Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  There was another element to Niven’s thinking, though, that he was not prepared to share with the Stones or anyone else for now but was crucial to his thinking. The fact was, after nearly a year off the road during which all five of them had splintered off into different, sometimes frightening worlds, Guns N’ Roses as a working band were in no fit state to go on the road – at least not until four-fifths of them had cleaned up. Apart from the audacity of countering Mick Jagger, whose love of a dollar bill was legendary, it was one of the few cards Niven had to play. When Niven went to watch the Stones play in St Louis he got worried all over again. The show was still a revue, but the Stones were hot again, Keef oozing cool, revivified by a successful solo record and tour, Mick still impossibly athletic and vital. Guns, by contrast, looked near death.

  Nevertheless, Niven’s gamble had worked. Guns N’ Roses would receive a million dollars for their four shows opening for the Rolling Stones, appearing between the opening act, Living Colour, the all-black rock band also then hot-as-a-pistol following the success of their double-platinum debut album, Vivid, and the headliners. Now all they had to do was turn up on time. But with a couple of hours to go before the first Stones gig, with 77,000 people already in the venue, Axl Rose was a no-show. The problems had begun a week or so before, at a video shoot for the Appetite track ‘It’s So Easy’ at the Cathouse, directed once again by Nigel Dick. ‘We always wanted to do a video for that song,’ Axl told me. ‘We’re gonna have a home video at some point, so we wanted to do some videos that were, like, completely no-holds-barred, uncensored type of things. Just live shooting, instead of worrying about whether MTV is gonna play it. Just go out there and do a fucking blown-out live, real risky video.’

  The video, which featured sadomasochistic scenes involving Erin, was never officially released. Alan Niven saw to that. ‘I get a call from Nigel Dick saying Axl had called Nigel direct, saying, “I want to shoot some footage for this.” Nigel’s going, “You are going to go fucking ballistic when you see this stuff.” He’s got her hung from the doorway and slapping her ass, the mouth-gag and so on … Lots of fun [but] you don’t put it in a fucking video that represents the entire band and put it out there for the whole world to see.’ The upshot was that Niven ‘wouldn’t let the final edit be done and I got the offline copies. The reason for that was I knew he was committing suicide with that bondage shit with Erin. And lo and behold he got divorced. So you know what they would have done with that? I protected the little fuck.’

  As if to compound a night of negative energy, David Bowie had shown up to see Slash, and had started talking to Erin Everly, who was appearing in the video. Axl had taken one look at that and started throwing punches Bowie’s way before having him thrown off the set. ‘Bowie and I had our differences,’ Axl shrugged when I asked him about it. ‘And then we went out for dinner and talked and went to the China Club and stuff, you know, and when we left I was like, “I wanna thank you. You’re the first person that’s ever come up and said I’m sorry about the situation.” And then I open up Rolling Stone the next day and there’s a story in there saying I’ve got no respect for the Godfather of Glam even though I wear make-up and all this bullshit. It’s laughable.’

  Axl wasn’t laughing though when, at the warm-up for the Coliseum shows, a club gig promoted as an RIP magazine party, he told Izzy he didn’t want to play with the Rolling Stones. Izzy was taken aback but not hugely concerned. Axl was always worried about things to a ludicrous extent. He hadn’t wanted to do the Aerosmith tour, then looked back on it as the highlight of the year. Whatever happened, Niv would handle it. Then, at 6 a.m. on 18 October, the morning of the first show, Axl rang Izzy and told him he was quitting Guns N’ Roses. Again, however, Izzy was unsure how seriously to take the claim. Axl, by his own admission, ‘quit the band every three days’, as he’d told Howard Stern in a radio interview just a few weeks before.

  This time, though, it was different. With controversy over ‘One in a Million’ still raging, Living Colour’s vocalist, Vernon Reid, had voiced strong concerns in the press. In order to avoid any possible clash at the Coliseum shows, Axl and the band had been allotted their own separate area backstage, on the opposite side from Living Colour’s dressing rooms. According to Colleen Combs, Axl’s personal assistant, he was already so ‘paranoid’ about the reaction his first major appearance on stage since the controversy over ‘One in a Million’ started would provoke, ‘he really thought someone was going to take him out. He thought someone was going to kill him.’

  When Izzy arrived at the Coliseum that afternoon, he passed the news along to Alan Niven. ‘It’s gonna be a long four days …’ he said. Niven, who’d been there before, knew it could go either way: Axl hadn’t actually told anyone else he was quitting, just Izzy. Maybe he’d wake up feeling differently. Or he just wouldn’t show up and Niven would face the worst day of his professional career. As the hours till show time dragged by, and Axl still failed to arrive, backstage the tension in the GN’R dressing room was such that Doug Goldstein was almost in tears. When Living Colour took to the stage, Niven knew it was time for desperate measures. Once again, he didn’t flinch from taking them.

  As he says now, Axl not turning up for a show ‘was not an altogether novel circumstance and it did not necessarily mean he wouldn’t eventually come’. However, his non-appearance at the show in Phoenix the previous year had produced a minor riot with considerable property damage. Now, though, they were playing for much bigger stakes. ‘A riot by 77,000 disappointed stadium stoners was quite probable in the event Axl did fail to show. The consequences could be genuinely catastrophic. The tragedy at Donington still haunted my consciousness.’

  Niven turned to Stones’ production chief Brian Ahern and asked him, ‘Brian, do you have a real solid contact in the LAPD? A genuine “no questions” kind of a guy?’ Ahern answered, ‘I’ll send him in.’ Without another word, Ahern made the call. ‘Cool and completely without confusion or stress, Brian is an exceptional individual and I will for ever appreciate his calm and his confidence,’ says Niven. ‘I spoke with his contact. Within minutes a “black and white”, containing a reliable pair of uniformed cops, pulled up at the Shoreham Towers.’ The uniformed cops raced up to the twelfth floor and began banging on Axl’s front door. ‘The startled occupants were herded down to the cruiser. Sirens wailing and all lights ablaze, the police car sliced through the evening traffic.’ The car drew up at the very foot of the steps leading to the stage. It was in this manner that Axl arrived in the Coliseum to appear before 77,000 LA-generates, a mere 25 minutes behind schedule.

  As Axl stepped out of the police car he had a face like thunder. When he was then told that Vernon Reid, speaking from the stage, had given a short speech halfway through Living Colour’s set, to the effect that anybody who called somebody else a nigger was promoting racism and bigotry, no matter how hard they tried to explain it away, he was apoplectic. When he was then told that large sections of the Coliseum crowd had stood on their seats and applauded loudly, whistling and cheering their approval, he was ready to kill somebody. ‘We went out with a mission,’ Reid later explained. ‘I made a statement about “One in a Million” onstage, and I remember afterward Keith Richards made it a point to come over to the dressing room and shake my hand.’ Ultimately, he says, ‘When I heard that song, I was probably more disappointed than anything, because I liked the band. [But] I thought the objectification was wack, like I’m somehow standing in the way of this guy.’

  When word got back to the GN’R dressing rooms about Reid’s putdown – and that it had received a standing ovation – concern over how Axl might react was such that no one could bear to make eye contact with him. Guns N’ Roses took the stage just before 8 p.m. The band was still tuning up, getting ready to blast off, when Axl grabbed the mike and told the audience, ‘Before we start playing, [I want to say] I’m sick of all this publicity about our song.’ He then denied he was a racist, but insisted that certain words – agains
t groups of people who offend you – was acceptable, in an artistic context. ‘If you still want to call me a racist,’ he bellowed, ‘you can … shove it …’

  The band cranked into gear and Axl began his manic perambulations around the stage. Now, though, a moment of black comedy was added to the spidery farce. Axl, who had refused to come and view the construction of the Stone’s massive stage ahead of the show, found himself blinded by several follow-spots as he attempted to race back from one side of the stage. He ran clear off the stage and plunged into the photographer’s pit. ‘I stopped breathing,’ says Niven. Then slowly a hand holding a microphone emerged from the darkness as, slowly, two security men hoisted Axl back onto the stage. Now, with embarrassment added to his anger and frustration, he went for broke. The second song of the set was ‘Mr Brownstone’. Axl stomped to the lip of the stage and told the crowd: ‘I just want to say … I hate to do this onstage, but I tried it every other fucking way. And unless certain people in this band get their shit together, this will be the last Guns N’ Roses show you ever see …’

  It was a typical piece of Axl grandstanding. The review in the LA Times the next day described it as ‘both a troubling and fascinating display – one that will probably go down as a storied moment in LA rock. Rose has the potential to be one of the most compelling figures in American rock since the late Jim Morrison.’ But below the surface it was another case of events in his life conspiring to send Axl Rose into a tailspin. Not only were the band rusty and drugged out – Slash’s heroin dealer had a backstage pass – and not only had he discovered David Bowie hitting on his girlfriend, but a few days before the shows he had been contacted indirectly by William Rose’s brother, who’d told Stuart that William Rose was dead. ‘Great family,’ Axl told me with a mournful shrug. ‘I don’t even know how he died. And I don’t care …’

  Axl had been referring onstage specifically to Slash and Steven. Slash, whose mother, Ola, was at the show, told me afterwards that he had thought about walking off when Axl made his shocking little speech. However, there was no denying that he was, as he put it, going through another ‘really bad phase’. Nevertheless, he admitted he’d avoided meeting any of the Stones because he was so ‘high out of my gourd … That was during my real wasted days, and basically when you are high like that you don’t care who it is; nothing was more important than getting on with what I had to get on with.’

  Steven, who was now shooting up smack on a daily basis, had been even more appalled. ‘[Axl] said to me, “Just start playing ‘Brownstone’,”’ he recounts. ‘So I’m playing “Brownstone” and he comes out and says everybody’s fucked up on dope. He was so gone that I’m hiding there behind the drums thinking, I don’t know this guy …’

  According to Duff, everyone ‘was pissed off at [Axl] for that. But I can say I was pissed off with Axl for doing that because I was not one of the guys that he was talking about. I mean, I just walked into that thing. So I was furious, of course. But the next day we were on the phone together, and, you know, it was okay, he explained his reasons for doing it. [Axl] was blowing off a lot of steam about a lot of shit. A lot of shit … That’s what happens with this band, we don’t bottle shit up. We just let it out.’

  According to Alan Niven, at the end of the set Axl had raced off the stage, ‘head down and radiating an intense glower, warning all and everyone not to approach him’. As he headed for the dressing rooms, David Geffen himself approached from the top of the stairs.

  ‘Great show, Axl,’ said David.

  ‘Hope you liked it, fucker,’ Axl nearly spat. ‘Because it’s the last one you’ll ever get.’

  Niven, who was behind Axl, recalled how Geffen looked stunned. ‘Leave it, David. I’ll fix it,’ he told Geffen. Though, ‘God knows how, I thought to myself.’

  Early the next day, both Alan Niven and Doug Goldstein drove to Shoreham Towers to check on Axl, see if perhaps he’d cooled down and changed his mind about – yet again – leaving the band.

  ‘Axl was in bed and he was not going to leave it,’ Niven later wrote. ‘Not for anything or anyone. On his way to the apartment I had suggested Dougie stop and get a bag of donuts, a very, very large one.’

  Axl sat in bed and complained about Slash. He complained about Steven. He complained about Duff. He complained about everyone and everything but his worst vitriol was reserved for Slash. He didn’t care if he had a show. He did not care that it was with the Stones, in front of 77,000 more people. He hated Slash. He wasn’t going to go on a stage with him ever again.

  ‘All Doug and I could do was to listen and listen and listen and keep him talking. And feed him donuts. As the morning wore on into the afternoon the sugar began to build in his bloodstream – a tsunami sugar rush was developing. Axl began to get animated. His legs began to jerk fitfully under the sheets. Energy was building with nowhere for it to go. It was just enough for us to be able to persuade Axl that if, and that would be a big “if”, we could get Slash to apologize to Axl, for his heroin use, for whatever, and in public, then maybe, possibly, perhaps, he might think about doing the show.

  ‘I quietly slipped into the living room. I got on the phone with Slash. “I don’t want to hear anything but a groveling apology, Slash,” I growled into the phone. “I don’t care how you feel or whether it’s justified in any way shape or form. It’s the only chance we have to get him on stage today and that’s all that matters right now.”’

  Whether Slash would comply with such demands was moot. As Niven so elegantly put it: ‘Anyone who is not sharing the needle will have, at the least, some degree of resentment about those who are – there’s almost nothing quite as selfish, detached or destructive as a smack habit. Addicts, of course, always have the arrogance of their superior and totally misplaced belief that they have control of their usage.’

  Axl, though, ‘surely had grounds to be pissed, but his method of dealing with the situation had the selfishness of the narcissistic sociopath. Axl wasn’t that concerned with Slash’s condition as much as he was mad that Slash was not demonstrating a dutiful compliance to Axl’s whim and will …’

  In the end, Slash went along with it. Partly because it suddenly felt like if he didn’t it was he who would be blamed for the band fucking up their biggest engagement yet. Partly, perhaps, because he knew Axl had a point. As well as the aborted trip to Hawaii, Doug Goldstein had taken Slash into his Hollywood home to try to detox. But again with less than satisfactory results. As he describes: ‘It was prior to my being married but my soon-to-be first wife was with me.’ For ten days, they put up with Slash ‘crawling on my floors, vomiting, defecating, urinating … And I’m cleaning it up.’ When Goldstein had to leave for a couple of days to go on tour with Great White, he says, he came home to stories of Slash waking up his flatmate, Ross Goza, in the middle of the night screaming for drugs. Goza was a music director for LA’s biggest rock radio station, KNAC. ‘He was woken up with Slash choking him, saying, “You’re gonna drive me to fucking Los Angeles! [To score.] And you’ll never tell Doug or I’ll fucking kill you!” And Ross is like, “Okay.” So Slash wrote him a cheque, which Ross still has …’

  Even before the Stones shows, ‘I was tired of taking him to rehab facilities that he would check himself out of the first night,’ says Goldstein. He had even taken to paying people to spy on him. ‘Slash used to score at a magazine stand. So there was this guy in the office building across the way, and I was paying him, and he would call me and say, “Oh, yeah, your guy was by today. Twice!”’ In that long, dark period after they came off the road from the AFD tour, trying to keep track of them ‘was crazy’.

  Whatever his reasons, in the end Slash swallowed his pride and made an apology to Axl. ‘With great reluctance he said he would consider repeating it onstage,’ Niven remembers. ‘Axl, in turn, halfheartedly agreed to consider coming to the show.’ Slash duly made his own announcement from the stage that second night vowing to quit his evil ways. ‘… Last night I was up here and didn
’t even know it,’ Slash told the crowd. ‘Smack isn’t what it’s all about. No one in this band advocates heroin. We’re not going to be one of those weak bands that fall apart over it.’ Or as Alan Niven puts it: ‘Bless his heart, Slash took the bullet for the team.’ As for Axl, says Niven, ‘He had proven that he could make almost everyone bend to him. His future power grabs, his demand for control and ownership of the name, started to become clear in his mind. Perhaps it was at that very moment, full of donuts and angry at being hauled to a show in a police car, under threat of being handcuffed, that he decided what he wished the future of the band to be.’

  When, a few weeks later, I asked Axl about it, he was still adamant he’d done the right thing. ‘That was definite and that was serious. I mean, I offered to go completely broke and back on the streets, cos it would have cost, like, an estimated $1.5 million to cancel the shows, okay? That means Axl’s broke, okay? Except [for] what I’ve got tied up in Guns N’ Roses’ interests or whatever. But I didn’t want to do that because I wouldn’t want the band to have to pay for me cancelling the shows. I don’t want Duff to lose his house cos Axl cancelled the shows. I couldn’t live with that. But at the same time I’m not gonna be a part of watching them kill each other, just killing themselves off. It’s like, we tried every other angle of getting our shit back together and in the end it had to be done live. You know, everybody else was pissed at me but afterwards Slash’s mom came and shook my hand and so did his brother.’

  He said that Elton John had actually sent flowers to his dressing room after the first show with the Stones. ‘Yeah, it was great. He sent these flowers and a note. He didn’t mean it against the Stones. It was meant towards the press and anybody else who was against Guns N’ Roses. It said: “Don’t let the bastards grind you down! I hate them all too … Sincerely, Elton John.” That was just the greatest.’