Huge fan

The first feature on Guns N’ Roses to be published in the UK press – in an issue of Sounds magazine dated April 4, 1987 - carried an evocative headline: Raising Hell In The City Of Angels.

The band – singer Axl Rose, guitarists Slash and Izzy Stradlin, bassist Duff McKagan and drummer Steven Adler – had recently finished recording their debut album Appetite For Destruction. The album would be released in August, and before that, on June 19, 1987, Guns N’ Roses would make their live debut in the UK at London’s Marquee club.

Sounds writer Paul Elliott met the band in LA the day after they played an album launch party gig at the Whiskey A Go Go club. After a booze-fuelled lunch at the Hyatt hotel on the Sunset Strip, they moved to a room at the cheaper Park Sunset Hotel across the street, where the Sounds interview took place under the watchful eye of the band’s manager Alan Niven. Guns N’ Roses already had a reputation as the wildest band in Los Angeles. They had been nicknamed ‘Lines N’ Noses’. Unknown to Elliott at the time, Alan Niven had instructed them to not discuss drugs during this interview, and even had a signal for them to them to change subject whenever drugs were mentioned – he rustled his copy of the LA Times. After the interview, the band went back to the home they shared in Hollywood – a dilapidated place that they named The Hellhouse, a place that became part of the myth of the greatest rock ’n’ roll band of its generation.

RAISING HELL IN THE CITY OF ANGELS

In LA, you’re nowhere without a car. All day and long into the night, tyre rubber screeches on hot, shiny road surfaces. Buses? Forget it. Kids can be fully licensed drivers at 16 and there’s barely a soul walking the streets.

Glinting in 70s-degree winter sunshine, autos spill off the driveway and crowd the front lawn before a smallish, detached, flaking white-wood house just off Santa Monica Boulevard, home for Guns N’ Roses and a string of friends. It’s breakfast time – three in the afternoon – the day after the band were slung out of the Cathouse, their favorite nightspot, over an incident involving a liter of Jim Beam (supplied gratis by the club’s owner), which left some of the pool room’s furniture reduced to firewood. More parked cars line both sides of the street, and, as Axl, Izzy, Duff, Slash and Steven slump on the porch for photos, cradling guitars and leaning on a New York-registered Harley Davidson, another three vehicles pull up opposite the house. These are Los Angeles Police Department black-and-whites. Guns N’ Roses and their neighbours obviously don’t mix too good. The squad cars empty slowly and one cop of medium build walks to where a couple of sacks of rubbish and a broken chair sit near the pavement. A rough demo of Guns N’ Roses’ debut record for Geffen, Appetite For Destruction, rips out from a ghetto blaster. The officer smiles from behind regulation shades. “Where’s the party?”

“We ran out of beer,” Duff replies.

“Sure. We’ll be back in twenty minutes. Okay?”

All nod as the cop returns to his car.

“Hey,” Axl shouts after him. “How about if we take a couple of pictures on your car? You don’t mind, do you?”

“Er… I guess not.”

They scramble off the porch and squeeze on to the car’s wide hood. As they laugh and pose, you can sense the disgruntled neighbours’ eyes burning, their blood pressure rising. “That’s the third lot of cool cops in a row,” Axl says, grinning. Which is tough shit for the neighbours, wouldn’t you say?

“The West Hollywood sheriffs have got to be the biggest fucking pigfaces I’ve ever known. They know our name, too, because of all the things that have happened.”

This is Izzy, rhythm guitarist, talking a few hours later. Gaunt, a little tired and fidgety, continually smoking and toying with the used butts that overfill an ashtray, he crouches on the floor of my hotel room with his head in his hands and his elbows resting on the large bed where bass player Duff lies asleep. Next to Izzy, singer Axl – a wiry figure, shirtless under a crumpled, kitsch fake-fur coat – does most of the talking. His voice is soft, deep and slightly rasping. Axl enjoys opening up and the others tend not to compete. He bites his tongue only once during the hour in which we talk – when the group’s manager Alan Niven, sitting quietly behind Slash, advises him that details of legal wrangles with former managers should not be on tape. Slash, a Ramones lookalike, his face shielded by a mass of black ringlets, sticks to one-liners and loses some of his humour to the formality of a question and answer routine. Drummer Steven, likeable, boyish, sun-bleached beach bum, jokes but hasn’t a great deal to say.

Izzy and Axl come from Indiana. Is LA any better?

“Must be,” Izzy says. “I’m still here.”

“We grew up in Indiana and we got a lot of shit,” Axl says. “I got thrown in jail over twenty times, and five of those times I was guilty. Of what? Public consumption. I was drinking at a party underage. The other times I got busted because the cops hated me. So I don’t have much love for that fucking place! People used to say to us, ‘You guys should go to California.’ And when we got here, we found we were five years behind the times. You show up and think you’re going to fit in, and they say, ‘So what boat did you get off?’”

Izzy: “No one in the band was born in LA. We all ended up meeting here. Slash was born in… er, Stoke On Trent.”

Why did you move to LA? Purely to get a gig?

“Yeah.” And do you plan to leave LA pretty soon?

Axl: “Fucking right, man! After this next tour.”

LA serves no real purpose in Guns N’ Roses’ future, although up till now it’s been home, first base, a point from which to build. The sun and the scent of big record company dollars on the West Coast originally drew the five of them together, and the local clubs provided them with vital early exposure. But they’ve not grown at all sentimental about the place. Axl sees the LA rock scene currently in a state of decline.

“It’s died a bit and I think the reason why is us,” he says. “Two years ago we started playing in places like the Troubadour and the Roxy. As soon as we began headlining, we brought in different opening bands like Jetboy, Faster Pussycat and L.A. Guns, and it kind of created this scene. In that crowd we were pretty much the top draw. Eventually, we quit playing for a while to work on the record and the other bands started headlining, but I’ve noticed that some of them haven’t been as cool about helping other bands out. We always tried to help others because I want to see a really cool rock scene. I want to be able to turn on my radio and not be sick about the shit I’m going to hear. Right now, we’re playing again with Jetboy and Faster Pussycat, who have also been signed by major labels, so it’s all starting up again, but only for a couple of gigs. That’s basically all the scene that there is.”

Izzy: ‘Our scene is now dying out because the four main bands (L.A. Guns too) got signed.”

“All in all,” says Slash, “I think the whole idea of an LA scene is pretty trivial.”

Axl: “Well, there’s no fucking New York scene, and as far as I know there’s no real British scene at this kind of club level.”

Slash: “The thought of the LA scene just makes me sick. LA is considered a pretty gay place, and we get a lot of flak from people thinking we’re posers.”

Axl: ‘We know one guy who’s been going to The Rainbow for about four years, telling girls he’s in such and such a band, and he couldn’t play his way out of a wet paper bag!”

Steven: “In LA there’s a million people who think they’re musicians and only a few who are.”

“Poison fucked it up for all of us,’ Axl says. “They said that everyone in LA was following their trend.”

What did you do for money before you signed with Geffen?

“G-I-R-L-S.” Steven laughs.

Izzy: “Sold drugs, sold girls, sold… we just got it. We managed. In the beginning we’d throw parties and ransack a girl’s purse while one of the guys was with her.”

Slash: ‘Not being sexist or anything, but it’s fucking amazing how much abuse girls will take.” “Slash!” Izzy winces.

That’s not being sexist?

“He does it purposely,” Axl says with more than a hint of weariness. He attempts to cleat the air with a change of subject. “We have a song about a girl I met called Michelle, and when I’d written it all nice I thought, That’s not how it really is. So I wrote the real story down, kind of as a joke. The first lines go: ‘Your daddy works in porno/Now that mommy’s not around/She used to love her heroin/But now she’s underground.’ She and her dad ended up loving it. It’s a true story, and that’s what works, I think.”

There’s a fair plastering of dirt and grime and down-at-heel seediness in Guns N’ Roses’ music, too. It was evident on the trashy four-track EP Live Like A Suicide (released in 1986 on their own Uzi Suicide label), and it has spread to the raw mixes of the new album material. And as ‘bitchin’’ as these songs are, they are also remarkably varied in style.

“We’ve got our progressions already planned out,” Axl says. “How we’re going to grow. This record’s going to sound like a showcase. I sing in, like, five or six different voices, so not one song is quite like another, even if they’re all hard rock. In the last year I’ve spent over thirteen hundred dollars on cassettes, everything from Slayer to Wham! – to listen to production, vocals, melodies, this and that. I’m from Indiana, where Lynyrd Skynyrd were considered God to the point that you ended up saying, ‘I hate this fucking band!’ And yet, for our song Sweet Child O’ Mine I went out and got some old Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes to make sure that we’d got that downhome, heartfelt feeling.”

Does it surprise you if people call Guns N’ Roses original?

“Yeah. I think it’s because they haven’t seen it in a long time. This is the only real rock 'n’ roll band to come out of LA in the last ten years. Van Halen was the last.”

Izzy: “Motley Crue was more teen metal. We go for a more roots-oriented sound than most other bands around here.”

You’ve been labeled “this year’s model of the perennial LA bad boy band”…

Slash: “The only reason we get that bad boy shit is because the other bands in LA are such wimps.”

And the Aerosmith comparison? You seem to have gleaned a lot from them, even down to the lifestyle.

“That’s OK,” Axl says. “because in my mind, the hardest, ballsiest rock band that ever came out of America was Aerosmith. What I always liked about them was that they weren’t the guys you’d want to meet at the end of an alley if you’d had a disagreement. I wanted to come out of America with that same attitude. So, one reason why there’s been this Aerosmith comparison is, fuck, they were the only goddamn role model to come out of here!”

Somebody told me that you ‘take everything’ – is that true?

All laugh before Steven says: “We were just going to ask you about this bed here…”

“No comment at all,” Izzy grumbles.

Axl: ‘We take everything – and that goes in every single way. We take everything from everything we hear, from what we see and do…”

Sure, Axl.

Survivors, scavengers, sexists, sleazeballs, brats, bums, bad apples... If there is a familiarity about Guns N’ Roses it is hardly surprising – the motions they’re going through are timeless. These five are simply the latest in a long line of no-goods upholding a great and glorious rock’n’roll tradition. And in a year when raising hell has regained its glamour, Guns N’ Roses are calling the shots.

As a Geffen employee says, off the record: “Guns N’ Roses? Yeah, they’ll make it. If they live…”

http://metalhammer.teamrock.com/features/2014-05-30/the-night-axl-had-to-be-arrested-to-get-him-to-the-gig-on-time

1989 hadn't been good to Guns N' Roses.

Axl Rose had sent much of the year publicly defending the band's song One In A Million against accusations of homophobia and racism, while behind the scenes things were falling apart. Axl was missing rehearsals, Izzy Stradlin had been arrested for urinating in the aisle during a flight to LA before being punched by Motley Crue singer Vince Neil at the MTV awards, and heroin was a growing problem.

Then the Rolling Stones came calling, offering the band the main support slot on their US dates. Feeling that Guns N' Roses wouldn't be able to complete an entire tour, the band's then-manager Alan Niven negotiated a million dollar fee for a four night stint at the LA Coliseum.

280,000 tickets were snapped up, and by the day of the show ticket brokers were selling single seats for up to $700. As showtime approached, the tension grew: not only was there the usual air of danger around Guns N' Roses, but the press had been amplifying the Stones/Roses rivalry, suggesting it was time for the old guard to pass the torch onto the new. Only problem? Axl Rose, disenchanted by his bandmates' behaviour, was nowhere to be found.

Alan Niven takes up the story:

"The day of the first show [October 18], Brian Ahern [the Stones’ production manager] comes to me and he goes: “Your guy’s not here. Tell me what I’m supposed to do.” I said: “Do you have a contact in the LAPD who is an absolutely no-questions-asked guy?” And he said: “I do.” So the guy came in and I told him: “I’m going to give you an address.” And it was Axl’s apartment. I said: “I want you to immediately send two no-questions-asked uniforms to this address, get the occupants out of that condominium in any which way they can, and bring them right here – in handcuffs if necessary.”

"They went and got him, and the band arrived on stage a mere twenty minutes late. I’m standing in the backstage feeling pretty damn clever. And that’s right at the moment that Axl announces this is going to be the last show and he’s going to retire."

Biffy Clyro and Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators are joining forces to play an intimate show for fans at Glasgow's iconic O2 Academy on Friday November 7 ahead of the 2014 MTV EMA

The gig will be filmed for MTV and broadcast as part of MTV World Stage around the globe and is part of MTV Music Week, a series of events that will be staged by MTV throughout Glasgow in the lead up to the EMA on November 9.

The Use Your Illusion albums (1991) weren’t the first cassettes I ever bought, but they were the first ones bearing the dreaded and mysterious “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” sticker, and therefore their purchase presents the clearest memory. I smiled at my dad as he picked me up from the mall, pretending those tapes in my pocket weren’t burning rectangles in my eleven-year-old leg. That night I spent an hour trying to peel and wash the stickers off the cases, before I realized that all I had to do was switch the inserts with some Bill Cosby tapes. A young bastard was born.

Ah, but this is too much preamble. It would appear that Axl Rose has emerged with a truly completed Chinese Democracy, ending years of one joke and, surely, starting another one. To mark the occasion, I present a tribute: one to the fallen Stylus Magazine’s great Playing God feature; one to antiquated technology (and notions of commercial and artistic prowess-slash-pretentiousness); and one to my own misbegotten youth which depended so heavily on the former. I present a trimming of one of the most overblown, indulgent, and artistically strangled projects in pop history—or, at least until Chinese Democracy sees the light of day. But it wasn’t enough to just slice the fat—my task was to find a way to fit the best of it on either side of a sixty minute tape (“one side longer to preserve continuity” be damned), in the true spirit of ’91. My picks are entirely solipsistic; “November Rain” is nowhere to be found. Here we go.

Side A

1. “You Could be Mine” (II; 5:43)

Both albums grossly violate the ’80s cock-rock golden rule (one which was adhered so gloriously on Appetite for Destruction): the killer advance single needs to kick off the album. Instead, on I we get the well-meaning but slight “Right Next Door to Hell,” and II gives us the power-ballad “Civil War,” where Axl as philosopher-warrior literally asks “what’s so civil about war, anyway?” My nth generation Maxell rectifies matters: one great wah-pedal riff from Slash gives way to a Stones plagiarism from Izzy. The song’s chorus was first quoted on the insert to Appetite, but is perhaps best known for the Terminator II cross-promoting video that correctly assessed the band to be “wastes of ammunition.” Future generations will laugh at the ever-litigious Axl chastising his ex for “call[ing] my lawyer with ridiculous demands,” if they aren’t already.

2. “Pretty Tied Up (The Perils of Rock N’ Roll Decadence)” (II; 4:44)

I almost switched the first two songs around, for one reason. Imagine that it’s 1991, and the highly anticipated album from “The World’s Most Dangerous Band” begins with a sitar, a high hat, and someone in a bad sportscaster accent saying “the perrrrrrls of rocknrolllll decadence!” If you’re not laughing, you should stop reading. For all its hideous sexism, I still think this is a pretty good song; I hear it gets played pretty often on AOR stations, wherever they exist.

3. “Dust N’ Bones” (I; 4:58)

Two Izzy songs in a row, and the only one with his vocals that I’ve kept by virtue of its strength (Slash and Duff are credited as co-authors, but I’m hoping against hope that this is one of the “totally arbitrary” credits awarded by Axl that Slash complained about in his admittedly fascinating autobiography. Then again, “sometimes these women are so easy” is one of those nose-pinching lines that can only come from Duff’s pen). This song has no business being almost five minutes long, though, which serves as a metaphor for the entire project. Nevertheless, Izzy is in full Exile on Main Street glory here, and his plaintive gruff is a great counterpoint against Axl’s shrieking—which is here rendered into the endemic Scary Man vocal that appears all over the entire album.

4. “Perfect Crime” (I; 2:23)

When the jig was up, this was my mother’s Exhibit A for chucking this album in the trash (although she never did; I found all of the Guns’ tapes and Nirvana’s Incesticide CD in my father’s desk drawer, and stole them back, and never heard boo about the matter again). There were way too many fuck’s and motherfucker’s to let it slide (George Carlin RIP), but she apparently had no problem with Axl’s truly head-scratching Scary Man spoken word in the bridge: “ostracized / but that’s alright / I was thinking about something myself…” Entire algebra classes were spent pondering that one. Musically this rips, and while thrash rock was never the band’s forte, tracks like this really lightened the load. On my beat up cassette, this album is zipping right along.

5. “Don’t Damn Me” (I; 5:18)

The band (or Axl, same diff) hated this song. They only played it once on the entire two year tour, and at the end of the recording Axl wants everyone to know “all riiiiiight, that sucked.” He’s admittedly sleeping at the wheel, here: his vocal merely follows Slash’s riff. This fits on my tape because a) it’s a great riff and b) there are no overdubs, Scary Man vocals, or weird spoken word pieces on this entire track, which on Use Your Illusion is cause for a fucking parade. My friend Jim and I loved the outro, too: at every New Years’ party we ever attended, we tried to time the dropping of the Times Square ball with the final “all riiiiiiight, that sucked / BONK!” This illustrated how bad the prior year had been for us, in ways both intentional and otherwise.

6. “Breakdown” (II; 7:04)

“Breakdown” ends side A for time considerations more than anything else, although not only does this include Scary Man and a horrifying spoken word outro (“Our soul driver in his soul-mobile, yeah baby! They’re about to strike! They’re gonna get him! Smash! Rape!”) but one of the worst pseudo-country intros I’ve ever heard. If you can get through all that, the song’s actually not bad at all. It isn’t nearly as cloying as any piano song heard on radio, and its final lyric (“funny how everything was roses when we held on to the guns”) provides an odd coda to the self-referential drama on all of this side. That still leaves the outro, which, with any luck, will be cut off by the tape finishing before the song does.

Side B

1. “Garden of Eden” (I; 2:41)

Alright, alright, I’m caught: I like stupid riffs and fast tempos, and this riff is pretty goddamned stupid. That would be fine, too, except Axl really piled on some shit here: weird, atonal synth noises; bubbles; fucking lots and lots of swirling bubbles. A spoken intro, Scary Man vocal, the aforementioned overdubs (BUBBLES!), and to cap it all off motherfucking Duff McKagan puts in his two cents with a poison apple (or is that eyeball? Don’t put anything past this man). So why am I kicking off side B with it? Slash’s surf-rock slide-from-nothing intro. Don’t bother sending me hatemail, I already hate myself.

2. “Locomotive” (II; 8:42)

Axl Rose was so consumed with his vision of this project that he moved into the studio. For nine months, this man lived, ate, shat, breathed, and probably screwed Use Your Illusion. During that time, he looked at this song, added the requisite weird vocals and Scary Man overdubs, had the producer Mike Clink go through every flanger effect in Los Angeles, and in nine months, what did he come out with? “If love is blind / I guess I’ll buy myself a cane.” Slash brings out all of his big guns, probably because he has to.

3. “Estranged” (II; 9:23)

I cut the last fifty seconds or so off of “Locomtive”’s coda (you’re not missing anything—the band reaches for “Layla” like resolution but instead just jams in a different minor key), and the jarring effect it has on this song’s piano intro is palpable. I can never tell if Axl’s emotive intro is intentionally funny or not; Slash’s guitar makes you believe every word. Seventeen years later, I’m still struck by how well-arranged this song is: it’s a power-ballad in reverse, sure, but the way it floats between minor and major keys, loud guitars and subdued ones, is truly unlike anything in big-budget rock at the time, and maybe even still be the case. Best of all, Axl lets one of his own songs get out of the way—there isn’t an unnecessary sound to be found, and Axl-as-rock-god-cum-sensitive-artist-who-beats-his-girlfriend achieves a kind of pathos. This is hands down the best installment of the overblown “trilogy” video concept, and, of course, the least successful. Major labels should hire me.

4. “Coma” (I; 10:08?)

Scary Man cries “Help me!” during one of this song’s many, many dramatic overdubs, and one has to wonder if the sound is the song itself crying out for relief. “Coma” is here because it succeeds for the exact opposite reason “Estranged” does (and for the very same reason most of the project is so tiring), that all of the bullshit actually works in the conceit’s favor: a man chooses between life and death. Because literally everything is here: not only Scary Man and actors reciting lines (funny side note, but the sheet music for the segment starting at 7:10 actually says “Riff B w/ bitching”) but wind effects, heart beats and the inevitable flatline. Melodically, there’s a lot going on as well: the key changes at least five times during the song’s final two minutes, and some real violence is being done to music theory as the song repeatedly goes between major and minor chords. The last two minutes are the key to Illusion I, and they’re the key to my album as well, appearing as a perfect mirror to the final minutes of “Rocket Queen,” affirming that the band survives entirely on the prowess of vocalist and guitarist. If I’ve timed it right, the tape stops at precisely the moment the flat line ends, leaving Matt Sorum’s extraneous drum hits in the rubbish bin in which they belong.

APPENDIX: The Five Worst Songs from Use Your Illusion

The problem with Illusion is not that the material breaks down to two mediocre records, but it’s more like three: you have the obvious Guns N Roses material (which this tape leans pretty hard on) (heh, “pretty hard on”); the way-too-long, slow, piano led, “epic” songs; and total fucking shit. (Which, I suppose, at least wouldn’t be at all mediocre.) I leave you with some final thoughts on the least of the worst, leading a crowded field, and in ascending order:

5. “Shotgun Blues”

I suppose I should save this spot for “Don’t Cry (alt lyrics),” a waste of now-precious analogue tape if ever there was one. But this song is too aggressively tuneless to avoid contumely: like the weak but mostly harmless “Dead Horse,” Axl supposedly wrote this before joining the band, or forming a brain. Best worst part: the end, where a choir of Axls sing “I know” while Axl the rebarbative bully asks “you think anyone with an IQ over fifteen is gonna believe your shit, fuckhead?” An important question, since the IQ of the average Guns fan is probably twenty.

4. “Back Off Bitch”

Score one for mom: if “Perfect Crime” got her radar up, this one sent her to the rafter, and with good reason. There are some songs worth fighting for, however ideologically flawed: Chuck D namedrops Louis Farakkhan in “Bring the Noise,” and even if you find yourself on thin ice defending the NOI’s sometime positive effects on Black consciousness, you can ultimately say that the beat itself is such a monster, such a clear ground zero in the history of pop music, that one has to look the other way. This is not one of those songs, and I would like to publicly apologize to my mother for ever conflating the two.

3. “So Fine”

Duff McKagan sings solo.

2. “My World”

To be fair, no one else in the band, including management, had any idea this was coming til the CDs were actually pressed, so it falls (and falls, and FALLS) on Axl. Let’s see: a beat made entirely of synth loops and a woman’s sex sounds, and Axl rapping the lines “you ain’t been mindfucked yet / oh my distorted smile / guess what I’m doin now?” Did you know that the woman in “Rocket Queen” was actually having sex with Axl in the studio, hence someone got a credit for “fucking engineer?” As George Carlin would say, a real “Emmy award winner.”

1. “Get in the Ring”

Oh, like it could be anything else. It’s one thing to do Scary Man on ex-girlfriends, judges, hangers on, and, um, whomever else was plaguing Mr. Rose’s expense account. And critics certainly count, too, but it’s another thing to name names on a CD. That’s certainly the most embarrassing thing about this track, but there are still goodies: Scary Man talking about crushing your head right in his vice, the Duff-ism that is “we’ve built a world out of anarchy” (hit pause: you can hear the skulls of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman banging against their coffins), and finally, “in this corner, weighing 850 pounds, Guns N Roses.” Should Axl decide to resurrect this song, he would have to play by himself for that to be accurate. Maybe that’s the idea.

At a certain point, just about all of us acquire enough age and/or experience that the actions of younger generations start to seem a little strange — or outright foolish. For Slash, that time might be now.

He vented his frustrations with the youth of the entertainment industry in a recent interview with Ireland’s Independent, sneering, “You know what’s wrong with the whole f—in’ entertainment business? Kids these days just want to grab a bunch of cash, do as little work, with as little integrity as possible, and just f—ing retire, man.”

It’s an attitude Slash can’t understand or abide because, as he insisted, he pursued a career in music “because I loved playing. I loved doing concerts. I loved recording. And that’s still what I’m in it for today.” (His fans seem to appreciate it, too; his latest effort, the recently released ‘World on Fire,’ debuted at No. 10 in the U.S.)

Asked what he’d say to his young sons (Cash, 10, and London, 12) if they came to him and said they wanted to follow in his footsteps, he struck a reasonable tone. “I’d say, ‘Look, if you want to pick up an instrument, play it because you love the sound it makes. If you want to write songs and be in a band, that’s fine, too. Just know there’s nothing to be gained from it except personal enjoyment.’”

Concluded Slash, “The chance of getting anywhere with it are so slim that you really need to be doing it for the love of it and not have any expectations. But they’re my kids, and I’m going to support them whatever they decide to do. Right now, I don’t see them headed in that direction. But then it didn’t click with me either ’til I was almost 15 years old.”