by Slash
As self-destructive as we may or may not have been, and despite the communication barriers between the members, we had the desire to play music and move forward at all costs. That an outside influence completely disrupted the band really is a shame.
It was a dream come true…but as we prepared for our monster tour, the last thing on our minds was being careful what we wished for.
I THINK IT TOOK TWO DAYS FOR DOUG Goldstein to be elected the official new manager of Guns N’ Roses. At the time we had not finished mixing the record, but Doug, from the start, wanted to make a name for himself in the industry and make money, and we were the perfect vehicle for that. We booked a series of gigs straightaway, and on strategic days off, would go into the studio to complete the albums. For a while, our tour schedule delayed the release of the albums indefinitely.
We certainly had our fun, though. Doug took us out of the studio to play Rock in Rio in Brazil in 1991, which would be Matt and Dizzy’s first show with Guns. It was incredible; we played two nights in a row to 180,000 fans in Maracanã Stadium. It was a festival that had gone on for weeks, where everyone from Megadeath to Faith No More, to INXS, Run-D.M.C., and Prince, had played. It was something else; I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a more insane Guns N’ Roses crowd—and that is saying something. When we kicked into the bridge of “Paradise City,” people swan-dived from the upper tier of the stadium—seemingly to their death. There aren’t words that can do their degree of intensity justice: we had had people stacked outside of our hotel so deep that we couldn’t leave. We couldn’t even go down to the pool, because when we did, somehow people would launch themselves over the fifteen-foot wall and run up and basically attack us. They didn’t want to hurt us, but they definitely wanted to break a piece of us off to keep for themselves. It was bizarre. We couldn’t leave our rooms, and our wives, or girlfriends, or any women seen in our company, were taunted and, basically, marked for death by these fans of ours.
We did a bunch more dates. We had three theater dates in L.A., San Francisco, and New York, with various bands opening for us, such as Blind Melon and Faith No More and Raging Slab. At the New York show we shot live footage, which made the basis of the video for The Terminator 2 soundtrack. That video also featured shots of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Terminator himself, at the Rainbow. We then started a tour with Skid Row in the United States, including two nights at the Inglewood Forum in L.A. I tell you, being that huge of a band was fucking killer. Having Skid Row was my kind of tour: total debauchery.
Way before we finished mixing and mastering the albums, Axl was committed to getting the right image for our cover art. Since he’d been the one who brought that brilliant Robert Williams painting in for Appetite, we trusted him to find the art for these two albums as well. Once again he did: the image for the nebulous mix of songs we’d worked up was by Mark Kostabi. It was a young Dutch-looking figure in a “thinker” pose that had been inspired by a Renaissance painting. At the time, Axl really wanted that image to be the two faces of those albums. In the end we had one in red, one in blue, and the rest of us were just like, “Okay, cool, man.” That made the two album concept more palatable.
That was one of what might be considered “big” decisions that, as a band, we were too quick to pass off to our lead singer. But I don’t regret it at all: if that was where Axl was going to throw down the gauntlet, it was all good. I was much more concerned that the Illusion albums would be released separately so that our fans didn’t have to spend thirty or forty bucks to get our new music: they could decide if they wanted one or the other album and buy accordingly. Hopefully they’d want both. In the end, Use Your Illusion I sold more than Use Your Illusion II.
When the albums went on sale, fans were lined up outside of record stores all around the country. I can vouch for the fact that there was a line down the block at Tower Records on Sunset that night because I drove past there on my way to the airport with Renee. I had the limo pull in and we snuck in the back door and were brought up to the same little office above the sales floor where I’d been detained for shoplifting when I was in junior high; I looked down at all the kids on line to buy the records through the same one-way glass that some manager had watched me through the day I got busted stealing. It was surreal.
The records went to number one and number two the week they were released, which was a record. And then they stayed there. There was fanfare everywhere, and we needed to get organized for our tour. It was going to be bigger than anything we’d done.
The new music was much more complicated, so bringing it to the stage was going to require added musicians. I was elected the unofficial music director, in charge of finding background vocalists and horn players. I had a hard time swallowing the concept of three guys in tuxes blowing brass, so I hired hot chicks instead. Of course, good-looking backup singers were a necessity as well. I sort of did it all tongue in cheek. We also brought in Teddy Zig Zag, this great blues player I’d jammed with countless times, to play additional piano and the harmonica. Actually I relied on Ted to recruit all of the female session players and he did an amazing job.
As we prepared to take off again, I had a lot to do with the stage design as well. I helped design a pretty efficient and good-looking stage that we would live on for the next two and a half years. There were ramps, little stages over the amps for the girls, a keyboard area, and a piano that came from under the floor for Axl. We also had a cool grating for a floor so that lights could shine from beneath us it.
We were hands-on for the whole development of that big-ass stage we ended up with. We had the Guns N’ Roses logo on the floor, which was cool, too. It was fucking incredible for us to have the money and the public demand to design our ultimate performance vehicle. It was a dream come true…but as we prepared for our monster tour, the last thing on our minds was being careful what we wished for.
Slash integrates his BMX moves into his guitar playing on the Illusions tour.
11
Choose Your Illusion
I’ve experienced extreme highs and lows, and rode them all to the end. But when they’re so close together that they’re virtually interwoven, it is alienating. That is something else altogether; suddenly the once familiar seems strange, and nothing feels stable. As a kid, I’d stared in disbelief from the side of many stages that, to me, were bigger than life itself. Now I was playing on an even bigger one, with my band’s logo emblazoned on the floor beneath my feet. We had arenas full of fans waiting to see us everywhere we went, all around the world. We released two albums on the same day that debuted at number one and number two. It couldn’t have been going better. And backstage, behind it all, we were splitting apart like the atom in an A-bomb.
When I look back on it now, I can see the roots of the whole thing, but at the time I didn’t have that kind of perspective at all. It was always there, but in the post-Appetite era, the condition really came into its own: Axl became a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It was one thing during the recording of the Illusion records when he was holing up in the recording studio and being excessively overindulgent; none of us liked that much, but we were willing to allow it. We certainly didn’t think it could get worse. Those sessions were the times when the rest of us began to let those things happen against our better judgment. It was tedious yet still fun, but we were kidding ourselves thinking that situation was all going to be fine once the album was released. It was really tough for me because I felt very close to Axl for periods of time when we were working together toward a common goal, and then, not much later, I’d feel like we were on opposite sides of a fence. It started a real love/hate situation between us.
Axl and I had a pretty rocky relationship from the very beginning, which continued until the very last time we spoke, for the simple reason that we have such different, different ways of looking at and handling things. I bear him no ill will; I know that his version of events is every bit as viable as mine…just different. It took me a long time to even sort of understand Axl—if
I ever did at all—let alone predict what made him react the way he did. I wanted to know what made him happy, what pissed him off, what inspired him creatively; all of those things are essential knowledge when you work in such close proximity with someone in a creative endeavor.
Early on, when we first met, what he did would sometimes take me by surprise. We related to each other because both of us were rebellious and anarchistic, but I could never understand why he took rebellion to the point that it made his life difficult for no real reason. I could understand standing up for what you believe in and that conflict often results from that. But Axl took it to a degree of self-sabotage that I just did not comprehend. I spent a lot of time trying to sort that out, to just understand it intellectually in some way, until I realized that there was no rhyme or reason to it whatsoever.
I was drawn to Axl like everyone else is because he is such an amazing singer and performer and has such powerful all-around charisma. I also admired the fact that he always had a point of view that he felt strongly about and was always so sincere about it. He’s a brilliant lyricist and such a really tortured artist that he won me over because my mentality has always been to root for the underdog—and that was such a major part of his brilliance.
I learned to take the bad with the good as far as our friendship was concerned because Axl had a lot of stuff going on. We’d have these very in-depth, personal conversations, especially during the period when the band was starting out and we lived together. There were moments there when I loved him to death, when he was just so cool and we had really close, heartfelt talks that he would lead. It was cool to get to know someone like him, because I can go for years without saying anything about how I feel, but Axl is not like that at all; he needed someone to communicate his feelings to. We’d have these great, peaceful one-on-ones about what bothered him and what was on his mind when the static died down. We’d talk about personal stuff from his past, all the things that concerned him, interested him, his goals for himself and for the band, what he wanted to do with his life. It was a great insight into someone that I already admired, and I liked him a lot during those times because he was human and vulnerable and I felt like we really connected.
The flip side to Axl, the Hyde to his Jekyll, was that once you felt that you had a strong bond going with him he’d do something that completely defied what you knew. One of the great things about our band was that we always had one another’s back, regardless of the situation, but that became hard to do with Axl eventually. He never did anything directly to me; he did things that jeopardized the entire band and its standing among our peers and our fans. That was something that I could never understand. But that never mattered much because Axl was always there to explain it away and he always had a lot to say about why he did what he did.
The longer this type of behavior continued, though, the I more I harbored mistrust when it came to him, because the guy that I’d have those intimate talks with was not the same guy who would make what I considered inconsiderate decisions. It was a contradiction that became hard for me to handle. In some instances Axl’s reactions to certain things were detrimental only to the band—they weren’t huge at first; usually they were worth compromising over to further our collective progress. Izzy was always very calm about dealing with Axl and I’d hang with Izzy a lot during those times. Duff, too, had his way of dealing with Axl, which was also pretty mellow.
Steven, on the other hand, used to get irate, because as far as he was concerned, Axl’s behavior made no fucking sense at all. As I’ve said before, Steven didn’t understand him and didn’t have the capacity to understand him, so he’d react directly at Axl. But for my part I put a lot of hours into trying to understand Axl and where he was coming from, because for our band to succeed, it had to be us, united, against the world. We had to keep our ranks tight. Whenever Axl did stuff that belittled the rest of us, it put distance between us where there should have been none. In my opinion it weakened our foundation.
This situtation went back and forth for ages, where we vacillated between being unified and being compromised. During the making of the first record, these incidents with Axl weren’t so dramatic. As the band got bigger, though, his demands got bigger. And as time went on, we developed a habit of appeasing him. If it wasn’t that big of a deal in the short run, we’d let him have whatever he wanted; we’d tell him what he wanted to hear. But it established a pattern in which he got used to getting what he wanted.
One of the hard things about him back in the day was that when no one else agreed with him, Axl’s retaliation wasn’t easy: he’d throw something, knock something down, leave the building, or walk away, fuming, down the street and quit the band. In the heat of those moments, you couldn’t reason with Axl; he was like a kid having a tantrum. It made me wonder about the dynamics of his upbringing. I’m in no position to give away the details, but from what Axl told me of it, his childhood was very rough.
When we were starting out, his behavior was tolerable because we were all moving in the same direction and we could justify the compromises we had to make. When we got back from the final leg of the Appetite tour two years later and all through the business of getting together and eventually working together again in Chicago, I started to see the less sensible side of him come out more and more—that’s why I left those writing sessions. Axl never understood why I left Chicago because he thought we were getting so much done, but the truth was that his negative energy was just really hard to work with. I know I’m not the only one to feel that way; almost anyone who ever worked for us would say something similar. The reason that the people working for us hung in there was the same reason that the band hung in there: there were these great, endlessly amazing moments that made all of the negative, really dark, hard moments worth it. Axl was so self-centered at times that everyone was affected by it. I can only assume that the rest of us balanced it out. But what do I know? Well, I do know this: Axl definitely has his version of events that is every bit as valid as mine.
WHEN THE BAND HEADED INTO THE STUDIO to record the Illusion records, everything going on behind the scenes got much worse very fast: there was so much unnecessary money being spent, and no one addressing the issue, because no one wanted to go there; the mood was that touchy. The truth is, no one in the band graduated high school, let alone had a degree in psychology; none of us knew how to effectively get through to Axl. It could be easy to do sometimes if you hung out with him quietly in his space, on his watch; you could sort some stuff out under those ideal conditions. Actually, it was the only way to discuss anything with him. Any other approach wasn’t constructive; usually all it did was double the damage and set him off worse than he’d been before.
The problem that arose for me personally was a deep bitterness at having to deal with this situation at all; I stopped wanting to even try to reason with Axl anymore. I found myself working very hard to accomplish something very simple: I used to have to go and talk to him at length about things I didn’t want to talk about just to be able to address one simple band issue. It began to fall on my shoulders to handle these day-to-day decisions that required Axl’s input and after a while I just didn’t want to do it; I wanted to hand that responsibility off to someone else. I just wanted to play music.
Doug Goldstein took over that role once he spent enough time with us on the road. He watched how we all interacted very carefully, and stepped in to play the part of the guy who “dealt with Axl.” Doug played a lot of games to get things done: he’d have the necessary conversations with Axl…but not the way anyone in the band would have done it. The way I see it, Doug was intent on making things happen for the wrong reasons. He was there in the first place to make himself money and to work his way up the industry ladder by establishing his reputation as manager for Guns N’ Roses. He’d tell Axl whatever he needed to and do whatever it took to keep Guns together not because he cared about us at all, but because having us as a client was essential to his reputation—but of course th
at’s no more than my opinion.
I saw Doug’s true colors pretty quickly, I must say. When he stepped in and replaced Alan Niven in May 1991, just as we were beginning to tour again, I didn’t think he’d help mediate for the right reasons—the band’s best interests. Nonetheless, I leaned on him to help deal with Axl. He could get us over whatever obstacle was in our way as far as Axl’s demands were concerned, but it was a no-win situation, because it was clear that Doug wasn’t telling Axl what he needed to hear for our greater good. Axl needed to be talked down, if anything, not appeased. Because that had gone on too long. Doug was never going to do that, though; he was only going to say whatever worked in the short term. Again, that was my opinion, at least.
In two years Guns had become a whirling dervish of miscommunication that spent money like it was water. And every day Doug would tell the rest of us that he was going to stop it all, yet nothing changed. All the rest of us wanted to do was keep moving forward as a band, to have a good time and get things done. To me that never seemed like something that should be that hard to do.
A permanent shift in the mood of the band came at the first mention of the contracts and the ownership of the band name, all of which first happened when Steven was kicked out. Axl insisted that owning the band name was something we needed to litigate, and making our “identity” a “commodity” left us feeling dictated to—which was something that never went over well. That legal arrangement damaged our sense of mutual respect because it made the rest of us apart from Axl feel pretty taken for granted. We could tolerate a lot because we were so easygoing, but an unrecognized tension was building, and the contract issue brought it to a head. Even then, we never talked about it, because we’d gotten well into the habit of blowing things off, but I know Izzy felt it; I know Duff and I did, too—we’d all look at one another sideways whenever the subject came up.
