Axl's and Slash's religion/philosophy

[foghat43]

I would be interested to know if Axl or Slash have expressed any interest or affiliation with any particular religion or philosophical worldview (e.g. atheist, agnostic, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, New Age, etc.)

I've read that Axl was raised in a strict Pentecostal environment and that he seems to still hold some general fascination with Christian imagery…wearing crosses, collecting antique crucifixes, the cross on the cover of AFD, etc. I also know that he has read some Ayn Rand (Objectivism).

I'm curious about their (Axl and Slash) current religious/philosophical views (if any)?

I would prefer to keep this on topic and specific to Axl’s and Slash’s views (documented somewhere, publicly expressed in books, interviews, etc.) rather than giving your own personal opinions about religion or speculating about what Axl/Slash believe. Not looking for a debate over the pros and cons of differing worldviews…just curious about their beliefs.

Thank you!

[Axl_morris]

Axl also wore a Kill your Idols T-shirt which would suggest he wasn't religious.

[alfierose]

He does have a mahoosive crucifix in his house though..I think.

[kanudo19]

He's religious

[alfierose]

I have no idea about Slash. Doesn't strike me as the religious or naval gazing type but you never know.

[ShadowOfTheWave]

Axl addresses his position on beliefs a little here: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-12-02/news-and-interviews/35529851_1_spiritual-haven-axl-rose-delhi

[Nosaj Thing]

Axl believes in Charles Manson.

[liers]

Axl was into past lives in the late 90's. He had a spiritual adviser, Yoda, who lived on a mountain in Arizona who he visited regularly. In 1998 he was arrested for attacking an airport security guard on his way back from seeing Yoda because the guard touched something she gave him. I remember either Erin or Stephanie accused him of beating her because he said in past life they were Indians and she killed their children.

I can't even type this without laughing. Axl had to be on something in the late 90's.

Here's a snippit from the 2000 article about Axl Rose.

"I'll punch your lights out right here and right now. I don't give a fuck who you are. You are all little people on a power trip." These are not lyrics to a bitter new GN'R track about lawyers, perhaps reminiscent of Axl's old rants on CD and from the stage against reporters and photographers and anybody else who failed to do his precise bidding. These words, the Phoenix Police Department reports, are what Axl shouted at security personnel at Sky Harbor International Airport in February 1998 after a screener asked to search his hand luggage. Threatened with arrest, Axl, travelling in jeans, a red sweat shirt and a gray stocking cap, rejoined, "I don't give a fuck. Just put me in fuckin' jail." He spent a couple of hours behind bars. The matter was resolved on February 18th 19999 when Rose, via telephone, pleaded no contest to a misdemeanour charge of disturbing the peace and paid a $500 fine.

Lost in the minor hoopla over the arrest was the matter of what, exactly, Axl was doing at the Phoenix airport. Was Axl coming back from a place where he often goes - Sedona, the New Age bastion in the red-rock canyons 115 miles north of Phoenix, where he sees one of the most important people in his world, a psychic known derisively in the GN'R camp as Yoda?

Though nobody knows precisely how he got involved, people who know him say Axl started visiting Sedona in the early nineties, sometimes travelling with Beta, his housekeeper, or Earl, his bodyguard. Many believers in past lives, channelling, UFOs and the predictive power of crystals pass through Sedona. The town is so tuned in, vibewise that certain canyons are understood to be vortexes for masculine energy and others for feminine forces. In the produce aisles of Sedona supermarkets, shoppers dangle crystals over the pints of strawberries.

For close to a decade, Rose has been a powerful, almost evangelical believer in homeopathic medicine. The world, in Axl's view, is a perilous place, populated by greedy doctors affiliated with the American Medical Association who prescribed dangerous synthetic medicines. When GN'R toured, homeopathic elixirs for Axl's throat were always on hand. He introduced Echinacea and protein shakes to a GN'R more accustomed to vodka and heroin.

Axl's childhood woes are well documented; he does not come, as Axl himself might say, from a healthy place. In 1992, in this magazine, Axl talked about learning at the age of seventeen that the man he thought was his real father was in fact his stepfather. Axl's biological father, William Rose, abandoned the family when Axl was two and is believed to be dead. Through therapy, Axl said, he recovered memories of being beaten and sexually abused as a child. It is these traumas, primarily, that Axl wrestles with, and it is these experiences that may, in part, be blamed for his hostile attitude toward women and his consuming need for control. A friend says "All that baggage, as he was being constructed, it all comes to bear. It's not an external issue. It's really core to his makeup."

Yoda's real name is Sharon Maynard. A rather plain Asian woman of middle age, Maynard stands about five feet five and has a medium build and dark, curly hair. Since 1978 she has run a not-for-profit business in Sedona called Arcos Cielos Corp., which loosely translated from the Spanish means "sky arcs." The company, with assets of $241,602 in 1998, lists itself as an "educational" enterprise. Aricos Cielos operates out of Maynard's rural home in Sedona, which she shares with her husband, Elliott, a gently gray-haired man. "Dr. Elliott and Sharon Maynard" are both thanked in the Use Your Illusion liner notes.

Sharon Maynards keeps a low profile in town. "She is way under, low-key," says a local business man with ties to the psychic community. None of the New Age booksellers or silversmiths I talked to knew her, and she wasn't listed in the phone book or with the Center for the New Age, where a tick three-ring binder full of psychics and past-life therapists is available for perusal - and many of those listed are available for immediate consultation in booths upstairs. This is not surprising. Much of the more high-end psychic work in Sedona is done b quiet figures like Yoda who work out of private homes.

While it is customary for tour employees to submit a photograph for a laminated pass, with Axl other things seemed to come into play. Doug Goldstein is said to gather photos at the singer's instruction for psychic assessment. In Sedona, some think, Yoda would examine these photos. What does so-and-so want out of Axl? Does this person have his best interests in mind? What kind of energy do they emit?

Submitting a photo to Axl for evaluation by Yoda, some say, coincided with employment in the GN'R world. Band members, crew members, record-company executives - everybody did it. The procedure still goes on. Recalls one current employee, "I sent my picture in. Everybody gets a photo made for a pass. People made jokes about auras being read. What's this for? Nobody really knew. But I don't know anybody who got canned for anything other than not doing a good job." On occasion, according to a music-industry figure Axl recently worked with, Yoda even requests photographs of the sons and daughters of people in Axl's world.

In February 1998 in Arizona, Axl was carrying some presents he'd recently received - "going to the psychic for review," in the words of one knowledgeable source. One item in Axl's bag was a large hand-blown glass sphere. Axl was apparently worried that the security personnel at the airport might break it, and that led to his outburst and arrest.

How important is Yoda to Axl? One associate says Yoda's influence, while important, is tempered by the force of Axl's personality; "He wasn't turning his life over to somebody with a candle and a crystal. I say that with every confidence. It's just not consistent with who he is. He makes his own decisions."

Still, Yoda showed up on tour. "She came with some of her pals," a crew member recalls. "Funny dudes: Southwestern people with funny shoes. Their look didn't fit in: they were like aliens."

During a 1992 GN'R swing through the US with Metallica, Yoda apparently became concerned about energy fields around Minneapolis and ordered that a date contemplated for the city not be booked. It was later rescheduled for a different Minneapolis venue. "Axl had trouble," a tour regular says, "in areas of the country that had a strong magnetic field concentration."

Before some dates in Japan, presumably at Yoda's urging, information about atomic power sources in the country and power sources for the Tokyo dome had to be collected. A source involved in this mission says he never understood precisely what this data was used for. "It was something about the magnetic forces that exist in the universe and where those things are in comparison to where Axl would be spending his time."

Axl also sometimes took a psychotherapist from Los Angeles, a Victoria Principal look-alike named Suzzy London on the road. London maintained an area backstage for herself and Axl. He cast her as his therapist, wearing a black miniskirt, in the video for "Don't Cry."

Members of the band and its entourage took different views of Axl's various counsellors. Some showed them healthy respect. Others scorned them. "They had to accompany him to Japan to make sure that the bad-energy waves didn't capture him there," a former employee recalls. "If it was any exotic, wonderful place around the world, the advisers generally had to be flown in at some point. But if it was Kansas City, everything was really fine. I mean it was St. Louis where the riot happened." Were they with him in St. Louis? Angry at a fan with a camera at a July 2nd 1992 show at the Riverport Amphitheatre, Rose launched himself into the crowd, touching off a riot that injured more than fifty people and caused more than $200,000 in damage.

Axl has spoken in the past about his experiences with past-life-regression therapy. A typical past life regression sessions begins with hypnosis. During traditional psychotherapy, a patient placed in a trance may be able to recall traumatic events that have been repressed and that may lie at the root of current emotional problems. Freudian theory holds that recognizing and understanding such traumas, which often occur in childhood, can promote healing.

Under hypnosis by a past-life expert, the playing field expands. A patient may be able to remember back even further, to a life or lives that were lived hundreds if not thousands of years ago, and discover traumas that occurred then. Some patients may speak in the voice or the language of that long-dead being, whether it be a Roman ruler or a Southern plantation slave.

Past-life adherents tend to believe that one lives one's life with different incarnations of the same group of people. Axl, according to a confidant, believes he and Stephanie Seymour were together in fifteen or sixteen past lives.

After a shouting match with Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love backstage at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards at UCLA's Pauley Pavillion, Axl told a friend that Love was trying to possess him. "He believes people are always trying to find a window through to control his energy," a friend says. How does Axl combat this? "By controlling the people who have access to him."

After he and Seymour broke up, in 1992, the model began dating Peter Brant. Axl, according to one friend, ordered subordinates to obtain a photograph of Brant's wife, Sandra. Axl intended to take it to Yoda for a specific purpose, according to a former Geffen employee: "Axl wanted to cast a spell around Sandra to protect her from Peter, because he felt that she, too, had been cuckolded as he had been, and he had a great deal of sympathy for her." Seymour, then 26, and Brant, 48, married in Paris in 1995.

Even by loose New Age standards, Axl has received some bizarre advice over the years. After Axl's ex-wife, Erin Everly, the daughter of singer Don Everly, and the inspiration for the GN'R hit "Sweet Child o'Mine" sued Axl in 1994, charging assault and sexual battery, Everly sat for a deposition. She testified that Axl believed that she and Seymour were sisters in a past life and were "trying to kill him." As far as her own relationship with Axl went, Everly said, "Axl had told met that in a past life we were Indians and that I killed our children, and that's why he was so mean to me in this life."

Everly was asked, "Had Axl ever told you that he was possessed?

"Yes," she said.

"What did he say he was possessed by?"

"John Bonham."

Bonham, the rambunctious Led Zeppelin drummer died in his sleep after a bender in 1980. Rose denies ever saying he was possessed by Bonham.

"They're the ultimate controlled relationships," a friend says of Axl's various therapy sessions. "Starts at a certain time, ends at a certain time, you pay for it, you can stop paying for it and stop going. And as long as you want somebody to listen to you, as long as you want somebody to say the things that you want to hear, you can pay them to do it."

Once in a while, in a New Age community that embraces a certain number of charlatans, Axl got taken to the cleaners. During his marriage to Everly, Axl went for an exorcism. The exorcism apparently didn't involved the priests and crosses that viewers of prime-time television have come to expect. "Mainly it involved getting some kind of herbal wrap," Axl testified during the Everly case, some "work on my skin." The man who performed this procedure charged $72,000. Even Axl admitted, "I ended up getting ripped off for a lot of money in the long run."

Through a series of hairpin turns and steep grades, PRIVATE Canyon Road winds a couple of thousand feet up to the top of an arid hill near the Point Dume section of Malibu. The sun skims and slants and shimmers off the Pacific Ocean and the celebrity homes that crowd the beach below. Axl lives in a Mediterranean style compound that was valued last year at $3.8 million, a price tag fairly typical for the neighbourhood. He moved into the canyon in 1992, paying a mortgage of about $15,000 a month. PRIVATE was going to be the place he and Stephanie Seymour would live together as man and wife and raise their children.

Edited February 7, 2014 by liers

[Axl_morris]

Yeah alan niven spoke about that in that interview last year. They took hundreds of thousands from Axl.

[Funkadelic]

"[...]I do like to explore and consider lots of different concepts, ideologies, belief systems, religions etc, and have an understanding of what others feel, think or believe, but in my opinion, ultimately what one "believes" is their own business." (from the indian interview)

Seems like a great approach to religion and beliefs if you ask me.

[wasted]

Booze.

[Amir]

From the 2012 tour programme:

"We are made up of two contrasting ideals: Love and Fear. Pick one and live."

[Axl Sauce]

slash worships the devil. just look at the movie he produced. he wears black. axl calls him the devil too so nuff said

[Val22]

Isn't Slash jewish?

Axl wears a lot of crosses, but who knows if it's just for decorations or if he really believes in Jesus or God?

[lukeaxl]

I'm sure I read somewhere that axl found out that yoga and her bloke were taking the piss out of him and taking him for a ride. Or was it when she died her bloke was getting him to see someone else to keep the money coming in?

[Lumikki]

Isn't Slash jewish?

Axl wears a lot of crosses, but who knows if it's just for decorations or if he really believes in Jesus or God?

Slash is NOT jewish. Pearla once said they were not jewish when someone assumed the same in an interview. He mentions going to church as a child with his grandmother or something in his book, but nowadays he probably is not particularly religious at all.

[DangerousCurves]

I remember seeing somewhere that Slash has or had an interest in Voodoo, the New Orleans variety, as opposed to Haitian. I don't believe hoodoo or Santaria were discussed.

[Snowmass]

I'd guess both could give a fuck about religion. "Don't need your religion......"

Edited February 12, 2014 by Snowmass