Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  He also called Izzy ‘an asshole’ for ‘the way he went about’ leaving the band. ‘We got this letter saying, “This changes, this changes, and maybe I’ll tour in January.” And they were ridiculous demands that weren’t going to be met. I talked to Izzy for four and a half hours on the phone. At some points, I was crying, and I was begging. I was doing everything I could to keep him in the band.’

  When I had the opportunity to speak with Izzy personally about why he left, however, a few years later he said he simply couldn’t take it any more. ‘The shows were completely erratic. I never knew whether we’d be able to finish the show from day to day, cos [Axl] would walk off. I said to Duff and Slash, we gotta learn a cover song or something, for when [Axl] leaves the stage. They were like, “Ah, let’s have another beer …” They didn’t care.’ The final straw, he said, came after he reversed his initial decision to leave, and Axl – in a repeat of the Steven Adler situation 18 months before – issued Izzy with a contract to sign. ‘This is right before I left – demoting me to some lower position. They were gonna cut my percentage of royalties down. I was like, “Fuck you! I’ve been there from day one, why should I do that? Fuck you! I’ll go play the Whiskey.” That’s what happened. It was insane.’

  By then, said Izzy, the control issues seemed to have completely taken his old friend over. ‘And I never saw it coming. I mean, this is my side of it, he’d probably say I’m completely fucking crazy, but I think he went power mad. Suddenly he was trying to control everything. The control issues just became worse and worse and eventually it filtered down to the band. He was trying to draw up contracts for everybody! And this guy – he’s not a Harvard graduate, Axl. He’s just a guy, just a little guy, who sings, is talented. But, man, he turned into this fucking maniac! And I did, too, but it was a different kind of maniac. I was paranoid about the business aspect – freaking out going, ‘Where’s all the money?’ For [Axl] the money wasn’t as big a deal. But he had this power thing where he wanted complete control. And you can say, well, it goes back to your fucked-up childhood where his dad used to smack him around, you know, and he had no control, so now he’s getting it back. But it’s like, it’s still kooky, you know? You don’t have to have everybody signing stuff.’

  Whatever the truth, with the next leg of the tour starting in less than a month, there was simply no time to reflect on the impact that Izzy’s loss would have. ‘Even when we lost Izzy because we had all those shows booked, I was just like, let’s keep going,’ Slash said. ‘But when the tour was finally over and it was time to get back to work, it was impossible, because Izzy wasn’t there, Steven wasn’t there, and it really dawned on me, the harsh reality that Axl and I had grown so far apart and we weren’t really all that close to begin with. We’d grown so far apart there was no putting that back together.’

  The band shot a video for ‘Don’t Cry’ without Izzy and then took a short hiatus that was mostly taken up with trying to find a new guitarist and then get rehearsed in time for the resumption of the tour. Axl’s first thought was to try and recruit Dave Navarro, whose vast, trippy soundscapes had pushed Jane’s Addiction to the forefront of the alt-rock movement that sat halfway between Guns N’ Roses and the grunge scene that was rapidly emerging from Duff’s hometown of Seattle. The pair met in LA to discuss the idea, and after they’d spoken at length, Axl thought he’d found the right man. Slash was less convinced. He was a fan of Navarro’s musicianship but Dave was a lead player like him rather than a rhythm player like Izzy, and what Guns N’ Roses needed at this point in time was a rhythm player. Nonetheless Axl was insistent and so Slash had the band set up at Mates rehearsal rooms in North Hollywood and asked Dave Navarro down. But Dave Navarro didn’t show – three times.

  After the third occasion Slash spoke to Axl, who spoke to Navarro, who assured them he’d be along, and so Slash went back to Mates and Navarro stood up them up once more. His name was not mentioned again. ‘There were a number of reasons it didn’t work out,’ Navarro said candidly some years later. ‘If I could pick one, it would be my own heroin addiction.’

  Slash had a guitarist in mind too, the memory of a show way-back-when at Madam Wong’s, when Candy had opened for Hollywood Rose. Candy had a guy whose style was not unlike Izzy’s, loose-limbed, hip-rolling … His name was Gilby Clarke. Slash tracked him down to his most recent project, Kill for Thrills, and when they hooked up there was an instant chemistry, plus, importantly, a willingness from Clarke to throw himself into the job.

  With the resumption of the tour looming, Gilby learned 60 songs in two weeks and flew through his audition – a couple of weeks after that he was in full rehearsals, and before anyone could really process the change, Guns N’ Roses were back on the road, the Use Your Illusion records high in the charts and, to the big bad world out there, little damage done. ‘Izzy’s departure had happened so quietly, with no fanfare and no media awareness,’ said Slash. ‘It was such a major change within the band, but to the outside world it was a non-event.’

  It was the classic push-pull that they were all becoming used to. Success, in the form of record sales and sold-out shows, seemed unending, and yet every day seemed to bring more ‘crazy assed shit’ to deal with.

  11

  BOUGHT ME AN ILLUSION

  With the Use Your Illusion albums on their way to selling a combined total of over 30 million copies worldwide and a seemingly limitless demand for tickets to see them play, by 1992 Guns N’ Roses should have been the richest band in the world. Yet from the moment the Use Your Illusion tour proper had begun in East Troy, Wisconsin, on 25 May 1991, the band were deep in a hole financially. On a tour of this scale, everything cost money. Firstly there was the band, of course, expanded to include the keyboard player Dizzy Reed – with plans for later in the tour for additional stage musicians led by the piano player and ‘pit boss’ Teddy ‘Zig Zag’ Andreadis, including a horn section featuring the baritone saxophonist Cece Worrall-Rubin, trumpeter Ann King and tenor sax player Lisa Maxwell; plus three back-up singers, Roberta Freeman, Traci Amos and Diane Jones. There were also a crew of 232 and two huge identical stages that leapfrogged one another from city to city. There was the private jet, plus hotel costs and other incidental expenses, plus costs borne by the promoter as a part of their fee: everything from venue hire to printing and distributing tickets. To cover them, the band earned an average gross from ticket sales of $601,000 per show. As Duff McKagan, who would later graduate from business school, put it: ‘Oh, we generated a lot of dough, but it took us two years to break even – just to break even – on that tour …’

  And these were just the standard costs that any tour accountant would have factored in long before the whole thing lumbered off around the world. What kept Guns N’ Roses in the red for so long was actually the real, underlying story of the tour: fees, penalties and fines paid to venues, promoters and local authorities for going onstage late and breaking curfews, the riots that took place, plus all of the other waste that comes with the madness and boredom of being on the road: the yachts they rented; the boat out to the Barrier Reef; the go-kart tracks and the restaurants that they paid to close down; the endless no-expense-that-anyone-could-think-of-spared theme parties – Roman baths, Mexican fiestas, a travelling casino – organised every night by Axl’s half-brother, Stuart, and his sister, Amy. In those details lay the story of a band careening inexorably off the rails. Doug Goldstein, now manager rather than tour manager, was nonetheless on the road almost full-time, there, as Slash and several others felt, to pacify Axl and keep the peace by any means necessary.

  As Goldstein says now: ‘Ninety-nine per cent of managers wouldn’t have even been at the show. Just sitting in their big homes in Palos Verdes or Bel Air or wherever, collecting their fucking huge cheques and not doing any of the work that’s really imperative with a band like GN’R. The amount of stress that you go through every day that there’s a show. Fuck, even when there’s not a show. What’s gonna happen today that I’m gonna
need to put my thinking cap on and be able to react to in seconds? Cos I tell you what, if you say the wrong thing, Axl’s gone. He’s gone! You’re not getting him back onstage. No way.’

  It had always been that way with Axl and Guns N’ Roses, he says. But this was now something different. ‘Clearly from the beginning it was just as frenetic and as risky but you’re playing in front of eighty people in a club, and it’s a lot easier to finagle your way around an eighty-person instead of an 80,000-person crowd. The amount of lives in jeopardy grows exponentially, at that point.’

  The support bands on every leg of the tour were big acts in their own right – Skid Row; Nine Inch Nails; Smashing Pumpkins; Blind Melon; Faith No More, Motörhead … all there for the same reason: to have a good time. At least as far as Slash and Duff and Matt – the unruly gang of three – were concerned. Not quite everyone felt the same way though. Faith No More’s keyboardist, Roddy Bottum, described the scene backstage as ‘excess, excess, excess. There were more strippers than road crew.’ Reprimanded for ‘laughing about the absurdity of the touring environment in the press’, his band were ‘told that we’d have to apologise to Axl or leave the tour. We made an attempt to explain where we were coming from, but I think it went over his head because as a sort of peace offering he brought us to a trailer backstage where two naked women strippers were having sex.’

  Touring for a while with Soundgarden in tow was another uneasy fit. The third prong in a Seattle trident that also included Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Soundgarden – despite their Zeppelinworshipping roots – were perceived as dour grunge icons apparently set on doing away with the self-indulgent excesses of the hair metal scene that had originally birthed GN’R. The disconnect between the two bands was best illustrated by the disastrous prank pulled during their final show, in Arizona, in February 1992. As Soundgarden played their last song, Slash, Duff and Matt walked onstage holding three blow-up dolls. Slash, who was naked behind his, fell over and gave the crowd more of an insight into his life than he’d intended. Yet for Soundgarden’s singer, Chris Cornell, these were harmless high jinks, behind which the band hid, while their leader glowered in the shadows.

  ‘Without saying anything negative about Axl,’ commented Cornell in 2012, ‘what I remember the most was Duff and Slash and everyone else being regular, sweet, warm guys in a rock band that just wanted to play rock music. And then, like, there was this Wizard of Oz character behind the curtain that seemed to complicate what was the most ideal situation they could ever have been in: they were the most successful and famous rock band on the planet. Every single show, hundreds of thousands of fans just wanted to hear songs. For some reason there seemed to be this obstacle in just going out and participating in that. That is what I remember the most. It’s sad.’

  Slash, in an interview from around the same time, put it more simply. Soundgarden, he said, ‘came from a place where there was no fun to be had while rocking …’ It was clear – to Slash and Duff and Matt, at least – that they needed some real rock’n’roll accompaniment on tour. It was soon to arrive.

  Once the tour had lapped America and sped through Japan, Mexico and London for an appearance at the Freddie Mercury tribute show at Wembley Stadium – where Axl was able to make amends to Elton John for the ‘One in a Million’ fiasco and play ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ with John and Queen – the band arrived back in LA for a press conference at which they announced a co-headline tour with Metallica.

  It was a thrilling concept, an idea of commercial genius: here were the two flat-out biggest rock bands on planet Earth, both known for the brilliance and excesses of their live shows, together as co-headliners on the same bill. The tour was to begin in July, allowing Guns N’ Roses to make another circuit of Europe in the meantime. They were road-ready and playing well, and they needed to be. Like them, Metallica were reaching a creative and commercial peak, the officially untitled record known universally as The Black Album that they’d released the preceding August was blowing up, its mix of no-limits thrash metal tempered by grandiose arena rock ballads like ‘Nothing Else Matters’, and even a hit single with the sneakily catchy riff of ‘Enter Sandman’ powering their breakthrough into the mainstream. They were an utterly formidable live act, too, battle-hardened and blue collar, known for the intensity of their performance and the no-bullshit attitude they brought along with it.

  This was in stark contrast to the reputation Guns N’ Roses had now built up as the band that was always late onstage – with a singer likely to walk off at a moment’s notice. Doug Goldstein would always be the one expected to coax Axl back. He depicts one memorable occasion in Lisbon, Portugal, in July 1992, a couple of weeks before the tour with Metallica was to begin, when the band was headlining a massive outdoor show at the Estádio José Alvalade.

  ‘The stage is the furthest from the dressing room of any building I’ve ever been into in my life. Like a fire walk, right? So somebody throws a pipe bomb on stage and it goes off next to Axl and Axl’s like, ‘Fuck this! I’m fucking out of here!’ Throws the mike down and I’m telling you it was the longest walk from stage to dressing room of any venue I’ve ever been into. It was, like, a two-mile walk! I tell the security guy Earl [Gabbidon], who’s Axl’s personal security guy, ‘I don’t care if they play wipe-out, keep the fucking band playing.’ So I walk back to the dressing room with Axl. He’s not saying a word. I’m not saying a word.

  ‘Finally, we get to the dressing room and he goes on this diatribe, right, for I don’t know maybe thirty minutes. ‘Fuck this motherfucking shit! Fuck, fuck, fuck! I’m not here to blow up for people! That’s not why I’m here! I’m here to fucking entertain!’ So finally after thirty minutes I realise I’ve eaten two pizzas. I’m like, oh my god! This guy’s gonna turn me into the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man! Then he goes, “What do you think?” I go, “Pardon me?” He goes, “What do you think?” I go, “Wait a second, this is where I get to interject my thought?”

  ‘He goes, “Shut up, Doug. Yes, what do you think?” I said, “First off, happy anniversary.” He goes, “What the fuck are you talking about?” I said, “Exactly one year ago today we were in St Louis.” He goes, “You’re fucking kidding me.” I go, “No. It is exactly one year ago today. So, what do I think? We have 230 people on the road with us. I personally hired every single person. So I stuck you guys into a car in St Louis and I stuck around to defend my friends. I saw half of them crying, because they were fearful for their lives.

  ‘“So what do I think? I think that you owe it to the guys who have been setting up and tearing down your stages for the past two years to go back onstage. Because I don’t want to see them petrified and crying again.” He just said, “You know what, let’s go.” So we fucking went back and he finished the show.

  ‘The rest of the band, I don’t think they know to this day the shit I had to go through. First off, I have absolutely tried to empathise with what it’s like to be up in front of 120,000 people without a singer. I mean, that’s gotta just, like, eat your fucking gut to pieces. Not having any clue if he’s coming back. But I don’t think any of them ever put themselves in my position, empathetically, and tried to realise if I don’t get this fucking guy back on stage, my band is in jeopardy, the fans are in jeopardy, and the 232 people working for me are in jeopardy.

  ‘So every single fucking person in that venue is contingent upon me figuring out the right fucking thing to say to Axl Rose at that given moment, to get him to go back. And you know what, not one fucking time was I unable to get him to go back. Not one fucking time.’

  So far anyway …

  Guns N’ Roses landed back at JFK airport in New York on 12 July 1992, a Monday, with the first show of the co-headline tour with Metallica scheduled for Friday at the RFK Stadium in Washington, DC. Axl was arrested at the airport on the outstanding warrant for the St Louis riot, bailed by a judge two days later and told he was free to go on tour. (GN’R were eventually banned from St Louis for life, and Axl was charged with four counts o
f misdemeanour assault and one count of property damage and fined $50,000.) Slash managed to fill those same few days by agreeing to marry his girlfriend, Renee. Nothing was ever quiet, it seemed.

  Metallica had negotiated to go on first throughout the tour, which proved a smart move. Both bands were keen to impress one another and there was some natural competition, too. There was a mutual respect, one that showed itself from Guns’ side with Axl’s idea for the post-gig theme parties that were to become infamous for their lavishness and expense. His inspiration came from the Rolling Stones and the lounge they had at every show to entertain their guests. ‘We’d spend $100,000 a night on parties,’ said Matt Sorum. ‘For two and a half years, there was something every night.’ As well as an ‘open bar’, several pinball machines, pool tables, hot tubs and strippers dancing from tables, one night would be ‘Greek night – four greased-up, muscle-bound guys [carrying] in a roast pig.’ Another night would be ‘Sixties night’, with lava lamps on all the tables and slogans spray-painted on the walls: ‘Acid is groovy’; ‘Kill the pigs’. There were also limos on-call 24 hours a day. ‘The first night we played Giants Stadium,’ says Matt, ‘there was one pinball machine and a few bottles of booze backstage. Axl came in and said, ‘This isn’t the Rolling Stones!’ So the next night there’s a full casino, tons of lobster and champagne flowing everywhere.’

  While Metallica were onstage, Guns N’ Roses would be at their hotel. None of the band would have got to bed much before 7 a.m. Lemmy, for so long one of the band’s heroes, whose band, Motörhead, opened the show when they played the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on 3 October, recalled how ‘they were already fragmenting. Axl was on his own. It didn’t feel like they were thinking as a band any more.’ As Slash would write in his autobiography: ‘Our inability to get onstage on time was like the big elephant in the room every night. Lars Ulrich [Metallica’s drummer] never said anything to me, but he did to Matt and it was humiliating and embarrassing how lame those parties were and how disappointed Metallica were that we couldn’t even get onstage on time.’