Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  After another month of club shows, the cards started to fall their way once more. Mötley Crüe were about to go out in support of a Number 2 hit album, the multi-platinum Girls, Girl, Girls, and Whitesnake had been booked as the support act. But Whitesnake’s 1987 album was breaking out too, also reaching Number 2 on the Billboard chart and about to be catapulted to greater sales with a hit single ‘Is This Love’. When Whitesnake pulled out of the Crüe tour to play headline shows of their own, Niven and Zutaut used their Crüe connections to have Guns N’ Roses step in as last-minute replacements. Although the Crüe and Guns would soon be at the centre of one of rock’n’roll’s most infamous feuds (which would in turn have its knock-on effects for me), they were for a couple of brief months the perfect match, Crüe at the peak of their trashy appeal, Guns hungry to knock them off their coke-encrusted perch.

  As Guns wound around America, Appetite at last began to ascend the Billboard Hot 100, first in the high 60s, then creeping, by December 1987, up to Number 59, with sales approaching 200,000 albums. Not at all bad for the debut album by an underground band with zero radio support. This jump came on the back of yet more drama. In Lakeland, Florida, the band filmed a slot for MTV, for the Headbangers Ball segment. Alan Niven and Doug Goldstein realised that the band were in no fit state to be taped. Slash and Izzy were on some distant smack planet – where they’d been joined by Mötley Crüe’s bassist, Nikki Sixx – Duff was drinking himself into oblivion most days and Axl was unpredictably contrary whenever confronted by the press, and so damage limitation was entered into. The band were filmed playing ‘It’s So Easy’, Goldstein did an interview in an attempt to put a bright shiny face on a bunch of obvious fuck-ups, before MTV finally got to confront the band face to face in the dressing room as Mötley Crüe took the stage, a piece that rapidly degenerated into an unairable few minutes of drunken swearing and laughter. It finally made the air, heavily cut, years later when Appetite was the biggest-selling rock record on the planet.

  Back on the road with the Crüe, Axl found himself in trouble again. This time in Atlanta, where police actually walked on stage and arrested him during the second song for attacking one of the arena security guards, who, Axl claimed, had been beating up the band’s friends in the audience. He was held for questioning backstage while the rest of the band were left to get on with their 45-minute set as best they could. A roadie hurriedly hauled onstage helped out with some of the vocals, while Slash contributed a 15-minute guitar solo and Steven managed a longer-than-usual drum solo to fill in the gaps. After the show, Axl was incandescent with rage, claiming he had been the victim of trumped-up charges. ‘In Atlanta I dived in and I had police saying I hit them,’ he fumed. ‘I never did, but I had to plead guilty because we didn’t have any money at the time. Lie? Yes, I guess I did lie once. I lied and said that I hit four cops. I guess we should reopen the case and take me to trial for perjury. But I didn’t have $56,000 to pay them off under the table.’

  The Crüe tour ended in predictable disaster back in LA. Both bands returned home together. Guns were due back out with Alice Cooper a few days later, and Slash holed up in the Franklin Plaza hotel. Nikki Sixx joined him, where they were both shot up by a local smack dealer introduced to them by Robbin Crosby of Ratt. Sixx immediately overdosed and Slash found himself once again dragging a corpse into the shower in an attempt to bring it back to life. Sixx was luckier than Todd Crew – the paramedics arrived in time to restart his heart with needles full of adrenalin, and he took off into the night, calling Slash on the phone the following day to thank him for saving his life. Sixx would immortalise the night on Mötley Crüe’s next album in a song called ‘Kickstart My Heart’. Slash would do everything to try to forget about it. Until next time …

  5

  MUCH TOO HIGH

  1988 would be the year that the lives of everyone connected to Guns N’ Roses would be changed for ever. For the five band members it was the moment when their dreams of rock stardom became an inescapable reality. By 6 August, Appetite for Destruction, led by the single ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’, would have topped the Billboard chart for the first time (it would return on a further three occasions) and was in its first of three solid years – 147 weeks – within the Top 200. The band was on tour with Aerosmith (Tim Collins having negotiated entirely separate travel and accommodation for both acts) and about to fly to the UK to appear at the Donington Monsters of Rock festival, where they would encounter another terrible low. Newly immortal, until that moment, they thought the worst was behind them. They were wrong.

  The year had begun in the studio. Eddie Rosenblatt had urged Niven to make another record, something the manager had forcefully resisted, taking the view that they’d sold almost 250,000 albums without a proper single, video or marketing campaign, and – not unreasonably – asked Rosenblatt what he thought they might sell should they get one? Instead, with Mike Clink, the band cut some acoustic songs for a prospective stop-gap EP or a bunch of B-sides: a sweet ballad of Axl’s called ‘Patience’; a blackly comic tune they’d debuted at the UK shows, ‘Used to Love Her’ (‘… but I had to kill her!’, a lyric inspired by Axl’s fondness for ‘shock comic’ Sam Kinison); and ‘One in a Million’, an obnoxious Rose rant that also began in Kinison-esque humour but quickly descended into something far less funny, storing up trouble for the band later on). They also recorded a rangy acoustic, much longer and doubly vitriolic version of ‘You’re Crazy’ that Clink liked as much as the electric version on Appetite.

  Between times there were one-off shows. They opened for Great White at KNAC’s second anniversary show, where Cinderella’s drummer, Fred Coury, sat in for Steven Adler, who’d broken his hand in a barroom brawl following a show opening for Alice Cooper in Minneapolis a week before Christmas. Then there was an unannounced ‘secret’ show billed as the Drunk Fux, which featured the five-man band plus Axl acolytes Del James and West Arkeen, performing an impromptu set of covers – including a first public performance of a new song, ‘Yesterdays’, a ragtag blues shuffle Axl had recently banged together with Del and West and another street kid, named Billy McCloud, and which Axl announced he and the band would be recording the following week. (They didn’t.) There was also a hurriedly arranged Thursday night gig at the Cathouse on 21 January – Steven’s first full gig back behind the drums, essentially a glorified rehearsal for three shows in Scandinavia supporting Mötley Crüe.

  Essentially, though, the band was treading water. Again Eddie Rosenblatt urged Niven and Zutaut to consider getting another album ready to go, based on the latest session with Clink. ‘No way, this record’s just beginning,’ Zoots told Eddie. ‘We haven’t even scratched the surface yet. There’s a Number One single that is buried on the second side of the album. The promotion people have not even listened to it!’ Zutaut was referring to ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’, but by then neither Rosenblatt nor anyone else at the company was prepared to listen.

  Exasperated, Zutaut appealed directly to David Geffen, who asked simply: ‘What is the one thing that I could do to help you?’ Zutaut replied, ‘It would help if you could get the “Welcome to the Jungle” video played on MTV.’ Geffen said he would do what he could and put a call through to MTV’s chief executive, Tom Freston, an old friend who owed him a favour. Freston accordingly agreed to air ‘Welcome to the Jungle’. Just one proviso: MTV would play it only once, at 3 a.m. on the East Coast, midnight on the West Coast. After that, all bets were off. However, within minutes of the video airing for the first time a week later, the phones began to light up at the network as their switchboard became overloaded with calls for repeat plays from overexcited fans. Within a month, ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ had officially become one of the most-requested videos on MTV that year.

  At the same time, in another weird example of the kind of synchronicity that seemed to bless their professional relationship, Alan Niven had managed to wangle Guns N’ Roses into a live appearance on MTV. Originally the station had approached Niven about filmi
ng Great White live at The Ritz in New York for an MTV Special that would also be broadcast live across several radio stations. It seemed like a no-brainer. Great White’s Once Bitten album had just gone gold in America and MTV wanted to get in on the ride. Alan said yes on one condition. ‘My other band opens, okay?’ The MTV producers agreed.

  In the weeks leading up to the show in February, however, ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ had begun its own heavy rotation, moving the needle on the dial of the Appetite album, too, which was also now approaching gold status for over 500,000 sales. Suddenly Alan Niven was presented with the unique situation of having two hot’n’heavy acts steaming up the US charts. On the eve of the show, he decided the ‘smart call’ was ‘to flip the bill order’. He goes on: ‘Guns had just gone white hot. I went to Great White and said, “What’s the fucking rule? Be a hard act to follow before you follow a hard act.”’ So they switched places and Great White opened the MTV Special instead. Both bands played the same length of time but there was no doubting afterwards who the stars of The Ritz were that night.

  ‘There’s a couple of moments in [the Great White] set that still give me goosebumps when I play back the tapes,’ insists Niven. ‘To the point where Slash ran into the dressing room after they played and said, “You fuckers! How do we follow that?”’ But not only did GN’R follow that, ‘To a lot of people that is the apex of watching Guns N’ Roses. Imagine all the fucking faces, cognoscenti and industry fuckers that were there at the show. I’m not the greatest at the social bit but I’m having to work the room and be nice to everybody and try to remember who fucking everybody is.’ Next thing, he got a tap on the shoulder. ‘Goldstein panicking saying Axl can’t find his bandana. “He wants you to go into the crowd and find him one.” So I did. I went into the crowd and found one. He didn’t like that one so I went and found another one. Second one was okay. Slash is aware of all this. So what would your state of mind be when you went out on stage? Good god, half the fucking time each was seething at the other. And The Ritz was the classic example. Yet most people think that’s the apex of GN’R live on film. Yet not everybody was happy with Axl at that moment. But what’s his muse? His muse is confrontation. His muse is conflict. He’s a power tripper.’

  Whatever the background, the results were dynamite, and can still be seen on YouTube today. Niven is right. This was Guns N’ Roses, at their earliest, now classic best. When Slash dived into the audience at the climax of ‘Rocket Queen’, you could almost touch the heat from the crowd, escaping, hissing like bad gas from the manholes of New York City.

  With his star rising fast, instead of making him feel more at ease, Axl Rose’s on- and offstage behaviour was becoming increasingly erratic. He became more difficult and demanding, attempting to control every situation, even those involving large crowds, by losing his temper: he would walk offstage if something offended him and have to be coaxed back. A fortnight before the end of the tour, he didn’t take the stage at all. It happened at the second of two shows they were to headline, 12 and 13 February, at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix. The first show had ended prematurely when Axl walked off at the end of ‘Nightrain’ and refused to come back out for an encore. No one knew quite why, putting it down to another of Axl’s weird head-trips.

  The following afternoon, however, he barricaded himself in his hotel room with his then-girlfriend, Erin Everly, and refused to come out. ‘We tried everything to get him out,’ says Niven. ‘We banged on the door and shouted, “Come on, dude, we got a gig. Come out!” and he’d shout back, “Fuck off!” I don’t know if Axl and Erin were fighting. That was probably something that happened more often than not, but he refused to come out no matter what we said.’

  As opening band, T.S.O.L. – a Californian punk-metal band signed to Niven’s former label, Enigma – completed their 40-minute set, Niven pushed them back onstage to try to buy some time. ‘Finally, these poor guys in T.S.O.L. came offstage after playing Beatles covers. They looked at me mournfully and said, “We’ve played absolutely everything we know. We’re beat. Can we quit now?” That was the moment I had to walk onstage and say, “Tonight’s performance by Guns N’ Roses, unfortunately, will not occur due to a medical emergency.” Immediately, people started throwing shit at me and it got ugly fast. The crowd rioted and it spilled out into the parking lot, and at least one car was turned over and set on fire.’

  When they got back to the hotel, led by a seething Steven Adler, they told Axl he was fired, to which he responded with the classic ‘You can’t fire me, I was leaving anyway …’ Then he called the band’s bluff, took a car to the airport and left them to stew. ‘For about three days, it really did look like the band was over,’ says Alan Niven. But the tactic worked. He and Slash talked on the phone a few days later and Axl was back, but the pattern was set. Axl had asserted his authority, established his indispensability, and clearly demonstrated his willingness to exercise his power over and emotional control of the band. Steven Adler would later reflect, ‘It was the greatest time of my life, but one of the guys – I don’t need to name him – made it so difficult for us all. Quite often he made the best and most exciting times I’ll ever experience feel like a complete pain in the ass. Besides the loneliness and sadness I felt when I was excluded, the worst thing was to play in front of [thousands of] people and have the guy storm offstage in the middle of the first song. With no warning, he’d throw the microphone to the floor, then leave. And not come back. Quite rightly, the audience would boo, and it was an awful feeling to know there was nothing the rest of the band could do about the situation. You’d go backstage and get in a fight with the guy. He’d say, “Fuck you” and get on a plane and you’d have to cancel a lot of other shows. It’s all coming back to him now because he’s the one who looks bad. But at the time it reflected badly on all of us.’

  So much so it almost holed the GN’R bandwagon beneath the waterline. Says Niven: ‘I lost what I had just had to compete with our own fucking agent for, which was the opening slot for AC/ DC. I’d got AC/DC to agree to do that. [But] that invitation was rescinded when they heard about the Phoenix riot.’

  As ever, Axl felt his actions were entirely justifiable. ‘I guess I get mad because of some form of fear about my own weaknesses,’ he once said in a moment of deep clarity. ‘Everybody has theirs, and mine happen to be in what I do. And what I do is sing and run and get my picture taken. I’ve always needed high maintenance to keep my act together. Nothing really comes naturally to me except the desire to sing. I used to jump ship every three days. And I wasn’t crying wolf. It would usually come down to, I was leaving but there was no place to go. What am I gonna do, go to Paris, do poetry? Look at art museums and hope that not going after what I set out to do didn’t eat me alive? Go pump gas? I was leaving to pump gas a few times, and ready for it. Then, I don’t know, something in me would go, “You can deal with this now.” It just took time to be able to deal with it. A lot of my anger came from people not understanding that I needed that time.’

  As Tom Zutaut had been telling anyone who’d listen, ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ was the single that would properly break Appetite. Now they were listening. At the start of April, a couple of weeks before the album broke the US Top 10 for the first time, Guns N’ Roses shot a video for ‘Sweet Child’ at the Ballroom in Huntington Park, taking their girlfriends along, including Erin Everly, who’d inspired the lyrics, and Duff’s girlfriend, Mandy, whom he’d marry the following month. Albeit mimed, ‘Sweet Child’ is a near-perfect rendition of everything that made the band so captivating, from Axl’s cobra-swaying dance to the cigarette dangling from Izzy’s thin lips, to Slash coaxing then bullying his trusty Les Paul copy through the guitar solo: this was Guns N’ Roses at their dizzy, seductive peak. Even now, decades later, its power remains undiminished. Alan Niven realised that this was their moment: ‘They got to a point where they got a momentum that you knew was going to be unstoppable, and for me that was in the spring of ’88 …’

 
And yet, as with almost every other crucial milestone in their harum-scarum story, the ‘Sweet Child’ video so nearly didn’t happen. In fact, as far as Axl was concerned, it didn’t happen at all the way he originally envisaged it. Alan Niven takes up the story.

  ‘Eddie Rosenblatt had begrudgingly put up $35,000 to do a second video. Thirty-five grand for a video in those days was zero. Great White’s first video had a budget of over 100k.’ Axl, though, having done one video, ‘was now Martin Scorsese’ and had his own idea for the kind of video he wanted for ‘Sweet Child.’ Nigel Dick was again the director. Alan told him straight: they were going for a no-frills, straight, as-live performance video. No storyboards. No nothing but the band and the song. ‘Nigel found a room in central LA, three inches deep in pigeon shit and had it cleaned up.’ The only snag was that Axl, who’d had no ideas for ‘Jungle’, had several for ‘Sweet Child’.

  In an effort to manage expectations, Niven set up a dinner for him, Nigel and Axl. Then sat listening patiently as Axl outlined his ideas for the video in excruciating detail. ‘I told Nigel just to say yes to whatever Axl suggested,’ Niven smilingly recalls. ‘We start with the detail of a printed newspaper that had something to do with him and Erin lying in the gutter. Then the car tyre goes over leaving perfect tracks …’ He pauses and sighs. ‘By the time we were in the cornfields of Kansas, fucking Nigel is sitting at the table with eyes bigger than goose eggs. “Yeah, we can do that. Yeah, we can do that …” We come to the end of the meal and Axl is really happy because War and Peace is going to be remade starring him and Erin.’