Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  Alan Niven made another smart intervention when he suggested tightening up, in ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, the original two repetitions of the ‘when you’re high … and you … never wanna come down …’ section to just one. At the time the band knew nothing of his creative involvement with Great White. ‘It’s a very good thing that none of us were aware of that,’ Slash said, ‘because that session might not have gone so well and “Welcome to the Jungle” would be a very different song … It never bothered me once we found out about Alan’s connection to Great White, but it had quite a negative, snowball effect among other members of our band.’ Meaning Axl.

  That lay ahead, a problem for another day. Along with ‘Sweet Child’ the Appetite sessions would produce one more late-breaking, self-lacerating Guns N’ Roses tune, a song that Slash and Izzy began to – well – cook up, after the Geffen deal was signed and then finished in the studio. The lyrics, which they presented to Axl scrawled on a brown paper bag, were essentially a description of their days on dope, a repetitious existence of escalating usage – ‘I used to do a little but a little didn’t do it, so a little got more and more …’ – and helplessness – ‘He’s been knocking … He won’t leave me alone …’. They called it ‘Mr Brown-stone’, a sledgehammer reference to what was going on, and set it to a shuffling, Bo Diddley verse section alongside an urgently rising chorus, and when sung by Axl it seemed to turn from a confession into a warning. It was ruthlessly autobiographical, a full stop, along with ‘Sweet Child’, on the band’s lives to date: ‘[The record] is a storybook of what this band went through in Hollywood; trying to survive, to when it was finished,’ Slash said. The 30-odd songs stretched from ‘November Rain’, which Axl had begun writing back in Indiana, and ‘Anything Goes’, which he and Izzy had started in the very early days of Hollywood Rose, right up to ‘Mr Brownstone’ and ‘Sweet Child’.

  The job now was to parse those 30 songs down to a single album, to dig through to the essence of the band. Tom Zutaut was firmly of the view that it needed to be a hard rock album, with a maximum of one ballad. Alan Niven was in agreement – his plan was to build a core fan base for what he still regarded as an ‘underground’ band. Axl was of the opinion that they wanted a classic, ‘live’-sounding record that captured a moment in time. He understood that big, romantic songs as close to his heart as ‘November Rain’ and ‘Don’t Cry’ would have to wait for their time – which wasn’t now.

  The Clink sessions had been an outstanding success. Even in their raw, unmixed state, it was obvious that the producer had fulfilled every brief, and, what’s more, he had put himself on the line to do it, catching the easy-going, do-it-right-now immediacy of Steven, Duff and Izzy, working one-on-one with Slash on his solos and then going straight to 18-hour days recording Axl’s vocals, which were the most complex parts on the recordings.

  Speaking soon after the record was released, Axl explained: ‘I sing in about five or six different voices that are all part of me, it’s not contrived. I’m like a second baritone or something. I used to take choir classes and stuff and I’d always sit there and, since I could read music, I’d try to sing other people’s parts and see if I could get away with it. We had this teacher who was pitch-perfect, or whatever you call it. He had ears like a bat, man, like radar. So in order to get away with singing someone else’s part, you’d really have to get it down. Or else he’d know …’ It was true, too: from ‘It’s So Easy’ to ‘Sweet Child’ to ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, Axl’s vocal range and natural ability to inhabit a lyric and sell the song, owning the narrative, would become a huge part of the record’s appeal.

  Soon after New Year, Alan Niven took Slash to New York to meet with candidates to mix the songs. They had dinner with Rick Rubin, who had just put Aerosmith in front of a new generation with the groundbreaking Run DMC cover/collaboration of their decade-old song ‘Walk This Way’. ‘We just shot the shit,’ Slash remembered, ‘because he’d already passed on mixing us. A lot of people passed on mixing us – and, once again, all of them regretted it later.’

  Alan Niven briefly considered doing the job himself and mixed a trial version of ‘Mr Brownstone’ that Izzy in particular liked a lot, but ultimately band and manager elected to go with the team of Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero, experienced engineers who had worked mostly on dance and pop club remixes but who produced a thunderous take on ‘Mr Brownstone’ as an audition piece. They found themselves in Media Sound studios in Manhattan’s midtown, playing host to the band sans Steven but plus Niven and Zutaut and assorted crew and girls, most of whom were put up at the Parker Meridian hotel, where they shared rooms. The material was pared down to that which would make the album, with Niven keen to stockpile the leftovers. One by one, the early versions of ‘November Rain’, ‘Pretty Tied Up’, ‘Civil War’, ‘The Garden’, ‘Dust and Bones’, ‘Yesterdays’ and ‘Don’t Cry’ fell away. Among the last to go were ‘Back Off Bitch’ and ‘You Could be Mine’, which until quite late was thought to have good potential as a first Guns N’ Roses single.

  Thompson and Barbiero had developed a unique way of working: Barbiero set up a basic mix before Thomson joined him at the desk and they began playing the song through, Thomson working on the guitar and vocal dynamics while Barbiero controlled the foundations. With four hands on the faders, they’d take pass after pass at the songs until everyone was happy. ‘[They were] amazing,’ enthused Slash in his autobiography. ‘They had a system, pretty much an unspoken language, between them. Steve was the energetic, in-your-face guy, and Michael was the reserved, analytical, calculated guy. And they got on one another’s nerves constantly, which somehow fuelled their creativity.’

  Slash had arrived in New York with an arm in plaster having fractured his wrist – as only he could have done – thumping the floor to try and get a record to stop skipping while he was having sex with a girl at one of Duff’s friend’s houses in Seattle. He had one night out with Steve Thompson, where he’d felt supremely out of place in a New York disco called China Club clad in his top hat and leathers, but the differences between the band and Thompson and Barbiero were evident and best illustrated by a notorious incident in the mixing of ‘Rocket Queen’. Adriana Smith, a friend of Slash’s from LA, found herself in New York and hooked up with the little crew at the Parker Meridian, spending her nights in the room shared by Slash and Axl and her days drinking in the studio. When Axl decided that the ‘Rocket Queen’ mix was lacking something, he turned to Smith, as she reminisced many years later: ‘Basically, Axl propositioned me in the studio. I was really drunk and although we were both seeing other people at the time, he had a really creative interest for this song and wanted to give it an edge and I was the girl to do it. I did it for the band.’

  ‘We lit some candles for atmosphere,’ Slash said, ‘and she and Axl went out into the live room, got down on the floor by the drum riser, and we recorded the performance …’ Michael Barbiero was less impressed: ‘I didn’t want to be around for recording a girl getting fucked,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t the high point of my career. So I set up the mikes and had my assistant record it. If you look at the record, it says, “Victor ‘the fuckin’ engineer” Deyglio. So it’s literal.’ Axl and the band simply thought it was funny. Or as Duff later put it: ‘She was a goer. She knew how to work a microphone.’

  Work done, they retreated to LA for a couple of homecoming shows, the first at the Whisky and the second at the Roxy, shows that would essentially mark the end of Guns N’ Roses as an LA club band. They didn’t quite know it yet, but they had outgrown those few miles of tiny clubs, however resonant their history. In the necessary lull between completed mixes and the final track-listing and sequencing of the record, which would take place in May 1987, Alan Niven instituted a plan, one which had been working in the music business ever since Chas Chandler brought Jimi Hendrix to London in the last months of 1966. British audiences, if they could be persuaded to get behind the latest US sensation, imbued them with a cachet th
at could travel back over the Atlantic and offer some glamour to otherwise familiar local boys. ‘In terms of the development of the band, it was key to my strategy that we connected well in the United Kingdom,’ says Niven. ‘It was about creating a perception that it was not just a bunch of Hollywood fuck-ups, it was a band that had international appeal.’

  It was time for another Alan Niven masterstroke. He struck a deal with Geffen’s president, Eddie Rosenblatt, to personally distribute all 10,000 copies – records and cassettes – of the Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide EP. Then turned up in a van to pick them all up. ‘Eddie told me later, when I loaded that van up and disappeared down the road, he rather wondered if he’d ever see me again.’ Niven sold the lot to an independent distribution company called Important and picked up a cheque for $42,000. Then he went back to Eddie with the cheque. ‘I pulled it out and waved it at him behind his desk. He went to hold it and I pulled it away from him. I said, “This takes us to England.” And he sat there and looked at me for a moment. I said, “This pays for our first trip to England, okay?” And he goes, “Okay.” And I gave him the cheque. And that’s how we paid for the three Marquee shows.’

  The Marquee was the emblematic rock dive in London’s Wardour Street. Since the dawn of the Sixties, every major rock artist from the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix to David Bowie and the Sex Pistols had played there. Getting Guns N’ Roses to play their first shows outside America there was a major coup, the kind of outside-the-box thinking that would earmark GN’R as somehow different – smarter, cooler – than their LA contemporaries. ‘It was essential to me to bring them to England,’ says Niven. ‘It was essential to me to get ahead of the pack.’ Faster Pussycat were also recording their major label debut; LA Guns were not far behind. Other West Hollywood charmers like Jetboy were snapping at their heels. ‘It gave me a clear message: get ahead of the pack.’

  To help set the scene for their London debut, Geffen brought some of the British rock press to LA. Sounds, the inkie weekly known – unlike its more illustrious rivals NME and Melody Maker – for its uninhibited love of hard rock and heavy metal, carried the first UK interview with Guns N’ Roses, the band bemoaning what they saw as a fake LA scene (Axl taking the chance to stick the knife into Poison; Slash claiming Van Halen as the only real rock band to emerge from the city) before the writer, Paul Elliott, concluded accurately that ‘raising hell has regained some of its glamour’. Time Out were next, London’s leading arts, culture and listings magazine left somewhat open-mouthed after a trip to West Arkeen’s latest residence, a biker crashpad on Poinsettia Street that several members of Guns used as a place to hang out and sleep in. It was, if anything, even worse than the Hell House, and quickly got the same moniker, Slash describing it as, ‘more gruesome than anything else I’ve seen in a first-world country’. It didn’t stop him frequenting the place, and telling the Time Out reporter that he was there because he’d just ditched his girlfriend, as her ‘boobs were too big’.

  Niven made sure he was on hand for both encounters, ensuring that to the outside world, newly exposed to this phenomenon, Guns N’ Roses came across exactly as they were: cocky, rowdy, wild and so far unstopped.

  4

  FIVE SKULLS AND A DEATH’S HEAD

  The effect of the first wave of serious British press coverage of Guns N’ Roses would be magnified just as soon as Europe got up close and personal with them, but before it happened the final choices that would turn Mike Clink’s sessions into Appetite for Destruction were made. The record was sequenced, a job that in the last days of vinyl and albums having a very clearly delineated side one and side two (on the finished artwork, the band would label these ‘G’ and ‘R’) required a great deal of thought and an artist’s touch. The best records, the kind of great and deathless albums Guns were trying to follow, had not just dynamics but a sense of narrative.

  ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, with the furious intensity of its knife-slashing opening riff (itself almost cathartic after the tease of Slash’s guitar intro) and its story of a wide-eyed country boy stepping off the bus and into the alien city, was an obvious opener. ‘Paradise City’, the upside of the dream, was its perfect counterpoint to close side one. Then ‘My Michelle’ to open side two, its story about Michelle Young blisteringly frank and unblinking, was bookended by the record’s final track, ‘Rocket Queen’, inspired by another of the band’s noir-ish Hollywood circle, Barbi Von Greif (‘I wrote this song for a girl who was gonna have a band and she was gonna call it Rocket Queen. She kinda kept me alive for a while’, as Axl told Hit Parader in 1988). In between, it was all killer no filler, don’t-bore-us-get-to-the-chorus solid gold: side one’s triple hook to the liver of ‘It’s So Easy’ (bad girls, worse drugs), ‘Nightrain’ (bad booze, worse girls) and ‘Out ta Get Me’ (slithering urban paranoia with undertones of Axl’s real-life troubles with the law) before the withering self-critique of ‘Mr Brownstone’. And then side two’s flipside to the hedonistic excess: after ‘My Michelle’, the sweetness of Izzy’s ‘Think About You’ (‘Some-thin’ changed in this heart of mine / And I’m so glad that you showed me’); and then Axl’s ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ (‘She’s got eyes of the bluest skies …’); ‘You’re Crazy’ (‘Looking for a lover in a world that’s much too dark …’); and then ‘Anything Goes’ to puncture the balloon, a descent back into the Hell House days (‘Panties round your knees / With your ass in debris’).

  The overall effect was of a mad ride through the life of the band, mostly tough and defiant but occasionally touching and vulnerable, a record that achieved a truthfulness in its voice that eluded all of the other preening hair bands on the Strip. All of the qualities that would make it so successful and so loved came built in: the wild lifestyle that gave the songs their street-level honesty; the volatile combination of personalities that could stretch the band to breaking point in terms of its personal relationships also provided a controlled fury in the music that couldn’t possibly be faked. Izzy and Steven’s loose, half-a-beat-behind, rhythmic groove, Duff’s punkish attack, Axl with his five voices for any occasion and Slash’s pyrotechnic lead playing, all caught at a very particular time and in a very particular place, worked in a way that this sort of art should work: on the central nervous system, triggering instant releases of adrenalin. It wasn’t there to be intellectualised or critiqued; LA and the scene on the Strip weren’t about that. Axl in particular may have had artistic pretentions that he would go on to try to fulfil, but the band’s first record was a straight-up body punch, fraught and dazzling, made in a moment and for the moment, not for any kind of posterity.

  It was almost impossible to see it as a major commercial hit. It lacked the fluffiness beloved of mainstream radio. Alan Niven wasn’t even sure if they’d get budget for a video clip, even if they could find a song that could be cleaned up enough for public consumption – the record had at least 12 audible ‘fuck’s including, in ‘It’s So Easy’, Axl’s unequivocal ‘why don’t you just … FUCK OFF …’

  Mike Clink, though, was certain both he and the band had excelled themselves and that the album would be a success despite its obvious commercial challenges. ‘I said to Tom Zutaut at Geffen, “This is going to sell two million copies.” He said, “No, it’s gonna sell five million!”’ According to Barbiero, ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ had ‘sounded like a hit to all of us. So much so that I remember Axl asking me when we were finished if I thought the album would actually sell. I told him that, despite the fact that it was nothing like what was on the radio, I thought it would go gold. I was only off by 20 million records.’

  The album title that so effortlessly summed up Guns N’ Roses in the late 1980s was one of the only things on the record that wasn’t theirs. Axl had a postcard depicting a painting by the LA artist Robert Williams, a graphic, cartoonish image of a robot standing over an apparently sexually assaulted woman, her shirt torn, scratch marks on her exposed breasts, her panties around her calves, while above them hovered an avenging vision of
hell with red claws and dagger teeth. Williams had called it Appetite for Destruction. Axl wanted not just Williams’s title, but the rights to use the painting as the album cover, too, and Zutaut duly negotiated a deal with the artist. Within the Geffen rank and file, however, there was an immediate disquiet about the idea. The climate around censorship in America in 1987 was heated. Tipper Gore, wife of the US senator and future Vice President Al Gore, had used her public profile to launch the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) after finding her 11-year-old daughter listening to a notorious Prince track, ‘Darling Nikki’ (‘I met her in a hotel lobby / Masturbating with a magazine’). Gore had parlayed her outrage into some Congressional hearings and the stickering of albums with a ‘Parental Advisory’ warning. It was effectively a badge of honour for most artists, especially those in rap and the more outré rock bands, but however dismissive the artists may have been, Geffen were acutely aware of both Guns’ reputation in the industry and of the uncompromising content of the record. They feared that if it had a cover like the Williams painting it wouldn’t be stocked by major retailers such as WalMart and Sears, and that others – Tower Records, for example – might be reluctant to display it prominently. Then there was the whole of the South of the country, deep in the Bible Belt, where Geffen’s salesmen knew that it would be impossible to get the album into racks without protest. The issue would float on, unresolved, as the planned spring release slipped back to summer.