by Mick Wall
As Niven reached for the bill he told Nigel, in front of Axl, to thumbnail it and give him an estimate for how much he thought Axl’s ideas for the video would cost, and fax it to Alan’s office in the morning. ‘Nigel faxes this thing through the next day and it’s something like $285,000.’ Alan called Axl with the news. When he told him how much it would cost, ‘I could just hear the suck of oxygen out of Axl’s lungs. He said, “What are we gonna do?” I said, “Don’t worry, we’ll get it done. We can’t do this at the moment but we obviously will get a video done.”’
To his credit, Axl then came up with the idea of including all the girlfriends in the video, knowing that if he were to include Erin in the shoot there’d be hell to pay if the other band members couldn’t bring their girls along for the ride too. Niven and Dick, meanwhile, made plans to shoot the as-live video they’d already discussed. At 5 a.m. after filming for several hours, ‘Axl realised that none of his desires were being fulfilled in this shoot, and that basically it was a bad shoot, and he stormed off. I looked at Nigel and he said, “Don’t worry, I think I’ve got enough.”’ He explains: ‘Nigel had been concerned because we only had a budget for a single camera. So he had an idea. “What if I bring in a couple of Bolexes” – 16mm handheld film cameras – “and anybody can pick up a Bolex and shoot footage?” I said, “You’re a fucking genius!”’
There were three Bolexes, loaded all the time, left lying around so anyone from the band’s entourage could pick up one of the cameras and run around and shoot things. Nigel Dick also shot in both colour and black-and-white. Over the next couple of days, Alan and Nigel sat through hours of the footage. Niven instructed Dick to make two videos, one ‘best-shot’ predominantly in colour with flashes of black-and-white, and a second completely in black-and-white, except for the very last image, in which Axl turned into colour. It was an inspired move. When MTV called Niven a few weeks into its heavy rotation of the first ‘Sweet Child’ video, saying it had reached the end of its shelf life and would now be downgraded to a much lower level of rotation, Niven told them: ‘“Fine, you’re gonna have another edit on your desk by the end of the day.” And they did and we got another six weeks of airplay on the subsequent video. Two for thirty-five grand!’
The result was 12 weeks of heavy rotation for what would become the most iconic video of the late-Eighties rock era – a feat that would eventually send ‘Sweet Child’ to Number 1 on the Billboard chart, the band’s first and only singles chart topper. Joy, however, was not unconfined, at least not for Axl and Slash, who bristled at seeing the near six-minute album version of the song edited down to a more ‘radio-friendly’ four-minute version, something they achieved by effectively neutering Slash’s elongated guitar solo. ‘I hate the edit of “Sweet Child o’ Mine”,’ Axl would later complain in Rolling Stone. ‘Radio stations said, “Well, your vocals aren’t cut.” [But] my favourite part of the song is Slash’s slow solo; it’s the heaviest part for me. There’s no reason for it to be missing except to create more space for commercials, so the radio-station owners can get more advertising dollars. When you get the chopped version … you’re getting screwed.’
Back on the road, the band got bumped from the opening spot on the next David Lee Roth arena tour – and for exactly the same reasons AC/DC had bumped them: ‘Too much hassle, man’, as he told me, though behind the scenes many suspected it was more to do with the fact that the increasingly insecure Roth, who’s post-Van Halen solo career had hit a serious bump in the road, simply feared the competition – Alan Niven again found himself having to scrabble to come up with Plans B, C and D. He’d managed to bridge the gap in their touring schedule by getting them their first national TV slot on Fox’s The Late Show, where they stole the show with the new, snake-hipped ‘You’re Crazy’, sans swear words, and a hopped-up version of ‘Used to Love Her’ that even left Axl smiling. For the next few weeks, though, they would be on their own, headlining small theatres and auditoriums, with the backing of German sheet-metallists UDO, and Zodiac Mindwarp, then big briefly in the UK, and whose neo-biker image provided a neat bridge between UDO’s generic heavy metal garb and GN’R’s soulful living-on-the-Strip mien. The crowds loved the shows, but it was like the English tour all over again, the band punching above their weight, using the tour as a lifeline until something better came along. Niven, meanwhile, was trying to square the circle by also keeping tabs on Great White – still the more prominent of his two acts – who were then touring sold-out American arenas in support of Whitesnake. He was so busy, ‘I swear to God there were a couple of times I passed myself at LAX.’
Then, out of the blue, a little taste of tomorrow – and another odd blast of synchronicity. Great White’s Once Bitten and Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction had both originally been scheduled for release on the same day in July 1987. Sensibly, Eddie Rosenblatt had delayed the release of Appetite by four weeks, to give Alan Niven time to ‘gasp for oxygen’. Since then the latter had been lagging behind the former, in terms of sales, if not prestige: Once Bitten had gone gold in the US in November; Appetite had gone gold the following March. Now, suddenly, in April 1988, they had caught up with each other.
‘They both went platinum on the same day,’ says Niven. It was Thursday, 7 April 1988 – exactly a week after GN’R’s eye-catching appearance on The Late Show and just a few days before they shot the ‘Sweet Child’ video. That night Great White opened for Whitesnake at the LA Forum in Inglewood. The final night of the tour, there was a party afterwards. That morning, Alan Niven had got a phone call from Capitol saying they had just shipped their millionth copy of Once Bitten. Niven was ecstatic: vindication at last for his faith in a bunch of no-hopers he’d almost single-handedly now turned into million-selling rock stars. Then that evening, as he was walking into the LA Forum to see Great White, Eddie Rosenblatt showed up (like GN’R, Whitesnake were signed to Geffen) and made straight for Niven. ‘Congratulations,’ said Eddie, ‘we just moved the millionth copy of Guns N’ Roses.’
Now Niven was truly knocked out. He had to stop walking and check what condition his condition was in. On top of everything, 7 April also happened to be his thirty-fifth birthday. He blurted out the good news to Eddie, who just stood there and gave him the gimlet eye. ‘Well, somebody’s living life right,’ said Eddie.
The next day, though, it was back to business. Most pressing: finding another big tour to get Guns N’ Roses latched on to. When Iron Maiden’s manager, Rod Smallwood – a pal of Niven’s but another manager who’d turned down the opportunity to manage GN’R early on, claiming there was ‘just something not right about them’ – offered the band ten shows opening for Maiden in Canada in May, plus another 22 across America throughout June, Niven grabbed it with both hands. Yet things started to go wrong almost immediately.
The first inkling he had that things were about to turn bad, says Niven, was when he got a phone call from Izzy going, ‘Niv, there’s some fucker with fucking horns on his head and they’ve got cardboard icebergs on stage. What the fuck are we doing here?’ Doug Goldstein laughs as he recalls: ‘So we get on the [Maiden] tour and first day, swear to god, the scrims [backdrop props] behind the band were robotic ducks. It’s kind of early in the day and Axl’s never usually there but for some reason he’s there earlier in the day. And he comes up to me and he goes, “No photographs the entire tour. There’s not a fucking chance, man. No way. Zero, Doug. And if I see one camera I’m fucking bailing.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Dude, I don’t even need to tell you why. If you can’t figure it out then you’re a fucking idiot.”’
He goes on: ‘I hadn’t been up to see it yet so I asked Slash, why is Axl is upset? He goes, “Doug, all I can tell you is I’m with him on this one.” I go, “Come on! Why in the fuck are we on this tour? It’s all about promotion. It’s all about getting out there and bashing the headliner.” That’s what you do as an opener. He goes, “Look, Doug, I’m just telling you, I agree with him.” So I go to my last resort
– Duff. I’m like, “Come on, Duff, buddy, I need to rally the troops.” He goes, “Yeah, yeah. Let’s walk out here and see what the issue is.”’ But when, on their way to the stage, Iron Maiden’s singer, Bruce Dickinson, came out of his dressing room ‘wearing these knee-high frilly boots, Duff looks at me and goes, “I don’t even need to see it, Doug. I’m in with the two of ’em. No photographs.”’
But, as Alan Niven points out, ‘Sweet Child’ hadn’t hit big yet and although the band had the buzz, it was important to build and keep them on the road. ‘Also,’ he says, ‘if you’ve got a bunch of fucking addicts, it’s easier to wrangle with their asses if you’ve got them on a mobile facility like a bus. If they’re in LA they’re scattered everywhere. The one time I went through cold turkey with Slash, we had him in our guest room, counting out his Valiums, cleaning the puke out of his mouth, getting him through the week. What does the fucker do the minute he’s through the week? He calls up COF for a fucking car and he goes to find his dealer. If I can keep them on the bus and keep them moving I’ve got a better chance of keeping them alive.’
Guns N’ Roses simply met Iron Maiden at the wrong moment for both bands. Huge throughout the rest of the world and noted for their relentless work ethic, the veteran British metal act had never quite cracked America in the same way as they had everywhere else. Their current album, Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, had only just made gold status and ticket sales for the early part of the tour had been slow. Guns N’ Roses not only had a bigger album, but as soon as they joined the tour, ticket sales picked up. Soon the feeling within the GN’R camp was that they were the real headline act here. Duff even took a week off to get married to his girlfriend, Mandy Brixx, at the end of May, leaving the Cult’s bassist, Kid Chaos, to fill in. It was impossible to imagine them treating – for example – Aerosmith in the same way, a band they actually related to and respected.
Axl, in particular, loathed every moment he was on the road with Maiden. As if affirming every doubt and second thought he had about the validity of doing the tour, the first night at the Moncton Coliseum, on 13 May, he cut the set short after the Maiden fans kept booing and throwing things at them. When a beer can bounced off his arm during ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’, he told the crowd that he didn’t like ‘warm beer, especially not Alpine’. Then he stormed off, yelling, ‘Fuck you, Moncton!’ The following night at the Metro Centre, in Halifax, before ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’, an enraged Axl told an audience member he could suck his dick then challenged him to come up onstage for a fight. In Ottawa, Axl was in such a foul mood he began ranting into the mike about trying to kill someone before ‘My Michelle’.
By the time the Maiden tour had reached Seattle at the start of June, it looked like Axl and the band had finally settled into their new temporary home. They were including ‘Sweet Child’ in their short, punchy set, and the band was starting to play a little freer, without the anxiety and tension that had marred the Canadian shows. The closer the tour got to LA, though – to home – the worse Axl’s moods were becoming again. I was there at the two nights at Irvine Meadows, a 17,000-capacity outdoor amphitheatre in Long Beach, California, where GN’R were supposed to open for Maiden, and when I arrived the disquiet was obvious. Things had degenerated to the point where the two bands were hardly speaking. The brace of Irvine shows should have been a glorious homecoming for Guns N’ Roses. Instead, both their appearances were cancelled when Axl succumbed to ‘voice problems’. The rumourmongers whispered that there was nothing wrong with his voice. Axl simply resented opening for a band he now considered smaller than Guns N’ Roses, something which Doug Goldstein now strenuously denies.
‘He used to blow out his pipes all the time. When you go through seven different cycles of your vocal cords, from stretching and compressing, that guy’s just built to fail.’ Axl found himself sitting in the surgery of an otolaryngologist, Dr Joseph H. Sugar-man – coincidentally, the brother of the former Doors biographer Danny Sugarman. ‘He wanted to operate on Axl and Axl’s like, “Fuck you.”’ Instead, Axl put himself in the hands of Dr Hans von Leden, an ear, nose and throat specialist who taught at UCLA and USC and treated voice disorders in singers, attorneys, teachers, politicians, pastors and other professionals. ‘Hans von Leden was this old German guy working out of UCLA, the president of the Otolaryngology Association. And the guy was like [German accent], “No! Don’t ever let anybody operate on your vocal cords. We can heal them!” So that was it. He was Axl’s guy. He had zero fucking clue who Axl was. Axl brought him a platinum record. He was like, “What is zis?” He had no idea. Cute little guy, probably weighed 100 pounds dripping wet.’
In the event, all 15 of the remaining shows GN’R were to have done with Iron Maiden were cancelled, along with a handful of shows that were to have followed in Japan. While Axl took care of his voice, the rest of the band did what they always had done, away from the road. Got high. Git low. Gone round and round wherever you go … Slash was staying at the Hyatt on Sunset under the name Mr Disorderly. Steven was staying there, but under his own name. I was in a hotel across the street: the plusher Mondrian. I arranged to meet Slash for an interview one morning at 11 a.m. and we walked across Sunset Boulevard back to my hotel (where there was an expense account waiting – they might have been famous but the money hadn’t started rolling in yet). He told me he’d just been ‘smoking a foil’ before meeting his dad for breakfast. That is, smoking heroin. We bumped into Steven hanging around outside. Asked what he was doing, he just smiled, shook his blond head. ‘Ah, you know, man. People to see, places to go.’ Though not Axl, who was home with Erin. Or Duff, who was home with his new wife, Mandy. Or Izzy, who … actually, nobody knew where Izzy was at. Like Slash and Steven, Izzy had nothing to do, except get wasted.
By then everybody in LA seemed to know their names, or at least their faces. The ‘Sweet Child’ video was gathering momentum on MTV and all the rock magazines were now splashing their out-of-it faces across their into-it front covers. As Slash and I took a table inside the bar at the Mondrian, next to the pool, a bunch of bikini-clad young girls surrounded us. ‘Hey, Slash, can I get your autograph?’ ‘Sure, baby.’ ‘Hey Slash, my girlfriend Melissa says she went out with you?’ ‘Uh … sure, baby … maybe …’ ‘Hey, Slash …’ He stood there patiently signing his name on various areas of their bodies, sometimes adding a little drawing of a bad man smoking a cigarette. Or maybe a skull playing guitar … Or something that looked something like that anyway … It was pretty clear he didn’t really know what he was doing any more.
He told me he’d just been saying goodbye to his father, Tony, when I’d arrived to meet him. ‘He was telling me to keep my feet on the ground and stuff. I told him, I’m cool. I know what it’s all about. I mean, look at me. T-shirt, jeans, boots, that’s me, man. That’s all there is. Besides, we haven’t had any money yet. We just get these phone calls – yesterday it was 35,000 sales, today it’s 91,000 sales. It freaks my ass out.’ Acknowledging that part of the band’s appeal lay in the notion that it might end tomorrow, Slash concluded, somewhat prophetically, ‘Actually, I’d rather it collapsed. I’d rather be as good as possible in the amount of time that you can do it, and do it to the hilt. Then fall apart, die, whatever …’
Slash smiled as he said this. Hidden behind all that hair I couldn’t tell if his eyes were smiling too, or just his mouth. Like all the best jokes we both knew it contained more than its fair share of truth, the seeds of future past. But for now, off the road, with the album fast on its way to its second, maybe even third million, everybody’s good mood had returned. Even Axl’s. ‘The funny thing about Axl,’ says Doug Goldstein, ‘he has a fantastic sense of humour. Nobody knows that about him. He is hilarious. Because he has that high intellect, I always say you can tell when someone is intelligent by their sense of humour. Because if you’re daft that synapse doesn’t take place in the brain. Or if it does, it’s very delayed, and he is so bright that he just, bang, fires them off o
ne after another.’
He recalls Axl phoning him around this time with an important question. ‘I’d always told him, don’t read the press. So he calls me and says, “Dougie, I know you told me to never read the press but I couldn’t help it. Everybody says that success has turned me into an asshole.” I started laughing. He says, “Why are you laughing?’ I go, “What do you want me to say?” He goes, “I want you to tell me the truth. Do you think the success has turned me into a prick?” I go, “All right, you want the truth? Axl, when I first started working for you, you were the biggest asshole I’ve ever met in my life. But you weren’t publicised and nobody knew it. Now you’re just a highly publicised asshole but you’re not nearly as difficult to work with as you were back then.” He just laughed at me.’
More and more, Doug Goldstein was the man to keep everybody’s spirits up on the road. It was also while the band was off the road that summer, waiting for Axl’s voice to heal, that Goldstein found himself spending more time with Slash, while they were both holed up at the Hyatt. ‘Not only do we have not enough money for a Sunset-facing view, our rooms are so small you had to go out into the hallway to change your mind. So I’m in my room and all of a sudden I hear all of these sirens, so I look out the backdoor and some guy had taken a dive off the roof. Slash calls me and he’s crying, saying, “Did you look out the window?” I said, “Yeah.” He says, “Fuck, man. I’m so bummed.” I go, “No, man. I hear you. What a horrible way to go. I tell you what, why don’t you come to my room and we’ll talk about it.” He says, “Yeah, okay, give me, like, five minutes.” So he walks in and then standing on the heater, which is, like, by the window, I have two signs in my hand: 9.0 and 9.5. He was like, “You’re fucking sick, man!” I said, “Well, it wasn’t a bad dive.”’