Blackstar

@MillionsOfSpiders, yes, I mentioned Frances in my post among other titles in brackets, because I remember Axl referring to this movie in the first extended piece Rolling Stone had made about the band. Here's the excerpt:

 A psychiatrist has diagnosed Axl's problem as manic-depressive disorder, a condition that can cause people to swing from impulsive, reckless, and argumentative fits to catatonic and suicidal periods. "I can be happier than anybody I know," Axl says. "I can get so happy I'll cry. I can get completely opposite, upsetwise." Many manic-depressives turn to drugs or alcohol to lessen the pain of their illness.
Although Axl takes lithium to combat the disorder, he thinks it's ineffective and claims to be in control of his moods. "Did you ever see that movie - I think it was Frances?" Frances Farmer, an actress, was institutionalized because of her emotional outbursts. "I always wonder if, like, somebody's gonna slide the knife underneath my eye and give me the lobotomy. I think about that a lot."

Another interesting thing about this biopic (which is great btw), is that the actual person whose life it is based on, the actress Frances Farmer, lived the last years of her life in Indiana (she died in 1970) and her last role was in a play at a Lafayette theater. Maybe Axl had heard about her before the movie came out.

And yeah, Axl was terrified of getting professional help. Apart from the movie and the effect it may have had on him, it was human to be afraid, given the still existing common perception of any mental illness as "craziness" and everything that goes with the label. And this is why I think he felt relieved believing that he could find help in "regression therapy", even though he might not necessarily believe all these things deep down.

7 hours ago, Frey said:

I don't think it's hard to understand. Wouldn't you want to stand up for somebody you love (and she does love him, she said so recently) if you feel someone's trying to hurt them/is nasty to them? If it had been by my girlfriend or someone else I love, I would probably haven gotten involved and said something as well.

There's inconsistency on Erin's part though. She unwillingly testified for Stephanie's lawsuit, but she sued Axl as well; of course she had every right to do it (and she could have pressed criminal charges too). Let's say this was decades ago, so it doesn't mean anything regarding her current feelings. But then, there was the auction three years ago, which doesn't seem to me like a thing someone would do to a person who he/she cares about even a little; among the things she sold there is some very personal stuff, for example the notes we discussed here.

Stephanie wouldn't have any reason to talk to her sons about Axl and what happened years ago; but it's all over the internet and they may have found it out by themselves and asked her about it.

@killuridols, thanks

Sorry is good, but somewhat awkward choice for the encore.

https://www.periscope.tv/sportsmktgguy/1lPKqAneNVQKb

This is working fine for now:

https://www.periscope.tv/22072/1MnGnyeEYbVKO

@killuridols, I have read (RS 2000 article and People's Magazine via Chinese Whispers) that Erin sued Axl too for domestic violence in 1994 after her testimony for Stephanie's counter-lawsuit. Isn't this true?

https://www.periscope.tv/dallasdave72/1MYxNzpdQoRxw

6 hours ago, killuridols said:

While I hope I NEVER make it to middle-age, if I ever do, I know I don't want to be like this idiotic woman

9 thoughts of a middle-aged woman at a Guns N Roses concert

1. I can't believe that girl's mother really let her out of the house in those. They'd need another yard of fabric just to be called "shorts." Wait ... I think she is the mother.
2. What do you mean I can't bring a purse into the Dome? Where am I supposed to carry a flashlight so I won't trip in the aisles? Earplugs to protect my hearing? The Tiger Balm for my arthritic knee and my AARP card? You know, just in case.
3. If one more person bumps into me and my arthritic knee, I will be forced to write a strongly worded letter to Georgia Dome representatives, gently "suggesting" they install chair lifts on the stairs. If that doesn't work, I'll play the AARP card.
4. Look, Singer-Dude for the warm-up band, there's no need for that kind of language. Does your mother know you talk like that in public?
5. Is that how Axl Rose used to look? It's difficult to tell, since I never followed him in Tiger Beat magazine. Plus, my eyesight is failing. He looks strange, though. I hope I don't look like that when I'm his age ... in, like, three years.
6. Seriously, did he always look that way? His face looks waxy. Like a wax figure. A waxy statue of Axl Rose ... wait ... Waxl. Waxl Wose.
7. I really like those giant screen-thingies that show close-ups of the band. Back in the day, sitting in the balcony meant the band looked like tiny scurrying ants down there playing tiny ant guitars with tiny ant guitar picks. It was like watching "Honey, I Shrunk the Rock Stars." On the other hand, without the screens, no one would be able to see Waxl Wose's face.
8. Axl Rose wardrobe change count: T-shirts 8, headgear, 6. I wonder if he was making an artistic statement about rock music by alternating between designs of snakes, skulls and women's behinds. Whatever. It worked for him. Maybe – and I'm thinking out of the box here – he is just a really sweaty guy.
9. What did Sweetums say? I can't hear anything over what sounds like bees buzzing in my ear. Or maybe I just have wax in my ears ... or could it be the dying strains from Waxl, Waxl Wose?

http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2016/08/9_thoughts_of_a_middle-aged_wo.html

1 hour ago, pinkforgirls said:

Alright since the cat is already out of the bag.....And Erin added to her comment. Her "truth" has piqued my interest. 

These are representative of two types of persons I detest:

- The untalented writer who sells his/her half-ignorance as wit and expressive of the "average person's" common sense.

- The spoiled rich brat.

On 02/08/2016 at 10:34 AM, action said:

this.

I guess the reasoning behind it was, UYII was supposed to be blue in tone, so it "had" to start with a melancholical song. that's why UYI I starts, firing on all cilinders with RNDTH.

I think this concept, this division between blue and red, ultimately hurt these albums. also, they couldn't stick to their own concept, since UYI I contains ballads and UYI II contains rockers. Yet, UYI II was always envisioned as the blue album.

IMO, if they insisted on releasing two albums at once, they should just have tried to release two more balanced records. I'm sure there's two appetites in there somewhere. starting UYI II with YCBM and go from there.

but what does it all matter anyway? in the age of digital music, anyone can rip these albums with WMP and make their own tracklistings. And if you use "shuffle" a lot, like I do, tracklistings become even more irrelevant.

Having said that, I still think that appetite is the best album, no matter how many ways you look at it. the instrumentation flows naturally, and then you have the great songs, the great sound of the record, the simple but effective lyrics. it's thunder and lightning in a bottle.

I don't think there was really a concept of "red" and "blue". They deliberately spread different styles of songs all over the two albums. Axl wanted it this way.

I agree that it would have been better if they had made two more consistent albums, with UYI I being an evolved AFD and UYI II being "the other side of GnR" or "GnR exploring/experimenting with different styles/sub-genres". The two covers and Don't Cry could have been in either or them. I believe they would have sold the same or even more, as UYI I would have had YCBM, RNDTH, DTJ etc. and II would have November Rain, Estranged, Coma etc.

14 hours ago, AxlsFavoriteRose said:

this is what i've been saying all along. he sounds more like Bon, does better on Bon songs and has the same kinda wit Bon had. i think Axl must have studied up on Bon cos he says some things that are almost exactly what Bon said. which is fine going by the adage imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

Yes, this. I thought that Axl did better with Bon songs, too. And @night prowler was spot on when he said that Axl reminds Angus of Bon's character.

@giuls, yes, when he did those 1992 interviews he was already in the process of the so called "regression therapy". And yeah, those "psychologists" helped him to an extent, but he would have had much better results if had gone through some serious therapy.

22 minutes ago, Andy14 said:

But don't do it! It puts too much pressure on me. Too. Much. 

I can see an association here. Izzy and other people Axl has worked with have described him as a somewhat music geek

11 minutes ago, cheesecake said:

This interview was the one that I've read and aware of years ago, but not the one you posted before. So this superceded the prev interview? Meaning to say, he did end up severing his ties with his stepdad?

Yes. There is a series of interviews he did in 1992 in which he talked about these things and this is one of them. The most known is the RS one.

1 hour ago, cheesecake said:

I think the magazine (RollingStone if I'm not mistaken) mentioned above was owned by Peter Brandt not Grant... though I believe you accidentally clicked G as it's near B on the keypad/board.

It wasn't Rolling Stone, it was Interview Magazine and yeah, it was a keyboard lapsus, I wanted to type Peter Brandt and I typed Led Zeppelin manager's name instead

1 hour ago, cheesecake said:

I've always thought he has never made amends with Mr Bailey...so...great to know something new albeit it being actually old LOL.

1 hour ago, Frey said:

Someone also posted another interview here in this thread or some other thread from around 1988 where he also talks about his relationship with his stepfather and how his stepfather is his "best friend" now. And the thing about him buying land in Wisconsin together with his stepfather with the Appetite money. I always thought it was fascinating how he went from trying so hard to make his relationship with his family work and find something positive about it to completely cutting them off and calling them monsters in the span of 2 or 3 years.

Yeah, and there are two other positive references to his stepdad in interviews from that period (1988-89). 

this from the 1988 RS article/interview:

Axl now considers L. Stephen Bailey his "real dad," but he discovered his hidden past at a time when he was growing his hair, playing in bands, and fighting with his parents. So, Bill Bailey began calling himself W. Rose.

and this, also from RS, where Axl said that his stepdad liked WTTJ:

Right now I don't want to have a child, because I can't give it enough time. But I'd want him to talk about what he listened to with me, and have him show me new things, and me show him new things. He could play me the Screaming Banshees From Hell, and I could play him Jimi Hendrix or something. We could talk about the music. We'd talk about things together. I think it's a parents job to raise their child. My father likes "Welcome to the Jungle." Ten years ago, if a song like that was caught in our house, man, it was over. But I can't hold how he once felt against him.

1 hour ago, cheesecake said:

Oh...the sound check picture has made its round in the Social Media thread. I believe it was taken before he broke his foot.

I don't know, maybe... But Slash wore this shirt at one of the first shows of the NITL tour, Axl wears his ripped jeans and also the stage set is that of the tour.

EDIT: I see @oaka provided the info.

3 hours ago, Frey said:

What kind of crazy stuff happened then exactly? I keep seeing references to this, but the only thing I know about is him not showing up in Philly and the tour subsequently getting cancelled.

And also this incident where he took his pants of on stage for some reason and stood around singing with his pants around his ankles

- The Vegas 2001 show incident, when Slash wasn't allowed in because, according to Axl, he had his guitar with him and he would sabotage the show.

- The rant about Slash and the old band, where Axl seems very nervous:

- At that period (2001-2002) Axl kicked out of his life most of the people that were near him since the old days: Robert John, Doug Goldstein, Tom Zutaut (Del James and Marc Canter were the exceptions). Craig Duswalt may have left at that time as well; although he doesn't say in his book when exactly and why he stopped working for Axl, he mentions that he was around up to a point in the early CD era and after that he and Axl met again in 2006.

- There is also the crazy story Tom Zutaut said in the BBC doc (that Axl believed that it was someone else in Slash's body). Zutaut hasn't spoken with Axl since 2001 (at least as far as we know), so he couldn't know what Axl believed in 2015, but what he said may have been true at the time he was still around. He has also said that everyone back then was mocking Axl behind his back because of his crazy beliefs. There is an Axl interview from 2001, where he said that his relationship with Slash fell out when Slash "died" from the overdose:

The start of the fight between them, was the hospilization of the guitarist in 1992, because of an overdose.

- Do you remember that movie "Pulp Fiction"? He needed to get an injection in the heart like in the movie - he said.

In later interviews Axl didn't seem to believe such a thing though, because his negative accounts on Slash (for example that he wanted to "take over the band") were going back before the 1992 incident.

1. Human Being
2. Ain't It Fun
3. You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory
4. Raw Power
5. Since I Don't Have You
6. Attitude
7. New Rose
8. Down On The Farm
9. Look At Your Game Girl
10. I Don't Care About You
11. Black Leather
12. Buik Makane/Sex Dump Thing
13. Hair Of The Dog

(I tried to rank them mainly as covers but it wasn't easy, so the list is a hybrid of how much I like the songs and how well I think they covered them)

@Lumikki, @Frey, As I had posted the first time we were discussing this, Axl's mother's birth date is known (1945), so it's safe to conclude from the yearbook that she missed one school year because of the pregnancy. This means that the guy on the yearbook would normally have been one school year ahead and one year older than her (not two). But  @stella pointed out that the yearbooks are not necessarily indicative of the person's age. Since there is no other info about him, he could have been held back at school as well for various reasons (unlikely the Vietnam War though, because it hadn't escalated yet), so he could have been older. Regardless of the actual age difference, the fact that a guy with that name was at the same school with Axl's mom, is a strong indication imo (not proof of course).

20 hours ago, Lumikki said:

As for the early 2000 years, I just googled and found this. Apparently Axl even had a psychiatrist with him on tour (to convince him to go onstage among other things). Hope it was an actual psychiatrist though, and not a Suzy London type fake

The cancellation of the first GUNS 'N ROSES tour in nearly a decade is directly due to lead singer Axl Rose's increasingly bizarre behavior, according to Chicago Sun-Times columnist Bill Zwecker. "Always an eccentric in the admittedly wild world of rock music, Rose has close friends and associates extremely concerned over his mental state during the last couple of months," Bill writes in his column published today. "The singer himself has openly admitted he's battling inner demons. ''I managed to get enough of myself together to do this,' the New York Post quotes Rose as telling a Madison Square Garden concert crowd last week.

"Sources say Rose is very close to checking himself into a psychiatric clinic to deal with 'exhaustion' and a number of other emotional problems. Famous for his outrageousness, the aging rocker lately 'has been even more whacked than usual,' a longtime pal tells this column.

"For this tour, Rose even traveled with his own psychiatrist, whose major responsibility apparently was convincing him it was important for his mental health to get onstage nightly and perform.

"Obviously that didn't work Friday, when Rose refused to appear for a Philadelphia gig — effectively ending the tour."

http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/chicago-sun-times-axl-rose-close-to-checking-himself-into-psychiatric-clinic/

I didn't know about this... From the events of that time and the way Axl acted it's obvious that he was in a bad state, but if the part about the clinic is true and he had come at that point (given his fear of psychiatrists, medicines and clinics), things were very serious. I think that, along with his other problems, the band name was more of a big burden for him than a safety net, although even now he would insist that it was the right thing to do.

@cheesecake, I think Axl wore the jackets because it wasn't hot in the venue (which is an air-conditioned dome), so he could bear having them on (apparently he likes them a lot ). Duff wore a jacket too at the beginning of the show.

@Millions_of_Spiders, I can't imagine he has only one pair of these trainers. What I don't understand is why he has many pairs of the same jeans. Aren't there any other designs that he likes?

@Lumikki, apart from the excerpt from Slash's book posted above by WhenYou'reTalkinToYourself, it's in the 1991 RS interview we were discussing in the other thread:

A few months before the AMAs, there was another fiasco when the band opened up for the Rolling Stones in Los Angeles and nearly broke up in the process. What led to those shows?
At that time I was at the tail end of a really, really serious heroin problem. I felt the band had to do the Stones gigs to bring us back together. We were all living in our separate houses, no one saw anybody, I was doing my thing, and only three of us were going to rehearsals on a regular basis. So I said, "Yeah, let's do the gig," even though our management was against it. I made an agreement with the band that after the Stones shows were over, I'd clean up. That was agreed upon and understood.

The night of the first Stones date, Axl went onstage and alluded that drugs were destroying the group. How did you feel when you heard that?
I was about to walk off. I was pissed. We finished the show, and it was one of those nights where everybody had their little part of the stage and just stayed there. The show sucked, it was lousy, and then Axl announced he was going to quit.

But he returned the next night, and things seemed to improve after you gave a little speech about dope. Were you pressured into making those remarks?
Axl said he wouldn't perform unless I agreed to go up and do what he called apologize, which I refused to do. I said what I said, and he came out, and it was very warm because what I said was totally honest. It wasn't an apology; it was sort of an explanation. No, not even that — I just opened up and said what I felt about heroin and what it does to people, who it's killed and how wrong it is. Because that's how I felt. But I was a junkie at the same time.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/the-rolling-stone-interview-slash-19910124

6 hours ago, The Garden of Guns N Roses said:

Do you know from where this is from? Just found it.   I have never seen this one before

Great find, this picture! Thanks!

5 hours ago, Andy14 said:

Could be this?

November 20th, 1987: Axl Rose Punches a Security Guard

If there was one thing Axl Rose enjoyed more than being onstage, it was jumping offstage. During a show at the Omni in Atlanta, Axl supposedly saw a security guard shoving a friend of his. The singer leaped into the crowd and grabbed the guard before punching him in the face. He tried to go on with the show, but the police hauled him off during "Mr. Brownstone." While Axl was detained backstage, the band soldiered on, with a roadie, Big Ron, stepping in to sing a pair of classic rock covers ("Communication Breakdown" and "Honky Tonk Women"). There were also prolonged drum and guitar solos. Axl avoided trial by pleading guilty to assault and paying a fine. Guns N' Roses would not return to Atlanta until 2006.

Btw. Would be a great poster. His hair looks great there .

Yes, Axl looked beautiful even in mugshots   And I was wondering how come reporters, writers etc. haven't dug into them yet. He had a few, particularly between 1986-88.

Axl later apologized for that incident:

DEL: When you and Slash aren't at each other's throats, you're really a force to be reckoned with.

AXL: Let me say something about us being at each other's throats: We haven't really been that way in the past year and a half. I love the guy. We're like opposite poles of energy, and we balance each other out. We push each other to work harder and complement each other that way. We had a run-in in Dayton [Ohio], because both myself and Dougie thought he said something shitty to me onstage. That was the night I cut my hand to the bone. Backstage we have monitors much like the ones onstage, and while I was back there dealing with my hand, I thought I heard him take a potshot at me. I wrapped my hand up in a towel and was like, "Let's get it taken care of, so I can finish the show." I came back onstage and was a dick to him and told him I'd kick his fucking ass in front of 20,000 people. That was fucked up. I was wrong, and I apologized the second I realized I was mistaken. Someone who is supporting me as strongly as he does is a hand I never want to bite.

http://www.heretodaygonetohell.com/articles/showarticle.php?articleid=11