Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  During their short-lived tenancy in Arnold Stiefel’s rental house the divisions in their lives became obvious – at least they would have been had Slash and Izzy been compos mentis enough to notice. While their rooms quickly became little more than drug dens, lit first by naked bulbs and then finally by nothing at all, Axl retreated to the top of the house, where he furnished his bedroom properly and padlocked the door. Now that he had Erin, there was further reason to withdraw from the chaotic, druggy, hedonistic lifestyle that the band were falling deeper into. Yet the relationship would ultimately become volatile and destructive for both Erin and Axl. Many years after they separated, Everly auctioned some of the letters and notes that Rose had written to her, and they are an enlightening little snapshot into their world: ‘FROM AN ASSHOLE’ was the tag with one florist’s delivery; ‘Sorry for being hard on you, you didn’t do anything wrong …’ begins another, ‘I just became frustrated with my predicament and didn’t know how to verbalise my feelings’; ‘Ya didn’t need to play it so tough – I should have known better – I never realised how much you cared and wanted me …’ and so on.

  While the last months of their marriage would be marred by rage and accusations of violence, the notes show in Axl a gentleness and a willingness to both compromise and apologise that his bandmates and those in other areas of his life may have found surprising.

  It was precisely these feelings, imbued in this new and adult relationship, that he was to reflect in a new song, one of the last written for Appetite. It’s a measure of the gap that was developing between singer and band that their initial reaction to his ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ was less than enthusiastic. ‘Joke’ was the word that cropped up most often. Slash had begun playing the carnival intro guitar figure as ‘a joke’, and described the process of writing and rehearsing the song as ‘like pulling teeth. For me, at the time, it was a very sappy ballad.’ Duff agreed, also calling the new song ‘a joke. We thought, “What is this song? It’s gonna be nothing.”’

  ‘It was a joke,’ Slash went on. ‘We were living in this house that had electricity, a couch and nothing else. The record company had just signed us and we were on our backs. There was a lot of shit going on. We were hanging out one night and I started playing that riff. And the next thing you know, Izzy made up some chords behind it, and Axl went off on it. I used to hate playing that sucker.’ But Axl heard something in the music that fitted his lyrical idea. Like much of his early writing, it was directly autobiographical, but tenderly so. He was prepared to be revealing and romantic – ‘Her hair reminds me of a warm, safe place / Where as a child I’d hide’ – in a song that played against type. And he knew exactly how it should sound, too: ‘I’m from Indiana, where Lynyrd Skynyrd are considered God to the point that you ended up saying, I hate this fucking band,’ he told me. ‘And yet for “Sweet Child” I went out and got some old Skynyrd tapes to make sure that we’d got that heartfelt feeling.’

  Axl’s refusal to take no for an answer paid off, becoming a significant turning point for both singer and band. When the song later became the engine that drove Appetite for Destruction forward, played endlessly on radio and looped on MTV, it was enough to convince Axl he should never again listen to what anyone else had to say about one of his songs – including Slash. Maybe especially Slash. It was also noticeable that Axl was closer artistically and in terms of friendship to West Arkeen. Arkeen was one of the great characters on the LA scene, the kind of guy who seemed to flourish in the pre-grunge, pre-austerity excesses of the late Eighties and early Nineties (sadly he wouldn’t make it out of 1990s, dying of an opiate overdose at just 36 in 1997). He’d first met the band when he lived next door to Duff, and grew especially close to Axl and Slash, who would say of him: ‘for a long time, he literally was the only one we could trust’. But while they were close, Slash never wrote with Arkeen. ‘We hung out and jammed a couple of times but there was only a couple of songs I was ever around where I was there with Axl and we were all playing together,’ he said. While an unnamed ‘friend’ would later tell the veteran American rock biographer Stephen Davis that Arkeen was ‘a strange, shadowy figure, very private and withdrawn. A weirdo. But Axl rated him – highly. You’d see Axl playing stuff for West, getting his opinion on what they were doing.’

  Axl, already separated from his band by their enthusiastic chemical excess and becoming surer of his artistic judgement, began to hear of Tom Zutaut’s growing concerns over the state of Guns N’ Roses, and had other things on his mind than the so-called strangeness of his friends. Mike Clink had been to see Zutaut in August 1986 to tell him that the early pre-production sessions were going nowhere because Slash wasn’t showing up. The summer had become one long fall into the depths of addiction. Slash had been so out of it at a Geffen photo shoot that he had to be physically held upright for the session. He nodded out one night at the band house and had to be revived. There were stories of nightclub fights, and of Axl threatening to leave the group. ‘There was a point where I fucking stopped playing guitar,’ Slash admitted. ‘I didn’t even talk to my band except for Izzy, because we were both doing it.’

  Zutaut began to worry that his bosses would start to think that investing in the most dangerous band in the world was just too, well, dangerous. Making and promoting a record would cost them north of $500,000 when production and marketing were thrown on top of a recording budget of more than $300,000. It was a lot of money to risk on hopeless junkies – and Tom was the man risking it. He read the band the riot act, recalling that ‘as much as you can threaten junkies’ he did, telling them that he was on the verge of dropping them before they’d even released anything. If the ship was going down, Zutaut wasn’t going down with it. Slash and Izzy had brief spells in rehab as a result, which kept their worst excesses at bay for a few weeks at least. And after they’d wrecked the apartment at Rumbo Recorders by putting a boulder through the window, Mike Clink drew the line. ‘I’d never come into contact with guys like that,’ he admitted. ‘During our first meeting, they were spitting over each other’s heads. They really were living on the street, that reckless life. But I pushed them hard and had a rule: no drugs in the studio.’

  Clink made a sort of Devil’s bargain: deliver the goods, and he would ignore their destructive behaviour away from Rumbo. He was happy for them to work all night – their usual pattern – just as long as they were working. ‘He kept us at arm’s length,’ said Slash. Ultimately it would prove a wise call – once Clink was able to tell Zutaut that songs were going down on tape, the record company’s nerves began to settle.

  The final legalities of the Geffen deal were completed when the band inked their full 62-page contract, binding them to the company. Alan Niven signed his deal, too, and took Guns for a boozy evening at Barney’s Beanery to mark the occasion, impressing them with both his capacity to hold his drink and his tales of encounters with the Sex Pistols when he’d worked for Virgin. ‘I had a little silver single plaque in my office for “Something Else” [from The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle]. Duff noticed that so I was all right. Later he came to find out that the very first time the Pistols got airplay in America was when I placed a copy of “Pretty Vacant” on the turntable of WMMS [in Cleveland].’

  These were important moments for Guns N’ Roses. They received the rest of their advance money from Geffen, and their hand-to-mouth hustling existence – although not yet dead – was eased as they became corporate assets. And it was a symbolic moment for Axl, who signed the contracts with his new name, changed by deed poll from the loathed William Bruce Bailey to W. Axl Rose. It was his break with the past, a new start and a statement of his determination to forge a new life on his own terms.

  The album sessions would not begin in earnest for another few weeks. The band continued to gig around LA, their headline shows at the Troubadour, the Roxy and the Whisky sold out and packed to the rafters with fans wanting to see if the rumours that buzzed on the streets were true – Slash was dead; Izzy was in rehab; Axl
had quit. The answers appeared right there in front of them, the shows were that weird mix of intensity and sloppiness that Guns N’ Roses were making their own. When Guns headlined the Street Scene festival in a park downtown, the atmosphere reached such a peak, stoked by Axl’s exhortations, that the show was stopped after a few songs by the fire marshals, and all of them, including Mike Clink, began to wonder how they might get that same feeling down on tape.

  While they wrestled with that, Alan Niven turned his attention to the first recordings that Guns N’ Roses would issue to the waiting world – the ‘indie’ release that Axl had promised from the stage of the Troubadour back in July. The notion of an ‘indie’ record was hollow, a dress-up designed to ape the genuine article like Mötley Crüe’s Too Fast for Love or Poison’s Look What the Cat Dragged In, two dirt-cheap, dirty-sounding records that had earned their creators major record deals. Guns already had a major record deal. And surprisingly for a band so sold on authenticity, there was an element of artificiality to the 12-inch EP Live?!*@ Like a Suicide, released in December, that Axl in particular would quickly see through and denounce. It wasn’t a live record at all; instead its four tracks were pulled from some early sessions at Pasha studios in Hollywood, when the band had briefly tried out Spencer Proffer as a producer, and Take One in Burbank with Hans-Peter Heuber and Alan Niven engineering and mixing. Informed by Geffen that they wouldn’t pay to record a GN’R show, crowd noise was simply added to these studio recordings, taken, Duff admitted, from the Texxas Jam festival held annually over the 4 July weekend in Houston. Niven chose the label name – the confrontational UZI Suicide – safe in the knowledge they wouldn’t have to use it again. Geffen pressed 10,000 copies and released it (they claimed) on 24 December – in fact it had come out nine days earlier in order to allow fans to get it before Christmas.

  ‘I wasn’t sure I would get away with it but no one called us out,’ says Alan Niven now. ‘Plus, my success with indie releases was one of the reasons Geffen came to me.’ There was also the knowledge that it was one thing to be signed to a major label, quite another to get them on the case building momentum. Alan knew it didn’t just come to new artists. They almost had to force the label’s hand, no matter how good the contract they’d just signed appeared to be. It wasn’t an end in itself, merely a toehold. ‘So that when Appetite came out there was already some awareness of who they were. Some expectation. I said, “Here’s the kicker, they cannot have the word ‘Geffen’ on them. The boxes cannot have [Geffen distributers] ‘WEA’ on them. They’ve got to be as if I’d had them pressed [independently]. There can’t be anything linking this to WEA or Geffen.”’

  The one thing that all of this artifice couldn’t disguise was the music. Live?!*@ Like a Suicide lasts for less than 14 minutes and features just four songs, but the street-level appeal that had packed Hollywood’s clubs over the summer of 1986 was obvious. It opened with a faked stage intro – ‘Hey fuckers, suck on Guns N’ fuckin’ Roses!’ – but the faking ended there. Reluctant to waste their best material on an EP, the two original songs, the opening ‘Reckless Life’ and ‘Move to the City’, came from the Hollywood Rose era, and featured a co-writing credit for Chris Weber. They were teamed with a couple of covers, a vicious take on Rose Tattoo’s ‘Nice Boys’ (‘Nice boys – don’t play rock’n’roll’ runs the chorus, while the verses are pertinent takes on girls brought low by hanging out with said boys) and a nod to their main inspiration with Aerosmith’s ‘Mama Kin’, an act of homage that quickly aligned them with a deeper history than the here-today-gone-later-today hair metal scene. All that really tied Guns to the Strip were the cover images, on the front Axl, face almost entirely obscured by his towering, primped hair, leaning on Duff’s shoulder, and on the rear a deliberately sleazy line-up shot styled by ‘rocket queen’ Barbi Von Greif, which was all de rigueur leather and cowboy boots.

  Live?!*@ Like a Suicide sold out immediately, mostly in Hollywood. But, crucially, it found its way to the critics, too, with the band’s first national and international reviews appearing in RIP, Circus and, in the UK, Kerrang! – all of which recognised Guns N’ Roses as the real deal, in its rawest form. Strikingly, the one dissenting voices’ was Axl’s, who had hit out at the idea almost from the start: ‘It’s the most contrived piece of shit we’ve done …’ he said. ‘It ain’t no live record. If you think it is, you’re crazy or stupid.’

  When he uttered those words in December 1986, Axl was in a position that artists sometimes find themselves in – aware that the work just being heard by the public has already been left well behind by their newer endeavours. Everything about the Appetite for Destruction sessions, from the very first demoing of the songs, was a giant step forward from the punkish, lo-fi racket of Live?!*@ Like a Suicide. Yet the die was cast, especially at Geffen: these guys were a feral pack, trailing destruction down the Strip and even to the doors of the Geffen offices – staff were aghast at one appearance which saw them accompanied by a naked girl, still wet, wrapped in a shower curtain. Then there was the day-today prosaic detail of their existence: casual sex in an era of AIDS, hard drugs, constant in-fighting, outrage in clubs and bars … there was at least one serious discussion between Axl and Slash over drug use affecting performance. Doubts were expressed over Steven Adler’s ability even when sober. One executive urged Zutaut to get the record done quickly before the band’s inevitable self-immolation.

  Navigating this path was Mike Clink, who not only had a terrific pair of ears but a hard-earned degree in rock star psychology. Having read the band the riot act over drugs in the studio, he set about getting the real Guns N’ Roses down on tape. Clink was intent on ‘capturing the band’s essence, not beating it into the ground’, and so all the tracks were initially recorded as-live, with the aim of nailing the song while the band were still feeling it, with overdubs kept to a minimum. Slash, already a fan of the way that Clink had engineered Michael Schenker’s guitar sound on one of his favourite records, UFO’s Lights Out, was quickly taken with the producer’s way of working: ‘He knew how to direct our energy into something productive,’ he recalled. ‘His secret was simple: he didn’t fuck with our sound. He worked hard to capture it perfectly, just as it was.’ Duff was equally happy: ‘With my favourite punk bands the bass was the loudest thing and led the way,’ he said. ‘And [on] the songs that would make up Appetite, the bass was the loudest, roundest thing on the recordings. It had a lot of space.’

  Yet Mike Clink’s skills weren’t just technical. Recognising Axl’s attention to detail and latent perfectionism, he handled the singer’s contribution entirely differently. As Axl later told me, what people didn’t hear immediately ‘is that there was a perfectionist attitude’ to the recordings. ‘I mean, there was a definite plan to that. We could have made it all smooth and polished. We went and did test tracks with other producers and it came out smooth and polished – with Spencer Proffer. And Geffen Records said it was too fucking radio. That’s why we went with Mike Clink. We went for a raw sound, because it just didn’t gel having it too tight and concise.

  ‘Cos Guns N’ Roses onstage, man, can be, like, out to lunch. Visually, we’re all over the place and stuff and you don’t know what to expect. But how do you get that on a record? But somehow you have to do that. So there’s a lot more that’s needed on a record. That’s why recording is my favourite thing, because it’s like painting a picture. You start out with a shadow, or an idea, and you come up with something that’s a shadow of that … And then you add all these things and you come up with something you didn’t even expect. Slash will do, like, one slow little guitar fill that adds a whole different mood that you didn’t expect. That’s what I love …You use the brush this way and allow a little shading to come in and you go, “Wow, I got a whole different effect on this that’s even heavier than what I pictured. I don’t know quite what I’m on to but I’m on it”, you know?

  ‘“Paradise City”, man,’ he continued, ‘That’s like, I came up with two of
those first vocals – there’s five parts there – I came up with two and they sounded really weird. Then I said, look, I got an idea. I put two of these vocal things together, and it was the two weirdest ones, the two most obtuse ones. And Clink’s like, “I don’t know about that, man …” I’m like, “I don’t know either, why don’t we just sleep on it?” So we go home and the next day I call him up and now I’m like, “I don’t know about this.” But he goes, “No, I think it’s cool!” So now he was the other way. So then we put three more vocal parts on it and then it fit. But the point is, that wasn’t how we had it planned. We don’t really know how it happened.’

  Clink was realistic about the band’s habits too. He, Alan Niven and Axl had homes to go to at the end of each day, but stranded in the ‘tedious’ Valley, Slash, Izzy and Steven, plus studio techs Porky and Jame-O and a giant minder/driver named Lewis, hired by Alan Niven to limit any damage, would go out and disrupt whichever local bar they could find that they hadn’t disrupted already. Through the fug of their hangovers, Clink would quietly have a word when he felt an individual wasn’t playing at his best and shepherd him in later to redo their part. Slash had a slightly bigger problem when it came to laying down his lead-guitar lines. During his chaotic, druggy, sofa-surfing summer of ’86, he’d sold or otherwise lost most of his instruments. Now, although he felt Izzy, Duff and Slash had essentially finished their parts during the initial Rumbo ‘as-live’ sessions, he was struggling for the sound he wanted. On the final day at Rumbo, Alan Niven provided the answer, turning up with a beautiful flame-top Les Paul replica that he’d got from Jim Foot, a guitar maker in Redondo Beach. Slash loved it and after a search of rental shops with Clink found the right Marshall amp and the pair spent some happy time in Take 1 studio rerecording and overdubbing together. The guitar has remained Slash’s main studio instrument ever since, although as he admitted in his autobiography, even he has been unable to replicate the exact sound he and Clink got for Appetite … never mind all of the wannabes who’ve attempted to kick-start their careers by aping it: ‘The size and shape of the room, the soundboard used in recording, as well as the molecular quality of the air all play a part – humidity and temperature affect a recording tremendously … It is more than just setting up the same equipment in the same booth because, believe me, many have tried.’ Happy at last with his sound, Slash worked at some pace, nailing, he reckoned, a song a day. And happy to be back on the right side of the Hollywood Hills, Duff would hang at the studio while Slash worked before the pair disappeared into the night together. From the first song Slash overdubbed, ‘Think About You’, to the last, ‘Paradise City’, this was the pattern they repeated.