Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  During the early weeks of 1990 word was Steven had actually been fired, for his failure to comply with Axl’s onstage demands at the Stones show to quit ‘dancing with Mr Brownstone’. Then, the last time I spoke to Axl – the day I phoned to check he was still okay with me going ahead and publishing his broadside against Vince Neil – I took the opportunity to ask about Steven. First he’s out of the band, then he’s back again … What’s the story right now, I asked? ‘He is back in the band,’ said Axl. ‘He was definitely out of the band. He wasn’t necessarily fired, we worked with Adam Maples [of the Sea Hags], we worked with Martin Chambers [of The Pretenders], and Steven did the Guns N’ Roses thing and got his shit together. And it worked, and he did it, and he plays the songs better than any of ’em, just bad-assed, and he’s GN’R. And so if he doesn’t blow it, we’re going to try the album with him, and the tour and, you know, we’ve worked out a contract with him …’

  A contract? Stipulating that he had to stop taking drugs or he was out of the band? ‘Yeah, exactly. But, you know, it’s worked out. It’s finally back on and we’re hoping it continues. It’s only been a few days so far. It’s only been since Thursday last week, and he’s doing great. We’re all just hoping it continues.’

  A few weeks later, on 7 April, Guns N’ Roses appeared at Farm Aid, the now annual benefit concert to raise money for family farmers in the US, spurred on by Bob Dylan’s comments at Live Aid in 1985 saying he hoped some of the money would help American farmers in danger of losing their farms through mortgage debt. Hosted by Willie Nelson, the 1990 show was televised live from Indianapolis in Indiana, an hour’s drive from Axl’s home town of Lafayette. It was important to Axl to make this a good one. Coming onstage in a cowboy hat and shades, Axl began by telling the crowd: ‘I’d like to dedicate this performance to my Uncle Bob Rose …’

  But the 13-minute set was a shambles. The band hadn’t played live since opening for the Stones six months before. They hadn’t rehearsed either. Steven Adler, who was clearly having trouble, later claimed the band had deliberately sabotaged his performance, in order to have a reason to fire him permanently.

  ‘They weren’t clueing me into new songs or even telling me what they were playing.’ Steven had made a theatrical dive for his drum riser at the start of the show – and missed it by four feet. The band started with one of their best new numbers, ‘Civil War’, written by Axl, Slash and Duff, which Steven had been struggling with in the studio and had never played all in one go with the band. It provided for a very shaky start. Things got even worse, though, with the second number, a cover of the UK Subs’ ‘Down on the Farm’, which Steven later claimed he had never even heard before. At the end of the short set, Axl yelled, ‘Good fucking night!’ threw the mike to the ground and strode off, clearly unhappy.

  Steven Adler was officially fired from Guns N’ Roses in July 1990.

  If the best rock’n’roll bands are like gangs – us against the world – then this one was about to break up, losing something that, once gone, could not be recovered. In a gang that traded on its dangerous reputation, Steven Adler had become too big a risk. Axl had once said, ‘We’re a bad-boy band. We’re not afraid to go to excess with substances, sexually and everything else. A lot of people are afraid to be that way. We are not.’ But even bad-boy bands had their limits, and the arrival of smack as their drug of choice was the end of any kind of innocence. Their decadence was now of the darkest kind. ‘The lifestyle was a huge part of it,’ Adler explained. ‘It’s like, sex and rock’n’roll, that was the lifestyle I was living, right from the start. It was never heavy drugs at first. The heroin thing didn’t come until after we were successful. I was a big pothead. That’s what I liked, the three Ps, man – Pot, Pussy and Percussion … We had waaay more fun before we got success than after.

  ‘Heroin, that was something that Slash was doing,’ Adler went on, ‘because we came off this huge tour – 20,000 to 30,000 people per night – and we were waiting to go into the studio, and Axl kept delaying it … It was just something people were doing. I don’t blame my decision to try it on Slash, I just wanted to try it, even though I’d never really liked drugs. Izzy was doing it, and Slash, and I thought, well, let me try it. And the thing is, the first two times I tried it, I never used a needle. I was like, “No way”, and they said, “You don’t need to use a needle, you can just smoke it …”

  ‘The first two times, I was so sick, and as sick as it sounds, I did it again. I was waking up every day, and not having something wonderful and exciting like a gig to do, I started to get down, a real depression, like a Valium down. And time flies when you get on [heroin] … that’s why I got into it. I kind of took it to make the time go by. Getting addicted,’ he somewhat naively insisted, ‘was the last thing I expected to happen.’

  ‘It was totally regrettable,’ said Slash. ‘But the band finally got to the place where we wanted to make a record, which was a hard enough place to get to … we’re talking about the span of about a year, which to us was like a lifetime, and Steven … we could not get him back to front. We were resigned to the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to do it in the time frame that we needed to get going, because we might miss the bus. We might fall apart again and take another year to get it together.’

  Every time Steven now sat at a drum kit, it seemed as though he blew it. He was too out of it to function, even in the louche, loose style that he’d always played in. Slash, Duff and their producer, Mike Clink, found themselves on the sharp end, stuck in the studio trying to work on the nuts and bolts of getting basic tracks for the songs down with a drummer who could no longer perform. The clock was running and the bills were growing.

  ‘Steven is not the world’s best drummer by any stretch,’ Alan Niven conceded. ‘But he had a quality that he brought to the band that anybody would accept as being part of the magic. He had such an enthusiasm for what he was doing. Duff even had to show him what to play sometimes. Let’s be real – Steven’s not going to be sitting in with Chick Corea any time soon, but exuberance is just the right word for him. So did we want Steven to go? Fuck no. Replacing people in bands is a pain in the ass. It changes the dynamic personally and musically. We tried for the longest time to give Steven a vision and a function. There was a combination of factors going on. One was that he could just not connect to the kind of material that Axl was writing. “Coma”, “Estranged” … he’d just roll his eyes. And, of course, the fact that he had no control over his heroin habit.’

  Adler’s recollections of the time are harrowing enough, even through the haze with which he recalled them: ‘Man, I was fucked up, and I have never denied that, I couldn’t really deny it because it was pretty fucking obvious … But I wasn’t the only one. I remember one day Slash called me to go to the studio and play “Civil War”, I think it was. I’d been given an opiate blocker by a doctor. I still had opiates in my system and it made me so sick. I must have tried, like, twenty times to play it, but I couldn’t. I was very weak and I didn’t have my timing. Slash and Duff were shouting at me and telling me I was fucked up.’

  The band had one card left to play. A legal document was drawn up – the contract Axl had mentioned to me – that put him on a 30-day probation designed to allow him time to kick his heroin habit. Failure to do so would result in his sacking. Steven Adler signed it on 28 March 1990. ‘We were like, what do we do?’ recalled Duff. ‘We had a band lawyer, and it was like, okay, you’ve got to warn him formally. This will scare him. You’re gonna get six months and you’ve got to do this and that. The lawyer’s like, okay, we’ll try that. We really thought that he’d pull it back and he didn’t. All the way up to getting Matt Sorum to play on the record, we thought that would get Steven back. Then we realised, it’s just not going to happen. It’s just not. I wouldn’t be being honest if I told you I knew exactly the point. I don’t remember exactly when it was but it was right in there. I just thought for a while, he’s going to come through this cycle. I’m not si
tting here twenty years later in judgement. We all had our battles.’

  ‘In no way was it minor,’ says Alan Niven of the decision to put Adler on probation, and of the drummer’s inability to recognise the threat. ‘It was incredibly painful and frustrating. I’ve got to confess I’m still capable of a flash of red-hot anger with Steven at that. I have an understanding of why and what happened to him. But it was survivable. We spent a lot of time with Steven trying to get him through it and I resent the fact that he plays the victim, I think that’s bullshit. You know, own up, Steven. Be responsible for your own decisions and actions. You let us down, all of us. And we got to the point where putting him on probation didn’t work. This whole cockamamie thing about “they didn’t pay me my royalties” is bullshit. He was paid his royalties and in fact he was paid composer royalties that he didn’t deserve. That was a courtesy bestowed on him by the rest of the band in a sense of all for one and one for all. If everybody’s sharing the writing credits, nobody is going to be trying to foist bad ideas on another person. You can hold that creative magic together and not let that kind of argument undo it. When you start with a band, two things are going to fuck you up, and the first is fighting over composer royalties – mechanicals, as they’re known. The other is your girlfriends and wives. They’ll fuck you up worse than drugs.’

  By July the situation had become untenable, not that Adler seemed to have grasped the fact. ‘I got a call a few weeks after that and I had to go to the office and there was all these stacks of papers, contracts, for me to sign, and I realised that I was being fired …’

  For many years, Adler’s departure has been linked to a dark rumour concerning Erin Everly, who had wed Axl on 28 April. (Everly would claim in a 1994 interview with People magazine that the proposal had been somewhat unconventional – Rose arrived at her apartment at 4 a.m. with a gun in his car and threatened to kill himself unless she married him. They drove to Las Vegas that same night.) Adler is said to have found himself in the middle of this volatile relationship when Everly overdosed at his house (an event he acknowledged in his 2010 autobiography).

  Axl confirmed in a 1992 interview with Del James that Everly had been found ‘naked’, and been taken to the emergency room. ‘I had to spend a night with her in an intensive-care unit because her heart had stopped thanks to Steven,’ Axl told James. ‘She was hysterical, and he shot her up with a speedball. She had never done jack shit as far as drugs go, and he shoots her up with a mixture of heroin and cocaine? I kept myself from doing anything to him. I kept the man from being killed by members of her family. I saved him from having to go to court, because her mother wanted him held responsible for his actions.’

  Two decades later, Alan Niven addressed the full extent of the rumour directly: ‘Axl was fucking convinced that Erin had been overdosed and raped,’ he said. ‘Well, that’s going to go down well, isn’t it? That was a really clever choice that you made there, Steven, and it really helped everybody. Is it any surprise we got to the point that we had to seriously consider getting someone else? Did we have any choice?’

  Whatever the full extent of the story, the incident further loosened the bonds that had kept the original five together. Axl’s marriage would not survive the year. Erin claimed that he first threatened divorce a month after the wedding, and then two months after that, she alleged that the singer beat her so badly she was hospitalised. In September she fell pregnant – ‘I thought it could have been a cure for Axl’ – but she miscarried and, she said, had to sell her Jeep to play her medical bills. The marriage was annulled in January 1991.

  Izzy Stradlin was the first to realise what the band had lost musically with Steven Adler’s sacking. ‘[It was] a big difference,’ he said in a 1992 interview. ‘The first time I realised what Steve did for the band was when he broke his hand in Michigan [in 1987]. Tried to punch through a wall and busted his hand. So we had Fred Coury come in from Cinderella for the Houston show. Fred played technically good and steady, but the songs sounded just awful. They were written with Steve playing the drums and his sense of swing was the push and pull that give the songs their feel. When that was gone, it was just … unbelievable, weird. Nothing worked. I would have preferred to continue with Steve, but we’d had two years off and we couldn’t wait any longer. It just didn’t work for Slash to be telling Steve to straighten out. He wasn’t ready to clean up.’

  Nonetheless it was Slash who found Adler’s replacement, the hard-hitting, 29-year-old Californian Matt Sorum, who got his break drumming on Tori Amos’s debut record, Y Kant Tori Read (a foray into soft rock that Amos has subsequently requested not be reissued), which in turn led to a spell with The Cult, then in the midst of their reinvention from self-consciously mystical North of England Goths to balls-out arena rockers with a sound so monolithic it made AC/DC sound like Madonna. Sorum was a rocker through and through, a good fit temperamentally, who grew up admiring ‘Keith Moon and Roger Taylor – guys who drove around in Rolls-Royces with bimbos, drinking champagne and driving their cars into swimming pools. That’s my idea of a rock star; that’s why I did it. I grew up idolizing rock’n’roll debauchery, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll party.’

  ‘I remembered seeing Matt with The Cult and thinking that he was the only good drummer [I’d heard], and calling him and having him come down,’ Slash said. ‘We started rehearsing this material and next thing you know we’re in the studio. Getting the basic tracks together so that we could play them front to back actually happened really quickly. But that’s a hell of a lot of material and it was an epic journey.’ Alan Niven took a different view. ‘Matt is a competent drummer but he couldn’t replicate Steven. He has a great consistency but he also has a heavy hand. He cannot match the feel that Steven had.’

  As Izzy had predicted, the pulse of the band changed with Sorum’s arrival, and yet he fitted in in more ways than one – ‘Here I was replacing the drug addict drummer, right? But he did heroin and I had cocaine’ – and he offered momentum at a time when things had stalled badly. ‘That was one of the reasons why it was okay to let Steven go, because I’d been through so much in such a short amount of time in order to get to the point where it was time to go into the studio,’ said Slash. ‘I had to clean my act up and I was ready to go. That’s really my whole purpose in life, to play and record and to tour. I was 200 per cent locked into it.’

  Yet the doubts and the cracks were growing. ‘We make choices every day,’ Alan Niven told Jon Hotten in 2011. ‘With Use Your Illusion, Slash made a choice and I totally understood it, and to this day I don’t agree with it.’ Speaking now, he recalls an event that made him understand that the politics of the band had shifted irrevocably from the original one-for-all gang mentality. One Friday night when he and Slash went to see Albert Collins, the blues guitarist, play, ‘and I came crawling home on the Sunday afternoon so jagged on coke I had to take an X [ecstasy pill] to get down.’

  At one point on that lost weekend they were sitting alone together in Slash’s Laurel Canyon house. ‘Here’s the thing,’ says Niven, ‘you can never remember a single conversation you have on coke. But I remember very clearly what Slash and I talked about. The main thrust was he was really upset about how things were going with Use Your Illusion. He felt that one song of that kind of epic style might be appropriate, but so many? I was trying to persuade him that he really needed to articulate that to Axl. He looked at me and he said, “My dad has got a cupboard full of gold and platinum records and he doesn’t have a pot to piss in. I’ll do what I have to do to get the cheque. I’ll compromise.” And that’s where he folded. From then on, Axl was in charge.’

  At the same time, the distance between Alan Niven and Axl Rose was growing, too, something exacerbated by the fact that Doug Goldstein’s relationship with Axl was drawing closer. Slash could see that another power struggle was developing. ‘That was a volatile situation that was going to explode at some point,’ he said. ‘Alan wasn’t going to take Axl’s shit and Axl could not stand
that, so it was a battle. I think in hindsight, although it wouldn’t have been any fun, but all we could have done differently was just to refuse Axl everything that he ever wanted. I don’t think it would have been very productive, but, all things considered, what we ended up doing was going along with a lot of stuff just in order to be able to continue on, which built a monster.’

  At first, with Sorum in for Adler, the speed that the material began to come together covered over any cracks. Although the entire process would take nearly two years and seven recording studios, one of the most remarkable elements of Use Your Illusion is how quickly the basic tracks were laid down. But then the different visions for how the album should sound became manifest. ‘With a new drummer we did thirty-six songs in thirty-six days so we weren’t fucking around,’ Slash recalled. ‘After the basic tracks were done, I’d spend three weeks doing guitars, which for thirty songs was actually pretty fast. I was sometimes doing two songs in one day. But everything hit a brick wall when it came to doing the synthesiser stuff, and I never agreed with doing the synthesiser stuff anyway. Although I think some of it is brilliant, it was part of the new way, which was the beginning of the end. That was the beginning of the whole process taking for ever. It was like a lot of days were not working, some days it was working, and most of the record was finished. It didn’t really need all the rest of it. That was the biggest disagreement for me.’