by Lonn Friend
“Uh, yeah, buddy,” I said. “You wanna come over? It’s kinda winding down, but there’s plenty of food left and my buds are still here.”
“Yeah,” he fired back. “I’m with Axl, Sebastian [Bach, from Skid Row], and Ian [Astbury, from the Cult] and their gals.”
For a moment, I stared blankly out the back window at our suburban patio, sparsely populated with a handful of friends whose professions ranged from advertising account executive to salesgirl at Tiffany’s. “You’re bringing Axl, Bas, and Ian … here? To my house? Now?” I asked, feeling equal parts fear and elation.
“Yep,” he said. “Is that cool?”
“Come on down, dude! … Joyce!” I shouted through the back door of our 1,200-square-foot abode. “We’ve got rockers on the way. Someone needs to make a run for more beer! A lot more!”
The editor’s backyard birthday shifted into high gear when the rockers entered the Friend-family domain. Passing through our living room to the back door off the kitchen, the parade sauntered down the redwood steps of our back deck and into the arms of disbelief. My guests looked as if they’d just been transported to Munchkin land and the Lollipop Guild midgets were in the house. Behold the parade: Axl, Erin Everly (daughter of ‘60s pop icon Don Everly, and Axl’s girlfriend at the time), Sebastian, Maria (Sebastian’s bride), Ian, Ian’s dark princess—and taxi driver to the stars, Del James.
After some modest drinking and conversation, the party warmed up considerably. The trio of rock notables—now swilling brews on my back porch—had combined sales by this time in 1990 somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 million units worldwide. Sebastian Bach had the sandpaper screech, bad-kid charisma, and an imposing six-foot-six-inch stature. He idolized Axl, walked in his shadow, and didn’t hesitate to cop a move here or there while retaining a stunning individuality that fueled the multiplatinum success of Skid Row’s resounding self-titled debut.
Ian Astbury was the troupe’s rock ‘n’ roll shaman. As the charismatic lead singer of the Cult, Ian was the one who green-lighted GN’R for the opening slot on their first arena tour. Axl and Sebastian held the British crooner in deep respect for being not just a magnetic stage veteran but also the composer of modern rock songs that bridged the gulf in the late ‘80s between metal and alternative.
At around 10 P.M., the energy on the property shifted. That’s when Axl pulled me aside. “I’ve got some rough mixes of the new album,” he whispered softly. “You wanna hear ‘em?” The band had been in the studio for months carving out the follow-up to one of the greatest debut efforts in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. Del had been keeping the magazine informed of the progress of the Use Your Illusion project, and I spoke regularly to Slash, who’d told me that they had tracked more than thirty-five songs for what looked like an unprecedented double-CD release: two entirely separate titles, hitting the market on the same day.
There were few bands in rock with the commercial authority to undertake such a campaign, and Guns N’ Roses was one of them. “Uh, are you kidding?” I asked.
“I’ll pull my car onto your carport and we’ll listen on the stereo.”
A few moments later, Axl Rose was standing six inches from my left ear, singing me the lyrics to “November Rain” as the instrumental tracks blared out of his car speakers. How far the song had come in the year since Del and I first heard the exquisite melody in that Chicago rehearsal room.
But the highlight of the evening came when Axl and Sebastian followed me into the kitchen to use the phone and refresh their drinks. Out of nowhere, the duo busted into a resounding rendition of the timeless spiritual hymn “Amazing Grace.” It was better than any “Happy Birthday” (except maybe the one Steven Tyler sang to me backstage in Phoenix on the Get a Grip tour, summer ‘93).
GN’R hit the road in May of ‘91 with a cache full of songs but no official product in stores. It didn’t matter. This was the band that never followed rules. They would jam the tracks from their upcoming masterwork live, for the fans, and they sold out every show regardless of there being no new record to promote. Use Your Illusion I and II were released simultaneously in the States on September 17, 1991, months after the original release date.
Bob Clearmountain—the legendary studio magician who’d tweaked the knobs for the Stones and Springsteen—had mixed the original master, but Axl and Slash hated it, thought it was too slick. They brought in Sex Pistols mixer Bill Price to retool (dirty up) the entire double-sized opus. Having moved several million units in a few short weeks, the band (especially Axl) was feeling pumped. He even accepted a Thanksgiving pitch to break radio silence and do the unthinkable—a live on-air interview—and I would be along for the ride.
Rockline was the venerable weekly Q&A radio mainstay hosted by seasoned L.A. DJ Bob Coburn. “B. C.” had a classic FM voice and a deep knowledge of contemporary music and, like me, preferred the nonconfrontational route to conversation.
It was long established that Axl was not keen on doing press. But the band was so hot that he was compelled to speak up. Several songs from Illusion—namely, “Don’t Cry,” “Civil War,” and “Live and Let Die”—were saturating the airwaves. Add to that the approaching holiday season, the time of year when record sales traditionally go through the roof, and you see why he had to do the interview. The GN’R faithful needed reassurance that Axl Rose was a living, breathing sentient being. He was the biggest rock star in the world, but you could count on one hand how many times his voice had been heard outside of a concert.
Axl’s anxiety over the Rockline appearance was one of the reasons he asked me to coproduce the event, which amounted to me just being there, a friend and trusted journalist in the room. The night before the broadcast, I drove out to his Malibu home. I thought spending a few hours just talking would ease his mind, even get him excited for the experience. He greeted me at the door graciously, showed me around his glamorous pad, and poured me a glass of white wine. Axl was not the drinker in the band. Everyone else handled that task quite well. Then about an hour after I arrived, the phone rang. It was a fellow musician in crisis.
On the other end of the line was Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro, having some sort of a narcotic-related meltdown. He was reaching out to Axl for help. I grabbed what bits and pieces of information I could by eavesdropping while Axl counseled his friend. If he didn’t want me to hear the conversation, he would have left the room. To this day, I’m not sure whether Dave was high during the call, but it was obvious that Axl cared about him.
Ninety minutes or so later, the conversation ended. Axl apologized for the distraction but none was required. I was enamored by his compassion. We chatted until after midnight. I told him that Coburn was a cool guy and not to worry. He’d take the high road and ask questions mostly about the music.
Axl’s new girlfriend, supermodel Stephanie Seymour, was driving him to the L.A. Studios on Cahuenga Boulevard near Universal City. I’d been there more than an hour, chatting with B. C, producer Mark Felsot, and Global Satellite president Howie Gilman. They were understandably anxious when, with ten minutes to air, there was no sign of the rocker and his sexy chauffeur. “It’s Axl. He’ll be here. Don’t worry,” I said. He walked into the Rockline booth about fifteen seconds before air-time, delayed by a gaggle of autograph-seeking fans in front of the building.
The interview went off without a hitch. B. C. asked about the songs on Use Your Illusion, the recent death of his hero Freddie Mercury, and his relationship with Slash and the band. There was no drama. Fans called in and expressed their love for the often-misunderstood artist. That’s when I realized how much Axl was enjoying himself. By shunning the press, he’d lost touch with the people most responsible for his rock ‘n’ roll ascension. Every artist, no matter how eccentric, needs to feel that connection, even if it’s only once in a blue Hollywood moon.
A couple months later, the window of opportunity opened for me to gather some on-the-record quotes from Axl for the magazine when I made a cross-cou
ntry winter road trip to see and feel the GN’R beast roar in President George H. W. Bush’s backyard. We were sitting on a dressing-room sofa in Washington, D.C., backstage at the Capital Centre. The compost of that conversation appeared in my March 1992 RIP feature, “Guns N’ Roses: From the Inside.”
I’ve had a mutated form of polio, a mutated form of rubella, the swine flu, scarlet fever, and strep throat in my heart. It’s mostly respiratory stuff. Air conditioners in hotels circulate the same air, and on the plane everyone’s breathing the same air. So if anyone’s got anything, my tonsils grab it. I’m chronic like that. That’s one of the reasons I’ve never liked touring. I also found out it is supposedly some kind of mental thing having to do with me punishing myself for expressing myself. For twenty years of my life I was beaten by my parents for expressing myself, so part of me believes I should be punished for that expression. I do this by lowering my own resistance. Turn that around, and there you have it—self-punishment. Other than that, I’m pretty healthy.
That was no excuse for those who’ve been bitten by his tardiness or angst-inspired verbal tirades. One night Axl called me at home because he was upset about something he’d read in Kerrang! According to Axl, the journalist completely missed the boat in reviewing the band’s performance at Rock in Rio. “We were on the second night,” Axl told me. “Why didn’t he see that?” Our conversation rambled on about the press, and I was forced to ask Axl why a sentence in a British metal rag should matter to the lead singer of the biggest rock band in the world. “I just care,” he answered with conviction. “I don’t know why. I just do.”
One fateful night in Montreal, Axl may have cared too much, or perhaps not enough. It was the megaband coheadlining bill of the ages: Metallica and Guns N’ Roses, August 8, 1992. In a freak accident, Metallica front man James Hetfield caught fire by mistakenly walking into a pyro blast. The band was forced in that tragic instant to cancel their set as their singer was whisked away to a local hospital with severe burns over 40 percent of his body. But instead of carrying the torch, so to speak, Axl got pissed off nine songs into GN’R’s set, complaining of monitor trouble, and stomped offstage, taking his band with him and igniting a torrent of violence that poured from the stadium and out into the streets.
This event signaled the acceleration of Axl’s onstage dysfunctional behavior that had commenced with the infamous riot in St. Louis the previous year on July 2, 1991, at the Riverport Amphitheater in the Missouri suburb of Maryland Heights. Having just throttled into “Rocket Queen,” Axl spotted a biker in the pit rolling videotape. He abruptly stopped the song and asked security to take care of the bootlegger. When arena officials didn’t move fast enough, the Red Tornado decided to take matters into his own hands, diving onto the burly fan, fists flying, band members gazing on helplessly.
GN’R crew hoisted Axl out of the pit and back onstage, where he grabbed the mike and announced to the less-than-understanding Midwest throng of testosterone-and-whiskey-fueled fanatics that he and his band were done. They’d only played eighty minutes of their two-plus-hour set. That’s when the gates of Hell and all its angels—two-wheeled or otherwise— went berserk. Hundreds of fans on the floor trashed the stage, destroyed Axl’s piano, and looted gear. The Gunners and crew escaped with their lives. In the alphabetical liner-note acknowledgments in Use Your Illusion I, “Lonn and Joyce Friend” comes just before “Fuck you, St. Louis.”
Axl made airing anger in public an art form, often poisoning an otherwise ecstatic performance. And it wasn’t just from the live pulpit that he delivered his indicting sermons. His unprecedented vitriolic tongue-lashing of the press in Use Your Illusion II ‘s “Get in the Ring” is a classic example of his pathological inability to just do his thing and not give a shit who was out there jotting down notes, critiquing his art, his life, his flaws, or his calling. Axl never learned to use his illusion. He let it use him, which contributed to the relatively short lifespan of GN’R.
On June 6, 1992, the mutual trust we had forged resulted in a magical transatlantic tour to the City of Lights, Paris, France, for a pay-per-view concert that netted me two round-trip first-class tickets and a handsome five-figure consulting fee. Axl and manager Doug Goldstein wanted me involved, so they exercised their influence and brought me on board.
With respect to professional compensation, no rocker in my career ever stepped up for me the way that Axl did. A decade later, Jon Bon Jovi would toss me a handful of nickels for a similar consulting exercise. As for the Paris concert itself, well, that proved to be a bootlegger’s wet dream.
On the ride from the hotel, everyone was in great spirits. Slash’s grade school pal from L.A. Lenny Kravitz was hanging with us, doing his own gig in a couple nights. Lenny was already a god in France. It took years to equal stateside the popularity he’d accomplished in Europe with his debut LP. But something went amiss in the hours between our arrival at the venue and the time GN’R finally took the stage, involving Stephanie Seymour and her ex-boyfriend, movie star Warren Beatty. Apparently, “Bugsy” had called Paris, looking for his girl who’d run off with the rock star. This was the actual, word-for-word rant Axl laid on the fifty-eight thousand mostly clueless French-speaking fans in attendance, not to mention the hundreds of thousands tuned in on pay-per-view TV and FM stations worldwide:
I’d like to dedicate this next song to a man who likes to play games. To a man who lives his life playing games… premeditated games. A man who is so empty, that’s all he can do is play fucking games. A man who is a parasite. A man who lives his life sucking off other people’s life force and their energy. An old man who likes to live vicariously through young people and suck up all their life ‘cause he has none of his own. I’d like to dedicate this song to a cheap punk named Warren Beatty. A man who has a family and a baby but who spends his time fucking around with other people because he doesn’t know what to do with his own life. A man who uses you and uses the media and uses everybody to fulfill his fucking parasitic needs. Well, listen, home-fuck, if you think Madonna kicked your ass, I’m betting on Annette, you stupid fucking asshole. This song is called “Double-Talkin’ Jive,” motherfucker!
Whenever Axl was pissed, he would fiddle with the spongy head that covered the microphone. Tonight, he mangled the mike throughout the entire diatribe before catapulting into the smoldering song like a man possessed.
Joyce and I were standing at the soundboard. “What was that all about?” she asked me.
“I don’t know,” I laughed nervously. “But it’s a good thing Warren Beatty isn’t here tonight.”
The band then kicked into the cover of McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” from Use Your Illusion I, brought that much closer to home by the anger and judgment of an artist forever slave to the perception that someone was always “out to get” him. My relationship with Axl was intellectual, professional, and distant. I respected him and he knew that. He was a true artist, tormented by demons, driven by the ineffable need to express and channel what was passing through his being. Whether his musical creation was born in Heaven or Hell was irrelevant. It took insight and patience to even attempt a connection with this extraordinary individual. I believe to this day, the only true comrade Axl ever had was Del.
The front man in a rock band usually has tons of drama. Their sheer artistic day-to-day maintenance is astonishing. Del was Axl’s guy, from errand boy to shrink to creative coconspir-ator. How else did he coauthor “The Garden” and “Yesterdays” from Use Your Illusion and live happily for fifteen years on the mechanical royalties from those songs alone? If the real Axl Rose story is ever written, Del will compose it. No one else could.
But Slash, he was a different story. When the band wasn’t touring, we’d spend time together outside the office, go to concerts or local clubs. Slash was the yin to Axl’s yang. He was always in a good mood and never complained about anything except running out of booze or cigarettes. But as affable and approachable as the friendly guitarist was, he too was wrestling
with his own demons. This became clear the night I visited his home in the Hollywood Hills to conduct the interview for the exclusive February 1990 RIP cover story, “Slash: Under the Black Hat,” the feature that led to my coauthoring (with Jeffrey Ressner) a Rolling Stone cover story a year later.
What is significant about the RIP story is what I didn’t reveal in the published text: Slash’s heroin addiction, something he’d freely discuss later in the Stone story. Both photographer Robert John and I knew something was amiss the night we met at Slash’s house for the RIP session. Robert had accompanied me to the guitarist’s Walnut Drive pad to shoot the cover and layout pix. When we got there, Slash was alert and accommodating. He’d ordered some food from a deli down on Sunset Boulevard.
I started rolling tape as we munched, but about a half hour into the session, Slash asked if we could break for a little while. “I’d like to go upstairs and take a shower,” he said.
“Sure, dude. We’ll just hang out in the living room and wait for ya. Take your time.”
And take his time he did. An hour went by and Slash was nowhere to be found. Robert said, “I’m going upstairs to check on him.” About thirty minutes later, Robert returned, reporting that he got some awesome shots of Slash in the shower but that maybe I should come back tomorrow and finish the interview.
“Did he ask me to leave, Robert?” I asked.
“No, man, he’s just, uh, let’s say, not in real good shape right now.” Robert didn’t reveal what was happening, but when Slash finally returned—a full two hours later—it was obvious. He had been shooting heroin and was now extremely stoned.
Robert’s remarkable photo of Slash standing naked under the water spray, cigarette dangling from his lips, eyes sliced shut, black curls gently sliding down his shimmering back, is a microcosmic image of what made RIP the iconoclastic magazine it was. No other metal mag had access or license to capture or publish such blatant invasions of artistic space.
