Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  Geffen was then in New York but a meeting was arranged at the executive’s home; an extraordinary face-off that Goldstein claims ended with him physically strong-arming Geffen. ‘We’re sitting at breakfast across from each other and [Geffen] says, “Why are you here?”’ Goldstein replied that ‘with all due respect’ he was recommending to the band that they don’t sign the deal Niven had worked out for them with Geffen. At which point, says Goldstein, an outraged Geffen ‘starts poking his finger in my face … I took his arm and twisted it in such a way that his face was now on the table. I said, “Again, sir, with all due respect, I was told you do your research on people before you meet with them. If you did your research on me you’d find out that if you stick your finger in my face I’m gonna snap your fucking arm at the elbow.”

  ‘I said, “Here’s what you and I are gonna do. I’m gonna pretend that this little fucking escapade never happened. I’m gonna let you up. I’m gonna walk outside, knock on your door, and we’re gonna start again.” I said, “Does that work for you?” and I applied pressure on his head. He’s like, “Yes, yes.” So I let him up and I walked outside, knocked on the door, “Hi, Mr Geffen, Doug Goldstein.” And he’s fucking livid, right? He kept screaming at me for, like, three hours. And finally, it occurs to me what his issue is. He’s a guy who believes in being a man of his word. Unlike a lot of people that got to where he is but doing just the opposite. If David Geffen tells you that he’s going to do something, he fucking does it. That’s one of the things that I love about David Geffen. He is a man of his word. He’s a very, very, very ethical person when it comes to shit like that. And if he tells you something he’s gonna make sure it happens, and conversely he expects the same respect.’

  The problem, Goldstein decided, was that Geffen had already agreed a deal with the Japanese based on the figures of the new deal Niven had negotiated. He was loath to go back and tell them things had changed. So Goldstein started telling Geffen that he had done his research. ‘I appealed to the ex-manager in him. I said, I have a band waiting for me in St Louis, and they’re totally expecting me to come back with good news. Do I have to fly back to St Louis and say, “David gave me the choice between bubble-gum and dick and we were out of bubblegum”?

  ‘He goes, “Doug, I don’t ever want to talk about this again. I don’t care if I never speak to you again. But I am not going to get involved in a renegotiation. You can start talking to David Berman, who is the head of business affairs, and Eddie Rosenblatt, and whatever you come with you come up with.” I thanked him and I went on my way to St Louis. The net result is, it took me six months, but I got the royalty points up to the highest any act in the history of music had ever had at that point. Thirty-four points. More than doubling what they had received in the past.’

  Flying from New York down to St Louis that afternoon, Doug Goldstein felt sure he now had things under better control. That from here on in the band’s main worries were over; the Use Your Illusion albums, delayed while contract negotiations had dragged on with Geffen, would now get an official release date and the tour would start to make real money.

  Then the band went onstage in St Louis and all hell broke loose again.

  There had been onstage rumblings since the band’s 17 June show at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, when Axl arrived late onstage and told the crowd: “Yeah, I know it sucks … If you got any real complaints, you could do me a favour though. You could write a little letter on how much that sucked and send it to Geffen Records. Tell those people to get the fuck out of my ass.’ He returned to his record company frustrations a few songs later: ‘The new record will be delayed again,’ he said, pacing along the edge of stage. ‘Geffen Records decided they wanted to change the contract and I’m deciding, “Fuck you.” And since I don’t have time to do both, go back there and argue and bitch with them or be on tour, I guess we’ll just be on tour and have a good time and fuck them. It’s a shame but … So we’ll play a lot of the new shit tonight and it really doesn’t matter, does it?’

  Axl had flared briefly a few days before, too, at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, where he saw a member of the crowd fighting with the band’s photographer, Robert John, and stopped the show until the fan was ejected, but these were minor things always likely to happen when so many combustible elements are thrown together. What happened in Missouri three weeks later, however, was far more serious, and seemed to leave a greasy trail of bad karma that would follow Guns N’ Roses for the next two years.

  The band were 15 songs into their show at the Riverport Amphitheatre in St Louis when Axl saw a member of the audience quite close to the stage filming the show with a video camera. In the middle of ‘Rocket Queen’ he started shouting to the security guards to ‘take that … Get that guy and take that …’ Adrenalin pumping through him, when nothing happened right away, he shouted, ‘I’ll take it, goddamn it!’ and hurled himself from the edge of the stage towards the fan. There was a brief melee while the band continued playing the ‘Rocket Queen’ riff, and then security wrestled Axl back to the stage. When he got there, he grabbed his mike and yelled, ‘Thanks to the lame-ass security, I’m going home’, and threw the microphone to the stage so violently it made a sound like the crack of a gunshot. The band kept playing for a few moments (‘We had a full bag of tricks to keep things moving whenever Axl made a sudden exit,’ said Slash archly), but when the singer didn’t return, the guitarist shuffled towards the wings, where Doug Goldstein yelled in his ear that the show was over.

  They had played for more than the 90 minutes that they were contracted for, but it was unfinished business and the crowd was far from happy. With the band in their dressing room in the bowels of the arena, a full-scale riot broke out above them. Axl had calmed down somewhat and suggested going back on, but as they neared the stage it was clear that was now impossible. The place was being trashed, unconscious fans were being carried out and the police were at full stretch trying to limit the damage. They retreated back to the dressing room, where they hunkered down until the police could transport them safely through the chaos back to their hotel.

  Doug Goldstein describes it now as a night he will never forget. ‘There was this young kid who was a big Guns N’ Roses fan, and Axl’s telling everybody, “Look, you need to get this guy out of the crowd.” We found out later that the guy worked for the local security, he had taken the night off to see his favourite band. So they’re not gonna do anything about it. More importantly, I’ve got eight guys doing security, and yet not one of them jumped into the crowd to take care of it. Axl is like, “Really? Nobody’s gonna take care of this? Are you serious?” So he finally took it upon himself.’

  After Axl stormed off stage, Goldstein followed him. ‘I go into his dressing room. I go, “Hey, bud, it’s going to get really ugly if you don’t get back out there.” He had a cut on his knee. He goes, “Doug, you know how I do this. Just leave me alone for two minutes. I’ll be fine. I got to clear up this blood then I’ll come back out. Go get the other band members and tell them we’re going back on.” I say, “Great. Thank you.”

  ‘So I assemble the band and we’re ready to go onstage and the promoter and the chief of police are there and they go, “What are you doing?” I go, “I’m taking the band back out there.” They go, “Fuck you, you are. You’ve done enough damage, get the fuck out of here!” I said, “Guys, you don’t get it. If you put the police in front of these people they’re gonna rip this place to shreds.” And the promoter gets in my face. “You heard me. Get the fuck out of here!” I said, “All right. It’s on your hands then.”’

  Goldstein told the band’s new tour manger, Josh, to get the band on the tour bus and call ahead to their hotel in Chicago that they were going to be arriving early. Then walked back out and did his best to help police quell the riot. ‘To see guys running with Marshall stacks, off the stage and out of the building. Video screens! What are you going to do with video screens?’

  The next morning the sun rose on
a scene from Apocalypse Now. The crowd had levelled the place. Everything the band had left onstage had been trashed. The damage to the venue ran to almost a quarter of a million dollars. The next show in Chicago had to be cancelled, and Guns N’ Roses didn’t play again for almost a week, when they appeared almost 1000 miles away in Dallas, Texas. Axl was charged with inciting a riot, but wasn’t arrested for almost a year. So, again, Axl ends up having to deal with all of that crap and it’s not only unfair and unnecessary but he will not defend himself. He’s like, “I’m not about to explain who I am or what I’m about.” I don’t know where that comes from, quite honestly, but it’s there.’

  Slash would recall in his autobiography that when he returned to St Louis four years later with his solo band, Snakepit, he ran into the fan who had been holding the camera. He’d just been awarded a sum of money from the lawsuit won by the city against Guns N’ Roses, but had also endured death threats, and for a while had been unable to leave his house.

  The band snuck a reference to the riot on the inside of the Use Your Illusion sleeve notes (‘Fuck you St Louis!’) but their reputation was set. And, though it wouldn’t become evident until later, Axl had, in his strange way, asserted his control over what happened onstage – he decided when they went on, and what was and wasn’t acceptable from the people who came to watch them.

  After a triumphant – and lengthy – homecoming with four nights at the Inglewood Forum, where on the third night they played for more than three and half hours to celebrate the completion earlier that day of the Use Your Illusion album mixes, Guns N’ Roses headed for Europe. They called the run the Get in the Ring, Motherfucker tour. Skid Row accompanied them. The levels of debauchery remained epically high and the gang of three had a new accomplice in Skid Row’s singer, Sebastian Bach, a young and green Canadian eager to learn from the masters … ‘We’d done it all before but we did it all again with Sebastian,’ remarked Slash. ‘That leg of the tour through the States to Europe was debauched and sick and took hedonism to a new level.’

  Offstage, Slash and Duff and Matt and whoever else cared to join them partied while Axl and, increasingly, Izzy, slipped away and did their own thing. While the gang of three quickly grew used to Axl’s absence – that split had been happening all the way through the recording of the albums – Duff was pretty sure that he knew the exact moment when Izzy Stradlin checked out of Guns N’ Roses: ‘I remember when he got sober, I was watching him,’ Duff said. ‘Really early on, early-Nineties, while we were still on the road. And the moment that he became at peace with himself was the moment I also recognised, he’s not going to be here very much longer …’

  Axl’s habit of going on late now became so regular the others found it stifling. Getting angry with him didn’t work. Pointing out how much money the band was being charged in fines for breaking curfews held no meaning. Eventually, they simply resigned themselves to hanging around waiting …

  At first it didn’t seem like a big deal: this was the most dangerous band in the world after all, and the crowd had come to get a taste of that danger, that unpredictability. They arrived in Helsinki on 12 August and went straight from the plane to a club to watch The Black Crowes play. The following evening the tour opened at the Jäähalli and a pattern that was becoming as predictable as Slash, Duff and Matt getting happily fucked up began again: Axl walked offstage an hour into the show, just as the band were launching into ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, and came back 25 minutes later. Four days later in Stockholm the band went on after 11 p.m. as Axl was reportedly playing blackjack and then watching a firework display. Two days after that, the show in Copenhagen was halted when a firecracker was thrown onstage and Axl led the band off until the culprit turned themselves in. The band flew on to Oslo and checked into their hotel, only to take a call from one of Axl’s team telling them that he had travelled to Paris instead, and the Oslo show was cancelled.

  The next scheduled date was in Mannheim, Germany, on 24 August, where they’d sold more than 38,000 tickets in two days. The band went on late again, and again Axl walked offstage. The venue’s design meant that the band’s dressing rooms were almost a mile from the stage, and so a fleet of vans had been organised to shuttle them back and forth. When Axl didn’t return, the rest of the band went to look for him and found him sitting in his van. As Slash remembered it, he and Duff tried to persuade Axl to return, and when they failed, Matt Sorum went stomping down towards the van, the last threads of his temper finally snapping. Just as he did, Axl stepped out of the vehicle and began to walk towards the stage.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Sorum yelled. Axl turned around and got back in the van. By now, fearing another riot, the promoters had closed the gates around the backstage area to prevent the band from leaving, and police in riot gear had begun to enter the arena. Axl returned to the stage and the set was completed.

  ‘Wow, that was close,’ thought Slash, as they walked off after the encores. In fact, it was worse than close. The next morning Izzy sent word that he was quitting the band. The show may have been the last straw, but the reality was that this had been coming for a long while now. Izzy was in neither camp – the Slash–Duff– Matt party boys nor the Axl play-when-I-say-so faction – and the bullshit all around him had simply become too much. Rock’n’roll was supposed to be a simple life, lived to the full but enjoyed to the full, too, and that enjoyment, as far as Izzy could see, was not predicated on private jets and huge crowds, nor on living in a haze of drugs and booze. The man that Alan Niven called ‘the heart of the soul’ of Guns N’ Roses, the guitarist whose effortlessly loose groove gave them their unique swing, was gone. Slash spent several days trying to change his mind, but he knew it was no good. The seeds had been sown when Izzy had quit drugs the year before, then departed Los Angeles for a quieter life back in Lafayette. ‘I needed to get out of LA for my own sanity,’ he remembered. ‘I was tired of the whole scene. I didn’t move there as a junkie. I became one in LA. It came with the turf. Once I quit drugs, I couldn’t help looking around and asking myself, “Is this all there is?” I was just tired of it; I needed to get out.’

  Izzy said he regarded the excesses of the Use Your Illusion album and tour with the same cool eye: ‘I think you make more decisions when you’re sober. And when you’re fucked up, you’re more likely to put up with things you wouldn’t normally put up with. I didn’t like the complications that became such a part of daily life in Guns N’ Roses. Sometimes for the simplest things to happen would take days. You’re sitting there in the dressing room at a hockey rink and for, like, two hours the walls are vibrating while the audience is going, “Bullshit! Bullshit!” That time goes slow when you’re sober. And they have to send a helicopter to the hotel to get him [Axl]. He would just “get ready”, and sometimes he would “get ready” for a long time. I don’t know what goes on upstairs with him. To me it’s simple. Get an alarm clock, ya know? There’s a modern invention that seems to work for people. You set it, and then you wake up when you’re supposed to.’

  As Alan Niven says now, when Izzy Stradlin walked out on Guns N’ Roses, ‘I wasn’t expecting it but it didn’t surprise me. For the record, I had nothing to do with that.’ Niven was in Switzerland with Great White when Izzy told him the news. ‘I got a phone call. He said, “I’m quitting, I can’t stand it any more.” I said, “Let’s meet up in London and talk about this.” He had one gig left on that leg, which was Wembley, and he wasn’t gonna go [to Wembley]. There had been a gig in Germany where Axl was late and the security was not good. There were Germans walking around with submachine guns and Izzy totally wigged. Like, what if this goes fucking south? I had to talk him into playing Wembley.’

  Alan found out there was a hotel right near to the stadium, a Hilton. He took it upon himself to rent a suit there for Izzy. ‘He still hasn’t paid me for this, the fucker!’ he laughs. ‘I said, “You go and sit in the Hilton and have somebody on the crew tell you when Axl turns up. And when he turns up you can be
there in five minutes.”’ So that’s what Izzy did, playing his final show with the band before 72,000 fans that had no idea they were witnessing history. A few days later Guns N’ Roses were back in LA, taking a break while they awaited the release finally of the Use Your Illusion albums – and looking for somebody to fill Izzy’s shoes.

  Izzy Stradlin’s departure from Guns N’ Roses was made official on 7 November 1991: the second of the original five-piece to find himself gone: one for being too much of an addict, the other for being far too sober. Izzy now rehired Alan Niven as his manager and set about making a solo album. Slash was distraught. Duff was in a daze. Axl just had one more reason to feel angry and betrayed. In an interview with Rolling Stone some months later, Axl put the blame for Izzy’s abrupt departure squarely at the feet of his childhood friend.

  ‘My personal belief is that Izzy never really wanted something this big,’ Axl told Kim Neely. ‘There were responsibilities that Izzy didn’t want to deal with. He didn’t want to work at the standards that Slash and I set for ourselves.’

  Asked for examples, Axl claimed Izzy didn’t want to make videos; that even getting Izzy to work on his own songs on the Use Your Illusion albums ‘was like pulling teeth … Izzy’s songs were on the record because I wanted them on the record, not because Izzy gave a shit either way. If people think I don’t respect Izzy or acknowledge his talent, they’re sadly mistaken. He was my friend. I haven’t always been right. Sometimes I’ve been massively wrong, and Izzy’s been the one to help steer me back to the things that were right. But I know that I wanted to get as big as we possibly could from day one, and that wasn’t Izzy’s intention at all.’