by Mick Wall
Emboldened by the success of the Vegas and Rio shows, ‘new’ Guns N’ Roses dates were announced in March for London, Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham: part of a 14-date summer tour of Europe, scheduled to begin in Nuremberg on 1 June. But then things got weird again and the tour was cancelled in late May because, according to official sources, Buckethead had been ordered to rest after suffering ‘internal haemorrhaging’ of the stomach – despite the fact that he had played a solo show just prior to the announcement. The release of Chinese Democracy was also postponed from the ‘June release’ previously suggested by Doug Goldstein’s office, until autumn at the earliest, pending some unspecified ‘adjustments’. Hopes were still high for an end-of-year release when it was announced that all the cancelled summer shows would not be rescheduled for December.
Vicious rumours circulated amongst the cognoscenti that the real reason the tour had been pulled was because Axl’s recent hair transplants had reportedly left him with ‘big, scarred patches on the back of his head’, while yet another unconfirmed report suggested he was also undergoing liposuction. Certainly, newly taken pictures of the singer suggested he had succumbed to the lure of botox, as had several top-line entertainers of his generation and older. And that those suspiciously lustrous braids he was now sporting were the result, most likely, of a skilfully designed weave.
When the rescheduled dates were also then cancelled – again, just weeks before the tour was due to start in Holland on 2 December – the rumour mill went into overdrive, with several promoters up in arms. Axl, though, put the blame this time firmly at the feet of Doug Goldstein, who was forced to issue a laughable official statement to the effect that he had ‘forgotten’ to tell Axl about the planned tour. The statement read: ‘Following the euphoria of [the band’s appearance at] Rock in Rio, I jumped the gun and arranged a European tour as our plan was to have the new album out this year. Unfortunately, Buckethead’s illness not only stopped the tour, but it slowed down our progress on Chinese Democracy. I am very sorry to disappoint our fans, but I can assure them that this is not what Axl wanted, nor is it “Another page from the Howard Hughes of rock,” as some media will no doubt portray it. I made a plan, and unfortunately it did not work out.’
Speaking now, however, Goldstein explains what really happened. The day after the Rio show in January, he and the band’s London agent, John Jackson, were walking in from the pool just as Axl was walking out. ‘Axl goes, “Guys, I’m having a fucking blast. Can we book a European tour for this summer?” I looked at John. He said, “We can make that happen. When are you looking at, Axl?” He goes, “I don’t know. June to middle of August?” John says, “Certainly. We can do that.” I said, “Axl, do you want to see the routing?” He said, “No, just book it and sell the tickets.” I said, “Okay, you got it.”
‘So I see the routing from John Jackson and I say, “Yeah, looks good. Let’s go.” I called Axl and said, “Hey, we sold all the tickets in, like, ten minutes. The entire European tour is sold out.” So fast forward about four or five months and we’re about three weeks from leaving, and Axl calls me up. I’m on my way home. He goes, “I’m on my computer. What the fuck am I looking at, these European dates?” I said, “Dude, what are you talking about?” He goes, “I never fucking agreed to these.” I go, “Axl, look, I’m walking back in from the Hotel Intercontinental pool in Rio with John Jackson …” Give him the whole rundown. And he goes, “No. Never fucking happened. I’m not going on the tour. It’s all on you. Fuck you.” Click.’
The last-minute cancellation of the European tour in December didn’t prevent Guns N’ Roses making a return appearance in Las Vegas for another New Year’s Eve show, this time at a modest-sized venue called The Joint housed at the Hard Rock Café. Again, it was a sell-out, with jubilant holiday fans packing in to see Axl Rose and the new line-up. One longstanding fan from the band’s very earliest days was refused entry though. His name: Slash. He was in Vegas anyway for New Year’s Eve, so decided to check out the new band – only to be told he was not welcome and would actually be blocked from entering even if he showed up at the door with a ticket. According to Doug Goldstein, forced yet again into explaining the inexplicable, ‘We didn’t know what his intentions were. If nothing else, it would have been a distraction. Axl was really nervous about these shows. We decided on our own not to take any risk.’ According to Slash, ‘I was trying to be discreet but apparently [Doug Goldstein] found out and it was major pandemonium. It was like they sent out an all-points bulletin.’
This was also the last show for the guy who had helped force Slash out of the band in the first place: Paul Huge. Surrounded by lavishly well-paid session stars, all from other well-known bands, Huge was even more out of his depth than he had been when ostensibly replacing Izzy. The guitarist they now brought in to replace him said it all: the 35-year-old Richard Fortus, most recently of Psychedelic Furs off shoot Love Spit Love, who was given the nod for the job by Axl’s new ‘musical director’, Tommy Stinson, an old amigo from way back. Axl issued a brief statement via the official GN’R website in which he emphasised how much Huge had ‘helped us a lot in the writing and the recording of this record and to me was a vital part of not only the band but also my life’. The problem was Paul disliked touring, claimed Axl. ‘We’re fortunate to have found Richard. [He] has this vibe kind of like Izzy but with amazing feel …’ Something, it seemed, Paul Huge had been lacking.
A tour of the Far East followed before the band finally arrived back in London in readiness for the first Guns N’ Roses show in Britain for nine years, headlining the Saturday night bill at the Carling festival in Leeds, on 23 August. As if to remind British fans of exactly what they’d been missing all these years, Axl did not take to the stage with the band until nearly 11 p.m., over an hour past the advertised stage time. When he did so, though, he did it in style, exiting his private dressing room backstage straight into a chauffeur-driven stretch limo in which he was driven to the stage, less than 50 yards away, past the bemused assemblage of other acts that had already appeared that day, including members of The Prodigy, Offspring and Slipknot, as if to say: make way for the king, the PA blasting out ‘Gimme Danger’ by Iggy Pop and The Stooges.
The 60,000-strong Leeds crowd, already teased to its limit, went crazy as the familiar echoing riff to ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ began bouncing around their heads and the video screens began flashing up psychedelic visions of some skull-infested hell. Axl Rose was back, baby. Fuck you very much. For many people in the crowd, though, there was still something missing.
‘Where’s Slash?’ cried one daring soul during ‘Patience’. ‘He’s up my ass, that’s where he is. Go home!’ snapped Axl.
Later into the set, as Axl took his seat at his grand piano for ‘November Rain’, he turned to the crowd and said, ‘Well, it appears that we’re gonna have an interesting evening. You see, the city council and the promoters say we have to, like, end the show.’ He gazed out at the sea of faces, waited for the catcalls to die down, then added, ‘ … they could say maybe I’m inciting a riot. Now I’m not, cos I don’t want anyone to get arrested or anyone to get in trouble or anything like that. But I think we got a good seven or eight fucking songs left at least. And I didn’t fucking come all the way over to fucking England to be told to go back fucking home, by some fucking asshole!’
Axl got what he wanted as most of the 60,000 roared their approval. He wasn’t done yet though. ‘All I’ve got for the last eight years is shit after shit after shit in the fucking press and Axl’s this, Axl’s that. I’m here to play a fucking show and we wanna play! So, if you wanna stay, I wanna stay and we’ll see what happens. Everybody … Nobody try to get in trouble or anything. Try to have a good time.’
It was now past midnight. Earlier in the afternoon, festival officials had witnessed around 500 drunken fans gang together to fight police, knocking down and setting fire to 71 toilet blocks and a Portacabin. Nobody wanted to even guess at the kind of trouble the
crowd might cause now if Axl walked off. As the next song ended, Axl was given the news. ‘We’ve got more time,’ he told the crowd triumphantly. ‘And to whoever is responsible for that I’d like to say thank you.’ The show eventually ended without further incident just before 1 a.m.
Forty-eight hours later, onstage at what was still then known as the London Arena (now the O2), Axl informed the audience that most of the new songs they had played so far on the tour were no longer actually going to appear on Chinese Democracy. He went on to explain that he and the band had, in fact, already completed the recording on a follow-up to Chinese Democracy. ‘By the time the record company release the second group of songs, and we do this all over again, who knows? Maybe I’ll have finished the third album.’ The crowd cheered and cheered, but as was becoming more and more the norm these days, afterwards nobody was quite sure exactly what it was they were supposed to be cheering for. Just the sheer daring of the guy, perhaps? The sheer bad-ass craziness? Or just the fact that he had even turned up at all?
Three days later Guns N’ Roses had been ready to launch their first US tour for a decade with a ‘surprise’ appearance live onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards show. This was an old stomping ground for Axl. The first time he’d done the show with Guns N’ Roses in 1988, they had torn the place apart with a blissfully out-of-control version of ‘Welcome to the Jungle’. Four years later they had given the watching millions a taste of the deliciously over-indulgent theatricality of ‘November Rain’. What more perfect setting could there be to relaunch the new twenty-first-century version of Guns N’ Roses live on national American television?
This time, though, the performance was a disaster. Once again, they had decided to begin with ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, but all it did was serve to underline the contrast between the new band and the old, Axl out of breath as he ran around the stage overcompensating for the fact that he was no longer the svelte snake-hipped gunslinger of the Eighties but an overweight, over-costumed guy who looked like his much angrier father. When the band then launched without introduction into ‘Madagascar’, it became clear that Axl was hurting. That the real surprise to the appearance of the new band was that they believed they could get away with it. As the British rock-writing legend Nick Kent later observed: ‘Rose looked deeply frightened that night and his one new song was another terrible self-pitying dirge.’
Ending with ‘Paradise City’, the last image the dumbfounded crowd had was of a wild-eyed Axl staring out from the stage in typically messianic stance, arms aloft, eyes closed, mouthing the words: ‘Round one.’
The ensuing US tour was doomed from that moment on, with the dates soon collapsing beneath the weight of riots, no-shows, delayed appearances, cancellations, tantrums, ‘health problems’, even the hiring of a new latter-day Suzzy London-type ‘tour psychiatrist’ in order to try to coax Axl onto the stage each night. By the time the tour had reached its first major stop, in New York, on 5 December, for a show at Madison Square Garden, where all 20,000 tickets had sold out the day they went on sale, it found Axl on a high. As he told the crowd that night, ‘I managed to get enough of myself together to do this.’ Afterwards he told everyone he met at the after-show party that this had been ‘as good as the band could get’ and that it was ‘time to cut our losses’ and get on with things again – specifically, the release of a new album.
The following night, however, the demons returned and armed police were called in to quell what threatened to be another riot amongst the 14,000-capacity crowd at First Union Center arena in Philadelphia. Just minutes before the band were scheduled to take to the stage, an announcement was made that the show would have to be cancelled due to the non-appearance of not just Axl this time but the entire band. Ripped-up seats and broken beer bottles rained down on the stage. The next day a spokesman explained the decision by saying they had received a phone call ‘shortly after 11 p.m.’ informing them that an unspecified band member had been ‘taken ill’ and that the group would therefore not be able to perform that night.
Within days shows in Washington, DC, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Sacramento and San Jose were also unceremoniously cancelled. While Axl refused to offer any further excuses or vapid explanations, the promoters, Clear Channel, publicly warned ticket-holders to expect more cancellations. It seemed only a matter of time before the announcement was made that the rest of the tour was pulled – which it eventually was on 11 December.
Privately, some members of the band’s entourage wondered if Axl had ‘lost his nerve’ following the critical lambasting his appearance at the MTV awards show had received. Stinson and Finck were rumoured to have already tendered their resignations, while Buckethead was also said to be seriously out of sorts.
According to the New York Post, the band ‘had been previously frustrated by the delays and Axl’s pathological perfectionism, tardiness and general insanity. Now they’re back in the same boat, and they’ll probably split.’ According to another ‘friend’, ‘Axl has never been so totally alone before – this time he had nobody to blame but himself.’
With the new line-up apparently blowing up in his face, speculation now mounted that Axl was ready to discuss some sort of reunion with the original Guns N’ Roses line-up. This last, though, was pure invention, idle rumours sparked by the fact that Slash, Duff and Matt were now very publicly back together again in LA, while talking privately of working together in some capacity again. There was even speculation that Izzy was involved somewhere in the background. All they needed, it was said, was a singer. Could it be true?
Meanwhile, a story in the Chicago Sun-Times published in January 2003 claimed: ‘Sources say that Rose is very close to checking himself into a psychiatric clinic to deal with “exhaustion” and a number of other emotional problems.’ Quoting another unnamed source, the paper went on: ‘Famous for his outrageousness, the aging rocker lately has been “even more whacked than usual.” The singer himself has openly admitted he’s battling inner demons.’
Axl wasn’t the only one now asking himself serious questions about the future. Doug Goldstein, who’d agreed to sell his Big FD management company – and, with it, his overriding control over Axl and Guns N’ Roses – to the giant Sanctuary Music Group, decided he could take it no longer and announced his decision to ‘retire’ to Hawaii, where he had a wife and son. ‘For two years I’d been flying from LA to Hawaii every Friday night, then back to LA again on the red-eye Monday morning. I just couldn’t do it any more,’ he says now.
In a further twist, he now says that he had to return half the money he’d received from Sanctuary for his company – reportedly in the region of $8 million. ‘That was the condition for getting out of my deal with Sanctuary.’ By then, he says, half of his salary was already going to Sharon Maynard, ‘Axl’s guru in Sedona, at [Sanctuary’s] directive … It got really weird once [Sanctuary] got involved. I mean, really fucking weird. [They] had no clue how to talk to Axl. He was way out of [their] league.’
Be that as it may, the real cause of the problem, Doug confesses, was that he and Axl had never resolved the fallout from the cancelled European tour in 2001, which Axl still maintained was all Doug’s fault. Things between them had never been the same. Once Doug Goldstein ‘retired’ to Hawaii, they never would be again.
Speaking now, more than a decade since the split, Goldstein admits he is still heartbroken. ‘I lived for him every day of my life. And it kind of blows me away that he … I believe that Axl feels like once you’ve abandoned him he turns his back on you. Even if he wanted to let me back into his life, he would stop himself. It’s sad, because him and I, I mean, we loved each other. I was his – for lack of a better definition – I was his big brother. I was there through thick and thin. When he needed me at four o’clock in the morning, I was in the car and up. It probably cost me my first marriage … She honestly thought when I was leaving at four o’clock in the morning that I was going to my girlfriend’s home. She didn’t believe that I would actually must
er up the coffee and energy to get out of bed to go to his fucking call. But I did. And it had zero to do with the money and everything to do with the fact that I loved him to death.
‘I was very fearful that he was going to become part of the 27 Club. Even when he was older than that. I knew that I could separate him from thoughts of suicide. And so for me to not do that, what kind of a friend would I be? For me to drive for two hours from south Orange County to Malibu, it was nothing for me. It certainly beat the alternative. Which was him making some desperate move. If I could thwart that by stepping in, I’d do it seven days a week. Beta would call me crying, ‘He’s gonna kill himself!’ So I’d have to go up to his home and find him lying in bed with a gun in his mouth crying. I’d have to sit there and talk him off the fence. So I wasn’t just a manager, right? I had a brother who was manic-depressive, and suicidal at times – which kind of honed me for my craft or my profession with Axl. Which is, just be there for him. I have other people in my life who have the depressive side of bipolarity. Basically, they don’t really want to harm themselves, they just want to be loved, and know that they’re cared about. So that’s all I’ve ever done with Axl is just love him, and try and be there as a friend and be supportive. I don’t know who serves that role now.’
On 19 June came an even more savage blow to Axl’s plans – when Slash, Duff and Matt played their first official show together in LA, at the El Rey Theatre, with their new singer – the former Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland. The new band even had a name: Velvet Revolver. Following favourable reviews in Rolling Stone and Spin, the new band also had a whopping new multi-million-dollar record deal, with RCA, to go with it. Axl was enraged that his former bandmates were ‘cashing in’ on the Guns N’ Roses name. They would fail, he was sure. That’s what he told Beta and anyone else crazy enough to bring up the subject with him. When he lay in bed at night alone though, he wasn’t so sure.