by Mick Wall
In order to try to stay on top of everything, Goldstein would find himself staying awake round the clock for days at a time – ‘I’ve never really been a sleeper’ – but on the Illusion tour, he says, ‘For three nights in a row I wouldn’t sleep and the fourth night I’d sleep for four to six hours. The really cute thing is Slash and I were so close he knew my sleeping pattern, so on the fourth night he’d come to my room and he’d answer the phones so that my sleep wouldn’t be disrupted. Oh my god, yeah. It was so cute. He’d show up, “Hey, go to sleep.” “Okay, man.”’
That was when things were going good. After nearly two years on the road, though, even Slash was flagging. ‘Slash used to come to me about once every two weeks,’ Goldstein says. ‘And whenever there was something would happen he’d say, “This is fucking insane. I’m outta here.” My response was always the same: “You know what, Slash? If you wanna leave this train and go do clubs in LA, let’s go.” Or whenever Slash would bring up: “Axl’s costing us a ton of money.” I’d say, “He is costing us money I’ll give you that. If you wanna go play the Whiskey, we can do that. But, remember, we just played in front of 220,000 people at the Maracana Stadium, in Rio, for two nights, and we picked up $7 million. The [outgoing expenses] cost us $500,000 to do that. So we will end up with $6.5 million, where the Whiskey we’re gonna pick up a $250 to $500 guarantee.” But it was what it was. Basically, I was just trying to keep it going as long as I could.’
Nevertheless, with the benefit of a quarter of a century’s hindsight, Doug Goldstein now says he regrets not allowing Slash and Duff to confront Axl more directly with their grievances. ‘I used to say the best thing that I did for the band was I never let Axl know how much the rest of the band hated his fucking guts. Because if he would have known that Slash and Duff and Matt and even Izzy … To Axl, he thinks Izzy quit the band because of the rampant drug use. That wasn’t it at all.’
Now, though, he says, ‘If I had one thing to do over again it would be, I wouldn’t keep the band away from Axl. I thought at the time that I was doing the right thing. But in retrospect clearly I was not. Because they had no idea how much Axl loved them. In retrospect, I should have let them have their disputes heard, because Axl, I protected him from hearing that in fear that we’d all be going home.’
What about the relationship between Slash and Axl?
‘There wasn’t one.’
Did Axl and Slash still connect on any level?
‘I think on the stage they did. But other than that, not really. I have to take some responsibility for that again, because if I were to … who knows? I mean, Axl was so sensitive that if Slash would have said, “You’re being a big fucking cunt”, I think maybe we would have all gone home. I don’t know. Hindsight’s 20/20. But … I really don’t know the answer to that. Had I let them sit in a room and figure out each other’s grievances maybe they would have been able to work things out. Maybe they wouldn’t have. I don’t know.’
Then there was Montreal. A week after the tour had been put on hold while Axl recovered his vocals, the Guns N’ Roses–Metallica tour resumed with a huge show at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal. It was to prove another pivotal moment on the tour. After a strong support bill featuring Motörhead, Faith No More and Ice T’s Body Count, Metallica were three songs into what was shaping up as a typically powerful set when James Hetfield was badly burned by a rogue pyro stage effect. By Hetfield’s account, ‘During “Fade to Black”, I’m up there playing the part, you know, and these coloured flames are going off. I’m a little confused on where I’m supposed to be. I walk forward, I walk back, the pyro guy doesn’t see me and “whoosh” a big coloured flame goes right up under me. I’m burnt – all my arm, my hand completely, down to the bone. The side of my face, hair’s gone. Part of my back … I watched the skin just rising, things going wrong.’
A quick-thinking stagehand dumped a bucket of cold water over Hetfield’s injured arm, which temporarily cooled the injury, but by the time he’d been led backstage, the pain from the second-and third-degree burns was intense. Metallica had no choice but to abandon their set. Guns N’ Roses were at their hotel when a call came asking them to travel to the stadium and cover the rest of Metallica’s show. They agreed immediately and en route Slash discussed with the other musicians what extra material they could play to extend their set. There was, however, no Axl. Guns N’ Roses took the stage two hours later than their regularly scheduled time and the crowd was already tilting dangerously on the edge when Axl cut the planned two-hour set short at the ninety-minute mark, complaining the onstage monitors were not loud enough for him to hear himself sing. He’d already told the baffled crowd, before ‘Double Talkin’ Jive’, that this would be ‘our last show for a long time’. Then, at the end of ‘Civil War’, he growled, ‘Thank you, your money will be refunded, we’re outta here.’ Cue another riot as more than 2000 fans fought with police, resulting in over a dozen injuries. As Metallica’s Lars Ulrich later commented wryly: ‘That was the wrong night to have monitor problems.’
When the tour finally got going again, at the International Raceway in Phoenix, Arizona, on 25 August, it was almost midnight before Axl led the band onstage, announcing to the exhausted crowd, ‘Maybe I was just too fucking bummed-out to get my ass up here any quicker.’ Or as he put it afterwards: ‘Maybe I couldn’t move any faster than I was because it was a bitch.’
Says Doug Goldstein now: ‘Everybody blamed Axl for not getting to the show at an earlier time. But the reality is I called him and just said, “Where are you in the process?” And he said, “What’s up?’ I told him and he said, “Doug, I’ll do the best I can but you know what I go through.” I said, “Right, no, I understand.” People say it was two and a half hours [before Axl got to the show], that’s bullshit. It was more like fifty minutes when he showed up. Maybe an hour and fifteen, tops. And here’s the reality on the Montreal riot. Nobody knows what really transpired.’
He claims that during the break while Axl waited for his voice to repair itself, Lars Ulrich had instructed Metallica’s production manager to have his drum riser moved ‘so that the first fifteen rows of fans can see him. Thereby causing the sites of the pyro cubes to be moved. But he [Lars] doesn’t tell anyone that they’ve change the pyro cubes, and so James is standing in an area which normally is a safe spot for him. And the pyro blows up right on top of him … Axl gets solely blamed for it, and he had fucking nothing to do with it.’
Trapped in the dressing rooms beneath the stadium, the band heard the riot begin. It sounded like a stampede, the ominous thunder of thousands of people laying waste to everything around them. The sky boxes were trashed, the merchandise stalls looted, cars in the parking lot upturned and set alight. There were more than a dozen arrests, with ten rioters and three police officers taken to hospital and damages estimated next morning at half a million dollars. It was St Louis all over again, only this time with less of an excuse.
‘It was a very tense time,’ said Slash in his autobiography in 2007. ‘It was actually a huge issue for me because I’d lost face with everyone in Metallica … when it mattered most it felt like we’d given even less. I couldn’t look James or Lars or anyone from their band in the eye for the rest of the tour.’
It’s a tribute to the toughness of James Hetfield that he was back onstage less than three weeks later, unable to play guitar but patched up and ready to sing. The band had even found time to rehearse a stand-in rhythm player, Metal Church’s John Marshall. The experience wasn’t an entirely comfortable one for Hetfield: his arm was heavily bandaged, moving about was difficult and he wasn’t sure of what to do with himself during the lengthy instrumental passages in some of Metallica’s more epic songs – ‘Maybe I should go off and do some laundry’ – but he was there. It emphasised the apparent gulf in the attitudes of the bands towards their work. What’s more, James Hetfield was the kind of classic alpha-male biker-type dude that Axl sometimes seemed to aspire to be. Axl spent part of the ensuing
break in New York, where one of his management team, Craig Duswalt, met his future wife. As he said: ‘I’m married to Natasha because James Hetfield stood on a flash pot in Montreal …’
Even on the longest and most arduous tours, life went on. Axl, having had his marriage to Erin Everly annulled 18 months before, was in a new and consuming relationship with the model Stephanie Seymour which had begun in the summer of 1991. Seymour would appear in the infamous video for the ‘November Rain’ single that had come out in February 1992, a vast and overblown production that cost $2.1 million to make and that featured Axl ‘marrying’ his girlfriend in a wedding that soon turned into a mini-riot, Slash seen soloing on the edge of a mountain as cameras mounted on helicopters whirled around him in faux epiphany. Given Axl’s attachment to the song the symbolism was heavy; the po-faced nature of the storyline – drawn from a Del James concept – adding to the merriment of the band’s detractors. Indeed, with grunge the new flavour of the day, bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam seemed to be bringing a ground zero approach to everything that had come before, their sights set firmly on what were now perceived to be ridiculous metal trolls like Mötley Crüe and Poison, Def Leppard and Bon Jovi. Ironically, Guns N’ Roses had probably done more to help usher in this new age of rock than any other Eighties artist besides Metallica. But things like the wincingly over-the-top ‘November Rain’ video and Axl Rose’s increasingly self-indulgent demands were eroding their image. Street rock was now epitomised by the frill-free riffs and thrift store chic of grunge. The NME, then still Britain’s most influential music weekly, had gone as far as labelling Nirvana ‘the Guns N’ Roses it’s okay to like’.
Nowhere was this made more clear, symbolically, than on 9 September 1992 when Guns N’ Roses performed ‘November Rain’ live at MTV’s annual Video Music Awards, held that year at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion. Elton John had agreed to join the band on piano and backing vocals and Axl was tremendously excited about it. Nothing must go wrong! The fat had already hit the fire, however, when Nirvana, who opened the show with ‘Lithium’, stole the show by busking a few bars of a completely different song, the as yet unreleased ‘Rape Me’, which the MTV organisers had expressly forbidden them from doing, only segueing into ‘Lithium’ as MTV’s vice-president, Judy McGrath, was about to order the director to cut to a commercial break. It caused a major frisson backstage and set a precedent that made Slash and Duff swearing at the America Music Awards the previous year look asinine by comparison. It also set a defiantly anti-establishment tone Axl would find impossible to match with his much more studied and showbizzy duet with Elton. The comparison between the old, ornately garbed gods and the new, lean and hungry pretenders was there for all to see. Things turned really nasty though when, as Nirvana left the stage, Kurt Cobain spat on the keys of the piano he believed belonged to Axl, but which actually belonged to Elton.
Then, to add insult to injury, Cobain’s wife, Courtney Love, whose taste for confrontation was the equal of Axl’s, called out as he wandered past with Stephanie, ‘Axl! Axl!’ Holding aloft her and Kurt’s baby daughter, Frances Bean. ‘Will you be the godfather of our child?’ Furious, Axl marched over to where she and Cobain were seated and pointed his finger in Kurt’s face. ‘You shut your bitch up,’ he ordered, ‘or I’m taking you down to the pavement!’ The Nirvana entourage burst into laughter. All except for Kurt, who pretended to be affronted, glaring at Courtney and telling her, ‘Shut up, bitch!’ At which his band and friends all burst into laughter again.
In an effort to take the sting out of the situation, Stephanie sweetly asked Courtney, ‘Are you a model?’ But Courtney merely regarded her coldly. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Are you a brain surgeon?’
It didn’t end there, though, and when Nirvana returned to their trailer after the show, waiting for them was a posse from the GN’R camp, including Axl’s bodyguards. Kurt ran into the trailer to check that Frances was untouched, but Nirvana’s bassist, Krist Novoselic, was immediately surrounded. A lot of pushing and cursing ensued, in which Duff made it pretty clear he intended to personally see to Novoselic. But an even larger crowd of industry onlookers began to gather and the situation was eventually resolved without anyone getting hurt. Pissed off but still supremely paranoid, Axl told friends that Love was actually trying to possess him. ‘He believes people are always trying to find a window through to control his energy,’ said a friend. Axl’s way of dealing with it was by ‘controlling the people who have access to him’.
With a sense of irony not even Kurt could have dreamed up, the final show of the Guns N’ Roses–Metallica tour, on 6 October, was at the King Dome in Seattle, the home of grunge’s biggest stars. After it was over, RIP published one of Axl’s most revealing interviews yet. In it, he owned up for the first time to feelings of inadequacy. ‘I’m a difficult person to deal with,’ he admitted, ‘I’m a pain in the ass to understand, and I’ve had my share of problems.’
He didn’t take drugs any more though, he said, even the pot smoking had been almost eradicated. Instead, he was ‘on very specific, high-tuned vitamins’. He was also involved in ‘extensive emotional work to reach certain heights with myself that doing hard drugs would interfere with’, undertaking several detox programmes at once, he said, in order to ‘release trapped toxins that are there because of trauma’. This was one of the reasons why he was so often late onstage, he said. He didn’t mean to ‘inconvenience the crowd’ but he was ‘fighting for my own mental health, survival and peace’.
The work he was doing was ‘so I can do my job’. He had learned that ‘when certain traumas happen to you, your brain releases chemicals that get trapped in the muscles where the trauma occurred. They stay there for your whole life. Then, when you’re fifty years old, you’ve got bad legs or a bent back.’ That wasn’t going to happen to him. ‘But as soon as we release one thing and that damage is gone, some new muscle hurts. That’s not a new injury; it’s a very old injury that, in order to survive, I’ve buried.’ Every day he was on the road he received some form of either ‘muscle therapy’ or ‘kinesiology, acupuncture …’ He wasn’t about ‘escaping through drugs and sex any more,’ he insisted. ‘I’ve reached a point where I can’t escape. There is no escape …’
He also admitted that he was basically the leader of the band now. Matt Sorum, Gilby Clarke, Dizzy Reed, even Duff were ‘all members of this gang’ but ‘the business is basically run by Slash and myself. Then we run whatever it is we’re discussing by Duff and see if he’s cool with it. Guns N’ Roses is basically Slash, Duff, Doug Goldstein and myself.’
Asked what came next for the band, he answered prophetically, ‘We’ve pretty much stayed within the parameters of rock’n’roll music as we know it. I’d like to see if we could add anything to GN’R, possibly bring in a new element that hasn’t been there before … There was a certain focus we all wanted to keep for Illusion I and II, but when I did ‘My World’ everyone dug it and wanted it on the record. By the next record I think we can branch out a lot further … I don’t feel now like I did when I wrote “Estranged”. I’m not as bummed out as I was then. I’ve grown past that.’
While Metallica had made millions of dollars from the co-headline tour with Guns N’ Roses, even though the bands were on an equal split Goldstein found himself in the unenviable position of having to explain to Axl and Slash why GN’R had lost around 80 per cent of their fees in costs associated with going on late plus the untrammelled spending on entertaining themselves. The only remedy was to keep touring and claw it all back. In the event, they would play on for another ten months, heading down through South America and the Pacific Rim, followed by another trek through North America and then Europe – almost 50 shows in all, and ending up in South America once more, for two climactic gigs at the River Plate stadium in Buenos Aires.
There were some magical moments: in Colombia, at the magnificent El Campín stadium in Bogotá, they played ‘November Rain’ in the middle of a tropical storm, steam rising up from the 3
6,000 crowd, as if the very heavens were answering Axl’s call. And then there were some moments everyone wanted to forget. Being ‘smart enough to know that going to Bogotá in ’92 was an arduous task and you’re playing with some guys that are just not above board’, Doug Goldstein had demanded – and got – all the band’s fees upfront. ‘I also hired US Embassy security to complement the eight or so security guys that I already employed.’
The signs were not good, though, when the band’s equipment was delayed leaving Simón Bolívar International Airport in Venezuela, where they had just headlined a sold-out show at the 20,000-capacity Caracas Polyhedron. Booked to perform two shows – a Friday and a Saturday night show in Bogotá – the group arrived at their hotel late on Thursday night, early Friday morning, where an already worried Goldstein was concerned to find the three promoters of the shows sitting in the hotel bar ‘absolutely blasted out of their minds. Between the booze and the coke I couldn’t tell if they were gonna fall down or jump over the fucking bar.’
A noisy stand-off ensued with the Colombian promoters demanding half their money back as the band would only now be able to perform one of their two scheduled shows. Goldstein, however, insisted the band was happy to stay on and play a second show on the Sunday, to make up for the lost date on Friday. He picks up the story.
‘They were like, “No, fuck you! You have to give us the money back!” I said, “No, fuck you. I’m going to bed. Goodnight.” So I go to my room and about four o’clock in the morning they call me.’ They informed Doug that they had taken one of the band’s PR people hostage. ‘Oh, and by the way, the three guys that are promoting the event, one guy owns the television station, one guy owns the radio station and the other guy owns the newspaper. The chances of getting my story out are fucking nil. So I go, “You know what, she’s not that good.” Click. Hung up the phone.’