War Of The Roses - A Lurid Tell-All and the promise of the band's first new album in 15 years

[madison]

DATE: Aug. 31, 2008

SOURCE: The New York Post

WAR OF THE ROSES

A LURID TELL-ALL AND THE PROMISE OF THE BAND'S FIRST NEW ALBUM IN 15 YEARS PUT LEGENDARY ROCKERS GNR BACK IN THE SPOTLIGHT

By LARRY GETLEN

August 31, 2008

For Guns n' Roses, "Appetite for Destruction" was more than the title of a landmark album that sold 15 million copies in the US and turned the group into rock legends. It was also the perfect description of a hunger that, while catapulting them to stardom, also mired them in a miasma of degrading sex, lethal drugs and brutal violence that left them and their associates on the brink of death.

"Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses," an explosive new book by veteran music historian Stephen Davis, lays out the gory details, sin by sin.

Drawing on interviews with Davis and passages from his book, we examine the band's depraved rise and fall.

YOUNG GUNS

Axl Rose, born William Bruce Rose, was raised by a Pentecostal stepfather who shunned rock music and considered television satanic. He enforced his family values with brutal beatings.By his teens, Axl was angry. The first time he got drunk, at 16, he threw a beer at a cop, punched a guy so hard he "saw his teeth go down his throat," and fell out a two-story window, breaking his hand.

Other members of Guns had turbulent childhoods as well. Slash (born Saul Hudson) was raised in Hollywood by a costume designer mom who dated David Bowie and did lots of drugs. Drummer Steven Adler, another Hollywood kid, smoked weed for the first time at 8, and by 13 was getting oral sex from strange men on Santa Monica Boulevard.

A teenage Axl hitchhiked to LA to search for his friend Jeff Isbell (Izzy Stradlin), but on the way a man tried to rape him. When the man cornered him, Axl held a straight razor to the man's face.

Axl and Izzy eventually formed the band Hollywood Rose. Izzy survived by dealing brown Persian heroin, while Axl slept in abandoned apartments and behind dumpsters, living on $3.75 a day, enough for "biscuits and gravy at Denny's, plus a half-pint of cheap wine."

Axl's raging intensity made him the hottest singer on the Sunset Strip, but his stage presence was lousy. When a friend took him to see the band Shark Island, Axl "developed" his signature moves by stealing them, including his infamous snake dance, from the band's singer, Richard Black.

SEX, DRUGS & DEATH

Once Guns N' Roses' classic lineup coalesced, the group moved into a moldy 12-by-12-foot rehearsal space so nasty that Slash felt safer sleeping in a Tower Records parking lot. The shack became debauchery headquarters for the entire Strip. Aerosmith's Joe Perry would score heroin from Izzy there, and Eagle Don Henley's "Sunset Grill" was written about the evil that took place in the adjoining alley.

And drugs weren't all the band sold. Izzy later admitted that they pimped out some of their groupies, and ripped them off as well. "If one of the guys was f - - - ing a girl in our sleeping loft," he said, "we'd ransack the girl's purse while he was doing her."

When the band signed to Geffen Records, Aerosmith manager Tim Collins met the group in his apartment. Izzy locked himself in Collins' bathroom for hours. When the band left, Collins "found blood dripping from the ceiling and walls." He called Perry, who told him, "one of them is a junkie. He was mainlining in your bathroom." Frightened for Aerosmith's recent sobriety and his own, Collins passed on managing the group.

Even as an early EP drew critical raves, Geffen was terrified the band would die, and planned accordingly. One executive said, "We must record everything they do - rehearsals, sound checks, concerts - now. This band is going to be incredibly popular, and incredibly short-lived. One of them is going to OD before it's all over."

Still, no one could deny their explosive brilliance. Davis remembers GNR opening for Aerosmith.

"It was like Led Zeppelin f - - - ed the Sex Pistols and this was their bastard love child," Davis says. "Joe Perry was standing next to me. I said, 'Joe, what do you think?' He said, 'It's the only band since Led Zeppelin that makes me think of Led Zeppelin.' "

But as the buzz grew, the consequences of their debauched lifestyle piled up. Good friend Todd Crew was shooting smack with Slash and porn star Lois Ayres in the Milford Plaza Hotel in Times Square, when he "nodded off in a heroin coma and fell out of his chair." Slash called a friend in LA.

"He's like, OD'ing," Slash said. "He's turning . . . blue. No, he's not breathing. I think he's gone."

Death by heroin would become familiar to Slash. Sometime later, he was partying with Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx. As their dealer shot a needle into Sixx's arm, Sixx "turned blue and fell out of his chair."

"Oh no," Slash murmured. "Not again." When the ambulance arrived, Sixx was clinically dead. If paramedics hadn't plunged two adrenaline needles into Sixx's heart to revive him, Slash might have been marked as the Grim Reaper of the Sunset Strip. Slash relived the experience later, when his heart stopped for eight minutes after a drug binge before being revived with defibrillators. The experience left him angry because it "really ate into my day off."

GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS

Axl, meanwhile, began dating Erin Everly, daughter of Everly Brother Don. The relationship was volatile and violent. Even in public, Axl was seen "beating her and pulling her hair" like a "rabid dog." Axl grew increasingly unstable. He agreed to a psychiatric test and was diagnosed with manic depression, known today as bipolar disorder.

As "Appetite" soared into the Top 10, the band, dragged down by vices, never enjoyed its success. Slash took advantage of so many skanky groupies, junkies and porn stars that he was terrified of catching AIDS.

"If drinking doesn't get me, AIDS will," he said. "It's like a f - - - ing ghost sent to haunt us."

In July of 1988, "Appetite" hit No. 1, fueled by the power ballad "Sweet Child o' Mine." The album sold 5 million copies in three months, and Guns became the first rock band in a generation to have the top-selling album and single simultaneously.

An EP called "GN'R Lies" followed, featuring the song "One in a Million," which railed against "n - - - ers," "immigrants," "Iranians," "police" and

"f - - - - ots." The press was up in arms, with Billboard calling the song "racist, gay-bashing garbage" and "a brainless screed," but the EP went to No. 2.

EMPEROR AXL

By early 1989, Axl's mania and paranoia were far worse. He fired virtually the entire crew; painted his apartment all black, seeking "a reason to stay alive and began a gun collection that included a riot-grade shotgun, a 9mm pistol, and an Uzi.

His abuse of Everly turned more brutal. At one hotel, Axl locked her in a closet and set it on fire. When Everly later sued him, Slash's girlfriend testified that "Axl threw a television at Erin, kicked her with his cowboy boots, and spat on her while she cried and pleaded not to be hurt."

Sales of "Appetite," meanwhile, were up to 12 million copies.

Later that year, Guns opened four nights for the Rolling Stones. When Axl saw how Mick Jagger called the shots, he took inspiration. The first night, he told the stadium crowd, "Unless certain people in this band . . . get their s - - t together . . . these will be the last Guns n' Roses shows you will ever f - - - ing see."

Years later, Slash, the speech's intended target, said that night was "one of the things that made me hate Axl more than anything. Something I probably never forgave him for."

When Axl threatened lifelong friend Izzy, who had written many of the band's best songs, with cutting his money because he didn't move enough onstage, Izzy left the band.

As their next release, the two-CD "Use Your Illusion," hit the top two spots on the Billboard charts, the stage show of this once raw guitar band had become a 13-person extravaganza, and the backstage entourage, including chiropractors and "gurus," was 80 people strong.

After a co-headlining tour with Metallica, during which Axl ignited a riot by refusing to take the stage for three hours even after Metallica's James Hetfield was burned in a pyrotechnics accident, Guns faded away.

An album of punk covers sold poorly. Geffen gave a $10 million album advance for new material, but the band never showed at the studio.

"CHINESE" DEBACLE

In 1994, the band announced the title of its next record: "Chinese Democracy." Fourteen years and more than $13 million later, fans are still waiting.

Axl became a recluse. He retained rights to the band's name, but once Slash officially quit in October 1996, Axl's attempt to call his band "Guns N' Roses" was mostly an illusion.

Geffen gave him $1 million and promised another million if the record was completed by March 1999. But Axl wasn't ready, so the band recorded more than a thousand digital audio tapes tapes and CDs of music without him.

In, 1998 the first Guns N' Roses song in eight years, "Oh My God," appeared. Axl said the album would be out in 2000.

That year, Interscope (which had absorbed Geffen) hired Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker, who had the band re-record the entire album. Axl then hired Buckethead, a guitarist who wears a chicken bucket on his head, and re-recorded the album again. And in early 2002, Axl had the songs re-recorded yet again.

By February 2004, Geffen had pulled the plug, with $11 million down the drain.

In early 2006, songs from "Chinese Democracy" appeared on the Web, with some radio stations playing a song called "I.R.S." before the band's management took action. Axl publicly hinted the album would be out in 2007 - which didn't happen - and earlier this year, Amazon.com posted a release date for "Chinese Democracy": August 25, 2008.

The day before, ironically, a man named Kevin Cogill was arrested for streaming nine songs from the album on his Web site. Cogill, out on $10,000 bail, faces up to three years in prison, and $250,000 in fines.

And earlier this month, rumors spread that "Chinese Democracy" would be released this year exclusively through Best Buy or Wal-Mart, and that one track, "Shackler's Revenge," would be included on the video game "Rock Band 2."

Some, however, prefer that "Chinese Democracy" simply remain a rumor.

"Fans said to me, 'Please don't let "Chinese Democracy" ever come out,' " says Davis. " 'We've heard the stuff, and it's not that great. Can't this great band die with dignity?' "

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