2016.02.05 - BBC Four - The Most Dangerous Band In The World: The Story Of Guns N' Roses
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2016.02.05 - BBC Four - The Most Dangerous Band In The World: The Story Of Guns N' Roses
by Blackstar Wed Jan 10, 2024 5:01 am
(I'm not posting the video because of copyright restrictions).
Transcript:
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Steven: We were The Rolling Stones and Poison was The Beatles.
Matt: This is not for kids.
Tom Zutaut: The one thing that made Guns N' Roses dangerous and drew everybody to them ultimately led to its demise. The entire Sunset Strip experience, from The Rainbow, to the Roxy to the Whisky A Go Go is like an adult fairytale. Sunset Strip was pretty amazing at this time. A lot of people don't realise that there were thousands of kids there, to the point where the sheriffs had to literally block off Sunset Boulevard.
[Opening titles]
Tom Zutaut: If you were in a band and you wanted to be noticed by anybody, you tried to get into the Rainbow.
Steven: It was a place to go to get drinks and chicks and drugs. And I loved every minute of it.
Tom Zutaut: All the bands, the bands that were big, the bands that were not big, you know, kids from Iowa with dreams... Everybody hung out at the Rainbow.
Lemmy (Motorhead): A lot of dead rock stars used to come here (laughs). Led Zeppelin came here, famously. That was Slash's table. It was Jimmy Page's table.
Mario Maglieri (Owner Whisky A Go Go & The Rainbow): Led Zeppelin used to party here, and one day I was walking through the dining room there, and I saw about four heels sticking out because they had the long tablecloths there and I always wondered what them girls were doing under there. You can figure that out.
Steven: Me and Slash went there one night, and it was ladies' night and he couldn't get in. For some reason they didn't let him in, but I got in. So he went home and had his mum dress him up like a woman. He put a dress on and he went up there and he got in.
Tom Zutaut: The real people, the wannabes, the dreamers, the schemers, it was all at the Rainbow.
[Welcome to the Jungle is played]
Zutaut: You know, you had Madame Wong's, which was a Chinese restaurant. The woman who owned it loved rock music. There was Gazzari's, which is where Van Halen were discovered. A lot of bands played at the Starwood. Bands like, you know, London, Nikki Sixx's band he was in before Motley Crue. They all stood in line and mixed to get into the Rainbow and, obviously, the rock stars got in there automatically, they didn't even have to pay. They let them in because Mario, who owns the Rainbow, also owned the Whisky. He did co-own even the Roxy next door.
[Snippet from Axl and Slash interview on MTV in May 1988]
[Footage from Welcome to the Jungle video shoot]
Marc Canter: I'm looking around and I'm thinking, "Wow, this is really - this is good. These guys really click." I began to videotape the shows to basically grab, capture what was happening.
Tom Zutaut: You know, there's always this term, the fifth Beatle. So Slash introduced me to Marc Canter and said, "If there were a fifth Beatle in Guns N' Roses - since there’s five of us, I guess there'd be a sixth Beatle, it's Marc Canter." What Marc Canter was doing for Guns N' Roses is what I would do for a new band that I found and signed. The difference is that Marc was feeding the band in his parents' Deli instead of using a record company expense account.
Marc Canter: The first time I videotaped a show - they watched it and then they could learn from that because they could hear what they are doing, and mistakes, if there's any, they could see if there's something they want to change. It was kind of helping them learn what they're doing, but maybe they want to change about what they're doing. I'm sure they didn't need to look at every gig, because after one or two they got the idea of what they loved and what was going on. I took pictures, that kind of stuff. I never stopped taking pictures, because sometimes I'd set the video on wide angle and just snap a few shots anyway. They just knew that every time there was a gig I'd be there and I'd be doing that.
Vicky Hamilton: I had Welcome To The Jungle on my answering machine and it was the piece that goes, "You're gonna die!" Beep!
[Old footage of fans outside Gazzarri’s]
Michael Monroe: “What kind of people are they?!
[Snippet from August 25, 2010 interview with Slash on CNN Talk Asia]
[Footage from Welcome to the Jungle video shoot]
Michael Monroe: Wow! It's so cool. I could do that.
[Snippet from 2010 interview with Slash]
Marc Canter: I first met Slash in 1976 and I was at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. I had a motorbike and he was walking by and was thinking of taking it. Then he looked inside, saw me and recognised me from school, but we didn't know each other. So, he decided to make friends with me rather than try to steal it. That way, it would be a sure way of getting to ride it without being in trouble. We became good friends and, at some point, we started riding BMX bicycles together. He got good pretty quick. It also showed in his artwork.
Steven: I met Slash - the first time I met him I was riding my skateboard over at Laurel Elementary School just down the street from my grandmother's apartment where I lived. I fell off the ramp and right on my head. He was walking down the street and said, "Hey, dude, you’re okay?"
Marc Canter: There was an incident where… Slash always liked reptiles, so he had a snake. I bought the snake, but we kept it at his house. And I remember one time I gave him, like, a dollar, or whatever it was at that time, for a mouse to feed the snake. And he bought cigarettes with it. So the snake died and I blamed him for selling out the snake to a pack of cigarettes.
[Snippet from 2010 interview with Slash]
Steven: I brought him to my grandmother's house.
Slash (from old interview): And he had a cheap stereo and a cheap little, like, Sears electric guitar and an amp that went with it. And we'd ditch school and go to his house and he'd just crank the stereo all the way up. I think it was Kiss Alive. And we’d jump up and down on the bed with the electric guitar and just bang on it with the amp turned all the way up. And that turned me on.
Steven: Within a couple of days, he had that guitar. And then within a week his grandmother bought him an acoustic guitar. And then literally, within two weeks, he was playing it. And within three weeks, he actually wrote his first song.
Slash (from old interview): I didn't have any defined heroes, but I definitely had bands that I liked. I mean I liked Zeppelin, I liked David Bowie and I liked, you know, the Stones and The Beatles and everything that was going on. And there was other stuff, there was Stevie Wonder… I mean, there was a really wide range of music that I liked.
Marc Canter: He told me that he was in a band and I should come check it out. So I came to the rehearsal and it was Tidus Sloan at that time. And right away, I saw the same talents I saw from his drawing and his bike riding into his music.
Michael Monroe: A lot hadn't happened since the punk thing in London - there was The Stray Cats, of course, had been a happening thing, which was great. But then... After that, it was the post-punk period.
Mario Maglieri: It wound up from what you've just said to more or less rock and roll and then you've got glam rock and you’ve got so many different types of music. A lot of it good, a lot of it was nothing.
[Snippet from Axl and Slash interview on MTV, May 1988]
Vicky Hamilton: I kept on seeing these guys walk up the hill with, like, this black hair and a blond one. And, you know, during that time period, ‘81, punk rock was huge in LA. And here were these long-haired freaks and it turned out to be Motley Crue.
Nikki Sixx: It wasn't unusual to walk out and see two girls in the hallway passed out, naked with broken bottles and pizza boxes, and Tommy is, like, having sex with some girl that just, you know, just threw up. I mean, you know, it was just like that.
Tom Zutaut: Motley Crue explodes, and then the next thing you know there are ten bands that all have teased hair and hairspray, and look like the boys-next-door version of boys dressed like girls. You know, something becomes successful and then there's all the sort of copycat bands. But it was getting a bit boring and monotonous because, you know, hair bands were becoming kind of a generic term.
Michael Monroe: So many bands that came up with big hair and posing, and partying, and the sex, drugs, rock and roll cliche.
Tom Zutaut: Everybody was kind of doing the same shtick.
Michael Monroe: Bands that played their hairspray cans better than their instruments.
Tom Zutaut: People were actually getting kind of tired of it.
Marc Canter: The garage bands that Slash was in basically played their covers and a few originals, and they hung out with other bands that were doing similar things. But none of the other bands became famous, other than Tracii Guns - ended up eventually in LA Guns. Road Crew was another one of Slash's bands.
Steven: I grew up playing drums and learning how to play drums, playing with Slash.
Marc Canter: Steven saw Slash was in that band Road Crew and, right away, he wanted in. So he auditioned for Slash and, right away, Slash was blown away by his double bass drum skills. London was a band that everybody had passed through.
[Snippet from interview with the band London, 1986:
Lizzie Grey: This is, like, the training school for rock stars. We get somebody in the band and as soon as they leave they become rock stars.
Interviewer: So who else was in the band?
Lizzie Grey: Couple of dudes from Guns N' Roses, a dude from WASP and Nikki Sixx from Motley Crue.]
Marc Canter: Steven and Slash were in it somewhere in 1984. Before that, they were in bands that were just basically garage bands. So, you know, they never really played the Sunset Strip and London was a band that was on the Sunset Strip. At that point, Slash went through an audition for Poison. Slash didn't really want to do it, because they were kind of bubblegum-ish and the whole silly string... And it was just like "Ah..."
Slash (from old interview): I thought a lot of it was very sappy. There was a lot of stuff about the image that I wasn't necessarily into. The whole band having the same haircuts. I liked all the harder-edged stuff.
Marc Canter: Back then, they'd hang out at the Rainbow. And at the Rainbow, you would meet different musicians and, you know, if you were looking for a bass player you might find one at the Rainbow, just because it was a revolving door of musicians.
Steven: Duff - me and Slash put an ad in the Recycler paper for a bass player and he was the first person to come meet us.
Tom Zutaut: Duff, like, brought this sort of punk reckless, abandonness spirit and attitude to the band. You know, he's the Slash of bass players.
Marc Canter: Slash said to me, "Me and Steven are going to go up to this band called Rose. There's this really cool guy. He's supposed to be a good singer named Bill, and this guy Izzy, and they're supposed to be really cool. They're from Indiana." That day, Bill changed his name to Axl, literally. Because we thought he was Bill, but then, when we met him, he said his name was Axl. So I never really ever called him Bill. It was... from the very first day, he was Axl to me. At that time, they were looking for a guitar player and Slash was looking for a singer.
[Snippet from Axl and Slash interview on MTV, May 1988]
Marc Canter: Slash was thinking, you know, to get Axl and Izzy in his band Road Crew. And Axl and Izzy – or Axl, at least, was looking to get a guitar player in Hollywood Rose.
[Snippet from Axl and Slash interview on MTV, May 1988]
Marc Canter: Slash ended up joining, and Steven, Hollywood Rose. And Izzy ended up quitting immediately and then joining London, a band that Slash and Steven had just left.
[Snippet from Axl and Slash interview on MTV, May 1988]
Steven: When we were watching him perform, I said to Slash, "We get that guitar player and that singer and get Duff in here, we're going to have the greatest band ever."
Marc Canter: They did about five gigs, a couple of rehearsals, maybe a couple of parties at rehearsal studio and then it fell apart. They had differences. Not necessarily musical differences, I don't think. They just didn't get along or whatever. Axl joined up with Tracii right around that same time and said, "Okay, let's put the band together, but this time we're going to change the name. We're Hollywood Rose, you're LA Guns, let's do Guns N' Roses." So that's why they changed it to Guns N' Roses.
Vicky Hamilton: Axl called me when I was a booking agent at Silver Lining Entertainment and he said, "You come highly recommended. We'd like you to book some shows for us." I said, "Cool, send me a tape." He was like, "Can I, like, bring you a tape?" And I was like, "Well, I don't really have a stereo here, so can you send it?" And he’s like, "Oh, it's OK. I'll bring a ghetto blaster and play it for you." Two hours later, he and Izzy show up, ghetto blaster in hand, and, you know, they played me songs that were on Appetite For Destruction. And I was, like, blown out. I was, like... I booked them sight unseen.
Steven: We wouldn't be successful if it wasn't for her. She was the one who shopped us around, she did all the work, we just played music.
Marc Canter: They had Tracii Guns and Rob Gardner as the drummer, and Izzy had made it back into the band. He'd joined back with Axl and they hired Duff, coincidentally, so Duff's now in the band for, like, a gig or two. And Slash just joins Black Sheep, and they had a gig at the Wolf & Rissmiller Country club in Reseda - Slash's first gig with them. Who shows up at the gig? Axl and Izzy. Because why? Tracii quits and Rob Gardner quits, so they're missing a guitar player and they're missing a drummer. They've got a gig in four days, five days, at the Troubadour and Duff has booked a tour to Seattle. So they said, "Look, Tracii and Rob are out. How about you and Steven?" So, of course, Slash quits Black Sheep and he joins Guns N' Roses.
[Snippet from Axl and Slash interview on MTV, May 1988]
Marc Canter: Then they took off to Seattle, and on the way up there the car broke down and that became what was known now as Hell Tour. And they had to hitchhike and they didn't have any money, and they had to steal vegetables from farms to eat.
Steven: We went out as far as we could up to, I think, Portland. Portland, Oregon, we're on the freeway hitchhiking, had the guitars and the stick bags. And we got a couple of rides with some hippy girls, a Mexican guy and his kid... And then finally, Duff's friend from Seattle drove down.
Marc Canter: You know, they went through hell to get there, and now they get there and they have another good gig.
Steven: We did the show. I'm sure it was terrible. We went back to Duff's friend's house, I smoked a lot of weed and ate spaghetti, and we went home the next day (laughs).
Marc Canter: They get back to Los Angeles and now they're more than just a band of musicians that fit. They're kind of blood brothers, because they suffered a little bit on the road and, you know, they had each other's backs now.
Steven: But it was the greatest time, because we did it together and we figured, if, you know, we can hitchhike to Seattle in a day, we can do anything.
Marc Canter: So now it's, like, the middle of June and they have a gig booked in a couple of weeks. They need photos for flyers and they're hungry. So they come to Canter's, I feed them their first good meal they've had in, you know, two weeks (laughs).
Steven: Me and Slash and the other GNR guys, I think we were the only people to ever eat for free at Canter's.
Marc Canter: We do a bunch of photos with Jack Lue. Jack knew what he was doing.
[Footage of Michael Monroe performing with GN’R]
Mike Monroe: People are going ape shit (laughs). Like, "Fuck! Fuck!" I could hear them shouting as I was filming! "Yes!" You know?
Marc Canter: They were a perfect fit. Axl was the rock and roll, Rolling Stones, Hanoi Rocks kind of a thing and Duff was the punk. Slash was hard rock and blues… Appetite was written under no pressure at all. They were living behind Guitar Center in a little garage studio. It was meant for rehearsing. It was like a shoebox, really. While they were there, Izzy said, "Check out what I wrote." And he'd show a riff and Slash would hear that and he would funk it out. Like My Michelle, you know, it went [hums]. That's all it did and Slash was like, "Uh-uh." [hums]
Steven: The place we lived was disgusting. It smelt, it had no toilet, no sink. Thank God we had a lot of girlfriends, you know, from strip clubs or biker girls. And we’d go to their places and take showers, and they would bring us food… But it made us stronger. And even being in that little shithole, we were able to create magic. And it was a shithole, trust me (laughs).
Vicky Hamilton: They were sleeping in it and stuff, and Axl got in trouble with the law. The story is that he had sex with this girl and threw her out, and then she said that he raped her. So then the cops started looking for him. And Slash called me and said, "Can Axl sleep on your couch? Only for a couple of days.” But what was supposed to be a couple of days ended up being six months. And shortly after Axl moved in, they all moved in except for Duff, who lived with his girlfriend. I would barricade the bedroom door so they couldn't get in.
Steven: She let us live with her. She let us destroy her apartment. I guarantee she didn't get her deposit back on that one.
Vicky Hamilton: I introduced them to Ray Brown, who was a pretty famous designer at that point in time. He made Axl that snakeskin belt that you see in all the early Appetite stuff.
Marc Canter: Vicky Hamilton was like Mama Kin. She nurtured them, but she also knew that they were drawing a crowd, and she knew the music was good, and she had experience with getting them to the next level.
Vicky Hamilton: I was kind of like a den mother for them and drove them to rehearsals.
Marc Canter: Steven started doing some bad drugs. He was freebasing. Slash was doing dope. He wasn't hiding the alcohol, but he was hiding the dope. Izzy's girlfriend Desi, she got them all hooked on it – well, not all of them but a lot of them. Eventually, I found out about it and I was really pissed about it, and I stopped buying them food. They'd call me and say, "Let's go to Tommy's," you know, and I'd go, "No," I said, "because, if I take you to Tommy's and buy you food, then, when you do get money you're just going to buy some heroin. This way, fuck you."
Vicky Hamilton: I tried to keep them sober, but they were going up on the roof and doing the drugs and stuff, that I wouldn't see them. And at that point in time I was kind of a mess too. I smoked a lot of pot and I drank the Jack Daniel's with them as well, so... (laughs).
Marc Canter: I remember when Guns N' Roses first got together and Slash and Steven joined, Izzy's girlfriend Desi was the first one to come out and... not strip, but she was wearing next to nothing. She would do that for every time they played a gig. She'd come out just for that one song, for Jumpin' Jack Flash.
[Footage of GN’R performing Jumping Jack Flash]
That went on for, you know, about eight or nine months. And then, at some point, they got Pam Jackson to do it and she was really a stripper, and she was a good stripper and she really took it to the next level. I mean, she didn't get naked but she knew how to really, you know, move it around. Desi was more of a dancer and Pam was more of the stripper. And then after that, they were hanging around strippers constantly, because strippers liked the band and they always had money, and the band didn't. So the strippers would buy the booze, they'd buy them some food, they could sleep in their apartment, have sex with them... Basically, the strippers were heaven. The strippers coming up on stage was simply going to make the show better, because sex sells and sex is... everyone likes to see a stripper. So now the music's good and there's a stripper so...
[Live footage]
Marc Canter: It was only a matter of time before somebody was going to find them, and sign them and get them out there to the world.
Vicky Hamilton: Music Connection did an article, a cover story on Guns N' Roses and that kind of wound it up into high gear.
Marc Canter: Tom Zutaut had already heard about them from this guy that works at a little record store here at Melrose, Vinyl Fetish.
Tom Zutaut: They go, "You know, you're the guy that found Motley Crue, you'll love this. You need to check it out." And I said, "Well, what's the name of the band?" And Joseph said, "They're called Guns N' Roses. Isn't that a cool name?"
[Live footage]
Vicky Hamilton: During the time period on the Sunset Strip, it was like every record label had a hair band. That was like a glam rock band. Guns N' Roses was different than the other bands in the pack because there was something slightly dangerous about them and it was a little more guitar-laden.
Tom Zutaut: Slash had drawn a poster that was hanging at Fairfax in Sunset, of the pistols and the roses. I saw that poster, I pulled my Jeep over, I ripped it down. This is the coolest poster I think I'd ever seen. At the time, I had no idea that Slash drew it. I found out what time they were going on and I went to the gig. Well, I missed Guns N' Roses because, earlier in that evening, Axl had traded slots with Shark Island. So I watched Shark Island's set, Axl comes out, does and encore with them and I'm like, "Holy shit. This guy is incredible." Whatever that animal magnetism, that stare, whatever it is, he's got.
Marc Canter: So then he went to see them at the Troubadour a month later.
Tom Zutaut: Whenever I would go to see a band, word would get out and bidding wars would start just because I was there... because of all the rock bands I'd already had success with.
Vicky Hamilton: I had 16 A&R people at that show.
Tom Zutaut: Really, I don't even need to see the band. If the band is halfway competent... This guy has got something that I've never seen before. Lightning in a bottle.
[Footage from backstage at a 1986 show]
Tom Zutaut: I went and talked to the band and, you know, I gave them my phone number, I got their phone numbers and I said, "Guys," I said, "I want you to come to my office." It was literally the loudest show I had ever heard. It was so loud that I saw people pulling out their packs of cigarettes and putting, you know, butts in their ears. People like this [puts his hands on his ears]. It was ear-splitting, like damage-your-brain loud. But it was explosive. I'd never seen anything like it and everyone else in the band was equally as powerful as Axl. And I was just like, "This is going to be the biggest band in the world." I knew it.
Marc Canter: Slash's guitar playing was phenomenal. Every generation needs its own guitar hero and I really felt that he would be, like, the next Jimmy Page, Clapton, Beck or Hendrix. After a couple of songs, he saw right away that he wanted them, but he sort of ducked out of there because he saw other A&R people there looking, and they all looked up to him. And they saw him leaving and he was like, "Yeah, they were loud, they sucked." Because he wanted to bluff them. So, Tom ended up signing them.
Tom Zutaut: They sign the deal, they get the cheque... and that is the story of how the band got signed.
[Live footage]
Marc Canter: That was the last gig that they did that was, you know, the end of what they were doing before they got signed.
Vicky Hamilton: When they got their advance money from Geffen, a lot of that went to tattoos. They got, immediately, a lot more tattoos (laughs).
[Snippet from Axl and Slash interview on MTV, May 1988]
Tom Zutaut: You know, it took almost two years to get the band, you know, to the point where Appetite was a record.
Vicky Hamilton: Tom Zutaut said to me, "We will have to get the band major management." Because in their mind I wasn't major management material.
Tom Zutaut: No-one would manage them. Everybody turned it down. So finally I called Alan and I said, "Alan, you have to manage this band or I can't even get this record put out."
[Live footage]
Marc Canter: Rocket Queen was just a song that Axl wrote about his friend, Barbi.
Tom Zutaut: We were actually mixing the record, and Axl looks at me and he's like, "We can't mix this song yet, it's not done."
Marc Canter: Axl had always wanted to record a sex act and incorporate it somehow.
Tom Zutaut: Steven hadn't shown up, but his girlfriend, Adriana, was there.
Marc Canter: Adriana Smith was one of the strippers.
Tom Zutaut: And Axl's like, "How would you like to be a part of rock and roll history?" And she goes, "What do I got to do?" He goes, "You've just to fuck my brains out for as long as you can."
Marc Canter: She wanted to help them, but she wasn't sure if she should do it. And Alan Niven put down a big bottle of Jack Daniels and said, "How about now?"
Adriana Smith: And I was like, "For the band! Sure, no problem. For the band. And a bottle of Jack Daniel's."
Marc Canter: I was kind of surprised because it was Steven's girlfriend.
Steven: There was no girlfriend in my life. My girlfriend was rock and roll.
Adriana Smith: They mic'd the floor of this vocal booth and dimmed the lights, and we just got busy. They just start having outrageous sex and we're rolling tape. It concludes, Axl comes in, he listens back and goes, "Yeah, this will work. He goes, “Let's edit this because we only want to use it here, here and here." Anybody can go hear Rocket Queen and they can hear the best 36 seconds of it, but there's about an hour and a half of it altogether.
Steven: I thought it sounded great. I was like, "Good job, guys."
Marc Canter: Now that you know, next time you hear it, you'll hear it (laughs).
Steven: It's for the good of art. It's rock and roll.
Marc Canter: They had enough songs to make a record, they just... Tom was just looking for… you know, he knew what he wanted. He wanted something else.
Tom Zutaut: When they wrote Sweet Child O' Mine, Marc Canter called me and he said, "They've got this new song, you're going to love it. It's exactly what they need."
Marc Canter: As soon as he heard Sweet Child he said, "OK, now you're done. Let's go into preproduction."
Tom Zutaut: We were almost finished with Appetite and we put an EP out through independent distribution. It was called Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide. Geffen funded it, but I was able to carve that money out and use it to bring the band to play that Marquee show.
[Audio snippet from concert at The Marquee, June 1987]
Tom Zutaut: We did it and the band exploded. Like, the press went crazy. I believe that that particular Marquee show is one of the best shows they ever played, but nobody in America wanted to know about them. People wanted them to just disappear. We put Appetite out. Radio stations won't play it, they refused to play it.
Marc Canter: Maybe, you know, heavy metal stations like KNAC might have played it, but...
Tom Zutaut: MTV were pushing really hard that they were never going to play Guns N' Roses because John Malone said if we play this band, he's going to drop us off his cable systems. John Malone deemed them to be a threat to good Christians.
Marc Canter: The only reason why they had sold 200,000 records in a year was because they were on tour with The Cult, Alice Cooper, Motley Crue. And during that time they would play at arenas, say of 10,000 people, and the next day, you know, maybe 100 or 200 people would go out and buy their record.
Tom Zutaut: So 200,000 units, and I get a call from Ed Rosenblatt, and he said, "Tom, this record's over. We're walking away from this record." I said, "This record's going to sell millions and it's only at 200,000.” So I went upstairs, I saw David, and he's like, "Well, what can I do?" And I said, "Well, you could call your friends that run MTV and get them to play this video we made. This video is fantastic. Tell them to play it." "All right," he goes, "I'll take care of it." About an hour later David calls me up. I go up and he says, "They're kind of hoping that no-one that knows John Malone will be watching the channel at 4am in New York, 1am in LA, but they're going to play the video one time." And he goes, "That's the best I could do." So that's it, they're going to play it once. So I had to deliver this horrific news to the band, and they were like, "Well, let's just have a big party." And one of the funniest things about this party is that, you know, some of the band were shooting heroin in the kitchen. The rest of the band was sort of drinking beer and whatever, whiskey… I went out and got bucket-loads of cookies and milk. You know, people who drink and do drugs still like cookies and milk. So before the video comes on, maybe like 11 at night, there's a knock on the door and it's the LA County sheriffs, and they want to, like... "We've had some complaints about noise." And I let them in and I definitely gave warning that I was going to let them in, and some people were in the toilet flushing things, whatever, you know, scrambling. And then so the sheriffs come in, and they see, like, some really hot chicks and the guys in the band. They're all sitting there with, you know, milk-lips and milk-chins eating cookies watching MTV (laughs). And so the sheriffs are like, "We have no idea why your neighbours are complaining.” You know, “You just look like a bunch of kids watching TV and having milk and cookies." And they left, and that was the end of it. Finally, I wake up around three, and I've got all these messages. So I call into the office, and my assistant's like, "We think you need to come in." I said, "Who made the most phone calls looking for me?" And they go, "Al Coury, the head of promotions." So I go and see him and he's like... [shouts gibberish]. You know, he sounded like a gremlin on steroids or something. Basically he says, “The MTV switchboard blew up last night. Too many phone calls came in, it sparked the thing and it melted. MTV's never had so many calls, and they continue to be bombarded with phone calls today. Every kid in America is calling them requesting this video, and they know there's no way we could have paid that many people to do it. So they're going to add the video.”
Marc Canter: The minute MTV started playing Welcome To The Jungle, everything changed. They were selling a couple of hundred thousand records a week.
[Snippet from Slash interview:
Slash: We bought actual news footage that had been shown on television from NBC and CBS and ABC.]
[Snippet from Axl interview at the 1989 MTV Awards:
Axl: We've worked really hard to get on MTV by our… without really compromising, but doing what we wanted to do.]
Riki Rachtman: Appetite For Destruction is one of the greatest rock and roll records ever. And those type of records that have the swearing in it and controversial topics don't get that big. They're not supposed to, because that's not vanilla. But they did.
[Snippet from MTV program:
Voice of Kurt Loder: As the hot young band on the bill, Guns N' Roses were, of course, the object of much fond speculation among their elders.
Steven Tyler: It's real easy for a band to go out and buy the image and watch other bands performing and mimic it and pick it up, but they seem to have it right down to the bone.]
[Snippet from TV news report about the original artwork of Appetite]
[Snippet from MTV interview at Robert Williams’ exhibition, November 1988]
Tom Zutaut: It just exploded. And then I brought up Sweet Child O' Mine, you know, and said, "We should shoot a video for this song." And it became a number one record at seven minutes long, regardless.
[Clip from Sweet Child O’ Mine music video]
Tom Zutaut: Erin Everly understood Axl better than most because she had her own difficult childhood. They had this great love affair, this great romance and passion for each other, and Sweet Child O' Mine is written about her. But I think that she truly did and does love Axl in a way that almost nobody else probably has, and I think she helped him a lot. She wanted to see him achieve his dreams and she knew his dreams were, because they were together.
Marc Canter: Sweet Child became, like, a number one single, and that was it getting played on pop stations, which put them into a whole different ballpark.
[Snippet from MTV news report about the release of "Lies"]
[Snippet from "Lies" press conference, July 23, 1988]
[Snippet from MTV news report about Slash and Duff swearing at the 1990 American Music Awards]
Marc Canter: They were getting into trouble.
Michael Monroe: Hey come on, get real.
Marc Canter: I remember one time where Izzy peed on a plane. I guess he was impatient, and whoever was in the bathroom didn't come out and he just went in the corner and peed, and got arrested. And that made news flashes across the country. Sometimes you'll sell records when you make the news.
[Snippet from TV program:
Host: Some of the lyrics, according to an influential group of American mothers, should not be falling on youthful ears.]
[Snippet from MTV post-CBGB’s show interview, October 30, 1987]
[Snippet from MTV Headbanger’s Ball interview, Oct. 24, 1987]
[Snippet from interview at the American Music Awards, January 22, 1990]
Marc Canter: Alice Cooper didn't know who they were at a gig in Santa Barbara, but that was a little bit of a disaster and the band kind of wrecked the backstage area. I'm sure Alice Cooper probably wished that that band was never put on the gig.
[Snippet from Axl and Slash interview on MTV, May 1988]
Riki Rachtman: Axl was one of the most intense people I've ever met in my life. He was a bad ass, without a doubt. He was a guy that I've seen get in street fights.
[Live footage from LA Street Scene 1986]
Marc Canter: Axl stopped doing dope around probably July of '86. Because he saw Izzy and Slash were just going down the drain. And Steven. Duff wouldn't touch it because his girlfriend died in his arms when he was 15. So Duff might have done coke or booze or whatever, but he wasn't going to touch heroin. And that's when Mr Brownstone got written.
[Live footage from LA Street Scene 1986:
Axl: This next song is a song about doing too much heroin. I know. But sometimes things go a little too far. A song called Dancing With Mr Brownstone.]
Marc Canter: Izzy had written on a pizza box “I used to do a little but a little wouldn’t do so the little got more and more”, just, you know, some lyrics. And it was like, Axl brought it to Izzy and they end up finishing the song and making Mr Brownstone.
[Live footage from LA Street Scene 1986]
Marc Canter: Axl got blamed for being this "Guns N' Roses are just a bunch of drug addicts" Axl, whatever. Axl was not a drug addict after August of 1986. Yet Slash, Steven and Izzy were.
[Snippet from Axl’s testimony at the trial for Steven's lawsuit, Aug. 23, 1993]
Marc Canter: Izzy didn't clean up until '89. And Slash until, what, five or six years ago.
Michael Monroe: You use the drugs, but once the drugs start using you, then you're in trouble.
Tom Zutaut: Axl was really starting to get deeply worried that the band was going to implode around him from drugs. I mean, certain members of the band had serious substance abuses, and they were mixing different things. Any of which could kill you. So he made a public statement about it, onstage, at the LA Coliseum, opening for The Stones.
[Snippet from Axl’s “Mr. Brownstone” speech at the LA Coliseum, Oct. 18, 1989]
Tom Zutaut: When they looked at Axl and Slash, Jagger and Richards saw themselves back in the '60s and '70s. You know, "We've been the bad boys of rock since the '60s, and now we're not the most dangerous band in the world, so I want that band to open for us."
[Snippets of Axl talking about playing with the Stones and Steven's firing, MTV Famous Last Words interview, August 31, 1990]
[Live footage from LA Street Scene 1986]
Marc Canter: Well, when Steven Adler lost his job in Guns N' Roses it was a dark time for him, and they were getting ready to record Use Your Illusions, and he just wasn't there, and if he was there, he wasn't capable of keeping time. They didn't just fire him, they brought in Matt to work a little bit and they thought, well, okay, Matt will do a little bit and then we'll bring Steven back.
[Snippet of Axl talking Steven's firing, MTV Famous Last Words interview, August 31, 1990]
Matt: Slash and Duff saw me play drums, I thought I'd be a good fit, and they were already thinking about making the move on drummers, so, yeah.
Steven: They kicked me out the band because I was doing drugs with them, and then they just brought Matt in to do drugs with them too. It wasn't like Matt was sober, he was doing drugs with them.
[Footage from Axl in court for the Adler lawsuit, August 23, 1993]
Steven: That was such a terrible time in my life. Man, just like being in a courtroom, and you've got these lawyers and they're saying this shit, your bandmates, the people you grew up with are saying shit about you. And then you have to say this about them. It was just so hard. I would bring heroin on a foil to court with me. Every chance I get, I go in a bathroom and smoke. I go, "I can't do this any more." I mean, I think I cried for a year straight.
[Snippet from Axl’s testimony for the Adler lawsuit]
[Footage from St. Louis riot]
Tom Zutaut: If he sees something in the crowd he doesn't like he's going to act on it. After that he didn't want to play the show any more and they tore the place up.
Steven: There would have been no destroying of the place if I was there. Because if Axl left and they started getting crazy, I would have started playing my drums and I would have got them excited. I would have done something to stop that.
Matt: We were all headed out and there was a lot of violence, there was the riot squad coming in, helicopters, tear gas, the whole thing. It was a full-on riot. It was pretty serious. We knew we were either going to be arrested for the situation or inciting a riot. So we were, like, running from the law (laughs). It was pretty awesome. So we went in this van. I'll never forget it, because we were going through the crowd and people were banging on the van, and Slash had his top hat on. I remember reaching over and going, "Take your hat off. It's obvious that it's you," you know? We stopped at a waffle house. Axl was still in his skirt. It was like... (laughs). We went in, people just looked over... "Holy shit." You know? We got up to Chicago and everything was on the news saying there’s riots, huge fires and 600 people injured. Like, holy shit, right? Record sales are going through the roof. It was, you know, amazing. So the next day it comes on the news that they're going to extradite Axl. They're going to arrest him for inciting a riot. We sent two decoys out of the hotel. We dressed them like Axl, and we had this other guy named Ronnie Stalnacker that worked for Slash. He had really curly hair like Slash. So we dressed him up like Slash. And the cops were coming in the front, and Axl went out the kitchen. And they arrested those guys thinking they were Axl and Slash.
[Footage from TV report about the Stump lawsuit trial in St. Louis:
Counsel: The plaintiff's case has been about dirty, nasty vulgar language.
Stump’s counsel: You jumped out at Billy, you attacked Billy and Billy was injured.
Judge: They have both compromised and they have both reached an agreement between each other.
Voice-over: Stephenson said he suffered back, knee and ear injuries, which should be at least partly soothed by the undisclosed cash settlement.
Axl: They originally asked for 2.8 million and we settled at a very minimal figure.]
Matt: The band was on top of the world, you know? I remember when it came time to do the jet, you know, to rent the jet. So we rented the 727, the MGM Grand, and it had four bedrooms. We had a bar in the middle of the plane and we were able to pick our own stewardesses. There was a lot of drinking going on and obviously we were in South America where you could score grams of cocaine for 3 dollars. (Laughs) You know? I'll take 10! You know, we did four or five laps around the world.
[Snippet from TV news reports about the release of Use Your Illusion]
[Snippet from MTV interview May 1991]
Matt: They had security on us with fucking walkie-talkies and shit. We found a way around it. We had those guys. We had “Matt's asleep” [mimics radio static]. I'd hear that outside my door and then I'd go out the fucking balcony, over the next balcony. In Texas one time, I got in a cab and I paid the cab. She says, "Oh, great show tonight." I said, "You didn't see me. Here’s $100. I'm not in this car." And I said, "Take me to the closest hotel." I made sure it was a hotel with a minibar, so I went up there and I drank, passed out on the bed. Woke up with Doug Goldstein and John Reese standing in front of my bed. "Where do you think you're going?" (Laughs) "How did you find me?" "We paid them more than you paid them." And I'm like, "Holy fuck." I mean, it was all the way across Dallas, Texas.
[Snippet from TV news report:
Voice-over: Guns N' Roses was apparently too controversial for the Kmart and Walmart chains. The two new albums, titled Use Your Illusion 1 and 2, will not be sold in those stores due to objectionable lyrics. But other retailers have ordered a record four million copies. In Los Angeles, customers parted with their money in a more orderly fashion than in New York City. Not everyone here was a fan of Guns N' Roses.
Customer: I hope that album fails, I mean, because I'm just so sick of his attitude, you know? And he acts like a jerk.]
[Footage from the show in St. Louis]
Marc Canter: It was very frustrating for the other members to watch these riots happen because of sound problems, because Axl wasn't at sound check.
[Snippets from interviews with Izzy, MTV Sept. 1992 and TuneCore Nov. 12, 2006]
Marc Canter: Izzy quit because he didn't want to spend the money on the videos. They had spent some money and he was paranoid about the riots and lawsuits coming, so he just was like, didn't want to... He just, like, took of. Plus, he's a bit flaky to begin with.
Vicky Hamilton: That was shocking, because Izzy and Axl were childhood friends. I think that Izzy was probably the most underrated person in that band. He's a great songwriter and I think that he was sort of the guy that kept things together.
Marc Canter: But when it eventually came time to write, there was no Izzy. And Izzy was the neutral figure between Slash and Axl. He was the missing piece of the puzzle.
Tom Zutaut: The beginning of the end for him was… he was starting to get ticked off about Axl being late for shows. And he started realising that Axl's tardiness was costing the band millions of dollars.
Matt: Izzy had got cleaned up, and got his own bus and he didn't want to, like, be anywhere near us. He wanted to ride away from the band.
Marc Canter: Duff was a train wreck with his drinking. And Slash was… you know, Slash was his dope buddy, and Slash was still doing that, so he didn't want to be near Slash. And then, you know, Axl wasn't ready to go on or whatever and they'd be backstage getting drunk all night. And Izzy just couldn't take it. Over time, Izzy just had had it in every possible way.
Matt: I would see him and he had his dog, and, you know, he had a chef on the bus and they were eating really well, and he rode his motorcycle - he had a couple of motorcycles. Izzy called me up, and called Duff and everybody, and said he was quitting the band. I said, "Well, can you at least finish the tour? We've only got one more gig. It's Wembley Stadium. It's sold out, 17,000 people." And Izzy played and then he... that was it. He left. We flew back to America, got back to LA and within two weeks we were back on the road with Gilby Clarke.
Tom Zutaut: I think that any of the members of Guns N' Roses, if anyone asked them what one of the greatest concerts they've played at, they would bring up the Freddie Mercury tribute. It was sort of like a crowning moment for Guns N' Roses to be accepted by their peers of the most successful rock bands in the world.
Matt: We played Santiago, Chile. And I remember we played it where they had Amnesty International. During the military coup in 1985 about 20,000 people were murdered in that stadium. We're playing to that same stadium where those people are actually buried in and around that stadium. In the ground there. So no-one had told Axl that piece of information and I remember him going, "I don't want to fucking play here." And then the military… there was security there. The chief of police, or whoever he was, said, "We will use force if you don't do the show." We said, "What kind of force?" "We will have to shoot and kill the singer" (laughs). He said it in Spanish. Maybe he fucked up the way it came out. “You got to play the show, finish the show.” And he did a great show that night. It was fucking perfect. It was… I said, "Doug, you need to tell Axl that part, because he needs to know" (laughs). Fucking… Yeah.
[Snippets from MTV news reports about the Montreal riot, August 1992]
Tom Zutaut: Axl's taking a lot of heat for being late on stage and it's not his intention to keep people waiting. Axl is someone who has no real perception of time sometimes when he's, you know, in his creative mode or finding his mojo to get up on stage and do that amazing thing that he does. People who bring us great art, they are not the most organised people in the world and they are not always obsessive-compulsively on time.
[Snippet of Axl talking about being late, That Metal Show interview, Nov. 11, 2011]
Tom Zutaut: During the making of Use Your Illusions, you know, Jann Wenner [founder of Rolling Stone magazine] had been after Axl for a really long time to do another cover story. And we were doing some vocals and I went to studio. Axl was sort of like, you know, sitting on the floor eating some hamburgers and stuff, and he looked at me just out of the blue when I got there and said, "I know I’ve said no, but I want to do this Rolling Stone interview. I want to expose my stepfather for the monster that he is and was." And he said, "You know, he used to take me to an air force museum and rape me in the toilets there - in the toilet stalls.” And he said, "You know, my mom wouldn't believe me and I used to get beaten for making up lies." And he said, "I want to use Rolling Stone, because they have been bugging me to do this article for so long, but I don't want them to, like, you know, put a whitewash on the story. I want it to come out as ugly and harsh as it is.” Because that was happening to his sister as well. “So if even one kid will read this interview and it spares them this pain, I want to help them.”
Marc Canter: Axl had fired Alan Niven. I think it had something to do with Alan booking the Use Your Illusion tour before the record was actually ready.
Tom Zutaut: Axl doesn't know that the tour is booked, even though everyone believes he knows.
[Snippet of Axl talking about Niven booking the tour, That Metal Show interview, Nov. 11, 2011]
Marc Canter: And Doug Goldstein, who was the Jedi of this all - he was their road manager and he was just on top of everything. If somebody eight miles away had a camera with a telephoto lens, he would snap and he would grab you. I mean, Doug was... if someone threw a bottle on the stage, he'd be the roadie that ran out and grabbed the bottle. He was an ace at what he did. So I guess Axl just figured, if he's an ace there, might as well make him manager. But eventually that helped tear the band apart, because he was yessing Axl, and Slash and Duff sort of got the raw end of that stick and got tricked into signing things they probably shouldn't have signed.
Tom Zutaut: Basically Axl issued an ultimatum. That whole concept was dreamed up by Peter Paterno, who's still the band's attorney. And it was written in a way where no-one ever thought the band would break up, because if the band broke up Axl would keep the name, but Axl would lose his say-so on the board of directors of original Guns N' Roses Incorporated. Peter Paterno told me he wrote it that way because he thought it would keep the band from ever breaking up, because he never believed that Axl would give up control of anything to do with Guns N' Roses and it would keep the band together. But, in spite of that, the band broke up anyway.
[Footage of Slash performing with Michael Jackson]
Tom Zutaut: If Axl would take his greatest press visibility of his career, and he would use that to try and save one child's life from sexual abuse, how do you think he would feel about his guitar player playing with a guy who admitted in court documents that he drove to some ten-year-old boy's house and slept with him in the ten-year-old's bed in the room next door to the mom for 168 days in a row?
[Footage of Slash playing with the Black Eyed Peas at the Superbowl]
[Snippet from MTV news report about the release of Duff's "Believe In Me" in 1993]
[Snippet of Duff talking about recording Believe In Me, MTV April 20, 1992]
Marc Canter: Axl was looking for something, you know, way above what they already did, he was looking to take a leap. Slash was almost heading back towards Appetite. He thought he could do it on his own. He didn't just quit and do Snakepit. He did Snakepit while he was still in the band. Slash was done with what he considered the bullshit. He had had it with what he thought were compromises to keep Axl happy. He wasn't willing to conform, so he eventually just quit.
[Snippet of Slash talking about quitting the band, CNN Pierce Morgan interview May 23, 2012]
[Snippets from MTV news reports about Axl's fax and Slash quitting the band, October 1996]
Matt: I got my first sort of insight on the mind of Axl Rose. He was talking about he was really into buying an army in Guatemala. He wanted to fund an army (laughs).
Marc Canter: If you ask Slash the ten things why he's upset with Axl and you ask Axl the ten things, they're not even going to match. They're not even going to be on the same list. They're mad at each other for different things.
Tom Zutaut: I don't know that anyone can point to any one incident, you know, when you're dealing with a person who rides the fine line between genius and insanity.
Marc Canter: It just got to be nasty. It was just like a bad divorce, and things were said and "he said, she said", and it just became this horrible thing that I thought would only last for a year or two.
Tom Zutaut: You know, the whole thing was crashing down, and Slash was gone, and Duff had his very own difficult journey. You know, I mean, drugs and alcohol nearly killed him. I think that he just got to a place where, you know, his personal growth was more important than this disintegrating, imploding band where none of the original members were left. And then Matt was fired from the band, and he and Duff both left around the same time.
Michael Monroe: Slash is doing fine on his own. Axl's got his...the Guns N' Roses name and he's got the band.
Marc Canter: As far as them working together, like I said, it would have to be a counsellor in between getting them to realise that their differences aren't that much.
[Snippet about the 2002 MTV Awards and Slash talking about Axl continuing as GN'R, VH-1 Behind The Music, July 5, 2004]
[Snippet of Duff talking about his pancreas "exploding", BBC HARDtalk interview Dec. 14, 2011]
Steven: I tried to kill myself every day for 25 years.
[Snippet of Duff talking about his addictions, BBC HARDtalk interview Dec. 14, 2011]
Steven: I felt hopeless, I was doing drugs that were depressants, I was doing alcohol, which is a depressant.
[Snippet of Slash talking about his addiction, Late Show with David Letterman, Oct. 30, 2007]
[Footage of Steven in Celebrity Rehab]
Tom Zutaut: You can put people in rehab, but they just keep going back to rehab.
Steven: Eventually, some sooner than others... I mean, today, what, 7/7/15? I have 18 months I'm not doing drugs or drinking, today. On 7/7/15. So... You know, it took... Like, Slash, I think he has 11 years. I think Izzy has 27 years. So everybody eventually got it.
[Snippet of Duff talking about his sobriety, BBC HARDtalk interview Dec. 14, 2011]
Marc Canter: Duff really got better, started exercising and working out and just bike riding and just, you know, 100% healthy. He just cut out bad foods and just became… you know, went back to school and got his degree and totally turned his life around.
Marc Canter: I remember somewhere on the Use Your Illusion tour where Slash actually - they found him dead near an elevator in a hotel somewhere. They called 911 and, you know, I don't know how long it took for an ambulance to come, but he was blue for a long time, and they got him back.
[Caption: Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash dies for 8 minutes after drugs overdose]
Matt: Well, that's well documented, he'd say it to you before. "Not a big deal. I've died three times." (Laughs) But, yeah, he was found in a lobby in San Francisco and his heart wasn't beating.
Marc Canter: Do I believe it?
Interviewer: That Slash died, that he flew away as a crow.
Marc Canter: Uh-uh (laughs). I’m not going there! (laughs). No. I'm not even going to go there.
Tom Zutaut: I think Axl genuinely believes that the soul of Saul Hudson left that body when Slash OD'd and that there's a replacement soul that has taken over Slash's body, and Axl truly does believe that. And I think that's the greatest stumbling block to getting the band back together. It could have been just the luck of the timing of that moment. That Axl perceived that Slash had died, and a replacement soul had taken over Saul Hudson's body and Saul had gone off into the next world. Who's-ever in Saul Hudson's body right now, it seems like Slash to me.
[Footage from various band members projects]
Marc Canter: If where you are in your life is what your music is going to sound like, then they've gone far away. Now, would people like to see them do a reunion just so they can have the same reunions that you see out of the Eagles and Van Halen and all these other bands that are doing it? Of course, because they put together music that's timeless and that will be relevant even 300 years from now.
[Footage from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony]
Matt: Axl made the decision not to come. In typical Axl style, he decided to just do it at the last minute. And all hell broke loose with the lawyers and shit like that was going on because, you know, we were going under the name Guns N' Roses. It wasn't our name. It's not our name any more. It's Axl's thing.
Tom Zutaut: I think the band should get back together, because they were the last rock band to come from nothing and sell out stadiums.
[Snippet of Duff talking about the possibility of a reunion, BBC HARDtalk interview Dec. 14, 2011]
Michael Monroe: I don't know. It's hard to say. I mean, they're doing their own thing. I don't know.
Marc Canter: I think having Duff now on talking terms with Axl is a big middleman.
[Snippet of Duff talking about the possibility of a reunion, BBC HARDtalk interview Dec. 14, 2011]
Michael Monroe: I think it will be kind of unnatural for them to get together now, because obviously they're not getting along.
[Snippet of Slash saying he and Axl are friends again, Aftonbladet TV interview, August 21, 2015]
[Snippet of Slash talking about the possibility of a reunion, CBS This Morning interview, May 7, 2015]
Matt: If it ever happens again, cool. But it's a fucking great movie in my mind when I want to turn it on, like right now.
Steven: For five guys to have such magic and be able to create magic so effortlessly, it's a shame that we haven't been doing it, and whatever we haven't been doing, it's over. We only have today, and hopefully tomorrow, so I think we should do something. Axl, Slash… talking to you (laughs).
[Caption: Since the completion of this film, the band have agreed to reunite and play Coachella Festival 2016.]
Transcript:
----------------
Steven: We were The Rolling Stones and Poison was The Beatles.
Matt: This is not for kids.
Tom Zutaut: The one thing that made Guns N' Roses dangerous and drew everybody to them ultimately led to its demise. The entire Sunset Strip experience, from The Rainbow, to the Roxy to the Whisky A Go Go is like an adult fairytale. Sunset Strip was pretty amazing at this time. A lot of people don't realise that there were thousands of kids there, to the point where the sheriffs had to literally block off Sunset Boulevard.
[Opening titles]
Tom Zutaut: If you were in a band and you wanted to be noticed by anybody, you tried to get into the Rainbow.
Steven: It was a place to go to get drinks and chicks and drugs. And I loved every minute of it.
Tom Zutaut: All the bands, the bands that were big, the bands that were not big, you know, kids from Iowa with dreams... Everybody hung out at the Rainbow.
Lemmy (Motorhead): A lot of dead rock stars used to come here (laughs). Led Zeppelin came here, famously. That was Slash's table. It was Jimmy Page's table.
Mario Maglieri (Owner Whisky A Go Go & The Rainbow): Led Zeppelin used to party here, and one day I was walking through the dining room there, and I saw about four heels sticking out because they had the long tablecloths there and I always wondered what them girls were doing under there. You can figure that out.
Steven: Me and Slash went there one night, and it was ladies' night and he couldn't get in. For some reason they didn't let him in, but I got in. So he went home and had his mum dress him up like a woman. He put a dress on and he went up there and he got in.
Tom Zutaut: The real people, the wannabes, the dreamers, the schemers, it was all at the Rainbow.
[Welcome to the Jungle is played]
Zutaut: You know, you had Madame Wong's, which was a Chinese restaurant. The woman who owned it loved rock music. There was Gazzari's, which is where Van Halen were discovered. A lot of bands played at the Starwood. Bands like, you know, London, Nikki Sixx's band he was in before Motley Crue. They all stood in line and mixed to get into the Rainbow and, obviously, the rock stars got in there automatically, they didn't even have to pay. They let them in because Mario, who owns the Rainbow, also owned the Whisky. He did co-own even the Roxy next door.
[Snippet from Axl and Slash interview on MTV in May 1988]
[Footage from Welcome to the Jungle video shoot]
Marc Canter: I'm looking around and I'm thinking, "Wow, this is really - this is good. These guys really click." I began to videotape the shows to basically grab, capture what was happening.
Tom Zutaut: You know, there's always this term, the fifth Beatle. So Slash introduced me to Marc Canter and said, "If there were a fifth Beatle in Guns N' Roses - since there’s five of us, I guess there'd be a sixth Beatle, it's Marc Canter." What Marc Canter was doing for Guns N' Roses is what I would do for a new band that I found and signed. The difference is that Marc was feeding the band in his parents' Deli instead of using a record company expense account.
Marc Canter: The first time I videotaped a show - they watched it and then they could learn from that because they could hear what they are doing, and mistakes, if there's any, they could see if there's something they want to change. It was kind of helping them learn what they're doing, but maybe they want to change about what they're doing. I'm sure they didn't need to look at every gig, because after one or two they got the idea of what they loved and what was going on. I took pictures, that kind of stuff. I never stopped taking pictures, because sometimes I'd set the video on wide angle and just snap a few shots anyway. They just knew that every time there was a gig I'd be there and I'd be doing that.
Vicky Hamilton: I had Welcome To The Jungle on my answering machine and it was the piece that goes, "You're gonna die!" Beep!
[Old footage of fans outside Gazzarri’s]
Michael Monroe: “What kind of people are they?!
[Snippet from August 25, 2010 interview with Slash on CNN Talk Asia]
[Footage from Welcome to the Jungle video shoot]
Michael Monroe: Wow! It's so cool. I could do that.
[Snippet from 2010 interview with Slash]
Marc Canter: I first met Slash in 1976 and I was at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. I had a motorbike and he was walking by and was thinking of taking it. Then he looked inside, saw me and recognised me from school, but we didn't know each other. So, he decided to make friends with me rather than try to steal it. That way, it would be a sure way of getting to ride it without being in trouble. We became good friends and, at some point, we started riding BMX bicycles together. He got good pretty quick. It also showed in his artwork.
Steven: I met Slash - the first time I met him I was riding my skateboard over at Laurel Elementary School just down the street from my grandmother's apartment where I lived. I fell off the ramp and right on my head. He was walking down the street and said, "Hey, dude, you’re okay?"
Marc Canter: There was an incident where… Slash always liked reptiles, so he had a snake. I bought the snake, but we kept it at his house. And I remember one time I gave him, like, a dollar, or whatever it was at that time, for a mouse to feed the snake. And he bought cigarettes with it. So the snake died and I blamed him for selling out the snake to a pack of cigarettes.
[Snippet from 2010 interview with Slash]
Steven: I brought him to my grandmother's house.
Slash (from old interview): And he had a cheap stereo and a cheap little, like, Sears electric guitar and an amp that went with it. And we'd ditch school and go to his house and he'd just crank the stereo all the way up. I think it was Kiss Alive. And we’d jump up and down on the bed with the electric guitar and just bang on it with the amp turned all the way up. And that turned me on.
Steven: Within a couple of days, he had that guitar. And then within a week his grandmother bought him an acoustic guitar. And then literally, within two weeks, he was playing it. And within three weeks, he actually wrote his first song.
Slash (from old interview): I didn't have any defined heroes, but I definitely had bands that I liked. I mean I liked Zeppelin, I liked David Bowie and I liked, you know, the Stones and The Beatles and everything that was going on. And there was other stuff, there was Stevie Wonder… I mean, there was a really wide range of music that I liked.
Marc Canter: He told me that he was in a band and I should come check it out. So I came to the rehearsal and it was Tidus Sloan at that time. And right away, I saw the same talents I saw from his drawing and his bike riding into his music.
Michael Monroe: A lot hadn't happened since the punk thing in London - there was The Stray Cats, of course, had been a happening thing, which was great. But then... After that, it was the post-punk period.
Mario Maglieri: It wound up from what you've just said to more or less rock and roll and then you've got glam rock and you’ve got so many different types of music. A lot of it good, a lot of it was nothing.
[Snippet from Axl and Slash interview on MTV, May 1988]
Vicky Hamilton: I kept on seeing these guys walk up the hill with, like, this black hair and a blond one. And, you know, during that time period, ‘81, punk rock was huge in LA. And here were these long-haired freaks and it turned out to be Motley Crue.
Nikki Sixx: It wasn't unusual to walk out and see two girls in the hallway passed out, naked with broken bottles and pizza boxes, and Tommy is, like, having sex with some girl that just, you know, just threw up. I mean, you know, it was just like that.
Tom Zutaut: Motley Crue explodes, and then the next thing you know there are ten bands that all have teased hair and hairspray, and look like the boys-next-door version of boys dressed like girls. You know, something becomes successful and then there's all the sort of copycat bands. But it was getting a bit boring and monotonous because, you know, hair bands were becoming kind of a generic term.
Michael Monroe: So many bands that came up with big hair and posing, and partying, and the sex, drugs, rock and roll cliche.
Tom Zutaut: Everybody was kind of doing the same shtick.
Michael Monroe: Bands that played their hairspray cans better than their instruments.
Tom Zutaut: People were actually getting kind of tired of it.
Marc Canter: The garage bands that Slash was in basically played their covers and a few originals, and they hung out with other bands that were doing similar things. But none of the other bands became famous, other than Tracii Guns - ended up eventually in LA Guns. Road Crew was another one of Slash's bands.
Steven: I grew up playing drums and learning how to play drums, playing with Slash.
Marc Canter: Steven saw Slash was in that band Road Crew and, right away, he wanted in. So he auditioned for Slash and, right away, Slash was blown away by his double bass drum skills. London was a band that everybody had passed through.
[Snippet from interview with the band London, 1986:
Lizzie Grey: This is, like, the training school for rock stars. We get somebody in the band and as soon as they leave they become rock stars.
Interviewer: So who else was in the band?
Lizzie Grey: Couple of dudes from Guns N' Roses, a dude from WASP and Nikki Sixx from Motley Crue.]
Marc Canter: Steven and Slash were in it somewhere in 1984. Before that, they were in bands that were just basically garage bands. So, you know, they never really played the Sunset Strip and London was a band that was on the Sunset Strip. At that point, Slash went through an audition for Poison. Slash didn't really want to do it, because they were kind of bubblegum-ish and the whole silly string... And it was just like "Ah..."
Slash (from old interview): I thought a lot of it was very sappy. There was a lot of stuff about the image that I wasn't necessarily into. The whole band having the same haircuts. I liked all the harder-edged stuff.
Marc Canter: Back then, they'd hang out at the Rainbow. And at the Rainbow, you would meet different musicians and, you know, if you were looking for a bass player you might find one at the Rainbow, just because it was a revolving door of musicians.
Steven: Duff - me and Slash put an ad in the Recycler paper for a bass player and he was the first person to come meet us.
Tom Zutaut: Duff, like, brought this sort of punk reckless, abandonness spirit and attitude to the band. You know, he's the Slash of bass players.
Marc Canter: Slash said to me, "Me and Steven are going to go up to this band called Rose. There's this really cool guy. He's supposed to be a good singer named Bill, and this guy Izzy, and they're supposed to be really cool. They're from Indiana." That day, Bill changed his name to Axl, literally. Because we thought he was Bill, but then, when we met him, he said his name was Axl. So I never really ever called him Bill. It was... from the very first day, he was Axl to me. At that time, they were looking for a guitar player and Slash was looking for a singer.
[Snippet from Axl and Slash interview on MTV, May 1988]
Marc Canter: Slash was thinking, you know, to get Axl and Izzy in his band Road Crew. And Axl and Izzy – or Axl, at least, was looking to get a guitar player in Hollywood Rose.
[Snippet from Axl and Slash interview on MTV, May 1988]
Marc Canter: Slash ended up joining, and Steven, Hollywood Rose. And Izzy ended up quitting immediately and then joining London, a band that Slash and Steven had just left.
[Snippet from Axl and Slash interview on MTV, May 1988]
Steven: When we were watching him perform, I said to Slash, "We get that guitar player and that singer and get Duff in here, we're going to have the greatest band ever."
Marc Canter: They did about five gigs, a couple of rehearsals, maybe a couple of parties at rehearsal studio and then it fell apart. They had differences. Not necessarily musical differences, I don't think. They just didn't get along or whatever. Axl joined up with Tracii right around that same time and said, "Okay, let's put the band together, but this time we're going to change the name. We're Hollywood Rose, you're LA Guns, let's do Guns N' Roses." So that's why they changed it to Guns N' Roses.
Vicky Hamilton: Axl called me when I was a booking agent at Silver Lining Entertainment and he said, "You come highly recommended. We'd like you to book some shows for us." I said, "Cool, send me a tape." He was like, "Can I, like, bring you a tape?" And I was like, "Well, I don't really have a stereo here, so can you send it?" And he’s like, "Oh, it's OK. I'll bring a ghetto blaster and play it for you." Two hours later, he and Izzy show up, ghetto blaster in hand, and, you know, they played me songs that were on Appetite For Destruction. And I was, like, blown out. I was, like... I booked them sight unseen.
Steven: We wouldn't be successful if it wasn't for her. She was the one who shopped us around, she did all the work, we just played music.
Marc Canter: They had Tracii Guns and Rob Gardner as the drummer, and Izzy had made it back into the band. He'd joined back with Axl and they hired Duff, coincidentally, so Duff's now in the band for, like, a gig or two. And Slash just joins Black Sheep, and they had a gig at the Wolf & Rissmiller Country club in Reseda - Slash's first gig with them. Who shows up at the gig? Axl and Izzy. Because why? Tracii quits and Rob Gardner quits, so they're missing a guitar player and they're missing a drummer. They've got a gig in four days, five days, at the Troubadour and Duff has booked a tour to Seattle. So they said, "Look, Tracii and Rob are out. How about you and Steven?" So, of course, Slash quits Black Sheep and he joins Guns N' Roses.
[Snippet from Axl and Slash interview on MTV, May 1988]
Marc Canter: Then they took off to Seattle, and on the way up there the car broke down and that became what was known now as Hell Tour. And they had to hitchhike and they didn't have any money, and they had to steal vegetables from farms to eat.
Steven: We went out as far as we could up to, I think, Portland. Portland, Oregon, we're on the freeway hitchhiking, had the guitars and the stick bags. And we got a couple of rides with some hippy girls, a Mexican guy and his kid... And then finally, Duff's friend from Seattle drove down.
Marc Canter: You know, they went through hell to get there, and now they get there and they have another good gig.
Steven: We did the show. I'm sure it was terrible. We went back to Duff's friend's house, I smoked a lot of weed and ate spaghetti, and we went home the next day (laughs).
Marc Canter: They get back to Los Angeles and now they're more than just a band of musicians that fit. They're kind of blood brothers, because they suffered a little bit on the road and, you know, they had each other's backs now.
Steven: But it was the greatest time, because we did it together and we figured, if, you know, we can hitchhike to Seattle in a day, we can do anything.
Marc Canter: So now it's, like, the middle of June and they have a gig booked in a couple of weeks. They need photos for flyers and they're hungry. So they come to Canter's, I feed them their first good meal they've had in, you know, two weeks (laughs).
Steven: Me and Slash and the other GNR guys, I think we were the only people to ever eat for free at Canter's.
Marc Canter: We do a bunch of photos with Jack Lue. Jack knew what he was doing.
[Footage of Michael Monroe performing with GN’R]
Mike Monroe: People are going ape shit (laughs). Like, "Fuck! Fuck!" I could hear them shouting as I was filming! "Yes!" You know?
Marc Canter: They were a perfect fit. Axl was the rock and roll, Rolling Stones, Hanoi Rocks kind of a thing and Duff was the punk. Slash was hard rock and blues… Appetite was written under no pressure at all. They were living behind Guitar Center in a little garage studio. It was meant for rehearsing. It was like a shoebox, really. While they were there, Izzy said, "Check out what I wrote." And he'd show a riff and Slash would hear that and he would funk it out. Like My Michelle, you know, it went [hums]. That's all it did and Slash was like, "Uh-uh." [hums]
Steven: The place we lived was disgusting. It smelt, it had no toilet, no sink. Thank God we had a lot of girlfriends, you know, from strip clubs or biker girls. And we’d go to their places and take showers, and they would bring us food… But it made us stronger. And even being in that little shithole, we were able to create magic. And it was a shithole, trust me (laughs).
Vicky Hamilton: They were sleeping in it and stuff, and Axl got in trouble with the law. The story is that he had sex with this girl and threw her out, and then she said that he raped her. So then the cops started looking for him. And Slash called me and said, "Can Axl sleep on your couch? Only for a couple of days.” But what was supposed to be a couple of days ended up being six months. And shortly after Axl moved in, they all moved in except for Duff, who lived with his girlfriend. I would barricade the bedroom door so they couldn't get in.
Steven: She let us live with her. She let us destroy her apartment. I guarantee she didn't get her deposit back on that one.
Vicky Hamilton: I introduced them to Ray Brown, who was a pretty famous designer at that point in time. He made Axl that snakeskin belt that you see in all the early Appetite stuff.
Marc Canter: Vicky Hamilton was like Mama Kin. She nurtured them, but she also knew that they were drawing a crowd, and she knew the music was good, and she had experience with getting them to the next level.
Vicky Hamilton: I was kind of like a den mother for them and drove them to rehearsals.
Marc Canter: Steven started doing some bad drugs. He was freebasing. Slash was doing dope. He wasn't hiding the alcohol, but he was hiding the dope. Izzy's girlfriend Desi, she got them all hooked on it – well, not all of them but a lot of them. Eventually, I found out about it and I was really pissed about it, and I stopped buying them food. They'd call me and say, "Let's go to Tommy's," you know, and I'd go, "No," I said, "because, if I take you to Tommy's and buy you food, then, when you do get money you're just going to buy some heroin. This way, fuck you."
Vicky Hamilton: I tried to keep them sober, but they were going up on the roof and doing the drugs and stuff, that I wouldn't see them. And at that point in time I was kind of a mess too. I smoked a lot of pot and I drank the Jack Daniel's with them as well, so... (laughs).
Marc Canter: I remember when Guns N' Roses first got together and Slash and Steven joined, Izzy's girlfriend Desi was the first one to come out and... not strip, but she was wearing next to nothing. She would do that for every time they played a gig. She'd come out just for that one song, for Jumpin' Jack Flash.
[Footage of GN’R performing Jumping Jack Flash]
That went on for, you know, about eight or nine months. And then, at some point, they got Pam Jackson to do it and she was really a stripper, and she was a good stripper and she really took it to the next level. I mean, she didn't get naked but she knew how to really, you know, move it around. Desi was more of a dancer and Pam was more of the stripper. And then after that, they were hanging around strippers constantly, because strippers liked the band and they always had money, and the band didn't. So the strippers would buy the booze, they'd buy them some food, they could sleep in their apartment, have sex with them... Basically, the strippers were heaven. The strippers coming up on stage was simply going to make the show better, because sex sells and sex is... everyone likes to see a stripper. So now the music's good and there's a stripper so...
[Live footage]
Marc Canter: It was only a matter of time before somebody was going to find them, and sign them and get them out there to the world.
Vicky Hamilton: Music Connection did an article, a cover story on Guns N' Roses and that kind of wound it up into high gear.
Marc Canter: Tom Zutaut had already heard about them from this guy that works at a little record store here at Melrose, Vinyl Fetish.
Tom Zutaut: They go, "You know, you're the guy that found Motley Crue, you'll love this. You need to check it out." And I said, "Well, what's the name of the band?" And Joseph said, "They're called Guns N' Roses. Isn't that a cool name?"
[Live footage]
Vicky Hamilton: During the time period on the Sunset Strip, it was like every record label had a hair band. That was like a glam rock band. Guns N' Roses was different than the other bands in the pack because there was something slightly dangerous about them and it was a little more guitar-laden.
Tom Zutaut: Slash had drawn a poster that was hanging at Fairfax in Sunset, of the pistols and the roses. I saw that poster, I pulled my Jeep over, I ripped it down. This is the coolest poster I think I'd ever seen. At the time, I had no idea that Slash drew it. I found out what time they were going on and I went to the gig. Well, I missed Guns N' Roses because, earlier in that evening, Axl had traded slots with Shark Island. So I watched Shark Island's set, Axl comes out, does and encore with them and I'm like, "Holy shit. This guy is incredible." Whatever that animal magnetism, that stare, whatever it is, he's got.
Marc Canter: So then he went to see them at the Troubadour a month later.
Tom Zutaut: Whenever I would go to see a band, word would get out and bidding wars would start just because I was there... because of all the rock bands I'd already had success with.
Vicky Hamilton: I had 16 A&R people at that show.
Tom Zutaut: Really, I don't even need to see the band. If the band is halfway competent... This guy has got something that I've never seen before. Lightning in a bottle.
[Footage from backstage at a 1986 show]
Tom Zutaut: I went and talked to the band and, you know, I gave them my phone number, I got their phone numbers and I said, "Guys," I said, "I want you to come to my office." It was literally the loudest show I had ever heard. It was so loud that I saw people pulling out their packs of cigarettes and putting, you know, butts in their ears. People like this [puts his hands on his ears]. It was ear-splitting, like damage-your-brain loud. But it was explosive. I'd never seen anything like it and everyone else in the band was equally as powerful as Axl. And I was just like, "This is going to be the biggest band in the world." I knew it.
Marc Canter: Slash's guitar playing was phenomenal. Every generation needs its own guitar hero and I really felt that he would be, like, the next Jimmy Page, Clapton, Beck or Hendrix. After a couple of songs, he saw right away that he wanted them, but he sort of ducked out of there because he saw other A&R people there looking, and they all looked up to him. And they saw him leaving and he was like, "Yeah, they were loud, they sucked." Because he wanted to bluff them. So, Tom ended up signing them.
Tom Zutaut: They sign the deal, they get the cheque... and that is the story of how the band got signed.
[Live footage]
Marc Canter: That was the last gig that they did that was, you know, the end of what they were doing before they got signed.
Vicky Hamilton: When they got their advance money from Geffen, a lot of that went to tattoos. They got, immediately, a lot more tattoos (laughs).
[Snippet from Axl and Slash interview on MTV, May 1988]
Tom Zutaut: You know, it took almost two years to get the band, you know, to the point where Appetite was a record.
Vicky Hamilton: Tom Zutaut said to me, "We will have to get the band major management." Because in their mind I wasn't major management material.
Tom Zutaut: No-one would manage them. Everybody turned it down. So finally I called Alan and I said, "Alan, you have to manage this band or I can't even get this record put out."
[Live footage]
Marc Canter: Rocket Queen was just a song that Axl wrote about his friend, Barbi.
Tom Zutaut: We were actually mixing the record, and Axl looks at me and he's like, "We can't mix this song yet, it's not done."
Marc Canter: Axl had always wanted to record a sex act and incorporate it somehow.
Tom Zutaut: Steven hadn't shown up, but his girlfriend, Adriana, was there.
Marc Canter: Adriana Smith was one of the strippers.
Tom Zutaut: And Axl's like, "How would you like to be a part of rock and roll history?" And she goes, "What do I got to do?" He goes, "You've just to fuck my brains out for as long as you can."
Marc Canter: She wanted to help them, but she wasn't sure if she should do it. And Alan Niven put down a big bottle of Jack Daniels and said, "How about now?"
Adriana Smith: And I was like, "For the band! Sure, no problem. For the band. And a bottle of Jack Daniel's."
Marc Canter: I was kind of surprised because it was Steven's girlfriend.
Steven: There was no girlfriend in my life. My girlfriend was rock and roll.
Adriana Smith: They mic'd the floor of this vocal booth and dimmed the lights, and we just got busy. They just start having outrageous sex and we're rolling tape. It concludes, Axl comes in, he listens back and goes, "Yeah, this will work. He goes, “Let's edit this because we only want to use it here, here and here." Anybody can go hear Rocket Queen and they can hear the best 36 seconds of it, but there's about an hour and a half of it altogether.
Steven: I thought it sounded great. I was like, "Good job, guys."
Marc Canter: Now that you know, next time you hear it, you'll hear it (laughs).
Steven: It's for the good of art. It's rock and roll.
Marc Canter: They had enough songs to make a record, they just... Tom was just looking for… you know, he knew what he wanted. He wanted something else.
Tom Zutaut: When they wrote Sweet Child O' Mine, Marc Canter called me and he said, "They've got this new song, you're going to love it. It's exactly what they need."
Marc Canter: As soon as he heard Sweet Child he said, "OK, now you're done. Let's go into preproduction."
Tom Zutaut: We were almost finished with Appetite and we put an EP out through independent distribution. It was called Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide. Geffen funded it, but I was able to carve that money out and use it to bring the band to play that Marquee show.
[Audio snippet from concert at The Marquee, June 1987]
Tom Zutaut: We did it and the band exploded. Like, the press went crazy. I believe that that particular Marquee show is one of the best shows they ever played, but nobody in America wanted to know about them. People wanted them to just disappear. We put Appetite out. Radio stations won't play it, they refused to play it.
Marc Canter: Maybe, you know, heavy metal stations like KNAC might have played it, but...
Tom Zutaut: MTV were pushing really hard that they were never going to play Guns N' Roses because John Malone said if we play this band, he's going to drop us off his cable systems. John Malone deemed them to be a threat to good Christians.
Marc Canter: The only reason why they had sold 200,000 records in a year was because they were on tour with The Cult, Alice Cooper, Motley Crue. And during that time they would play at arenas, say of 10,000 people, and the next day, you know, maybe 100 or 200 people would go out and buy their record.
Tom Zutaut: So 200,000 units, and I get a call from Ed Rosenblatt, and he said, "Tom, this record's over. We're walking away from this record." I said, "This record's going to sell millions and it's only at 200,000.” So I went upstairs, I saw David, and he's like, "Well, what can I do?" And I said, "Well, you could call your friends that run MTV and get them to play this video we made. This video is fantastic. Tell them to play it." "All right," he goes, "I'll take care of it." About an hour later David calls me up. I go up and he says, "They're kind of hoping that no-one that knows John Malone will be watching the channel at 4am in New York, 1am in LA, but they're going to play the video one time." And he goes, "That's the best I could do." So that's it, they're going to play it once. So I had to deliver this horrific news to the band, and they were like, "Well, let's just have a big party." And one of the funniest things about this party is that, you know, some of the band were shooting heroin in the kitchen. The rest of the band was sort of drinking beer and whatever, whiskey… I went out and got bucket-loads of cookies and milk. You know, people who drink and do drugs still like cookies and milk. So before the video comes on, maybe like 11 at night, there's a knock on the door and it's the LA County sheriffs, and they want to, like... "We've had some complaints about noise." And I let them in and I definitely gave warning that I was going to let them in, and some people were in the toilet flushing things, whatever, you know, scrambling. And then so the sheriffs come in, and they see, like, some really hot chicks and the guys in the band. They're all sitting there with, you know, milk-lips and milk-chins eating cookies watching MTV (laughs). And so the sheriffs are like, "We have no idea why your neighbours are complaining.” You know, “You just look like a bunch of kids watching TV and having milk and cookies." And they left, and that was the end of it. Finally, I wake up around three, and I've got all these messages. So I call into the office, and my assistant's like, "We think you need to come in." I said, "Who made the most phone calls looking for me?" And they go, "Al Coury, the head of promotions." So I go and see him and he's like... [shouts gibberish]. You know, he sounded like a gremlin on steroids or something. Basically he says, “The MTV switchboard blew up last night. Too many phone calls came in, it sparked the thing and it melted. MTV's never had so many calls, and they continue to be bombarded with phone calls today. Every kid in America is calling them requesting this video, and they know there's no way we could have paid that many people to do it. So they're going to add the video.”
Marc Canter: The minute MTV started playing Welcome To The Jungle, everything changed. They were selling a couple of hundred thousand records a week.
[Snippet from Slash interview:
Slash: We bought actual news footage that had been shown on television from NBC and CBS and ABC.]
[Snippet from Axl interview at the 1989 MTV Awards:
Axl: We've worked really hard to get on MTV by our… without really compromising, but doing what we wanted to do.]
Riki Rachtman: Appetite For Destruction is one of the greatest rock and roll records ever. And those type of records that have the swearing in it and controversial topics don't get that big. They're not supposed to, because that's not vanilla. But they did.
[Snippet from MTV program:
Voice of Kurt Loder: As the hot young band on the bill, Guns N' Roses were, of course, the object of much fond speculation among their elders.
Steven Tyler: It's real easy for a band to go out and buy the image and watch other bands performing and mimic it and pick it up, but they seem to have it right down to the bone.]
[Snippet from TV news report about the original artwork of Appetite]
[Snippet from MTV interview at Robert Williams’ exhibition, November 1988]
Tom Zutaut: It just exploded. And then I brought up Sweet Child O' Mine, you know, and said, "We should shoot a video for this song." And it became a number one record at seven minutes long, regardless.
[Clip from Sweet Child O’ Mine music video]
Tom Zutaut: Erin Everly understood Axl better than most because she had her own difficult childhood. They had this great love affair, this great romance and passion for each other, and Sweet Child O' Mine is written about her. But I think that she truly did and does love Axl in a way that almost nobody else probably has, and I think she helped him a lot. She wanted to see him achieve his dreams and she knew his dreams were, because they were together.
Marc Canter: Sweet Child became, like, a number one single, and that was it getting played on pop stations, which put them into a whole different ballpark.
[Snippet from MTV news report about the release of "Lies"]
[Snippet from "Lies" press conference, July 23, 1988]
[Snippet from MTV news report about Slash and Duff swearing at the 1990 American Music Awards]
Marc Canter: They were getting into trouble.
Michael Monroe: Hey come on, get real.
Marc Canter: I remember one time where Izzy peed on a plane. I guess he was impatient, and whoever was in the bathroom didn't come out and he just went in the corner and peed, and got arrested. And that made news flashes across the country. Sometimes you'll sell records when you make the news.
[Snippet from TV program:
Host: Some of the lyrics, according to an influential group of American mothers, should not be falling on youthful ears.]
[Snippet from MTV post-CBGB’s show interview, October 30, 1987]
[Snippet from MTV Headbanger’s Ball interview, Oct. 24, 1987]
[Snippet from interview at the American Music Awards, January 22, 1990]
Marc Canter: Alice Cooper didn't know who they were at a gig in Santa Barbara, but that was a little bit of a disaster and the band kind of wrecked the backstage area. I'm sure Alice Cooper probably wished that that band was never put on the gig.
[Snippet from Axl and Slash interview on MTV, May 1988]
Riki Rachtman: Axl was one of the most intense people I've ever met in my life. He was a bad ass, without a doubt. He was a guy that I've seen get in street fights.
[Live footage from LA Street Scene 1986]
Marc Canter: Axl stopped doing dope around probably July of '86. Because he saw Izzy and Slash were just going down the drain. And Steven. Duff wouldn't touch it because his girlfriend died in his arms when he was 15. So Duff might have done coke or booze or whatever, but he wasn't going to touch heroin. And that's when Mr Brownstone got written.
[Live footage from LA Street Scene 1986:
Axl: This next song is a song about doing too much heroin. I know. But sometimes things go a little too far. A song called Dancing With Mr Brownstone.]
Marc Canter: Izzy had written on a pizza box “I used to do a little but a little wouldn’t do so the little got more and more”, just, you know, some lyrics. And it was like, Axl brought it to Izzy and they end up finishing the song and making Mr Brownstone.
[Live footage from LA Street Scene 1986]
Marc Canter: Axl got blamed for being this "Guns N' Roses are just a bunch of drug addicts" Axl, whatever. Axl was not a drug addict after August of 1986. Yet Slash, Steven and Izzy were.
[Snippet from Axl’s testimony at the trial for Steven's lawsuit, Aug. 23, 1993]
Marc Canter: Izzy didn't clean up until '89. And Slash until, what, five or six years ago.
Michael Monroe: You use the drugs, but once the drugs start using you, then you're in trouble.
Tom Zutaut: Axl was really starting to get deeply worried that the band was going to implode around him from drugs. I mean, certain members of the band had serious substance abuses, and they were mixing different things. Any of which could kill you. So he made a public statement about it, onstage, at the LA Coliseum, opening for The Stones.
[Snippet from Axl’s “Mr. Brownstone” speech at the LA Coliseum, Oct. 18, 1989]
Tom Zutaut: When they looked at Axl and Slash, Jagger and Richards saw themselves back in the '60s and '70s. You know, "We've been the bad boys of rock since the '60s, and now we're not the most dangerous band in the world, so I want that band to open for us."
[Snippets of Axl talking about playing with the Stones and Steven's firing, MTV Famous Last Words interview, August 31, 1990]
[Live footage from LA Street Scene 1986]
Marc Canter: Well, when Steven Adler lost his job in Guns N' Roses it was a dark time for him, and they were getting ready to record Use Your Illusions, and he just wasn't there, and if he was there, he wasn't capable of keeping time. They didn't just fire him, they brought in Matt to work a little bit and they thought, well, okay, Matt will do a little bit and then we'll bring Steven back.
[Snippet of Axl talking Steven's firing, MTV Famous Last Words interview, August 31, 1990]
Matt: Slash and Duff saw me play drums, I thought I'd be a good fit, and they were already thinking about making the move on drummers, so, yeah.
Steven: They kicked me out the band because I was doing drugs with them, and then they just brought Matt in to do drugs with them too. It wasn't like Matt was sober, he was doing drugs with them.
[Footage from Axl in court for the Adler lawsuit, August 23, 1993]
Steven: That was such a terrible time in my life. Man, just like being in a courtroom, and you've got these lawyers and they're saying this shit, your bandmates, the people you grew up with are saying shit about you. And then you have to say this about them. It was just so hard. I would bring heroin on a foil to court with me. Every chance I get, I go in a bathroom and smoke. I go, "I can't do this any more." I mean, I think I cried for a year straight.
[Snippet from Axl’s testimony for the Adler lawsuit]
[Footage from St. Louis riot]
Tom Zutaut: If he sees something in the crowd he doesn't like he's going to act on it. After that he didn't want to play the show any more and they tore the place up.
Steven: There would have been no destroying of the place if I was there. Because if Axl left and they started getting crazy, I would have started playing my drums and I would have got them excited. I would have done something to stop that.
Matt: We were all headed out and there was a lot of violence, there was the riot squad coming in, helicopters, tear gas, the whole thing. It was a full-on riot. It was pretty serious. We knew we were either going to be arrested for the situation or inciting a riot. So we were, like, running from the law (laughs). It was pretty awesome. So we went in this van. I'll never forget it, because we were going through the crowd and people were banging on the van, and Slash had his top hat on. I remember reaching over and going, "Take your hat off. It's obvious that it's you," you know? We stopped at a waffle house. Axl was still in his skirt. It was like... (laughs). We went in, people just looked over... "Holy shit." You know? We got up to Chicago and everything was on the news saying there’s riots, huge fires and 600 people injured. Like, holy shit, right? Record sales are going through the roof. It was, you know, amazing. So the next day it comes on the news that they're going to extradite Axl. They're going to arrest him for inciting a riot. We sent two decoys out of the hotel. We dressed them like Axl, and we had this other guy named Ronnie Stalnacker that worked for Slash. He had really curly hair like Slash. So we dressed him up like Slash. And the cops were coming in the front, and Axl went out the kitchen. And they arrested those guys thinking they were Axl and Slash.
[Footage from TV report about the Stump lawsuit trial in St. Louis:
Counsel: The plaintiff's case has been about dirty, nasty vulgar language.
Stump’s counsel: You jumped out at Billy, you attacked Billy and Billy was injured.
Judge: They have both compromised and they have both reached an agreement between each other.
Voice-over: Stephenson said he suffered back, knee and ear injuries, which should be at least partly soothed by the undisclosed cash settlement.
Axl: They originally asked for 2.8 million and we settled at a very minimal figure.]
Matt: The band was on top of the world, you know? I remember when it came time to do the jet, you know, to rent the jet. So we rented the 727, the MGM Grand, and it had four bedrooms. We had a bar in the middle of the plane and we were able to pick our own stewardesses. There was a lot of drinking going on and obviously we were in South America where you could score grams of cocaine for 3 dollars. (Laughs) You know? I'll take 10! You know, we did four or five laps around the world.
[Snippet from TV news reports about the release of Use Your Illusion]
[Snippet from MTV interview May 1991]
Matt: They had security on us with fucking walkie-talkies and shit. We found a way around it. We had those guys. We had “Matt's asleep” [mimics radio static]. I'd hear that outside my door and then I'd go out the fucking balcony, over the next balcony. In Texas one time, I got in a cab and I paid the cab. She says, "Oh, great show tonight." I said, "You didn't see me. Here’s $100. I'm not in this car." And I said, "Take me to the closest hotel." I made sure it was a hotel with a minibar, so I went up there and I drank, passed out on the bed. Woke up with Doug Goldstein and John Reese standing in front of my bed. "Where do you think you're going?" (Laughs) "How did you find me?" "We paid them more than you paid them." And I'm like, "Holy fuck." I mean, it was all the way across Dallas, Texas.
[Snippet from TV news report:
Voice-over: Guns N' Roses was apparently too controversial for the Kmart and Walmart chains. The two new albums, titled Use Your Illusion 1 and 2, will not be sold in those stores due to objectionable lyrics. But other retailers have ordered a record four million copies. In Los Angeles, customers parted with their money in a more orderly fashion than in New York City. Not everyone here was a fan of Guns N' Roses.
Customer: I hope that album fails, I mean, because I'm just so sick of his attitude, you know? And he acts like a jerk.]
[Footage from the show in St. Louis]
Marc Canter: It was very frustrating for the other members to watch these riots happen because of sound problems, because Axl wasn't at sound check.
[Snippets from interviews with Izzy, MTV Sept. 1992 and TuneCore Nov. 12, 2006]
Marc Canter: Izzy quit because he didn't want to spend the money on the videos. They had spent some money and he was paranoid about the riots and lawsuits coming, so he just was like, didn't want to... He just, like, took of. Plus, he's a bit flaky to begin with.
Vicky Hamilton: That was shocking, because Izzy and Axl were childhood friends. I think that Izzy was probably the most underrated person in that band. He's a great songwriter and I think that he was sort of the guy that kept things together.
Marc Canter: But when it eventually came time to write, there was no Izzy. And Izzy was the neutral figure between Slash and Axl. He was the missing piece of the puzzle.
Tom Zutaut: The beginning of the end for him was… he was starting to get ticked off about Axl being late for shows. And he started realising that Axl's tardiness was costing the band millions of dollars.
Matt: Izzy had got cleaned up, and got his own bus and he didn't want to, like, be anywhere near us. He wanted to ride away from the band.
Marc Canter: Duff was a train wreck with his drinking. And Slash was… you know, Slash was his dope buddy, and Slash was still doing that, so he didn't want to be near Slash. And then, you know, Axl wasn't ready to go on or whatever and they'd be backstage getting drunk all night. And Izzy just couldn't take it. Over time, Izzy just had had it in every possible way.
Matt: I would see him and he had his dog, and, you know, he had a chef on the bus and they were eating really well, and he rode his motorcycle - he had a couple of motorcycles. Izzy called me up, and called Duff and everybody, and said he was quitting the band. I said, "Well, can you at least finish the tour? We've only got one more gig. It's Wembley Stadium. It's sold out, 17,000 people." And Izzy played and then he... that was it. He left. We flew back to America, got back to LA and within two weeks we were back on the road with Gilby Clarke.
Tom Zutaut: I think that any of the members of Guns N' Roses, if anyone asked them what one of the greatest concerts they've played at, they would bring up the Freddie Mercury tribute. It was sort of like a crowning moment for Guns N' Roses to be accepted by their peers of the most successful rock bands in the world.
Matt: We played Santiago, Chile. And I remember we played it where they had Amnesty International. During the military coup in 1985 about 20,000 people were murdered in that stadium. We're playing to that same stadium where those people are actually buried in and around that stadium. In the ground there. So no-one had told Axl that piece of information and I remember him going, "I don't want to fucking play here." And then the military… there was security there. The chief of police, or whoever he was, said, "We will use force if you don't do the show." We said, "What kind of force?" "We will have to shoot and kill the singer" (laughs). He said it in Spanish. Maybe he fucked up the way it came out. “You got to play the show, finish the show.” And he did a great show that night. It was fucking perfect. It was… I said, "Doug, you need to tell Axl that part, because he needs to know" (laughs). Fucking… Yeah.
[Snippets from MTV news reports about the Montreal riot, August 1992]
Tom Zutaut: Axl's taking a lot of heat for being late on stage and it's not his intention to keep people waiting. Axl is someone who has no real perception of time sometimes when he's, you know, in his creative mode or finding his mojo to get up on stage and do that amazing thing that he does. People who bring us great art, they are not the most organised people in the world and they are not always obsessive-compulsively on time.
[Snippet of Axl talking about being late, That Metal Show interview, Nov. 11, 2011]
Tom Zutaut: During the making of Use Your Illusions, you know, Jann Wenner [founder of Rolling Stone magazine] had been after Axl for a really long time to do another cover story. And we were doing some vocals and I went to studio. Axl was sort of like, you know, sitting on the floor eating some hamburgers and stuff, and he looked at me just out of the blue when I got there and said, "I know I’ve said no, but I want to do this Rolling Stone interview. I want to expose my stepfather for the monster that he is and was." And he said, "You know, he used to take me to an air force museum and rape me in the toilets there - in the toilet stalls.” And he said, "You know, my mom wouldn't believe me and I used to get beaten for making up lies." And he said, "I want to use Rolling Stone, because they have been bugging me to do this article for so long, but I don't want them to, like, you know, put a whitewash on the story. I want it to come out as ugly and harsh as it is.” Because that was happening to his sister as well. “So if even one kid will read this interview and it spares them this pain, I want to help them.”
Marc Canter: Axl had fired Alan Niven. I think it had something to do with Alan booking the Use Your Illusion tour before the record was actually ready.
Tom Zutaut: Axl doesn't know that the tour is booked, even though everyone believes he knows.
[Snippet of Axl talking about Niven booking the tour, That Metal Show interview, Nov. 11, 2011]
Marc Canter: And Doug Goldstein, who was the Jedi of this all - he was their road manager and he was just on top of everything. If somebody eight miles away had a camera with a telephoto lens, he would snap and he would grab you. I mean, Doug was... if someone threw a bottle on the stage, he'd be the roadie that ran out and grabbed the bottle. He was an ace at what he did. So I guess Axl just figured, if he's an ace there, might as well make him manager. But eventually that helped tear the band apart, because he was yessing Axl, and Slash and Duff sort of got the raw end of that stick and got tricked into signing things they probably shouldn't have signed.
Tom Zutaut: Basically Axl issued an ultimatum. That whole concept was dreamed up by Peter Paterno, who's still the band's attorney. And it was written in a way where no-one ever thought the band would break up, because if the band broke up Axl would keep the name, but Axl would lose his say-so on the board of directors of original Guns N' Roses Incorporated. Peter Paterno told me he wrote it that way because he thought it would keep the band from ever breaking up, because he never believed that Axl would give up control of anything to do with Guns N' Roses and it would keep the band together. But, in spite of that, the band broke up anyway.
[Footage of Slash performing with Michael Jackson]
Tom Zutaut: If Axl would take his greatest press visibility of his career, and he would use that to try and save one child's life from sexual abuse, how do you think he would feel about his guitar player playing with a guy who admitted in court documents that he drove to some ten-year-old boy's house and slept with him in the ten-year-old's bed in the room next door to the mom for 168 days in a row?
[Footage of Slash playing with the Black Eyed Peas at the Superbowl]
[Snippet from MTV news report about the release of Duff's "Believe In Me" in 1993]
[Snippet of Duff talking about recording Believe In Me, MTV April 20, 1992]
Marc Canter: Axl was looking for something, you know, way above what they already did, he was looking to take a leap. Slash was almost heading back towards Appetite. He thought he could do it on his own. He didn't just quit and do Snakepit. He did Snakepit while he was still in the band. Slash was done with what he considered the bullshit. He had had it with what he thought were compromises to keep Axl happy. He wasn't willing to conform, so he eventually just quit.
[Snippet of Slash talking about quitting the band, CNN Pierce Morgan interview May 23, 2012]
[Snippets from MTV news reports about Axl's fax and Slash quitting the band, October 1996]
Matt: I got my first sort of insight on the mind of Axl Rose. He was talking about he was really into buying an army in Guatemala. He wanted to fund an army (laughs).
Marc Canter: If you ask Slash the ten things why he's upset with Axl and you ask Axl the ten things, they're not even going to match. They're not even going to be on the same list. They're mad at each other for different things.
Tom Zutaut: I don't know that anyone can point to any one incident, you know, when you're dealing with a person who rides the fine line between genius and insanity.
Marc Canter: It just got to be nasty. It was just like a bad divorce, and things were said and "he said, she said", and it just became this horrible thing that I thought would only last for a year or two.
Tom Zutaut: You know, the whole thing was crashing down, and Slash was gone, and Duff had his very own difficult journey. You know, I mean, drugs and alcohol nearly killed him. I think that he just got to a place where, you know, his personal growth was more important than this disintegrating, imploding band where none of the original members were left. And then Matt was fired from the band, and he and Duff both left around the same time.
Michael Monroe: Slash is doing fine on his own. Axl's got his...the Guns N' Roses name and he's got the band.
Marc Canter: As far as them working together, like I said, it would have to be a counsellor in between getting them to realise that their differences aren't that much.
[Snippet about the 2002 MTV Awards and Slash talking about Axl continuing as GN'R, VH-1 Behind The Music, July 5, 2004]
[Snippet of Duff talking about his pancreas "exploding", BBC HARDtalk interview Dec. 14, 2011]
Steven: I tried to kill myself every day for 25 years.
[Snippet of Duff talking about his addictions, BBC HARDtalk interview Dec. 14, 2011]
Steven: I felt hopeless, I was doing drugs that were depressants, I was doing alcohol, which is a depressant.
[Snippet of Slash talking about his addiction, Late Show with David Letterman, Oct. 30, 2007]
[Footage of Steven in Celebrity Rehab]
Tom Zutaut: You can put people in rehab, but they just keep going back to rehab.
Steven: Eventually, some sooner than others... I mean, today, what, 7/7/15? I have 18 months I'm not doing drugs or drinking, today. On 7/7/15. So... You know, it took... Like, Slash, I think he has 11 years. I think Izzy has 27 years. So everybody eventually got it.
[Snippet of Duff talking about his sobriety, BBC HARDtalk interview Dec. 14, 2011]
Marc Canter: Duff really got better, started exercising and working out and just bike riding and just, you know, 100% healthy. He just cut out bad foods and just became… you know, went back to school and got his degree and totally turned his life around.
Marc Canter: I remember somewhere on the Use Your Illusion tour where Slash actually - they found him dead near an elevator in a hotel somewhere. They called 911 and, you know, I don't know how long it took for an ambulance to come, but he was blue for a long time, and they got him back.
[Caption: Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash dies for 8 minutes after drugs overdose]
Matt: Well, that's well documented, he'd say it to you before. "Not a big deal. I've died three times." (Laughs) But, yeah, he was found in a lobby in San Francisco and his heart wasn't beating.
Marc Canter: Do I believe it?
Interviewer: That Slash died, that he flew away as a crow.
Marc Canter: Uh-uh (laughs). I’m not going there! (laughs). No. I'm not even going to go there.
Tom Zutaut: I think Axl genuinely believes that the soul of Saul Hudson left that body when Slash OD'd and that there's a replacement soul that has taken over Slash's body, and Axl truly does believe that. And I think that's the greatest stumbling block to getting the band back together. It could have been just the luck of the timing of that moment. That Axl perceived that Slash had died, and a replacement soul had taken over Saul Hudson's body and Saul had gone off into the next world. Who's-ever in Saul Hudson's body right now, it seems like Slash to me.
[Footage from various band members projects]
Marc Canter: If where you are in your life is what your music is going to sound like, then they've gone far away. Now, would people like to see them do a reunion just so they can have the same reunions that you see out of the Eagles and Van Halen and all these other bands that are doing it? Of course, because they put together music that's timeless and that will be relevant even 300 years from now.
[Footage from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony]
Matt: Axl made the decision not to come. In typical Axl style, he decided to just do it at the last minute. And all hell broke loose with the lawyers and shit like that was going on because, you know, we were going under the name Guns N' Roses. It wasn't our name. It's not our name any more. It's Axl's thing.
Tom Zutaut: I think the band should get back together, because they were the last rock band to come from nothing and sell out stadiums.
[Snippet of Duff talking about the possibility of a reunion, BBC HARDtalk interview Dec. 14, 2011]
Michael Monroe: I don't know. It's hard to say. I mean, they're doing their own thing. I don't know.
Marc Canter: I think having Duff now on talking terms with Axl is a big middleman.
[Snippet of Duff talking about the possibility of a reunion, BBC HARDtalk interview Dec. 14, 2011]
Michael Monroe: I think it will be kind of unnatural for them to get together now, because obviously they're not getting along.
[Snippet of Slash saying he and Axl are friends again, Aftonbladet TV interview, August 21, 2015]
[Snippet of Slash talking about the possibility of a reunion, CBS This Morning interview, May 7, 2015]
Matt: If it ever happens again, cool. But it's a fucking great movie in my mind when I want to turn it on, like right now.
Steven: For five guys to have such magic and be able to create magic so effortlessly, it's a shame that we haven't been doing it, and whatever we haven't been doing, it's over. We only have today, and hopefully tomorrow, so I think we should do something. Axl, Slash… talking to you (laughs).
[Caption: Since the completion of this film, the band have agreed to reunite and play Coachella Festival 2016.]
Last edited by Blackstar on Wed Jan 10, 2024 3:53 pm; edited 3 times in total
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Re: 2016.02.05 - BBC Four - The Most Dangerous Band In The World: The Story Of Guns N' Roses
by Blackstar Wed Jan 10, 2024 5:10 am
I started transcribing this months ago. I finally got to finish it today.
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Re: 2016.02.05 - BBC Four - The Most Dangerous Band In The World: The Story Of Guns N' Roses
by Soulmonster Fri Jan 12, 2024 7:22 pm
This quote is intriguing:
The interviewer asked both Marc and Tom whether they believe it was true that Axl thought Axl flew away as a crow when he overdosed, and Axl himself would state that his problems with Slash started with this incident.
I had never heard about this before, but apparently the interviewer had. Where they he hear about it?
I think Axl genuinely believes that the soul of Saul Hudson left that body when Slash OD'd and that there's a replacement soul that has taken over Slash's body, and Axl truly does believe that. And I think that's the greatest stumbling block to getting the band back together. It could have been just the luck of the timing of that moment. That Axl perceived that Slash had died, and a replacement soul had taken over Saul Hudson's body and Saul had gone off into the next world. Who's-ever in Saul Hudson's body right now, it seems like Slash to me.
The interviewer asked both Marc and Tom whether they believe it was true that Axl thought Axl flew away as a crow when he overdosed, and Axl himself would state that his problems with Slash started with this incident.
I had never heard about this before, but apparently the interviewer had. Where they he hear about it?
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Re: 2016.02.05 - BBC Four - The Most Dangerous Band In The World: The Story Of Guns N' Roses
by Blackstar Fri Jan 12, 2024 8:54 pm
I suppose they had already interviewed Tom Zutaut when they asked Marc about it.Soulmonster wrote:This quote is intriguing:I think Axl genuinely believes that the soul of Saul Hudson left that body when Slash OD'd and that there's a replacement soul that has taken over Slash's body, and Axl truly does believe that. And I think that's the greatest stumbling block to getting the band back together. It could have been just the luck of the timing of that moment. That Axl perceived that Slash had died, and a replacement soul had taken over Saul Hudson's body and Saul had gone off into the next world. Who's-ever in Saul Hudson's body right now, it seems like Slash to me.
The interviewer asked both Marc and Tom whether they believe it was true that Axl thought Axl flew away as a crow when he overdosed, and Axl himself would state that his problems with Slash started with this incident.
I had never heard about this before, but apparently the interviewer had. Where they he hear about it?
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Re: 2016.02.05 - BBC Four - The Most Dangerous Band In The World: The Story Of Guns N' Roses
by Soulmonster Fri Jan 12, 2024 9:04 pm
Blackstar wrote:Soulmonster wrote:This quote is intriguing:I think Axl genuinely believes that the soul of Saul Hudson left that body when Slash OD'd and that there's a replacement soul that has taken over Slash's body, and Axl truly does believe that. And I think that's the greatest stumbling block to getting the band back together. It could have been just the luck of the timing of that moment. That Axl perceived that Slash had died, and a replacement soul had taken over Saul Hudson's body and Saul had gone off into the next world. Who's-ever in Saul Hudson's body right now, it seems like Slash to me.
The interviewer asked both Marc and Tom whether they believe it was true that Axl thought Axl flew away as a crow when he overdosed, and Axl himself would state that his problems with Slash started with this incident.
I had never heard about this before, but apparently the interviewer had. Where they he hear about it?
I suppose they had already interviewed Tom Zutaut when they asked Marc about it.
That could be.
I wouldn't necessarily given it much gravity if it weren't for the fact that Axl himself said that Slash's OD was a turning point. Before I just thought it was Axl being exasperated with Slash not being in more control over his addiction and how it could affect the UYI touring, but now it takes on a different interpretation with Axl thinking Slash changed in a fundamental, and supernatural, way when it happened.
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Re: 2016.02.05 - BBC Four - The Most Dangerous Band In The World: The Story Of Guns N' Roses
by Blackstar Fri Jan 12, 2024 9:25 pm
I had this quote in mind in our earlier discussion here:Soulmonster wrote:
That could be.
I wouldn't necessarily given it much gravity if it weren't for the fact that Axl himself said that Slash's OD was a turning point. Before I just thought it was Axl being exasperated with Slash not being in more control over his addiction and how it could affect the UYI touring, but now it takes on a different interpretation with Axl thinking Slash changed in a fundamental, and supernatural, way when it happened.
https://www.a-4-d.com/t6-2009-02-27-axl-rose-interview-with-spinner-magazine#23281
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Re: 2016.02.05 - BBC Four - The Most Dangerous Band In The World: The Story Of Guns N' Roses
by Soulmonster Fri Jan 12, 2024 9:46 pm
Blackstar wrote:Soulmonster wrote:
That could be.
I wouldn't necessarily given it much gravity if it weren't for the fact that Axl himself said that Slash's OD was a turning point. Before I just thought it was Axl being exasperated with Slash not being in more control over his addiction and how it could affect the UYI touring, but now it takes on a different interpretation with Axl thinking Slash changed in a fundamental, and supernatural, way when it happened.
I had this quote in mind in our earlier discussion here:
https://www.a-4-d.com/t6-2009-02-27-axl-rose-interview-with-spinner-magazine#23281
Yeah, cool, and you said you weren't sure to trust that source (which is Tom Zutaut's opinion on the OD incident as stated in the 2016 documentary), and I would agree with you on that, I take all previous manager's state with a pinch of salt, but then we have the Globo article from 2001 when Axl said his problems with Slash started with the OD incident. And I can't align Axl's later problems with Slash purely on an overdose, it wasn't exactly the first time someone in the band OD'ed. It does seem that Axl put more emphasis on this incident, beyond the "mundane" of a drug overdose. Still, in recent years Axl seems to have gone somewhat away from thinking this is the point in time when the animosity happened; he has been talking about how they were at odds with each other long before 1992, including in the lawsuits where he argued that Slash had been running a powerplay against Axl since they first started.
Btw, for anyone else reading, here's is a summary of Slash's overdose in San Francisco, where Axl allegedly beliefs (or believed) that Slash's soul left him when he was dead: https://www.a-4-d.com/t5000p30-15-may-december-1992-touring-and-feuds#19759
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Re: 2016.02.05 - BBC Four - The Most Dangerous Band In The World: The Story Of Guns N' Roses
by Blackstar Fri Jan 12, 2024 9:57 pm
I think Axl might have really believed that for a period, like at least until the early 00's, which also co-incided with when Tom Zutaut was back into the fold in 2001 and that's how he heard about it.
Later, however, when Axl talked about Slash, he would as well accuse him of things that had happened prior to that incident (e.g. that Slash had wanted to take over the band since the beginning, that he pushed Steven and Izzy out of the band, etc.). So maybe he stopped believing it at one point.
Later, however, when Axl talked about Slash, he would as well accuse him of things that had happened prior to that incident (e.g. that Slash had wanted to take over the band since the beginning, that he pushed Steven and Izzy out of the band, etc.). So maybe he stopped believing it at one point.
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Re: 2016.02.05 - BBC Four - The Most Dangerous Band In The World: The Story Of Guns N' Roses
by Soulmonster Fri Jan 12, 2024 10:01 pm
Blackstar wrote:I think Axl might have really believed that for a period, like at least until the early 00's, which also co-incided with when Tom Zutaut was back into the fold in 2001 and that's how he heard about it.
Later, however, when Axl talked about Slash, he would as well accuse him of things that had happened prior to that incident (e.g. that Slash had wanted to take over the band since the beginning, that he pushed Steven and Izzy out of the band, etc.). So maybe he stopped believing it at one point.
I hope so! Because it it completely bonkers!
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Re: 2016.02.05 - BBC Four - The Most Dangerous Band In The World: The Story Of Guns N' Roses
by Blackstar Sat Jan 13, 2024 10:46 am
Tom Zutaut's story made headlines in the British tabloids on January 28, 2016 (a week before the documentary was aired).
The Sun:
Guns N Roses split up after Axl Rose ‘saw Slash’s soul leave his body after 8-minute heroin overdose’
https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/tv-old/249349/guns-n-roses-split-up-after-axl-rose-saw-slashs-soul-leave-his-body-after-8-minute-heroin-overdose/
Daily Star:
Axl Rose 'saw Slash's soul rise out of his body' before Guns N Roses split
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/music/axl-rose-guns-n-roses-17156868
Daily Mirror:
Is this the real reason Guns N' Roses rockers Slash and Axl Rose fell out?
https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/real-reason-guns-n-roses-7260216
The Sun:
Guns N Roses split up after Axl Rose ‘saw Slash’s soul leave his body after 8-minute heroin overdose’
https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/tv-old/249349/guns-n-roses-split-up-after-axl-rose-saw-slashs-soul-leave-his-body-after-8-minute-heroin-overdose/
Daily Star:
Axl Rose 'saw Slash's soul rise out of his body' before Guns N Roses split
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/music/axl-rose-guns-n-roses-17156868
Daily Mirror:
Is this the real reason Guns N' Roses rockers Slash and Axl Rose fell out?
https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/real-reason-guns-n-roses-7260216
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Re: 2016.02.05 - BBC Four - The Most Dangerous Band In The World: The Story Of Guns N' Roses
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» 2016.07.17 - Billboard - Axl Rose Tells Onstage Story of Guns N’ Roses Being Detained at Canadian Border
» 2016.06.23 - Culture Creature - The Inside Story of Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Appetite for Destruction’ Album Cover
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