Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  ‘The other aspect was that I looked at it and said financially you get a better return on two separate albums than you do on a double, you earn more in royalties. And it hadn’t been done before [in the new CD era].’ He recalled how the 1968 Jimi Hendrix double album, Electric Ladyland, had originally been sold as two separate LPs. ‘There was some sort of sense of precedent and it could be viewed as critically valid. We had a huge cloud to get out from under and that was the incredible sales of Appetite. I was very nervous of a situation where we might sell two million double albums, having sold at that point something like 12 million of Appetite.

  ‘I had a meeting with Rosenblatt, and he pushed a pencil and a piece of paper at me and said, write down what you think we’re going to do. Believe it or not, I wrote down that I thought we’d do four million of each single album, which meant we could say we’d sold eight million albums. That, I thought, would have a sense of continuity as opposed to drop-off. Rosenblatt loved it because fiscally it worked better for Geffen than a double album. He could absolutely see the intelligence behind it.’

  There would eventually be two albums: Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II – the title lifted from a Mark Kostabi artwork of the same name that Axl had recently become fascinated by. Nevertheless, Niven admits, he was ‘fucking terrified’ when he broached the idea with Axl. ‘Can you imagine what a retail disaster that would have been if that had been a fucking double album priced at fucking $29? We’d have done one and a half million if we’d been lucky, and we were coming off eight [of Appetite]. It would have been a fucking nightmare. I sat Axl down and said, “We’ve got a working-class following. You wanna charge them thirty bucks in one go? If we do it as two separate albums they can buy one, one week, and one the next. And you’re not digging into their fucking grocery money, Axl.” And he bought it! He bought it.’

  So, ultimately, did everyone else. Doug Goldstein says the only argument he can remember having with Axl in those days was over how to release the two Use Your Illusion albums. ‘My argument was let’s release two really strong albums away from each other, which will lengthen the arc of tour cycle time. But Axl was stuck on the fact that nobody had ever entered the charts at 1 and 2 at the same time, and he wanted to do that. And in fact he did.’ Indeed, within a week of release, Use Your Illusion II had gone straight into the US charts at Number 1, with Use Your Illusion I right behind it at Number 2. This was now about more than just success. This had become a cultural signifier, a piece of living history, the last great event of the vinyl and CD era.

  Axl had also insisted on wrapping both CDs in a facsimile of Kostabi’s original painting: a detail from The School of Athens, one of the most famous frescos by the sixteenth-century Italian High Renaissance painter Raphael – with Use Your Illusion I coloured yellow and red, while Use Your Illusion II came in purple and blue. A young Estonian-American artist who first came to the attention of the New York art scene in the Eighties, Kostabi’s work was a kind of Warholian expression of designer chic (a Blooming-dale’s shopping bag) and curation (his NY studio, dubbed Kostabi World, employed a number of ‘painting assistants’ and ‘ideas people’). For Alan Niven, Kostabi was ‘an art scavenger deeply [that] didn’t do anything except sign his name to stuff that he had people put together. And he’d scavenge images from historical pieces.’

  Nevertheless, Axl was happy to pay Kostabi $85,000 for the painting so that he could use it for the covers. Niven now maintains, however, ‘We could have used that painting for the artwork and Kostabi couldn’t have done nothing about it because he was using public domain images.’ He goes on: ‘While I’m looking at it and thinking, great when it comes to the merchandising, we don’t have to pay Kostabi or anybody else a dime, it always made me smile to think of Axl writing a huge cheque to this guy when he could have had Del James paint similar backgrounds, cut out the same image, stick it on and give Del a six-pack.’

  Despite the over-elaboration of the packaging, the overselling of the importance of the music, the bent-over-backwards desire to do something that was simpler bigger and better than anything so far produced in a time and place that thrived on believing it was the biggest and best at everything, the end product would be an impossible-to-swallow-whole maze of musical journeys that crisscrossed and overlapped, collided spectacularly and, in some cases, seemed to lead nowhere, before taking off again on another wondrous musical expedition. Ultimately, where Appetite for Destruction had expressed a single vision – a compelling and irresistible one-note howl of angst and ambition – Use Your Illusion would see the personalities and artistic aspirations of the band shatter into their component parts. Everyone seemingly alone out there spinning around in space, moving at the speed of light from one tripped-out farscape to another without once looking down for fear of falling, falling, falling …

  ‘When it comes to Use Your Illusion, somewhere in there is one perfect album, no longer than fifty to sixty minutes,’ reckoned Alan Niven, looking back. Yet it was the sheer audacity of releasing so much material in one go that said the most about them. Use Your Illusion I and II became albums that said plenty about their time. They are indulgent, bloated by lengthy cover versions and created by men who weren’t hearing the word ‘no’ too often. And yet they are also unafraid and unapologetic, and they contain some of the best work Guns N’ Roses ever produced. Interestingly, too, they lend perspective to the band’s two other major releases: a clear line can be drawn through them from Appetite for Destruction to Chinese Democracy. ‘When I look back on it, it was a monumental achievement,’ said Slash, years later. ‘The first thing I think of when I think of those albums is that it was such a whirlwind of shit was happening at that particular time, but it was a huge accomplishment. I think the Use Your Illusion records, if you know the back-story, were very victorious. After all of it, we came through.’

  ‘That record polarised people. I’ve come to understand that, and I’ve come to be at peace with the whole thing,’ said Duff McKagan in 2011. ‘I only figured this out recently. “When are you guys gonna get back together?” Well, none of us guys have said we’re going to. I wonder if some people – not all – if some people think if we got back together, they’d get their teenage years back? Are they asking us to get back together so that they can get their youth back, even for a minute? The title of the record, it’s fucking appropriate, when you think about it …’

  They would also provide a commercial peak that no one would enjoy again. ‘Most people go through life saying, “I wonder what it’s like to get to the apex of your occupation,”’ Alan Niven concluded. ‘A lot of people spend their lives worrying about anonymity. But when you get to the apex of your occupation, you find out it’s a fucking illusion, it doesn’t exist. And when your anonymity is compromised, you find out its value. The toll came later and when it did come it hit hard. I went through the severest depression you can go into, the bottom of the black pit. I felt that everything I loved and believed in had proved itself worthless and all the relationships I’d put stock into had realised a betrayal.’

  With Niven and Adler gone, with Izzy on the brink, with Slash and Duff blindsided by their drug habits and their desire for a hassle-free, rich-rock-star life, with Doug Goldstein in place and Axl in control, with the money rolling in and fans across the world ready to pack stadiums in which to watch them play, the scene was set for a takeover, and that was exactly what was going to happen.

  PART TWO

  Real’s a Dream

  ‘The junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.’

  William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

  10

  THIS SIDE OF HELL

  Slash shook his head and smiled that crooked smile. ‘It’s like, I thought, once we get out of LA and back on the road, everything will work itself out again,’ he said. ‘But, like, that’s when everything got rea
lly crazy. I mean, out of control! Like, we went out on tour again after all this time and … like … never came back …’

  Things had been strange for a long time. Now, in Brazil, in January 1991, where Guns N’ Roses were booked to appear for two nights at the Rock in Rio festival, things got seriously weird. They’d almost finished Use Your Illusion, and Alan Niven had booked them their first full-length live shows since the LA Coliseum gigs with the Rolling Stones in October ’89. Only snag: Axl, via Doug Goldstein, had informed Niven that he would not be welcome in Rio. The festival itself – the second of its kind after a money-grab debut in 1985 – was a fortnight-long bacchanal that saw half of the rock world decamping to three hotels in the city: bands, crews, broadcasters, record company types, press, wives, girlfriends, groupies, hangers-on and anyone else who could lay their hands on a laminate and the price of an air fare, all sequestered at either the Rio Palace or Copacabana Place hotels on Copa beach. Or, in the case of Guns N’ Roses and their entourage, a few miles away at the even more exclusive Intercontinental hotel, high on a cliff overlooking Ipanema beach.

  The shows themselves were to take place at Brazil’s most famous football stadium, the Maracana, and would run for nine nights. Guns N’ Roses and the other headline acts, Prince and George Michael, were booked to headline two shows apiece, with A-Ha, New Kids On The Block and INXS taking care of the others. All sorts of support acts were there, too, from the teenybopper Disney queen Debbie Gibson to Woodstock veterans Carlos Santana and Joe Cocker, plus battle-hardened hell-raisers the Happy Mondays and Billy Idol, and experienced stadium rockers like Judas Priest, Queensrÿche and Faith No More.

  Guns N’ Roses had rehearsed at Long Beach before flying to Rio three days before their first show and rehearsing again at a small facility in the city. Along with the new material, the shows would be the first for Matt Sorum and new keyboardist Dizzy Reed, so there was already a different vibe around. I was in Rio to write about the whole demented circus and the creeping paranoia and the sense of change were right there, too, and I could feel both like a cold wind on the back of my neck. It had the Vince Neil interview at its root, a story that had rotted away in Axl’s head, a supposed injustice that spelled doom not just for this writer but for any others that now put in requests for interviews. From now on journalists and photographers would be required to sign written agreements, essentially forfeiting control of their own material: Axl’s latest attempt to try to control every aspect of his environment.

  A two-page document giving the band copyright ownership and approval rights, on pain of a $200,000 damages claim if violated, though impossible to enforce in practical terms, naturally proved immensely unpopular with all sections of the media in Rio. A host of important magazines refused to sign the contracts, including Playboy, Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, Spin and Penthouse. Axl, though, merely shrugged. As Geffen Records’ publicity chief, Bryn Bridenthal, commented: ‘In twenty-five years of doing publicity I’ve never dealt with a press contract before, but when you deal with this band, you deal with a lot of firsts.’ Although the contracts would later be revised, dropping the $200,000 penalty, they would become a source of ill-will throughout the forthcoming world tour.

  Had we all taken a step back at that moment, however, we would have seen the dimensions of their universe, the Big Bang expansion that they were living through. The Appetite for Destruction tour had begun at the Marquee in Wardour Street with the band holed up together at a cheap rental flat in Kensington. The Use Your Illusion tour began when they travelled to Rio de Janeiro on a Boeing 727 leased from the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas. ‘It was a great crash pad,’ recalled Slash. ‘It was pretty ornate: it had all of these little private lounges and bedrooms.’

  They liked the 727 so much they hired it for the rest of the tour. And while the jet was bigger than the apartment they’d stayed in for the Marquee shows, they’d been a gang back then, tight and inseparable. Now, Steven was gone, and the gaps between them were widening. ‘We got the gigs supporting the Rolling Stones,’ remembered Duff in 2011. ‘We’re massive Stones fans, so that was great for us. We got down there and the Stones each had their own limo, their own trailer, their own lawyer – you know, Mick has one, Keith has one, Charlie has one … I remember turning around to Izzy and saying, “Man, we’ll never be like that.” Of course, six months later, that was us …’

  While they were in LA the divisions had been easier to hide, or at least to ignore. Thrown together on the road, in the plane and at the hotel and the sound check and the gig and the inevitable party afterwards, it was easy to spot that Guns N’ Roses had split into three camps. There was the party-hardy duo of Slash and Duff, who were quickly joined by Matt Sorum; there was Axl, who had the constant worry about keeping his voice in shape and who was consciously isolating himself from the worst excesses of drugs and booze; and there was Izzy, still clinging to sobriety but whose doubts about his future in the band were mounting by the day as the tour stretched out before him, apparently endless. As Slash would write in his memoir: ‘Duff and I had our new party buddy Matt and no matter how many days we’d stay up, we could always play the gig. We just felt like we were kings of the world; we had a good time with everything and we always did our job. Izzy, unfortunately, was shell-shocked; he was trying his best to keep away from our whole partying scene, so the tour from the start wasn’t as much fun for him. And Axl; well I won’t pretend to know what was going on with him, then, now or ever.’

  It was a key admission. The world may have seen Axl and Slash as the natural successors to Mick and Keef, the self-styled Glimmer Twins embodying the look, sound and lifestyle of their band, but it was miles from the truth. Axl and Slash had never been that close on a personal level, happy to write together and play together on stage, but equally happy to leave each other the fuck alone off it. Like much else about Guns N’ Roses by the early Nineties, ‘Axl and Slash’ was already an illusion, existing mainly in the minds of the fans who wanted it to be true. The Rock in Rio shows, it was hoped, would re-announce and redefine Guns N’ Roses as a viable entity. Live like a suicide! This would be bigger, brasher and more spectacular than before, widescreen entertainment for the new masses of fans – 130,000 per night in Rio. But without Steven and with the additional keyboards of Dizzy Reed, it sounded different. On huge stages with a vast production, the band looked different, too, marionettes dancing in the mid-distance. The set lists were unfamiliar, as ‘Civil War’, ‘Estranged’, ‘Double Talkin’ Jive’ and ‘Pretty Tied Up’ were tucked amongst the Appetite hits, along with Slash’s ‘Godfather Theme’ solo, a Matt Sorum drum solo and a snippet of Alice Cooper’s ‘Only Women Bleed’.

  When at the end of the festival they flew back to LA to finish working on the Use Your Illusion material and to begin production rehearsals for the tour proper, no one knew that the lollapalooza of endeavour and excess that had begun in Brazil would run, in all, for two and a half years, a labour of love and blood that would change the lives of almost everyone who took part. ‘The expanding gap between Axl and me and between Axl and the rest of us got pretty wide while we were having the records mixed,’ admitted Slash. Tapes were being couriered from the studio to Axl’s house, a situation the guitarist felt was merely ‘tolerable’.

  It was to be an interview given by Slash to Rolling Stone soon after Rock in Rio that became the next bump in the road. In it, Slash likened his relationship with Axl to ‘two fucking Japanese fighting fish in the same bowl. We’ve always been the same. We have our ups and downs, and we butt heads. As long as I’ve known Axl, we’ve had so many differences that have been like the end of the line as far as we were concerned. I think that happens with most singers and guitar players, or whatever that cliché is. It might look a little intense on the outside, seeing all this shit that we’re going through, but it makes for a tension that’s – in a morbid kind of way – really conducive to the music we collaborate on. But as far as Axl goes, he is the best singer-lyricist aro
und.’

  The magazine ran the piece as their cover story at the end of January, and ‘from what I understand Axl was cool with it,’ said Slash, ‘or at least didn’t see anything wrong with it at first’. But when the guitarist arrived at Long Beach Arena for production rehearsals for the tour just days after the magazine had been published, he found the straitjacket he’d bought as a Christmas gift for Axl left on his guitar amp for him to discover as he walked onstage. ‘It was exactly the sort of eggshell walking the band had become,’ Slash said of the days of silent treatment that followed. It was a classic pattern that many would recognise from a bad marriage; the non-communication, the feeling that any small incident could set off another uncivil war.

  ‘I think he and I are just completely different people,’ Slash later reflected. ‘In the early years I worked really hard to understand him so that we could be close, and I would feel that there was a point where there was an understanding and then he would turn around and any number of things would happen where I would feel completely deceived, and that builds up such a distance. When we were touring we were never in the same room except when we were onstage, and that kind of lack of communication is what builds animosity in a volatile situation – with two within the group of powerful people working in tandem but really completely far apart.’

  It wasn’t just Axl and Slash who were now locked in a battle for ultimate control of Guns N’ Roses. It was Alan Niven and Doug Goldstein. In a 2011 interview, Niven recalled how, in March of 1991, just as Bill Price had completed his mixes, he was at a Great White show at the Meadowlands in New York when he got a phone call from Axl, who told him that they could no longer work together. ‘I said, “Well, I’ll be back in LA in a couple of days, let’s have dinner and talk about it”, and that was the last time I ever spoke to him. He agreed we’d have dinner. My perception was, maybe this is permanent, maybe it’s not. Obviously he had his agenda.’