by Mick Wall
LAST OF THE GIANTS
The True Story of
Guns N’ Roses
MICK WALL
For Axl, you won
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY
ABOUT MICK WALL
LEMMY: THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY
‘Wall’s vision of Lemmy as a rock‘n’roll stalwart who made no concessions is vivid to the last.’
THE GUARDIAN
FOO FIGHTERS: LEARNING TO FLY
‘Wall turns his attention to the Foo Fighters, charting the band’s rise – or, more accurately, Dave Grohl’s journey from punk rock everyman to stadium rock hero. Classic.’
ROLLING STONE
GETCHA ROCKS OFF
‘Wall understood like no one how to really get close to the stars … In the end he even wrote down the truth about Axl Rose only to be called a “motherfucker” in the Guns N’ Roses song ‘Get In The Ring’. This was actually an accolade, as it proved how well he had hit the nail on the head.’
ROLLING STONE
THE DOORS: LOVE BECOMES A FUNERAL PYRE
‘Jim Morrison was the Terrible Angel of the American Sixties, and his latest biographer Mick Wall tells his story with a passionate, wide open drive, like Jim’s famous Shelby GT Ford Mustang with a nitrous oxide hookup. Here James Douglas Morrison emerges more and more as a stand-up, reciting American poet, and an artist whom this author makes you really feel for.’
STEPHEN DAVIS, AUTHOR OF HAMMER OF GODS
LOU REED: THE LIFE
‘Mick Wall has written in a rough and unsentimental style that suits his subject, and he doesn’t gild Reed’s more unpleasant aspects.’
THE TIMES
AC/DC: HELL AIN’T A BAD PLACE TO BE
‘Mick Wall has a habit of delivering gold-standard biographies that pull no punches, and in the wake of his Zeppelin and Metallica books he has pulled off a splendid hat-trick in Hell Ain’t A Bad Place To Be.’
RECORD COLLECTOR
ENTER NIGHT: A BIOGRAPHY OF METALLICA
‘It takes a writer of Mick Wall’s pedigree and calibre … to present the whole wild, wonderful and emotionally draining tale all over again and make it as consistently fascinating and momentous as ENTER NIGHT … the definitive account of heavy metal’s biggest band of all.’
CLASSIC ROCK
WHEN GIANTS WALKED THE EARTH
‘So this is the big one: a fat, juicy biography of the biggest band ever … Mick Wall, the veteran rock journalist, lays it all bare in a book that can only be described as definitive.’
DAILY TELEGRAPH
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Part One: Down on the Street
1Do You Know Where the Fuck You Are?
2Where the Girls are Pretty
3Chicken à la LSD
4Five Skulls and a Death’s Head
5Much Too High
6The Missing Million
7Stupid Junkies
8Flying Like a Space Brain
9This Close to Heaven
Part Two: Real’s a Dream
10This Side of Hell
11Bought Me an Illusion
12Beautiful and Fucked Up
132000 Intentions
14The Project
15Smell the Poppies
16Blame It on the Falun Gong
17In This Lifetime
Notes and Sources
Illustrations
Also by Mick Wall
Copyright
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Heartfelt thanks to all those that helped make this book a reality, either directly or indirectly, over time and space: Linda Wall, Anna Valentine, Robert Kirby, Malcolm Edwards, Alan Niven, Doug Goldstein, Vicky Hamilton, Emma Smith, Kate Walsh, Marleigh Price, Jessica Purdue, Krystyna Kujawinska, Mark Handsley, Craig Fraser, Mark Thomas, Jon Hotten, Dave Everley, Joe Daly, Vanessa Lampert, Steve Morant, Ian Clark, and John Hawkins. Last but hardly least, the five original members of GN’R.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1.Slash (3rd row, 2nd from left) in his 6th grade class photo from Third Street School in 1977 in Los Angeles. (Getty Images)
2.Slash plays with his first band Tidus Sloan during lunchtime at Fairfax High School on 4 June 1982. (Getty Images)
3.Steve Darrow (left), W. Axl Rose and Slash of the rock group ‘Hollywood Rose’ perform at Madame Wong’s on 16 June 1984. (Getty Images)
4.Axl and Slash backstage at the Stardust Ballroom in LA on 28 June 1985. (Getty Images)
5.Duff McKagan, Izzy Stradlin, W. Axl Rose, Steven Adler and Slash pose for an early group shot in a booth at Canter’s Deli in June 1985. (Getty Images)
6.Slash with his English father Tony Hudson backstage at the Roxy Theatre, LA, on 31 August 1985. (Getty Images)
7.Guns N’ Roses onstage at the LA Street Scene on 28 September 1985. (Getty Images)
8.Pam Manning dancing with Axl onstage at the Whisky-A-Go-Go on 5 April 1986. (Getty Images)
9.Izzy in Tokyo, 1988, holding his award for the Music Life ‘Popularity Vote’ and a bottle of saké. (Getty Images)
10.Backstage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium after opening for Ted Nugent on 30 August 1986. Centre: Geffen A&R rep Teresa Ensenat and Tom Zutaut, who signed the band to Geffen. (Getty Images)
11.Axl onstage at the Castle Donington festival, England, 1988. Two fans died during their set. (Getty Images)
12.Axl and Slash onstage at Rock In Rio II on 15 January 1991. (Getty Images)
13.Axl shares the stage with Mick Jagger at the Rolling Stones show in Atlanta, December 1989, performing ‘Salt Of The Earth’ – suggested by GN’R manager Alan Niven, who Axl then banned from the show. (Getty Images)
14.Axl with would-be second wife, Stephanie Seymour. The model would later claim in court that after one fight the singer had grabbed her by the throat and dragged her barefoot through broken glass. (Getty Images)
15.Axl is escorted to a police car after being arrested as he stepped off an Air France Concorde jet from Paris, 12 July 1992, at New York’s Kennedy Airport. He was arrested on charges stemming from the St. Louis riot a year before. (Press Association)
16.Duff McKagan, Slash, Axl and Gilby Clarke onstage at The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium on 20 April 1992. (Getty Images)
17.Axl and Erin Everly. The girl he married and divorced in less than a year – and wrote ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ for. (Getty Images)
18.The infamous MTV Video Music Awards show in New York, in 2002. According to Nick Kent, ‘Rose looked deeply frightened… his one new song, a terrible self-pitying dirge’. (Getty Images)
19.Buckethead, whom Axl had built a chicken coop for him to record in. (Getty Images)
20.No Axl. No Izzy. The rest pose in the press room during the 27th Annual Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Induction Ceremony on 14 April 2012. (Getty Images)
21.Velvet Revolver: Duff and Slash onstage with the late Scott Weiland, LA, 2004. (Getty Images)
22.Slash and Meegan Hodges – the love of his life who he was reconciled with after 25 years and a big part behind his decision to reform with Guns N’ Roses – at The Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association’s 46th Annual Beastly Ball on 11 June 2016. (Getty Images)
23.Axl and Angus Young of AC/DC perform at the Olympic Stadium in London, 4 June 2016. (Press Association)
24.Axl on his ‘throne’. Coachella festival, 16 April 2016. (Getty Images)
25.The man with the plan. Alan Niven, at his mountain home in Prescott, Arizona, 2016. (Fraser Harding)
PART ONE
Down on the Street
‘Give up all hope, all illusion, all desire … I’ve tried and still I desire, I still
desire not to desire and hope to be without hope and have the illusion I can be without illusions. Give up, I say. Give up everything, including the desire to be saved.’
Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man
1
DO YOU KNOW WHERE THE FUCK YOU ARE?
Los Angeles is full of ghosts. Take a drive through West Hollywood, along Sunset Boulevard and its many tributaries, and names and places from the past return, some urgent, some distant, all able to conjure those ghosts by their mere mention. Tower Records, bankrupt since 2006; the Hyatt on Sunset, once known and feared as the ‘Riot House’, now a sanitised boutique hotel called the Andaz West Hollywood; the Roxy, the Rainbow Bar and Grill, the Whisky a Go-Go, the Troubadour … all still standing, but existing on the fumes of their shared, impossible to replicate pasts; nasty joints like the Coconut Teaszer and Gazzarri’s, now long gone; Sunset Strip Tattoo, relocated from its ramshackle shop opposite the Hyatt some way further down Sunset; the buildings that once housed the Starwood and the Tropicana and the Cathouse and the Seventh Veil now rebranded and reused; the 24-hour Ralphs supermarket that had so many aspiring musos walking its aisles it was known as ‘Rock’n’roll Ralphs’; the Capitol Records building, the Geffen Records building, each monuments to a vanished industry. And the side streets with their stories: North Clark, where once both Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses lived in the cheap apartments that lined it; Alto Loma, where the ‘hidden oasis’ of the Sunset Marquis hotel lay – Hunter S. Thompson used to call that place ‘the Loser’s Hilton’, so many and varied were the touring bands and LA rich that partied in the cabanas by the rippling pool …
West Hollywood is a different place now, and ironically, given the turbo-charged, try-hard heterosexuality of the late 1980s, one of the city’s best-known LGBT districts. But for anyone who remembers its ghosts and who saw the place in its 1980s heyday, this is the town where anything that could happen did happen. Where everything was coooool, baby, one minute, then out of control the next.
Imagine arriving here, as W. Axl Rose and many thousands of others did, from the Greyhound Bus terminal in North Hollywood and seeing the Strip for the first time at night. The atmosphere of the place came at you like a bullet in the back, a supercharged mix of ambition and abandon, hedonism and desperation: it was like a permanent first night away from home, no responsibility, no tomorrow, no fucker telling you what to do or what to wear or where to go, a heady blast of freedom, intoxicating and scary. The levels of bullshit and testosterone were off the charts. Everyone was in a band, or starting a band or thinking about it, or else they were a budding promoter or a DJ or a VJ or a manager. In a pre-internet age, cheap photocopied flyers were the best form of communicating who you were and when you were playing – by the end of the night, discarded A5s would be blowing down Sunset like tumbleweed. Bands formed and broke up and reformed again with this guy replacing that guy, this name instead of that one, one crazy dude after another. Loose collectives looking for the magic formula, the glory moment at which the touchpaper would ignite and they could begin their climb from a paid-for slot on the bottom of the bill.
It could happen, and it did: look around and you could even see the people that it had happened to – David Lee Roth, singer with LA’s biggest home-grown band, Van Halen, ligging with his manager, Pete Angelus, in the Rainbow; Vince Neil, a Mexican kid from the wrong side of town now somehow singing his way to platinum heaven with Mötley Crüe, dragging the mud-wrestling girls from the Tropicana back to his house to party; Robbin Crosby, Ratt’s blond bombshell of a guitarist, propping up the bar at the Troubadour, surrounded by chicks and chicks-with-dicks … and until the gods pointed their fingers and decided that this was your fate, there was an itinerant life of cheap places to crash, sofas to surf, rehearsal space to find. There was some movie doing the rounds saying ‘lunch is for wimps’ … well, so were breakfast and dinner out in Hollyweird, California. Any spare dollars – and who had those? – were allocated to booze, partying and flyers long before loose change was scraped up for fast food or whatever cheap shit was left on the shelves after midnight at Ralphs. The true Hollywood vampires knew girls who would buy their groceries and offer up their beds while they were busy trying to climb the greasy KY pole …
This was a very particular life in a very particular time and place and it was being projected outwards from these few neon streets to the rest of the world. Rock rags like Hit Parader, Circus, RIP, Spin and Kerrang! helped build the myth. Video clips that began on Headbangers Ball then crept onto mainstream, daytime MTV. Radio stations like KNAC – blasting out Poison, W.A.S.P., Ozzy Osbourne – saw their playlists picked up across America. People saw and people heard and they came in their thousands to be part of it. Axl stayed only a few weeks, freaked out by the place and its people, walking around with ‘a can of mace in one hand, a piece of steel in the other’ like the hayseed Indiana boy he was, but somehow he knew that he had to come back …
Young Bill Bailey, just turned 18 years old and not yet W. Axl Rose, was a smalltown cop’s nightmare. In Lafayette, Indiana, in the late 1970s, most of the teenage troublemakers were of the usual sort: bored, drunk, pumped full of hormones and not particularly bright. It didn’t take the FBI to catch them. Bill Bailey was different. He was bright – very, in fact – and his rebellion had both a root and a reason. It wasn’t that they couldn’t arrest him. It was that they couldn’t stop him, couldn’t make him respect their authority, or anyone else’s. He ran up 20 arrests by his estimate (‘I was guilty on five’), although Tippecanoe County Court records state that he spent a total of ten days in the county jail as an adult over a period from July 1980 through September 1982, on charges of battery, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, public intoxication, criminal trespass and mischief. When he finally hitchhiked out of town, back to LA and away from the torture of his early years, he was technically skipping judge’s bail. He would not return for a very long time.
If Axl Rose is the last great rock star, then Bill Bailey is the sad, sweet, clever, abused and angry child that Axl left behind in Lafayette. Yet he lives on in every onstage meltdown and backstage bust-up, in every act of intransigence and temper. And he surfaces in the untold moments of kindness and vulnerability, in the love songs with which he lays himself open and protects so fiercely. He’s there in the lyric to ‘One in a Million’ – ‘Police and niggers that’s right / Get out of my way’ – and to ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ – ‘She’s got a smile that it seems to me / Reminds me of childhood memories …’. He’s there in his choice to cover a Charles Manson song on the Spaghetti Incident? album, and he’s there again in his need to emulate the songwriting of Elton John and Freddie Mercury. He’s there in the desire to control every element of Guns N’ Roses, from the ownership of the name to the safeguarding of the musical legacy. It’s easy enough to make the link between a young Bill Bailey dreaming of one day having the freedom to sing somewhere other than the bathroom of his family home out of earshot of his religious zealot father, and the glistening edifice of Chinese Democracy, a record so singular and out of time that it could only have been the work of a reclusive rock star taking the chance to offer his version of a perfectly realised artwork to the world, uninterrupted by anyone.
It began on 6 February 1962, when he was born William Bruce Rose to a pretty 17-year-old single mother named Sharon Lintner, who was still in high school, and a Lafayette bad boy, also called William Rose, who definitely wasn’t. Before Bill was two years old and with any certain memory of what happened, William and Sharon may or may not have legally married, and, when they split in 1964, he may or may not have been abducted, briefly, by his natural father, and sexually abused by him, too. When, many years later, he bought into ‘regression therapy’, Axl would claim that ‘I didn’t like the way he treated me before I was born, so when I came out I was just wishing that the motherfucker was dead …’ And also that William Rose had ‘fucked me up the ass … I remember a needle. I remember getting a shot. And I rem
ember being sexually abused by this man and watching something horrible happen to my mother when she came to get me.’
The reality of this is for Axl to know. If it happened, little Bill did not recall it. Sharon met and married Stephen Bailey a year later, and Bill would grow up believing that Stephen was his natural father.
And Stephen Bailey was another doozy in the dad stakes, a case of out of the frying pan and into the fires … Known to some of his friends at church as ‘Beetle’, he was, to give him his full title, the Reverend L. Stephen Bailey and his faith was of the fire-and-brimstone kind. He preached at the Pentecostal church that stood on a gravel road in the farming country outside of town, where heaven and hell were tangible destinations, transcendence and sin both real and alive, where people writhed on the floor and spoke in tongues and the word of God was there to be spread, where Puritanism was desirable and rock’n’roll music, alcohol, premarital sex and most other kinds of pleasure most certainly weren’t. Young William and his half-siblings, Stuart and Amy, who came along early in the Bailey marriage, made the eight-mile trip to church every Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Wednesday night as a minimum, and usually more often.
When, during the elementary school years, William began having vivid nightmares about living in a house with his mother and a strange man who did bad things, he was told that the dreams were sent by the devil. Of the endless trips to church he remembered: ‘We had tent meetings, we had healings. We saw blind people read. People would talk in tongues. There were foot-washings, the whole bit.’ At home, Stephen Bailey ruled his family with God-fearing rhetoric and an iron hand. William was struck in the face for watching a woman in a bikini in a TV advertisement. The television itself was thrown out soon afterwards. The Bailey kids got to listen to the radio once a week on a Sunday afternoon when Stephen and Sharon had some ‘special time’ in the bedroom. When he was asked, many years later, if he could recall any happy memories of his childhood, Axl replied, ‘As in a good time? Wow! I guess it would be when the three of us kids were playing and getting along with my stepfather, wrestling around, kind of getting away from whatever was going on and all relating and having fun as little kids.’
