Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  Niven maintained that ‘One of the factors is that [Axl] didn’t feel he had total control of me. Because I had other responsibilities and other interests, he couldn’t control me exclusively. I don’t think that sat very well with him. That was slightly ungrateful because there were moments in the development of GN’R where Great White were a hello for them and that’s never been acknowledged and appreciated.’ He pointed out that the ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ video ‘wouldn’t have happened without Great White. And Great White broke before Guns N’ Roses did. They went gold in the November of ’87 and that gave me a little bit of leverage I could use with GN’R. Obviously if a manager’s got one band breaking and all over radio, you tend to hook the other band on and go, yeah, look at this one, too.’

  According to Doug Goldstein, however, the division between Alan and Axl had existed a long time and had only grown deeper in recent months. Speaking now, Goldstein says he feels ‘the only reason that Niven had brought me in was because he hated Axl and Axl hated him’. He recalls a telling incident when he was sitting with Axl at the back of the tour bus ‘just after I had started with the band as their tour manager … Niven walks [up] with a piece of paper and hands it to Axl. And Axl goes, “What’s this?” Niven goes, “Lyrics.” Axl goes, “Are you fucking kidding me? You’re my manager. You’re not my co-writer. I don’t know if you think you’re Bernie Taupin or what but you’ll never fill that role with me. This isn’t Great White.” Then he opened the bus vent and let it fly. I was like, these guys just don’t like each other.’

  But while Niven acknowledges that his relationship with Axl was bruising – ‘There would be a blast and a silence and a blast and a silence,’ he says now. ‘The silences were the worst because you knew there was a blast coming. Something to complain about, some issue, something you weren’t doing right. Usually a phone call. Or [Doug] would relay the message’ – he is convinced Goldstein was an opportunist with an eye for the main chance. ‘He let the dark side take over,’ he says simply.

  According to Goldstein, though, ‘the reality is, for two and a half years Axl tried to terminate him and I told him, fuck you, you can’t he’s my partner’. He insists that at the time Niven was fired ‘Axl hadn’t spoken to Niven in about nine months. So Alan was doing the Great White stuff. I was doing the GN’R stuff. And Slash and I used to save him for about two and a half years. Axl would call and say, “He’s fired.” And I’d say, “You can’t fire him. He’s my partner.” Then I’d enlist Slash’s aid and he’d call Axl and say, “No, you’re not gonna fire him, he’s our manager.” So we kept him involved for, like, two and a half years when he should have been fired in the first place.’

  Goldstein recalls the clinching incident that in his view triggered the end. ‘Axl has his annulment come through with Erin Everly, and he’s obviously excited about it. So he calls me and says, “Oh my god, you know what came through?” I said, “Good for you. I know that’s been weighing heavy on your head. What do you say you go to a restaurant with your girlfriend and I’ll buy you guys a bottle of champagne?” He says, “Wow, Doug, thank you, that’s great.”

  ‘So he goes, “Can I talk to Alan?” I thought, oh shit, right? So then I thought, you know, maybe this is Alan’s way back in. So I go to Alan’s office, which was in the back and I said, “Alan, Axl’s on the phone”, and I said, “Look, his annulment just came through, he’s excited …” He goes, “Dougie, I know how to handle it.” He picks up the phone and Axl tells him whatever it is he tells him and Alan goes, “Really? How sad for you. Yet one other thing you failed at.” I was like, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  ‘My phone rings. It’s Axl. He says, “You heard that?” I go, “Yeah, I heard that.” He goes, “You know what, Doug? I’m tired of you and Slash saying I have to work with him. Fuck him. I’m never working with him again. I’m getting in my car.” He had this little convertible BMW. He says, “Wherever it runs out of gas I’ll be getting a job there at the local gas station. You and Slash can find me. I suggest you work this out.”

  ‘So I called Slash, which was my normal MO, and I said, “Look, Axl’s trying to fire Alan again.” And Slash says, “Doug, I’m tired of this guy …”’ Goldstein goes on to make an allegation against Niven that the latter bitterly refutes. To do with a dinner Alan had given for Slash and his then fiancée, Renee Suran. Says Niven: ‘Slash and Renee left before the first glass of wine had been broached. He said she wasn’t feeling well.’ More significantly, he remembers, this was just a few days after another dinner he had given to celebrate Axl’s twenty-ninth birthday, ‘which he failed to attend – and at which Zutaut, who had been at Axl’s with Doug, leaned into my ear and whispered, “Doug is not your friend” … As I recall, I wanted to get a sense of where the land lay with [Slash] … I guess I found out.’

  The upshot was that Doug Goldstein would take over as the manager of Guns N’ Roses, forming his own newly named Big FD [Fucking Deal] management company. When asked in 2011 about what went down when Niven was fired, Slash said this: ‘I backed Alan all the way up to a certain point and then he did actually do something that set me off and I said, I can’t fight for you any more.’ Though he quickly added: ‘But that was a volatile situation that was going to explode at some point. In other words, I can’t see how it would have turned out had we done it differently. All I can see happening is that nothing would have happened, because it would have been at a standstill. I think we probably would have broken up a lot sooner.’ He was insistent, though, that his feelings were always conflicted about appointing Goldstein as Niven’s successor. Slash in 2011 to Jon Hotten: ‘Alan was somebody that I trusted, whereas I knew Doug was somebody that played both sides against the middle. In other words, he’s telling me one thing, telling Axl another and appeasing Axl all the time. It became sort of, like … divide and conquer. And I was aware of it, but, at the same time, as long as shit was getting done I was okay. As long as we kept booking tours and I was sort of kept in the mix as far as the mechanics, that’s how we managed to get from 1990 to 1990-whatever.’

  Again, though, Goldstein has a somewhat different version of events. ‘Slash used to come to me and say, “Doug, we are so happy that you’re working with us because all Alan does is get drunk and do blow with us.” I’d come back to Alan and say, “Look, they don’t want you partying with them.” And he’d say, “Fuck off. You need to be one of them.” And I’d say, “You’re out of your mind. No, they don’t want that.” No matter how hard I tried to beat that into his head he just never got that.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve heard but I was actually very careful about preserving my sense of responsibility,’ says Alan Niven. ‘I’d get high with Izzy. Now and then with Slash. But that was it.’ The fat had been in the fire, he points out, since ‘Axl’s demand that I not go to Rio … What I did know is that the band would bend to anything from Axl to just get as much of the tour done as possible.’

  For some objectivity I asked Stephanie Fanning for her views on why the relationship between Alan Niven and Doug Goldstein ended so bitterly. Speaking down the line from her home in Malibu, she recalls: ‘During and after the Illusion records were done and they were gearing up for that tour and everything, Alan got along great with all of the band. He was the guy who would maybe have fun with them a little bit, party or whatever. But he was also the business guy and they respected and loved him.

  ‘But Alan and Axl would clash … That was no secret. Alan stands his ground. Alan doesn’t really kiss anybody’s ass. He doesn’t really say what you want to hear. He says what should be heard. It came to a point where Axl had really had enough of Alan. I think maybe Doug sat back at that time and said maybe I want to be the guy in charge. Maybe I want to be the one with all the power. Maybe I want to be the one making all the money … and Axl was also close to being done with Alan. Then Doug stepped in and kind of went with it.’

  She sighs. ‘I mean, what would all of us do at that time in our lives, at
that age? They were getting ready to do one of the biggest tours of all time with one of the biggest records of all time. I don’t know what all of us would do if you put us in that position. Cos Axl was saying, “He’s done. I want him out.” And he knows Doug couldn’t fight back.’

  *

  Doug Goldstein took over as Guns N’ Roses’ manager just as the Use Your Illusion tour was about to begin with three warm-up shows in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, and the dynamic of the band shifted once more. Slash was in no doubt that Doug was Axl’s man. Yet the world from Axl’s point of view looked very different. Slash, Duff and Matt were locked into their party-hearty lives and they weren’t planning on pulling back – hedonism and decadence were perks of the job. Izzy, meanwhile, had kicked his coke and heroin habits and was now having serious doubts about the whole escapade. And Axl knew that he had to stay pretty straight in order to sing for two hours a night: ‘I have a different physical constitution and different mind-set about drugs than anybody I’ve known in Hollywood, because I don’t abstain from doing drugs, but I won’t allow myself to have a fucking habit. I won’t allow it,’ he told Del James.

  There was also all the small stuff to be sweated. Doug Goldstein recalls one such incident he feared would derail the tour before it had even begun, involving Axl’s pets, two longhaired Maltese dogs named Porsche and Geneva. ‘Like the dogs Zsa Zsa Gabor used to have,’ explains Doug. Axl ‘used to fawn over these dogs. They basically ruled the home.’ When the singer left for a short vacation ahead of the Illusion tour beginning in earnest, he asked Goldstein if he’d look after them for him. ‘I was renting a home at the time in LA. We had a backyard. So no problem.’

  Staying with Goldstein was the band’s production manager, Dale Skjerseth, aka ‘Opie’ for his resemblance to the Opie Taylor character from the American Sixties sitcom The Andy Griffith Show. Halfway through Axl’s vacation, Opie called Doug at the office one day. ‘He says, “Oh-oh. We’re in big time trouble.”’ Opie had let the dogs outside and when they came back inside they were covered in crap, their fur thick with detritus. ‘He said, “So I took them to the groomers and said please get the stickers out of them, and I came back two hours later and they had shaved them bald!” I’m going, “Fuck me!”

  ‘We were gearing up for the Use Your Illusion tour and so all of us are on pins and needles, don’t do anything to frustrate Axl at this time. Otherwise we’re all fucking going home. In the end I said, “You know what, I’m gonna take my dick in my hands and fucking raise the courage and call Axl and tell him what happened.” I was dejected as hell. I was like, we’re two seconds away from the whole thing being pulled. What am I gonna tell the band, it’s over two fucking bald dogs?

  ‘So I get Axl on the line and I go, “Hey, bud, how’s your trip?” He goes, “Yeah, really good.” I go, “… Um. Need to share something with you.” He goes, “What’s up?” I go, “It’s about Porsche and Geneva.” He goes, “Are they okay?” I go, “Yeah, yeah … they’re doing okay.” He goes, “Doug, what’s going on?” I go, “Well, um … we’ve had a haircut. They kind of got in the backyard and all these stickers in their fur so Opie and I thought, you know, rather than hand you back dogs that were full of stickers, we’d do ahead and get them cut a little bit.” He goes, “What’s a little bit?” I go, “Well, they’re kind of shaved.” He starts laughing. He goes, “Don’t worry about it. We do that with them all the time.” I’m like, thank God! I mean my heart was pounding. I thought, I’ve got to call all the promoters … It’s not like one of the guitar players died. It’s two bald dogs.’

  Other times things could still be fun. When Tom Zutaut called Doug Goldstein one day and told him that Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to put ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ in his new movie, Terminator II: Judgment Day, Goldstein laughed and said, ‘Are you fucking high? Tom, we’re currently recording Use Your Illusion I and II, why in fuck would we go after a song that’s now four years old? This is the perfect opportunity to put together our lead track from [the new] record. What better situation could we have?’ So he pitched Arnold “You Could be Mine” …’

  Schwarzenegger loved the track so much he came back and told them he wanted to be in the video! The result was one of the iconic videos of the early Nineties, a head-rush confection of live band action and spectacular scenes from what was about to become the biggest hit movie of the year.

  Goldstein remembers the meeting at Schwarzenegger’s Hollywood home where the idea was first discussed. ‘We all went to Arnold’s house and that guy is the best salesperson I’ve ever seen in my life. Oh my god, the band was salivating at his every word. He knew what every guy liked. He knew that Niven was the port and Cuban cigar guy. He knew that I was a Diet Pepsi drinker. He knew that Slash was a Jack Daniel’s guy. He knew that Axl was a Dom Perignon guy. He knew that Duff was a Stoli guy … The thing that I loved is that he decided to put himself in the video, which was brilliant!

  ‘Another thing he did, he has [his wife] Maria in the kitchen cooking. Tell me that normally they don’t have house staff there? They made sure that they were all gone when we showed up though. So the appearance was, hey, it’s me and poor Maria, living in this big home and doing it on her own. He was so fucking calculated it was incredible! Charming and alluring and oh my god, I wanted to sleep with the guy!’ He laughs. As for Axl, ‘He loved him! He absolutely fucking oh my god loved him!’

  Out on the road, at first everything was cool, magical even. Whatever the problems offstage the chemistry was still there, especially between Axl and Slash. Axl was singing brilliantly well, absolutely at the peak of his powers. There was an almost electric charge to headlining their own arena tour – thousands upon thousands of people there not to see a festival bill as they had been in the past, but buying tickets to see the biggest, baddest rock’n’roll band on the planet. They kept the set list loose and interesting: they had at least 30 songs in the repertoire. They’d open with one of ‘It’s So Easy’, ‘Nightrain’, ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ or ‘Perfect Crime’. ‘Mr Brownstone’ and ‘Live and Let Die’ were mid-set regulars. ‘November Rain’ was Axl’s baby, played at a piano that rose up through the stage on a specially constructed platform. Slash had his Godfather solo spot and Matt played a drum solo. ‘Paradise City’ would close the show. Around them, they dotted the best of Appetite and GN’R Lies, plus some fierce takes on the Use Your Illusion highlights. As the tour ran on and the albums were released, the crowds became more familiar with the new records and the likes of ‘Civil War’ and ‘Estranged’ became mesmerizing moments too. ‘We were an unreal band with an unreal singer,’ remembered Slash. ‘Axl was amazing …’

  It didn’t last.

  Alan Niven’s last significant act as the manager of Guns N’ Roses had been to instigate a renegotiation of the band’s contract with Geffen Records. Any other label might have initiated its own renegotiation talks with an act that had now sold over ten million records in the past two years, but David Geffen was known for defiantly refusing such approaches.

  ‘I’d heard from a very good friend of mine that Howard Kaufman, who managed Whitesnake, went into David and said, “Listen, Coverdale has sold you five million albums. Let’s renegotiate the contract and pay him better.” And Geffen told him to fuck off. Howard then made the huge mistake of going back to Geffen, this time in the company of his artist, David. He thought that if he walked into Geffen’s office with the artist that that would stand Geffen down. That he wouldn’t say no to Coverdale himself. Howard had to endure the humiliation of being told to fuck off a second time, in front of his artist …

  ‘When Aerosmith hit the five million mark and asked for a renegotiation too, [Tim Collins] got kicked to the kerb real fast. And my friend at Geffen told me about this. So I knew that Howard and Whitesnake and Tim and Aerosmith had been brushed aside. So that told me that, in this instance, you don’t ask David, you fucking tell him.’

  Niven had devised a two-pronged strategy. For his
then wife’s birthday, he booked a private room at La Chardonnay, then one of LA’s most chic restaurants. Chief amongst the guests were Geffen’s president, Eddie Rosenblatt, and his wife. Having arranged to have Rosenblatt seated next to him, Niven waited while he counted the glasses of wine Eddie had. ‘Waiting until he’s had just the right amount. Then I lean against his shoulder and I say, “Please don’t react badly to this, and react quietly. But I need you to take a message back to David Geffen.” He looks at me, and I go, “Tell David that if he doesn’t renegotiate the contract we’re gonna go out on tour without finishing the album.”’

  The other arm of his strategy was his awareness that Geffen was then planning to sell the label to the Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. in Japan, in a deal that would make David Geffen a billionaire. Rosenblatt and Niven had already estimated ‘we’d do a hundred million [dollars] in gross from the first week of sales of the Use Your Illusions worldwide’. So Niven ‘knew I had [David Geffen] up against the wall a little bit because he wanted the Use Your Illusion [albums] sold and in his profitable pocket before he sold the label to the Japanese’. He adds: ‘To my knowledge it’s the only time that David Geffen has ever renegotiated an extant contract.’

  There was, though, a coda to Niven’s renegotiation, which occurred once he was out of the picture. According to Doug Goldstein, the deal that Niven had negotiated was for a massive upfront payment of $10 million, with the royalty points left as they were, which, he says, ‘started at thirteen and went to fifteen. Which for a superstar act is absolutely fucking deplorable. Normal would have been somewhere around twenty to twenty-two. So I called David Geffen’s office, and I said, “Look, I need to have a meeting with David.”’