Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  ‘Then the chorus came about because I like getting really far away, like “Rocket Man”, Elton John. I was thinking about friends and family in Indiana, and I realised those people have no concept of who I am any more. Even the ones I was close to. Since then I’ve flown people out, had ’em hang out here, I’ve paid for everything. But there was no joy in it for them. I was smashing shit, going fucking nuts. And yet, trying to work. And they were going, “Man, I don’t wanna be a rocker any more, not if you go through this.” But at the same time, I brought ’em out here, you know, and we just hung out for a couple months – wrote songs together. Had serious talks, it was almost like being on acid cos we’d talk about the family and life and stuff, and we’d get really heavy and get to know each all over again. It’s hard to try and replace eight years of knowing each other every day, and then all of a sudden I’m in this new world. Back there I was a street kid with a skateboard and no money dreaming about being in a rock band, and now all of a sudden I’m here. And it’s weird for them to see their friends putting up Axl posters, you know? And it’s weird for me too. So anyway, all of a sudden I came up with this chorus, “You’re one in a million”, you know, and “We tried to reach you but you were much too high …”’

  I asked about the fact that so many of his lyrics were littered with drug analogies. My point was that back in the Sixties and Seventies this would have been par for the course. But in the all-new, more hypocritical atmosphere of the uptight Eighties, such things now tended to mark the band out as different from the rest. Was that the real point, or were they all just hyper-autobiographical?

  ‘Everybody was into dope then and those analogies are great in rock songs – Aerosmith done proved that on their old stuff, and the Stones. And drug analogies … the language is always, like, the hippest language. A lot of hip hop and stuff, even the stuff that’s anti-drugs, a lot of the terms come directly from drug street raps. Cos they’re always on top of stuff, cos they gotta change the language all the time so people don’t know what they’re saying, so they can keep dealing. Plus they’re trying to be the hippest, coolest, baddest thing out there. It happens. So that’s like, “We tried to reach you but you were much too high” – I was picturing ’em trying to call me if, like, I disappeared or died or something. And “You’re one in a million” – someone said that to me real sarcastically, it wasn’t, like, an ego thing. But that’s the good thing, you use that “I’m one in a million” positively to make yourself get things done. But originally it was kinda like someone went, “Yeah, you’re just fucking one in a million, aren’t ya?” And it stuck with me.

  ‘Then we go in the studio, and Duff plays the guitar much more aggressively than I did. Slash made it too tight and concise, and I wanted it a bit rawer. Then Izzy comes up with this electric-guitar thing. I was pushing him to come up with a cool tone, and all of a sudden he’s coming up with this aggressive thing. It just happened. So suddenly it didn’t work to sing the song in a low funny voice any more. We tried and it didn’t work, didn’t sound right, it didn’t fit. And the guitar parts were so cool I had to sing

  it like, HURRHHHH! So that I sound like I’m totally into this.’

  It certainly didn’t sound like he was faking it on the record, I said.

  ‘No, but this is just one point of view out of hundreds that I have on the situation. When I meet a black person, I deal with each situation differently. Like I deal with every person I meet, it doesn’t matter.’

  Had he taken any abuse personally from black people since the controversy over the song first broke?

  ‘No, not actually. Actually, I meet a lot of black people that come up and just wanna talk about it, discuss it with me because they find it interesting. Like a black chick came up to me in Chicago and goes, “You know, I hated you cos of ‘One in a Million’.” And I’m like, “Oh great, here we go.” Then she goes, “But I ride the subway …” All of a sudden she gets real serious. She says, “And I looked around one day and I know what you’re talking about. So you’re all right.” I’ve got a lot of that …’

  What about from other musicians?

  ‘I had a big heavy conversation with Ice Cube,’ he mentioned casually. One of the five-man team of rappers known as NWA [aka Niggerz Wit Attitudes] whose track “Fuck tha Police” had caused so much heat it had every cop in LA gunning for them, with Ice Cube coming up with key lines like “I don’t know if they fags or what / Search a nigga down, and grabbing his nuts …”’

  According to Axl, Cube had written him a letter, ‘wanting to work on “Welcome to the Jungle” cos he’d heard I was interested in turning it into a rap thing. He wanted to be part of it. Anyway, we ended up having this big heavy conversation about “One in a Million”, and he could see where I was coming from all right. And he knows more about that shit than most.’

  Finally, we let the gnarly topic of ‘One in a Million’ go. Axl lit another cigarette, opened another can of Coke, and we steered the conversation back to the next Guns N’ Roses album. ‘There’s, like, seven [finished] songs right now,’ he said, ‘but I know by the end of the record there’ll be forty-two to forty-five and I want thirty of them down.’

  Was he thinking of making it a double album then?

  ‘Well, a double album or a single, seventy-six minutes or something like that. Then I want four or five B-sides – people never listen to B-sides any more – and that’ll be the back of another EP. We’ll say it’s B-sides, you know. Plus there should be four other songs for an EP, if we pull this off. So that’s the next record and then there’s the live record from the tour. If we do this right, we won’t have to make another album for five years,’ he added with a crooked grin.

  Five years? Seriously? Why would he want to wait that long?

  ‘It’s not so much like five years to sit on our asses,’ he said. ‘It’s, like, five years to figure out what we’re gonna say next, you know? After the crowd and the people figure out how they’re gonna react to this album.’

  What kind of musical direction does he see the band taking on this next album then? (This was not a question one would have asked, say, Mötley Crüe or Bon Jovi, but it was clear even then that Axl always had bigger things in mind for Guns N’ Roses.)

  ‘This record will show we’ve grown a lot,’ he said with a straight face. ‘But there’ll be some childish, you know, arrogant, male, false-bravado crap on there, too. But there’ll also be some really heavy serious stuff.’

  It had been such a long time since Appetite for Destruction first came out, though – nearly three years at that point – wasn’t there the possibility of a backlash building up in time for the new album?

  ‘It doesn’t fucking matter. This doesn’t matter, man. It’s too late. If we record this album the way we wanna record this album, it could bomb, sure. But five years from now, there’ll be a lot of kids into it in Hollywood. Ten years from now, it’ll be an underground thing like Aerosmith and Hanoi Rocks. The material has strong enough lyric content and strong enough guitar parts, you’ll have no choice. It’ll permeate into people’s brains one way or another. If the album doesn’t sell and be successful, some day in ten years from now someone’s gonna write a record and we’re gonna be one of their main influences, and so the message is still gonna get through. Whatever we’re trying to say and the way in which we try to say it, we pay attention to that. If we get that right, the rest just takes care of itself. There is an audience for what we’re saying that’s going through the same things we are, and, in a way, we are leading.’

  How conscious was he of their perceived role as ‘leaders’?

  ‘It’s been … shown to me in a lot of ways. I didn’t want to accept the responsibility of it really, even though I was trying, but I still was reluctant. Now I’m kind of into it. Because it’s like, you have a choice, man, you can grow or die. We have to do it – we have to grow. If we don’t grow, we die. We can’t do the same sludge, I’m not Paul Stanley, man! I can’t fucking play sludge,
man, for fucking thirty years. Sludge, man. It’s sludge rock.

  ‘That’s one of the reasons why 1989 kinda got written off. We had to find a whole new way of working together. Everybody got successful and it changed things, of course it did. Everybody had the dream, when they got successful they could do what they want, right? That turns into Slash bringing in eight songs! It’s never been done before, Slash bringing in a song first and me writing words to it. I’ve done it twice with him before and we didn’t use either of those songs, out of Slash’s choice. Now he’s got eight of ’em that I gotta write words to! They’re bad-assed songs, too.

  ‘I was working on, like, writing these ballads that I feel have really rich tapestries and stuff, and making sure each note, each effect, is right. Cos whether I’m using a lot of instrumentation and stuff or not, I’ll still write with minimalism. But it has to be right; it has to be the right note and it has to be held the right way and it has to have the right effect, do you know what I mean?’

  Actually, I was taken aback. I hadn’t realised that the man who’d written ‘You’re Crazy’ and ‘Out ta Get Me’ was such a perfectionist. ‘What people don’t understand is there was a perfectionist attitude to Appetite. There was a definite plan to that. We could have made it all smooth and polished. We went and did test tracks with different people and they came out smooth and polished. We did some stuff 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.

  ‘We knew what we were doing, and we knew this: we know the way we are onstage, and the only way to capture that energy on the record, okay, is by making it somewhat live. Doing the bass, the drums, the rhythm guitar at the same time. Getting the best track, having it a bit faster than you play it live, so that brings some energy into it. Then adding lots of vocal parts and overdubs with the guitars. Adding more music to capture … because Guns N’ Roses onstage, man, can be out to lunch! But it’s like, you know, visually we’re all over the place and you don’t know what to expect. How do you get that on a record? That’s the thing.

  ‘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 and it’s a shadow of that. You might like it better. It’s still not exactly what you pictured in your head. But you go into the studio and 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. It’s like you’re doing a painting and you go away and come back and it’s different. You allow different shading to creep in and then 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?’

  I noted that they were using Clink again to produce the new album. Axl was insistent, though, that they would also be bringing in extra elements to their sound that simply weren’t available to them first time around.

  ‘We’re trying to find Jeff Lynne,’ he said. Jeff Lynne? The mastermind behind the Electric Light Orchestra and, more recently, the Traveling Wilburys? I struggled to picture Jeff Lynne working with Guns N’ Roses. Not Axl, though. Turned out he’d been an ELO fan throughout his teens.

  ‘I want him to work on “November Rain”, and there’s, like, three or four possible other songs that if it works out I’d maybe like him to look at.’ As an additional producer to Clink? Or to contribute some string arrangements? ‘Maybe some strings, I don’t know. Cos this record will be produced by Guns N’ Roses and Mike Clink. I might be using synthesiser – but I’m gonna say I’m using synthesiser and what I programmed. It’s not gonna be like, “Oh, you know, we do all our shows live”, and then it’s on tape. That’s not gonna be the thing. I mean, I took electronics in school. It’s like, I don’t know shit about synthesisers but I can take a fucking patch-chord and shape my own waveforms and shit, you know? So now I wanna … you know, jump into today. I’ve never had the money to do it before. Maybe someone like Jeff Lynne can help me. It’s a thought.’

  Of course, as we know now, using synthesisers and ‘jumping into today’ was to become a thought that grew in Axl’s mind to the exclusion of almost all others in the 1990s. For now, though, it was all about enhancing the band rather than going all the way back to the drawing board. Axl had recently told another magazine writer that if ‘November Rain’ wasn’t recorded to his complete satisfaction he would actually quit the music business. ‘That was then,’ he shrugged. ‘At that time it was the most important song to me.’

  Had he been serious, though, about quitting the biz? ‘Yeah, that’s the fucking truth, all right. But the worse part of that is, like, if you wanna look at it in a negative way, I’ve got four of those motherfuckers now, man! I don’t know how I wrote these, but I like them better than “November Rain”! And I’m gonna crush that motherfucking song, man! But now I’ve got four of them I gotta do, and they’re all big songs. We play them and we get chills. It started when I came in one day with this heavy piano part, it’s, like, real big, and it fits this bluesy gospel thing that was supposed to be a blues-rocker like “Buy Me a Chevrolet” by Foghat or something. Now it’s turned into this thing, like “Take Another Piece of Heart” [by Janis Joplin] or something …’

  My head was still swimming over the notion of Guns N’ Roses, the most dangerous band in the world, working with Jeff Lynne, the most anonymous rock star in the world. Why him? Was Axl a closet ELO fan?

  ‘Oh yeah, I’m an ELO fanatic! I like old ELO, Out of the Blue, that period. I went to see them play when they came to town when I was a kid and shit like that. I respect Jeff Lynne for being Jeff Lynne. I mean, Out of the Blue is an awesome album. So, one: he’s got stamina. And two: he’s used to working with a lot of different material. Three: he’s used to working with all kinds of instrumentation for all kinds of different styles of music. Four: he wrote all his own material. Five: he produced it! That’s a lot of concentration, and a lot of energy needed. Hopefully, I would like, if he’s available, to have him. He’s the best. But I don’t know if we can get him or not.’

  Intrigued as to what other artists he’d been influenced by, I asked him for his three favourite songs from his youngest days, the ones that still burned large in his musical memory. I’d become so used to Slash and Duff citing bands like Aerosmith, Motörhead and the Sex Pistols, it hadn’t occurred to me until right then that Axl might have a much broader range of inspiration to draw from.

  The first song he picked was by Led Zeppelin. Very Guns N’ Roses, actually, you might say. Except that the track he picked was one of Zeppelin’s least acclaimed; indeed, one of the tracks they were originally lampooned for: ‘D’Yer Maker’, from their Houses of the Holy album – and a minor US hit single in the summer of 1973. Only Axl pronounced it Dyer Maker – until I explained that it was actually a play on the word ‘Jamaica’, said with an English accent, based on the song’s self-conscious reggae-feel.

  He stared at me. ‘Wow. I never knew that. When I was in grade school I used to write down the names of, like, all the novelty songs. Like “Spiders and Snakes” [by Terry Jacks] and stuff like that. Then I heard “D’Yer Maker” and I made fun of it like crazy. I was telling everybody about this weird song I’d heard on the radio. So I’m laughing at it and this and that, but by recess in the afternoon I’m sitting in the corner with my pocket radio and I just had to hear that song again. I mean, I had to hear it. That was, like, the first case of “I have to hear that song.” I had it going through my head and I had to hear it.’

  It was his belated discovery of Zeppelin’s music, he said, that ‘got me into hard rock’. Axl was just 11 at the time and had never heard of them before. ‘I heard that and then I was hooked. After that I was Led Zeppelin all the way. That song just blew my mind. I thought, how does he write
like this? How does he feel like this? I mean, cos everything around me was, like, religious and strict. Even though we were in a city we went to a country church and stuff. I mean, the language was so much different. There was no, whoa, cool vibe and stuff, like in that Zeppelin song. It was like, how did he think like that, you know?’

  Axl’s expression darkened, however, as he recalled how it was while trying to learn the chords to ‘D’Yer Maker’ on the family piano that he first got ‘knocked right off the piano bench’ by his stepfather. ‘I would play and then I would do the drum-break on the top and just beat the shit out of the piano. Then get knocked right off. Pow!’

  The second track that had influenced him most back then, he said, was ‘Benny and the Jets’ from the 1973 Elton John double album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Axl said he was also a great fan of Elton John’s lyricist, Bernie Taupin. So much so, he said he’d love to be able to interview Taupin about his lyrics. (Interestingly, when Taupin was later asked for his opinion of Axl’s own lyrics, he claimed he was ‘an admirer’, particularly of the lyrics to ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’.)

  ‘Elton John is just the baddest!’ Axl said grinning. ‘There’s nobody badder when it comes to attacking the piano and using it in a rock sense. I mean, you’re gonna tell me that “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting”, or “Grow Some Funk of Your Own”, or, like, “Ballad of a Well-Known Gun” or “Somebody Saved My Life Tonight” and things like that, ain’t heavy songs? There’s no way! Those guys wrote seven number one albums in the US from, like, ’72 to ’75. Bernie Taupin was twenty-five years old, writing off the top of his head, writing albums in two hours! And the guy’s vocabulary and education …’ He shook his head in awe.