by Mick Wall
Having called their bluff (the so-called hostage was allowed to go back to her hotel room), Goldstein then had to find a way to keep the band calm. ‘Back in ’92 in Bogotá, it was crazy. The entire day and night, all you hear is machine-gun fire in the hills. We’re all going, why in the fuck are we here, right?’
He was on the phone the morning of the show when suddenly there was a huge boom. ‘A huge bomb outside the hotel rocks back and forth. So Duff, who looks like a fucking ghost he’s been doing so much blow, he comes into my room and he goes, “What the fuck was that?” I go, “What was what?” He goes, “Don’t say what! The fucking bomb!” ‘I say, “What the fuck?” he says, “Fuck you, Doug! The bomb!”
‘I hang up the phone. I go, “Dude, what are you talking about?” He goes, “Doug, fuck you. I’m on my way to the airport. I’m fucking going home, this is crazy!” I go, “Duff, if you go catch a plane before the show, they’re gonna kidnap me until we return all the money. You can’t fucking do that to me.” He goes, “Are you out of your fucking mind, man? I am not fucking staying here!” I go, “Duff, I’m gonna take you back to the Old Compadre …” He’s shaking his head as I’m talking. I go, “One of the first questions I asked you guys [when we met], what do you guys wanna be? You guys collectively said you wanna be the biggest band in the world. You know what? To be the biggest band in the world you have to play the world.”’ He laughs. ‘Duff’s rebuttal was one of the greatest comeback lines ever: “No, no, Doug. I remember that dinner. Axl, Slash: biggest band in the world. Duff: biggest band in North America. Okay for me …”’
Goldstein wasn’t laughing when they arrived at the venue that afternoon. The promoters, still convinced there would only be one show, oversold the event by some 30,000 tickets. ‘So there are kids everywhere outside of the building that have tickets but there’s no seats for them so the fire marshal and the cops aren’t letting them in. The cops are on horseback and they’re wielding these huge wooden sticks, just pounding kids. The band, of course, they have no fucking clue what’s going on.
‘So they’re continuing to play. It was a stadium with no roof. So, like clockwork, Axl hits the beginning notes to “November Rain” and a huge fucking downpour! It was actually really cool. But they looted the streets of Bogotá, the kids. All of the storefronts are being busted down and they’re stealing all this shit and stuff from the shops. Turning over cars. I mean it was a fucking scene … I used to say we were the signature CNN band. Every night there was something on CNN about GN’R …’
They weren’t clear yet, though. At seven o’clock the following morning, there was a fierce pounding on Goldstein’s hotel door. ‘I open the door and it’s some guy with a machine gun. He sticks a machine gun in my chest and hands me a letter. I’m like, uh oh.’ The letter was to inform Goldstein that he had ‘a mandatory meeting with the mayor that day at three o’clock. So in Spanish I tell the guy as soon as Mr Goldstein gets back I’ll let him know.’
He then went to the phone and called his US Embassy security contact and asks him to come to his room, where Goldstein showed him the letter. ‘He goes, “There’s no meeting.” I go, “Right, I’m being kidnapped, right?” He goes, “Absolutely.” Then he goes, “Time to get out of Dodge.”’
Goldstein moved fast to get the band out of the hotel by 7.30 a.m. and straight to the airport. ‘We had to sneak out of town. We were never so happy to leave a place …’
Nobody had time to think about what might have happened, though. Too much real stuff was still going on. Forty-eight hours later they did a show in Santiago, Chile, then two in Buenos Aires, Argentina, then three in Brazil, two in São Paulo, one in Rio. There was a three-week break after that for Christmas and New Year, and by 12 January they were back on the road, starting with three nights at the 42,000-seater Tokyo Dome in Japan.
They said farewell to the horn section and the backing singers to save money and instead played an intimate little middle section of acoustic songs that sometimes sent shivers down the spines of all in attendance – musicians and fans alike. Then there was more bad luck: Duff was knocked unconscious onstage in Sacramento by a bottle full of piss thrown from the audience. Then Gilby broke his arm falling off his motorcycle, while practising for a celebrity race in honour of the TJ Martell Foundation for leukaemia, cancer and AIDS research. It nearly scuppered their planned return for more European dates, but then Izzy agreed to return for that leg of the tour,
‘Izzy and I grew up together and we’re like a family in lots of ways – including having our differences,’ Axl explained. When I later reminded him of that quote, Izzy simply smiled and shook his head. ‘Well, what else could he say? They were kind of in a spot and if I hadn’t agreed to help out they might have missed out on that whole leg of the tour.’ The temporarily reunited band rehearsed together in Tel Aviv then played some sloppy but terrific rock’n’roll right through the rest of the tour. The crowd in Tel Aviv got a nice glimpse of Axl’s sense of humour when he came onstage in a T-shirt that read ‘Guns N’ Moses’. After a show at the Olympic Stadium in Athens, the supermodel Claudia Schiffer joined them afterwards for a party at the Mercedes Club. Then on 26 May they performed in Istanbul, where Axl stopped the show after just three songs to berate the audience for throwing lit fireworks at each other. ‘Someone will get hurt and the band will be forced to leave the stadium,’ he told them. Remarkably, the crowd stopped and the show continued.
Still, though, the dogs of doom kept snapping at their heels. Doug looks back at one huge concert in Germany: ‘It was one of the ones where Gilby had broke his arm and we needed to bring Izzy back. So he was playing and Axl left the stage and Izzy just, he left. He said, “You know what, I’m not fucking doing it. This is crazy.” So I tried to get the wives out on a bus back to the hotel and the local cops literally shut down our access to the exit. So I couldn’t even get the wives out, let alone the band. We got shut in.’
At the end of May Guns N’ Roses headlined the first of two shows to over 50,000 people at the National Bowl in Milton Keynes. After the encore of ‘Paradise City’, Axl threw two dozen red roses into the crowd. For Izzy, ‘it was weird. We toured Israel, Greece, Istanbul, London – I liked that side of it, seeing some places I’d never seen.’ But that was the only thing he liked about it. ‘Money was a big sore point. I did the dates just for salary. I mean, I helped start this band …’
The second show the following day saw the return of Gilby and his wife, who had flown in especially for the occasion. With Gilby’s wrist injury now healed, this was also Izzy’s last show with the band. For the encores they were joined by the Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood and former Hanoi Rocks vocalist and Axl acolyte Mike Monroe. Afterwards, Izzy told me he left without even saying goodbye. ‘I didn’t actually say, “See you” cos they were all fucked up. Duff and these guys, they didn’t even recognise me. It was really bizarre. It was like playing with zombies. Ah, man, it was just horrible. Nobody was laughing any more …’
12
BEAUTIFUL AND FUCKED UP
After one last show in Paris, on 13 July, Guns N’ Roses flew straight to Argentina, where the final show of their world tour was scheduled to take place four days later at the 70,000-capacity River Plate stadium, in Buenos Aires. As if to give them the send-off they had grown accustomed to on tour, the night before the show more than 50 cops from the city’s narcotics division forced their way into Axl’s top-floor penthouse suite, where he was having dinner. They turned the place upside-down looking for drugs. Then, when they couldn’t find any, they left again, without apology. ‘They’d have had better luck trying one of the others’ rooms,’ quipped a crew member. ‘By then, Axl was about the only one not doing drugs on a permanent basis.’
Broadcast live on TV in Argentina and Uruguay, for once the show the next night kicked off promptly at 9.30 p.m. Starting the 21-song set with ‘Nightrain’ and ending it with ‘Paradise City’, by midnight the band were already back at the hotel, where A
xl, Slash and others remained in the bar until six o’clock the following morning, Axl at the piano for some of it, treating the assembled throng to one last tune. They had been on the road for two and a half years, played 192 shows in 27 countries and sold more than seven million tickets while doing so. It would go down in history as one of the last great rock’n’roll tours, a monument to industry and excess, perhaps never to be repeated.
Back in LA the sense of dislocation they’d experienced after returning from the Appetite tour three years before now returned with some force. Even a road rat like Slash confessed he was happy to hang his top hat in the same spot for a while, although he’d sold the Walnut House up in the hills and bought a much bigger new place on Mulholland Drive where he and Renee could begin their married life. ‘We tried to stop the wheels for a second,’ he said, ‘but it was very hard to do …’ It was perhaps a portentous moment when the house was destroyed six months later in the Northridge earthquake.
Axl was back in court a month after the tour ended, this time to testify in the lawsuit brought by Steven Adler against the band after his dismissal. The case centred on the legalities of Adler’s termination agreement and his entitlement to future royalties. Axl’s evidence focused on Adler’s contribution to the Use Your Illusion sessions, and he told the court that the drum track for ‘Civil War’ had to be assembled from more than sixty takes laid down by Steven (he was referring to the session at which Adler admitted he’d been given an opiate blocker and was too out of it to play properly). During the court hearings, Axl described the agreement he and Slash had come up with for splitting royalties in the lead-up to recording Appetite. ‘There was lyrics, melody, music – meaning guitars, bass and drums – and accompaniment and arrangement. And we split each one of those into twenty-five per cent … When we had finished, I had forty-one per cent [of overall takings], and other people had different amounts.’
With the judge calculating that the ‘different amount’ Steven would have received came to roughly 15 per cent, the case came to an abrupt end when, on 24 September, the band agreed to an out-of-court settlement: a one-off payment of roughly $2.5 million to Steven, plus a further agreement giving him 15 per cent of all future Guns N’ Roses royalty payments related to the period he was in the band – i.e. their first two albums. ‘It wasn’t [a] pay-off,’ Steven pointed out. ‘It was what they owed me. And I got all my royalties back.’ Furious, Axl was unable to concede that Steven had played a critical part in the band’s rise to stardom. ‘He didn’t write one goddamn note [of Appetite] but he calls me a selfish dick!’ he fumed. They did not speak again for nearly 15 years.
‘We weren’t lawyers, we were rock’n’rollers,’ said Steven somewhat ruefully in 2001. The money was little consolation – he missed the band and missed his friends and his sad decline began: being young, rich and addicted to drugs was not a good combination. It would take a prison sentence, numerous overdoses (31 trips to the emergency room, he once estimated), two strokes and a heart attack to eventually bring Steven back to some sort of normality.
Duff was back in the city for barely a month when he hit the road again. Still drinking heavily and snorting cocaine round the clock Duff felt unable to do anything other than keep moving. He’d recorded a solo album in a matter of weeks called Believe in Me, a typical rich rock star effort full of guest appearances – Slash, Matt, Dizzy, Gilby, West Arkeen and Teddy Zig Zag, plus Sebastian Bach, Lenny Kravitz and Jeff Beck. It was recorded quickly, with Duff handling much of the instrumentation, and reflected his influences: mostly punk, but also Prince and a little hip hop. Almost nobody bought it. But the album sessions had drawn Guns N’ Roses together long enough for them to lay down the backing track for a cover of Johnny Thunders’ ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms around a Memory’, again with Duff on lead vocals but which was held back, at Axl’s insistence, for Guns N’ Roses.
They still had several punk covers stretching back to the Illusion sessions, which they’d originally planned to issue as an EP or mini-album. Now Gilby went over Izzy’s guitar parts and they threw a few more songs into the mix, mostly old punk rockers that had inspired them at some point along the way: the New York Dolls (‘Human Being’); The Stooges (‘Raw Power’); The Damned and the UK Subs (‘New Rose’ and ‘Down on the Farm’) … In spirit it was like Metallica’s Garage Days EPs, an acknowledgement of their roots that also meant a nice payday for some ageing punks (imagine getting the call from your publisher – ‘Hey, the biggest band in the world want to cover that song you wrote years ago and put it out. Is that okay with you?’).
Most controversial – and perhaps unsurprisingly at the insistence of Axl – was a version of ‘Look at Your Game, Girl’, an almost forgotten acoustic dirge written by America’s most infamous thrill-killer and wannabe muso Charles Manson as part of an album designed to fund his trial defence back in 1970. ‘The song talks about how the girl is insane and playing a mind game. I felt it was ironic that such a song was recorded by someone who should know the inner intricacies of madness,’ explained Axl. But even the band baulked at this, and the recording features only Axl, Dizzy Reed on bongos and guest guitarist Carlos Booy. In all, there was enough for an album rather than an EP, and it emerged in November under the title The Spaghetti Incident?, a band in-joke that referred to evidence given at the Adler lawsuit about a food fight between Axl and Steven, with the Manson song as a ‘hidden’ extra not included on the track listing. The band had been persuaded to keep it after they were reassured that all of Manson’s royalties would be paid over to the family of one of his victims, Wojciech Frykowski.
Although it was a stop-gap and was never claimed to be much more than that by the band, The Spaghetti Incident? debuted at Number 4 on the US album chart and Number 2 in the UK, and sold over 200,000 copies in its first week. Rough and ready but lacking the leering, cheap ferocity of some of the originals, the album nonetheless kept Guns N’ Roses connected to their roots in some small way, however distant they may now have become. As Rolling Stone pointed out in its review: ‘Punk rock is sometimes best read as a vigorous howl of complaint against one’s own powerlessness, but Axl doesn’t quite connect to the punk rock material on Spaghetti as anything but a conduit for pure aggression.’
It was as if they had just enough energy left to get the record out before things really fractured. The intense, often negative energy of the Use Your Illusion era demanded a sign-off, some kind of symbolic marking of what it was and what it had forced its participants to become. It got one, and it almost cost Duff McKagan his life. As soon as he heard that Duff had booked a solo tour to begin almost as soon as the Use Your Illusion shows were complete, Axl called the bassist. ‘Are you fucking crazy?’ he asked. ‘You’re insane to even think about it.’
The truth was, Duff felt that if he stayed in LA he was as good as surrendering to his cocaine addiction, so readily available was the drug and so empty were his days. He told himself that at least on the road he had a chance to keep ahead of it all. It was an addict’s logic. There was a price to be paid for the years of drinking and drugging and partying and for Duff the bill was about to come in. He kept the coke under control while he spun through Europe yet again, but the booze was running riot, he was in end-stage alcoholism, the room next door to death. He deluded himself into thinking that switching from vodka to wine would keep the lid on it all, but soon he was drinking ten bottles a day. He wasn’t eating and his body began to bloat. After the tour he flew back to LA, where ‘I felt sicker than ever. I kept getting nosebleeds, I had sores …’
He picked up the phone and cancelled a planned tour to Australia. Instead he flew home to Seattle, where he’d bought a house on Lake Washington. He’d barely even seen the place, but felt drawn to go. On the same flight from LAX was Kurt Cobain. They sat talking: ‘He had just skipped out of a rehab facility. We were both fucked up. We ended up getting seats next to each other and talking the whole way, but we didn’t delve into certain things. I was in my hell, he was
in his, and we both seemed to understand,’ Duff ruminated in his autobiography. At the airport in Seattle he almost asked Kurt to come over to his place and stay for a while, but they lost each other in the queue somewhere and so Duff went home alone. A few days later, Doug Goldstein called to tell him that Cobain had committed suicide at his own place on the lake. Duff had been one of the last people to speak to him.
A month later, on the morning of 10 May, Duff woke up in pain – not the normal backwash from booze and coke, but something far worse, the kind of pain that made it impossible to move as far as the phone to call 911. He was dying. He felt it. But all he could do was lie there on the bed waiting. All that saved him was chance: a childhood friend stopped by to say hello and found him in the bedroom. Somehow he got him out of the house and a few doors down the street to where Duff’s long-term doctor had his offices. He was given two shots of Demerol by the doctor, then a shot of morphine in the ambulance. But none of it touched the pain. Duff’s pancreas had swollen so much that it had burst, spilling digestive enzymes into his abdomen. The powerful stomach acids burning holes through his tissue and organs caused the pain. His only chance was surgery to repair the tear, and a probable lifetime of dialysis. Once again, he got lucky. The surgery saved him. He stayed in hospital for a couple of weeks and when he got out, he started drinking again – this time water.
‘For the first few months I still had the shakes and I didn’t know anybody sober,’ he later reported. ‘So I rode my mountain bike and first of all it was like self-flagellation, I was beating myself for failing my mom and some of my friends. But it also started to make me feel whole, I was drinking water for the first time, I literally didn’t drink water for ten years. I started eating healthy food, and reading books …’