1988 would be the year that the lives of everyone connected to Guns N’ Roses would be changed for ever. For the five band members it was the moment when their dreams of rock stardom became an inescapable reality. By 6 August, Appetite for Destruction, led by the single ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’, would have topped the Billboard chart for the first time (it would return on a further three occasions) and was in its first of three solid years – 147 weeks – within the Top 200. The band was on tour with Aerosmith (Tim Collins having negotiated entirely separate travel and accommodation for both acts) and about to fly to the UK to appear at the Donington Monsters of Rock festival, where they would encounter another terrible low. Newly immortal, until that moment, they thought the worst was behind them. They were wrong.
The year had begun in the studio. Eddie Rosenblatt had urged Niven to make another record, something the manager had forcefully resisted, taking the view that they’d sold almost 250,000 albums without a proper single, video or marketing campaign, and – not unreasonably – asked Rosenblatt what he thought they might sell should they get one? Instead, with Mike Clink, the band cut some acoustic songs for a prospective stop-gap EP or a bunch of B-sides: a sweet ballad of Axl’s called ‘Patience’; a blackly comic tune they’d debuted at the UK shows, ‘Used to Love Her’ (‘… but I had to kill her!’, a lyric inspired by Axl’s fondness for ‘shock comic’ Sam Kinison); and ‘One in a Million’, an obnoxious Rose rant that also began in Kinison-esque humour but quickly descended into something far less funny, storing up trouble for the band later on). They also recorded a rangy acoustic, much longer and doubly vitriolic version of ‘You’re Crazy’ that Clink liked as much as the electric version on Appetite.
Between times there were one-off shows. They opened for Great White at KNAC’s second anniversary show, where Cinderella’s drummer, Fred Coury, sat in for Steven Adler, who’d broken his hand in a barroom brawl following a show opening for Alice Cooper in Minneapolis a week before Christmas. Then there was an unannounced ‘secret’ show billed as the Drunk Fux, which featured the five-man band plus Axl acolytes Del James and West Arkeen, performing an impromptu set of covers – including a first public performance of a new song, ‘Yesterdays’, a ragtag blues shuffle Axl had recently banged together with Del and West and another street kid, named Billy McCloud, and which Axl announced he and the band would be recording the following week. (They didn’t.) There was also a hurriedly arranged Thursday night gig at the Cathouse on 21 January – Steven’s first full gig back behind the drums, essentially a glorified rehearsal for three shows in Scandinavia supporting Mötley Crüe.
Essentially, though, the band was treading water. Again Eddie Rosenblatt urged Niven and Zutaut to consider getting another album ready to go, based on the latest session with Clink. ‘No way, this record’s just beginning,’ Zoots told Eddie. ‘We haven’t even scratched the surface yet. There’s a Number One single that is buried on the second side of the album. The promotion people have not even listened to it!’ Zutaut was referring to ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’, but by then neither Rosenblatt nor anyone else at the company was prepared to listen.
Exasperated, Zutaut appealed directly to David Geffen, who asked simply: ‘What is the one thing that I could do to help you?’ Zutaut replied, ‘It would help if you could get the “Welcome to the Jungle” video played on MTV.’ Geffen said he would do what he could and put a call through to MTV’s chief executive, Tom Freston, an old friend who owed him a favour. Freston accordingly agreed to air ‘Welcome to the Jungle’. Just one proviso: MTV would play it only once, at 3 a.m. on the East Coast, midnight on the West Coast. After that, all bets were off. However, within minutes of the video airing for the first time a week later, the phones began to light up at the network as their switchboard became overloaded with calls for repeat plays from overexcited fans. Within a month, ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ had officially become one of the most-requested videos on MTV that year.
At the same time, in another weird example of the kind of synchronicity that seemed to bless their professional relationship, Alan Niven had managed to wangle Guns N’ Roses into a live appearance on MTV. Originally the station had approached Niven about filming Great White live at The Ritz in New York for an MTV Special that would also be broadcast live across several radio stations. It seemed like a no-brainer. Great White’s Once Bitten album had just gone gold in America and MTV wanted to get in on the ride. Alan said yes on one condition. ‘My other band opens, okay?’ The MTV producers agreed.
In the weeks leading up to the show in February, however, ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ had begun its own heavy rotation, moving the needle on the dial of the Appetite album, too, which was also now approaching gold status for over 500,000 sales. Suddenly Alan Niven was presented with the unique situation of having two hot’n’heavy acts steaming up the US charts. On the eve of the show, he decided the ‘smart call’ was ‘to flip the bill order’. He goes on: ‘Guns had just gone white hot. I went to Great White and said, “What’s the fucking rule? Be a hard act to follow before you follow a hard act.”’ So they switched places and Great White opened the MTV Special instead. Both bands played the same length of time but there was no doubting afterwards who the stars of The Ritz were that night.
‘There’s a couple of moments in [the Great White] set that still give me goosebumps when I play back the tapes,’ insists Niven. ‘To the point where Slash ran into the dressing room after they played and said, “You fuckers! How do we follow that?”’ But not only did GN’R follow that, ‘To a lot of people that is the apex of watching Guns N’ Roses. Imagine all the fucking faces, cognoscenti and industry fuckers that were there at the show. I’m not the greatest at the social bit but I’m having to work the room and be nice to everybody and try to remember who fucking everybody is.’ Next thing, he got a tap on the shoulder. ‘Goldstein panicking saying Axl can’t find his bandana. “He wants you to go into the crowd and find him one.” So I did. I went into the crowd and found one. He didn’t like that one so I went and found another one. Second one was okay. Slash is aware of all this. So what would your state of mind be when you went out on stage? Good god, half the fucking time each was seething at the other. And The Ritz was the classic example. Yet most people think that’s the apex of GN’R live on film. Yet not everybody was happy with Axl at that moment. But what’s his muse? His muse is confrontation. His muse is conflict. He’s a power tripper.’
Whatever the background, the results were dynamite, and can still be seen on YouTube today. Niven is right. This was Guns N’ Roses, at their earliest, now classic best. When Slash dived into the audience at the climax of ‘Rocket Queen’, you could almost touch the heat from the crowd, escaping, hissing like bad gas from the manholes of New York City.
With his star rising fast, instead of making him feel more at ease, Axl Rose’s on- and offstage behaviour was becoming increasingly erratic. He became more difficult and demanding, attempting to control every situation, even those involving large crowds, by losing his temper: he would walk offstage if something offended him and have to be coaxed back. A fortnight before the end of the tour, he didn’t take the stage at all. It happened at the second of two shows they were to headline, 12 and 13 February, at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix. The first show had ended prematurely when Axl walked off at the end of ‘Nightrain’ and refused to come back out for an encore. No one knew quite why, putting it down to another of Axl’s weird head-trips.
The following afternoon, however, he barricaded himself in his hotel room with his then-girlfriend, Erin Everly, and refused to come out. ‘We tried everything to get him out,’ says Niven. ‘We banged on the door and shouted, “Come on, dude, we got a gig. Come out!” and he’d shout back, “Fuck off!” I don’t know if Axl and Erin were fighting. That was probably something that happened more often than not, but he refused to come out no matter what we said.’
As opening band, T.S.O.L. – a Californian punk-metal band signed to Niven’s former label, Enigma – completed their 40-minute set, Niven pushed them back onstage to try to buy some time. ‘Finally, these poor guys in T.S.O.L. came offstage after playing Beatles covers. They looked at me mournfully and said, “We’ve played absolutely everything we know. We’re beat. Can we quit now?” That was the moment I had to walk onstage and say, “Tonight’s performance by Guns N’ Roses, unfortunately, will not occur due to a medical emergency.” Immediately, people started throwing shit at me and it got ugly fast. The crowd rioted and it spilled out into the parking lot, and at least one car was turned over and set on fire.’
When they got back to the hotel, led by a seething Steven Adler, they told Axl he was fired, to which he responded with the classic ‘You can’t fire me, I was leaving anyway …’ Then he called the band’s bluff, took a car to the airport and left them to stew. ‘For about three days, it really did look like the band was over,’ says Alan Niven. But the tactic worked. He and Slash talked on the phone a few days later and Axl was back, but the pattern was set. Axl had asserted his authority, established his indispensability, and clearly demonstrated his willingness to exercise his power over and emotional control of the band. Steven Adler would later reflect, ‘It was the greatest time of my life, but one of the guys – I don’t need to name him – made it so difficult for us all. Quite often he made the best and most exciting times I’ll ever experience feel like a complete pain in the ass. Besides the loneliness and sadness I felt when I was excluded, the worst thing was to play in front of [thousands of] people and have the guy storm offstage in the middle of the first song. With no warning, he’d throw the microphone to the floor, then leave. And not come back. Quite rightly, the audience would boo, and it was an awful feeling to know there was nothing the rest of the band could do about the situation. You’d go backstage and get in a fight with the guy. He’d say, “Fuck you” and get on a plane and you’d have to cancel a lot of other shows. It’s all coming back to him now because he’s the one who looks bad. But at the time it reflected badly on all of us.’
So much so it almost holed the GN’R bandwagon beneath the waterline. Says Niven: ‘I lost what I had just had to compete with our own fucking agent for, which was the opening slot for AC/ DC. I’d got AC/DC to agree to do that. [But] that invitation was rescinded when they heard about the Phoenix riot.’
As ever, Axl felt his actions were entirely justifiable. ‘I guess I get mad because of some form of fear about my own weaknesses,’ he once said in a moment of deep clarity. ‘Everybody has theirs, and mine happen to be in what I do. And what I do is sing and run and get my picture taken. I’ve always needed high maintenance to keep my act together. Nothing really comes naturally to me except the desire to sing. I used to jump ship every three days. And I wasn’t crying wolf. It would usually come down to, I was leaving but there was no place to go. What am I gonna do, go to Paris, do poetry? Look at art museums and hope that not going after what I set out to do didn’t eat me alive? Go pump gas? I was leaving to pump gas a few times, and ready for it. Then, I don’t know, something in me would go, “You can deal with this now.” It just took time to be able to deal with it. A lot of my anger came from people not understanding that I needed that time.’
As Tom Zutaut had been telling anyone who’d listen, ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ was the single that would properly break Appetite. Now they were listening. At the start of April, a couple of weeks before the album broke the US Top 10 for the first time, Guns N’ Roses shot a video for ‘Sweet Child’ at the Ballroom in Huntington Park, taking their girlfriends along, including Erin Everly, who’d inspired the lyrics, and Duff’s girlfriend, Mandy, whom he’d marry the following month. Albeit mimed, ‘Sweet Child’ is a near-perfect rendition of everything that made the band so captivating, from Axl’s cobra-swaying dance to the cigarette dangling from Izzy’s thin lips, to Slash coaxing then bullying his trusty Les Paul copy through the guitar solo: this was Guns N’ Roses at their dizzy, seductive peak. Even now, decades later, its power remains undiminished. Alan Niven realised that this was their moment: ‘They got to a point where they got a momentum that you knew was going to be unstoppable, and for me that was in the spring of ’88 …’
And yet, as with almost every other crucial milestone in their harum-scarum story, the ‘Sweet Child’ video so nearly didn’t happen. In fact, as far as Axl was concerned, it didn’t happen at all the way he originally envisaged it. Alan Niven takes up the story.
‘Eddie Rosenblatt had begrudgingly put up $35,000 to do a second video. Thirty-five grand for a video in those days was zero. Great White’s first video had a budget of over 100k.’ Axl, though, having done one video, ‘was now Martin Scorsese’ and had his own idea for the kind of video he wanted for ‘Sweet Child.’ Nigel Dick was again the director. Alan told him straight: they were going for a no-frills, straight, as-live performance video. No storyboards. No nothing but the band and the song. ‘Nigel found a room in central LA, three inches deep in pigeon shit and had it cleaned up.’ The only snag was that Axl, who’d had no ideas for ‘Jungle’, had several for ‘Sweet Child’.
In an effort to manage expectations, Niven set up a dinner for him, Nigel and Axl. Then sat listening patiently as Axl outlined his ideas for the video in excruciating detail. ‘I told Nigel just to say yes to whatever Axl suggested,’ Niven smilingly recalls. ‘We start with the detail of a printed newspaper that had something to do with him and Erin lying in the gutter. Then the car tyre goes over leaving perfect tracks …’ He pauses and sighs. ‘By the time we were in the cornfields of Kansas, fucking Nigel is sitting at the table with eyes bigger than goose eggs. “Yeah, we can do that. Yeah, we can do that …” We come to the end of the meal and Axl is really happy because War and Peace is going to be remade starring him and Erin.’
As Niven reached for the bill he told Nigel, in front of Axl, to thumbnail it and give him an estimate for how much he thought Axl’s ideas for the video would cost, and fax it to Alan’s office in the morning. ‘Nigel faxes this thing through the next day and it’s something like $285,000.’ Alan called Axl with the news. When he told him how much it would cost, ‘I could just hear the suck of oxygen out of Axl’s lungs. He said, “What are we gonna do?” I said, “Don’t worry, we’ll get it done. We can’t do this at the moment but we obviously will get a video done.”’
To his credit, Axl then came up with the idea of including all the girlfriends in the video, knowing that if he were to include Erin in the shoot there’d be hell to pay if the other band members couldn’t bring their girls along for the ride too. Niven and Dick, meanwhile, made plans to shoot the as-live video they’d already discussed. At 5 a.m. after filming for several hours, ‘Axl realised that none of his desires were being fulfilled in this shoot, and that basically it was a bad shoot, and he stormed off. I looked at Nigel and he said, “Don’t worry, I think I’ve got enough.”’ He explains: ‘Nigel had been concerned because we only had a budget for a single camera. So he had an idea. “What if I bring in a couple of Bolexes” – 16mm handheld film cameras – “and anybody can pick up a Bolex and shoot footage?” I said, “You’re a fucking genius!”’
There were three Bolexes, loaded all the time, left lying around so anyone from the band’s entourage could pick up one of the cameras and run around and shoot things. Nigel Dick also shot in both colour and black-and-white. Over the next couple of days, Alan and Nigel sat through hours of the footage. Niven instructed Dick to make two videos, one ‘best-shot’ predominantly in colour with flashes of black-and-white, and a second completely in black-and-white, except for the very last image, in which Axl turned into colour. It was an inspired move. When MTV called Niven a few weeks into its heavy rotation of the first ‘Sweet Child’ video, saying it had reached the end of its shelf life and would now be downgraded to a much lower level of rotation, Niven told them: ‘“Fine, you’re gonna have another edit on your desk by the end of the day.” And they did and we got another six weeks of airplay on the subsequent video. Two for thirty-five grand!’
The result was 12 weeks of heavy rotation for what would become the most iconic video of the late-Eighties rock era – a feat that would eventually send ‘Sweet Child’ to Number 1 on the Billboard chart, the band’s first and only singles chart topper. Joy, however, was not unconfined, at least not for Axl and Slash, who bristled at seeing the near six-minute album version of the song edited down to a more ‘radio-friendly’ four-minute version, something they achieved by effectively neutering Slash’s elongated guitar solo. ‘I hate the edit of “Sweet Child o’ Mine”,’ Axl would later complain in Rolling Stone. ‘Radio stations said, “Well, your vocals aren’t cut.” [But] my favourite part of the song is Slash’s slow solo; it’s the heaviest part for me. There’s no reason for it to be missing except to create more space for commercials, so the radio-station owners can get more advertising dollars. When you get the chopped version … you’re getting screwed.’
Back on the road, the band got bumped from the opening spot on the next David Lee Roth arena tour – and for exactly the same reasons AC/DC had bumped them: ‘Too much hassle, man’, as he told me, though behind the scenes many suspected it was more to do with the fact that the increasingly insecure Roth, who’s post-Van Halen solo career had hit a serious bump in the road, simply feared the competition – Alan Niven again found himself having to scrabble to come up with Plans B, C and D. He’d managed to bridge the gap in their touring schedule by getting them their first national TV slot on Fox’s The Late Show, where they stole the show with the new, snake-hipped ‘You’re Crazy’, sans swear words, and a hopped-up version of ‘Used to Love Her’ that even left Axl smiling. For the next few weeks, though, they would be on their own, headlining small theatres and auditoriums, with the backing of German sheet-metallists UDO, and Zodiac Mindwarp, then big briefly in the UK, and whose neo-biker image provided a neat bridge between UDO’s generic heavy metal garb and GN’R’s soulful living-on-the-Strip mien. The crowds loved the shows, but it was like the English tour all over again, the band punching above their weight, using the tour as a lifeline until something better came along. Niven, meanwhile, was trying to square the circle by also keeping tabs on Great White – still the more prominent of his two acts – who were then touring sold-out American arenas in support of Whitesnake. He was so busy, ‘I swear to God there were a couple of times I passed myself at LAX.’
Then, out of the blue, a little taste of tomorrow – and another odd blast of synchronicity. Great White’s Once Bitten and Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction had both originally been scheduled for release on the same day in July 1987. Sensibly, Eddie Rosenblatt had delayed the release of Appetite by four weeks, to give Alan Niven time to ‘gasp for oxygen’. Since then the latter had been lagging behind the former, in terms of sales, if not prestige: Once Bitten had gone gold in the US in November; Appetite had gone gold the following March. Now, suddenly, in April 1988, they had caught up with each other.
‘They both went platinum on the same day,’ says Niven. It was Thursday, 7 April 1988 – exactly a week after GN’R’s eye-catching appearance on The Late Show and just a few days before they shot the ‘Sweet Child’ video. That night Great White opened for Whitesnake at the LA Forum in Inglewood. The final night of the tour, there was a party afterwards. That morning, Alan Niven had got a phone call from Capitol saying they had just shipped their millionth copy of Once Bitten. Niven was ecstatic: vindication at last for his faith in a bunch of no-hopers he’d almost single-handedly now turned into million-selling rock stars. Then that evening, as he was walking into the LA Forum to see Great White, Eddie Rosenblatt showed up (like GN’R, Whitesnake were signed to Geffen) and made straight for Niven. ‘Congratulations,’ said Eddie, ‘we just moved the millionth copy of Guns N’ Roses.’
Now Niven was truly knocked out. He had to stop walking and check what condition his condition was in. On top of everything, 7 April also happened to be his thirty-fifth birthday. He blurted out the good news to Eddie, who just stood there and gave him the gimlet eye. ‘Well, somebody’s living life right,’ said Eddie.
The next day, though, it was back to business. Most pressing: finding another big tour to get Guns N’ Roses latched on to. When Iron Maiden’s manager, Rod Smallwood – a pal of Niven’s but another manager who’d turned down the opportunity to manage GN’R early on, claiming there was ‘just something not right about them’ – offered the band ten shows opening for Maiden in Canada in May, plus another 22 across America throughout June, Niven grabbed it with both hands. Yet things started to go wrong almost immediately.
The first inkling he had that things were about to turn bad, says Niven, was when he got a phone call from Izzy going, ‘Niv, there’s some fucker with fucking horns on his head and they’ve got cardboard icebergs on stage. What the fuck are we doing here?’ Doug Goldstein laughs as he recalls: ‘So we get on the [Maiden] tour and first day, swear to god, the scrims [backdrop props] behind the band were robotic ducks. It’s kind of early in the day and Axl’s never usually there but for some reason he’s there earlier in the day. And he comes up to me and he goes, “No photographs the entire tour. There’s not a fucking chance, man. No way. Zero, Doug. And if I see one camera I’m fucking bailing.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Dude, I don’t even need to tell you why. If you can’t figure it out then you’re a fucking idiot.”’
He goes on: ‘I hadn’t been up to see it yet so I asked Slash, why is Axl is upset? He goes, “Doug, all I can tell you is I’m with him on this one.” I go, “Come on! Why in the fuck are we on this tour? It’s all about promotion. It’s all about getting out there and bashing the headliner.” That’s what you do as an opener. He goes, “Look, Doug, I’m just telling you, I agree with him.” So I go to my last resort – Duff. I’m like, “Come on, Duff, buddy, I need to rally the troops.” He goes, “Yeah, yeah. Let’s walk out here and see what the issue is.”’ But when, on their way to the stage, Iron Maiden’s singer, Bruce Dickinson, came out of his dressing room ‘wearing these knee-high frilly boots, Duff looks at me and goes, “I don’t even need to see it, Doug. I’m in with the two of ’em. No photographs.”’
But, as Alan Niven points out, ‘Sweet Child’ hadn’t hit big yet and although the band had the buzz, it was important to build and keep them on the road. ‘Also,’ he says, ‘if you’ve got a bunch of fucking addicts, it’s easier to wrangle with their asses if you’ve got them on a mobile facility like a bus. If they’re in LA they’re scattered everywhere. The one time I went through cold turkey with Slash, we had him in our guest room, counting out his Valiums, cleaning the puke out of his mouth, getting him through the week. What does the fucker do the minute he’s through the week? He calls up COF for a fucking car and he goes to find his dealer. If I can keep them on the bus and keep them moving I’ve got a better chance of keeping them alive.’
Guns N’ Roses simply met Iron Maiden at the wrong moment for both bands. Huge throughout the rest of the world and noted for their relentless work ethic, the veteran British metal act had never quite cracked America in the same way as they had everywhere else. Their current album, Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, had only just made gold status and ticket sales for the early part of the tour had been slow. Guns N’ Roses not only had a bigger album, but as soon as they joined the tour, ticket sales picked up. Soon the feeling within the GN’R camp was that they were the real headline act here. Duff even took a week off to get married to his girlfriend, Mandy Brixx, at the end of May, leaving the Cult’s bassist, Kid Chaos, to fill in. It was impossible to imagine them treating – for example – Aerosmith in the same way, a band they actually related to and respected.
Axl, in particular, loathed every moment he was on the road with Maiden. As if affirming every doubt and second thought he had about the validity of doing the tour, the first night at the Moncton Coliseum, on 13 May, he cut the set short after the Maiden fans kept booing and throwing things at them. When a beer can bounced off his arm during ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’, he told the crowd that he didn’t like ‘warm beer, especially not Alpine’. Then he stormed off, yelling, ‘Fuck you, Moncton!’ The following night at the Metro Centre, in Halifax, before ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’, an enraged Axl told an audience member he could suck his dick then challenged him to come up onstage for a fight. In Ottawa, Axl was in such a foul mood he began ranting into the mike about trying to kill someone before ‘My Michelle’.
By the time the Maiden tour had reached Seattle at the start of June, it looked like Axl and the band had finally settled into their new temporary home. They were including ‘Sweet Child’ in their short, punchy set, and the band was starting to play a little freer, without the anxiety and tension that had marred the Canadian shows. The closer the tour got to LA, though – to home – the worse Axl’s moods were becoming again. I was there at the two nights at Irvine Meadows, a 17,000-capacity outdoor amphitheatre in Long Beach, California, where GN’R were supposed to open for Maiden, and when I arrived the disquiet was obvious. Things had degenerated to the point where the two bands were hardly speaking. The brace of Irvine shows should have been a glorious homecoming for Guns N’ Roses. Instead, both their appearances were cancelled when Axl succumbed to ‘voice problems’. The rumourmongers whispered that there was nothing wrong with his voice. Axl simply resented opening for a band he now considered smaller than Guns N’ Roses, something which Doug Goldstein now strenuously denies.
‘He used to blow out his pipes all the time. When you go through seven different cycles of your vocal cords, from stretching and compressing, that guy’s just built to fail.’ Axl found himself sitting in the surgery of an otolaryngologist, Dr Joseph H. Sugar-man – coincidentally, the brother of the former Doors biographer Danny Sugarman. ‘He wanted to operate on Axl and Axl’s like, “Fuck you.”’ Instead, Axl put himself in the hands of Dr Hans von Leden, an ear, nose and throat specialist who taught at UCLA and USC and treated voice disorders in singers, attorneys, teachers, politicians, pastors and other professionals. ‘Hans von Leden was this old German guy working out of UCLA, the president of the Otolaryngology Association. And the guy was like [German accent], “No! Don’t ever let anybody operate on your vocal cords. We can heal them!” So that was it. He was Axl’s guy. He had zero fucking clue who Axl was. Axl brought him a platinum record. He was like, “What is zis?” He had no idea. Cute little guy, probably weighed 100 pounds dripping wet.’
In the event, all 15 of the remaining shows GN’R were to have done with Iron Maiden were cancelled, along with a handful of shows that were to have followed in Japan. While Axl took care of his voice, the rest of the band did what they always had done, away from the road. Got high. Git low. Gone round and round wherever you go … Slash was staying at the Hyatt on Sunset under the name Mr Disorderly. Steven was staying there, but under his own name. I was in a hotel across the street: the plusher Mondrian. I arranged to meet Slash for an interview one morning at 11 a.m. and we walked across Sunset Boulevard back to my hotel (where there was an expense account waiting – they might have been famous but the money hadn’t started rolling in yet). He told me he’d just been ‘smoking a foil’ before meeting his dad for breakfast. That is, smoking heroin. We bumped into Steven hanging around outside. Asked what he was doing, he just smiled, shook his blond head. ‘Ah, you know, man. People to see, places to go.’ Though not Axl, who was home with Erin. Or Duff, who was home with his new wife, Mandy. Or Izzy, who … actually, nobody knew where Izzy was at. Like Slash and Steven, Izzy had nothing to do, except get wasted.
By then everybody in LA seemed to know their names, or at least their faces. The ‘Sweet Child’ video was gathering momentum on MTV and all the rock magazines were now splashing their out-of-it faces across their into-it front covers. As Slash and I took a table inside the bar at the Mondrian, next to the pool, a bunch of bikini-clad young girls surrounded us. ‘Hey, Slash, can I get your autograph?’ ‘Sure, baby.’ ‘Hey Slash, my girlfriend Melissa says she went out with you?’ ‘Uh … sure, baby … maybe …’ ‘Hey, Slash …’ He stood there patiently signing his name on various areas of their bodies, sometimes adding a little drawing of a bad man smoking a cigarette. Or maybe a skull playing guitar … Or something that looked something like that anyway … It was pretty clear he didn’t really know what he was doing any more.
He told me he’d just been saying goodbye to his father, Tony, when I’d arrived to meet him. ‘He was telling me to keep my feet on the ground and stuff. I told him, I’m cool. I know what it’s all about. I mean, look at me. T-shirt, jeans, boots, that’s me, man. That’s all there is. Besides, we haven’t had any money yet. We just get these phone calls – yesterday it was 35,000 sales, today it’s 91,000 sales. It freaks my ass out.’ Acknowledging that part of the band’s appeal lay in the notion that it might end tomorrow, Slash concluded, somewhat prophetically, ‘Actually, I’d rather it collapsed. I’d rather be as good as possible in the amount of time that you can do it, and do it to the hilt. Then fall apart, die, whatever …’
Slash smiled as he said this. Hidden behind all that hair I couldn’t tell if his eyes were smiling too, or just his mouth. Like all the best jokes we both knew it contained more than its fair share of truth, the seeds of future past. But for now, off the road, with the album fast on its way to its second, maybe even third million, everybody’s good mood had returned. Even Axl’s. ‘The funny thing about Axl,’ says Doug Goldstein, ‘he has a fantastic sense of humour. Nobody knows that about him. He is hilarious. Because he has that high intellect, I always say you can tell when someone is intelligent by their sense of humour. Because if you’re daft that synapse doesn’t take place in the brain. Or if it does, it’s very delayed, and he is so bright that he just, bang, fires them off one after another.’
He recalls Axl phoning him around this time with an important question. ‘I’d always told him, don’t read the press. So he calls me and says, “Dougie, I know you told me to never read the press but I couldn’t help it. Everybody says that success has turned me into an asshole.” I started laughing. He says, “Why are you laughing?’ I go, “What do you want me to say?” He goes, “I want you to tell me the truth. Do you think the success has turned me into a prick?” I go, “All right, you want the truth? Axl, when I first started working for you, you were the biggest asshole I’ve ever met in my life. But you weren’t publicised and nobody knew it. Now you’re just a highly publicised asshole but you’re not nearly as difficult to work with as you were back then.” He just laughed at me.’
More and more, Doug Goldstein was the man to keep everybody’s spirits up on the road. It was also while the band was off the road that summer, waiting for Axl’s voice to heal, that Goldstein found himself spending more time with Slash, while they were both holed up at the Hyatt. ‘Not only do we have not enough money for a Sunset-facing view, our rooms are so small you had to go out into the hallway to change your mind. So I’m in my room and all of a sudden I hear all of these sirens, so I look out the backdoor and some guy had taken a dive off the roof. Slash calls me and he’s crying, saying, “Did you look out the window?” I said, “Yeah.” He says, “Fuck, man. I’m so bummed.” I go, “No, man. I hear you. What a horrible way to go. I tell you what, why don’t you come to my room and we’ll talk about it.” He says, “Yeah, okay, give me, like, five minutes.” So he walks in and then standing on the heater, which is, like, by the window, I have two signs in my hand: 9.0 and 9.5. He was like, “You’re fucking sick, man!” I said, “Well, it wasn’t a bad dive.”’
The serious stuff was left to Alan Niven. Having seen GN’R bumped from both the AC/DC and David Lee Roth arena tours, and having been forced to withdraw from the Iron Maiden jaunt, but with an album, Appetite, and single, ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’, now looking like the biggest hits of the summer, he saw only one possible option left for the band to capitalise on their possibly once-in-a-lifetime position. ‘I went to Eddie Rosenblatt at Geffen and said, “Look, there’s only one other tour left. We have to have it. I need it. You need it!” And that was the Aerosmith tour.’
With three hit singles in the US that year and their first million-selling album since the Seventies, Aerosmith were now approaching the apex of the same steady climb they had begun a year earlier when they cancelled their European tour, effectively dumping GN’R in the process. The difference in their respective fortunes between then and now, though, just 12 months later, was enormous. With sales of Appetite now overtaking those of Permanent Vacation, having both bands on the same bill guaranteed a sell-out wherever it alighted in America that year. The fact they were both on the same label made it, on paper at least, a no-brainer.
The only snag was that the five members of Aerosmith had now all been on the wagon for two years. While the five members of Guns N’ Roses didn’t actually appear to know what a wagon was. What Alan Niven was relying on was that, as he says, ‘Most people live in abject fear of David Geffen.’ And that Tim Collins ‘was very compliant with the suggestions and wishes of David Geffen and Eddie Rosenblatt. He was extremely compliant. I think I might be one of the few that couldn’t be bothered. But, anyway, I went to Eddie and said we have to have it.’
Niven’s request was granted. ‘Eddie’s looking at me going, “Okay, kiddo. I hear you.”’ On one condition: that nobody from the GN’R camp, including most of all the band themselves, would be allowed to be seen drinking or – God forbid – doing drugs anywhere on tour where the Aerosmith entourage might be within sight. Or, as Niven puts it now, chuckling darkly, ‘They had turned Aerosmith into candy-asses … there’s restrictions about who can come backstage. What they can drink … And they took out Guns N’ Roses as support?’ He almost chokes with laughter. ‘Fucking un-fucking-believable. Are you kidding me? Poor Tim is sitting there going, “I’ve got to run a clean machine and take that fucking crew?” But he does it.’
Then Niven hit on an idea that made him wheeze even more with laughter. To bond with Tim and try to reassure him that all will be well on tour and that his boys won’t corrupt Tim’s newly clean boys, Alan takes him to … his gun club! ‘I pull out my .44 Magnum and I say, “Try this. You’ll find it empowering.” He took one shot with my .44, dropped it and stumbled back about four paces. Eventually he got a little more comfortable, enough to shoot my .25 Beretta that I used to keep in my pocket. So he’s shooting my little bip-bip-bip-bip-bip gun and he’s comfortable with that.’ Alan had deliberately decided not to give Tim the little gun and allow him to work his way up. ‘I put the .44 Magnum in his hand. You want a little bit of symbolism? You gonna fuck with us? We’re Guns N’ Fucking Roses.’ He laughs. ‘It’s no wonder people have negative things to say about me. I must have been a total shit.’
But if Niven thought his problems were over, he was sorely mistaken. ‘So we got the Aerosmith tour,’ he goes on. ‘Everybody’s happy – except Axl.’ As the first date in Chicago, in July, came closer, ‘Axl locked himself in his apartment and wouldn’t communicate with anybody.’ In desperation Niven told Izzy to go there and talk Axl down. ‘Get him to come. It’s gonna be good. It’s gonna be cool.’ Izzy did as his manager asked, but when he got there Axl wouldn’t even let him in. ‘They tried talking through the door and that wouldn’t work and Izzy came back and reported that to me.’ Izzy told Alan: ‘He’s locked up in his bedroom and he won’t come to the door.’ Alan asked if there was any way Izzy could talk to him in his bedroom and Izzy said, ‘Well, there’s a tree outside his fucking bedroom window.’ Niven looked at him and said, ‘“Go climb the fucking tree and talk to him!” So Izzy goes off. He climbs the fucking tree and there’s Izzy hanging in the fucking tree, going, “Come on, dude, it’s Aerosmith, it’s gonna be cool. Let’s go. We all wanna go.” And Axl’s like, “FUCK OFF! I DON’T WANNA DO IT!” True story.’
What now? Sitting in his office, surrounded by his staff and other band members, waiting for his decision, he was faced with a stark choice. Doug was there, Izzy was there, as was Stephanie Fanning. Chitchatting, ‘trying to figure out what the fuck was going on’. Niven sighs deeply. ‘I had this general rule of thumb. That if Axl was yelling at me it was like, whatever. But when he spoke softly, quietly, my ears really opened and I became incredibly attentive to what he was saying. Because I knew I was hearing from the centre of his consciousness.
‘This was probably Wednesday. The first Aerosmith show was the Sunday evening. I had to push the button for the trucks to leave with the equipment the next morning if we’re gonna be there, and we were trying to evaluate what to do. Steph stuck her head into my office and she was pale. Very drawn. She looked at me and she said, “Axl’s on the line.” I looked at her face and I went, “Oh fuck …” I picked up the phone and this very soft voice said, “Niv, I – just – can’t – do – it. Cancel the tour.” I said, “Okay, Ax”, and I put the phone down.’
He told the others what Axl had just said. They all looked at him. ‘I sat there for a moment. Then I went, “You know what, I signed a contract for five fucking individuals. Five people applied their signature to my contract. Not one. The other four want to do this. The one we can’t go onstage without tells me he can’t do it.” I felt in a complete and utter bind. And then, where these things come from, God alone knows. But I’m staring at the table and there are these two red dice staring back at me …’
Niven had just returned from a Great White show in Las Vegas. He had some dice on his desk, from the Aladdin, where they’d stayed. As he sat there wondering what the hell to do about the Aerosmith tour, he recalled reading Luke Rhinehart’s classic novel, The Dice Man, as a young man in the Seventies. ‘He thought all our neurosis came from the conflict of choice. Am I gonna be a gentleman or am I gonna stick it up her ass? If I let the dice decide I will not feel guilty or neurotic about what I do.’
Alan Niven rolled the dice. ‘I sat in front of everybody and said, “Here goes …”’ He said he would give Axl ‘the weight of the odds. If I throw a ten or less we’re done. And I think it might be over. If I throw an eleven or a twelve, we’re all going. And we’ll be there. And if he’s not there then it’s entirely on him.’
He threw an 11. ‘I said, “That’s it. Send the trucks. Send the crew. We fly out. We’re going.” And we all went.’
They didn’t even send Axl plane tickets for the trip to Chicago. ‘We just left a message saying we were going. That we would be there and he could join us if he wanted to. It was up to him to sort it.’
Alan Niven admits he ‘had no fucking idea’ if Axl would call his bluff. The stress, he says, ‘was mountainous’. But Axl did arrive, on the morning of the show. Alan Niven was sitting eating breakfast at the hotel when he heard ‘the clank, clank, clank’ of Axl’s jewellery. ‘He comes marching in, in his shorts and his forty-eight pounds of jewellery on him. So anonymous. So discreet. And he looks at me and I swear to God if looks could kill I’d have been vaporised. But he was there.’
Axl didn’t say a word, just glared at Niven, ‘then went to the far side of the room and sat at a table, then one or two people went to sit with him. Then he announced that he would not go onstage if I was there and I had to leave.’
As a result, Niven was not there for the first three weeks of the Aerosmith tour. He later had the red dice put into Perspex. He still has them today.
As Aerosmith’s guitarist, Joe Perry, later recalled, ‘Guns N’ Roses were different. They had dug down a little deeper into rock’s roots. I heard a lot of Aerosmith in them, which meant I also heard a lot of bands that came before us. And I remember being a little jealous, because they were really hitting the nail on the head … Part of the thrill was wondering what [Axl] was going to do next.’
Certainly, the supposed ban on the band’s ‘bad boy behaviour’ only applied to the actual tour venues, and even then, as Slash told me at the time, ‘We still do what we do, we just stick the booze in plastic cups so it looks like water.’ When he came into his dressing room one night after a show, though, and found Aerosmith’s singer, Steven Tyler, examining the near-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the table, he admitted he was embarrassed. ‘Steven looked at me kind of pityingly and said, “Did you drink all this before you went onstage?” I had to kind of hide the other bottle of Jack I’d taken onstage with me.’
Doug Goldstein remembers the tour as ‘no different to any of the others in terms of having to deal with Axl and Slash’. He describes arriving at one hotel and being told the band’s rooms had all been cancelled. ‘I told them. “Look, no problem. Just call Vanessa” – the name of the hotel manager – “and tell her we’re gonna be pulling the bus up to her house and that twelve of us are going to be sharing her bed with her.” So this old gal goes into the back and this big, heavy, Italian-looking guy with a moustache and a tie comes out, and says, “Which one’s Goldstein?”
‘I’m like, wow, we’re really going there? He leans over the counter, he goes, “Look, you’re gonna get in your room at three o’clock. You gotta fucking problem with that?” I don’t know what it is about my head but when I snap, I snap. So I grab the guy by the tie and I pull him halfway over the counter. He tries to reach for the phone so I tighten up his tie and he’s turning purple on me. I go, “You’re gonna fucking die before you get a hold of the cops. I suggest you get your fat Guido ass back there and get me my goddamn keys.”’
Turning to one of the band’s security team, Todd, Doug told him: ‘“Go put Slash on a luggage trolley and get him up here now.” He goes, “What?” I go, “Just fucking do what I said!” So he goes downstairs and he brings Slash, who’s obviously passed out, he’s literally upside down in that his head’s on the luggage bottom and his legs are dangling over the top. But he still has the bottle of Jack in his hand. So Todd rolls him up next to me at the front desk, and there’s, like, fifty people waiting to get into their rooms. The general manager of the hotel comes out and he goes, “Hey, he’s got to get out of here.” I go, “You know what, he’s gonna get out of here the second I have a fucking room to put him in. Until then he’s your new furniture.” Needless to say, I had the keys in about two minutes.
‘So I put Slash over my shoulder and we go to the elevator and I’m riding up with about eight guys in business suits and Slash starts urinating down my back. I was like, motherfucker! I drop him on the ground and this guy’s laughing at me. I turned round and I go, “What?” He goes, “Look, I don’t want you to get pissed off at me but I’ve been watching you since you walked into the hotel. I don’t know what they’re paying you but it can’t even be remotely enough for what the hell you have to put up with!” The elevator doors open up and I go, “Yeah, thanks for the observation.” I’m literally pulling Slash down the hallway by his hair cos I don’t want to have to pick him up by his peed pants.’
Kept abreast of the antics of their support act, but also acutely aware of how many tickets they were helping them sell, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry – the Axl and Slash of Aerosmith, with a shared history of alcohol and drug abuse that far outweighed anything Guns N’ Roses had yet come up with – were smart enough to let the circus carry on. One night, Joe came to Slash and told him how ‘awesome’ his guitar solo in ‘Sweet Child’ had been that night. When the tour was over, Steven gifted Axl a complete set of specially made silver Halliburton travel cases, costing thousands of dollars. Months later, Steven would also go out of his way to help the band through their drug problems, though only Izzy actually took him up on his offer.
Aerosmith also displayed their class by not causing a scene when Rolling Stone arrived on the tour ostensibly to cover both bands and ended up choosing Guns N’ Roses for their cover. The Geffen promotional staff were thrilled at the outcome. David Geffen bought Tom Zutaut a Range Rover as a reward for both his hard work – and sheer persistence. Meanwhile, Appetite for Destruction officially became America’s Number 1 album on 6 August 1988. They got another video, this one for ‘Paradise City’, in the can, again relatively cheaply, with most of the budget – 80,000 dollars’ worth – going, says Niven, ‘to Union fees to have six cameras shoot the band onstage in Giants Stadium’. (Something he says he ‘mitigated a little bit by taking Vance Burberry with us to Donington armed with a 16mm Bolex’. All of which combined to create another action-packed performance video in an age when most bands were now investing in high-tech video production values to try to please MTV.)
This time when the band flew to England, though, they did so on Concorde. ‘The record company went crazy but I just said, fuck it,’ Alan Niven says shrugging. ‘I felt by then we’d earned the right.’
Indeed. The trip should have been a triumph. Instead, it was a tragedy. One of the worst any of them would face. Looking back years later, some would suggest it was even the beginning of the end of the story of Guns N’ Roses. But in truth there were still greater triumphs and tragedies to come.
As Axl yelled into the crowd as the band fled the rain-soaked Donington stage that day: ‘Don’t kill yourselves!’
But it was already too late.