1986.10.23 - Arlington Theatre, Los Angeles, USA

Basically one of the first, "Oh, where's Axl? He's really late," incidents. [...] Alice had just made his big comeback in '86, right. Constrictor, I guess, right? So he hadn't been doing anything for years and he was retooling his whole band and his whole image to be more 80s metal, right? And in an interim, he would do these warmup shows in like the suburbs before he'd go on a full tour. [...] Full on the same production in a nice big place or a medium sized place, but it just would be like a warm up show like before they were unadvertised, you know. And Guns N' Roses got asked to be because... When the Cathouse club with Riki Rachtman and Axl, they were all a big part of that scene. And Alice's people were sort of started hanging around noticing that this, "Okay, this is where the people that we need to reach are in this pool. We need to start grabbing from this pool of people." So they got GN'R, they had been signed, but still no record, no one knew who they were yet. They got to play in Santa Barbara, in a big stage, opening for Alice, which was all of our idols, even them. And we went to the show and it was, they were all up on stage, set up and we're, "Okay." And they were like, kind of like, "You only got like," a whatever, "40 minutes set" or something, you know, "'cause you're a developing band and no one really cares. They want to see Alice." And they're like just stalling a little bit, in five minutes. And there's like, Axl's not here. And you know, it's like, "Well, where is he?" "He called from somewhere, he said he was just leaving the Valley." It was like, you know, half hour before it was time to be on stage and it's an hour and a half drive, you know, that kind of thing. And so they stalled and stalled and stalled. And finally, they said, you know, the Alice people were furious, like they were like, "What the fuck is this? We give you guys a chance. This is what we get." [...] So it turns out that Axl actually sort of showed up, but they were like, "We got to start playing. Let's just play. Let's play some instrumental. We'll just we got to make some sound because we only have 15 minutes to play now, because..." They started playing some songs and then Izzy would like kind of sing, try to sing and you could tell that they were just like, "Oh shit." And then Ronnie Schneider, you probably know his name, he was in Roadcrew, the bass player. And he was one of the early roadies for Guns N' Roses, like the whole first kind of wave of tours that they did. He was like the right hand man, cause he was buddy of Slash's and stuff. He was like the roadie and he just, he came up and he's like, "You want to sing?" And the did Whole Lotta Rosie, AC/DC, they used to do that in their set, you know, or some AC/DC song and kind of, you know, kind of got through it, but it wasn't like at an Axl level. And then they were sort of like, "Okay, thank you, good night." And people were just sort of like, "What happened?" You know, then Alice came on. And then, I mean, I was friends with some of the Alice people, manager, mint[?], and they were like, backstage, you know, going, "Okay, we fucked up. We're gonna set an example. Not only will you not ever play with Alice Cooper again, but we're gonna make sure that you have a really hard time playing anywhere," like almost like a mafia move, you know? And then within a year, there were like best buds. "Hey, come on, come on stage with me," you know?