by Mick Wall
Then Guns N’ Roses arrived in London for three shows at the Marquee, the first on 19 June, and then the 22nd and 28th. They were jetlagged, hungover, testy, some of them not long out of rehab. For Slash it was a return to a country he barely remembered (when he was in a state to remember anything). The others had never left America. Alan Niven and Tom Zutaut, both far more worldly, at least in terms of culture and travel, were soon dealing with the same kind of shit they got in LA: Duff threw Steven up against a wall for making stupid remarks about Robert John, who’d paid his own way on the trip; Slash arrived in the midst of a five-day bender and needed two days’ sleep. He got drunk again at a party to celebrate the release of Bob Dylan’s film Hearts of Fire, and caused a ruckus; Axl had a brief scuffle with the security staff at Tower Records after he felt faint from the effects of anti-histamine tablets and lack of sleep and sat on some steps, unwilling or unable to move when requested.
The growing fractiousness was in part due to the desire Guns had to prove themselves. They were in the city of the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols. The infamous UK music press was primed and ready to take down this latest bunch of LA wannabes. But the London branch of Geffen was behind them in a way that the US branch could not be. They had issued a limited-edition double A-side of ‘It’s So Easy’ and ‘Mr Brownstone’, knowing that it had no chance of any radio play, but, as their label manager Jo Bolsom told me: ‘We knew the music press would pick up on it, which they did, and that it would reinforce the band’s reputation as being wild and out there, so it did its job. It also sold quite well. We only pressed up about 10,000 copies initially anyway.’
Before the first show at the Marquee, before a packed Friday night crowd, Alan Niven gave the band a pep talk. ‘I sat those little fuckers down and I said, “Listen, they’re gonna look at you as a bunch of poser LA wankers. They’re gonna test you. They’ll spit at you. They’ll yell at you. And if you blink, you’re fucking dead. You give it as good as you get.’ And god bless the Marquee audience, that’s exactly what happened. Until Axl and Duff threatened to come offstage and fuck with a couple of people. From that moment on it was a love affair.’
It was their London agent, John Jackson, who came up with the idea of doing the first Marquee then leaving it for a few days until the weekly music press came out with their reviews, then follow that with two more shows, the following week. It was a clever plan, but it nearly backfired when the first show fell distinctly short of the kind of wild-eyed impact everyone had been predicting. Whether it was the pressure or the jetlag or the history or the disorienting effect of being thousands of miles from home, the first Marquee show was a flop, a real stinker.
‘It’s great to be in fucking England, finally!’ Axl told the audience from the stage, as Slash wrung the last of the life out of set-opener, ‘Reckless Life’. The crowd response was perhaps down to excitement, perhaps due to the edgy atmosphere, perhaps even a flashback to the punk years: a hail of spit and plastic beer glasses were hurled stagewards, causing Axl to stop the next number, fittingly ‘Out ta Get Me’. ‘Hey, if you wanna keep throwing things we’re gonna fucking leave,’ he screeched. ‘So whaddaya think?’ he challenged them. Another glass clattered noisily into Steven’s drum-kit. ‘Hey, fuck you, pussy!’ Axl cried, pointing his finger angrily at the drunken culprit and yelling more obscenities out of range of the microphone. It was an inauspicious beginning. The set restarted with ‘Anything Goes’, but the fragile connection between band and audience had been lost. The singer took it badly, calling the evening ‘a total nightmare’, upset that he’d ‘failed’ in the hometown of bands he revered.
Poor reviews duly appeared in both Kerrang! and the NME just a few days later.
The NME review was written by Steve Sutherland, a distinguished journalist who would go on to edit the paper, but who nonetheless was no particular fan of LA rock in general or of Guns N’ Roses in particular, and who was withering about them. Axl took the review personally, rang the office and threatened to visit Sutherland (who later wrote that he took ‘an early lunch’ as a precaution). More hurtful to Axl – because he knew in his heart it was true – was Xavier Russell’s review for Kerrang!, which said plainly that ‘Guns N’ Roses blew it, pure and simple.’ Although Russell, who had heard an early tape of Appetite … mitigated his critique by calling the record ‘truly wonderful’ and speculating that the performance may have been different had the crowd not thrown beer cans at the band from the off. As Axl himself would tell me when they returned to tour the UK a few months later, ‘It was the first magazine that really came out and supported us big time. When you said we were good, I believed you guys. So if you say a gig sucks, I believe that too …’
At least they had two more shows to rescue themselves. The band moved from a hotel to a rented flat in Kensington, which settled them down a little. Axl’s friend Del James, and Todd Crew, the now former Jetboy bassist and Slash’s drug buddy, arrived in town and the Guns gang mentality kicked in. The final show in particular was a triumph, the band adding epic new versions of AC/DC’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ to the set, and Kerrang! showing its faith in the band by commissioning another review: ‘[They were] raw, savage, furious, emotional, dangerous, rebellious, vibrant, hungry, intoxicating … firmly in the tradition of the Stones, Aerosmith, Rose Tattoo, Sex Pistols, Motörhead [and] AC/DC,’ it almost yelled. The band returned to LA better, wiser and a little more aware of how wide the world was. Peter Makowski, a veteran music writer who had been around almost every big rock band of the 1970s and ’80s, spent time with them in London, and offered a good insight into what the band were like on their first trip outside the US: ‘The excitement came more from their image and the way they connected with an audience,’ he told me. ‘Rock was going through a very safe phase, Bon Jovi were the big sensation, Iron Maiden still ruled. Guns N’ Roses appealed to the fans left cold by that stuff. The disaffected punk and metal fans that were hungry for something a bit more real, and suddenly here it was at last.’
Offstage, he said, the band, ‘seemed like a fairly normal bunch of people. I took Izzy to Ladbroke Grove to buy some reggae albums, and got to know Axl a little bit. He was the quietest of the bunch, almost shy, I thought, if you can imagine that now. In terms of drugs, there was a fair bit of drinking but I never saw them use anything heavy. Then, a few days after the first show, Slash phoned one night to ask if I could get him “anything”. I thought he meant hash and I said I’d see what I could do. Then Izzy rang and said, “Whatever you do, don’t get Slash any gear” – meaning heroin. “He’s only just stopped and it’s too risky.” That was the first time I realised they might have a problem.’
Just as Alan Niven and Tom Zutaut had planned, the fine detail of the UK visit and the odd dodgy review in the NME meant nothing in America. What carried weight was the fact they’d been there and done it. As Izzy said soon afterwards: ‘Everything just took off. Word spread and we had a platform at last.’ Soon after returning to America they flew to New York to be seen at the New Music Seminar, and to have some merchandise meetings and talk with their new booking agents, ICM. It was there that their lifestyle would again cast a dark shadow over the romantic ‘most dangerous band’ image, and where the death of Todd Crew would illustrate, starkly, the sordid realities of the junkie existence.
Slash had travelled to New York with a porn actress called Lois Ayres, who he’d been seeing in LA and who had flown east with him to perform at a couple of strip clubs. Ayres was booked into the Milford Plaza on Eighth Avenue, and Slash decided to stay with her. They were awoken at seven in the morning by a phone call telling them that Crew was in reception and asking for Slash. He was in a bad way. He’d been fired by Jetboy and had just broken up with his long-term girlfriend. ‘He arrived at my door already fucking drunk,’ Slash recalled in his autobiography, ‘with a full litre of what we liked to call Toad Venom in one hand: vodka and orange juice disguised in a 7 Up bottle.’
By Slash’s account, he was unwilling to leave Crew alone and took him to all of his meetings around Manhattan, stopping off also at a Western Union so that Crew could pick up some money. Crew was drunk to the point where Slash had to prop him up and help him walk. Nonetheless by early afternoon they were done, and wandered into Central Park, where they ran into three musician friends. From there they went drinking and the idea to score some heroin was raised. The three musician friends disappeared to buy heroin in the East Village and, Slash said, all five then went to the apartment of the Plasmatics’ bassist, Chosei Funahara, where Slash cooked up some smack for himself and Crew. From there the pair bought a case of beer and entered a cinema in Times Square to watch Jaws 3D. Crew left halfway through to phone his former girlfriend, and Slash found him passed out by the payphones. He took Crew back to the Milford Plaza, where later, Slash claimed, they were visited again by the three musicians they’d met in the park.
As he recounts in his autobiography: ‘They were all set to shoot dope and hang out and Todd suddenly perked up and was eager to join in. It was another losing battle, so I got onboard. I shot almost all of my dope because this stuff still had yet to kick in. At the same time I was monitoring Todd to be sure he didn’t have too much, because he’d been drinking heavily for about eighteen hours. I can’t say what happened for sure, but I’m almost positive he got a shot from someone else who was there that night when I wasn’t looking. What I gave him wasn’t strong enough to cause what happened.’
What is known to have happened next is that Crew OD’d and slipped into unconsciousness, and the other three musicians fled, leaving Slash alone to try to revive him. He threw him in the bath, doused him in cold water and slapped him until he came round, whereupon he put him to bed. He called Robert John in LA, and then ‘a girl named Shelley who worked at ICM’. By Slash’s account he was still talking to Shelley when Crew once again stopped breathing and this time could not be revived. ‘Todd, all of twenty-one years old, died in my arms …’
Paramedics arrived about 40 minutes later and removed the body. Slash was questioned by police at the hotel for some hours, and afterwards Alan Niven collected him and flew with him back to LA. News of Crew’s death spread quickly through the Hollywood rock crowd, and, as Slash admitted, many blamed him for what had happened. He attended Crew’s funeral in Oakland, where ‘I had to deal with finger-pointing from Todd’s obviously distraught family – everybody thought the death was my fault.’ Crew’s family would hire a private investigator to try to find out what had happened in New York, and after Slash had published his account of the death in his autobiography in 2007, it was questioned again by another member of Jetboy, the guitarist, Billy Rowe, who told the Blabbermouth website: ‘There’s definitely some loopholes in the story.’
Whatever the truth, regret was all that was left. Axl confessed to his, in that he hadn’t spoken to Crew about his habit while they were in London, as he’d intended to do. Slash said that ‘it really fucking scared me’. And yet it would not be enough to stop him using. A bunch of junkies shooting up and one turns blue. Happens every day in New York, LA, London …
Nevertheless, Todd Crew’s death hung over the US release of Appetite for Destruction three days later. Initially, as many had foreseen, nothing much happened. It was a record at odds with what was playing on rock radio – big hits from Aerosmith, in their new, AOR-friendly incarnation, Heart, Def Leppard, Whitesnake … There was as yet, though, no single or video in America to help boost the album’s profile, and when the first pressing of the record, 30,000 copies, went out in the Robert Williams sleeve they were almost immediately rejected by major retailers. ‘All that people saw was a girl with her knickers pulled down – not the karmic retribution in it,’ claimed Niven. Williams himself had foreseen the problems the band would have. ‘I told Axl he was going to get into trouble,’ he asserted. Intriguingly, he said that his main concern was that ‘None of the guys in this band were too articulate, so [I knew] they would direct the media to me to defend the cover.’
In the event, Geffen circumnavigated the problem by simply moving the image on new pressings of the album from the front cover to somewhere inside; while the front was freshly adorned by another cartoon-like image – on a plain black sleeve was featured Axl’s newly minted tattoo of a death’s-head cross studded with five skulls, each of which represented a different member of the band. The alternative ‘black sleeve’ was also made available to record retailers in Britain after WH Smith banned the original sleeve from its shelves and Virgin Megastore in London refused an in-store display.
It was another indication of what kind of world Appetite for Destruction was released into: post-AIDS, post-Reagan, third-term Thatcher, a world in which rock had become a shiny, happy, bighaired thing in which stars got married, worked out and lived more like Tom Cruise than Keef Richards. A world where marketing was more important than A&R; videos more ‘market penetrative’ than tours. Neither Rolling Stone nor the rest of the mainstream media saw fit to acknowledge the release. Until Appetite really began to move months and months later and it suddenly became achingly hip to possess a copy, it was ignored. Yet it was the first truly potent chronicle of urban street life that had existed outside of the realm of hip hop and rap since the decade began; and a genuine return to the raw, untamed, visceral values of rock in its pre-MTV heyday. It would shatter the post-Live Aid image of do-gooder rock stars like Sting and Bono and Peter Gabriel, preaching to the converted. It was unreasonable, anarchic, a response to a world of music that in Axl’s phrase has ‘sucked fucking dick since the Sex Pistols’.
It was liberating to hear, to play loud with the summer windows wide open, and, for a music writer, the band were liberating to write about and be around, a throwback to why we’d all got into this industry in the first place. Although the corporate machine was soon to close around them – no one would sell any records without it – in a way it would happen on Guns N’ Roses’ own terms, with them presented as pretty much what they were. All that would be concealed was the real darkness behind the image: the excesses of the Hell House, the reality of junkie life, the death of Todd Crew …
At first, though, there was just the low hum of the rock press and its universally excellent reviews, and some early adopters. Most notable among them were another British band cleaning up on the US circuit, the Goth poseurs turned unreconstructed, Rick Rubin-produced rock monsters, The Cult, who were filling arenas all over the US with thumping, derivative yet bullshit-free songs like ‘Love Removal Machine’ and ‘Wild Flower’. Guns N’ Roses were offered, and accepted, the opening slot on the next leg of one of their apparently endless tours, beginning in August 1987 in the rock’n’roll outpost that was Halifax, Nova Scotia. The whole thing nearly came to nothing, though, when Axl thought he could take a Sten gun across the Canadian border, and forced the band into cancelling a show when he was refused entry.
Maybe he was still under the influence of the nerve-shredding video the band had just made for ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, which would, like the album, go nowhere – at least, not at first – before becoming recognised as probably the best, certainly the most shocking, rock video of 1987. An Englishman, Nigel Dick, directed, and ended up with a suggestively violent film that would ultimately be heavily censored before it ever made it to any kind of rotation on MTV. It was quite an achievement, on all sorts of levels.
Geffen had grudgingly put up $75,000 for Guns N’ Roses to shoot a video for what would be their first single in America. And only then because Tom Zutaut was pestering them so much Eddie Rosenblatt ended up telling Alan Niven to call off his attack dog. Nevertheless, $75,000 was about half what most new artists might expect to get to shoot their all-important debut video. It meant they certainly wouldn’t be able to shoot the storyboard Alan wanted for that price. ‘So what I did was I butted “Jungle” against a Great White video shoot for their next single, “Lady Red Light”, and used the same director, the same equipment
, the same crew.’
Great White were on a roll. Their recent single, ‘Rock Me’, had become a staple of rock radio in America that summer. ‘It meant we got to a second Great White video fast.’ In the video and film world you did four-day rental deals. If you took it for even one day more they would charge you for another four. So Niven booked a four-day rental on ‘Lady Red Light’, ‘then immediately went into “Jungle”, so I could [offset] my shortfall on “Jungle” and kind of sweeten it across the whole board. By running four days in a row [two with each band] with the same production company I was able to amortise costs. Without that there would have been no “Jungle” video. And its form, with its socio-political content, was crucial to a perception of authenticity.’