Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  There was another aspect to the tour, however, that Axl also instigated which was much less publicised. Doug Goldstein explains: ‘Well, you know, Axl did come up with a great idea on the Metallica tour … different educational organisations, homeless causes, Greenpeace, anybody that had kind of a nice message to be delivered, we allowed them to set up in the concourse and deliver their messages. And that was Axl’s idea and it was a great idea, because those were very, very well-attended booths, and the organisations that were brought in loved the opportunity to do that. You know, when you’re in a 100,000-person stadium and you get to pass out educational material to people, that was Axl’s successful attempt at giving back.’

  Behind the scenes, Axl was also doing everything he could to try to get to the root of whatever it was that continually scratched at his insides like an unfinished feeling. Interviewed in 1992 for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, he spoke candidly of the intensive therapy sessions he had been undergoing, in terms of improving his mental attitude to his relationships with both men and women. ‘I reached a point where I was basically dead and still breathing,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have enough energy to leave my bedroom and crawl to the kitchen to get something to eat. I had to find out why I was dead, and why I felt like I was dead. I had a lot of issues that I didn’t really know about in my life and didn’t understand how they affected me. I didn’t realise that I felt certain ways toward women, toward men, toward people in general, and toward myself. The only way to get through that was to go back through it and find it and re-experience it and attempt to heal it. I’m still working on that but I’m a lot further along than I was.’ Meanwhile, he likened his relationship with the band as ‘kinda like a marriage and a half, or a marriage and a household’. Especially his relationship with Slash, which was ‘definitely a marriage’.

  He also spoke of his radically new perspective on the rock’n’roll lifestyle; specifically, the drug taking and heavy drinking Guns N’ Roses appeared to endorse. ‘I would also like it to be known that I’m not a person to be telling the youth of America, “Don’t get wasted.”’ Too many bands that had publicly cleaned up ‘talk about things they did and how they were wrong. I don’t know if it was necessarily wrong. It helped them survive. At the time they weren’t given the proper tools to do the proper healing. I personally don’t do any hard drugs any more, because they get in the way of me getting to my base issues, and I’d rather get rid of the excess baggage than find a way to shove it deeper in the closet, at this time in my life.’

  He confessed that the overwhelmingly negative critical reaction to ‘One in a Million’ had also helped him change. ‘I went out and got all kinds of video tapes and read books on racism. Books by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Reading them and studying, then after that I put on the tape and I realised, “Wow, I’m still proud of this song. That’s strange. What does that mean?” But I couldn’t communicate as well as I do now about it, so my frustration was just turned to anger. Then my anger would be used against me and my frustration would be used against me: “Look, he’s throwing a tantrum.”’

  Meanwhile, onstage, once they eventually got there, Guns N’ Roses were as brilliant as ever, with Gilby slipping unobtrusively into the Izzy role, his cool good looks and easy style fitting well with Slash’s shirt-off, king-of-cool persona. But the show was affected so often by Axl’s lateness, his unpredictable moods, the atmosphere being punctured like a balloon, Slash likened it to an athlete preparing for a race: there was an optimum moment when they were ready to go, but when that moment passed, adrenalin began seeping away to the point that, once they were onstage, it took a few songs for the rush to return and the band to really hit their groove.

  ‘The reality is that touring for Axl was a painstaking process,’ says Goldstein. ‘We had the $10,000 exercise machine put into his room every day that he’d get on. His routine was about a four-to five-hour routine daily, between chiropractic, massage, two hours of vocal warm-up and warm-down.’

  The singer now had his own expensively assembled retinue of chiropractor, masseuse, vocal coach, bodyguard, driver, personal assistant, PR, manager and gaggle of friends like Del James and Dana Gregory, his psychotherapist, Suzzy London, and a new, even more influential figure in his life: a professional psychic he had recently become enthralled by named Sharon Maynard. The head of a non-profit organisation based in Sedona, Arizona, Arcos Cielos Corp (from the Spanish for ‘sky arcs’), describing itself as an ‘educational’ enterprise, specialising in ‘channelling’ past lives, extra-terrestrial intelligence and the power of crystals, Maynard was a short, middle-aged Asian woman who had started to take a central role in Axl’s life that would stretch throughout the rest of the decade. Operating out of her own countryside home, where she lived with her husband, Elliott, a kindly grey-haired man, ‘Dr Elliott and Sharon Maynard’ had both been thanked in the Use Your Illusion liner notes. Known to the rest of the band and touring crew as Yoda (after the goblin-like mystic in Star Wars), Maynard had a role on the road that was less specific than London’s, but Axl’s reliance on them both grew equally important. According to a crew member, Yoda and her own assistant ‘were like aliens’.

  Every major decision Axl now made was in consultation with Maynard. ‘Slash and Duff – everybody – would say, who is this gal and why is she involved in a lot of the business decisions? I said, “You know what? I told Axl my opinion.” Which I did. I just questioned certain things and said those to him. And she was able to turn that around. Didn’t attack me. I think she knew better than that, cos Axl and I were very close and she didn’t want to play whose dick was bigger. But she handled it incredibly well. I’m a firm believer in that we all have our own beliefs and that we’re entitled to those. I had a responsibility as his manager to air my feelings. I told him that I respect any and all of the decisions that he made about his life cos it’s his life … I told him, “All I am is a conduit to your dreams. I’m not a dream maker, you tell me what your dream is and I’ll figure out how we’re gonna get there. I’m a facilitator of dreams.”’

  According to Axl, ‘It’s like, I have a pit crew. And it’s like, I’m a car.’ The chiropractor also stood at the side of the stage each night so that Axl could get adjusted between songs. And for a while he was taking up to 60 vitamins a day. ‘We do muscle testing and kinesiology,’ he explained. ‘We do chiropractic work and acupuncture. We do cranial adjusting. Oh, yeah. On a daily basis. I’m putting my life back together, and I’m using everything I can.’

  Everybody – from the lowliest bag carrier to the loftiest record company executive – was also now forced to sign confidentiality agreements forbidding them from commenting publicly on any aspect of the tour without Axl’s express permission first, and then only in writing. Whatever ‘regression therapy’ he was undergoing, paranoia was still the main order of the day and Axl was more determined than ever to exert complete control over any given situation he now found himself in.

  For all their efforts behind the scenes, though, the one thing Maynard, London and co. could not protect Axl from was random acts by his own fans. Ten days into the tour with Metallica, at Giant Stadium in Rutherford, New Jersey, on 29 July, during the last song, ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’, swaying back and forth in his white spandex shorts, white buckskin jacket and white cowboy hat, Axl was hit in the genitals by a cigarette lighter thrown from the audience. Doubled up in pain, he turned his back on the crowd, threw his microphone into the air, tore off his hat, and staggered to the side of the stage where he complained to Doug Goldstein that his voice had gone. ‘He literally came over to the side of the stage and goes [gruff voice], “I can’t talk. What do you want me to do?”’

  Duff took over briefly on vocals while the crowd began chanting, ‘Axl, Axl, Axl!’ But there was no way he was coming back and when the house lights came on the crowd just stood there for a while before filing out, dejected. The very next day an announcement was made claiming Axl had sustained ‘severe da
mage to his vocal cords’ and that the next three shows – in Boston, Columbia and Minneapolis – would all have to be rescheduled, although it was whispered amongst the crew that the latter had been cancelled on the orders of Yoda, who was ‘concerned’ about disruptive ‘magnetic energy concentrations’ around Minneapolis.

  Slash began to wonder whether Axl actually felt that he was heightening the atmosphere and anticipation with his elaborate preparations. ‘I think it was all building up what Guns meant to him in his mind,’ he observed in his memoir. ‘And in the face of that he simply could not comprehend how what he was doing did not make complete sense to us or the rest of the world.’

  Maybe he was onto something. It’s tempting to interpret Axl entirely through his actions, to see him as some kind of ego-riddled tyrant dictating his terms of business to the world, placing himself and his needs above those of the band, the crew, the paying punters and everyone else with a stake in seeing Guns N’ Roses play live. Yet run the film backwards and watch it through Axl’s eyes and another reality suggests itself. Guns N’ Roses is his life’s work, his greatest achievement. He has just poured into it his best songs about the rawest and most difficult moments in his life. He’s immensely proud of what he has created and he wants to present it to the world in the best possible way. Ranged against him are people in record companies, promoters, managers and a million other hangers-on, plus a band with whom he used to be tight but who now spend most of their time blasted out of their brains and failing to understand why he’s not having a good time, too. All of these people have agendas, be they business or personal, and they want something from him – time, money, something – and all of it in some way detracts from what he is trying to do. As a perfectionist, it drives him crazy, fuels the rage. He can see it, so why can’t they? So he controls whatever he can still control.

  He was a sensitive, shy, angry guy, clever and misunderstood and living in circumstances very few people could imagine. All of the past-life regression and the various therapies and thinking and searching he’d done came back to one thing: his childhood, and how it had been taken away from him; how his father’s abuse had left him marooned emotionally in his early years. ‘When they talk about Axl Rose being a screaming two-year-old, they’re right,’ he once said. Now he wasn’t medicating that pain but trying to express it artistically.

  When the film was run that way, a lot of what Axl Rose did and how he was made to do it made much more sense. There was no denying that, when it worked, the Guns N’ Roses of 1992 was the most spectacular event in rock: 250,000 watts of power, a maniacal fireworks display featuring 20 bangs, 28 sparkles, 15 airbursts, 20 flashes, 25 waterfalls and 32 fountains. Axl, now relying for parts of the set on a teleprompter for his lyrics, took to changing his stage outfits on almost every other song, from spandex shorts to leather kilt to Jesus/Bukowski/Manson T-shirts, to another that read: Nobody Knows I’m a Lesbian. The highlight was always his beloved ‘November Rain’, which he sang his heart out to while seated at a grand piano that rose into the middle of the stage with the piano designed to look like a motorcycle seat. Slash would casually climb atop the motorcycle for his back-arching guitar solo.

  ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ would end the set, a large red sign flashing the words: GUNS N’ ROSES, GUNS N’ ROSES, GUNS N’ ROSES … If Axl allowed an encore, which was never a given, they would stride back on for a blood-pounding version of ‘Paradise City’, the whole 12-piece band returning one last time for a bow, arm in arm, looking for all the world like the cast members surrounding the star of a major theatrical production, right down to the moment when Axl would toss roses into the crowd. Followed by more fireworks, the red lights now flashing: THANK YOU WE LOVE YOU, THANK YOU WE LOVE YOU … The very last thing the crowd would see each night would be a cartoon of a butcher chopping off his thumb and yelling, ‘Son of a bitch!’ before chopping off his arm and then his head, which was left twitching in a large pool of blood. What the hidden meaning of that was no one knew, but it made Axl laugh.

  Meanwhile, back in the so-called real world, Slash was planning his wedding to Renee Suran, although the relationship, which would be made official in October 1992, when the pair were finally hitched in Marina Del Rey, was by his own admission interrupted by various dalliances, including a fairly serious involvement with Perla Ferrar, who would later become his second wife. Duff married his second wife, Linda Johnson, a month before Slash married Renee.

  The subject of Slash’s prenuptial agreement led to trouble soon after the Metallica dates had resumed. In San Francisco the couple got into a row about it, and Slash sloped off to score some dope from a pornstar friend of his and her boyfriend. The trio got loaded on crack and smack in Slash’s hotel suite, the guitarist taking it too far and briefly OD’ing. He was taken to hospital and when he got back to the hotel, a furious Doug Goldstein sent a bottle of Jack Daniel’s flying through the TV set in Slash’s room. ‘You know the Narcan scene in Pulp Fiction?’ Goldstein asks, referring to the scene where the unconscious Uma Thurman character is jolted back to life after a heroin overdose by the drug dealer stabbing her in the chest with a syringe full of naloxone, a prescription medicine used by paramedics in emergency situations to reverse an opioid overdose. ‘We carried that,’ he says matter-of-factly.

  ‘I hit Slash with that on five different occasions. The fifth time that he went code blue, we were in San Francisco on the Metallica tour. I got a call at three o’clock in the morning: Slash is dead outside the elevator. I ran outside with the Narcan. Hit him in the chest. The EMT showed up, took him away, and myself and a couple of the other guys, we kicked the shit out of the drug dealers.’

  When Slash returned from the hospital early the next morning Doug was waiting for him in his suite, along with Earl Gabbidon, Axl’s personal security guy, John Reese, the tour manager, and Slash’s bodyguard, Ronnie, ‘who we used to call Slash on steroids. He looked just like Slash, identical, only very muscular,’ recalls Doug. ‘We’re sitting there and I said, “Slash, you’re done. You don’t do this any more.” And Ronnie his bodyguard’s crying. I saw that and I’d known Ronnie since I was seventeen years old, and I’d never seen him emote at all. I said, “Slash, look at Ronnie, you’re really gonna do this to your best friend?”

  ‘He says, “You know what? Fuck you! Fuck Ronnie! Fuck all you guys. Get the fuck out of my room. I’m gonna continue to do whatever the fuck I wanna do!” And some trigger snapped in my head and I started throwing shit and by the time I left I’d done $75,000 damage to the room. And I quit. I said, “You know what, I’m fucking out of here! Go fuck yourself! I’m not gonna watch my family kill themselves.” So I woke up my wife, put her in the car. We were off to the airport.

  ‘Then John Reese went to Axl and told him what happened, and Axl said, “Well, if Doug’s gone, I’m gone.” Then he went to Slash’s room and said, “Just wanna let you know, now that Doug’s quit, I’m quitting too. I suggest you try and make amends with Doug or I’m not gonna be at this Saturday’s show with Metallica at the Rose Bowl.”’ Back in LA the next day, Slash drove down to Doug Goldstein’s place in a limo. ‘He said, “What’s it gonna take?” I said, “Rehab. As soon as the Metallica tour’s over, you’re going straight in.”’

  He pauses, sighs. ‘Whenever I talk about it I allude to the bunker mentality in wartime. You know, three guys in a bunker and shots are being fired over their heads and they’re bunkered down for a week at a time. By the end of that week there’s so much PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder] that takes place and you’ve gotten so much closer because of it.’

  It was also left to Doug Goldstein to have a serious word with Duff, when his drinking became so bad he could barely play the bass any more. He had the sound engineer make him a recording on DAT purely of Duff’s playing. ‘Listening to it, it was like, doink! Doink! Then a gap. Then … doink! I’m like, what the fuck? I’m like, “Look, man, you need to stop drinking so much before the show. I don’t care how much you
want to drink after the show. That’s between you and your god. But it’s affecting the show therefore it’s affecting the kids who paid a ton of money to come to the show.” Duff’s like, “You’re crazy. I’m not playing like shit.”’

  Goldstein waited a few days, then called Duff into his hotel room one afternoon, where had a stereo was set up with a DAT player, and at a time when he knew he wouldn’t be drunk yet, and played Duff the tape. ‘It was a recording of the bass channel from the desk, so that was all you could hear. I played him ‘Sweet Child’. Again, it’s like, doink! Doink! Doiinnnkkkk!!! Not only is he not playing the parts, he’s not even playing them on time. I’m trying desperately not to laugh. You can tell he’s really embarrassed. But after that Duff cut down on his drinking before the show. He would drink [before] but substantially yes. Cos he was pretty much pickled the entire tour.’

  Goldstein, who still maintains that Axl Rose is ‘the most talented, intelligent, giving guy I’ve ever worked with, who has a wonderful sense of humour, which people don’t know about’, now feels, however, that, as he says, ‘I don’t think there would have been Slash’s and Duff’s horrendous drug and alcohol use had they not been scared shitless that Axl was gonna leave them hanging on a stage again.’

  Had they grown fearful of him by then, I wondered?

  ‘I don’t think they were fearful at all. I think they grew angry at having to stand up on stage and play alone. Matt Sorum used to come to me all the time and say, “I’m going in there and kick his fucking ass!” I used to say, “Come on, man. You do that we’re all on the way home.” Finally he comes to me at Axl’s dressing room door, and he goes, “That’s it, get the fuck out of my way!” And I’d had it with Matt’s bravado so I said, “Go ahead.” He walks in and I don’t hear any trashing of furniture or anything.’ Instead, when Doug went in to check on the situation a few minutes later, ‘He’s sipping champagne with Axl. Like, oh yeah, way to go, tough guy. You had your golden opportunity …’