1985. Steven and Slash were the last to join before the "Hell Tour" to Seattle, WA.
   When GN'R got off the Appetite tour in 1988 it was a hard period for several members, and the drub problems became huge. Trying to get some work done in the studio was almost impossible. Slash, Izzy and Duff managed to clean up enough, but Steven had more problems. Eventally the band thought they had wasted enough time and money so Steven was fired in the summer of 1990. A year later Slash talked to Q about it: "He's always been the child of the band, the one that was always just the happy-go-lucky, sex, drugs and rock'n'roll and that's it. He couldn't understand why the drugs were so separated from rock'n'roll all of a sudden; why he couldn't be a junkie and be in a rock'n'roll band, because the twain are supposed to meet on the same ground."⁴
   Steven gave his view on the situation to Classic Rock in 2001: "I went totally off, I was thrown out of the band because they said I was doing heroin, but everyone was, Doug Goldstein (band manager) took me to this doctor, the doc gave me this thing called an opiate blocker, and it works by making you violently sick if you take any opiates. You can absolutely not take it if you have any trace of heroin in your system, because you can die. Now I did have, they put this injection in my buttocks and I have never felt pain like that, I can still remember it now, I was so sick, I will never forget that needle in my ass. I was sick for 6 weeks, and during that time, Slash called up and said that they were in the studio recording Civil War, and I had to get down there. I said shit, man, I can't, he said, but we can't waste the money, so I got up and went and I was so weak and sick that I had to play the song 25 times if not more, Slash and Duff got fucked up, I was not, but I was so sick. I never said nothing bad, I love those guys, Guns n' Roses was always the five of us. This was something that Axl wanted, there was a whole plan to get rid of me."⁵
   The 1990's were a troublesome time for Steven. He had serious drug-problems and attempts at forming bands and playing again always seemed to fail at an early stage. The drugs led to several times in prison. He definitely lost touch with the GN'R camp when he sued them for turning him onto drugs. It looks like Steve has shaped up during the last couple of years and he's played some one-off gigs, including a mini-tour with Gilby Clarke in South America.