by Mick Wall
‘Look!’ he yelled, ‘I’m taking time out from my playing to do this and that’s the only fun I get all day.’ The situation appeared to ease again and the band edged warily into ‘Welcome to the Jungle’. But black clouds reappeared in the sky above the stage and another torrential downpour threatened. They tried to calm the mood by playing a ballad, ‘Patience’, one of the new acoustic numbers, but the crowd seemed distracted. The intro to ‘Sweet Child’ received a belated cheer and the band crunched through it as best they could. There was no encore. ‘Don’t kill yourselves,’ offered Axl as he left the stage, unaware of the awful truth that was emerging even as the day unfolded. The sudden surge towards the front of the stage as the band had come on had knocked down dozens of fans, as others slipped in the mud. Two teenagers were trampled in the crush. Alan Dick and Landon Siggers would later die in the emergency tent; Siggers was so badly disfigured his family were only able to identify him through the scorpion and tiger tattoos on his arms.
‘I saw the whole thing happen,’ the late Maurice Jones, head of the promoters, MCP, told a Music Week writer, Jeff Clark Meads. ‘The problems were created by idiots, absolute idiots. They were pushing stage right and the crowd compressed. They just couldn’t go any further. Then about fifteen feet from the stage, a hole in the crowd opened and people went down. I went down to the front of the stage and I saw First Aid people and the doctors working and I felt so useless … I can’t describe how it felt. I saw five bodies on the ground and I knew somebody was dead.’
The official statement later issued by Chief Superintendent Dennis Clarke of the West Midlands police division described the crowd at Donington that year as ‘otherwise superb’ and announced that there had in fact been no arrests, yet reaction in Britain’s tabloid press was predictably over the top and some Sunday editions ran wholly inaccurate stories claiming, amongst other things, that the stage had collapsed and that Guns N’ Roses had refused to stop playing even after being informed of the plight of the injured fans. ‘We even had very well-known and supposedly responsible newspapers saying the stage had collapsed,’ Jones complained to Meads. ‘The stage didn’t collapse and was never in any danger of doing so.’
The coroner’s inquest would record an open verdict, concluding there was nothing more that could have been done to guarantee the safety of the crowd. Nonetheless, Northwest Leicestershire District Council placed a crowd limit on all future Donington events of 70,000, and it was two years before promoters were granted another licence.
‘We just looked out and it was like, oh, fuck!’ said Slash when I later asked him about it. ‘You could see that surge when we came on, you could see the force …’ When they were told afterwards that two fans had died, ‘It just destroyed the whole thing for me.’ Duff seemed even more upset. ‘Saw the whole fucking event, man,’ he told me. ‘I saw it going down. And we stopped, man. We stopped and screamed, “Back the fuck up!” cos we saw the kids going under. “Back the fuck up! Back the fuck up!” And the mud was this thick, it was about a foot deep, and we saw the kids go under and then some other people came over them. They couldn’t tell they were stepping on people, they thought it was just mud.
‘Man, we were like, this is our fault, man … I was there and I was watching it and there just seemed like nothing we could do except scream at them. I was ready to jump into the crowd, but I was scared to die myself. Maybe that’s chicken shit.’ I said I thought it was a brave admission, under the circumstances. But did Duff blame himself personally in any way for the tragedy of the two fans’ deaths? ‘I tell you, it really crushed us all. It really crushed us all. We went back to the hotel that night and we were watching the fucking news – they didn’t know who the kids were yet but one of them had this tattoo. We were just …’ He drifted into uncomfortable silence. ‘At first I felt that it was totally our fault for months and months. I probably will for the rest of my life.’
John Jackson, booking agent for both Guns N’ Roses and Iron Maiden, had been standing at the side of the stage when the accident happened. ‘You could tell fairly quickly that there was a major problem,’ he told me. ‘The security guys had spotted something, and they immediately relayed that there was a problem to the crew on the stage, who quickly got a message to the GN’R guys, who were fantastic … They couldn’t have had any idea what was going on, but they cooled the set down completely. They stopped and did some slow, rambling ad lib bluesy thing to calm the audience down, and in effect ruined their own set. But thank God they did.
‘The kids were taken into the St John’s Ambulance unit, but my head told me they were dead straight away,’ Jackson continued. ‘I can’t remember exactly when it was confirmed to me that deaths had occurred but it wasn’t long after. Very, very few people realised the extent of the tragedy until later, so it wasn’t necessarily discussed that the show should be called off. One of the reasons being the crowd had settled and we didn’t want to start more trouble. I’ve got an aerial photo of the audience actually taken around the time of the tragedy and there was loads and loads of room on the site still, plus you could see people still coming up the roads and through the turnstiles. It wasn’t a question of a crush; it was a question of people losing their footing because of the mud.’
Shockingly, none of the bands were informed of the tragedy until after Iron Maiden had climbed down from the stage more than eight hours later. The question of whether the festival should have been allowed to continue once the deaths had been made known to the organisers was thus neatly sidestepped. Had Jackson or Jones actually considered cancelling the rest of the show, though? ‘I don’t think so,’ said Jackson. ‘It would have been very difficult to tell that many people that the show was cancelled. It could have caused an even greater crowd problem. Over 100,000 people turned up that day, and nearly half of them were still on their way at the time of the tragedy. The previous record attendance had been 66,500 for AC/DC, in 1984. So it was a huge crowd. More than 35,000 people just turned up on the day expecting to buy tickets.’
When Alan Niven broke the news to the band about the deaths of the two fans, ‘he was just short of crying,’ recalled Slash. ‘That changed the whole thing. From such a high to such a low, it was too much. We never felt that carefree again.’ Later that night, both Axl and Slash could be found sitting side by side at the bar of their hotel, the scale of the tragedy just too much for them to take in, chatting to their entourage of friends and press pals, but their thoughts clearly elsewhere. As Niven reflected many years later: ‘It was heartbreaking, and Slash put it best when he said nothing ever felt quite so carefree after that. It’s a little hard to completely dissect that moment.’ Right then, the Rolling Stone cover line, which had just appeared on newsstands, seemed particularly and horribly appropriate. It read: ‘A brutal band for brutal times’.
The deaths of Alan Dick and Landon Siggers cast a pall over the rest of the year. The band played another big festival in September, second on the bill to INXS at the Texas Stadium, but it was a tough date to fulfil so soon afterwards and they considered pulling out. Ten days earlier ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ had scooped a gong at the MTV Awards. ‘Sweet Child’, meanwhile, had already overtaken it as the must-see video of the year. Now, suddenly, they were fried, done, just clinging on grimly waiting for the final Aerosmith dates to end and blotting out their worst moments with booze and dope. Both Appetite and ‘Sweet Child’ now sat at Number 1 in the US charts but none of that really mattered any more. As Slash told Musician magazine at the time: ‘We knew it had to end … the thing is, we’re burned out.’
The Appetite for Destruction tour, now nearly a year and a half old, was not quite over yet, though. There would be a couple of months trying to cool their jets back home in LA, Axl with Erin, Duff with Mandy, and Slash, Izzy and Steven with their various drug dealers and hangers-on. But time was short. In November, Geffen finally issued the mini-album GN’R Lies – and rubbed their hands with glee as it quickly rocketed to Number 2, selling more tha
n five million copies along the way. A classic stop-gap to capitalise on a voracious market, the eight-track mini-album comprised the four songs from Live?!*@ Like A Suicide and the four acoustic songs they’d recorded with Mike Clink at the start of 1988. The idea had come from an incident backstage at a show in Detroit a few days before the Donington show. As Doug Goldstein was escorting Axl from the backstage area to the band bus, some kid in tears ran up to Axl crying that the bootleggers outside were selling Live?!*@ Like A Suicide for $500 a pop and that he couldn’t afford it. He asked if Axl had a copy he could let him have. Axl did not, but bummed at being confronted by a genuine fan brought to tears by bootleggers, he was determined to do something.
‘Axl said, “Dougie, get his address and send him a copy.” So I stop and get the kid’s address. We get on the bus and I fire it up, then Axl comes out from the back and he goes, “Dougie, Slash, I need to talk to you.” Axl says, “How do we beat the bootleggers?” I said, “Easy.” Axl goes, “Oh yeah? How?” I say, “Okay, so Live?!*@ Like A Suicide are four, quote-unquote, live tracks. Dude, this is, like, simple arithmetic. Pick, like, your favourite four songs you want to do acoustically. Put out an album and you’ll be killing the bootleggers.” Because now the [fans] would be getting twice the content for whatever CDs cost back then …’
But if, as he insists, GNR Lies ‘was my idea’, Goldstein is equally insistent that he didn’t make a penny out of it. If so, he was the only one of the inner circle who didn’t. Enticingly packaged in a way that played heavily on the band’s growing infamy, the record’s original title was Lies! The Sex, the Drugs, the Violence, the Shocking Truth, quickly shortened to GN’R Lies, and presented in a spoof tabloid newspaper-style sleeve that sent up the growing tranche of stories about their misbehaviour. That should have been it, a simple cut-and-shut that boosted the band’s profile, seasoned their music reputation, and made fistfuls of cash for all involved.
And so it would have done but for the record’s eighth and final track, Axl’s ‘One in a Million’, which opened its second verse with the lines ‘Police and niggers that’s right / Get out of my way / Don’t need to buy none of your gold chains today’ and its fourth verse with ‘Immigrants and faggots / They make no sense to me / They come to our country and think they’ll do as they please / Like start some mini-Iran or spread some fucking disease’.
The general offensiveness of the song was obvious, but within Guns N’ Roses it was personally and specifically so. The head of their record label, David Geffen, was gay. Slash’s mother, Ola, was black. One of Duff’s sisters had an African-American husband and their children were mixed race. What’s more, the lines about ‘your gold chains’ and ‘some fuckin’ disease’ were wilfully ignorant and stereotypical, the kind of rubbish you were more likely to hear the KKK spouting than a major rock band.
The song had begun as a throwaway, Axl extemporising as he sat around in his apartment, teasing out the rudimentary riff on the two bottom strings of an acoustic guitar and scat-singing phrases to West Arkeen as the comedian Sam Kinnison ranted on the blaring TV. Coming from the same headspace as ‘Used to Love Her’, with a decidedly redneck, country twang, it was originally called ‘Police and Niggers’ and intended entirely as a joke. But Axl worked on the lyric, which returned to one of his favourite themes, the fear and alienation he felt when he first arrived at the Greyhound bus station in North Hollywood. As usual, when backed into a corner, his position became entrenched. The ‘mini-Iran’ jibe was aimed at a shopkeeper he’d got into a fight with, he said. The use of the term ‘nigger’ was, he’d explain, used in the same context that John Lennon had used it in his song ‘Woman is the Nigger of the World’. Rap bands used the word all the time, so why shouldn’t he? He didn’t believe in any kind of censorship. On the term ‘faggot’ he would later tell Interview magazine: ‘Maybe I have a problem with homophobia … Maybe I was two years old and got fucked in the ass by my dad and it’s caused a problem ever since. But other than that, I don’t know if I have any homophobia.’
Once it became clear that Axl was determined to have the song released on GN’R Lies, the band made their objections known; when I saw Slash again in the March of 1989, when the controversy was boiling nicely, he told me: ‘There’s a line in that song where it says, ‘Police and niggers, get out of my way’ that I didn’t want Axl to sing. But Axl’s the kind of person who will sing whatever it is he feels like singing.’ He also said that when he’d spoken to his mother on the phone, she’d told him she hadn’t yet heard ‘One in a Million’, but Slash heard via his brother Ash that she had, ‘and didn’t know what to say to me …’
Duff also made his discomfort known. Even Steven made overtures: ‘When I first heard “One in a Million” I asked Axl, “What the fuck? Is this necessary?” He just said, “Yeah, it’s necessary. I’m letting my feelings out.”’ Or as Izzy would later tell me: ‘That’s a song that the whole band says, “Don’t put that on there. You’re white, you’ve got red hair, don’t use it.” You know? “Fuck you! I’m gonna do it cos I’m Axl!” Okay, go ahead, it’s your fucking head. Of course, you’re guilty by association. [But] what are you gonna do? He’s out of control and I’m just the fucking guitar player …’
Ultimately, all were rebuffed. The Geffen legal department weren’t as easily assuaged. Axl’s intransigence resulted in one of the most astonishing – and strangest – solutions in the history of rock’n’roll and its close neighbour, commerce. Axl would write what was essentially an apologia, in tabloid style, to be incorporated into the record’s artwork. Printed on the front cover, it ran in full: ‘Ever been unjustly hassled by someone with a gun and a badge? Been to a gas station or a convenience store and treated like you don’t belong here by an individual who barely speaks English? Hopefully not, but have you ever been attacked by a homosexual? Had some so-called religionist try to con you out of your hard-earned cash? This song is very simple. My apologies to those who may take offence.’
Axl’s only immediate creative ally was Alan Niven, ironically perhaps, given Rose’s increasing antagonism towards him. ‘I first heard “Million” when Axl sat on his bed and played it for me,’ Niven recounts. ‘In that moment he shape-shifted into the person he was in that past moment, and instead of someone abrasive, he seemed only vulnerable to me. He was the young soul from Indiana somewhat intimidated by his initial urban experience in LA. There was nothing gratuitous about his intent or performance in that moment and consequently I backed the band doing it. In the moment I didn’t think through the effect on Slash and Ola. We don’t always make perfect decisions. But then I never really thought of Slash as “black” per se. We used to be less racially divided in England and peoples were just peoples – not African-American or otherwise. Slash was born in Hampstead, for heaven’s sake.’
This, though, was another story that wasn’t going away. Ever.
By the start of December 1988, Guns N’ Roses were back out on the road: five headline shows in Japan, held over from the summer, culminating in a sell-out show at the 14,000-capacity Budokan, in Tokyo. With the exception of Axl, the band were mostly drunk throughout this tour, as they knew they would be unable to score for drugs of any description once inside Japan. As Doug Goldstein says: ‘They knew they couldn’t take any heroin with them. So on the plane over Izzy takes a handful of sleeping pills and we literally have to carry him through customs – into the van and then up to his room.’ Hours later, ‘Izzy wakes up and he has literally no fucking clue where in the world he is. So he calls Steven. “Hey, man, where are we?” Steven goes, “We’re in fucking Japan.” Izzy goes, “No we’re not.” Steven goes, “I want you to go to the window right now and look outside and if you can see one head of blonde hair I’ll suck your dick!”
‘Another night, Steven’s sleepwalking cos he’s fucking drunk out of his mind. Cos that’s what they do when they can’t get any drugs, they drink their asses off. So Steven walks into his drum tech’s room, Tom Mayhew, and pisses in th
e heater. He thought it was the toilet. He’s lifting the seat up … oh my god!’
After Japan came three shows in Australia, followed by one in New Zealand. ‘Flying from Japan to Australia,’ Doug relates, ‘Axl is sitting next to Alan Niven. Steven and Tom Mayhew are in the seats in front of them. I am sitting directly across from Steven. I could never sleep on flights so out of boredom I start flicking water onto Steven. It wakes Steven up, who then punches Tom Mayhew as hard as he can. He thought it was Axl. He thought Axl was doing it and he was punching Axl. He hit this poor kid so hard all you heard was eerrrgggghhhhh!! Tom couldn’t get his breath cos Steven had just pounded him in the chest.’
And then it was home. Finally. Jetting back to Paradise City five days before Christmas. Where the grass was now greener than ever and the girls so pretty no one could tell the difference any more. ‘I think I prefer porn stars,’ Slash told me when I passed on a request for a dinner date message from one of the year’s Playboy Playmates of the Month. ‘Less talking …’
It would be another two years before Guns N’ Roses would set out on tour again. Two years in which Appetite for Destruction became one of the biggest-selling albums of the decade, notching up sales worldwide of over 30 million. Two years in which Guns N’ Roses went from being everybody’s favourite underground band to becoming the biggest, most talked-about band in the world. Even their nearest rivals in the big-and-bad stakes, Metallica, now looked to them for their lead into the Nineties, hiring Mike Clink to make their next album (until it became obvious that they really couldn’t follow GN’R) and hanging out with them whenever they were in LA, to the point where Lars Ulrich even had a special white leather jacket made – just like the one Axl wore in the ‘Paradise City’ video. Or, in the case of Metallica’s singer, James Hetfield, hanging out with Slash to score chicks. In his autobiography, Slash recalls ‘a girl James wanted to fuck and I let him take her into my bedroom. They were in there for a while and I had to get in there to get something, so I crept in quietly and saw James head-fucking her. He was standing on the bed, ramming her head against the wall, moaning in that thunderous voice of his, just slamming away, and bellowing, “That’ll be fine! That’ll be fine! Yes! That’ll be fine!”’