Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  According to Matt, the spark that caused him to be fired had been an argument he’d had with Axl about Slash. They had been in the studio when Paul Huge remarked he had seen Slash play with his band, the Snakepit, on the David Letterman show the previous night and that it had ‘sounded like shit and looked like shit’. According to a still angry Sorum, ‘I said, “Listen, motherfucker, when I’m sitting in the room, I’d appreciate it if you don’t fucking say shit about Slash. He’s still my friend. You can’t even hold a fucking candle to that fucking guy. He’s got more talent in his little toe than you, motherfucker, shut up!” And then Axl got in my face. I said, “You know what, Axl, man? You’re fucking smoking crack if you think this band’s GN’R without Slash. You’re gonna go play ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ with fucking Paul Huge? Sorry, dude, it ain’t gonna sound right. Fucking ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ without Slash?” [Axl] says, “I’m Guns N’ Roses – I don’t need Slash.” I said, “You know what? No, you aren’t.” We got into a big pissy match; it went onto a bunch of other bullshit for about another twenty minutes. And then he finally said, “Well, are you gonna fucking quit?” I said, “No, I don’t fucking quit.” And then he said, “Well, then you’re fucking fired.”

  ‘Paul Huge chased me out to the parking lot and said, “What the fuck, man? Just come back in and apologise!” I said, “Fuck you, Yoko! I’m gone!” And that was it. I went home to my fucking six-level palatial rock star estate with two elevators and my Porsche. I was producing a band called Candlebox at the time, they were living in my house. And I said, “I just got fired.” They said, “Ah, fuck, he’ll call you back”, and I said, “No, not this time.” Cos he’d fired me before but he always called me back. I said, “No, I don’t think so.” And about a month later I got the letter from the lawyers.’

  Duff: ‘Matt was never a full member of the band, he was on an ejector seat and Axl said, “I’m gonna fire him.” I answered that this decision required more than one person to be taken since we were a band, that he alone didn’t own the majority. All of this because Matt told him he was wrong. The truth is Matt was right and Axl was wrong indeed.’

  But Axl didn’t care what Duff or anyone else thought any more. ‘I thought, I never played for money and I’m not gonna start now,’ said Duff. ‘I’ve got a house, I’m secure financially.’ This, though, ‘was the worst moment of my career in Guns. I went out for dinner with Axl and I told him, “Enough is enough. This band is a dictatorship and I don’t see myself playing in those conditions. Find someone else.”’

  13

  2000 INTENTIONS

  The second half of the 1990s would be a bleak time for Guns N’ Roses. Slash and Duff and Izzy continued to work sporadically as solo artists, usually draped under the banner of a band, as if trying to conceal themselves from a now unforgiving spotlight. Steven Adler was still fighting his drugs demons, living off the fumes of his thinning celebrity. (When he approached me to help him write a memoir I couldn’t find anyone interested in publishing it.) By the end of the decade Matt Sorum had agreed to go back to The Cult, who had reformed after six years in a wilderness of their own. Meanwhile, the music scene quickly moved on, as it always does, past grunge, into nu-metal (a conflation of street rap and hard rock) and finally the yawning gape of the Napster generation. Marilyn Manson had taken over as the new shock rockers in America, while in Britain a parochial battle for supremacy between Oasis and Blur had stolen everybody’s cheese.

  It was the same for W. Axl Rose, as the last man standing in a band that had become a joke to the outside world – and a very unfunny nightmare for those having to live inside it. The impression was that Axl had exiled himself deliberately. There were no interviews granted, no new pictures released, no personal appearances, nothing to dispel the growing conviction that he had become the Howard Hughes of rock, a clearly brilliant, yet remote, figure for whom everything had now simply become too goddamn much.

  Even when he did venture out into the world, very few people even recognised him any more. Just like every other Eighties rock star still hoping to transition successfully into a more grunge-friendly apparition, Axl had now cut his hair short and abandoned the full-on LA Strip duds in favour of faded blue jeans and nondescript shirts. He had also put on weight. ‘He had personal hurt,’ says Doug Goldstein of those days. ‘If it wasn’t Stephanie, he was devastated about Slash leaving. Because he clearly loved Slash to death.’

  According to the LA performance artist Vaginal Creme Davis, Axl would also occasionally wear ‘those Michael Jackson-type disguises – fake moustaches and Members Only jackets’. Even when he occasionally went to concerts – always in the company of his faithful bodyguard, Earl Gabbidon – he often went unrecognised. According to Moby, ‘If you were walking down the street and Axl passed you, you’d never notice. He look[ed] like a regular, decent guy.’

  Working in the studio with a new set of hired-hand musos, Axl suffered from a similar malaise: unsure quite what it was he was after, hesitant where he had once been supremely confident that his path was the right one. He even began to shrink from the job of recording his own vocals, a sure sign of the crisis of confidence and lack of self-esteem he seemed to be labouring under. It was one thing to be the leader of a gang of rebels who all had strong ideas about what they wanted to do, marshalling them into a cohesive musical force; quite another to be the only guy in the room who was supposed to know what the hell was going on, trying to forge a new, more adventurous musical identity while everyone else simply waited to be told what to do.

  Dizzy Reed was the only other survivor of the Use Your Illusion sextet, and Dizzy had been little more than a glorified session player. Paul Huge was no help either. Brought in to act as buffer between Axl and Slash and the rest of the gang, now they were gone Huge’s role was indistinct. Axl liked to include Paul in the writing, but only as a strand in a complex sonic weave of ideas – the track that would eventually become the title of the album, ‘Chinese Democracy’, would feature a co-credit for Huge amongst seven others. But this was not like working with Slash and Duff and, in particular, Izzy, who would bring in whole tracks ready to go.

  The new ‘band’ now included Nine Inch Nails’ former guitarist Robin Finck – originally recommended by Matt, advising Axl that he would make a great foil for Slash, who could then be coaxed back, to which Axl retorted: ‘No, he would be a great replacement for Slash’ – bassist Tommy Stinson (formerly of alt-rock pioneers The Replacements) and former Vandals drummer Josh Freese (aka ‘the Bruce Lee of drums’).

  At first, Axl had invited Mike Clink to come in and see if he could add a little weight to the sessions. But Clink didn’t get it, as far as Axl was concerned. The singer didn’t want to merely make another Guns N’ Roses album. He wanted to create something that lifted the whole enterprise into the future. Next through the studio doors was the rising techno star Moby, then Killing Joke’s former bassist Youth, and then, in April 1998, the former Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails producer Sean Beavan.

  Youth (real name Martin Glover) left feeling that Axl’s problem was ‘partly perfectionism. The psychology is that if you have something out you get judged – so you want to stay in a place where you don’t get judged.’ While Moby recalled ‘an emotionally reserved’ man who became ‘a little bit defensive when I asked him about the vocals. He just said that he was going to get to them eventually. I wouldn’t be surprised if the record never came out, they’ve been working on it for such a long time.’

  Adrift in a darkening ocean of sudden thoughts, abandoned ideas, flashes of inspiration and second-guessing, even when almost-complete song ideas began to shape themselves Axl would order his studio engineers to keep recording anything and everything that the musicians spent longer than a few seconds on. By the end of each week he’d have as many as five CDs with various versions of different songs on them, until he had amassed a stack of more than 1000 CDs and DAT tapes, all painstakingly filed and labelled. ‘It was like the Library of Co
ngress in there,’ observed one engineer.

  That ‘cold black cloud coming down’ that Axl had sung of in ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ now seemed to follow him everywhere. Every year when Stephanie Seymour’s birthday came around he would ‘shut down for weeks’ at a time. A great many of the songs he was now writing were, he later confessed in Rolling Stone, directly about her, adding he hoped that one day her son, Dylan, would listen and ‘hear the truth’ about the relationship. The split with Slash – which he viewed as ‘a divorce’ – was similarly mourned. When Shannon Hoon died of an OD in a New Orleans hotel room, Axl was devastated all over again, seeing himself as something of a mentor to the Blind Melon singer.

  Not long after that, Axl heard that his mother, Sharon, was ill with cancer. She was 51, far too young to die, and though Axl still hadn’t forgiven her for not ‘protecting’ him as a child against the physical and mental abuses he suffered from both his fathers, Axl, Amy and Stuart flew to Indiana to be with their mother not long before she died in May 1996. When, a year later, West Arkeen died of an overdose of prescription painkillers, at the even more terrifyingly young age of 36, Axl began to think in terms of a curse. When not in the studio, he lived behind the electric iron gates of his secluded Latigo Canyon estate, rising late, working out, sitting on the computer. He had to ‘educate myself’ he said about the new technology that was redefining the making of music. At the same time, he also began taking guitar lessons. Everyone who worked for him was still expected to sign confidentiality agreements, which, along with photographs of themselves would be sent to Sharon Maynard for ‘psychic inspection’: motives; strengths, weaknesses; what kind of energy they emitted. Even photographs of an employee’s children were sometimes required.

  As if to emphasise the seesawing contrasts in his personality, Axl also began hosting special Halloween costume parties for friends – mainly employees, lawyers and other members of his inner circle – and their children, decorating the house with pumpkin-lanterns and fake spiders’ webs. There would be special mazes erected. Dave Quakenbush, vocalist with LA punk band The Vandals and a guest at the 1999 Halloween party, remembers Axl ‘wearing a dinosaur outfit. When some kids approached him and asked if he was Barney the Dinosaur, he said, “Nah! Barney’s a fag!” Then he stopped himself and said, “Oh, uh, I mean Barney’s a pussy.”’

  ‘It would be every Halloween and every Easter,’ explains Goldstein. ‘At the Easter party he used to dress as the bunny! All the little kids are coming up and sitting on his lap. He was a doll! The Easter parties were in the morning time, around noon. Then the Halloween parties would be starting at, like, three or four p.m. so the young kids could come. Then it would go on till very late in the evening with all the adults. They were hugely attended and incredibly … you know, everybody felt well looked after cos Axl invited everybody. All the attorneys and the attorneys’ assistants, and the accountants’ families. 400 to 500 people. And he brought in all these entertaining rides and fun things for the kids to do and a haunted house every year.

  ‘Then some asshole from the LA Times, who had been there for, like, seven years at these Halloween parties, wrote in the paper about how they were not as popular any more. It was just bullshit! And it totally … because Axl loved doing that and it broke his heart. So he just stopped doing the parties. It really broke his heart doing this once a year for everybody who worked hard on his behalf.’

  Occasionally, a real friend would try to break through the barriers Axl had set up for himself. ‘I’d moved back out to LA [and] was riding around one day and I thought, fuck it, I’ll go by his house,’ Izzy told me. ‘Bastard, he lives up in the hills, he’s got a big house, I’ll go and see what he’s doing, you know? And I go up and he’s got security gates, cameras, walls, all this shit, you know. So I’m ringing the buzzer and eventually somebody comes and takes me up and there he is. He’s like, “Hey, man! Glad to see you!” Gives me a big hug and shows me round his house. It was great.

  ‘Then, I don’t know, probably a month later, one night he calls me [and] we got into the issue of me leaving Guns N’ Roses. I told him how it was on my side. Told him exactly how I felt about it and why I left.’ Suddenly, the conversation became very onesided. ‘I mean, he had a fucking notepad. I could hear him [turning the pages] going, “Well, ah, you said in 1982 … blah blah blah …” And I’m like, what the fuck – 1982? He was bringing up a lot of really weird old shit. I’m like, whatever, man.’

  The two old high-school friends would not speak again for nearly a decade. ‘Every two or three years I’d put a call into the office and say, “Hey, tell Axl gimme a call if he wants to.” But I mean … the weirdness of his life. To me, I live pretty normal. I can go anywhere. I don’t think people really give a shit. But for Axl, I know for the longest time, because his face was all over the television and stuff, I don’t think he could really go anywhere or do anything. And I think because of that he kind of put himself in a little hole up there in the hills. He kind of dug in deeper and deeper and now I think he’s gone so fucking deep he’s just … I mean, I could be completely wrong. But I know he doesn’t drive and he doesn’t … he doesn’t do anything. I’ve never, never seen him in town. Isolation can be a bad thing, but Axl’s been at it for a long time now. You know, he always stays up at night …’ Izzy drifted off, shaking his head, no longer quite knowing what to say.

  On 6 February 1998, a Friday, Doug Goldstein organised a ‘surprise’ party for Axl, to celebrate his thirty-sixth birthday, inviting around 40 people – much the same crowd, minus the kids, that came together for his Halloween parties. Everyone brought presents, and a gigantic birthday cake was rested on a dais in the corner of the restaurant. But when it got to midnight and Axl still hadn’t turned up, people started to leave. Goldstein called Axl on his cell: the news was predictable. ‘Axl’s not going to be coming,’ Doug informed the remaining guests. ‘But order whatever you want and have a good time.’

  Four days later, Axl, travelling incognito to Phoenix, was arrested at Sky Harbor International Airport after tussling with security personnel. ‘I’ll punch your lights out right here and right now!’ he had screamed as they attempted a routine search of his baggage. ‘I don’t give a fuck who you are. You are all little people on a power trip!’ Threatened with arrest, Axl roared back: ‘I don’t give a fuck. Just put me in fucking jail!’

  He duly spent the next few hours in a locked cell at the local police station. A year later, after pleading ‘no contest’ to a misdemeanour charge of disturbing the peace, he was fined $500 and a day in jail – which he was already deemed to have served. According to friends, Axl had been carrying some of the birthday presents he’d received for ‘review’ by Sharon Maynard, whose home in Sedona, the self-styled New Age capital of America, lay 115 miles north of Phoenix. According to a Geffen press statement issued at the time: ‘Axl had some birthday presents in his bag, including a glass object that a friend had given him for his birthday. The way they were going through the bag he was afraid it would get smashed.’

  A couple of months after that, in a bid to change the conversation, Doug Goldstein let it be known that there were now around 30 finished tracks for the new Guns N’ Roses album, including such titles as: ‘Prostitute’, ‘Cock-a-Roach Soup’, ‘This I Love’, ‘Suckerpunched’, ‘No Love Remains’, ‘Friend or Foe’, ‘Zip It’, ‘Something Always’, ‘Hearts Get Killed’ and ‘Closing In on You’ – only two of which would actually end up on the album. A title for the album was also revealed: 2000 Intentions, which most took to be a strong hint that the album would be out in time to mark the new millennium. But, again, that proved to be a premature announcement, the title being amended to the deliberately anomalous Chinese Democracy.

  Nearly ten years since GN’R had unveiled the Use Your Illusion sets, people were now vague on where the group’s narrative had got to. The band had gone, barring Axl, and there was a new album but it still hadn’t been released? Say that again.


  When, in March that year, they had been named among the inaugural artists to be presented with the new Diamond Award from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), marking sales of over ten million copies of Appetite for Destruction, Axl pointedly refused to attend the ceremony in New York – as did Slash, Duff and Izzy. In fact, only Steven Adler showed up to receive the award and say a few words of thanks.

  For Doug Goldstein, the only connection Axl still had with his musical past, this was a time of ‘focusing on the minutiae instead of the overall. That’s the thing about Axl [and] he never changed. Everybody thought he did but he was consistent with me right up until the end. There was nothing that caught me by surprise. I knew the same guy all the way throughout. And I have to say he’s probably the most loyal individual I’ve ever met. Certainly the most loyal band member I’ve ever worked with. If you’re on his team, you’re on his team to the end.’

  Nevertheless, admits Goldstein, ‘It was pretty frustrating in that I’m a marketing guy. International marketing was kind of my deal in college. So all of a sudden I’m thrust into the position of having nothing to market. All I’m doing is spending and spending and spending, for the ten years it took to make Chinese Democracy.’

  Even during those periods when Axl wasn’t working in the studio, his huge staff of musicians and engineers remained on a monthly retainer totalling some $250,000 (including more than $50,000 in studio fees, a combined payroll for seven band members of approximately $65,000, plus guitar technicians on about $6000 per month, a recording engineer earning $14,000 per month and a ‘software engineer’ being paid $25,000 a month).