Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  Things got messy quickly. Axl’s lawyers petitioned for a restraining order after alleging Seymour had taken cocaine in his house in the presence of her two-year-old son, Dylan. According to another friend, Axl also believed he and Stephanie had been together in more than 15 past lives. Then, when Erin Everly found herself subpoenaed to give evidence in Seymour’s lawsuit, she decided to file one of her own, accusing her former husband of assault and sexual battery.

  Axl now had to endure the grimmest details of his personal life being discussed openly in court. Erin’s former flatmate Meegan Hodges-Knight testified under oath about such things as the night she woke up to overhear Erin begging Axl, ‘Please stop. Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me’, as Axl screamed at her. ‘And then all of a sudden he’d come out and he’d, like, break all of her really precious antiques, and she would be, “Please don’t break them, please”, and trying to get them back from him. And he’d push her and he’d break everything that he could get his hands on. I remember sleeping and waking up to crystal flying over my head, shattering on the floor.’

  Meegan had been the love of Slash’s life when she was in her teens. She stated that she had told Slash she was going to ‘do something’ about Axl but that the guitarist had stopped her, saying, ‘No, you’re going to make it worse.’ Meegan also asserted in her sworn deposition that she’d witnessed Axl kicking Everly and dragging her around by the hair one night. He then threw a television set at her, she said, which had luckily missed, and then spat on her. ‘That pig,’ said Meegan scowling.

  In her own sworn deposition, Erin described in shocking detail the occasion when Axl tied her hands to her ankles from behind, put masking tape over her mouth and a bandanna over her eyes, then led her, naked, into a closet, where he left her bound and gagged for hours. When Axl finally allowed Erin to leave the closet, she said, he picked her up and placed her face down on a convertible bed. He then ‘forced himself on me anally really hard. Really hard.’

  Erin also testified that Axl believed she and Seymour had been sisters in a past life and were now ‘trying to kill him’. Axl had also told her ‘that in a past life we were Indians and that I killed our children, and that’s why he was so mean to me in this life’. Erin also claimed that Axl had removed all the doors in her apartment in order to keep an eye on her wherever she went.

  For Axl this was all too much. He wasted no time instructing his lawyers to settle the case out of court. Erin reportedly walked from court with an undisclosed sum reckoned to be over a million dollars. Axl also ordered his minions to hurriedly gather up the few existing copies of a tape containing the unreleased version of the ‘It’s So Easy’ video from five years before, which featured Erin tied up in bondage gear, with a red ball pushed into her mouth, while Axl screams at her, ‘See me hit you! You fall down!’

  Neither Erin nor Stephanie ever pressed for criminal charges. The damage was done, however, and the story of their joint actions against Axl hit the front page of People magazine in 1995. Coming only a month after the magazine had led with the story of OJ Simpson’s being arrested for and charged with the murder of his estranged wife, Nicole Simpson, most people took a decidedly dim view of this new domestic-abuse story. Ironically, Erin herself still seemed to retain some sympathy for her beleaguered former spouse, admitting, ‘I felt sorry for him’ and ‘I thought I could make it all better.’

  The Seymour case was also hurriedly settled before the case could come to court, with Axl paying out a reported $400,000. Stephanie’s lawyer, Michael Plonsker, would neither confirm nor deny the sum involved, except to say that the suit was eventually resolved ‘amicably’.

  Stephanie Seymour married Peter Brant in Paris just a few months later. She gave birth to the first of two sons by Brant shortly after, and they remain happily married to this day. Says Doug Goldstein: ‘Oh my god, Axl was just fucking crushed! The guy deserves to have love in his life because he is so loving himself. He would be an amazing father, if given the opportunity. He really wanted to adopt Stephanie’s son, Dylan. But obviously was never given that opportunity.’

  According to Stephanie’s nanny, Beta Lebeis, who went to work for Axl as his housekeeper after the couple split, ‘When the band was over, he thought he could have a family, he would be married and would have children. This would be the second part of his life. He would have enough money and would dedicate his time to his family. He dreamed of a family, children, everything he never had.’

  Losing Stephanie had put paid to that dream. ‘Axl is a person who wants to do everything right,’ says Beta. He was ‘that kind of passionate man a lot of women would like to have in their lives. He was like a charmed prince. He did, for Stephanie, all kind of things you could find in a romantic book. What he did doesn’t exist in real life any more! I think a lot of women would have loved to be in her place. I would never leave a man like that. But Stephanie is very pretty and sexy; she can have any man she wants. She uses men as toys.’

  Beta added, ‘Have you ever seen a child with a new toy? They play with it and later they don’t want to play any more. I always told her she could hurt Axl more than she thought. Other men who fell in love with her would never suffer like Axl did. He wanted to do everything right, and he really thought everything was going right. He took this relationship very seriously. She almost killed him.’

  Indeed, says Doug Goldstein, the loss from his life of Stephanie Seymour and her son, plus the crumbling of Guns N’ Roses, sent Axl to the brink. He got used to getting phone calls in the dead of night, from a near-hysterical Beta, begging him to come over and talk to Axl, who was lying in bed in tears clutching a loaded gun.

  The rest of the time, Axl Rose now became a near recluse. ‘I’d be on the phone talking to the people at Geffen telling them Axl was in the studio working every day on the next Guns N’ Roses record,’ says Goldstein, ‘and I was still getting maybe five, ten calls a day from him. Primarily he was just continuing to try different things while still involved in the writing process. But really nothing else was going on. For a while …’

  On 20 January 1994, Axl Rose had been one of the guests at Elton John’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York, giving a short but heartfelt speech about what both Elton John and his lyricist, Bernie Taupin, had meant to him through the years, ending with the words: ‘When I first heard “Bennie and the Jets”, I knew at that time that I had to be a performer. So now a man who, in ways, is responsible for more things than he ever planned on – Elton John.’ Cue thunderous applause.

  Later that night, Axl sang ‘Come Together’ with Bruce Springsteen. Dressed down in his own version of post-grunge stage attire – jeans, boots, white tee and plain open shirt, he looked nervous next to Springsteen’s ultra-cool presence, his vocals squeezed out like drops of blood: a far cry from the strutting, peacocking hotshot who had blown Tom Petty off the stage at the MTV awards what now seemed like a lifetime before.

  It was the last time he would perform in public for six years.

  ‘Axl called me one day when we were off the road for a couple years,’ Doug Goldstein recalls. ‘He said, “What do you think, in retrospect, was the biggest mistake I’ve made in my professional career?” I said, “Probably the ‘November Rain’ video, showing the big mansion that the general public has paid for.” He went, “Wow. Yeah. You know what, you’re probably right.” So we let it go and then he called me about two days later and he said, “Hey, Doug, I want to go back to your point about showing my house. I understand because now it’s all about being one of the crowd, with Nirvana and Pearl Jam, flannel shirts, and it’s no longer superstars, they want you to be one of them. But nobody ever told us that the world changed.” I said, “You know what, you’re right.” It was a very valid point that he turned up … We would get on our bus or plane and we had no fucking clue what was happening worldwide. We were just doing what we enjoyed doing and that’s it, no more or less.’

  Not any more. Suddenly everything had changed,
and not just for Axl Rose. Duff McKagen had put another side project together, called Neurotic Outsiders, along with Matt Sorum, the former Sex Pistols guitarist, Steve Jones, and Duran Duran’s bassist, John Taylor. Duff would later admit to feeling left behind by the Seattle grunge bands that so dominated the rock scene in the first half of the Nineties. Although Neurotic Outsiders were based in LA, with half their line-up coming from England, a newly sober Duff, still crawling from the emotional wreckage of the past ten years, was determined to make up for lost time. He cut his hair short – as did Matt Sorum – and appeared onstage with the band at the Viper Room in LA shirtless, pogoing up and down to what for all the world sounded like a cross between the Sex Pistols and Nirvana – though lacking the key elements of both, in a frontman to rival Johnny Rotten or Kurt Cobain. Instead, a paunchy Jones took lead vocals and the result, epitomised by the bish-bash-bosh single, ‘Jerk’, sounded like what it was: a grunge wannabe; an after-the-fact-vanity release. There was one self-titled album, released on Madonna’s Maverick label in 1996, followed by short tours of Europe and the US. Before everything fell away again.

  Meanwhile, over at The Complex, the west LA studios, where a massive soundstage was now on 24/7 hire to Guns N’ Roses, it was as if time had stood still. By 1996, convinced that the next album had to be more forward thinking than the Use Your Illusion sets, Axl had ordered in a huge barrage of new equipment – and staff. Along with the pinball machines, pool tables and catering facilities, he now had a full-time computer expert tutoring him in the ways of new technology. Newly smitten by the outré electronica of Nine Inch Nails, The Prodigy and Moby – and still struggling with the fall from grace he had suffered in the wake of what he saw as the disrespectful grunge generation – Axl was desperate to reposition Guns N’ Roses as far into the future as he could. He had cringed when he’d listened to Slash’s ideas for the next album: the kind of substandard bad-boy boogie that even Duff had privately dismissed as ‘Southern rock’. He had winced just as much when he heard Duff’s late-to-the-party faux-grunge with the Neurotic Outsiders.

  Most excruciating of all for Axl, though, was the fact that they and Matt seemed to wilfully disregard his latest attempts to keep Guns N’ Roses on the bleeding edge of rock, shrugging off his imprecations to find something ‘new’ to say with their music as just the latest expression of an ego now completely out of control. This last was not helped by the fact that both Slash and Duff were now bitterly regretting the papers they had signed in 1993 handing over the rights to the Guns N’ Roses name: the deal that effectively left Axl as their leader.

  This, though, was a typically squint-eyed way of looking at things. Both Slash and Izzy had been complaining about Axl’s ‘interference’ in their music since the Illusion sessions. Slash claimed he had a tape of an early, rough mix of the Illusion material that was much more ‘strong and powerful’ than the recordings overseen by Axl that eventually emerged – ‘before the keyboards and horns and backing vocals got added’. Izzy, too, had bemoaned the fact that Axl always wanted to take the demos he brought in and turn them into big production numbers. As Axl had told Rolling Stone in 1992: ‘When Izzy had ’em on a four-track, they were done. I mean, I like tapes like that, but we’d just get destroyed if we came out with a garage tape. People want a high-quality album. And it was really hard to get Izzy to do that, even on his own material.’ In the end, said Axl, ‘Izzy’s songs were on the record because I wanted them on the record, not because Izzy gave a shit either way.’

  As Doug Goldstein says now: ‘The rest of the band, they were happy being AC/DC or the Rolling Stones, where every album is primarily the same. And Axl wanted to be the Beatles. He wanted every album to evolve. He didn’t want to put out Appetite for Destruction again. But the band, they were totally fine putting together songs that were simplistic, to the point, concise, easy to do. They just wanted to go fucking tour again. The Beatles came off the road and spent the rest of their career in the studio. Axl wanted to do something similar. But the Beatles only had four, then eight tracks to play with and it was the dawn of time recording-wise. Six weeks in the studio then was like six years now.’

  But while Axl was dreaming of building the same-sized musical cathedrals as previous studio perfectionists like Phil Spector and Brian Wilson, Slash and Duff and the rest of the world were still hung up on the fact that Guns N’ Roses had come crawling out of the same Hollywood sewers as Poison and Mötley Crüe. Nobody was even asking for anything more than that from him. And that riled the boy who had grown up studying Queen and Elton John, Led Zeppelin and Billy Joel, to the point where he was damned if he was going to let what he saw as the short-sighted stupidity of the others get in his way.

  ‘Nobody talks about the brilliance of Axl Rose as the song creator,’ says Goldstein. ‘They talk about Guns N’ Roses as being this incredible band. Yet who fucking put that together? Granted, I was with Slash and Duff when they were writing the music for Use Your Illusion. And “Locomotive” and “Coma”, they were doing that shit without Axl’s participation. But I’d get these phone calls from the studio, and Axl would say, “I fucking hate Slash. Have you heard this song ‘Locomotive’ yet? How the fuck am I supposed to write lyrics to this shit?” I’d go, “Hey, man, I don’t know. That’s your gig, right? I do the management. You do the songwriting.”’

  For Slash, who’d grown up loving David Bowie and Stevie Wonder, as well as Aerosmith and the Stones, attempting to take Guns N’ Roses to a new level musically was definitely not out of his field of vision. That wasn’t the problem, as he saw it, though. It wasn’t even the creatively stifling presence of Paul Huge. The main problem, said Slash, was that Axl was now openly acting as self-anointed leader. ‘It seemed like a dictatorship. We didn’t spend a lot of time collaborating. He’d sit back in the chair, watching. There’d be a riff here, a riff there. But I didn’t know where it was going.’

  Finally, in September 1996, Slash told Axl he’d had enough. ‘There’s a certain personal side to it, too,’ he told me. ‘I can’t relate to Axl. Maybe I never could. I mean, Axl came with Izzy, I came with Steven, and then we all hooked up with Duff.’ Now though, ‘I realised I was out alone, and that meant me and Axl had to come to terms with … not our animosity, but having a different opinion about everything. And, I mean, you know, Axl works as hard as anybody else but only on what he wants to work on, and I … I just lost interest.’

  Ultimately, he said, ‘It all comes down to this: if I hadn’t quit, I would have died, hanging round with nothing to do, no mutual artistic relationship, nothing. I mean, I tried to hang on in there, but it was like a big, revolving door, from really hi-tech equipment, guitar players, all kinds of shit going on … I was just waiting for the dust to clear. Eventually, I thought, we’ll never be able to put this on the right path.’

  When Slash told Axl he was leaving, the singer braved it out in public. No announcement was made. No private arrangements made to bring in an immediate replacement. As with his painful breakup with Stephanie Seymour, there was a part of Axl that secretly hoped Slash would come running back. Axl knew that without Slash there could be no Guns N’ Roses. Not one that would be instantly recognisable to the world at large. He decided to keep the news quiet until he could figure out what to do.

  When, though, in October 1996, Slash did an online interview where he admitted that ‘right now, Axl and I are deliberating over the future of our relationship’, Axl felt angry, hurt and utterly betrayed. He rushed to get his side of the story out, sending a fax to MTV on 30 October in which he suggested it was his decision that Slash should leave, one he had actually made as far back as 1995. He could no longer work with him, he said, because the guitarist had lost his ‘dive in and find the monkey’ attitude. Privately, however, Axl felt more alone than he ever had before. First Steven, then Izzy … now Slash? What was happening to him? In the most fragile moment of the night, he blamed himself. That’s when Doug would get the calls from Beta, begging him to come o
ver and talk Axl down. Up to face the day, though, Axl would know again that it wasn’t him it was them. Fuck ’em all!

  ‘Axl had a vision that GN’R should change and Slash had an attitude that Guns N’ Roses was Guns N’ Fucking Roses and that’s who they were,’ explains Tom Zutaut. ‘I don’t think they could get over their breakdown in communication. It wasn’t announced publicly [initially] because nobody wanted to say the band had broken up.’

  Speaking about the split to the official GN’R website in 2002, Axl remained defiant. ‘Originally I intended to do more of an Appetite-style recording,’ he recalled. ‘So I opted for what I thought would or should’ve made the band and especially Slash very happy. [But] it seemed to me that anytime we got close to something that would work, it wasn’t out of opinion [sic] that Slash would go, “Hey, it doesn’t work”, but it was nixed simply because it did work. In other words, “Whoa, wait a minute. That actually might be successful, we can’t do that.”’

  Slash scared of success? It would have been a laughable statement to make if it hadn’t been so obviously desperate. Axl had made similar claims about Izzy after he’d walked out, too, insisting he would have been happier if the band had not been so successful. ‘I wanted to get as big as we possibly could from day one,’ Axl had told Rolling Stone, ‘and that wasn’t Izzy’s intention at all.’

  The fallout from Slash’s departure, though, would be devastating. As Duff said later, ‘Slash turned his back and said, “This is shit.” He and Axl didn’t talk to each other any more. It had become quite irrational.’ By the end, he said, he had become ‘the one both came to see, and I got the impression I arbitrated little kids’ quarrels’. Duff loved Slash but he wasn’t ready to throw the towel in himself. When, though, some months later, Axl decided to fire Matt Sorum, Duff couldn’t bear it any more and told Axl he was quitting too.