Talking years later, after the war was over but the casualties were still being counted, Izzy Stradlin put it like this: ‘Alan Niven came along. Thank God he came along because he took us on. He probably looked at us and said, well, they’re a mess. But I think he’d been there maybe himself and saw potential. He worked with us and whether anybody says it or not he became like the sixth, silent, member.’ In fact, the 33-year-old Alan Niven was already the sixth, not-so-silent member of a soon-to-be-platinum LA band named Great White, a band he’d rescued from the dumper of a failed career as a wannabe heavy metal band and singlehandedly resurrected them into what they were by 1986: a more groovy, blues-influenced rock outfit with a back pocket full of potential hits. Having had the audacity to re-sign the band to the parent group (Capitol Records) of the label that had just dropped them (EMI America), Niven had completely made the band over, co-producing their comeback album, Shot in the Dark, co-writing four of the six original numbers on there and hand-picking the two covers, including their scorching version of the track ‘Face the Day’, originally by Australian rockers The Angels, whom Niven had also worked with.
More, Niven had taken it upon himself to personally promote the track to the two most influential rock radio stations in California at the time: KMET and KLOS. ‘“Face the Day” was the song of the year in LA in 1986,’ he recalls now. ‘Twenty or so labels in town and they all had huge budgets and slush funds and piles of coke and they’re going, “How the fuck is this guy getting all this airplay?” So in the perception of the huge industry giants along Sunset Boulevard, they’re kind of looking at me like, “Has this guy got a little bit of magic and mojo in his blood?” And that kind of helped with getting done what I needed done with GN’R. That and the English accent!’ He laughs. ‘Walk into a room and remember that you once lived in Oxfordshire. They daren’t say boo to you because you sound like you’ve stepped out of PBS.’ When Tom Zutaut, whom Niven had first met when they were both instrumental in getting Mötley Crüe a deal with Elektra, four years before, added him to the ‘cattle call’ in his search for new management for Guns N’ Roses, Niven admits he was reluctant to get involved, only agreeing to take the meeting ‘because Zoots was a friend’.
Like most of the people who make it in LA, Alan Niven was a guy from elsewhere. He’d been living in Sweden for two years, working for Virgin/Caroline, when an independent LA-based distribution company called Greenworld recruited him. ‘It was one of those moments where you knew you were fucked,’ he recalls. ‘Because I knew if I didn’t go I’d spend the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if I’d gone to LA.’ What happened was he struck oil almost immediately, doing the deal which allowed a raw, out-of-control West Hollywood band called Mötley Crüe to release their first album, on their own Leathür Records label, Too Fast for Love, in November 1981, as part of a ‘pressing and distribution’ deal with Greenworld Niven brokered with the band’s manager, Allan Coffman. ‘I arrived in LA and Mark Wesley, one of the Greenworld partners, gave me the Mötley cassette. “Piece of Your Action” came on and I went, okay …’ Niven didn’t even use lawyers for the contract, drawing it up himself. ‘Allan Coffman was only interested in getting the $15,000 cash advance we scraped together.’
Alan Niven first met Tom Zutaut, then working as a junior talent scout for Elektra Records, at the 1982 National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) convention at the Century Plaza hotel. ‘I had these Mötley Crüe posters in my booth,’ Niven relates, ‘and [Tom] said that he wanted to talk to me about the band. And I said, “Well, come and have dinner.” Niven was living with his then wife in a little cottage in Palos Verdes, overlooking the ocean, out towards Catalina Island. Zutaut arrived for dinner one Friday evening – and didn’t leave until the following Monday. Niven laughs as he recalls the special meal he had prepared for them: ‘I cooked him my roast chicken à la LSD. My thinking at the time was, well, we’ll find out who this guy is pretty quickly …’
They both ate the chicken. Wild peacocks roamed the area near the cottage and Tom was convinced they were wearing diamond earrings. ‘He had this incredible crush on Belinda Carlisle and he lay in front of the little fireplace in the cottage watching the flames telling me just how much he adored her. He wanted to be a success so as he could marry her. That was Tommy and I slipping off from the dock and going out into the ocean together …’ After that, Tom would go down to the cottage most weekends. ‘We spent a lot of time together. My then wife then went and worked as an assistant to him for a while. You know, we were pals, we were friends. We had plans. One day we wanted to run a record label ourselves, together.’ When Niven helped Zutaut sign Mötley Crüe to Elektra, ‘That opened the door to the A&R department for him.’ Niven, meanwhile, had been a key player in the emergence of the Enigma label, which grew out of Greenworld, in 1982, signing Berlin, who would go on to major international success with ‘Take My Breath Away’, and had been instrumental again in helping Zutaut sign Dokken to Elektra, a band who would also go on to platinum success in the US in the mid-Eighties.
At the time Zoots began twisting his arm about managing Guns N’ Roses, though, via Niven’s Stravinski Brothers company, Alan was fully committed to Great White. ‘I was looking at it and going, this means I’ve got to fragment my time and energy. And I’m really, really scared to do that, because it took an awful lot to get Great White another record contract. It went against all conventional wisdom. You fuck up on your debut record, you’re done. And I’d got a sense of what needed to be done and how to do it.’ With Great White there was now a workable plan in place. With this raw new outfit from the streets, the only plan that suggested itself was to hope for the best. ‘I’m looking at GN’R and going, I don’t expect this band to be anything more than a really great underground band. It wasn’t going to be a radio-friendly band and it had so much attitude and was so raw, I knew it was going to be a lot of hard work. [But] I was the last desperate management throw by Zoots as Rosenblatt was threatening to drop Guns without even recording an album.’ Tom told Alan later that when he signed on to be manager, Geffen’s president, Eddie Rosenblatt, had warned him: ‘This guy gets this thing looking like it could be productive within three months or they’re gone.’
Niven went to meet the band for the first time, at their new home, a house in Laughlin Park, in the plush Los Feliz area of LA, which Rod Stewart’s manager, Arnold Stiefel, had rented for them before getting cold feet. ‘A well-known Sunset stripper was leaving as I arrived,’ Niven recalls. ‘Iz was there and Slash. But no one else. Iz nodded off. Slash showed me his fucking snake. I hate fucking snakes. As I expected, it was a somewhat haphazard circumstance.’
When Niven arranged to go and see the band play, Axl didn’t show up for the first gig – or the second gig. As he explains: ‘Having signed a contract to work with the band in September of 1986, the very next show that the band were to perform was to open for Alice Cooper at the Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara. Alice was to perform a minor market one-off show as a conclusion to his pre-production for a tour. He needed someone to open and it was a good opportunity to get Guns on a decent-size stage; they had only played the LA clubs to this point.
‘I rented a big old Lincoln car to drive everyone the hundred miles out to Santa Barbara. When I went to pick up Axl he said he’d rather travel with the photographer, Robert John, and follow the band caravan out to the show. “No worries,” I thought. “Now the car will have a little more space.” How foolish of me. Set time drew near and there was no Axl. The band were anxious. I thought he was merely running late. Ten minutes before show time there was still no singer. At that point I left my “waiting for Axl” watch in the parking lot behind the theatre and went to the band dressing room. Everyone was miserable.
‘“We can’t play,” said Slash. Izzy just stared at his feet. “I don’t give a damn,” Niven told them. “We’re booked to play and play we will. You sort out who is going to sing what, but you fuckers are going on.” The band dejectedly traipsed onto the stage and Duff and Izzy did their best to carry the vocal load. ‘I may be wrong but I think even Slash took a go at one of the microphones. All in all it was probably the very worst gig the band ever did. As I stood in the audience I could hear the muttering of punters making negative comments – “I heard there was a buzz on this band. Man, they suck.” Maybe so, but at that moment Slash, Izzy, Duff and Steven won my heart for their effort in a ridiculous situation.
‘Axl later claimed he turned up just as the band went on. We never saw him, though, either before or after the set and we’d left passes at the door and his name on the backstage entrance. But there you have it. Ax has always had a difficulty in getting to the show on time, if at all. From that moment, however, my commitment was even more clearly to the band, to the whole, rather than the one prima donna fronting it.’
The development of that commitment was sorely tested on the very next gig. Booked to open for the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the UCLA campus, only 12 people turned up. ‘Twelve! I counted them. So I’m thinking, this is great. What the fuck have I got myself into with Tom Zutaut and his fucking band? Either the singer doesn’t turn up or the fucking audience doesn’t turn up. This is going to be great … Izzy stuck to me like glue. He was like, “We’ve got one manager from the bottom of the barrel. The last guy possible has agreed to do this. If we lose him we’re done.” And they would have been.’
Over time, says Niven, Izzy became ‘the one I could always count on for timely and pertinent input. When I wanted to know what somebody from the band felt about a particular situation, he was the one I talked to more than anybody else. It was him and Duff that caught my eye over both Slash and Axl, when I first went to see them. Because they had an amazing … they just exuded this incredible sense of cool when they were onstage. They weren’t working it. I was riveted with that confidence and insouciance.’
There was never any doubt, however, over who the leader of the band was, its main focus and truth-giver. Axl, he says, ‘really did have his moment of incredible androgynous beauty. Most people look at me like I’m barmy. But most people when we’re having a conversation about Guns, where appropriate I’ll go, “Well, you fucking tell me. What did Guns N’ Roses stand for?” And they look at me like, “They stood for something, you know, apart from appetites and indulgences?” And I go, “Fucking right they did! That’s why I connected to it, and if you don’t understand that then you’ve missed the point.”’
He describes the night Tom Zutaut came to him at his beach-side cottage and virtually begged him to take the band on. ‘I’ll never forget it … He sat by the window and he looked at me and said, “Niv, this is gonna be the end of my career. I’m gonna end up with egg on my face.” And he’s talking about throwing them off the label and saying, “I desperately need help.” Well, what did that tell me? Obviously, in huge fucking neon letters that these people are legitimately, authentically anti-authoritarian. If you know a little bit about me, that’s just like, okay, I’m in. There were aspects to Axl’s behaviour that I found excessively abusive of others, even considering the difficulties of whatever might have occurred in his childhood.’ In the end, though, Niven simply ‘believed that if I could keep some kind of discipline in place, we could sell half a million records’.
The first key move Alan Niven made as the new manager of Guns N’ Roses was finding them a producer who would get the best out of them in the studio: an engineer-turned-producer from Baltimore named Mike Clink, who’d apprenticed at one of LA’s most famous studios, the Record Plant, where he’d worked under Ron Nevison, a solid-gold, commercial hit-maker who had produced multi-million-selling records by Heart, Survivor, Europe, Ozzy Osbourne, Eddie Money and Jefferson Star-ship. Clink understood what sounded good on the radio, ‘But I knew what to do with Guns,’ he said. ‘They played me records they liked. Slash had Aerosmith; Axl had Metallica’s Ride the Lightning.’
Clink took the band to Rumbo Recorders, an environment in which Zutaut hoped and prayed they could only do limited damage. It was located in Canoga Park, north-west of Hollywood in the Valley, and shared a parking lot with the Winnetka Animal Clinic. ‘I put them in an apartment when we were making the record,’ Clink recalled, ‘and they destroyed it. One night they locked themselves out, so they put a boulder through a window. They thought it would look like somebody had robbed the place. When they finally got kicked out, there wasn’t one thing left intact. It looked like somebody was remodelling and had knocked down the walls.’ Or as Slash later told me: ‘We partied really hard, but when we were in the studio, we were pretty much together. There was no doping and all that stuff.’
Axl had known Erin Everly for a matter of weeks before the band entered the studio with Mike Clink, but it quickly became apparent that the relationship would be a significant one for them both. Erin, of course, was no friend from back home like Gina Siler, or one of the many lost girls on the Strip who found their way to the Hell House. She was part of Los Angeles’ elite, and lived in a different, more rarefied society, the daughter of a music legend, Don Everly, and the actor Venetia Stevenson, and the granddaughter of the director Robert Stevenson and the actor Anna Lee. In Axl, Erin had found the ultimate good girl’s bad boy, the singer of the most dangerous and dirty band in Hollywood. In Erin, Axl found an escape from all that. As Duff noted: ‘Axl continued to drop out of sight for days on end, a result of his erratic moods. Sometimes it was as if he was on speed, bouncing off the walls; then he would sleep for three days … I was always aware of what a fundamentally different type of person he was from me.’ But then Duff was now ‘an alcoholic’. Slash was strung out on heroin, along with his partner in grime, Izzy. Steven was a more general kind of fuck-up. He’d been living off his wits, sleeping on roofs, bundled in the corner on floors, for so long, wasted or sober it was all the same to him.
During their short-lived tenancy in Arnold Stiefel’s rental house the divisions in their lives became obvious – at least they would have been had Slash and Izzy been compos mentis enough to notice. While their rooms quickly became little more than drug dens, lit first by naked bulbs and then finally by nothing at all, Axl retreated to the top of the house, where he furnished his bedroom properly and padlocked the door. Now that he had Erin, there was further reason to withdraw from the chaotic, druggy, hedonistic lifestyle that the band were falling deeper into. Yet the relationship would ultimately become volatile and destructive for both Erin and Axl. Many years after they separated, Everly auctioned some of the letters and notes that Rose had written to her, and they are an enlightening little snapshot into their world: ‘FROM AN ASSHOLE’ was the tag with one florist’s delivery; ‘Sorry for being hard on you, you didn’t do anything wrong …’ begins another, ‘I just became frustrated with my predicament and didn’t know how to verbalise my feelings’; ‘Ya didn’t need to play it so tough – I should have known better – I never realised how much you cared and wanted me …’ and so on.
While the last months of their marriage would be marred by rage and accusations of violence, the notes show in Axl a gentleness and a willingness to both compromise and apologise that his bandmates and those in other areas of his life may have found surprising.
It was precisely these feelings, imbued in this new and adult relationship, that he was to reflect in a new song, one of the last written for Appetite. It’s a measure of the gap that was developing between singer and band that their initial reaction to his ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ was less than enthusiastic. ‘Joke’ was the word that cropped up most often. Slash had begun playing the carnival intro guitar figure as ‘a joke’, and described the process of writing and rehearsing the song as ‘like pulling teeth. For me, at the time, it was a very sappy ballad.’ Duff agreed, also calling the new song ‘a joke. We thought, “What is this song? It’s gonna be nothing.”’
‘It was a joke,’ Slash went on. ‘We were living in this house that had electricity, a couch and nothing else. The record company had just signed us and we were on our backs. There was a lot of shit going on. We were hanging out one night and I started playing that riff. And the next thing you know, Izzy made up some chords behind it, and Axl went off on it. I used to hate playing that sucker.’ But Axl heard something in the music that fitted his lyrical idea. Like much of his early writing, it was directly autobiographical, but tenderly so. He was prepared to be revealing and romantic – ‘Her hair reminds me of a warm, safe place / Where as a child I’d hide’ – in a song that played against type. And he knew exactly how it should sound, too: ‘I’m from Indiana, where Lynyrd Skynyrd are considered God to the point that you ended up saying, I hate this fucking band,’ he told me. ‘And yet for “Sweet Child” I went out and got some old Skynyrd tapes to make sure that we’d got that heartfelt feeling.’
Axl’s refusal to take no for an answer paid off, becoming a significant turning point for both singer and band. When the song later became the engine that drove Appetite for Destruction forward, played endlessly on radio and looped on MTV, it was enough to convince Axl he should never again listen to what anyone else had to say about one of his songs – including Slash. Maybe especially Slash. It was also noticeable that Axl was closer artistically and in terms of friendship to West Arkeen. Arkeen was one of the great characters on the LA scene, the kind of guy who seemed to flourish in the pre-grunge, pre-austerity excesses of the late Eighties and early Nineties (sadly he wouldn’t make it out of 1990s, dying of an opiate overdose at just 36 in 1997). He’d first met the band when he lived next door to Duff, and grew especially close to Axl and Slash, who would say of him: ‘for a long time, he literally was the only one we could trust’. But while they were close, Slash never wrote with Arkeen. ‘We hung out and jammed a couple of times but there was only a couple of songs I was ever around where I was there with Axl and we were all playing together,’ he said. While an unnamed ‘friend’ would later tell the veteran American rock biographer Stephen Davis that Arkeen was ‘a strange, shadowy figure, very private and withdrawn. A weirdo. But Axl rated him – highly. You’d see Axl playing stuff for West, getting his opinion on what they were doing.’
Axl, already separated from his band by their enthusiastic chemical excess and becoming surer of his artistic judgement, began to hear of Tom Zutaut’s growing concerns over the state of Guns N’ Roses, and had other things on his mind than the so-called strangeness of his friends. Mike Clink had been to see Zutaut in August 1986 to tell him that the early pre-production sessions were going nowhere because Slash wasn’t showing up. The summer had become one long fall into the depths of addiction. Slash had been so out of it at a Geffen photo shoot that he had to be physically held upright for the session. He nodded out one night at the band house and had to be revived. There were stories of nightclub fights, and of Axl threatening to leave the group. ‘There was a point where I fucking stopped playing guitar,’ Slash admitted. ‘I didn’t even talk to my band except for Izzy, because we were both doing it.’
Zutaut began to worry that his bosses would start to think that investing in the most dangerous band in the world was just too, well, dangerous. Making and promoting a record would cost them north of $500,000 when production and marketing were thrown on top of a recording budget of more than $300,000. It was a lot of money to risk on hopeless junkies – and Tom was the man risking it. He read the band the riot act, recalling that ‘as much as you can threaten junkies’ he did, telling them that he was on the verge of dropping them before they’d even released anything. If the ship was going down, Zutaut wasn’t going down with it. Slash and Izzy had brief spells in rehab as a result, which kept their worst excesses at bay for a few weeks at least. And after they’d wrecked the apartment at Rumbo Recorders by putting a boulder through the window, Mike Clink drew the line. ‘I’d never come into contact with guys like that,’ he admitted. ‘During our first meeting, they were spitting over each other’s heads. They really were living on the street, that reckless life. But I pushed them hard and had a rule: no drugs in the studio.’
Clink made a sort of Devil’s bargain: deliver the goods, and he would ignore their destructive behaviour away from Rumbo. He was happy for them to work all night – their usual pattern – just as long as they were working. ‘He kept us at arm’s length,’ said Slash. Ultimately it would prove a wise call – once Clink was able to tell Zutaut that songs were going down on tape, the record company’s nerves began to settle.
The final legalities of the Geffen deal were completed when the band inked their full 62-page contract, binding them to the company. Alan Niven signed his deal, too, and took Guns for a boozy evening at Barney’s Beanery to mark the occasion, impressing them with both his capacity to hold his drink and his tales of encounters with the Sex Pistols when he’d worked for Virgin. ‘I had a little silver single plaque in my office for “Something Else” [from The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle]. Duff noticed that so I was all right. Later he came to find out that the very first time the Pistols got airplay in America was when I placed a copy of “Pretty Vacant” on the turntable of WMMS [in Cleveland].’
These were important moments for Guns N’ Roses. They received the rest of their advance money from Geffen, and their hand-to-mouth hustling existence – although not yet dead – was eased as they became corporate assets. And it was a symbolic moment for Axl, who signed the contracts with his new name, changed by deed poll from the loathed William Bruce Bailey to W. Axl Rose. It was his break with the past, a new start and a statement of his determination to forge a new life on his own terms.
The album sessions would not begin in earnest for another few weeks. The band continued to gig around LA, their headline shows at the Troubadour, the Roxy and the Whisky sold out and packed to the rafters with fans wanting to see if the rumours that buzzed on the streets were true – Slash was dead; Izzy was in rehab; Axl had quit. The answers appeared right there in front of them, the shows were that weird mix of intensity and sloppiness that Guns N’ Roses were making their own. When Guns headlined the Street Scene festival in a park downtown, the atmosphere reached such a peak, stoked by Axl’s exhortations, that the show was stopped after a few songs by the fire marshals, and all of them, including Mike Clink, began to wonder how they might get that same feeling down on tape.
While they wrestled with that, Alan Niven turned his attention to the first recordings that Guns N’ Roses would issue to the waiting world – the ‘indie’ release that Axl had promised from the stage of the Troubadour back in July. The notion of an ‘indie’ record was hollow, a dress-up designed to ape the genuine article like Mötley Crüe’s Too Fast for Love or Poison’s Look What the Cat Dragged In, two dirt-cheap, dirty-sounding records that had earned their creators major record deals. Guns already had a major record deal. And surprisingly for a band so sold on authenticity, there was an element of artificiality to the 12-inch EP Live?!*@ Like a Suicide, released in December, that Axl in particular would quickly see through and denounce. It wasn’t a live record at all; instead its four tracks were pulled from some early sessions at Pasha studios in Hollywood, when the band had briefly tried out Spencer Proffer as a producer, and Take One in Burbank with Hans-Peter Heuber and Alan Niven engineering and mixing. Informed by Geffen that they wouldn’t pay to record a GN’R show, crowd noise was simply added to these studio recordings, taken, Duff admitted, from the Texxas Jam festival held annually over the 4 July weekend in Houston. Niven chose the label name – the confrontational UZI Suicide – safe in the knowledge they wouldn’t have to use it again. Geffen pressed 10,000 copies and released it (they claimed) on 24 December – in fact it had come out nine days earlier in order to allow fans to get it before Christmas.
‘I wasn’t sure I would get away with it but no one called us out,’ says Alan Niven now. ‘Plus, my success with indie releases was one of the reasons Geffen came to me.’ There was also the knowledge that it was one thing to be signed to a major label, quite another to get them on the case building momentum. Alan knew it didn’t just come to new artists. They almost had to force the label’s hand, no matter how good the contract they’d just signed appeared to be. It wasn’t an end in itself, merely a toehold. ‘So that when Appetite came out there was already some awareness of who they were. Some expectation. I said, “Here’s the kicker, they cannot have the word ‘Geffen’ on them. The boxes cannot have [Geffen distributers] ‘WEA’ on them. They’ve got to be as if I’d had them pressed [independently]. There can’t be anything linking this to WEA or Geffen.”’
The one thing that all of this artifice couldn’t disguise was the music. Live?!*@ Like a Suicide lasts for less than 14 minutes and features just four songs, but the street-level appeal that had packed Hollywood’s clubs over the summer of 1986 was obvious. It opened with a faked stage intro – ‘Hey fuckers, suck on Guns N’ fuckin’ Roses!’ – but the faking ended there. Reluctant to waste their best material on an EP, the two original songs, the opening ‘Reckless Life’ and ‘Move to the City’, came from the Hollywood Rose era, and featured a co-writing credit for Chris Weber. They were teamed with a couple of covers, a vicious take on Rose Tattoo’s ‘Nice Boys’ (‘Nice boys – don’t play rock’n’roll’ runs the chorus, while the verses are pertinent takes on girls brought low by hanging out with said boys) and a nod to their main inspiration with Aerosmith’s ‘Mama Kin’, an act of homage that quickly aligned them with a deeper history than the here-today-gone-later-today hair metal scene. All that really tied Guns to the Strip were the cover images, on the front Axl, face almost entirely obscured by his towering, primped hair, leaning on Duff’s shoulder, and on the rear a deliberately sleazy line-up shot styled by ‘rocket queen’ Barbi Von Greif, which was all de rigueur leather and cowboy boots.
Live?!*@ Like a Suicide sold out immediately, mostly in Hollywood. But, crucially, it found its way to the critics, too, with the band’s first national and international reviews appearing in RIP, Circus and, in the UK, Kerrang! – all of which recognised Guns N’ Roses as the real deal, in its rawest form. Strikingly, the one dissenting voices’ was Axl’s, who had hit out at the idea almost from the start: ‘It’s the most contrived piece of shit we’ve done …’ he said. ‘It ain’t no live record. If you think it is, you’re crazy or stupid.’
When he uttered those words in December 1986, Axl was in a position that artists sometimes find themselves in – aware that the work just being heard by the public has already been left well behind by their newer endeavours. Everything about the Appetite for Destruction sessions, from the very first demoing of the songs, was a giant step forward from the punkish, lo-fi racket of Live?!*@ Like a Suicide. Yet the die was cast, especially at Geffen: these guys were a feral pack, trailing destruction down the Strip and even to the doors of the Geffen offices – staff were aghast at one appearance which saw them accompanied by a naked girl, still wet, wrapped in a shower curtain. Then there was the day-today prosaic detail of their existence: casual sex in an era of AIDS, hard drugs, constant in-fighting, outrage in clubs and bars … there was at least one serious discussion between Axl and Slash over drug use affecting performance. Doubts were expressed over Steven Adler’s ability even when sober. One executive urged Zutaut to get the record done quickly before the band’s inevitable self-immolation.
Navigating this path was Mike Clink, who not only had a terrific pair of ears but a hard-earned degree in rock star psychology. Having read the band the riot act over drugs in the studio, he set about getting the real Guns N’ Roses down on tape. Clink was intent on ‘capturing the band’s essence, not beating it into the ground’, and so all the tracks were initially recorded as-live, with the aim of nailing the song while the band were still feeling it, with overdubs kept to a minimum. Slash, already a fan of the way that Clink had engineered Michael Schenker’s guitar sound on one of his favourite records, UFO’s Lights Out, was quickly taken with the producer’s way of working: ‘He knew how to direct our energy into something productive,’ he recalled. ‘His secret was simple: he didn’t fuck with our sound. He worked hard to capture it perfectly, just as it was.’ Duff was equally happy: ‘With my favourite punk bands the bass was the loudest thing and led the way,’ he said. ‘And [on] the songs that would make up Appetite, the bass was the loudest, roundest thing on the recordings. It had a lot of space.’
Yet Mike Clink’s skills weren’t just technical. Recognising Axl’s attention to detail and latent perfectionism, he handled the singer’s contribution entirely differently. As Axl later told me, what people didn’t hear immediately ‘is that there was a perfectionist attitude’ to the recordings. ‘I mean, there was a definite plan to that. We could have made it all smooth and polished. We went and did test tracks with other producers and it came out smooth and polished – with Spencer Proffer. And Geffen Records said it was too fucking radio. That’s why we went with Mike Clink. We went for a raw sound, because it just didn’t gel having it too tight and concise.
‘Cos Guns N’ Roses onstage, man, can be, like, out to lunch. Visually, we’re all over the place and stuff and you don’t know what to expect. But how do you get that on a record? But somehow you have to do that. So there’s a lot more that’s needed on a record. That’s why recording is my favourite thing, because it’s like painting a picture. You start out with a shadow, or an idea, and you come up with something that’s a shadow of that … And then you add all these things and you come up with something you didn’t even expect. Slash will do, like, one slow little guitar fill that adds a whole different mood that you didn’t expect. That’s what I love …You use the brush this way and allow a little shading to come in and you go, “Wow, I got a whole different effect on this that’s even heavier than what I pictured. I don’t know quite what I’m on to but I’m on it”, you know?
‘“Paradise City”, man,’ he continued, ‘That’s like, I came up with two of those first vocals – there’s five parts there – I came up with two and they sounded really weird. Then I said, look, I got an idea. I put two of these vocal things together, and it was the two weirdest ones, the two most obtuse ones. And Clink’s like, “I don’t know about that, man …” I’m like, “I don’t know either, why don’t we just sleep on it?” So we go home and the next day I call him up and now I’m like, “I don’t know about this.” But he goes, “No, I think it’s cool!” So now he was the other way. So then we put three more vocal parts on it and then it fit. But the point is, that wasn’t how we had it planned. We don’t really know how it happened.’
Clink was realistic about the band’s habits too. He, Alan Niven and Axl had homes to go to at the end of each day, but stranded in the ‘tedious’ Valley, Slash, Izzy and Steven, plus studio techs Porky and Jame-O and a giant minder/driver named Lewis, hired by Alan Niven to limit any damage, would go out and disrupt whichever local bar they could find that they hadn’t disrupted already. Through the fug of their hangovers, Clink would quietly have a word when he felt an individual wasn’t playing at his best and shepherd him in later to redo their part. Slash had a slightly bigger problem when it came to laying down his lead-guitar lines. During his chaotic, druggy, sofa-surfing summer of ’86, he’d sold or otherwise lost most of his instruments. Now, although he felt Izzy, Duff and Slash had essentially finished their parts during the initial Rumbo ‘as-live’ sessions, he was struggling for the sound he wanted. On the final day at Rumbo, Alan Niven provided the answer, turning up with a beautiful flame-top Les Paul replica that he’d got from Jim Foot, a guitar maker in Redondo Beach. Slash loved it and after a search of rental shops with Clink found the right Marshall amp and the pair spent some happy time in Take 1 studio rerecording and overdubbing together. The guitar has remained Slash’s main studio instrument ever since, although as he admitted in his autobiography, even he has been unable to replicate the exact sound he and Clink got for Appetite … never mind all of the wannabes who’ve attempted to kick-start their careers by aping it: ‘The size and shape of the room, the soundboard used in recording, as well as the molecular quality of the air all play a part – humidity and temperature affect a recording tremendously … It is more than just setting up the same equipment in the same booth because, believe me, many have tried.’ Happy at last with his sound, Slash worked at some pace, nailing, he reckoned, a song a day. And happy to be back on the right side of the Hollywood Hills, Duff would hang at the studio while Slash worked before the pair disappeared into the night together. From the first song Slash overdubbed, ‘Think About You’, to the last, ‘Paradise City’, this was the pattern they repeated.
Alan Niven made another smart intervention when he suggested tightening up, in ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, the original two repetitions of the ‘when you’re high … and you … never wanna come down …’ section to just one. At the time the band knew nothing of his creative involvement with Great White. ‘It’s a very good thing that none of us were aware of that,’ Slash said, ‘because that session might not have gone so well and “Welcome to the Jungle” would be a very different song … It never bothered me once we found out about Alan’s connection to Great White, but it had quite a negative, snowball effect among other members of our band.’ Meaning Axl.
That lay ahead, a problem for another day. Along with ‘Sweet Child’ the Appetite sessions would produce one more late-breaking, self-lacerating Guns N’ Roses tune, a song that Slash and Izzy began to – well – cook up, after the Geffen deal was signed and then finished in the studio. The lyrics, which they presented to Axl scrawled on a brown paper bag, were essentially a description of their days on dope, a repetitious existence of escalating usage – ‘I used to do a little but a little didn’t do it, so a little got more and more …’ – and helplessness – ‘He’s been knocking … He won’t leave me alone …’. They called it ‘Mr Brown-stone’, a sledgehammer reference to what was going on, and set it to a shuffling, Bo Diddley verse section alongside an urgently rising chorus, and when sung by Axl it seemed to turn from a confession into a warning. It was ruthlessly autobiographical, a full stop, along with ‘Sweet Child’, on the band’s lives to date: ‘[The record] is a storybook of what this band went through in Hollywood; trying to survive, to when it was finished,’ Slash said. The 30-odd songs stretched from ‘November Rain’, which Axl had begun writing back in Indiana, and ‘Anything Goes’, which he and Izzy had started in the very early days of Hollywood Rose, right up to ‘Mr Brownstone’ and ‘Sweet Child’.
The job now was to parse those 30 songs down to a single album, to dig through to the essence of the band. Tom Zutaut was firmly of the view that it needed to be a hard rock album, with a maximum of one ballad. Alan Niven was in agreement – his plan was to build a core fan base for what he still regarded as an ‘underground’ band. Axl was of the opinion that they wanted a classic, ‘live’-sounding record that captured a moment in time. He understood that big, romantic songs as close to his heart as ‘November Rain’ and ‘Don’t Cry’ would have to wait for their time – which wasn’t now.
The Clink sessions had been an outstanding success. Even in their raw, unmixed state, it was obvious that the producer had fulfilled every brief, and, what’s more, he had put himself on the line to do it, catching the easy-going, do-it-right-now immediacy of Steven, Duff and Izzy, working one-on-one with Slash on his solos and then going straight to 18-hour days recording Axl’s vocals, which were the most complex parts on the recordings.
Speaking soon after the record was released, Axl explained: ‘I sing in about five or six different voices that are all part of me, it’s not contrived. I’m like a second baritone or something. I used to take choir classes and stuff and I’d always sit there and, since I could read music, I’d try to sing other people’s parts and see if I could get away with it. We had this teacher who was pitch-perfect, or whatever you call it. He had ears like a bat, man, like radar. So in order to get away with singing someone else’s part, you’d really have to get it down. Or else he’d know …’ It was true, too: from ‘It’s So Easy’ to ‘Sweet Child’ to ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, Axl’s vocal range and natural ability to inhabit a lyric and sell the song, owning the narrative, would become a huge part of the record’s appeal.
Soon after New Year, Alan Niven took Slash to New York to meet with candidates to mix the songs. They had dinner with Rick Rubin, who had just put Aerosmith in front of a new generation with the groundbreaking Run DMC cover/collaboration of their decade-old song ‘Walk This Way’. ‘We just shot the shit,’ Slash remembered, ‘because he’d already passed on mixing us. A lot of people passed on mixing us – and, once again, all of them regretted it later.’
Alan Niven briefly considered doing the job himself and mixed a trial version of ‘Mr Brownstone’ that Izzy in particular liked a lot, but ultimately band and manager elected to go with the team of Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero, experienced engineers who had worked mostly on dance and pop club remixes but who produced a thunderous take on ‘Mr Brownstone’ as an audition piece. They found themselves in Media Sound studios in Manhattan’s midtown, playing host to the band sans Steven but plus Niven and Zutaut and assorted crew and girls, most of whom were put up at the Parker Meridian hotel, where they shared rooms. The material was pared down to that which would make the album, with Niven keen to stockpile the leftovers. One by one, the early versions of ‘November Rain’, ‘Pretty Tied Up’, ‘Civil War’, ‘The Garden’, ‘Dust and Bones’, ‘Yesterdays’ and ‘Don’t Cry’ fell away. Among the last to go were ‘Back Off Bitch’ and ‘You Could be Mine’, which until quite late was thought to have good potential as a first Guns N’ Roses single.
Thompson and Barbiero had developed a unique way of working: Barbiero set up a basic mix before Thomson joined him at the desk and they began playing the song through, Thomson working on the guitar and vocal dynamics while Barbiero controlled the foundations. With four hands on the faders, they’d take pass after pass at the songs until everyone was happy. ‘[They were] amazing,’ enthused Slash in his autobiography. ‘They had a system, pretty much an unspoken language, between them. Steve was the energetic, in-your-face guy, and Michael was the reserved, analytical, calculated guy. And they got on one another’s nerves constantly, which somehow fuelled their creativity.’
Slash had arrived in New York with an arm in plaster having fractured his wrist – as only he could have done – thumping the floor to try and get a record to stop skipping while he was having sex with a girl at one of Duff’s friend’s houses in Seattle. He had one night out with Steve Thompson, where he’d felt supremely out of place in a New York disco called China Club clad in his top hat and leathers, but the differences between the band and Thompson and Barbiero were evident and best illustrated by a notorious incident in the mixing of ‘Rocket Queen’. Adriana Smith, a friend of Slash’s from LA, found herself in New York and hooked up with the little crew at the Parker Meridian, spending her nights in the room shared by Slash and Axl and her days drinking in the studio. When Axl decided that the ‘Rocket Queen’ mix was lacking something, he turned to Smith, as she reminisced many years later: ‘Basically, Axl propositioned me in the studio. I was really drunk and although we were both seeing other people at the time, he had a really creative interest for this song and wanted to give it an edge and I was the girl to do it. I did it for the band.’
‘We lit some candles for atmosphere,’ Slash said, ‘and she and Axl went out into the live room, got down on the floor by the drum riser, and we recorded the performance …’ Michael Barbiero was less impressed: ‘I didn’t want to be around for recording a girl getting fucked,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t the high point of my career. So I set up the mikes and had my assistant record it. If you look at the record, it says, “Victor ‘the fuckin’ engineer” Deyglio. So it’s literal.’ Axl and the band simply thought it was funny. Or as Duff later put it: ‘She was a goer. She knew how to work a microphone.’
Work done, they retreated to LA for a couple of homecoming shows, the first at the Whisky and the second at the Roxy, shows that would essentially mark the end of Guns N’ Roses as an LA club band. They didn’t quite know it yet, but they had outgrown those few miles of tiny clubs, however resonant their history. In the necessary lull between completed mixes and the final track-listing and sequencing of the record, which would take place in May 1987, Alan Niven instituted a plan, one which had been working in the music business ever since Chas Chandler brought Jimi Hendrix to London in the last months of 1966. British audiences, if they could be persuaded to get behind the latest US sensation, imbued them with a cachet that could travel back over the Atlantic and offer some glamour to otherwise familiar local boys. ‘In terms of the development of the band, it was key to my strategy that we connected well in the United Kingdom,’ says Niven. ‘It was about creating a perception that it was not just a bunch of Hollywood fuck-ups, it was a band that had international appeal.’
It was time for another Alan Niven masterstroke. He struck a deal with Geffen’s president, Eddie Rosenblatt, to personally distribute all 10,000 copies – records and cassettes – of the Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide EP. Then turned up in a van to pick them all up. ‘Eddie told me later, when I loaded that van up and disappeared down the road, he rather wondered if he’d ever see me again.’ Niven sold the lot to an independent distribution company called Important and picked up a cheque for $42,000. Then he went back to Eddie with the cheque. ‘I pulled it out and waved it at him behind his desk. He went to hold it and I pulled it away from him. I said, “This takes us to England.” And he sat there and looked at me for a moment. I said, “This pays for our first trip to England, okay?” And he goes, “Okay.” And I gave him the cheque. And that’s how we paid for the three Marquee shows.’
The Marquee was the emblematic rock dive in London’s Wardour Street. Since the dawn of the Sixties, every major rock artist from the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix to David Bowie and the Sex Pistols had played there. Getting Guns N’ Roses to play their first shows outside America there was a major coup, the kind of outside-the-box thinking that would earmark GN’R as somehow different – smarter, cooler – than their LA contemporaries. ‘It was essential to me to bring them to England,’ says Niven. ‘It was essential to me to get ahead of the pack.’ Faster Pussycat were also recording their major label debut; LA Guns were not far behind. Other West Hollywood charmers like Jetboy were snapping at their heels. ‘It gave me a clear message: get ahead of the pack.’
To help set the scene for their London debut, Geffen brought some of the British rock press to LA. Sounds, the inkie weekly known – unlike its more illustrious rivals NME and Melody Maker – for its uninhibited love of hard rock and heavy metal, carried the first UK interview with Guns N’ Roses, the band bemoaning what they saw as a fake LA scene (Axl taking the chance to stick the knife into Poison; Slash claiming Van Halen as the only real rock band to emerge from the city) before the writer, Paul Elliott, concluded accurately that ‘raising hell has regained some of its glamour’. Time Out were next, London’s leading arts, culture and listings magazine left somewhat open-mouthed after a trip to West Arkeen’s latest residence, a biker crashpad on Poinsettia Street that several members of Guns used as a place to hang out and sleep in. It was, if anything, even worse than the Hell House, and quickly got the same moniker, Slash describing it as, ‘more gruesome than anything else I’ve seen in a first-world country’. It didn’t stop him frequenting the place, and telling the Time Out reporter that he was there because he’d just ditched his girlfriend, as her ‘boobs were too big’.
Niven made sure he was on hand for both encounters, ensuring that to the outside world, newly exposed to this phenomenon, Guns N’ Roses came across exactly as they were: cocky, rowdy, wild and so far unstopped.