(A Short History of Unfought Celebrity Boxing Matches, Starring Axl Rose and Vince Neil with Cameos by Scott Stapp, Fred Durst, Kid Rock, Tommy Lee, Kurt Cobain, DMX, and George Zimmerman)
If this book were submitted to the Motion Picture Association of America, and the MPAA read only what you’ve read so far (assuming you’re reading these essays in order), and the MPAA for some reason had been tasked with issuing potentially prohibitive consonants to books about musical rivalries, I’m guessing this book would be rated R. There has been a fair amount of bad language and a few scenes involving sexual situations. There has been virtually no violence, but this would actually make the book seem tawdrier in the MPAA’s eyes, as the MPAA would rather see a person getting his head blown off than that same person getting head.
What this book needs is some real, bruising, dangerously physical altercations. We are talking about human conflict, after all, but thus far the fights have all been purely metaphorical. (You could maybe set aside that Ping-Pong game between Prince and Michael Jackson as an exception.) At some point, all this tension has to be released in the form of visceral action. Humans yearn to tussle, and because we’re only human, we must succumb to this impulse.
“It’s to me one simple rule,” cigar-chewing boxing historian Bert Sugar once said of the sweet science. “Who imposes his will on the other man?”
Damn right.
As an American, I’m naturally obsessed with violence. But being an American also means taking a reflexive (if also somewhat phony) stance against violence. So for the record: Violence is bad. Violence hurts. Violence will ruin your day and stain your clothes. Therefore we must talk about a version of violence without consequence, a violence that is basically imaginary. It is violence that feels real but is not; violence that is in fact another metaphor, only this time dressed in leather and scarves.
Let’s talk about Axl Rose.
Now, I’ll admit that I don’t need much of an excuse to talk about Axl Rose. I’ve already inserted him into other chapters in this book. Axl is to this book what Drake is to R & B hits and major sports teams’ locker rooms. Maybe Axl doesn’t always belong, but I find that he, like Drake, is always a welcome presence.
When it comes to metaphors about fake violence, Axl Rose is the ear-cutting scene from Reservoir Dogs in human form. What you imagine Axl is doing is always worse than what he’s actually done, though either way it’s still pretty gross. Actually, if we’re talking about Erin Everly or Stephanie Seymour, it may well have been just as gross as you imagine.
Both Everly (his first wife) and Seymour (his girlfriend during the Use Your Illusion years) have publicly accused Rose of battery. But Rose was living an “It’s So Easy” lifestyle several years before Appetite for Destruction dropped. In a great John Jeremiah Sullivan essay focused largely on Rose’s childhood in Lafayette, Indiana, there’s a funny-sad anecdote about Rose striking a classmate’s mother over the head with his arm—which happened to be in a splint at the time. Rose’s outburst stemmed from a disagreement concerning the kid riding his bike in front of Axl’s friend’s house and leaving skid marks on the sidewalk. That sort of shit is probably still a capital offense in Indiana.
So, it appears that Rose has acted monstrously toward women from the moment he could swing an injured appendage. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I am going to focus on why Rose seems uninterested in executing his threats to hit those with XY chromosomes.
Axl Rose is commonly perceived to be a tough guy. But Axl Rose is not a tough guy. Axl Rose was once beat up by Tommy Hilfiger.
“It was the most surreal thing, I think, that’s ever happened to me in my life,” Rose later told KROQ, to the agreement of every single person who’s aware that Tommy Hilfiger once beat up Axl Rose. Hilfiger reportedly “smacked” Rose (to use Rose’s word) in 2006 at a New York nightclub because Axl moved a drink belonging to Hilfiger’s girlfriend, and you do not move a drink belonging to Mr. Tommy Hilfiger’s girlfriend in the presence of Mr. Tommy Hilfiger. Hilfiger later said that he hit Rose because he feared that Rose would hit him first. (Hilfiger and Rose later reconciled.)
Hilfiger acted on a perception of potential violence from Rose that wasn’t real, because people always believe Axl Rose to be more violent than he is. For a while that perception worked for him—it was the source of Axl’s power, giving him the upper hand in every encounter. He was like a gangster or a lion that escapes from some crazy guy’s backyard animal menagerie. Axl Rose intimidated people. He made you want to keep your distance. But the downside of being an anticipatory ass kicker eventually caught up with Axl Rose in a big way, long before Tommy Hilfiger handed Axl his ass.
In order to understand why that is, it’s important to revisit “Get in the Ring,” from 1991’s Use Your Illusion II. “Get in the Ring” is not a distinguished song in the Guns N’ Roses canon. It was never released as a single. It has never been performed live by any incarnation of GNR. If you were to poll GNR fans on the band’s worst songs ever, “Get in the Ring” would likely garner more votes than any track from the classic-era records, with the possible exception of “My World.” And yet “Get in the Ring” is one of those GNR songs that even non-GNR fans know—maybe not on the level of “Sweet Child o’ Mine” or “Welcome to the Jungle,” but the sheer ridiculousness of “Get in the Ring” (and the fact that Use Your Illusion II moved seven million units) has pushed the song into the general consciousness as an utterly insane gesture by a transparently deluded and extremely famous man.
“Get in the Ring” is perhaps better known as “that song in which Axl Rose threatens to throttle several journalists for highly questionable and vaguely articulated reasons.” The crimes described by Axl in “Get in the Ring” include “printin’ lies,” “rippin’ off the fuckin’ kids,” and “startin’ controversy,” all of which, in a conventional court of law, might call for a fine or even jail time but never corporal punishment. But Axl went rogue on “Get in the Ring” in more ways than one.
That “Get in the Ring” exists at all can be blamed on substandard early-’90s technology. Had GNR released the Use Your Illusion albums just a few years later, “Get in the Ring” would’ve been turned into a blog post about Axl’s desire to box a cabal of music writers in front of a paying audience. It never would’ve been a song immortalized on an album by the biggest band in the world. Putting it on a multiplatinum record gave “Get in the Ring” a permanence it doesn’t deserve. But “Get in the Ring” is part of the historical record now, which makes it easy to misconstrue Rose’s bluster as fact. If your knowledge of early ’90s GNR derives solely from the band’s records, you might believe that Rose actually beat those people up. But he so did not beat those people up. On the contrary, Axl actively avoided the (metaphorical) boxing ring after the song came out.
If Rose had been serious about boxing his enemies, he would’ve counted “Get in the Ring” among his greatest accomplishments. It was very effective at provoking the people Axl said he hated. One of the journalists Axl Rose called out, Spin publisher Bob Guccione Jr., publicly accepted Rose’s challenge. For a man named Guccione, boxing Axl must have seemed like a publicity stunt made in sleazeball heaven. But Rose never followed through.
Another writer named in “Get in the Ring,” Mick Wall, later wrote an unflattering unauthorized biography of the singer that opens with a detailed account of Axl’s beef with the author from the author’s point of view. Wall published his first unauthorized book about GNR around the time that the Use Your Illusion albums were released, and it was assumed that Wall ended up in “Get in the Ring” for that reason. But in the Rose bio, Wall theorizes that Axl was actually upset about a story Wall wrote for Kerrang! magazine in 1990, in which Rose ranted about wanting to assault Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil in connection with a previous altercation involving Guns N’ Roses guitarist Izzy Stradlin at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards.
Here’s Axl’s money quote from Wall’s story:
I tell ya, he’s gonna get a good ass-whippin’, and I’m the boy to give it to him. It’s like, whenever you wanna do it, man, let’s just do it. I wanna see that plastic face of his cave in when I hit him!…Personally, I don’t think he has the balls. But that’s the gauntlet, and I’m throwing it down. Hey, Vince, whichever way you wanna go, man: guns, knives, or fists, whatever you wanna do, I don’t care.
Unlike GNR’s bloated music videos at the time, which provided more face time for animated dolphins than for Duff McKagan, Axl’s taunt is concise and linear, and the meaning is unambiguous. It is a premeditated call to brawl—guns, knives, fists, Axl doesn’t care. As Wall tells it, Rose even cleared the quote before the piece ran. And yet once the story was published, Rose proceeded to throw Wall under the bus in light of the predictable firestorm the interview caused.
The most damaging fallout from the story (this, again, is Wall’s theory) was that Vince Neil eagerly accepted the invitation to “go” with Rose. Neil even went on MTV and challenged Rose to a charity boxing match. In the Mötley Crüe memoir The Dirt, Neil claims that Rose sent “little messengers to me,” instructing Neil to meet Rose “in the parking lot of Tower Records on Sunset or on the boardwalk of Venice Beach.” Neil says that he always showed up and Rose “chickened out a good half-dozen times.”
The Axl Rose–Vince Neil feud began when Neil punched Stradlin at the VMAs in retaliation for Stradlin allegedly groping Neil’s wife at Riki Rachtman’s legendary Sunset Strip skeez haven, the Cathouse. That Neil punched Stradlin is undisputed. What’s less clear are Axl’s intentions vis-à-vis avenging Izzy. In retrospect, Neil’s account seems the most credible—if he was willing to punch Izzy Stradlin, it’s logical to think that he would also punch Axl if given the chance. He was also “in the right,” as much as anybody in this moron circus could possibly be in the right. He went after a guy who attacked his wife. Neil’s motivation to fight is clearer than it is for Rose, who seems to have been driven primarily by machismo and ego.
At the time, it was widely assumed that Rose would destroy Neil in a fight. People were projecting the qualities of GNR’s music onto Rose as a fighter—he was presumed to have the battle skills of a starved alley cat injected with a potent speedball of crank and Jack Daniel’s, because that’s what he sounds like on Appetite. The media subtly reinforced this presumption of Axl’s superiority in the way they presented the combatants. Neil appeared on MTV News articulating his challenge to Rose directly into the camera, like a C-list wrestler. Rose, however, was allowed to blithely dismiss Neil in an interview with the channel’s avatar of seriousness, Kurt Loder. Vince Neil was unquestionably one of the biggest rock stars of his era, but Axl Rose was treated like a dignitary perched on a higher stratum.
Perhaps I should take a moment to explain the importance of MTV News to those of us who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s. Younger generations might not understand that MTV was once a trusted news source that provided valuable information on famous musicians. Kurt Loder was the Gen-X Walter Cronkite—his coverage of Kurt Cobain’s suicide is my generation’s equivalent of Cronkite’s emotional yet steady hand in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. These days MTV is known for…I actually don’t know what MTV is known for now. I haven’t watched MTV regularly in at least fifteen years. I assume MTV’s programming consists of reality shows in which twenty-one-year-olds flash their junk in exchange for Skrillex tickets, but don’t quote me on that. Back then, MTV was like the CNN of music—or Fox News, if Fox News preferred redheads named Tabitha to blondes. In the pre-Internet era, MTV was where you went to find out about new albums, concert tours, or, in this case, a potentially violent rock-star rivalry.
GNR, no matter the boorish behavior of its front man, was granted a veneer of seriousness by MTV that the network never afforded to Mötley Crüe. When Vince Neil punched out Izzy Stradlin, Izzy was exiting the stage from a duet he and Rose had performed with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on the song “Free Fallin’.” In 1989, GNR was already being integrated into the history of classic rock while Vince Neil fumed in the wings.
Rose’s battle with Neil inevitably was viewed through this lens. Rose didn’t have to fight Neil. Merely by talking about throwing down the gauntlet, Rose had already won. He had imposed his will on the other man.
The last time I challenged a person to a fight, I did not really want to fight. It happened when I was in my midtwenties. I was in a bar with my girlfriend at the time, and a guy walked up to her and made a vulgar comment. I felt obligated to confront him, so that’s what I did. I stood over him at the bar—he was sitting on a bar stool—and made sure my chest grazed his shoulder. I informed the guy that he’d have his own girlfriend if he didn’t say stupid bullshit to women in bars.
The guy kept his eyes locked on his beer. Meanwhile, inside my head, I was praying he wouldn’t call my bluff. This was my favorite bar. I drank at this place all the time. I did not want to look like an idiot by fighting this guy or, worse, risk getting kicked out and banned for life.
Fortunately, the guy did not want to fight, either. Instead he apologized.
By the way, this altercation was over the girlfriend I mentioned in the Clapton vs. Hendrix chapter, the one who later backed out of being my fiancée. We broke up five months into our engagement, and a year after that, we ate chicken strips at a Chili’s by the mall and she told me she was a lesbian and living with our former neighbor. In life, sometimes you’re Vince Neil standing in the wings with a balled-up fist, and other times you’re an unsuspecting Izzy Stradlin walking offstage. So it goes.
We have been conditioned to expect brute force as a punishment against those who do us wrong. Our legal system sanctions it, and when our legal system fails, we look to other institutions to bring the pain in the name of justice. In 2014, a man who specializes in celebrity boxing matches proposed such a bout between George Zimmerman—the Florida security guard who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager named Trayvon Martin—and the rapper DMX. The proposed fight seemed to have a built-in audience: after Zimmerman’s acquittal, millions of Americans were outraged. The promoter claimed that fifteen thousand people volunteered to fight Zimmerman. One of them was rapper the Game, who said he wanted to fight for “the legacy of Trayvon Martin and his family,” but apparently he was insufficiently famous. (Zimmerman allegedly wanted to fight Kanye West.)
DMX, however, appeared to be an ideal adversary. DMX’s popularity peaked in the early aughts with hits like “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem” and “Party Up (Up in Here),” which showcased his perturbed bark lashing out over minimal beats, like a pit bull rudely introducing itself to a poodle. “I am going to beat the living fuck out of him,” DMX promised. “I am breaking every rule in boxing to make sure I fuck him right up.” DMX vowed that once he annihilated Zimmerman, he was going to take his cock out and piss on him, “right in his muthafuckin’ face,” because “Zimmerman is a piece of shit and that’s what he needs to drink.”
Perhaps DMX lacked tact, but his “George Zimmerman should drink DMX’s urine” argument was otherwise sound.
Alas, neither blood nor piss was spilled in the name of justice. Zimmerman didn’t fight DMX or anybody else. No matter how much the public hated George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin, most people recoiled at the idea of Zimmerman fighting the ruffest of the Ruff Ryders on pay-per-view. People registered their outrage with the usual token gestures—Facebook pages protesting the fight were initiated, and online petitions were signed by tens of thousands of protesters. The fight was eventually canceled.
While Americans might have liked the idea of Zimmerman’s face being forcibly converted into ground chuck, they understood that a circuslike boxing match would empower Zimmerman by feeding into his transparent need for attention (and this would diminish Martin’s memory). Not assaulting Zimmerman in the virtual town square, therefore, was the tougher, more apt punishment for his crimes. In lieu of prison, marginalization as an eternal pariah would have to do.
This is basically what happened to Axl Rose after he tried to fight Kurt Cobain backstage at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards.
Before we get to that: I really wanted to write about two other nonstarter rock-star boxing matches in this chapter. But they’re not important enough to warrant much in the way of commentary or analysis. This book is about trying to find meaning in musical rivalries, but these conflicts mean zilch. Nevertheless, I find this stuff to be pretty hilarious. I’m sure my fellow slap-fight enthusiasts will agree. So I’ll just present the facts of these “fights” and let you rubberneck to your heart’s content.
Hardly anyone remembers this, but at the time it was pretty big news on MTV, and in my mind it represents the great lost moment of mutually assured destruction between the two most popular bands from two of the worst rock subgenres, nu-metal and post-grunge.
Here’s what happened: Creed and Limp Bizkit were on the same bill for a radio station–sponsored concert in 2000. Limp Bizkit was scheduled to go on before Creed. After showing up onstage late, Fred Durst called out Scott Stapp: “I want to dedicate this next song to the lead singer of Creed.…That guy is an egomaniac. He’s a fucking punk, and he’s backstage right now acting like fucking Michael Jackson. Fuck that motherfucker, and fuck you, too.”
It’s not clear what exactly prompted this outburst. Was Scott Stapp backstage treating a group of twelve-year-olds to free rides on his Ferris wheel? Did he have a pet monkey who mistakenly soiled Durst’s collection of red caps? Whatever it was, when Creed came out to perform, Stapp fired back: “It takes a lot more guts to say something to somebody than from behind their backs.” Stapp then sent Durst an anger management manual and challenged him to a charity boxing match, a mixed message on a par with naming a record Human Clay. Sadly, they never fought.
I’m torn: I feel like I hate Scott Stapp and Fred Durst equally, but I also sort of love Scott Stapp for wanting to fight Fred Durst, and I sort of love Fred Durst for saying that Stapp was “acting like fucking Michael Jackson.” This fight was too good for this world, I guess.
Technically, this fight really did happen. At the 2007 VMAs, Kid Rock took a swing at Tommy Lee after years of enduring Tommy’s taunts related to Pamela Anderson, whom both men married and divorced. (Rock alleged that Lee sent him “extremely disrespectful” e-mails from Anderson’s BlackBerry.) On his website, Lee referred to Kid Rock as “Kid Pebble” and described his punch as a “bitch slap.” A promoter stepped forward to propose a celebrity boxing match. “You send me two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and I will sit in a room and talk about it,” Rock told MTV. Later, Rock claimed that Lee phoned him to apologize and they were friends again.
If this boxing match had taken place, I’m sure Tommy Lee would’ve won. I guess I just have a natural fear of wiry guys who never wear shirts. I used to live next to a dude like that. One day he showed up at my apartment door and asked if I could drive him to the liquor store. It was the first time we had ever spoken. Apparently he woke up, saw that it was 9:30, assumed it was 9:30 at night (he was wrong), and was alarmed that he was not yet drunk. I told him I was busy. In reality, I suspected this guy was a full-blown alcoholic, and I felt ethically conflicted about enabling him. I also didn’t want him to puke in my car. After that I was his sworn enemy. He would blast George Thorogood CDs at all hours just to spite me. When I moved out, I returned to my apartment to pick up some boxes and discovered a pool of liquid outside my door. I don’t know what the liquid was or who left it, but any scenario is tied for the grossest possible cause. Anyway, I’m sure my wiry shirtless neighbor would’ve boxed me for twenty-five cents if it also included a free ride to the liquor store.
My only problem with Kid Rock vs. Tommy Lee is that it’s a little too meta. It’s like the Snakes on a Plane of rock-star feuds.
As previously mentioned in this book, my favorite awards show of all time is the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards. There is no second place because I am not interested in ranking awards shows, just in professing my adoration of this particular awards show. The ’92 VMAs are just the best. You had Nirvana vs. Guns N’ Roses. You had Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam. You had Dana Carvey as Garth Algar playing drums with U2. You had Bobby Brown performing “Humpin’ Around” and Elton John performing “The One” on the same show. Bryan Adams was invited for some reason. Honestly, I think about the ’92 VMAs all the time.
I love the ’92 VMAs so much that I’m self-conscious about the fact that I never shut up about them. I talk about the ’92 VMAs the way sportswriters blather on about “elite” quarterbacks. I just find them endlessly fascinating. If you and I were in a conversation and you were telling me about your kids, I would find a way to redirect the conversation back to the ’92 VMAs. “Oh, your son isn’t fitting in yet at his new school? That reminds me of how Nirvana’s legendary performance of ‘Lithium’ with the ‘Rape Me’ intro was preceded by Def Leppard playing ‘Let’s Get Rocked.’ Just to be clear, your son is Joe Elliott in this analogy.”
Should I ever meet a Hollywood producer, I have a pitch for a movie about the ’92 VMAs centered on a semifictionalized depiction of Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain’s relationship. (Eddie Vedder and En Vogue would also have significant supporting roles.) I would want David O. Russell to direct, as he’s become Hollywood’s go-to director for period pieces that require silly-looking wigs. The best thing about this pitch is that it could work as either a drama or a comedy, though I suspect the dramatic version would be unintentionally hilarious and the comedy version inadvertently depressing.
Hold on: you don’t know the story about Axl Rose’s run-in with Kurt Cobain at the VMAs? Oh, man, I love telling this story! Here’s the short version: It started when Courtney Love shouted a snarky comment at Axl, asking him to be godfather to her unborn child, Frances Bean. Axl (allegedly) told Kurt, “You shut your bitch up or I’m taking you to the pavement.” Kurt then turned to Courtney and sarcastically barked, “Okay, bitch, shut up.” Then Stephanie Seymour, Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue star and Axl’s girlfriend, turned to Courtney and said, “Are you a model?” To which Courtney replied, “No—are you a brain surgeon?”
This actually happened! It wasn’t made up by a screenwriter attempting to condense the cultural tensions of the early ’90s—specifically, ascendant Seattle grunge vs. rapidly sinking LA hard rock—into a hackneyed confrontation between cultural icons. This encounter really occurred. Rose was an aggressor who secretly didn’t want to fight but felt obligated to put up a front in order to assert his band’s shrinking authority. Cobain was the antagonist who explicitly didn’t want to fight, and he proved to be a superior nonfighter.
My friend Steve Gorman used to play drums in the excellent blues-rock band the Black Crowes, and he was actually at the ’92 VMAs. (The Crowes opened the show with a performance of their unkillable hip shaker, “Remedy.”) Not only did Steve perform at the VMAs, but his trailer was also situated between the Nirvana and GNR trailers. Now, he didn’t see the actual Axl vs. Kurt confrontation, but he was close enough to be annoyed by all the gossip buzzing backstage. The Crowes were known to be occasional brawlers themselves, and Steve says he and his bandmates were “taking odds” that they could kick Nirvana and GNR’s asses.
Now, Steve is a great guy and I’d be his friend even if he hadn’t played at the awards show that I’m most obsessed with. But the fact that he did play at the ’92 VMAs has caused me to exploit our friendship time and again. Any conversation with Steve has the potential to turn into a press conference about an incident he didn’t witness and barely remembers.
Since the Crowes satisfied their VMA commitment within the show’s first ten minutes, Steve went home early. He says, “By the time Nirvana was onstage and [Krist Novoselic] threw the bass on his head, I was already on the way to LAX.” But Steve was around before the show, which is when the nonfight fight took place.
“It was just in the air that there was this war going on,” he told me. “I remember the vibe actually being really serious. Do people actually care that a junkie and a poseur are going to fight? I picture it now like the Anchorman fights.”
Steve came away from the VMAs with the same impression as most people did—that Axl was a joke and Cobain emerged as the clear victor. Then the media tilted its coverage away from Rose and toward the other guy. It was the beginning of Axl’s marginalization, the worst beating of all. Axl was relegated to the Vince Neil role relative to Cobain, who went on MTV News and gleefully shared the story about the backstage encounter. Three years earlier, people assumed that Axl would win in a fight with Neil, and since they never actually fought, Axl scored an imaginary KO. But now it was the grunge era, and the idea of rock stars fighting just seemed stupid, which meant that Cobain looked like a winner for just being a bystander to Rose’s ridiculousness.
Rose vs. Cobain was the bookend for Rose vs. Neil. No punches were thrown in either situation, and no punches were required. In the end, Tommy Hilfiger could whup ’em all.