1987.07.DD - Hit Parader - Guns N' Roses: Street Tough (Axl, Slash)

Many thanks to @troccoli for sharing with us the rare articles and interviews he has collected, as well as many other amazing GN'R memorabilia.
The original picture of this interview can be found on his site here:
http://www.troccolitm.com/StreetToughPress.html

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Guns N’ Roses
STREET TOUGH

West Coast Glam Rockers Take Aim At The Big Time With Debut Disc.

By Marc Shapiro

Putting Guns N’ Roses in a room with a lot of time to kill is like putting a bomb with a short fuse next to a flame. And, on a recent night in a Los Angeles rehearsal hall, the fuse was definitely lit.

Earlier in the day, the band had discussed what guitarist Slash calls “some heavy shit”. The band’s EP, Live Like A Suicide, had just hit the streets and there was some concern about how well it was doing. But the biggest rub that night was the rehearsal itself, preparation for going into the studio for their first album.

“Yeah, I’m kind of bouncing off the walls,” said Slash. “Getting prepared to record this album is involving a lot of time sitting around with nothing to do. And that’s time that I need to fill. It’s not just me. We all really need constant activity. We hate the dead time, sitting around waiting for something to happen.”
Singer Axl Rose, however, quickly pointed out that the group’s current “thumb twiddling” state is nothing new.

“It pretty much began when we signed with our record company. Before that we were rocking out and kicking ass all the time. Then all of the sudden we found ourselves sitting around with a lot of money, being told not to do anything, there’s only one thing you can do. Party!”

In typical Guns N’ Roses fashion, “party” meant an endless round of excesses that soon tagged the band with a number of unsavory rumors.

“There was that rape charge,” said Axl, counting up the tall tales that have sprung up around the band. “Three of us had supposedly O.D.’d. We had been busted in England on drug charges and been dropped from the label. I was supposedly this bisexual heroin addict who had AIDS and was into small animals. There’s been about a rumor a week with this band.”

Slash, however, pointed out the truth to it all.

“It was the first time we had any money in our pockets. We didn’t fuck up. We worked very hard for a long time to get to the point where we had that money. We deserved to have a good time.

“Besides, a band like Guns N’ Roses always survives,” he continued. “When I was down to my last hundred bucks, I said ‘I’ll spend it because I know I’ll always get by.’ I don’t have any money right now. But I still have my cigarettes. I still drink. Guns N’ Roses will happen no matter what.”

“Hey man, give me a shot of Jim Beam,” yelled Axl to another band member. A bottle sailed across the room. Axl took a healthy swig that drained the bottle.

Scenes like this, coupled with the band’s admitted excesses with substances and sex, had led many rock and roll insiders to believe that Guns N’ Roses will self destruct before they can even get a record out. Axl chuckled at that theory.

“There’s probably a lot about this band that would give people cause to worry. We do have a ‘fuck you’ attitude. We party hard and do everything in the extreme. But we do know our limits. If somebody is doing something that begins to hurt the music the rest of us get down on him and say, ‘You can’t do that’. We’re as hardcore with each other as we are with other people, and we use that hardcore attitude to keep ourselves in line.”

This band’s attitude is so hardcore that they hired and subsequently fired one of the top rock producers in the business because he tried to sweeten up the band’s raw Aerosmith cum Motley Crue sound.

“We’re not the easiest band in the world to work with,” offered Slash as an explanation of the antics that have given their record company executives some new gray hairs. “The reason for that is we’ve got real strong ideas of our own. We will take suggestions. But the bottom line is that we’ll fight real hard for what we believe in. And why not? We know we’re always going to be at odds with people on something. But the bands who have made it big are the ones who have always been that way.”

At that moment, two members of the band wandered onto the rehearsal stage and broke into an acoustic duet of a Rolling Stones’ song. It was a scene in sharp contrast to the group’s much-publicized raucous image.

“We’re extreme people, so it doesn’t take much to set us off,” admitted Slash. “But we’ve learned some self control. We’re not smashing interviewer’s tape recorders anymore.”

Axl claims particularly to have benefited from the band’s cool-down program.

“I’ve really learned to control myself. It used to be that I would get mad, break everything in the fucking room, smack somebody in the face and then leave. Now I work real hard at trying to keep things cool and together.”

Break time ended with the band members, cursing all the while, returning to the stage to continue preparation for their first full slice of rock vinyl. Axl, however, feeling that his previous comments might have cast some doubt on Guns N’ Roses rough and ready image, puffed up his chest for one final shot.

“Don’t get me wrong, we are a bad boy band. We don’t lay down and die. If somebody punches Slash in the head, he’s going to have a pile of people on his back. We’re not afraid to go to excess with substances, sexually and everything else. A lot of people are afraid to be that way. We’re not.
“We’re not a band that’s afraid to say ‘fuck you.’”

I also think the date of this interview is wrong. Or, it may have been published in July 1987, but they talk about Live Like A Suicide just having hit the streets (it was released in December 1986) and about entering the studio to record Appetite (January 1987). So it is likely this interview happened in January 1987 and was released, maybe for the second time, in July 1987.

Yes, I agree, the interview seems to have taken place around January 1987. With the time window for an interview with a monthly magazine to be published being likely at least two months, it's possible that this interview was first released earlier (e.g. in March) and then re-released in July.
The same magazine had articles on the band also in April and May 1987, which seem to be behind in time too. So maybe it was taking them more than two months to release an interview they had done. Or maybe they had kept material they had obtained at the same time for future issues.