Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  Axl Rose was no longer sure about anything.

  14

  THE PROJECT

  After he was fired as the manager of Guns N’ Roses, in 1991, Alan did not hear from any of the band – barring his fellow ex-pat Izzy Stradlin – for nearly nine years. Then one night, sitting in his local bar, he got a phone call. ‘It was Curly,’ he says now – ‘Curly’ being his nickname for Slash. ‘It was just a delight to hear him after eight years.’ Slowly, over the months and years, they pieced back together the trust they had once shared in Guns N’ Roses. When Slash called again one night and invited Niven down to LA for a meeting with him and Duff, ‘I went down and we all had dinner. That’s when they told me they wanted me to work with them on “The Project”.’

  The Project was the original name for what eventually became Velvet Revolver: Slash, Duff, Izzy and Matt Sorum reunited, with the addition of an as yet unknown singer. Or put another way: Guns N’ Roses without Axl Rose. Niven was at once delighted by the idea, then horrified, then flattered, then dismayed. Had the offer been made five years before, or even five years later, he might have been on the next plane to LA. Right now, though, from his vantage point in the new mountainside home he’d made for himself in Prescott, Arizona, Alan Niven felt he had no choice but to decline.

  ‘There were two reasons. I had started to write songs again and they were the best things I’d ever written and I wanted to follow that, see where that went. As regards The Project, I thought if we reconvened everybody apart from Axl and Doug, that we’d be setting a bar that would be unfair for them. An expectation that I thought would be an albatross. And there was perhaps a third reason that I wasn’t articulating to myself. In that I wasn’t in the best of spirits.’

  In fact, Alan Niven hadn’t been ‘in the best of spirits’ since being fired. The brutal nature of his firing from Guns N’ Roses had caused him to descend into an emotional black hole.

  As he puts it now: ‘It took me ten years of accumulating experience and contacts to form a skillset that I could apply to, amongst others, Guns N’ Roses. It took five years to get them to selling out Wembley Stadium, and that was done under my watch. I put Wembley up for sale. Which was kind of sweet, in a way, because it’s English. One of my heartbreaks was, that was going to be the moment when I was going to have my mother driven down from Wales, I was gonna put her in a box at Wembley and let her see it and let her understand what I do. And that was denied of me and that’s sad but … anyway, it took ten years to acquire the skillset, five years to do the work. It took [Goldstein] three months to break it. Because of Izzy leaving three months after me means that it’s broken. It took [Goldstein] only two and a half years to completely destroy it after that. Two and a half years after Izzy leaving, it was just Axl and totally, totally destroyed.’

  It would take years for Alan Niven to recover. Meanwhile, things got worse before they could get better. The first Great White album that followed his split with GN’R, Psycho City, in 1992, had been a total flop, not even cracking the US Top 100. Co-produced and co-written by Niven, it had a cover featuring a gaudy neon sign with a big advertisement for the Rose Motel. The title track also featured a snippet of an answering phone message Erin once left for Niven, allegedly while Axl was being violent towards her. ‘Yes, I did use Erin,’ he admitted in an interview with the LA Times in 2016, ‘but I was hurt and angry and in the process of writing my anti-LA, anti-betrayal, anti-Goldstein content for the Psycho City album. So now you know.’

  A man on the verge of a breakdown, Niven was convinced by then that he was, as he puts is, ‘under psychic attack’ from Axl. Convinced that Axl was utilising the forces offered to him by Sharon Maynard and her circle of crystal-gazing, future-reading, aura-controlling followers, Niven had gone in search of his own form of magical defence. Stephanie Fanning, who had initially left to work with Niven, had firsthand knowledge of some of Niven’s occult intentions at this time. ‘I think he dabbled in some things when the band was gone,’ she says. ‘He was kind of talking to a couple of interesting people that I think were dabbling in that as well. But Axl was doing the same thing. I felt like they were duelling each other with a little bit of their whatever you want to call that – black magic, whatever. I think they were duelling each other. One would hear like, “I hear Axl’s doing this to me, I’m gonna do …” I feel like it was kind of going on between the two of them. I don’t know how much credence I place in that but, yeah, he was. He was. He definitely was. A little bit, for sure. I don’t know exactly if Alan was wishing Axl ill or hoping maybe to bring clarity between the two of them, cos to be honest as soon as I heard about it I kind of shut my ears off. I was like, I don’t want to get mixed up in any of that. I don’t know what that is. Maybe it scared me, I don’t know. I don’t know whether it was black or white, evil or good. Bring us back together; tear him apart … But I know he was talking to people who dealt in that world.’

  Eventually, Fanning left Niven – to go and work with Doug Goldstein again. ‘Alan, he went kind of underground. He stayed in LA for a couple of years while he was building the house [in Arizona]. But I was really hoping he’d get back in the game. Like, get back in the game. I’d bring him music into the office like, hey, check this out. And he just couldn’t … He just wasn’t … I don’t know if something left him. Look, it was even hard for me to wake up the next morning when GN’R was over. There was a huge emptiness in my stomach. A huge emptiness in my soul not to be with that band any more. So I can imagine what it was like for him.’

  ‘I already knew that [Niven] was into the Crowley, Jimmy Page, that whole kind of thing,’ says Doug Goldstein. ‘Him and Izzy used to go into New Orleans quite a bit.’ When Steph went back to work with Doug, she felt obliged to tell Doug of some of Alan’s strange behaviour. ‘She said, “He hired a black-magic specialist from New Orleans and every single day after work before he would go home he would go over there and they would put on black robes, and the candles and the incense, and they would cast evil spells on you and Axl.’ I was like, what a rat bastard, man! I mean, a) what a waste of fucking money. But b) what an evil bastard.’

  As far as Alan Niven is concerned now, though, ‘the psychic attack was definitely manifest in the deliberate undermining of [Izzy’s solo outfit] the JuJu Hounds by Goldstein and [Axl].’ He feels this ‘psychic attack’ was also manifest in the sharp decline of Great White’s fortunes: specifically by the arrival at their label, Capitol, of the former Zoo Entertainment promotions chief Ray Gmeiner, as replacement for Michael Prince, who had long been a supporter of Great White. ‘Gmeiner was Goldstein’s former roommate,’ he adds ominously.

  This was the last straw, he says. He had been ‘on the dark side of the moon to everyone in West Hollywood’ since losing the GN’R gig. A couple of tentative feelers from big-name acts had come his way in the immediate aftermath of the split, but Niven wasn’t interested. The big one was when David Geffen invited him to work with Bon Jovi. But it nearly made him puke, he says, when Jon Bon Jovi turned up at their first meeting with his lawyer and accountant in tow. ‘How could I possibly get excited, it was diametrically opposed to the nature and essence of my passion? This is not a job to me. It’s something that I value beyond a job.’ He sighs. ‘It was a very dark period for me and it got darker and darker.’

  Next he discovered that his wife had been having a long-term affair with Great White’s vocalist, Jack Russell. ‘He was terrified I was going to find out.’ It was a discovery that led to the overwhelming realisation that she had in fact ‘compromised pretty much every relationship that was of value to me. And who the hell would want a toxic individual like that in a business structure?’

  With his marriage in tatters and his career being held back by what he was convinced were ‘psychic’ forces, he recalled a place in New Orleans he’d once visited with Izzy called Barrington’s: ‘A retail mausoleum of ritualistic cornucopia. That covered all kinds of spiritual expression, from elephants’ feet with weird t
hings buried in them packed with mud, to drinking skulls … I still have a couple of items from there’, including a large wooden rosary, a cross made from the staff of a bishop … ‘I’m a fucking atheist. I’m managing a rock’n’roll band. I have very little knowledge but I’m curious … I have two Coptic Ethiopian healing scrolls. One of them is intact, about seven feet long. It’s very rare to find a whole one because they’re concertinaed. They’re stunningly beautiful. I bought two Coptic bibles there that were about 400 years old. The pages are like bark. All hand-constructed and handwritten …’

  He stresses, though: ‘I’m curious but I’m always going towards the light. So when things were going bat shit and I couldn’t figure anything out … I got to this point of: “This is ridiculous. There’s something to all this. Maybe I’ve been hexed. Maybe someone’s put a fucking curse on me.” So I called the guy at Barrington’s …’

  Niven was put in touch with someone who offered help – at a price. ‘I’d walked through the door. Whatever scepticism I had, I’d knocked on the door and it had been opened so I walked through it.’ For several months, he studied under ‘a mad monk – he was huge and looked like he’d been picked out of a medieval monastery. To this day I still don’t know how much of a bullshitter he was. I do know how much of a manipulator he was because I had to fly him here. I had to fly him there. I had to take care of him at this point. But he introduced me to a whole area of reading that I’d been oblivious to. Which was basically occult reading … the secret knowledge. I learned that the simple truth is that truth is simple. That you simply find the truth by simply being truthful.

  ‘At this point in my life I have a real clarity of darkness and light. But at that point I was just in pain. Isolated and confused. And this guy said, “I can ceremonially get rid of the negatives that are attacking you.” And I was being psychologically attacked and I was in a psychological and spiritual warfare. There was a lot of negativity being put my way. Goldstein is just one of the people who was putting out that energy in my direction. Axl was another who was putting out that energy in my direction. Yoda was probably another one that was putting out that energy because she wanted to exploit him.

  ‘I was his guard. Once I was out of the way they could feed off him like fucking maggots. So I had to go and have these special knives made, crudely, out of a particular copper. And there was going to be some ceremony of putting the knives in a certain way. And the fact that a water pipe broke was supposed to be symbolic. And I started to go, I think I’m being fucking had here. And I eventually cut myself off from this guy. But, yeah, my open mind, at that moment, to such as hexing and hoodoo was an act of defensive desperation … nothing was working and all felt unpleasant … I couldn’t figure what the hell was going on … and not going on …’

  At the time Slash and Duff had come to him with their idea for him to manage The Project, Alan Niven had reached rock bottom. Checking himself into a hotel, he washed down 172 pills with a bottle of ‘good Graham’s port’ – then sat there waiting to die. ‘I remember it so well because I put out the piles of ten and I had two left over and I thought, if I don’t start with these suckers I’ll never get to them.’ Painkillers, sleeping pills, ‘Ambiens, just anything I could get my hands on. The management of the hotel dragged me out of there after a few days … I got to a situation where I could see somebody down below going, “I’m not sure he’s on our list.” And upstairs they’re going, “Well, he’s not on our list either. If he’s no good to either of us let’s just throw him back.” I mean, how the fuck do you survive 172 pills?’

  When he came to after 72 hours, he found he had vomited all over the room. The hotel management got him up and dressed and packed, then virtually dragged him to his car. ‘They put me in my rental truck and I immediately hit a very expensive car sitting in front of the hotel. So they called a limo and got me down to the airport and I got on a flight down to LA, where a friend picked me up and took me to his home and I was out of it for a week. It was weeks before I could even walk straight. I got up one morning and went to the window and looked out at the ocean and went, “Where the fuck am I?” That’s not the desert. And my friend said, “That’s exactly what you said yesterday.”’

  The gilded hallways of major labels are littered with the ghosts of bloated rock star vanity projects that should never have seen the light of day. Central to these over-publicised debacles is a starry-eyed failure to recognise that just because you’re a rock star, that doesn’t mean you can carry a band. In the wake of his departure from Guns N’ Roses, Slash put together a new version of Slash’s Snakepit – led by the more generic-sounding rock vocalist Rod Jackson. Where It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere had offered Slash a low-pressure opportunity to unburden himself of the gathering tensions within GN’R, it had been a time-killer, badly lacking the sense of urgency that pervaded his work in Guns N’ Roses. Rebooting the Snakepit in 1999 felt more like knee-jerk reaction than a statement of intent, and the Snakepit’s 2000 release, Ain’t Life Grand, withered from a gaping lack of originality, not to mention an embarrassingly ham-fisted rap sequence to kick off the first single, ‘Mean Bone’, that sounded like it had been grafted on by some well-meaning but clueless record label drone.

  Slash desperately needed to channel his creative energies into something vital and dynamic, but without an equal and opposing force operating within his process, creating a sense of tension within his ideas, he was a man adrift. Even Matt, who kept time in the original iteration of Slash’s Snakepit and who played on It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere, understood that Slash’s Snakepit was never a long-term deal, referring to it as ‘a way for me and Slash to go and play music in the beginning when we were waiting around for Axl … I think it turned into more of a thing for Slash, cos just … you know, Slash just loves to play his guitar, and he is the consummate musician, you know?’

  Sorum had largely avoided the spotlight until 2001, when he rejoined The Cult to record and to tour behind their first album for seven years, Beyond Good and Evil. Duff had moved back to Seattle and reignited his old punk band, Ten Minute Warning, who were among the early progenitors of the city’s pre-Nirvana grunge scene. Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard has credited Ten Minute Warning as his inspiration for learning guitar and it was at his urging that Duff re-formed the band when he returned to Seattle in 1998. In true punk fashion, they recorded an album on Sub Pop and broke up shortly thereafter when their lead guitarist, Paul Solger, left the band. Bolstered, however, by his newfound sobriety and a disciplined diet and martial arts regimen, Duff dived headlong into other pursuits, mainly family life and academia, ravenously devouring the principles of business and finance in one-off community college courses and self-study. In 1998, Duff recorded a solo album, Beautiful Disease, where he sang and played most of the instruments alongside guest appearances from Slash, Izzy and Faith No More’s drummer, Mike Bordin. But when Duff’s parent label, Polygram, was bought during the album’s promotional campaign, Beautiful Disease fell among the earliest casualties. According to Duff, one of the new executives told him, ‘I’m going on a ski vacation and I’m going to listen to all the upcoming releases with my kids. We’ll decide whether they have a future with the label or not. When I come back I’ll let everyone know. I’ll have each artist into my office to tell them personally where they stand.’ Instead, ‘I never heard what his fucking kids thought of my record. In fact, I never heard from the guy again. On my birthday – the day of the album’s supposed release – an intern from the label called and left a message on my answering machine to say it wouldn’t be released that day or any other day.’ The album has never been released.

  Rather than sit around and mope, though, Duff enrolled in a string of business courses at a community college – notching up an impeccable 4.0 grade point average, no less – with one eye towards attending a proper university. Now 35, Duff had come a long way from the coke-fuelled alcoholic who’d glibly signed away his rights to the name Guns N’ Roses. Having seen ro
ck stardom from both before and after, Duff was now happy to divert his energies into creating a vibrant personal life wholly unconnected to his music. He was now independently wealthy, thanks to some sound investments he stumbled onto when he first got sober. ‘God bless him he has more money than god,’ chuckles Doug Goldstein, money made, he suggests, ‘by decisions that myself and the accountant helped him with. Once he had some money, we took him to the accountant’s office, and said, “Duff’s interested in investing and I obviously support that.” And the guy – his name was Michael Oppenheim, he was a great guy – said, “Do you have any idea what you want to invest in?” And Duff had no clue at that point. So he asked a great question. He said, “What are you passionate about?” Duff said, “Well, my hometown – Seattle.” So we immediately put his money into Starbucks and Google. Next thing I know he’s got his own radio show and daily newspaper column about what a financial guru he is. I’m sure he is today. But back when those first investments were made I don’t think he could spell “investment”.’

  Nothing, though, could diminish Duff’s passion simply for making music, and by 2001 he had his own new band, Loaded, recording and playing dates around the world. By 2002, Loaded had added a new lead guitarist into the mix – some cat that had been at high school with Slash named Dave Kushner.

  Slash was also going through some big life changes. He’d been diagnosed with cardiomyopathy and had a defibrillator inserted. ‘Years of drinking had swollen my heart to the point of bursting,’ he said in retrospect. ‘It reached the point where the doctors gave me between six days and six weeks to live. They installed a defibrillator to keep my heart from stopping and keep it beating at a steady rate. After the operation I began therapy and miraculously my heart started to heal. I was out of circulation for four months before I picked up a guitar. It was the darkest period of my life.’