For Izzy Stradlin, things would get worse before they finally got better. On 27 August he was on a flight from Indianapolis, drunk and tired and obnoxious. He ‘must have’ told a stewardess to ‘fuck herself,’ he later recalled blurrily, before jumping the queue for the toilet by relieving himself in a bin in the kitchen galley. The pilot put the plane down at the nearest airport, which was Phoenix, and Izzy was arrested for public indecency, a problem because he had a prior for drug possession and could have been jailed for six months. Instead he got another six months’ probation and had to keep peeing in cups for urine tests to prove he was clean.
‘That was my wake-up call,’ Izzy later told me. ‘That was the point where I said, this has got to fucking stop. I didn’t wanna wind up dead or, worse, in prison.’ Instead, Izzy went into rehab and began receiving professional counselling. What really made him stop, though, he thinks now, ‘was I wanted to. Cos I figured, at some point your heart’s just gonna pop, or your mind’s gonna snap, right? Eventually, that shit will kill ya, and it does. It kills people all the time. Once I got maybe, like, a week of sobriety, like actually going a whole week without a drink, I thought, oh god, if I can just keep this up …’ It wasn’t easy. ‘I’d been straight for a long time before some of the others even noticed. They’d offer me a line. I’d say, “Uh, no thanks, I don’t any more, remember?” But these were, like, the only friends I had. Those first five years we were together, the band was like our little family. Dysfunctional as hell but everybody had each other, you know?’
Two weeks after Izzy’s arrest, on 11 September 1989, he and Axl appeared at the MTV VMA Awards at the Universal Amphitheatre in LA. They accepted an award for ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ and jammed with Tom Petty, Axl on ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and both on Petty’s timeless ‘Free Fallin’’. As Izzy walked off stage and handed his guitar to his tech, Mötley Crüe’s singer, Vince Neil, jumped out in front of him and punched him in the face, cutting his lip: retribution, Vince would claim, for an unwanted sexual advance from Izzy to the singer’s new wife, Sharise, a former mud wrestler from the Tropicana. Depending on whose version you believed, Izzy went down, Vince ran off, Axl chased Vince, Vince offered to fight Axl, Axl told Vince ‘to leave my band the fuck alone’ – yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah and boys will be boys … Who knew what really went down? Yet the incident, minor though it was, would escalate into a situation that would drag many more people into the mire, me included …
Before that escalation began, however, Alan Niven found himself in a car with Bill Elson, Guns N’ Roses’ American booking agent. Elson was driving them from Manhattan to the Meadow-lands, in New Jersey, to watch Metallica play. Although Metallica would soon be on an upward curve almost as steep as GN’R’s, neither man was particularly interested in the show. Instead, Elson’s plan was to ‘socialise’ (in Niven’s description) with Metallica’s managers, Cliff Bernstein and Peter Mensch, who, aside from also looking after Metallica and Def Leppard, had been asked to ‘oversee’ the monolithic stadium tour about to be undertaken by the Rolling Stones, still the world’s biggest-grossing live act almost three decades after they’d first come to stardom.
The weather was awful, and as Elson drove, he tried to convince Niven that Guns N’ Roses should be the support act for the Rolling Stones tour. The offer was $50,000 per show, including the chance to play at the vast, 77,000-capacity LA Coliseum, for which, Elson guessed, lifelong Stones fans like Izzy, Slash and Axl might be prepared to remove their right nuts. The offer had come directly from Mick Jagger’s office, Elson mentioned casually.
But if Elson expected Niven to bite his hand off, he was wrong. Niven knew what the band would say (and he was right: ‘We’ve gotta play with the Stones,’ Slash and Izzy chorused), but he had a different view. Firstly, in his eyes, the Stones were now a heritage act. Their last tour, he said colourfully, had been ‘less than compelling, a sloppy stumble through the material from the obligatory but inconsequential album released for the tour, and a tired thrashing of old chestnuts …’, while Guns N’ Roses were now ‘white hot’. Niven was also aware that the Stones had form in buying some relevance by appointing the band du jour as their support, a habit that read like a who’s who of rock, from Janis Joplin and Santana to Lynyrd Skynyrd and Peter Tosh. In recent times it had included Foreigner, Prince, Southside Johnny … happy to offer support spots to anybody with enough current-day cachet to help the Stones sell even more tickets.
Now it was the turn of the new kings of the road, Guns N’ Roses – something Alan Niven had no objection to, in principle: credibility by association worked both ways. Any move that helped broaden the public perception of Guns N’ Roses, away from the LA metal scene of Mötley Crüe and Poison and more towards the classic rock’n’roll status of the Stones, was most welcome, thank you very much. But at $50,000 a show, when Elson knew better than anyone that Guns N’ Roses could now make double that by headlining their own shows – what kind of bullshit was that?
Alan told Bill he’d think about it. Then dug around and discovered that the Stones had already announced two nights at the LA Coliseum and had a further four on hold. Two nights alone represented over 150,000 tickets – with an average seat going at $30, while the best seats were being offered around town by ticket brokers for up to $700 a ticket. Then there was the money that would be rolling in from merchandising sales alone, where as well as the standard $20 T-shirts were such upscale items as a $450 leather jacket and a $190 flight jacket. When a rumour – leaked by persons or parties unknown – that GN’R would support the Stones got out, Niven read the runes, saw what was happening and called Bill to tell him Guns N’ Roses would not be doing the shows. Elson was aghast. Nobody turned down the Stones! But when the LA Times rang Niven about the rumour, he told them the same thing, citing the age difference between the bands, and pointing to the fact that Guns N’ Roses were now the band with all the street credibility.
By this time Slash and Izzy were almost apoplectic. ‘Niv, it’s the fucking Stones! We’ve got to do it!’ urged Izzy. But Niven stood firm. Finally, Elson called him again.
Said he’d received another call from Mick Jagger’s office. There was a new offer: four nights at the LA Coliseum for $500,000. Niven countered that the band’s price was now a round million dollars. ‘We’ve already sold him [Jagger] a shitload of tickets,’ he told Elson. Once again, Bill was forced to go back to the Stones with bad news. This wasn’t how things were supposed to be. It was a gamble, Niven knew, but one worth taking. If the Stones paid up, then Guns N’ Roses would earn almost as much for four shows as they would have for an entire tour at $50,000 per night – as well as saving themselves all of the usual costs associated with touring.
There was another element to Niven’s thinking, though, that he was not prepared to share with the Stones or anyone else for now but was crucial to his thinking. The fact was, after nearly a year off the road during which all five of them had splintered off into different, sometimes frightening worlds, Guns N’ Roses as a working band were in no fit state to go on the road – at least not until four-fifths of them had cleaned up. Apart from the audacity of countering Mick Jagger, whose love of a dollar bill was legendary, it was one of the few cards Niven had to play. When Niven went to watch the Stones play in St Louis he got worried all over again. The show was still a revue, but the Stones were hot again, Keef oozing cool, revivified by a successful solo record and tour, Mick still impossibly athletic and vital. Guns, by contrast, looked near death.
Nevertheless, Niven’s gamble had worked. Guns N’ Roses would receive a million dollars for their four shows opening for the Rolling Stones, appearing between the opening act, Living Colour, the all-black rock band also then hot-as-a-pistol following the success of their double-platinum debut album, Vivid, and the headliners. Now all they had to do was turn up on time. But with a couple of hours to go before the first Stones gig, with 77,000 people already in the venue, Axl Rose was a no-show. The problems had begun a week or so before, at a video shoot for the Appetite track ‘It’s So Easy’ at the Cathouse, directed once again by Nigel Dick. ‘We always wanted to do a video for that song,’ Axl told me. ‘We’re gonna have a home video at some point, so we wanted to do some videos that were, like, completely no-holds-barred, uncensored type of things. Just live shooting, instead of worrying about whether MTV is gonna play it. Just go out there and do a fucking blown-out live, real risky video.’
The video, which featured sadomasochistic scenes involving Erin, was never officially released. Alan Niven saw to that. ‘I get a call from Nigel Dick saying Axl had called Nigel direct, saying, “I want to shoot some footage for this.” Nigel’s going, “You are going to go fucking ballistic when you see this stuff.” He’s got her hung from the doorway and slapping her ass, the mouth-gag and so on … Lots of fun [but] you don’t put it in a fucking video that represents the entire band and put it out there for the whole world to see.’ The upshot was that Niven ‘wouldn’t let the final edit be done and I got the offline copies. The reason for that was I knew he was committing suicide with that bondage shit with Erin. And lo and behold he got divorced. So you know what they would have done with that? I protected the little fuck.’
As if to compound a night of negative energy, David Bowie had shown up to see Slash, and had started talking to Erin Everly, who was appearing in the video. Axl had taken one look at that and started throwing punches Bowie’s way before having him thrown off the set. ‘Bowie and I had our differences,’ Axl shrugged when I asked him about it. ‘And then we went out for dinner and talked and went to the China Club and stuff, you know, and when we left I was like, “I wanna thank you. You’re the first person that’s ever come up and said I’m sorry about the situation.” And then I open up Rolling Stone the next day and there’s a story in there saying I’ve got no respect for the Godfather of Glam even though I wear make-up and all this bullshit. It’s laughable.’
Axl wasn’t laughing though when, at the warm-up for the Coliseum shows, a club gig promoted as an RIP magazine party, he told Izzy he didn’t want to play with the Rolling Stones. Izzy was taken aback but not hugely concerned. Axl was always worried about things to a ludicrous extent. He hadn’t wanted to do the Aerosmith tour, then looked back on it as the highlight of the year. Whatever happened, Niv would handle it. Then, at 6 a.m. on 18 October, the morning of the first show, Axl rang Izzy and told him he was quitting Guns N’ Roses. Again, however, Izzy was unsure how seriously to take the claim. Axl, by his own admission, ‘quit the band every three days’, as he’d told Howard Stern in a radio interview just a few weeks before.
This time, though, it was different. With controversy over ‘One in a Million’ still raging, Living Colour’s vocalist, Vernon Reid, had voiced strong concerns in the press. In order to avoid any possible clash at the Coliseum shows, Axl and the band had been allotted their own separate area backstage, on the opposite side from Living Colour’s dressing rooms. According to Colleen Combs, Axl’s personal assistant, he was already so ‘paranoid’ about the reaction his first major appearance on stage since the controversy over ‘One in a Million’ started would provoke, ‘he really thought someone was going to take him out. He thought someone was going to kill him.’
When Izzy arrived at the Coliseum that afternoon, he passed the news along to Alan Niven. ‘It’s gonna be a long four days …’ he said. Niven, who’d been there before, knew it could go either way: Axl hadn’t actually told anyone else he was quitting, just Izzy. Maybe he’d wake up feeling differently. Or he just wouldn’t show up and Niven would face the worst day of his professional career. As the hours till show time dragged by, and Axl still failed to arrive, backstage the tension in the GN’R dressing room was such that Doug Goldstein was almost in tears. When Living Colour took to the stage, Niven knew it was time for desperate measures. Once again, he didn’t flinch from taking them.
As he says now, Axl not turning up for a show ‘was not an altogether novel circumstance and it did not necessarily mean he wouldn’t eventually come’. However, his non-appearance at the show in Phoenix the previous year had produced a minor riot with considerable property damage. Now, though, they were playing for much bigger stakes. ‘A riot by 77,000 disappointed stadium stoners was quite probable in the event Axl did fail to show. The consequences could be genuinely catastrophic. The tragedy at Donington still haunted my consciousness.’
Niven turned to Stones’ production chief Brian Ahern and asked him, ‘Brian, do you have a real solid contact in the LAPD? A genuine “no questions” kind of a guy?’ Ahern answered, ‘I’ll send him in.’ Without another word, Ahern made the call. ‘Cool and completely without confusion or stress, Brian is an exceptional individual and I will for ever appreciate his calm and his confidence,’ says Niven. ‘I spoke with his contact. Within minutes a “black and white”, containing a reliable pair of uniformed cops, pulled up at the Shoreham Towers.’ The uniformed cops raced up to the twelfth floor and began banging on Axl’s front door. ‘The startled occupants were herded down to the cruiser. Sirens wailing and all lights ablaze, the police car sliced through the evening traffic.’ The car drew up at the very foot of the steps leading to the stage. It was in this manner that Axl arrived in the Coliseum to appear before 77,000 LA-generates, a mere 25 minutes behind schedule.
As Axl stepped out of the police car he had a face like thunder. When he was then told that Vernon Reid, speaking from the stage, had given a short speech halfway through Living Colour’s set, to the effect that anybody who called somebody else a nigger was promoting racism and bigotry, no matter how hard they tried to explain it away, he was apoplectic. When he was then told that large sections of the Coliseum crowd had stood on their seats and applauded loudly, whistling and cheering their approval, he was ready to kill somebody. ‘We went out with a mission,’ Reid later explained. ‘I made a statement about “One in a Million” onstage, and I remember afterward Keith Richards made it a point to come over to the dressing room and shake my hand.’ Ultimately, he says, ‘When I heard that song, I was probably more disappointed than anything, because I liked the band. [But] I thought the objectification was wack, like I’m somehow standing in the way of this guy.’
When word got back to the GN’R dressing rooms about Reid’s putdown – and that it had received a standing ovation – concern over how Axl might react was such that no one could bear to make eye contact with him. Guns N’ Roses took the stage just before 8 p.m. The band was still tuning up, getting ready to blast off, when Axl grabbed the mike and told the audience, ‘Before we start playing, [I want to say] I’m sick of all this publicity about our song.’ He then denied he was a racist, but insisted that certain words – against groups of people who offend you – was acceptable, in an artistic context. ‘If you still want to call me a racist,’ he bellowed, ‘you can … shove it …’
The band cranked into gear and Axl began his manic perambulations around the stage. Now, though, a moment of black comedy was added to the spidery farce. Axl, who had refused to come and view the construction of the Stone’s massive stage ahead of the show, found himself blinded by several follow-spots as he attempted to race back from one side of the stage. He ran clear off the stage and plunged into the photographer’s pit. ‘I stopped breathing,’ says Niven. Then slowly a hand holding a microphone emerged from the darkness as, slowly, two security men hoisted Axl back onto the stage. Now, with embarrassment added to his anger and frustration, he went for broke. The second song of the set was ‘Mr Brownstone’. Axl stomped to the lip of the stage and told the crowd: ‘I just want to say … I hate to do this onstage, but I tried it every other fucking way. And unless certain people in this band get their shit together, this will be the last Guns N’ Roses show you ever see …’
It was a typical piece of Axl grandstanding. The review in the LA Times the next day described it as ‘both a troubling and fascinating display – one that will probably go down as a storied moment in LA rock. Rose has the potential to be one of the most compelling figures in American rock since the late Jim Morrison.’ But below the surface it was another case of events in his life conspiring to send Axl Rose into a tailspin. Not only were the band rusty and drugged out – Slash’s heroin dealer had a backstage pass – and not only had he discovered David Bowie hitting on his girlfriend, but a few days before the shows he had been contacted indirectly by William Rose’s brother, who’d told Stuart that William Rose was dead. ‘Great family,’ Axl told me with a mournful shrug. ‘I don’t even know how he died. And I don’t care …’
Axl had been referring onstage specifically to Slash and Steven. Slash, whose mother, Ola, was at the show, told me afterwards that he had thought about walking off when Axl made his shocking little speech. However, there was no denying that he was, as he put it, going through another ‘really bad phase’. Nevertheless, he admitted he’d avoided meeting any of the Stones because he was so ‘high out of my gourd … That was during my real wasted days, and basically when you are high like that you don’t care who it is; nothing was more important than getting on with what I had to get on with.’
Steven, who was now shooting up smack on a daily basis, had been even more appalled. ‘[Axl] said to me, “Just start playing ‘Brownstone’,”’ he recounts. ‘So I’m playing “Brownstone” and he comes out and says everybody’s fucked up on dope. He was so gone that I’m hiding there behind the drums thinking, I don’t know this guy …’
According to Duff, everyone ‘was pissed off at [Axl] for that. But I can say I was pissed off with Axl for doing that because I was not one of the guys that he was talking about. I mean, I just walked into that thing. So I was furious, of course. But the next day we were on the phone together, and, you know, it was okay, he explained his reasons for doing it. [Axl] was blowing off a lot of steam about a lot of shit. A lot of shit … That’s what happens with this band, we don’t bottle shit up. We just let it out.’
According to Alan Niven, at the end of the set Axl had raced off the stage, ‘head down and radiating an intense glower, warning all and everyone not to approach him’. As he headed for the dressing rooms, David Geffen himself approached from the top of the stairs.
‘Great show, Axl,’ said David.
‘Hope you liked it, fucker,’ Axl nearly spat. ‘Because it’s the last one you’ll ever get.’
Niven, who was behind Axl, recalled how Geffen looked stunned. ‘Leave it, David. I’ll fix it,’ he told Geffen. Though, ‘God knows how, I thought to myself.’
Early the next day, both Alan Niven and Doug Goldstein drove to Shoreham Towers to check on Axl, see if perhaps he’d cooled down and changed his mind about – yet again – leaving the band.
‘Axl was in bed and he was not going to leave it,’ Niven later wrote. ‘Not for anything or anyone. On his way to the apartment I had suggested Dougie stop and get a bag of donuts, a very, very large one.’
Axl sat in bed and complained about Slash. He complained about Steven. He complained about Duff. He complained about everyone and everything but his worst vitriol was reserved for Slash. He didn’t care if he had a show. He did not care that it was with the Stones, in front of 77,000 more people. He hated Slash. He wasn’t going to go on a stage with him ever again.
‘All Doug and I could do was to listen and listen and listen and keep him talking. And feed him donuts. As the morning wore on into the afternoon the sugar began to build in his bloodstream – a tsunami sugar rush was developing. Axl began to get animated. His legs began to jerk fitfully under the sheets. Energy was building with nowhere for it to go. It was just enough for us to be able to persuade Axl that if, and that would be a big “if”, we could get Slash to apologize to Axl, for his heroin use, for whatever, and in public, then maybe, possibly, perhaps, he might think about doing the show.
‘I quietly slipped into the living room. I got on the phone with Slash. “I don’t want to hear anything but a groveling apology, Slash,” I growled into the phone. “I don’t care how you feel or whether it’s justified in any way shape or form. It’s the only chance we have to get him on stage today and that’s all that matters right now.”’
Whether Slash would comply with such demands was moot. As Niven so elegantly put it: ‘Anyone who is not sharing the needle will have, at the least, some degree of resentment about those who are – there’s almost nothing quite as selfish, detached or destructive as a smack habit. Addicts, of course, always have the arrogance of their superior and totally misplaced belief that they have control of their usage.’
Axl, though, ‘surely had grounds to be pissed, but his method of dealing with the situation had the selfishness of the narcissistic sociopath. Axl wasn’t that concerned with Slash’s condition as much as he was mad that Slash was not demonstrating a dutiful compliance to Axl’s whim and will …’
In the end, Slash went along with it. Partly because it suddenly felt like if he didn’t it was he who would be blamed for the band fucking up their biggest engagement yet. Partly, perhaps, because he knew Axl had a point. As well as the aborted trip to Hawaii, Doug Goldstein had taken Slash into his Hollywood home to try to detox. But again with less than satisfactory results. As he describes: ‘It was prior to my being married but my soon-to-be first wife was with me.’ For ten days, they put up with Slash ‘crawling on my floors, vomiting, defecating, urinating … And I’m cleaning it up.’ When Goldstein had to leave for a couple of days to go on tour with Great White, he says, he came home to stories of Slash waking up his flatmate, Ross Goza, in the middle of the night screaming for drugs. Goza was a music director for LA’s biggest rock radio station, KNAC. ‘He was woken up with Slash choking him, saying, “You’re gonna drive me to fucking Los Angeles! [To score.] And you’ll never tell Doug or I’ll fucking kill you!” And Ross is like, “Okay.” So Slash wrote him a cheque, which Ross still has …’
Even before the Stones shows, ‘I was tired of taking him to rehab facilities that he would check himself out of the first night,’ says Goldstein. He had even taken to paying people to spy on him. ‘Slash used to score at a magazine stand. So there was this guy in the office building across the way, and I was paying him, and he would call me and say, “Oh, yeah, your guy was by today. Twice!”’ In that long, dark period after they came off the road from the AFD tour, trying to keep track of them ‘was crazy’.
Whatever his reasons, in the end Slash swallowed his pride and made an apology to Axl. ‘With great reluctance he said he would consider repeating it onstage,’ Niven remembers. ‘Axl, in turn, halfheartedly agreed to consider coming to the show.’ Slash duly made his own announcement from the stage that second night vowing to quit his evil ways. ‘… Last night I was up here and didn’t even know it,’ Slash told the crowd. ‘Smack isn’t what it’s all about. No one in this band advocates heroin. We’re not going to be one of those weak bands that fall apart over it.’ Or as Alan Niven puts it: ‘Bless his heart, Slash took the bullet for the team.’ As for Axl, says Niven, ‘He had proven that he could make almost everyone bend to him. His future power grabs, his demand for control and ownership of the name, started to become clear in his mind. Perhaps it was at that very moment, full of donuts and angry at being hauled to a show in a police car, under threat of being handcuffed, that he decided what he wished the future of the band to be.’
When, a few weeks later, I asked Axl about it, he was still adamant he’d done the right thing. ‘That was definite and that was serious. I mean, I offered to go completely broke and back on the streets, cos it would have cost, like, an estimated $1.5 million to cancel the shows, okay? That means Axl’s broke, okay? Except [for] what I’ve got tied up in Guns N’ Roses’ interests or whatever. But I didn’t want to do that because I wouldn’t want the band to have to pay for me cancelling the shows. I don’t want Duff to lose his house cos Axl cancelled the shows. I couldn’t live with that. But at the same time I’m not gonna be a part of watching them kill each other, just killing themselves off. It’s like, we tried every other angle of getting our shit back together and in the end it had to be done live. You know, everybody else was pissed at me but afterwards Slash’s mom came and shook my hand and so did his brother.’
He said that Elton John had actually sent flowers to his dressing room after the first show with the Stones. ‘Yeah, it was great. He sent these flowers and a note. He didn’t mean it against the Stones. It was meant towards the press and anybody else who was against Guns N’ Roses. It said: “Don’t let the bastards grind you down! I hate them all too … Sincerely, Elton John.” That was just the greatest.’
Had it worked, though, this public shaming of his bandmates? Axl grinned. ‘It way worked, man! Cos Slash is fucking on like a motherfucker right now. And the songs are coming together, they’re coming together real heavy.’
Within a week of finishing the Stones shows Doug Goldstein had taken Steven Adler and Slash to detox in Arizona, this time at an exclusive golfing resort. Turning up unannounced at Slash’s house was now a familiar ritual. Goldstein would tell him, ‘Okay, you need a pair of shorts and a pair of shoes. I’m gonna have to look inside your shoes first though. And I’m buying the smokes. Because what they used to do was hide little heroin balloons in the bottom of a pack of Marlboro. Towards the end it was, basically, I’m picking you up and you’re gonna be naked – and I’m gonna do a rectal search!’
This time, though, with the trip to Arizona, Goldstein would have Slash and Steven to try to deal with. ‘I’m supposed to monitor them while they get clean,’ he recalls. ‘So I got my sleeping pills and I’m going to administer to them. I pick up Steven and I go to Slash’s house and somebody had tipped him off, right? So he’s in the wind – nowhere to be found – but I said, “Fuck it, Steven, we’re going.”
‘We get on a plane and we’re out there for about four days and Stevie’s sleeping till, like, three in the afternoon. So I said, “Look, I’m gonna go golf in the morning.” Steven goes, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll just sleep in.” So I leave the hotel at, like, five thirty in the morning and it’s about maybe eight and I make my first birdie of the day. It’s hole nine, and this marshal pulls up and says, “Is there a Goldstein in the group? You need to call your office.” I call the office and Niv picks up. He goes, “Where the fuck are you?” I go, “I’m golfing, why?” “Slash is on his way to jail!” I go, “You’re in LA, go fucking bail him out.” He goes, “He’s in fucking Arizona at your hotel, you dumbass.”’
Unbeknownst to Doug Goldstein, Steven, unable to bear the gnawing pangs of heroin withdrawal any longer, had phoned Slash in LA the night before, begging him to ‘bring some junk and come out and we’ll party here’. Panicked, Goldstein jumped into his golf cart and drove as fast as he could back to the hotel. When he pulled up, he says, ‘There’s maybe ten cop cars, an ambulance, a fire engine and about 200 people all in a circle.’
Wading his way through the crowd, he saw Slash, ‘standing there stark naked and bloody. I’m like, oh no, this ain’t good! Slash goes, “Dougie, I was in the shower, right? I looked through the keyhole and these guys were shooting guns at me. But they don’t shoot bullets. They’re shooting arrows! The arrows are going, like, ping bang ping!”
‘I was like, oh my god … One of the cops who is standing next to him goes, “Hey, Slash, give him a physical description.” Slash goes, “Okay, so, the tall one, he was, like, four feet eight inches and he’s wearing an AC/DC T-shirt.” He saw that through the keyhole of course, right? I look at Earl Gabbidon, Axl’s bodyguard, and go, “Do me a favour, here’s my room key, go get the briefcase.” I used to carry a briefcase with $50,000 everywhere I went for situations just like this. I say to Slash, “Tell me what happened?” He goes, “So they’re shooting arrows at me so I said fuck it, I’m gonna kick their asses! So I broke through the shower door. Broke through the bathroom door then started counting the arrows in my head. Then these fuckers outran me but then some bitch comes up to me speaking in tongues so I fucking knocked her out and threw her on the ground …”
‘It was the maid. She was speaking Spanish! Now I’ve got my briefcase in my hand and I see this guy in the crowd and his shirt is bloody. I pull him to one side and I go, “Let me ask you a question. What did you see?” “I saw everything.” “You saw him hit the maid?” “Yep, I saw him hit the maid.” I said, “You know, I can’t help noticing you’re wearing a monogrammed shirt.” He’s like, “No, no, no. My wife bought it at, like, a bargain place.” I said, “Look, I know what I’m doing. Don’t tell me. That’s a fucking monogrammed shirt. That’s a $2000 shirt, right?” So I give the guy two grand. “So tell me again, what did you see?” He goes, “Oh, ho, ho, ho! Got it! I didn’t see shit …”
‘So he walks away. Then I go, “Where’s the manager on duty?” This guy goes, “That’s me.” I go, “Have you looked at the room yet?” He goes, “Yeah.” I go, “Any idea of the damage yet?” He goes, “Yeah. The room’s gonna be out of commission for two days while we repair it. It’s not that bad a damage really. You’re probably looking at, I don’t know, two grand.” I go, “I’m sorry, did you say five grand?” So I give him five grand for that.
‘I ask him, “How about the maid? What does she make?” He says, “Maybe $600 a month.” I go, “So three grand will cover her?” He goes, “Absolutely!” Meanwhile, the cops are cracking up, cos they totally see what I am doing. I look at the cops, I go, “Hey, guys. I got a feeling if you look around the crowd you’re not gonna find anybody who wants to testify against this guy any more.” They go, “You know what, get him out of here right now or we’ll be back to do it for you.”
‘And the whole time, Steven is standing on his balcony, yelling: “Stupid junky! Stupid junky!” I’m like, “Get the fuck back in your room and shut up!”’
When Slash arrived back in LA, though, the nightmare continued. Duff, his mother, Ola, and brother, Ash, were waiting for him to stage an intervention. Too exhausted and embarrassed to argue, Slash caved in and promised them he’d go to rehab. This time Doug Goldstein flew him to a well-known professional rehab joint in Sierra Tucson. ‘After three or four days,’ Slash said, ‘I decided, “Fuck this …” He called his heroin dealer from the airport and flew home to LA.’
Niven and Goldstein had a little more success when a few weeks later they managed to persuade Steven to take the trip to Tucson. Truly, this was last-resort time. The golf resort ‘cure’ had been the first time Steven had even considered any kind of managed withdrawal. They had tried the same trick of essentially kidnapping him and flying to Hawaii that had nearly worked with Slash, but as soon as he and Goldstein were in their seats in first class Steven had begun to scream blue murder. ‘He knew what was coming,’ Niven recalls. ‘The aircrew were not happy. “It’s gonna crash, its gonna go down!” he yelled. “The fucking plane’s gonna crash!”’ He tried to climb out of, and over the back of, his seat as Doug struggled to fasten his seatbelt. ‘The fucking plane’s gonna go down in flames, let me off it!’ he howled.
Steven and Dougie were hastily shown off the plane. Now, though, in the wake of Axl’s ultimatum onstage at the Coliseum, he simply had no choice. Not if he wanted to keep safe his gig in Guns N’ Roses. ‘Doug and I came to know the rehab centres of America as well as we knew the concert venues,’ Niven sighs.
Steven would stick it out in Tucson for longer than Slash. But only just. The detox didn’t take and within weeks he was back where he’d started. Doug Goldstein got some insight into why that might be, he says now, when he took it upon himself to visit Steven’s parents. ‘I drive out to the valley and they’re showing me pictures of Steven … big-time Jewish family sitting around eating potato knish.’ Goldstein told them where their son Steven was, that he needed their help. He was trying to get their son sober. Could they tell him what had happened in his life to make him that way?
‘The dad starts talking. “Hey, Doug, Deanna, she’s throwing a Tupperware party, so Steven’s out with his friends, he’s getting drunk, he’s twelve years old, and he comes home and in front of all the ladies he starts throwing up.” He goes, “You’re from a good Jewish family, what does a good Jewish family do? Throw him out of the fucking house!” I go, “Really? I know a lot of Jewish families. I’m from a good Jewish family and my family would have hugged me and found out what the hell’s wrong. You threw him out of the house at age 12? Where the fuck did he live?” “Well, we don’t really know that.”
‘Well, I do. He lived on the roof of his school for three months until his grandmother found him and brought him in. So when people go, “Stevie’s so cute, he’s like a little kid”, well, no shit. Here’s maturation pretty much stopped at age twelve. Pretty sad, man … Very sad.’
He continues his theme. ‘That kid would stick around until four a.m. to sign all the autographs. He was the face of GN’R to the fans, at the local venues, he was a sweetheart – without the drugs.’ The problem was, where the others would find ways to function – or at least, maintain – on dope, Steven was like a downhill racer without brakes. ‘I’m telling you: as tough as Slash was, Steven was harder. Whenever it was kind of go-time, Slash kind of – I don’t know how to put it, he just kind of knew when to back off the partying. Steven kind of never really got that.’
Or, at least, not until it was too late. ‘I tried every different thing I could think of to try and get Steven sober and it just … at the end of the day, if somebody’s not willing to go through those steps then it’s just not gonna happen.’
Despite the up-and-down nature of their four shows with the Stones, Mick Jagger had been alive to the impact the headlines generated by Axl’s onstage outbursts had on ticket sales. All four Coliseum shows had been massive sell-outs. For a band on its first major US tour for nearly a decade this was good news indeed. When the Stones then announced a special show they would be doing in Atlantic City, on 19 December, that would also be available to see on TV via a pay-per-view deal similar to that more usually arranged around heavyweight boxing championship world titles, Jagger had no doubt over who would add the icing to that delicious pay-per-view cake: W. Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin – the Jagger and Richards, no less, of Guns N’ Roses. ‘He ignored Slash,’ says Alan Niven, ‘as he would decades later in Los Angeles when inviting guests onto the stage at the Staples Center during their latest “Last Time” tour.’
The idea was simply that Axl and Izzy would come up onstage and join the Stones for one number. When the Stones’ office sent word that Axl and Izzy could pick which Stones song they would like to help sing and play, neither of them knew what to say. ‘I dunno,’ Axl told Niven. ‘There’s so many. How do you pick one? Ask Iz.’
‘Tell the Stones what to play? I dunno,’ echoed Izzy when Niven called for his input. Niven decided to take the matter in hand and choose for them. ‘I called Jagger’s office and told them they would just love to perform “Salt of the Earth”. Apparently that threw everyone into a bit of a tizzy since the band had never played the song live before. But I could not think of a more relevant statement, or a better treat for Stones fans, of which I was still one.’
Staged six days before Christmas, the final show of three at the East Coast gambling capital, this was to be the glorious finale to the Stones’ Steel Wheels tour. As well as Axl and Izzy, Eric Clapton would also be putting in an onstage appearance (on ‘Little Red Rooster’), as would John Lee Hooker (on ‘Boogie Chillen’). With the 16,000 tickets for the show selling for anything between $40 and $240 a go, and the pay-per-view slots going for a ‘suggested retail’ price of $24.95, this was another giant payday for the Stones for which nothing must be allowed to go wrong. That was the plan anyway.
But as Alan Niven would chokingly recall: ‘In Atlantic City, Axl was late to arrive to the hotel, late for rehearsal and late for the stage. He ordered me to go tell the Stones he would be present for rehearsal an hour or so later than scheduled. When he told me to do that, it was literally, “You’re fucking joking, Axl. Get in the shower. I’ll wait in my room.”’ Knowing that would hardly work, ‘I prevailed on Izzy to go to the rehearsal and buy Axl a few minutes while he composed himself.’
But when a forlorn Izzy sidled up onstage at the sound check, Keith Richards let him have it. ‘Where’s your fucking singer?’ Izzy mumbled an apology. Then did his best to fill in for as long as he could as the band worked their way fitfully through the unfamiliar ‘Salt of the Earth’. When Axl showed up an hour later, Keith confronted him. According to Izzy, says Niven, ‘Axl made some excuse about partying, missing a flight, whatever, Ax always had some lame excuse.’
‘Well, I slept in a fucking chandelier last night,’ growled Keith, ‘but I’m on time.’
But Alan Niven wasn’t around to see that. Axl had been so furious with his refusal to tell Jagger and Richards they would have to wait for him, he had effectively banned his own manager from the show. Niven, equally furious, was happy to leave. He says that ‘a very embarrassed Brian Ahern came to the room and told me, “I hate to tell you this, but Axl says he’s not going to go to rehearsal unless you’re out of the building.” I went, “Fine.” I wrote a little note to Axl telling him he was behaving really badly. He had good people who cared about and loved him. Then I went home and did what everybody else was gonna do and watched it in the comfort of my own home on pay-per-view.’
Yet when he did, he says now, he couldn’t help but note how, as he put it, ‘Axl’s passion and conviction would utterly outshine Jagger’s languid indifference when they performed “Salt of the Earth”. Urchin Axl truly connected to the sentiment of the song. Back in the day, when the little fucker was “on”, fired up by contention, conflict or competition, he was simply brilliant.’ On a wall in his office these days he has a framed photograph of Izzy Stradlin, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood onstage together in Atlantic City. ‘It’s like watching three gems being put on the same cushion in front of you.’
Axl would also share happier memories with me of Atlantic City. Whatever tensions his late arrival had aroused with Keith Richards, he said, Mick Jagger had been quick to be emollient. He related how Jagger and Eric Clapton had ‘cornered’ him about David Bowie at the sound check. ‘I’m sitting on this amp and all of a sudden they’re both right there in front of me. And Jagger doesn’t really talk a lot, right? He’s just real serious about everything. And all of a sudden he was like’, doing a cockney accent, ‘“So you got in a fight with Bowie, didja?” I told him the story real quick and him and Clapton are going off about Bowie in their own little world, talking about things from years of knowing each other. They were saying that when Bowie gets drunk he turns into the Devil from Bromley! I mean, I’m not even in this conversation. I’m just sitting there and every now and then they would ask me a couple more facts about what happened, and then they would go back to bitching like crazy about Bowie. I was just sitting there going, wow …’
Back in LA at the start of 1990, disorientated by the fame and the money and the madness inherent in having everything they’d dreamed of come true, they drifted. Slash and Duff showed up at the American Music Awards, drunk and coked, slurring and swearing … Axl and Slash jammed with Aerosmith at the Forum … Slash and Duff guested on an Iggy Pop record … Duff got divorced from Mandy, who he’d had a big fight with on New Year’s Eve … then, in April, the band played Farm Aid in Indianapolis, a televised gig that showed Steven in his worst possible light … Axl got married to Erin Everly in Las Vegas, after threatening to shoot himself if she refused … Slash jammed with The Black Crowes in New York … the days and nights rolled by, end on end. Every time I spoke to Slash – or Axl, or Duff, all of whom now came to me with different stories, crazy concerns, out-there insights and bad craziness – it was the same but different. Something new that had happened that made the rest of us feel old. You feared for them but at the same time you wondered at them, too. Wasn’t this what the real rock’n’roll lifestyle was supposed to be about?
When the LA Times ran a story about Axl winning ‘a temporary restraining order against the West Hollywood neighbor he is accused of hitting over the head with a wine bottle’, it made headlines in every music magazine, radio station and music TV channel in the world. Yet nobody who’d ever had the remotest dealings with Guns N’ Roses was the least bit surprised by the story. Gabriella Kantor, who lived along the corridor from Axl at Shoreham Towers, had called the cops, claiming Axl had hit her with a bottle after ‘an altercation’. Though no charges were filed, the band’s lawyers had got a judge to place the restraining order on Kantor, whom they described as ‘a potentially dangerous rock ’n’ roll groupie … upset that she is not a part of [Rose’s] social and or professional life’.
In order to try to keep a cap on things, Doug Goldstein was now paying $1000 a week to another occupant ‘just to tell me the goings on. He was a Middle Eastern guy, cute as hell. He calls me one day, absolutely out of his mind. “He’s fucking crazy! I don’t want your money! Fuck you!” I go, “Slow down, what happened?” “He crazy!” I go, “Yeah, I know. But what happened?”
‘What happened was Axl had taken Erin’s Halliburton suitcase and thrown it off the twenty-fourth floor and almost hit this guy.’ He laughs. ‘He’d have killed him if that had hit him. Are you kidding? No question, but very funny, actually. Another time, I got a phone call saying you better come up here. Axl shoved a piano out of the front window of his apartment. I mean, this shit, I wasn’t trained in this! Like, I’m calling crane companies, right? To come get this piano out of the fucking weeds down below the home. It was brilliant, man! I’ll tell ya, every day it was a different challenge. And it was okay because it was kind of fun. It was like, okay, never dealt with this one before.’
Axl moved out of his apartment for a while, to stay at the Sunset Marquis, where another scuffle took place in the dining room one morning – but which the hotel management, famed for their tolerance of the ‘unconventional’ ways of famous entertainers, were happy not to make a big deal of. This was Axl Rose, after all, now the most famous rock star in the world. Who would be dumb enough to fuck up that relationship?
Then four months after the shows at the Coliseum, the spat between Izzy, Axl and Vince Neil at the MTV Awards began to send out its shockwaves. None of us could have guessed then how far they would spread. It was January 1990. I was staying at the home of the band’s PR, Arlett Vereeke. Late one night the phone went. It was Axl, calling to rant about something or other he’d just read in Kerrang! Arlett told Axl I was there, and she handed over the phone to see if I could help. He told me to come to the Shoreham Towers apartment right away, where he would make some sort of ‘statement’. He ‘was in the mood to talk’. Arlett drove me over, and sat in on the whole interview, which made it more disconcerting when Axl tried to claim later I had made parts of it up – and Arlett dutifully backed him. But then, having once been a rock PR myself, I knew that that’s what good PRs do: back their clients to the hilt, right or wrong. It’s not the writer who’s paying their bills.
Axl answered the door and immediately turned his back on us, stomping down the corridor and launching straight into the ‘statement’. Standing there in crumpled T-shirt and jeans, his big red beard covering most of his face, he began raging about Vince Neil, who had been ‘saying some shit’ in Kerrang! – specifically, Neil’s claim to have punched out GN’R guitarist Izzy Stradlin for ‘messing’ with Vince’s wife, Sharise.
What came next was pure Axl Rose circa 1990, part hubris, part passion, part pain, and part ludicrous hyperbole. The whole incident was ‘bullshit’, he ranted. ‘Guns or knives, motherfucker … I don’t care. I just wanna smash his plastic face’ – this last a sarcastic reference to Vince’s then recent, supposedly hush-hush cosmetic surgery.
‘I can’t believe this shit I just read in Kerrang!’ he snarled, holding up a copy of Kerrang! dated 4 November 1989 and yanked open at a page from Jon Hotten’s interview with Mötley Crüe. ‘The interviewer asks Vince Neil about him throwing a punch at Izzy backstage at the MTV awards last year, and Vince replies …’ Reading aloud sarcastically: ‘“I just punched that dick and broke his fucking nose! Anybody who beats up on a woman deserves to get the shit kicked out of them. Izzy hit my wife, a year before I hit him.” Well, that’s just a crock of shit! Izzy never touched that chick! If anybody tried to hit on anything, it was her trying to hit on Izzy when Vince wasn’t around. Only Izzy didn’t buy it. So that’s what that’s all about …’
He continued ranting as I set up the tape recorder. ‘… Vince’s wife has got a bug up her ass about Izzy. Izzy doesn’t know what’s going on, Izzy doesn’t fucking care. But anyway, Izzy’s just walked offstage. He’s momentarily blinded, as always happens when you come offstage, by coming from the stage lights straight into total darkness.’ Which was when he said Vince came out of nowhere and hit Izzy. ‘Tom Petty’s security people jump on him and ask Alan Niven, our manager, who had his arm round Izzy’s shoulders when Vince bopped him, if he wants to press charges. He asks Izzy and Izzy says, “Naw, it was only like being hit by a girl” and they let him go.
‘Meantime … I’m walking way up ahead of everybody else, and the next thing I know Vince Neil comes flying past me like his ass is on fire or something. All I saw was a blur of cheekbones!’ He carried on like this, about how he wanted to ‘see that plastic face of his cave in when I hit him’.
‘Are you serious about this?’ I asked him. He said he was. ‘There’s only one way out for that fucker now and that’s if he apologises in public, to the press, to Kerrang! and its readers, and admits he was lying when he said those things in that interview. Personally, I don’t think he has the balls. But that’s the gauntlet, and I’m throwing it down …’
We sat down in the only two available chairs not smothered in magazines, ashtrays, Coke cans, barf-balls, more ashtrays … Axl sat perched in the balcony window overlooking the pulsing neon ooze of the Hollywood hills below. He lit another cigarette and waited for me to begin.
Axl didn’t really believe Vince Neil would take up that gauntlet and arrange to fight it out with him, surely? Still reluctant to make eye contact, he stared into space as he spoke.
‘I’ve no idea what he will do. I mean, he could wait until I’m drunk in the Troubadour one night and come in because he got a phone call saying I’m there and hit me with a beer bottle. But it’s like, I don’t care. Hit me with a beer bottle, dude. Do whatever you wanna do but I’m gonna take you out … I don’t care what he does. Unless he sniper-shoots me – unless he gets me like that without me knowing it – I’m taking him with me and that’s about all there is to it.’
What if Vince were to apologise?
‘That’d be radical! Personally, I don’t think he has the balls. I don’t think he has the balls to admit he’s been lying out of his ass. That’d be great if he did though, and then I wouldn’t have to be a dick from then on.’
It was so insanely ridiculous, so marvellously over the top I had to stop myself from laughing out loud. The biggest rock star in the world was offering a private audience in his own home and threatening to fight one of the other biggest rock stars in the city. Yet when the interview was published three months later, things became a whole lot less amusing.
The first hint of trouble I had was when Arlett tried to obtain the interview tape by telling me the band wanted to run it on ‘a special GN’R phone-line’. I asked for the number of this ‘special phone-line’. That’s when the mumbling and back-pedalling began. She said she’d get back to me. She did, a few days later. This time, though, the approach was more direct. Axl would ‘really like’ a copy of the tape, because – well, how could she put this? – ‘He doesn’t think he really speaks that way.’ What? ‘You know, that he would … say … those things.’ I still didn’t quite get it. ‘Axl doesn’t believe he said those things. Huh? What does he think happened then – I made them up?’
Silence.
‘But you were there …’
‘Yes,’ she said, hesitantly.
‘I even checked with him first,’ I said, remembering how I had read some of the most inflammatory quotes back to Axl over the phone – Arlett’s phone – a few weeks later, in order to give Axl the chance to retract or reword them. And how he had told me: ‘I stand by every fucking word, man …’
‘Yes,’ she said again, ‘I know. But if you could just send him the tape …’
I refused. Not because I felt I had anything to hide. I had been writing about Guns N’ Roses for three years. Of all the bands I had built long-term relationships with in those days – Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, to name a few – I had always felt I enjoyed a particularly close bond with Guns N’ Roses. There had been several occasions when I had deliberately not printed certain stories, in order to underline the trust we shared. Now this. What was Axl thinking? I felt insulted, let down and very angry. I decided to wait for the whole thing to blow over. Axl was always in a shit fit about something. Tomorrow it would be somebody else’s turn.
What I didn’t know then, though, was that Vince Neil had read the interview, and contacted Axl through various intermediaries to let him know he’d be only too willing to settle their score whenever and wherever Axl wanted. That was no surprise. Vince was a tough Mexican kid who’d grown up in a rough part of LA and was more than able to look after himself. As he related in Mötley Crüe’s 2001 autobiography, The Dirt: ‘The only thing that would have given me more pleasure than a number one record was breaking Axl Rose’s nose … I wanted to beat the shit out of that little punk and shut him up for good. But I never heard from him: not that day, not that month, not that year, not that century. But the offer still stands.’
Doug Goldstein tells me now that the fight offer had been so serious, the boxing promoter Don King had got wind of it and offered to stage it anywhere the pair wanted. His answer, rather than ‘guns or knives motherfucker’, was to say that he hadn’t said it at all. We wouldn’t meet again for another year, at which point the situation would worsen further.
Meanwhile, for all of Guns N’ Roses, their lives would continue to shift at bewildering speed, the madness barely easing. And as the months shot by like the lights of a speeding train, the one thing nobody seemed willing – or able – to talk about seriously was when – and if – there would be a new Guns N’ Roses album.
‘It was so splintered and such a struggle but I remember we finally got together after just a major rollercoaster ride of ups and downs,’ Slash recalled years later. ‘It was at my house on Walnut Drive in the Laurel Canyon hills. We compiled thirty fucking songs, more than thirty songs, in one evening. That was the one time in all of it that I remember that the band felt like itself. Just the guys like I was always used to – Izzy, Duff and Axl. We managed to put a focus on thirty-six songs. That was the only group writing session we had where we were all together in one room.’
Slash had offered up another long song, called ‘Coma’, which he had written ‘while I was completely stoned’. Izzy, the cool-as-fuck riff-king, had a slate of them: ‘Pretty Tied Up’, ‘Double Talkin’ Jive’, ‘You ain’t the First’, ‘14 Years’. Duff brought along ‘So Fine’ and ‘Dust n’ Bones’. Plus another Sid Vicious pastiche he had first sung for me in the kitchen called ‘Why Do You Look at Me When You Hate Me?’
And Axl had more, too: songs on which he’d collaborated with his most trusted friends, Del James and West Arkeen. West already had a co-credit on ‘It’s So Easy’, of course, from the Appetite days, but would now also add his name to the new songs ‘Bad Obsession’, ‘Yesterdays’ and ‘The Garden’. James shared credits on the latter two as well. At the time it suited Slash’s purpose. ‘West and Axl and Del and Duff, that was more what that was like,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mind. As long as the song was good and I could do something with it. I remember “It’s So Easy” being one of those songs that when I first heard it in its original form I was like, whatever, but then I got to it and changed it to what it sounds more like now. I remember “The Garden” being really good. But, no, I didn’t mind too much. I was usually too preoccupied doing whatever debauched shit I was doing. If everybody was busy doing that, nobody was looking over my shoulder while I was doing what I was doing.’
Looking back now, though, Slash acknowledged that the evening on Walnut Drive was, in retrospect, the end of something, one of the last times they were all together. ‘That was a very poignant moment,’ he said. ‘And the next thing you know we were looking for drummers …’