Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  That was all, and beyond it nothing. The family environment exerted its own socialising force. The kids began to police one another if they saw or said anything sexual. They were disciplined and conditioned by Stephen, and Sharon always seemed to take his side. He played them Jimmy Swaggart tapes on his reel-to-reel tape machine, making them listen to the jaded old fraud over and over. By the time William was ten years old, he knew the Bible well enough to win the church contest for youngsters, and he was invited to sermonise. Learning to speak in front of a crowd, and later to play piano and sing, Bill somehow found an identity. He knew it had to do with the music he practised time and again for church recitals. One time, in the car, Barry Manilow came on the radio singing ‘Mandy’ and the chorus was so catchy he joined in. His reward was a fat lip from Stephen, because the song was ‘evil’. Hey, if you got a smack to the jaw for singing ‘Mandy’ then what power did this music have? He got hold of a small radio from Sharon – probably one of the times she was feeling guilty about Stephen – and began listening to it under his bedcovers at night, and the tiny world of Lafayette and school and church opened up: he heard Elton John, Queen, Led Zeppelin, Billy Joel … He heard the words and sensed how the melodies made him feel. He understood these things had power, whether he was singing in church to get the congregation to raise the old wooden roof so that Stephen could have them at fever pitch for his sermons, or whether some guy like Freddie Mercury or Robert Plant was standing in front of many thousands and having them stand up and cheer and faint and scream out in tongues …

  Once the connection was made, his life began to change. The shy, nerdy kid that walked everywhere in Sunnyside Middle School with his back stooped and his eyes cast down, white shirt starched and black trousers pressed, transitioned into a rebellious, semi-delinquent kid at Jefferson High, fast with his temper and his fists, noted for that ‘psycho’ look in his eye that warned off even the toughest boys. He learned more about the power of music then. Stephen knocked him from the piano stool when he played Zeppelin’s ‘D’Yer Maker’. He got hold of an Elton John songbook and marvelled at the way the tunes were constructed (‘ten fingers of the weirdest chords in the world’). He looked at rock magazines like Creem in the drugstore on his way to his piano lesson and there he discovered other magazines, too, like Oui, which had arty pictures of beautiful women, right at the time he began to feel his dick tingle at the thought of the girls at school. And then he met Jeff Isbell.

  If Bill was learning what cool was and how you might figure out a way to become it yourself some day, Jeff seemed to have been born that way. Three months younger than Bill, he had the same beaky nose and sharp-planed face as Ronnie Wood or Johnnie Thunders, and he was rock star skinny, just like his all-time hero, Joe Perry, the guitarist in Aerosmith. He loved the loose-hipped vibe that the Stones and Aerosmith had, a sort of effortless, gun-for-hire cool that came from hanging just behind the beat. It was a style he’d find was his own, too, once he started out on guitar, but when he and Bill first met, they found a shared love of other stuff as well, music like ELO and David Bowie, and cool British bands who didn’t get on the US radio so much – Nazareth and Thin Lizzy. And AC/DC. Wait, they were Australian? Cool …

  Jeff was a drummer back then, and from musical roots. He’d been born in Florida, but his father, who had Native American blood somewhere on his side of the family, moved them to the countryside outside of Lafayette before Jeff started school, which meant, back in the early Seventies, no neighbours for ten miles in all directions down the unmade gravel roads – ‘far out in Bumfuck’, as Izzy would recall many years later. When his mother and father split the sheets soon afterwards, Jeff, his mom and his brother, Joe, moved into town, which at least offered him the chance of some sort of social life. His grandma encouraged his musical ambition, and on his thirteenth birthday, the longed-for drum kit arrived. Jeff’s best pal had an older brother who ran with the hooligan crowd. They liked to take over an old farmhouse to party, and when they were all good and drunk, they’d ask the skinny, beaky little kid to come up and jam on the drums with them. ‘That was my first adrenalin rush,’ Izzy recalled. ‘Other than that, my life was completely boring.’

  He fought that boredom by retreating into music and learning tricks on his skateboard. He started to grow his hair. He felt somehow that he was destined for life in a band, far away from Lafayette. He was hanging around a school corridor one day in ninth grade when ‘I heard all these books hit the ground, yelling, and then he went running past. A bunch of fucking teachers chasing him down the hallway …’

  The next time he saw Bill Bailey they were sitting next to one another in Driver Education class, and their friendship began. Jeff was in some school band or other, just a bunch of guys who didn’t really have a name, and he thought that his crazy new friend might make a frontman. ‘I thought, well, here’s a guy who’s completely crazy, he’d be a fucking great singer,’ he told me many years later. ‘We had to coax him a bit [and] it didn’t go so well in the early days. Sometimes he would just come over and stand around, like he was embarrassed. Or he’d start to sing and then he’d just leave. Walk out and I wouldn’t see him again for, like, three days! Some things don’t change, huh?’

  Jeff understood. He may not have been as academically gifted as Bill, but he was an astute reader of people and from an early age was settled in his own skin. When he and I spoke a decade after he’d quit Guns N’ Roses, his recollection of this high-school friendship gave an insight into Axl’s adult character: ‘He had long, red hair, he was a little guy and he got a lot of shit. I think he never got laid, too, in school. I hate to bring this up cos this is getting nasty. But he never got no pussy at school, Axl. So now the guy’s a big fucking rock star, he’s got the chicks lined up, he’s got money and he’s got people … and the power went to this guy’s head. I mean, he was a fucking monster! Nuts! Crazy!’

  All that came later, though. It wasn’t rock fans but the Lafayette police Bill first started getting noticed by, in the mid-Seventies. He was 15 and ‘because I was one of the smartest, the cops thought I was the ringleader’. His juvenile records remain sealed but he was arrested at least four times before he was 18, once in his own backyard. He started drinking and popping pills at 16, smoking joints when he could get them. By the time he discovered the truth about his parentage, Bill Bailey wasn’t just living on the wrong side of the tracks – he was ready to jump the rails completely. He’d been shuffling through some old papers in a drawer at home when he discovered that Sharon’s High School Diploma listed her surname as ‘Rose’ and not her maiden name of Lintner. He kept searching and found insurance documents that gave ‘Rose’ as his surname too. When he confronted his parents that evening, he got a part of the truth: he was told that his real father had hurt his mother and then disappeared, to where, no one knew or cared. ‘Your real father does not get brought up,’ Stephen warned him when he continued to press for information.

  He was at a vulnerable age, and the discovery struck at the heart of his identity and demolished his sense of self. Suddenly, the strange dreams he’d had as a child of living somewhere else with his mother and another man made sense. Relieved, too, perhaps, that the tyrannical Stephen Bailey was not his real father, Bill changed his name immediately, albeit unofficially, to ‘W. Rose’ – heartbreakingly, the ‘W.’ was because he didn’t want to share a full first name with a natural father who had abandoned and maybe abused him. His behaviour, though, worsened. His mood swings became so extreme that a psychologist diagnosed an intermittent psychosis. His grades dropped off a cliff-edge and then he quit school altogether. He couldn’t get a job, because all of the stores in the mall knew him as a shoplifter. The police ‘beat the crap’ out of him, he said, and tried to run him out of town. Stephen Bailey finally kicked him out of the family home under the ridiculous pretence of him having ‘too-long hair’ and so he went to stay with his grandmother. He started hanging around in Columbian Park, just behind his grandma’s ho
use, with Izzy and his pals: David Lank, who would take one of the early trips to LA with him, Mike Staggs, another local musician who would also take the trip west, Monica and Dana Gregory, Anna Hoon, whose younger brother Shannon would later find fame in Blind Melon, and Gina Siler, who met Axl on her seventeenth birthday, when he was 20, and became his first serious girlfriend.

  To all of his friends, the twin sides of his personality were apparent. Monica recalled his beautiful piano playing. Dana remembered ‘the vibe he gave off’ – bad enough to earn the warnings from the local cops. Jeff saw both sides: ‘He was just really fuckin’ bent on fighting and destroying things. Somebody would look at him wrong and he’d just start a fight. If it wasn’t for the band, I just hate to think what he’d have done.’

  Something had to give. Jeff moved to LA in 1981 and found his own new name – Izzy. And Bill followed a year later, the first few trips terrifying and aborted, the city just too vast and imposing and hostile, but with the threat of some proper jail time hanging over him and nothing much to keep him in Lafayette, he made the move permanently in December 1982, with Gina Siler in tow. A new life needed a new name, and W. Axl Rose was born. As he later explained, ‘I am “W.” Rose because “William” was an asshole.’

  Much has been made of ‘Axl Rose’ as an anagram of oral sex, but the truth was, A.X.L. was the name of one of Dana’s bands – a band Bill had been desperate to join – and he simply took the letters for himself. ‘I had a small apartment in Huntington Beach,’ Izzy recalled, ‘and Bill used to come down and crash on the floor. He was always coming out to visit [and] getting lost. Then, at the end of ’82, he came back out with this girl and rented an apartment. That’s when he finally stayed …’

  Unbeknown to Axl and Izzy, unbeknown to the world, Saul Hudson and Steven Adler were there waiting for them. After relocating from the drear environs of his father Tony’s native Stoke-on-Trent when he was four years old, Saul had grown up in the boho enclave of Laurel Canyon, in a house on Lookout Mountain Road. Leaving behind the scarred landscapes of the Potteries, where the coal-mining industry made its presence most obviously felt in the slag heaps which littered the horizon, young Saul now found himself in the same hippy paradise then occupied by rock denizens of the day like Jim Morrison, Frank Zappa, Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills and Nash (and Young). Indeed, a wooden shack in the Canyon was then every turned-on couple’s desire in those dreamy, incense-lit days. By the time Slash arrived in 1970, what had been a rundown, overgrown semi-wilderness had been transformed by musicians looking for cheap places to hang out and get high, to play their music beneath the bird-of-paradise plants, thickets of pepper trees and pines, and reinvent themselves as the love generation. It was the place where Elektra Records’ exec Barry Friedman would famously phone all his neighbours and get them to drop the needle on the new Stones album, all at the same time, until the Canyon rang out with their groovacious sounds.

  It was a childhood and a life that Axl might have craved, one of barefoot freedom and unfettered creativity, a house always full of music, dope and colourful characters. Tony Hudson, an ambitious young artist, had met Ola Oliver, an African-American clothing designer, in Paris. Ola left the little family in Stoke soon after Saul was born to return to LA and lay the foundations for their life there. When she was joined by her husband and son – and soon by a new addition in Saul’s younger brother, Ash – Saul seized on to this new existence. ‘My first memory of LA is the Doors’ “Light My Fire” blasting from my parents’ turntable all day long,’ he later recalled. One of his early babysitters was David Geffen, whose hugely influential record label Guns N’ Roses would one day sign to. Tony designed the Court and Spark album cover for Joni Mitchell, who lived just up the road, and who used some of Saul’s animal drawings to make a book of her poems. Ola’s clothing design really took off, and she worked with Joni, and David Bowie during his Thin White Duke phase, and then Ringo Starr and Carly Simon. Things were going so well, the family moved down the hillside to a swish apartment on Doheny Drive, just off Sunset, where Saul was introduced to everyone from Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder to John Lennon and Bill Cosby. Ola would take Saul to shows at the Troubadour and onto various TV and film sets where she was working and he felt the magic, especially when he saw a stage full of gleaming musical instruments laid out and ready to go.

  Now calling himself Slash, adopting a nickname given to him by the actor Seymour Cassel, a family friend – ‘Because I was always running around the place, at lightning speed’ – when Tony and Ola’s relationship began to hit the rocks, Saul would take long walks with his father. He learned of their split over a meal in Fatburger. Although his parents remained on amicable terms, and lived close to one another, ‘the only stability I knew was gone’, and he began staying for extended periods with his grandma, Ola’s mother, who was also called Ola. ‘I had to redefine myself on my own terms,’ he later remembered in his memoir, especially when it became clear to him that his mother was engaged in a brief but intense affair with Bowie that began shortly after he’d signed to appear in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth and Ola was hired to design the costumes. ‘Inside I was still a good kid,’ he said, ‘but on the outside I became a problem child.’

  By the time he was 12, Saul was drinking, smoking, even having sex. He began to seek the stability of a new family and found it in the suddenly hip sport of BMX biking with some older kids he’d met at a shop called Spokes and Stuff. ‘All of us but two – they were brothers – came from disturbed or broken domestic situations,’ he’d recollect. They’d ride all over – Laurel Canyon, Culver City, the La Brea Tar Pits – and especially Laurel Elementary School, where they’d spend their evenings hanging in the playground and smoking weed. Within a year he’d picked up another bad habit: kleptomania, lifting books, comics, tapes, art supplies … until it came to an embarrassing end at Tower on Sunset, when he was caught with pockets full of tapes which were laid out for his mother to see when she was summoned to collect him. ‘She didn’t say much and she didn’t have to,’ he reflected. ‘She was over thinking I could do no wrong …’

  Saul also struck up two key friendships during this restless period, the first an enduring one with Marc Canter, whose family owned the famous Canter’s Deli in West Hollywood. Canter would be on hand in the early days of Guns N’ Roses, often paying for flyers or buying guitar strings when money was short. The second was with a rough-and-tumble blonde kid named Steven Adler, who rocked up one evening in the Laurel Elementary playground, and who soon found himself as a classmate of Saul’s at Bancroft Junior High. The pair were, according to Saul, ‘instantly inseparable’. Soon they were snorting ‘locker room’ – a cheap form of amyl nitrate – before class, and then bunking off to smoke dope and wander the streets of Hollywood bullshitting one another about music, forming bands and hustling money.

  Steven was a Valley Boy who’d arrived in California at the age of seven from Cleveland with his mom, Deanna, and his older brother, Kenny. His natural father was an Italian ‘gangster wannabe’ called Mike Coletti, who had, in the Catholic tradition, originally named Kenny ‘Joseph’ after his own father and Steven ‘Michael’ after himself. When Deanna left Mike, the family moved in with her mother, Lilly, who insisted that, in the Jewish tradition, the children were not named after living family – thus Michael became Steven, and Joseph became Kenny. No matter how quickly the famously easy-going young Steven shrugged it off, this was a deeply unsettling period of his life which would leave its emotional scars.

  Soon he was, in his own words, ‘a crazy, wild, fucked-up kid’ who was essentially uncontrollable. When the claustrophobic apartments and biting winter winds of Cleveland got too much, Deanna headed west to join an older sister in SoCal. Steven’s course was set at the age of 12, on a day trip to Disneyland’s Magic Mountain: Kiss made a special appearance and hit him like a tidal wave. Deanna remembered Steven in the car on the ride home. ‘“Mom,” he said, “When I grow up, I want to be a rock star.”
I just said, “That’s nice, Stevie …” And I thought that would be that …’

  But Steven knew deep in his bones that it wasn’t anything to do with being ‘nice’, and soon he was convincing his new friend Saul of it, too. ‘We’d dip school nearly every day,’ he recalled. ‘Me and Slash would walk up and down Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards and each day we had this thing where we’d take a different type of alcohol and we’d walk up and down, up and down, and what we’d be talking about was how we’d be living when we were rock stars. It was like this dream that I always knew would come true. We’d go out and meet chicks – older women – who would take us back to their Beverly Hills homes. They’d give us booze, coke, they’d feed us, really. All we’d have to do was fuck them. Occasionally a guy would pick me up. In return for a blow job, I’d get a little dope and thirty or forty bucks.’

  Adler would also have darker experiences with some predatory paedophiles who hunted for young flesh in Hollywood, admitting in his autobiography that he’d been picked up on Santa Monica Boulevard by two men who took him to an apartment where he was ‘hurt quite badly … They didn’t beat me up but they did everything else and it was quite devastating.’

  The one thing he really had going for him was the music. It was Steven who finally got a guitar into Saul Hudson’s hands. ‘I lived about five or six blocks from Santa Monica Boulevard, so if I was with Slash, we’d always get back to my house first,’ he said. ‘I had two rooms – a living room and a bedroom – and I’d always sleep in the living room. In the bedroom, I had this guitar and a little amplifier that I was learning to play, and one day I just showed it to Slash. I knew two chords and two scales and I tried to play along to Kiss Alive – strike all of the Ace Frehley positions, man! Well, Slash just fell in love with that guitar. I gave it to him, and within a week he was writing songs. He was just made for the guitar. Made for it. I just wanted to be a rock’n’roll star. The guitar was too complicated for me …’