CHARLIE SHEEN first realised his hellraising lifestyle was out of control when he was told to clean up his act - by notoriously wild GUNS 'N ROSES rocker SLASH.

Sheen, who has always been open about his years of excess drugs, drink and promiscuous sex, admits the advice he got from his rocker pal came as something of a surprise.

He says, "One of my fondest memories is when Slash from Guns 'N Roses sat me down at his house and said, 'You've got to clean up your act.' You know you've gone too far when Slash is saying, 'Look, you've got to get into rehab, you have to shut it down. You're going to die.' "He's a terrific guy and I love him - he's a buddy of mine - but I had to step back from that situation and go, 'Yeah, but you're Slash. Whaddya mean?'"

But Sheen, who says he was on drugs at the time, recalls the conversation managed to serve as a wake-up call to change his destructive lifestyle. He recalls, "We'd been up for about four days. But I still heard him because a part of me was saying, 'This isn't as much fun as I thought it was going to be. Something's missing."

Sheen, who finally got sober after he came close to death in May 1998 after injecting two full syringes of cocaine, says, at one point, he was so convinced the drugs were going to kill him, he start to increase his intake just to get it over with.

He says, "I thought, All right, if I can't stop, I'm going to take this thing as far as I can. Let's get on a horse and drive this f***ing circus completely out of town." (LE/PLAB/NFA)

Source: WENN