Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  Axl answered the door and immediately turned his back on us, stomping down the corridor and launching straight into the ‘statement’. Standing there in crumpled T-shirt and jeans, his big red beard covering most of his face, he began raging about Vince Neil, who had been ‘saying some shit’ in Kerrang! – specifically, Neil’s claim to have punched out GN’R guitarist Izzy Stradlin for ‘messing’ with Vince’s wife, Sharise.

  What came next was pure Axl Rose circa 1990, part hubris, part passion, part pain, and part ludicrous hyperbole. The whole incident was ‘bullshit’, he ranted. ‘Guns or knives, motherfucker … I don’t care. I just wanna smash his plastic face’ – this last a sarcastic reference to Vince’s then recent, supposedly hush-hush cosmetic surgery.

  ‘I can’t believe this shit I just read in Kerrang!’ he snarled, holding up a copy of Kerrang! dated 4 November 1989 and yanked open at a page from Jon Hotten’s interview with Mötley Crüe. ‘The interviewer asks Vince Neil about him throwing a punch at Izzy backstage at the MTV awards last year, and Vince replies …’ Reading aloud sarcastically: ‘“I just punched that dick and broke his fucking nose! Anybody who beats up on a woman deserves to get the shit kicked out of them. Izzy hit my wife, a year before I hit him.” Well, that’s just a crock of shit! Izzy never touched that chick! If anybody tried to hit on anything, it was her trying to hit on Izzy when Vince wasn’t around. Only Izzy didn’t buy it. So that’s what that’s all about …’

  He continued ranting as I set up the tape recorder. ‘… Vince’s wife has got a bug up her ass about Izzy. Izzy doesn’t know what’s going on, Izzy doesn’t fucking care. But anyway, Izzy’s just walked offstage. He’s momentarily blinded, as always happens when you come offstage, by coming from the stage lights straight into total darkness.’ Which was when he said Vince came out of nowhere and hit Izzy. ‘Tom Petty’s security people jump on him and ask Alan Niven, our manager, who had his arm round Izzy’s shoulders when Vince bopped him, if he wants to press charges. He asks Izzy and Izzy says, “Naw, it was only like being hit by a girl” and they let him go.

  ‘Meantime … I’m walking way up ahead of everybody else, and the next thing I know Vince Neil comes flying past me like his ass is on fire or something. All I saw was a blur of cheekbones!’ He carried on like this, about how he wanted to ‘see that plastic face of his cave in when I hit him’.

  ‘Are you serious about this?’ I asked him. He said he was. ‘There’s only one way out for that fucker now and that’s if he apologises in public, to the press, to Kerrang! and its readers, and admits he was lying when he said those things in that interview. Personally, I don’t think he has the balls. But that’s the gauntlet, and I’m throwing it down …’

  We sat down in the only two available chairs not smothered in magazines, ashtrays, Coke cans, barf-balls, more ashtrays … Axl sat perched in the balcony window overlooking the pulsing neon ooze of the Hollywood hills below. He lit another cigarette and waited for me to begin.

  Axl didn’t really believe Vince Neil would take up that gauntlet and arrange to fight it out with him, surely? Still reluctant to make eye contact, he stared into space as he spoke.

  ‘I’ve no idea what he will do. I mean, he could wait until I’m drunk in the Troubadour one night and come in because he got a phone call saying I’m there and hit me with a beer bottle. But it’s like, I don’t care. Hit me with a beer bottle, dude. Do whatever you wanna do but I’m gonna take you out … I don’t care what he does. Unless he sniper-shoots me – unless he gets me like that without me knowing it – I’m taking him with me and that’s about all there is to it.’

  What if Vince were to apologise?

  ‘That’d be radical! Personally, I don’t think he has the balls. I don’t think he has the balls to admit he’s been lying out of his ass. That’d be great if he did though, and then I wouldn’t have to be a dick from then on.’

  It was so insanely ridiculous, so marvellously over the top I had to stop myself from laughing out loud. The biggest rock star in the world was offering a private audience in his own home and threatening to fight one of the other biggest rock stars in the city. Yet when the interview was published three months later, things became a whole lot less amusing.

  The first hint of trouble I had was when Arlett tried to obtain the interview tape by telling me the band wanted to run it on ‘a special GN’R phone-line’. I asked for the number of this ‘special phone-line’. That’s when the mumbling and back-pedalling began. She said she’d get back to me. She did, a few days later. This time, though, the approach was more direct. Axl would ‘really like’ a copy of the tape, because – well, how could she put this? – ‘He doesn’t think he really speaks that way.’ What? ‘You know, that he would … say … those things.’ I still didn’t quite get it. ‘Axl doesn’t believe he said those things. Huh? What does he think happened then – I made them up?’

  Silence.

  ‘But you were there …’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, hesitantly.

  ‘I even checked with him first,’ I said, remembering how I had read some of the most inflammatory quotes back to Axl over the phone – Arlett’s phone – a few weeks later, in order to give Axl the chance to retract or reword them. And how he had told me: ‘I stand by every fucking word, man …’

  ‘Yes,’ she said again, ‘I know. But if you could just send him the tape …’

  I refused. Not because I felt I had anything to hide. I had been writing about Guns N’ Roses for three years. Of all the bands I had built long-term relationships with in those days – Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, to name a few – I had always felt I enjoyed a particularly close bond with Guns N’ Roses. There had been several occasions when I had deliberately not printed certain stories, in order to underline the trust we shared. Now this. What was Axl thinking? I felt insulted, let down and very angry. I decided to wait for the whole thing to blow over. Axl was always in a shit fit about something. Tomorrow it would be somebody else’s turn.

  What I didn’t know then, though, was that Vince Neil had read the interview, and contacted Axl through various intermediaries to let him know he’d be only too willing to settle their score whenever and wherever Axl wanted. That was no surprise. Vince was a tough Mexican kid who’d grown up in a rough part of LA and was more than able to look after himself. As he related in Mötley Crüe’s 2001 autobiography, The Dirt: ‘The only thing that would have given me more pleasure than a number one record was breaking Axl Rose’s nose … I wanted to beat the shit out of that little punk and shut him up for good. But I never heard from him: not that day, not that month, not that year, not that century. But the offer still stands.’

  Doug Goldstein tells me now that the fight offer had been so serious, the boxing promoter Don King had got wind of it and offered to stage it anywhere the pair wanted. His answer, rather than ‘guns or knives motherfucker’, was to say that he hadn’t said it at all. We wouldn’t meet again for another year, at which point the situation would worsen further.

  Meanwhile, for all of Guns N’ Roses, their lives would continue to shift at bewildering speed, the madness barely easing. And as the months shot by like the lights of a speeding train, the one thing nobody seemed willing – or able – to talk about seriously was when – and if – there would be a new Guns N’ Roses album.

  ‘It was so splintered and such a struggle but I remember we finally got together after just a major rollercoaster ride of ups and downs,’ Slash recalled years later. ‘It was at my house on Walnut Drive in the Laurel Canyon hills. We compiled thirty fucking songs, more than thirty songs, in one evening. That was the one time in all of it that I remember that the band felt like itself. Just the guys like I was always used to – Izzy, Duff and Axl. We managed to put a focus on thirty-six songs. That was the only group writing session we had where we were all together in one room.’

  Slash had offered up another long song, called ‘Coma’, which he had written ‘while
I was completely stoned’. Izzy, the cool-as-fuck riff-king, had a slate of them: ‘Pretty Tied Up’, ‘Double Talkin’ Jive’, ‘You ain’t the First’, ‘14 Years’. Duff brought along ‘So Fine’ and ‘Dust n’ Bones’. Plus another Sid Vicious pastiche he had first sung for me in the kitchen called ‘Why Do You Look at Me When You Hate Me?’

  And Axl had more, too: songs on which he’d collaborated with his most trusted friends, Del James and West Arkeen. West already had a co-credit on ‘It’s So Easy’, of course, from the Appetite days, but would now also add his name to the new songs ‘Bad Obsession’, ‘Yesterdays’ and ‘The Garden’. James shared credits on the latter two as well. At the time it suited Slash’s purpose. ‘West and Axl and Del and Duff, that was more what that was like,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mind. As long as the song was good and I could do something with it. I remember “It’s So Easy” being one of those songs that when I first heard it in its original form I was like, whatever, but then I got to it and changed it to what it sounds more like now. I remember “The Garden” being really good. But, no, I didn’t mind too much. I was usually too preoccupied doing whatever debauched shit I was doing. If everybody was busy doing that, nobody was looking over my shoulder while I was doing what I was doing.’

  Looking back now, though, Slash acknowledged that the evening on Walnut Drive was, in retrospect, the end of something, one of the last times they were all together. ‘That was a very poignant moment,’ he said. ‘And the next thing you know we were looking for drummers …’

  8

  FLYING LIKE A SPACE BRAIN

  We had all seen in the New Year in 1989/90 by joining in with the chimes on MTV … 8, 7, 6, 5 … That is, myself, Slash, Duff, Arlett and several other Hollywood hound dogs, rising high on champagne, weed and whatever else our happy gang of over-entitled sun dogs it felt right to be doing round about that time and place … 4, 3, 2 … HOORAY!

  It felt like a good time to be alive. And yet the next couple of months would give me a startlingly contrasting view of just how upside-down life in LA could be, the twin faces of comedy and tragedy combining to – though I didn’t know it then – shred my career into confetti. I would recover. Everyone who went through the demented excesses of the 1980s would have to find a way to recover eventually or simply never be seen again. But it still amazes me how quickly the highs turned to lows. But then it still amazes everybody I’ve spoken to who ever had anything to do with Guns N’ Roses in their full toxic bloom how suddenly shit turned to gold and then platinum – and then back to shit again. Haunting all of us for the rest of our professional days.

  What follows are two interviews I did, first with Slash and Duff, then the more sensible parts of the Vince Neil-related interview I did with Axl, over the days that followed that New Year’s Eve party. The first, intended for broadcast on a show I presented in those days for Capital Radio in London, captures the spirit of Guns N’ Roses in the late-late-show era of the big-haired Eighties better than anything else I probably did with them. It’s not clever but it is funny. The second, conducted in those twilight hours Axl has always preferred to do his business in, now weighs heavy with portent – with the things that troubled Axl then, and several clues as to the things that would continue to trouble him in all his days to come.

  I set them out here as clear and unvarnished as I am able.

  The Capital Radio interview between myself and Slash and Duff, which was conducted in West Hollywood one drunken evening on the second day of January 1990, was never eventually broadcast, for obvious reasons, as you will see. But it is presented here in its full, inglorious glory.

  It begins with the sound of a very drunk Duff singing: ‘Doe, a deer, a female deer …’ Then my voice, in radio presenter mode, explaining to them that although we are prerecording the interview the show itself will go out live. ‘So you can say or do whatever you like, but …’

  Slash: Can we say ‘fuck’ in it?

  Mick: If you must, but try and keep it to a minimum, okay?

  S: Oh, cool. Okay.

  M: So, imagine it’s a Saturday night in London.

  S: Is it raining? Most likely …

  M: Just follow me, okay? I’m gonna start. Right. Slash. Duff. Thank you both for coming on the show …

  S: Well, thank you for letting us watch you come. [Much sniggering.]

  M: [starting again]: Okay, here on Capital FM I’m talking to Slash and Duff from Guns N’ Roses. It’s the day after New Year’s Day … Did you both have a good time over Christmas and New Year?

  Duff: Oh, yes! Oh, yes!

  S: Fucking wonderful …

  D: Oh, yes! We’re gonna go and do our record pretty, uh … like, in two weeks.

  S: Yeah, so anybody who’s been wondering, it will happen.

  M: That’s good, because you know what people have been saying in England – that you’re never gonna make another record because you’re such bad boys you’ll never get it together …

  D [blowing a huge raspberry]: AAHHH! PUUHHHSSSSTTTTT!! They’re WRONG!

  M: Do you have anything to add to that, Slash?

  S: Yeah! Fuck YOU … Ha, ha! No. We’re gonna make another record. We’ve just been through a lot of shit, you know. It’ll be fine. Just relax. It’s gonna be a really good one, too. It’s gonna be very …

  D [interrupting]: Imagine, like, riding on the Tube. Getting, like, one of those Tube tickets and riding on the Tube and then, like, getting lost on the Piccadilly Tube, and then you go to the Thames Tube and then it’s like, you get on another Tube and you get lost and lost and lost …That’s what happened to our band, kind of, like, in the fucking … broad scale of things. And we ended up on the Thames River in the rain. That’s, basically, what happened …

  M: … the band were on the River Thames in the rain and that’s why the new album didn’t get made last year?

  S [nodding enthusiastically]: We were drunk, we were lost and we had nowhere to go … And my top hat got fucking ruined …

  D: And now we’re back dry in the, er … somewhere dry.

  S: No, no, the thing is, it’s not like we’re … um … I won’t mention any names. But we’re not like some bands who make records like jerking off…

  D: POISON?

  S: No, no … It just means a lot to us, so we’re just taking our time with it and …

  D: WARRANT?

  S: Sshhh …

  D: BRITNEY FOX?

  S [giggling]: It’ll come back to haunt you, I promise you.

  D: No, I’m just kidding. No, what happened was … the album went wuuhhh! And then we went wuuhhh!

  S: No one expected … I thought – no offence to Lemmy or any of those guys – but I thought it would be like a Motörhead album, it would just come out and, you know, no big deal … Yeah, right.

  D: We went through a lot of stuff and then, after that, it took us a while to recoup and deal with our own lives.

  S: You get places to live …

  D: And deal with our own lives.

  S: And girlfriends …

  D: And deal with our own lives.

  S: Oh! That’s true! We all broke up with our old ladies today.

  D: Divorce!

  M: This is an official announcement, is it?

  D: Okay, this is in England – that’s many area codes away, right? Well, I got divorced, girls …

  M: Okay, before we get any further …

  D: No, let’s get much further!

  S: No, this is deep! This is deep!

  M: We’re gonna go much further, but first we’re gonna play a Guns N’ Roses track. Which track shall we hear?

  D: ‘Nightrain’!

  S: No! No, no, no, no, no, no, no … ‘You’re Crazy’.

  D: You’re crazy …

  S: I’m nuts, but no, play ‘You’re Crazy’ …

  D: Okay, ‘You’re Crazy’.

  S: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no! Fuck, I can’t remember the name of it …

  D: ‘NIGHTRAIN’!


  S: No! Everybody plays ‘Nightrain’ … Um … [starts snapping fingers] … um …

  D: Are you going down?

  S: No, no, no, no, no! Um …

  D: We don’t even remember our own record … ‘It’s So Easy’?

  S: No, the one … ‘ … pulls up her skirt’. The song we never play any more? [Both start humming two completely different riffs loudly. The interview has already descended into full-blown Spinal Tap absurdity.]

  D [looking at me]: You know the song we’re talking about … [starts humming again].

  S: No, wait, wait! We have to figure this one out. [Both start singing and humming and clicking fingers etc.]

  S: God, this is horrible … Um … ‘My way, you’re way …’

  D: ‘ANYTHING GOES’!

  S: ‘Anything Goes’!

  M [jolly radio voice]: Okay, this is ‘Anything Goes’ …

  D: By us, yes!

  [I back-announce the record and we get back into interview mode. Sort of.]

  M: What were we talking about?

  S: Nothing in particular … We got rid of our girlfriends, that was major.

  D: That was major! And both on the same day!

  S: On the same day! It was serious …

  M: Okay, let’s talk about the girlfriends …

  D: No. Let’s talk about music.

  S: Yeah, sure. It’d be more …