by Mick Wall
Collins brought the band to his suite at the La Dufy hotel, where they stayed up all night. He was impressed with Axl, but when he finally got into the bathroom after the numerous visits paid by Izzy and Slash, he found blood on the ceiling and realised that at least one of the band was mainlining heroin. ‘Frankly, I was scared of them,’ Collins told the American writer Stephen Davis, and despite pressure from David Geffen himself, he passed. Zutaut also tried Rod Smallwood, the straight-talking, Yorkshire-born, Cambridge-educated manager of Iron Maiden, but Smallwood had a stake in Poison, who were now label mates with Maiden at EMI, and he passed too. ‘There was just something about them I wasn’t quite sure of,’ he told me. ‘The singer did most of the talking but it wasn’t anything he said, so much, that put me off. Just something about them that wasn’t quite right, some vibe that was just … wrong.’
Guns N’ Roses’ reputation for being ‘unmanageable’ grew.
The chaos continued through the summer of 1986. Plans to record in London with Bill Price were scrapped, in part for budgetary reasons but also because Zutaut recognised the lunacy of letting Guns N’ Roses loose in a foreign land. David Geffen asked Price to come to LA, but Bill, who’d just got off producing Pete Townshend’s latest album and was already involved making demos with The Jesus and Mary Chain, decided against it. Mötley Crüe’s producer, Tom Werman, also passed, as did Bob Ezrin, who’d worked with Lou Reed and Roger Waters yet found the prospect of working with this band of Hollywood weird-kidz too much. A meeting with Cheap Trick’s guitarist, Rick Nielsen, ended with Izzy kicking Nielsen in the balls after a tequila binge. Zutaut even approached Mötley Crüe’s bassist, Nikki Sixx, as Nikki explained: ‘[To] see if I could give the punk-metal they were playing at the time a more commercial, melodic edge without sacrificing credibility. They were just a punk band, he told me, but they were capable of being the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world if someone could help them find the melodies to take them there. I was too much in agony trying to slow my down my drug intake to consider the idea …’
Finally they found someone at least willing to enter the studio with them when Nazareth’s guitarist, Manny Charlton, engineered a long session at Sound City in Hollywood. The band’s fierce work ethic was stimulated by the presence of one of Izzy and Axl’s high-school favourites, and the session produced 27 songs, including most of Appetite for Destruction, plus a batch that would be held over for Use Your Illusion, most notably Axl’s cherished ballad ‘November Rain’.
It was the breakthrough Zoots needed, and he was heartened by their work rate. When they headlined the Troubadour on 11 July, Axl was able to tell the crowd that not only would Guns N’ Roses be making a record for Geffen, but they would be releasing some of the Sound City sessions on an indie label to let their fans on the Strip get a taste of how LA’s hottest live band would sound on vinyl.
Before it happened, Zutaut rode his newly arrived good luck and forged two relationships that would catapult the band way beyond the few miles of Hollywood streets that had become their world. The first of those was with Alan Niven, a New Zealand-born, English public school-educated free spirit who had escaped from the future in the military that his father had laid out for him by learning to play guitar and write songs. While he waited for fame to strike, he parlayed his growing musical connection into a job for Caroline, the distribution wing of Richard Branson’s fledgling Virgin Records empire, a job that took him from London to Miami to Gothenburg then later LA, then later still … anywhere he damn well pleased.
‘By the time I was done with school and they were done with me, I was head of house,’ Niven says now. ‘School prefect, all that bullshit. At the end of that period I became completely and utterly disgusted with pleasing adults who I felt were hypocritical and letting me down. So that was where my sense of anti-authoritarianism blossomed and bloomed. Am I going to go to Sandhurst, with the family tradition? Fuck, no! I’m going to go and get high and see if somebody’s going to be actually kind enough to get me laid.
‘In those days we talked of consciousness expansion and the idea was not to get fucked up but to learn faster and comprehend more deeply and more quickly. We were marching through the doors of fucking perception. We were going to be the better generation. Then in the Seventies along came cocaine and all that shit went out the window.’
Though they didn’t know it yet, Axl Rose was about to meet his match. The one that helped light the fire that would consume them all, and the one he would later blow out – and, with it, everything else.
3
CHICKEN À LA LSD
Talking years later, after the war was over but the casualties were still being counted, Izzy Stradlin put it like this: ‘Alan Niven came along. Thank God he came along because he took us on. He probably looked at us and said, well, they’re a mess. But I think he’d been there maybe himself and saw potential. He worked with us and whether anybody says it or not he became like the sixth, silent, member.’ In fact, the 33-year-old Alan Niven was already the sixth, not-so-silent member of a soon-to-be-platinum LA band named Great White, a band he’d rescued from the dumper of a failed career as a wannabe heavy metal band and singlehandedly resurrected them into what they were by 1986: a more groovy, blues-influenced rock outfit with a back pocket full of potential hits. Having had the audacity to re-sign the band to the parent group (Capitol Records) of the label that had just dropped them (EMI America), Niven had completely made the band over, co-producing their comeback album, Shot in the Dark, co-writing four of the six original numbers on there and hand-picking the two covers, including their scorching version of the track ‘Face the Day’, originally by Australian rockers The Angels, whom Niven had also worked with.
More, Niven had taken it upon himself to personally promote the track to the two most influential rock radio stations in California at the time: KMET and KLOS. ‘“Face the Day” was the song of the year in LA in 1986,’ he recalls now. ‘Twenty or so labels in town and they all had huge budgets and slush funds and piles of coke and they’re going, “How the fuck is this guy getting all this airplay?” So in the perception of the huge industry giants along Sunset Boulevard, they’re kind of looking at me like, “Has this guy got a little bit of magic and mojo in his blood?” And that kind of helped with getting done what I needed done with GN’R. That and the English accent!’ He laughs. ‘Walk into a room and remember that you once lived in Oxfordshire. They daren’t say boo to you because you sound like you’ve stepped out of PBS.’ When Tom Zutaut, whom Niven had first met when they were both instrumental in getting Mötley Crüe a deal with Elektra, four years before, added him to the ‘cattle call’ in his search for new management for Guns N’ Roses, Niven admits he was reluctant to get involved, only agreeing to take the meeting ‘because Zoots was a friend’.
Like most of the people who make it in LA, Alan Niven was a guy from elsewhere. He’d been living in Sweden for two years, working for Virgin/Caroline, when an independent LA-based distribution company called Greenworld recruited him. ‘It was one of those moments where you knew you were fucked,’ he recalls. ‘Because I knew if I didn’t go I’d spend the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if I’d gone to LA.’ What happened was he struck oil almost immediately, doing the deal which allowed a raw, out-of-control West Hollywood band called Mötley Crüe to release their first album, on their own Leathür Records label, Too Fast for Love, in November 1981, as part of a ‘pressing and distribution’ deal with Greenworld Niven brokered with the band’s manager, Allan Coffman. ‘I arrived in LA and Mark Wesley, one of the Greenworld partners, gave me the Mötley cassette. “Piece of Your Action” came on and I went, okay …’ Niven didn’t even use lawyers for the contract, drawing it up himself. ‘Allan Coffman was only interested in getting the $15,000 cash advance we scraped together.’
Alan Niven first met Tom Zutaut, then working as a junior talent scout for Elektra Records, at the 1982 National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) conventi
on at the Century Plaza hotel. ‘I had these Mötley Crüe posters in my booth,’ Niven relates, ‘and [Tom] said that he wanted to talk to me about the band. And I said, “Well, come and have dinner.” Niven was living with his then wife in a little cottage in Palos Verdes, overlooking the ocean, out towards Catalina Island. Zutaut arrived for dinner one Friday evening – and didn’t leave until the following Monday. Niven laughs as he recalls the special meal he had prepared for them: ‘I cooked him my roast chicken à la LSD. My thinking at the time was, well, we’ll find out who this guy is pretty quickly …’
They both ate the chicken. Wild peacocks roamed the area near the cottage and Tom was convinced they were wearing diamond earrings. ‘He had this incredible crush on Belinda Carlisle and he lay in front of the little fireplace in the cottage watching the flames telling me just how much he adored her. He wanted to be a success so as he could marry her. That was Tommy and I slipping off from the dock and going out into the ocean together …’ After that, Tom would go down to the cottage most weekends. ‘We spent a lot of time together. My then wife then went and worked as an assistant to him for a while. You know, we were pals, we were friends. We had plans. One day we wanted to run a record label ourselves, together.’ When Niven helped Zutaut sign Mötley Crüe to Elektra, ‘That opened the door to the A&R department for him.’ Niven, meanwhile, had been a key player in the emergence of the Enigma label, which grew out of Greenworld, in 1982, signing Berlin, who would go on to major international success with ‘Take My Breath Away’, and had been instrumental again in helping Zutaut sign Dokken to Elektra, a band who would also go on to platinum success in the US in the mid-Eighties.
At the time Zoots began twisting his arm about managing Guns N’ Roses, though, via Niven’s Stravinski Brothers company, Alan was fully committed to Great White. ‘I was looking at it and going, this means I’ve got to fragment my time and energy. And I’m really, really scared to do that, because it took an awful lot to get Great White another record contract. It went against all conventional wisdom. You fuck up on your debut record, you’re done. And I’d got a sense of what needed to be done and how to do it.’ With Great White there was now a workable plan in place. With this raw new outfit from the streets, the only plan that suggested itself was to hope for the best. ‘I’m looking at GN’R and going, I don’t expect this band to be anything more than a really great underground band. It wasn’t going to be a radio-friendly band and it had so much attitude and was so raw, I knew it was going to be a lot of hard work. [But] I was the last desperate management throw by Zoots as Rosenblatt was threatening to drop Guns without even recording an album.’ Tom told Alan later that when he signed on to be manager, Geffen’s president, Eddie Rosenblatt, had warned him: ‘This guy gets this thing looking like it could be productive within three months or they’re gone.’
Niven went to meet the band for the first time, at their new home, a house in Laughlin Park, in the plush Los Feliz area of LA, which Rod Stewart’s manager, Arnold Stiefel, had rented for them before getting cold feet. ‘A well-known Sunset stripper was leaving as I arrived,’ Niven recalls. ‘Iz was there and Slash. But no one else. Iz nodded off. Slash showed me his fucking snake. I hate fucking snakes. As I expected, it was a somewhat haphazard circumstance.’
When Niven arranged to go and see the band play, Axl didn’t show up for the first gig – or the second gig. As he explains: ‘Having signed a contract to work with the band in September of 1986, the very next show that the band were to perform was to open for Alice Cooper at the Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara. Alice was to perform a minor market one-off show as a conclusion to his pre-production for a tour. He needed someone to open and it was a good opportunity to get Guns on a decent-size stage; they had only played the LA clubs to this point.
‘I rented a big old Lincoln car to drive everyone the hundred miles out to Santa Barbara. When I went to pick up Axl he said he’d rather travel with the photographer, Robert John, and follow the band caravan out to the show. “No worries,” I thought. “Now the car will have a little more space.” How foolish of me. Set time drew near and there was no Axl. The band were anxious. I thought he was merely running late. Ten minutes before show time there was still no singer. At that point I left my “waiting for Axl” watch in the parking lot behind the theatre and went to the band dressing room. Everyone was miserable.
‘“We can’t play,” said Slash. Izzy just stared at his feet. “I don’t give a damn,” Niven told them. “We’re booked to play and play we will. You sort out who is going to sing what, but you fuckers are going on.” The band dejectedly traipsed onto the stage and Duff and Izzy did their best to carry the vocal load. ‘I may be wrong but I think even Slash took a go at one of the microphones. All in all it was probably the very worst gig the band ever did. As I stood in the audience I could hear the muttering of punters making negative comments – “I heard there was a buzz on this band. Man, they suck.” Maybe so, but at that moment Slash, Izzy, Duff and Steven won my heart for their effort in a ridiculous situation.
‘Axl later claimed he turned up just as the band went on. We never saw him, though, either before or after the set and we’d left passes at the door and his name on the backstage entrance. But there you have it. Ax has always had a difficulty in getting to the show on time, if at all. From that moment, however, my commitment was even more clearly to the band, to the whole, rather than the one prima donna fronting it.’
The development of that commitment was sorely tested on the very next gig. Booked to open for the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the UCLA campus, only 12 people turned up. ‘Twelve! I counted them. So I’m thinking, this is great. What the fuck have I got myself into with Tom Zutaut and his fucking band? Either the singer doesn’t turn up or the fucking audience doesn’t turn up. This is going to be great … Izzy stuck to me like glue. He was like, “We’ve got one manager from the bottom of the barrel. The last guy possible has agreed to do this. If we lose him we’re done.” And they would have been.’
Over time, says Niven, Izzy became ‘the one I could always count on for timely and pertinent input. When I wanted to know what somebody from the band felt about a particular situation, he was the one I talked to more than anybody else. It was him and Duff that caught my eye over both Slash and Axl, when I first went to see them. Because they had an amazing … they just exuded this incredible sense of cool when they were onstage. They weren’t working it. I was riveted with that confidence and insouciance.’
There was never any doubt, however, over who the leader of the band was, its main focus and truth-giver. Axl, he says, ‘really did have his moment of incredible androgynous beauty. Most people look at me like I’m barmy. But most people when we’re having a conversation about Guns, where appropriate I’ll go, “Well, you fucking tell me. What did Guns N’ Roses stand for?” And they look at me like, “They stood for something, you know, apart from appetites and indulgences?” And I go, “Fucking right they did! That’s why I connected to it, and if you don’t understand that then you’ve missed the point.”’
He describes the night Tom Zutaut came to him at his beach-side cottage and virtually begged him to take the band on. ‘I’ll never forget it … He sat by the window and he looked at me and said, “Niv, this is gonna be the end of my career. I’m gonna end up with egg on my face.” And he’s talking about throwing them off the label and saying, “I desperately need help.” Well, what did that tell me? Obviously, in huge fucking neon letters that these people are legitimately, authentically anti-authoritarian. If you know a little bit about me, that’s just like, okay, I’m in. There were aspects to Axl’s behaviour that I found excessively abusive of others, even considering the difficulties of whatever might have occurred in his childhood.’ In the end, though, Niven simply ‘believed that if I could keep some kind of discipline in place, we could sell half a million records’.
The first key move Alan Niven made as the new manager of Guns N’ Roses was finding them a producer who w
ould get the best out of them in the studio: an engineer-turned-producer from Baltimore named Mike Clink, who’d apprenticed at one of LA’s most famous studios, the Record Plant, where he’d worked under Ron Nevison, a solid-gold, commercial hit-maker who had produced multi-million-selling records by Heart, Survivor, Europe, Ozzy Osbourne, Eddie Money and Jefferson Star-ship. Clink understood what sounded good on the radio, ‘But I knew what to do with Guns,’ he said. ‘They played me records they liked. Slash had Aerosmith; Axl had Metallica’s Ride the Lightning.’
Clink took the band to Rumbo Recorders, an environment in which Zutaut hoped and prayed they could only do limited damage. It was located in Canoga Park, north-west of Hollywood in the Valley, and shared a parking lot with the Winnetka Animal Clinic. ‘I put them in an apartment when we were making the record,’ Clink recalled, ‘and they destroyed it. One night they locked themselves out, so they put a boulder through a window. They thought it would look like somebody had robbed the place. When they finally got kicked out, there wasn’t one thing left intact. It looked like somebody was remodelling and had knocked down the walls.’ Or as Slash later told me: ‘We partied really hard, but when we were in the studio, we were pretty much together. There was no doping and all that stuff.’
Axl had known Erin Everly for a matter of weeks before the band entered the studio with Mike Clink, but it quickly became apparent that the relationship would be a significant one for them both. Erin, of course, was no friend from back home like Gina Siler, or one of the many lost girls on the Strip who found their way to the Hell House. She was part of Los Angeles’ elite, and lived in a different, more rarefied society, the daughter of a music legend, Don Everly, and the actor Venetia Stevenson, and the granddaughter of the director Robert Stevenson and the actor Anna Lee. In Axl, Erin had found the ultimate good girl’s bad boy, the singer of the most dangerous and dirty band in Hollywood. In Erin, Axl found an escape from all that. As Duff noted: ‘Axl continued to drop out of sight for days on end, a result of his erratic moods. Sometimes it was as if he was on speed, bouncing off the walls; then he would sleep for three days … I was always aware of what a fundamentally different type of person he was from me.’ But then Duff was now ‘an alcoholic’. Slash was strung out on heroin, along with his partner in grime, Izzy. Steven was a more general kind of fuck-up. He’d been living off his wits, sleeping on roofs, bundled in the corner on floors, for so long, wasted or sober it was all the same to him.