SLASH: I know David [Geffen] from when I was a little kid. My dad used to work for Geffen & Roberts, a management company, and we lived next door to Joni Mitchell. Any time Guns did anything bad—I wrecked our apartment, I wrecked our van—I’d call David and go, “I’m not such a bad guy and the band really likes this company.”
W. AXL ROSE: I spent my advance on clothes. I took out everybody I’d known for the last few months. Every time we went out, I paid for it because everybody used to do that for me.
RIKI RACHTMAN: Axl was the guy; the key word is was. If there was an opportunity for him to help a friend, he would. Axl and [GN’R manager] Doug Goldstein called MTV to get me the audition for Headbangers Ball. For the audition, Axl came with me to New York. We flew together, he paid for the hotel—the Mayflower Hotel. When I walked into my audition, I walked in with Axl. I was horrible. Is it who you know? Yeah. Did I care? No.
VICKY HAMILTON: The last time I saw Axl was at Hamburger Hamlet and he acted like he didn’t even know me, which was better than him screaming, “I’m gonna kill you, bitch!” He left [that message] on my answering machine. I took the tape out of my machine and said to [friend and journalist] Janiss Garza, “Put this somewhere. If I ever end up missing, take this to the police.” I think she still has it somewhere.
STEVEN ADLER: I love Vicky. We got signed because of her. She got us a record deal, and then Axl and the guys wanted to get rid of her. I was devastated because I loved her and she did everything for us, and they didn’t want her working for us because she was a girl. It was the eighties and some people still thought women weren’t as strong or powerful as men. It was bullshit. I was very disappointed in the band because she deserved to be with us.
VICKY HAMILTON: The day that Axl was screaming he was going to kill me was over something I said to Musician magazine. I believe the quote was, “Axl has two very distinctive personalities; one is a sweet, fun-loving boy, and the other is a demon dog from hell.” But that wasn’t what caused the break. The break happened when Tom Zutaut brought in Alan Niven to manage the band. The reason according to Tom was, “The band needs major management.” Funny how I was major enough to do A&R for a major label [Geffen] but not major enough to manage the band I brought in.
Guns N’ Roses’ trailblazing debut, Appetite for Destruction, was released in July 1987. From its opening salvo, “Welcome to the Jungle,” which describes Axl’s and Izzy’s intro to the surprisingly mean streets of sunny LA, to the prophetic drug anthem “Mr. Brownstone,” the album chronicled the band members’ down-and-dirty LA lives through incendiary yet accessible songcraft.
W. AXL ROSE [1986 interview]: We went through so many producers; we dealt with Spencer Proffer, Bill Price—who did the Pistols—then we found this guy [Mike Clink]. We weren’t so into him at first, but he made some cool comments, so we kept negotiating. We went and did some test tracks. He doesn’t necessarily go, “I think you should change this.” He’ll say, “I don’t know about that one part,” but he’ll fucking cause a scene about it. So we totally analyze something [and] we show him why it works perfectly the way it is, or we come up with a better idea. That’s all they wanted—to make sure we are giving 100 percent. Geffen was really worried, but then they heard Appetite and they think we’re great. Tom [Zutaut] told me if I lost my voice it was okay, I could leave my rough tracks.
DAVE MUSTAINE (ex-Metallica, Megadeth): I remember when Guns N’ Roses just came on the scene and I used to listen to “Mr. Brownstone” every day after I scored heroin. I’d hear it on KNAC and go, “All right, these are my kind of guys—me and Keith Richards and Guns N’ Roses.”
W. AXL ROSE [1986 interview]: They were going to ban our record cover, a picture by the artist Robert Williams. It’s this picture of a big red monster jumping over a fence, in armor. There’s a lot of energy, and there’s like an old man robot, and his brain’s exploding, and he’s smashing little pink robots. I found the painting by accident in a book. . . . It’s called Appetite for Destruction, which is also what we’re going to call the record. The picture is really strange; you can’t quite figure out what’s going on, and that always bothers you. But it captures the band. I submitted it to the band as a joke, and they all went “this is it.” The girl, her shirt’s open, she was abused by somebody; I don’t know if it’s the robot or the monster.
LONN FRIEND (ex–RIP magazine editor, author): We had the RIP magazine Park Plaza Hotel party in 1989. In a day and a half, Guns N’ Roses is opening for the Rolling Stones, four nights at the Coliseum. I say to management, “Why don’t you play the RIP party? You can use it as a warm-up in the club for the Stones shows.” By some miracle, everybody is into it. About two hours before GN’R are supposed to go onstage, the fire department shows up. The place was so full that the fire department starts to kick everybody out from downstairs, including Alice Cooper and Steve Vai. I’m wondering if we’re gonna be shut down. Then the curtain opens, the band hits the stage—bedlam. They must’ve played an hour and forty minutes; it was an epic performance. How prophetic that Axl Rose is onstage a couple days later, threatening to break up the band because his band members won’t get off of drugs. “Dancing with Mr. Brownstone,” in front of eighty thousand people at the Coliseum, which, right there, is a microcosm of why Guns N’ Roses was a completely unscripted, apocalyptic event in the history of rock and roll. You could not, with your finest craftsman, choreograph that chain of events, those personalities, and the collision of those guys.
One of Axl Rose’s big musical and style inspirations was Finnish band Hanoi Rocks. In fact, GN’R’s vanity label, Uzi Suicide, re-released all of Hanoi Rocks’s albums on colored vinyl. But Hanoi’s first visit to LA was tainted with the tragedy that ultimately resulted in the band’s demise. Drummer Nicholas “Razzle” Dingley was accompanying an already wasted Vince Neil on a beer run when Mötley Crüe’s front man lost control of his car and it hit an oncoming vehicle, killing Razzle instantly. It was yet another chilling illustration of the recklessness and vulnerability of many young rock stars.
MICHAEL MONROE (ex–Hanoi Rocks): At the end of 1984, Hanoi started doing our first American tour, and that’s when I broke my ankle in Syracuse, [New York]. We should have cancelled the whole tour and gone home, but there was an executive decision at CBS that we should go to LA to do some press, because there was a big following there. That’s when we first came to LA. That’s the last time I saw [drummer Nicholas] Razzle [Dingley]. The next day he went out partying with Mötley Crüe, and he died.
VINCE NEIL: As the car rounded the curve, I shifted into second gear for the final stretch home. But as I did so, the wheels chirped and the car slid sideways into the water to the left—into oncoming traffic. . . . Something was coming over the hill and heading straight for us. That’s the last thing I saw before I was knocked unconscious. When my head cleared, Razzle was lying in my lap. I lifted his head up and shook it, but he didn’t budge. I kept yelling “Razzle, wake up!” because I assumed he had been knocked out, too. . . . At the police station, the officers kept glaring at me. They kept asking me to tell them what had happened, but I just kept saying, “Where’s Razzle?” The commanding officer left the room. He came back and said coldly, “Your friend is dead.”
NEIL ZLOZOWER: When I got back to LAX from Club Med with Nikki Sixx and Robbin Crosby, my assistant told me about Vince killing Razzle. Nikki probably didn’t know yet. He got to Florida and someone said, “Aren’t you the guy in Mötley Crüe who killed someone this weekend?” He was, like, “What?” He had to fly back to LA; then all the shit hit the fan.
MICHAEL MONROE: After Razzle’s accident, me and [lead guitarist] Andy McCoy stayed in LA for a few days. We hung out with Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee, and it was a devastating time. Then we came back to London. That was my first experience in Hollywood. The first time I saw the Hollywood sign was when I was on my way to see Razzle’s body. It was like a wax doll. For years I had the creeps whenever I saw the sign.
VIN
CE NEIL: It was a very depressing time; everybody hated me. It was one of those experiences you hear about and go, “God I hope I won’t have to go through this.” I was looking at seven years in prison. It took a lot of smart people to help me through it. It was devastating to lose a friend like that. Of course [my bandmates] turned against me. It was an accident, but they thought I deliberately did it to fuck them over and they wanted me out of the band. I had no one to lean on. I was pretty much alone. We went on and did the Theatre of Pain tour. I was put on probation. I tried to be sober during the tour. The guys weren’t supportive at all. It was hard sitting on our airplane and having me pass cocaine and beers to somebody. There was no support there.
DON DOKKEN: I said, “There’s a person who murdered somebody and he never quit drinking.” [Vince Neil] did, what, one day in jail? I saw him about four days before it happened. He bought the Pantera. He sold me his other car—a 240Z. And he lived in Redondo Beach, on the Esplanade, the same street that he killed Razzle on. Mick [Mars] and I were renting a house in Hermosa, about a half mile away. Vince was always driving wasted, and he’d always make it the ten blocks home. Then Razzle died. Over the years, it’s not been any secret, everybody has seen Vince completely wasted out of his mind. It didn’t shake him at all, because he didn’t have to pay any punishment. The system doesn’t work when it comes to celebrities. I was shocked when he didn’t go to jail. I remember Mick saying, “Well, the band is fucked. He just killed somebody.” But [legendary manager] Doc McGhee got him out. Then Doc got busted too [in 1988, for drug smuggling].
Skid Row was one of the more popular latter-day hair bands. The Jersey boys formed in 1987, the year Guns N’ Roses released Appetite. Photographer Marc Weiss had shot front man Sebastian Bach’s former band, Madam X, in Phoenix, Arizona, and was so impressed he invited Bach to his wedding in New Jersey. During the event, the singer stepped onstage and performed a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” with the wedding band. Jon Bon Jovi’s parents were there, and since they knew that their son’s friend Dave “Snake” Sabo was looking for a singer, they asked Bach for his contact information. The singer sent Sabo a tape and was invited to audition for Skid Row. Mentored by Bon Jovi and his manager, Doc McGhee, Skid Row inked a record deal with Atlantic in 1988.
“Youth Gone Wild” was an iconic anthem of the waning hair era, and Bach’s bad-boy antics were as much a part of the band’s presentation as its music. However, his words and actions—even his attire—caused major controversies and engendered several lawsuits. On one occasion, he injured a young female fan with a bottle he threw from the stage. Another time, he was excoriated for wearing a T-shirt onstage that read “AIDS Kills Fags Dead.”
SEBASTIAN BACH (Skid Row): I’ll never forget Kurt Loder coming on MTV News and saying, “If homophobia was a restaurant, Axl Rose would be the proprietor, Ice-T would be the bellman, and Sebastian Bach would be the garbage man in the back.” That was fuckin’ ridiculous.
KURT LODER (MTV News): I might have said something like that, but not in those words. And hey, the guy was onstage wearing a T-shirt that said “AIDS Kills Fags Dead.” I’ve always liked Sebastian, and I liked his band. The T-shirt might have been just bad judgment on his part—a bad joke he should’ve kept to himself. But I don’t think he should’ve been shocked about getting grief for it.
SEBASTIAN BACH: I’m Mr. Homophobe!—the horrible guy that wore “the shirt.” Please! If I’m a homophobe, how could I do four fuckin’ Broadway shows? Whoops. Of course I regret anybody getting hurt.
KURT LODER: I actually saw him perform in a Broadway show several years after that incident—he was good—and I hung out with him a little bit after the show in his dressing room. He was still miffed about the T-shirt story, but as he explained, that was mainly because MTV went on to put a lot of rappers into heavy rotation on the channel who were sometimes pretty serious about their homophobia, although maybe some of them were just judgment-impaired young kids, too.
More than most touring rockers at the time, glam bands were notorious for their destructive extracurricular activities, which were often triggered by alcohol, drugs, and the desire to reenact or one-up the antics of their peers.
BRET MICHAELS: C. C. DeVille and I have been through three well-publicized knock-down, drag-out fistfights. Onstage at the MTV Awards was one of ’em. And in New Orleans I broke his nose. Bobby and me got in a huge fistfight in Atlanta a couple years ago onstage. He took his bass off and winged it at my leg. I ended up with twelve stitches; we were pissed off about songs in the set list.
EDDIE VAN HALEN: We thanked the people at the Madison, Wisconsin, Sheraton Inn on our second album because we damaged the seventh floor to the point where the people on the sixth floor had to check out. We turned on the fire hose and water leaked through the floor. Alex and Dave got my room key and took the table and fucking threw it out the window. I come back to my window. There’s no screen, the table’s gone. I looked down and the fucking table’s laying seven stories down in the snow. I went down to the front desk and said, “I’m Mr. Roth, and I lost my key.” I went into Dave’s room, grabbed his table, and put it in my room. The cops come, and everyone pretends they’re asleep. I had to try so hard not to laugh. It was like two Barney Fifes. They walked into the room and I could hear them talking. “I don’t get this. There’s no screen in the window, but there’s a table. In the other room, there’s no table, but there’s a screen.” They couldn’t figure it out. In the end we had to pay something like $70,000 worth of damage. We had to pay for the people who checked out, plus the damage.
ROB HALFORD: By the mid-eighties I was a full-on drunk and drug addict. I really was losing control, doing the classic smashing TV sets, pulling telephones out of the wall. For some reason, when I was drunk and high on cocaine, I used to have this thing about setting off fire extinguishers, whether they were in elevators, hotel rooms, or corridors. In Japan, when I came home from a night of sake, I was fumbling around trying to find all the fire extinguishers in the hotel to set them off. I had this idea to stick a tube from one of the fire extinguishers under the door of our tour manager at three or four in the morning and set it off. I ran back to my room, laughing hysterically like a complete idiot. But it wasn’t a water fire extinguisher. It was one of those extinguishers that shoots out pink powder. So I set it off and ran. People were yelling and screaming. I surreptitiously opened my hotel room door and looked down the corridor to see all these Japanese hotel employees, and this guy, who was not the tour manager, but a Japanese businessman, covered head to toe in pink powder. I’d put the hose under the wrong door. This poor guy’s room was just destroyed and he had to be moved.
GEORGE LYNCH: Monsters of Rock [1988] could arguably be considered the height of our rock stardom, but at the same time we were all strung out on drugs and the band was breaking up, we all knew it; the end was in sight.
DON DOKKEN: I have footage from Monsters of Rock; you hear George go into a solo, the cameras are scrambling looking for him, but he’s hiding behind his amp, sitting down at a table doing lines of coke. His roadie is holding a straw up to his nose as he’s playing.
SEBASTIAN BACH: When we were on tour with Guns N’ Roses in the early nineties there was a lot of partying going on. Slash said to me, “Hey, Sebastian, man. You can party all fuckin’ night and drink and smoke and snort and then you can still sing the next day. I can’t fuckin’ do that. When I drink I can’t sing.” I said to Slash, “Well dude, maybe you should think about cutting out the partying so you can sing better.” He goes, “Naah. I think I’m gonna try to sing as little as fucking possible.”
ROB HALFORD: The craziest times for Priest happened in Ibiza, where we recorded [at Ibiza Sound Studios] from 1981’s [Point of Entry] through 1984’s [Defenders of the Faith]. There, Ian [Hill] went through twenty rental cars and drove motorcycles in ponds in death-defying feats, and K.K. [Downing] got run over by a taxi and Glenn [Tipton] was on an acid trip so he plunged his hands into s
ome boiling water while he was trying to wipe [K.K.’s] wounds. K.K. was wrapped up in so many bandages he looked like an Egyptian mummy. He couldn’t walk for a week. We had to escape from Nassau because we were literally chased out of town by the locals because I got into a fistfight after we brought some boat rentals back that had damaged propellers. I got into a scuffle with the owner. We had people chasing after us throwing bottles and bricks. In the end, we had to escape from Nassau back to Miami so we could finish Turbo.
EDDIE VAN HALEN: I continued doing blow through 1984. I knew it wasn’t good for me. The last time I did some was with David [Lee Roth]. But it was just a one-off kind of thing. As soon as I did it, I went, “Aw, God, why did I do it?” That creepy feeling. It was not a problem stopping the shit because I used to end up hating it. After that first bump, it’s never the same. It just got worse and worse to the point where your skin starts to crawl and you feel uncomfortable. So that was an easy one to give up. Drinking was a lot harder.
ROB HALFORD: There were nights when I would do so much alcohol and cocaine I literally thought I was on the verge of crossing over. Then you wake up the next day and literally feel like walking death for three or four days. And you don’t learn, do you? People still do that today. History hasn’t taught us any lessons. [What made me stop drinking] was a cataclysmic event. The boy I was dating back then had a cocaine problem. We had one of those bombastic physical attractions and there was a tremendous amount of violence. We used to beat the crap out of each other in drunken and cocaine rages. One day we were fighting, and I left for my own safety and called a cab. As I was getting into the cab, he came up to me and said, “Look, I just want to let you know I love you very much.” When he turned away, I saw that he had a gun. Moments later he put the gun to his head and killed himself.
DAVE MUSTAINE: There is a line down the middle of AA [Alcoholics Anonymous]. There’s people who believe in God and those who don’t. The people who believe in God are the ones who get that spiritual enlightenment. Those who don’t—the ones who joke around and say God stands for “group of drunks”—well, those are the ones who are gonna continue to piss their pants on a curb for the rest of their life.
Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal Page 18
