Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (25 page)

PHIL LEWIS:
I didn’t see Guns N’ Roses early. We did a couple shows with them, like Perkins Palace in Pasadena, but Slash and Tracii didn’t get along and there was some shenanigans with the amps. Slash doesn’t like Tracii at all. He mentioned it twice in his book, and one of the reasons is something to do with that show.

SLASH:
There were a few Iron Maiden dates for us to do in California to end the tour. But Axl’s throat was such that he just couldn’t do them. LA Guns was hired to play the opening slot as long as enough of us showed up to jam with them. Duff, Izzy, Steven, and I showed up reluctantly—at best—to play a few songs. We got up there and our crew told me after that LA Guns had tried to sabotage our gear; they’d turned down all the amps to make us sound bad. I guess Tracii was worried that I was going to outplay him. That show ended any sort of civil relationship between Tracii Guns and me.

Early on, one of Guns N’ Roses’ favorite haunts was the weekly rock club Cathouse, which helped popularize glam metal in the same way the Soundhouse spearheaded the NWOBHM.

RIKI RACHTMAN:
We went to this party, six of us, and Taime [Downe] was one of them. We started talking and totally hit it off. I was DJ-ing this regular club; he came down and hung with me in the DJ booth. I said, “I should start a rock club.” He said, “I’m starting a band called Faster Pussycat.” I said, “I’ll call it the Cathouse and you can do it with me.” We called it Riki and Taime’s World Famous Cathouse. He was a very important part for the first couple months. The Cathouse is not to be confused with Gazzarri’s. We were more the gypsy/junkie thing, as opposed to the [hair metal thing]. I wanted a place for everybody to hang out. The very first live performance at Cathouse was Guns N’ Roses, Jet Boy, LA Guns, and Faster Pussycat, all taking turns playing acoustic; nobody had record deals. We probably had five hundred people there. Nobody knew Guns N’ Roses would become the biggest band in the world.

VICKY HAMILTON:
[GN’R] ended up living with me because Slash called one day and said, “The police are looking for Axl [on rape charges]. Can he come sleep on your couch for a couple of days?” This was before I was their manager. Axl moved in, then a few days later they were, like, “The police are still coming around. Can we move in?” So the rest of Guns is living with me, with the exception of Duff, who always lived with his girlfriend. I felt like I was having a heart attack every day because there was always something going on—the cops were beating at my door, or whatever. At one point, Howie Hubberman, who backed me on Poison and Guns N’ Roses financially, said, “Here’s a few hundred dollars. You and [roommate and concert promoter] Jennifer [Perry] need to go check in a hotel. I think you’re gonna have a nervous breakdown and die.” [The rape charges against Rose were ultimately dropped.]

STEVEN ADLER:
We lived there for three months; the five of us and Vicky and Jennifer. We destroyed this apartment. The last day we were there, Axl and I got into a fight and he pushed me into this fire extinguisher outside the front door. The glass broke and then I grabbed him in the living room, because he pushed me out the door. I pushed him on this coffee table; everything was destroyed.

VICKY HAMILTON:
The building we lived in was the first apartment building on Clark Street, across from the Whisky. I wasn’t present when that fight happened, but I did return to the broken window and my apartment being even more trashed than when I left. Once Steven was trying to help me pick up empty Jack Daniel’s bottles and beer cans while Axl was sleeping on the couch. We woke him up and he was so mad he picked up the heavy wood coffee table (which I still have, complete with cigarette burns and water rings) and heaved it at Steven with everything on it. Then he started punching him. It was the day before a showcase and I said, “Great, you want to kill your drummer the day before an industry showcase. Perfect!”

SLASH:
I hated Gazzarri’s. I never would set foot in there. But I did actually play there with Guns N’ Roses, once, right after we got a record deal, and Paul Stanley did sound for us, because he was courting us to produce us at that time. When [Geffen A&R man] Tom Zutaut was bending over backwards trying to find people to work with Guns N’ Roses in ’85, ’86, no one really wanted to work with us; anybody that we met would disappear. They’d show up at a meeting and go to the bathroom and never come back.

DUFF McKAGAN:
Finally, at the end of April of 1986, we got signed. There was heavy interest by all the majors, five or six. We were personally dealing with them.

IZZY STRADLIN:
We were staying at a place with a phone, and they’d call and leave messages. We’d say, “Yeah, we’ve been talking to Capitol, EMI, and Geffen, but we’ll meet you down at, uh, yeah, Le Dome. Yeah, for dinner. We’ll talk some more.” We went from eating fucking bean burritos to steak and lobster in a matter of a few days. That lasted about two weeks, and we got bored with that, so we said, “We’d better sign with somebody.” Geffen was very hip to what was going on. They know about rock and roll. There were labels we went to who wanted to sign us but they didn’t know who Aerosmith was. We’re in this office with big plants and desks and something came up about Steven Tyler, and the chick goes, “Who’s that?”

VICKY HAMILTON:
John Kalodner said to me after I went to work at Geffen, “Yeah, you brought me Stryper, you brought me Mötley Crüe, you brought me Poison—then of course the day you wanted to bring me Guns N’ Roses at Columbia, I wasn’t here.” I took ’em to Tom Zutaut at Geffen at that point.

W. AXL ROSE:
We got two firm, and a six-album deal. That’s good, because they wanted a lot more, and we didn’t want to be tied for that long. The deal is the best thing we could have fucking hoped for from any label, and we wouldn’t have gotten any more support from another label.

SLASH:
I know David [Geffen] from when I was a little kid. My dad used to work for Geffen & Roberts, a management company, and we lived next door to Joni Mitchell. Any time Guns did anything bad—I wrecked our apartment, I wrecked our van—I’d call David and go, “I’m not such a bad guy and the band really likes this company.”

W. AXL ROSE:
I spent my advance on clothes. I took out everybody I’d known for the last few months. Every time we went out, I paid for it because everybody used to do that for me.

RIKI RACHTMAN:
Axl was the guy; the key word is
was
. If there was an opportunity for him to help a friend, he would. Axl and [GN’R manager] Doug Goldstein called MTV to get me the audition for
Headbangers Ball
. For the audition, Axl came with me to New York. We flew together, he paid for the hotel—the Mayflower Hotel. When I walked into my audition, I walked in with Axl. I was horrible. Is it who you know? Yeah. Did I care? No.

VICKY HAMILTON:
The last time I saw Axl was at Hamburger Hamlet and he acted like he didn’t even know me, which was better than him screaming, “I’m gonna kill you, bitch!” He left [
that
message] on my answering machine. I took the tape out of my machine and said to [friend and journalist] Janiss Garza, “Put this somewhere. If I ever end up missing, take this to the police.” I think she still has it somewhere.

STEVEN ADLER:
I love Vicky. We got signed because of her. She got us a record deal, and then Axl and the guys wanted to get rid of her. I was devastated because I loved her and she did everything for us, and they didn’t want her working for us because she was a girl. It was the eighties and some people still thought women weren’t as strong or powerful as men. It was bullshit. I was very disappointed in the band because she deserved to be with us.

VICKY HAMILTON:
The day that Axl was screaming he was going to kill me was over something I said to
Musician
magazine. I believe the quote was, “Axl has two very distinctive personalities; one is a sweet, fun-loving boy, and the other is a demon dog from hell.” But that wasn’t what caused the break. The break happened when Tom Zutaut brought in Alan Niven to manage the band. The reason according to Tom was, “The band needs
major
management.” Funny how I was
major
enough to do A&R for a
major
label [Geffen] but not major enough to manage the band I brought in.

Guns N’ Roses’ trailblazing debut,
Appetite for Destruction
, was released in July 1987. From its opening salvo, “Welcome to the Jungle,” which describes Axl’s and Izzy’s intro to the surprisingly mean streets of sunny LA, to the prophetic drug anthem “Mr. Brownstone,” the album chronicled the band members’ down-and-dirty LA lives through incendiary yet accessible songcraft.

W. AXL ROSE [1986 interview]:
We went through so many producers; we dealt with Spencer Proffer, Bill Price—who did the Pistols—then we found this guy [Mike Clink]. We weren’t so into him at first, but he made some cool comments, so we kept negotiating. We went and did some test tracks. He doesn’t necessarily go, “I think you should change this.” He’ll say, “I don’t know about that one part,” but he’ll fucking cause a scene about it. So we totally analyze something [and] we show him why it works perfectly the way it is, or we come up with a better idea. That’s all they wanted—to make sure we are giving 100 percent. Geffen was really worried, but then they heard
Appetite
and they think we’re great. Tom [Zutaut] told me if I lost my voice it was okay, I could leave my rough tracks.

DAVE MUSTAINE (ex-Metallica, Megadeth):
I remember when Guns N’ Roses just came on the scene and I used to listen to “Mr. Brownstone” every day after I scored heroin. I’d hear it on KNAC and go, “All right, these are my kind of guys—me and Keith Richards and Guns N’ Roses.”

W. AXL ROSE [1986 interview]:
They were going to ban our record cover, a picture by the artist Robert Williams. It’s this picture of a big red monster jumping over a fence, in armor. There’s a lot of energy, and there’s like an old man robot, and his brain’s exploding, and he’s smashing little pink robots. I found the painting by accident in a book. . . . It’s called
Appetite for Destruction
, which is also what we’re going to call the record. The picture is really strange; you can’t quite figure out what’s going on, and that always bothers you. But it captures the band. I submitted it to the band as a joke, and they all went “this is it.” The girl, her shirt’s open, she was abused by somebody; I don’t know if it’s the robot or the monster.

LONN FRIEND (ex–
RIP
magazine editor, author):
We had the
RIP
magazine Park Plaza Hotel party in 1989. In a day and a half, Guns N’ Roses is opening for the Rolling Stones, four nights at the Coliseum. I say to management, “Why don’t you play the
RIP
party? You can use it as a warm-up in the club for the Stones shows.” By some miracle, everybody is into it. About two hours before GN’R are supposed to go onstage, the fire department shows up. The place was so full that the fire department starts to kick everybody out from downstairs, including Alice Cooper and Steve Vai. I’m wondering if we’re gonna be shut down. Then the curtain opens, the band hits the stage—bedlam. They must’ve played an hour and forty minutes; it was an epic performance. How prophetic that Axl Rose is onstage a couple days later, threatening to break up the band because his band members won’t get off of drugs. “Dancing with Mr. Brownstone,” in front of eighty thousand people at the Coliseum, which, right there, is a microcosm of why Guns N’ Roses was a completely unscripted, apocalyptic event in the history of rock and roll. You could not, with your finest craftsman, choreograph that chain of events, those personalities, and the collision of those guys.

One of Axl Rose’s big musical and style inspirations was Finnish band Hanoi Rocks. In fact, GN’R’s vanity label, Uzi Suicide, re-released all of Hanoi Rocks’s albums on colored vinyl. But Hanoi’s first visit to LA was tainted with the tragedy that ultimately resulted in the band’s demise. Drummer Nicholas “Razzle” Dingley was accompanying an already wasted Vince Neil on a beer run when Mötley Crüe’s front man lost control of his car and it hit an oncoming vehicle, killing Razzle instantly. It was yet another chilling illustration of the recklessness and vulnerability of many young rock stars.

MICHAEL MONROE (ex–Hanoi Rocks):
At the end of 1984, Hanoi started doing our first American tour, and that’s when I broke my ankle in Syracuse, [New York]. We should have cancelled the whole tour and gone home, but there was an executive decision at CBS that we should go to LA to do some press, because there was a big following there. That’s when we first came to LA. That’s the last time I saw [drummer Nicholas] Razzle [Dingley]. The next day he went out partying with Mötley Crüe, and he died.

VINCE NEIL:
As the car rounded the curve, I shifted into second gear for the final stretch home. But as I did so, the wheels chirped and the car slid sideways into the water to the left—into oncoming traffic. . . . Something was coming over the hill and heading straight for us. That’s the last thing I saw before I was knocked unconscious. When my head cleared, Razzle was lying in my lap. I lifted his head up and shook it, but he didn’t budge. I kept yelling “Razzle, wake up!” because I assumed he had been knocked out, too. . . . At the police station, the officers kept glaring at me. They kept asking me to tell them what had happened, but I just kept saying, “Where’s Razzle?” The commanding officer left the room. He came back and said coldly, “Your friend is dead.”