Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  Goldstein says he was in the office of the new label chief, Jimmy Iovine, ‘every month lying, saying the album’s coming along great. Sometimes it was supposed to be a half-hour meeting and it would end up to be two and a half’ – a situation made more galling when some of the musicians became so fed up waiting around that they began bailing out – in the case of the studio engineer, Billy Howerdel, and drummer, Josh Freese, forming their own band, A Perfect Circle, and recording the million-selling album Mer de Noms, an uncomfortably close yet apparently far more easily achieved approximation of the kind of rock-industrial sound Axl was striving for on Chinese Democracy. When the guitarist Ron Finck then left to rejoin Nine Inch Nails, all Axl’s feelings of betrayal and abandonment resurfaced.

  Says Goldstein: ‘Axl was making great choices like Josh Freese, one of the best fucking drummers out there and one of the nicest people on the planet. Unfortunately we lost a lot of the great guys because the process was just seemingly taking too long, and they were all given opportunities to jump into something that there was a real tour to get on. All of these guys. That’s the one thing that I have found out is Axl really enjoys the recording process. And he’s very, very, very, very calculated about how that goes, and most of the musicians that I come into contact with, they just wanna go play. So the recording process is not even remotely thought of in the same light as the way that Axl takes it. You know, Axl wants to put something out that is going to be remembered for ever and ever, and again most of the musicians I know are like, ‘Let’s just put it down and get the fuck out there.”’

  A chink of light finally appeared in the darkness in September 1999 when the track ‘Oh My God’ appeared on a trailer for the new Arnold Schwarzenegger movie End of Days – only after Finck’s contributions to the track had been wiped and Dave Navarro and Circus of Power’s former guitarist Gary Sunshine had been brought in to rerecord them. Axl also took the opportunity to issue his first public statement for five years, in which he described ‘Oh My God’ as a song that dealt ‘with the societal repression of deep and often agonizing emotions – some of which may be willingly accepted for one reason or another – the appropriate expression of which (one that promotes a healing, release and a positive resolve) is often discouraged and many times denied’. Whatever it meant, it was clear we were now a million miles away from visiting Rocket Queens in Paradise City.

  Two months later came the release of the double CD live album, Live Era ’87–’93, an orphan born after the fact which Axl refused to take responsibility for. Indeed, most of the work on the album had been overseen by Slash, who told me, ‘I figured if it was gonna come out anyway, it might as well be as good as we could get it.’ Slash and Axl had not even spoken about the album directly, he said, communicating only through intermediaries. ‘Suddenly there’s lots of faxes and phone calls, everybody avoiding each other.’ And what did Axl make of the final mix? ‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask and nobody said anything.’

  Neither the critics nor, more importantly, the fans seemed to care much about the album either. Peaking at an embarrassingly lowly Number 45 in the US charts, barely selling enough copies – over 500,000 – to even go gold. A similar fate befell the End of Days soundtrack that included ‘Oh My God’, while the track itself was largely ignored by radio. Instead, Axl’s attention was now focused on two new musicians: the guitarist Buckethead – a virtuoso who wore a mannequin-like face mask and an empty KFC bucket upside down on his head, and only conversed via a small handheld puppet – and the drummer Bryan ‘Brain’ Mantia: a 35-year-old Californian, born in the South Bay city of Cupertino, previously known for his work with Tom Waits, Praxis, Godflesh and, most recently, Primus, who had been brought into the line-up at the suggestion of Buckethead, whose solo albums he had also played on.

  Buckethead (real name Brian Carroll) was a strangely charismatic 31-year-old who had grown up in an LA suburb close to Disneyland. He was a shy, nerdy kid obsessed with comics, video games, Kung Fu movies and slasher flicks who also studied music theory at college, and his musical signature was a fondness for incorporating splashy classical influences into his raucous, ‘shredding’ guitar style. Uncomfortable onstage, he developed the Buckethead persona, he said, after eating a bucket of KFC one night. ‘I put the mask on and then the bucket on my head. I went to the mirror. I just said, “Buckethead. That’s Buckethead right there.”’ From which he developed his absurdly detailed chicken fetish – insisting that he had actually been raised by chickens and that his long-term ambition was to alert the world to the on-going chicken holocaust in fast-food outlets the world over. Before signing on as Axl’s latest replacement for Slash, Buckethead had been recording as a solo artist for almost a decade, going from the ‘post-metal psycho-shred’ of his 1999 album Monsters and Robots to the eerie ambience of his next release, Electric Tears. He also recorded under the anagram Death Cube K. The only reason he had joined Guns N’ Roses, he said, was that when Axl invited him to his house he gave him a rare collector’s edition of the Leather-face doll, which he took as a good omen, deciding that Axl ‘must understand me somehow’.

  According to Goldstein, who thought he’d seen it all until now, ‘To get Buckethead’s signature, Axl took him to Disneyland and they rode rollercoasters together. I was like, you know, this is a little fucking out there. I was told that his television was covered in Saran Wrap cos he masturbates so much. Too much fucking information! I could have gone the rest of my life without hearing that. It started getting really funky, though, when I got a call that we had to build a chicken coop for Buckethead. He did his leads in the studio with the chicken wire and the fencing all around. Until one day Axl’s pet wolf cub got in there and that was the end of that. I thought, you know what, maybe this is a little fucking crazy now.’

  Increasingly, Axl’s only solace came from his home life with Beta Lebeis and her own extended family. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1956, she was a divorced mother of three grown-up children now in their twenties. In a rare interview given to the Brazilian daily paper O Globo, in 2001, Beta described her role in Axl’s life as ‘his personal assistant, I organise his house, I coordinate his personal life’. She also spoke candidly of her role as what she called the ‘mother’ of the band. ‘I always light candles for them.’ Axl, she explained, had never known the love of a good mother, ‘like the good-night kiss’ and because of that didn’t know ‘how to demonstrate this kind of love, and it is very difficult for a grown-up to deal with this’. No wonder he found it so hard to trust others, she said. Axl needed ‘someone who listens to what he has to say and I am here for that’.

  She explained how she and her eldest son, Fernando, had lived with Axl at his Malibu mansion for the past seven years, although she now owned her own house ‘very close to Axl’s house’. Even when she wasn’t at the Malibu mansion, she never went out without her cellphone and pager, or anywhere where Axl couldn’t contact her 24/7. Quizzed about Axl’s interest in past lives, she replied, ‘Yes, Axl and I believe.’ It was ‘impossible’, she thought, ‘for two people who never met before, to get along this well. When I opened the door and he was there, I felt as if I knew him from ages ago.’

  Surrounded by his new ‘family’, Axl now worked out ‘for four hours a day’, Beta said, including running ‘almost eight kilometres every two days’. There was also ‘a doctor who tells us what we must eat’. The reason he was rarely seen in public, she said, was because ‘he doesn’t like bars or clubs’. Instead, Axl and Beta would ‘go a lot to the movies’. ‘According to his grandmother,’ said Beta, Axl ‘had never liked the day … He writes a lot in the night, because there’s no phone or other thing that could interrupt him. He is more creative late at night.’ Both Amy and Stuart Bailey had lived at the Malibu house at different times, but only Beta had remained a constant companion, there to ‘give him advice when he asks me for it. I know he values my opinion a lot.’

  Slowly, things were coming full circle. A new generation of Guns N�
� Roses fans were now discovering the Appetite and Illusion albums for themselves. MTV still rolled out the ‘Sweet Child’ video once in a while and always got a great reaction to it. Ozzfest had now replaced Lollapalooza as the most popular annual festival in the world, and a new ‘classic rock’ market was emerging that would breathe life into a scene considered moribund just a couple of years before. When, in November 1999, Axl accepted an invitation from Rolling Stone to speak by phone briefly to Kurt Loder, it was treated like the second coming. Axl claimed there were now more than 70 new songs in various states of readiness for the next Guns N’ Roses album – ‘at least two albums’’ worth of material, some of which he felt was ‘too advanced’ for most people to handle. ‘It’s like, “Hmm, I have to push the envelope a little too far. We’ll wait on that.”’ He compared what the new Guns N’ Roses were doing to ‘listening to Queen. [They] had all kinds of different-style songs on their records, and that’s something that I like. Cos I do listen to a lot of things, and I really don’t like being pigeonholed to that degree …’

  Asked to explain the title of the album, Chinese Democracy, he replied, ‘Well, there’s a lot of Chinese democracy movements, and it’s something that there’s a lot of talk about, and it’s something that will be nice to see. It could also just be, like, an ironic statement. I don’t know, I just like the sound of it.’

  Reassured by the way the magazine had carefully handled the piece, Axl allowed them back, this time into the studio, for a face-to-face interview. The resulting feature spoke of a man that ‘looks a bit older and more solidly built than the lean rock god of his “Sweet Child o’ Mine” days’; who was dressed in Abercrombie & Fitch ‘with his reddish hair intact and cut to a Prince Valiant-ish mid-length’. In the interview Axl confessed that during the early years after putting together the new line-up, ‘this wasn’t Guns N’ Roses’, adding, ‘But I feel it is Guns N‘ Roses now.’

  Pressed on why he hadn’t done as the other original members had and simply continued as a solo artist, he stonewalled: ‘I contemplated letting go of that, but it doesn’t feel right in any way. I am not the person who chose to try to kill it and walk away.’ No mention of the fact that he owned the name – and was damned if he was going to let go of it. Why should he? Hadn’t he been the chief instigator behind the band and everything that became so great about it? For Axl, when Slash left it wasn’t because the singer had become a dictator, it was because a still drug-addled Slash didn’t have what it took to try to take the band to the next level.

  He also shrugged off stories of him becoming a recluse. He simply didn’t ‘find it’s in my best interest to be out there’. He was ‘building something slowly’, he said. ‘If you are working with issues that depressed the crap out of you, how do you know you can express it? At the time you are just like, “Life sucks.” Then you come down and you express “Life Sucks” but in this really beautiful way.’

  It was time for Axl Rose to come out from wherever he’d been hiding. It was still a surprise, though, when he chose to do it in such a low-key way – making an unscheduled appearance onstage at the Cat Club, on Sunset, in June 2000, swaying through a few numbers with the part-time Thursday night band, the Starfuckers, led by the Cat’s proprietor, the former Stray Cats drummer ‘Slim’ Jim Phantom, and featuring, of all people, Gilby Clarke. Over six years since he’d last set foot on a stage, Axl admitted he didn’t know what to expect. ‘He was psyched,’ recalled one onlooker. ‘It seemed like it boosted him [that] people still want to hear him.’

  When he’d arrived with just Earl for company, Axl had done so in as no-big-deal a way as he could. With a baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes, nobody recognised him at first. When Slim Jim and Gilby first caught sight of him, this stocky, hunched-up figure nursing a beer at the bar, neither man was convinced it was actually Axl. So they went over and ‘tapped the guy on the shoulder’, said the drummer. ‘He turns round and Gilby says, “That’s not him.” But Axl grins and says, “Hey, Gilby, how are you doing?”’

  Inviting him up to join them onstage for covers of Rolling Stones classics – ‘Wild Horses’ and ‘Dead Flowers’ – Axl stuck around afterwards, hanging out and talking to his one-time band-mate until dawn. ‘I guess he ran into some friends of mine at the Roger Waters show at Universal Amphitheatre, and they told him that we were playing down there and he came by,’ said Gilby. ‘Maybe he just wanted to have some fun.’ Axl was ‘very, very excited about his new record and the new band’.

  Not yet excited enough, though, to call time on his endless deliberations and release it. Axl was now confidently predicting the album would contain up to 18 tracks, accompanied probably by an extra CD containing a further ten tracks. Back at his record company, though, things were getting desperate as the massive costs continued to escalate. Interscope – who through various corporate deals were now the inheritors of the Geffen catalogue – thought it might please Axl and speed things up if they brought Queen’s former producer, Roy Thomas Baker, out of retirement to oversee the project. But within a few months he was gone, too.

  Partly to appease the label executives who were now pulling their hair out and partly to dip his toes in the water again as a live performer, on 6 December 2000 the first official Guns N’ Roses concert for seven years was announced: a special New Year’s Eve show at the 2000-seater House of Blues, in Las Vegas. This would also serve as a relatively low-key live debut for the ‘new’ Guns N’ Roses, which now comprised guitarists Paul Huge, Buckethead, and – to Axl’s delight – a returning Robin Finck, plus the bass-ist Tommy Stinson and drummer Bryan Mantia, Dizzy Reed on keyboards, and an additional keyboardist and the most recent recruit, former Replicants member Chris Pitman.

  Kevin Morrow, Senior VP of Entertainment at the House of Blues, couldn’t believe his luck. ‘I thought it was a joke. I said to myself, “There is no way this can be real.”’ But with tickets priced at between $150 and $250 each, this was no joke. With the new band also now booked to appear at the Rock in Rio festival in Brazil in January, Axl saw this as a small but hugely significant step in rehabilitating the reputation of the band he had, to his mind, singlehandedly rebuilt.

  Nobody, not even Doug Goldstein, could be really sure how things might go, though. When the start time for the Vegas New Year’s Eve show – 1 a.m. – came and went without Axl going anywhere near the stage, he feared the worst. Then, at 3.35 a.m. precisely, Axl and his new Guns N’ Roses strode out onto the stage to huge applause.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Axl as the opening, footsteps-down-a-dark-alley notes to ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ echoed around the room. ‘I’ve just woke up. I’ve been taking a nap for about eight years.’

  The set lasted for nearly two hours, built mainly around guaranteed crowd-pleasers like ‘Sweet Child’, ‘Patience’, ‘Rocket Queen’ and a new, semi-acoustic version, more akin to the Dylan original, of ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’. Then, towards the end of the set, came six new numbers, beginning with a scorching version of ‘Oh My God’. This was followed by ‘The Blues’, a piano ballad very much in the ‘November Rain’ mould, Axl crooning like a sheep-killing dog about his lost love, Stephanie: ‘You know I tried so hard to make you change your mind … I don’t know what to do, everywhere I go, I see you …’.

  Next up was ‘Oklahoma’, said to have been written by Axl in response to the ‘lies’ told about him by Erin in court, but later to surface in revised form on the finished Chinese Democracy album as ‘Rhiad and the Bedouins’. Then ‘Chinese Democracy’ itself, the most immediately exciting of the new songs, almost like something the original line-up might have spat out. Then, another obvious highlight, ‘Madagascar’, another portentous ballad, with looped samples of movie dialogue, triggered by Chris Pitman, including a snatch from Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, Axl standing defiantly atop the mountain: ‘I won’t be told any more, that I can’t find my way any more …’ And then, just in case anyone was getting too comfor
table, the last and strangest of all the new numbers, ‘Silk Worms’, a keyboard and synthesiser special-effects blowout ‘put together by Mr Dizzy Reed and Mr Chris Pitman’, announced Axl, proudly. When the cacophony ended suddenly, to polite but baffled applause, the band sent the crowd home happy by bringing the hammer down on ‘Paradise City’.

  ‘I have traversed a treacherous sea of horrors to be with you here tonight,’ Axl announced at one point. No one doubted it, least of all the exhausted and relieved band of musicians who now stood about him dressed as Guns N’ Roses.

  Two weeks later they were back in Rio, playing much the same set and to almost identical effect. Perhaps it was the fact that he had his adoptive Brazilian ‘mom’ Beta with him, or perhaps he simply felt the Brazilian fans required a more direct statement from him about where Guns N’ Roses were at in the twenty-first century, but Axl took the opportunity onstage to talk to the 150,000-strong crowd about ‘the old band’. Bringing Beta onstage to interpret for him, he said, ‘I know that many of you are disappointed that some of the people that you came to know and love could not be with us here today’, this, to loud cheers and screams from the audience. Axl continued: ‘Regardless of what you have heard or read people worked very hard, meaning my former friends, to do everything they could, so that I could not be here today. I say, fuck that!’ The crowd cheered even more loudly, though what they thought they were cheering for was impossible to say.

  The next day, Axl was also interviewed for O Globo, chilling out by the Intercontinental Hotel swimming pool, sipping a caipirinha – a traditional Brazilian drink prepared with cachaça – and tequila. For nearly two hours Axl held forth about the ugly demise of the original band. ‘Everybody hated each other in the band, with the exception of me,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘Slash was fighting for power with Izzy because he wanted to take control of the band and destroy it’, adding that Duff had suffered panic attacks during the performances. ‘Do you remember that movie Pulp Fiction?’ he asked. Then spilled the beans about Slash getting similar Narcan injections to the one Uma Thurman’s character famously received in the movie.