by Mick Wall
Backstage after the show, Axl went ballistic at Merck Mercuriadis – who bravely offered to resign. Axl stormed off to his limo, which carried him at speed to the private plane that was waiting to fly him back to London. Returning to his Knightsbridge hotel, the Mandarin Oriental, he went straight to the bar, where he met Lars Ulrich, whose band, Metallica, had headlined Download the previous night, though to a spectacularly different crowd.
The summer 2006 tour never recovered. At the Paris show on 20 June they came on almost two and a half hours late. Seven days later Axl was arrested in Stockholm after an early-morning fracas at the band’s hotel, during which he fought with a security guard, biting his leg like a rabid dog, before the police arrived and arrested him. Charged with damaging property, assaulting a security guard and threatening police in the squad car on the way to the station, as one of the arresting officers, Fredrik Nylén, told local journalists, ‘He was aggressive and acting out’, adding pointedly that in Sweden ‘threatening a police officer is punishable by jail time’. After admitting the charges, Axl was fined 40,000 kronor (approximately £3000) and released 12 hours later. He was also ordered to pay 10,000 kronor (approximately £750) in damages to the security guard, who had been taken to hospital with his injuries. Issuing a press statement, Axl said, ‘We had a great gig in Stockholm and I am not going to let this incident spoil that. My assistant Beta and I were talking in the lobby of the hotel when the security started to give us a hard time. My only concern was to make sure she was okay.’
The final show of the tour, the second of two at London’s Wembley Arena, at the end of July, ended early after Axl collapsed at the side of the stage before the encores. Sebastian Bach stepped in for him. According to the official press release, Axl had become ‘ill after performing two concerts’ the night before: the first at Wembley and the second an unannounced semi-acoustic at London’s Cuckoo Club, which had begun at 4 a.m. The fact that Axl had been ‘partying’ with Lars Ulrich for several hours after the Cuckoo Club probably hadn’t helped either.
From there the tour continued on to America, where it took an even steeper nosedive. Still coming on way behind schedule, Axl came up with a new saying: ‘This isn’t McDonald’s or Burger King. It isn’t “Have it your way.”’ Sebastian Bach was still putting in his nightly appearances on ‘My Michelle’ and Izzy was said to be lined up for a handful of dates, too, but Guns N’ Roses were now viewed as more of a freak show than one of the last giants of rock. Internet speculation amongst even diehard fans was now centred on bets about what time they would, or wouldn’t, arrive on stage; how many numbers they would get to play before Axl stormed off; when the tour would eventually be cancelled.
Looking for someone to blame for this latest embarrassment, Axl fired Merck Mercuriadis, a few weeks before Christmas, releasing a statement via the internet. Under the heading, ‘An open letter to our fans from Axl’, dated Thursday, 14 December, 2006, he began by announcing the cancellation of the band’s January 2007 touring schedule, to save ‘valuable time needed by the band and record company for the proper setup and release of … Chinese Democracy’. Uh huh. He went on: ‘To say the making of this album has been an unbearably long and incomprehensible journey would be an understatement. Overcoming the endless and seemingly insane amount of obstacles faced by all involved, notwithstanding the emotional challenges endured by everyone – the fans, the band, our road crew and business team – has at many times seemed like a bad dream in which one wakes up only to find that they are still in the nightmare. Unfortunately, this time it has been played out for over a decade in real life.’ Pinpointing ‘on-going, behind-the-scenes triumphs and casualties’ and ‘various legal issues’, Axl said it was ‘easy for people to point out how others [would] have handled similar situations’ but that ‘without full knowledge of the various dynamics and circumstances involved, these types of comments or commentary are just uninformed, disassociated, generally useless – and often hindering – speculation’. Problems that had been ‘compounded by an overall sense of a lack of respect by management’ had also now resulted ‘in the end of both Guns’ and my managerial involvement with Merck Mercuriadis’.
At which point he actually gave a release date for the album: 6 March 2007. Pending ‘certain minor – and I do mean minor – additions, as well as contract negotiations’. He concluded: ‘We thank you for your patience … We do hope you can hold on just a bit longer, and if not, please take a break and we’ll be more than glad – if you so choose – to see you again later. All the best to each and every one of you over this holiday season, thank you and God bless. Sincerely, Axl Rose.’
Watching all this from afar was Doug Goldstein, now on the outs but still to his mind a concerned party. ‘Everybody thinks Axl’s this big, bad guy, who doesn’t care about his fans,’ he says now. ‘I couldn’t disagree more strongly. I believe, after my experiences of travelling with multitudes of bands, he has the most heightened fear of failure of anybody I’ve ever met in my life. He would much rather just cancel a show than give a mediocre performance. He cares so much about putting on the best show that his pre-show routine is about four hours. It’s the masseuse on the road, and the chiropractor-slash-acupuncturist, it’s the vocal warm-ups, it’s the vocal warm-downs. You know, he has to have a steak. I mean, all of these things that the little guy Hans von Leden taught him, to be the best possible singer out there, he goes through all of those kind of pre-conditioned exercises to get him in the best possible shape. But during that process if he doesn’t hit the mark, as far as he’s concerned, he starts it again.’
There followed an extended period when various big-name managers were sounded out for the job. Initially, the post was given to Doc McGhee, famously the manager who had steered both Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi to success in the Eighties, and now managed Kiss, Hootie & The Blowfish and several others. Few inside the biz doubted that Doc was merely positioning himself for the inevitable reunion that would finally come, if not now then someday – for sure. When Axl began to get the same feeling, on a flight to Japan, where Doc attempted to question him at length about what his problems with Slash and the guys might be exactly, suddenly he was looking for a new manager again. Years later, Doc would look back and laughingly tell friends how he ‘got sick and tired of the fact I could only speak to Beta. That whenever a meeting was taking place she was always there. That whenever I had managed to get Axl’s direct phone number she had changed it.’
Next came Irving Azoff, one of the most powerful men in the music business. Irving had managed The Eagles, been the chairman of MCA Records and then started his own label, Giant, under the aegis of Warner Bros. Now he was back in management, overseeing the careers of Christine Aguilera, Maroon 5, Jon Bon Jovi and several others. After The Eagles had been apart for nearly 15 years, famously telling the press that hell would freeze over before they reformed, it was wily, brilliant Irving Azoff who talked them into doing just that in 1994 with the squillion-dollar Hell Freezes Over tour and accompanying live double album. Irving was rock biz royalty. If anybody could handle Axl Rose, get him to do the right thing, it was Irving Azoff, surely?
And yet, to no one’s great surprise, except perhaps Irving’s, Chinese Democracy wasn’t released on 6 March 2007, nor on any other date that year. This time, however, there were no ‘open letters’ explaining why. Apparently, even Axl Rose had finally run out of excuses. A tour of Japan, scheduled for April, was ‘postponed’ two weeks before it was due to start after Tommy Stinson reportedly fell down a flight of stairs. In the official press release, Stinson was quoted as saying, ‘I feel so bad right now. I accidentally fell down a flight of stairs. I put my hand down to break my fall and heard a loud pop. The next morning my hand looked like a balloon. I went to see my doctor and while the good news is that it’s not broken, the bad news is it’s severely sprained and I may have done some ligament damage.’ He added, with feeling, ‘We had our last rehearsal a few days ago and shipped the gear to Japan and then thi
s happened. I feel horrible. We’d like to sincerely thank our fans worldwide for their patience and support.’
A month later a tour to South Africa was cancelled for the same reason. The tours of Australia and New Zealand that had been scheduled were also then cancelled. Some sprain. Next came talk of Velvet Revolver and the ‘new’ Guns N’ Roses actually doing a co-headline tour, with a temporarily reformed Stone Temple Pilots opening the show. Weiland would perform a brief set with the Pilots each night, before resuming with Velvet Revolver. A neat idea that also left the door open for a short set in which Slash, Duff and Matt hooked up with Axl and the guitarists and keyboardists from his band. Slash was even quoted on MTV in Brazil as saying, ‘It would be a good idea to get, just for a couple of shows, the original STP and the original Guns N’ Roses just for the fun of it.’ Still, insiders said it was never gonna happen. But then, when Slash said Velvet Revolver had recently agreed not to perform any GN’R songs in their set, even the most hardened cynics began to take the idea seriously. The fact that both bands had new albums ready to pop later that year – Libertad and Chinese Democracy – had promoters wading in with sky-high offers for such a tour. It would be like the GN’R–Metallica mega-tour of the early Nineties, only even more profitable.
Word round the campfire was that Axl was on the point of agreeing. Then he pulled back and did a 180-degree turn at the last minute. Shrewdly, Axl had foreseen the outcome of such a high-profile pairing – and that Slash and the other guys would most likely be the ones who came out on top in the comparison stakes. And, worse, how the clamour for the original line-up to get back together permanently would be hugely enhanced. Axl was damned if he was about to throw away a decade’s worth of work on Chinese Democracy, or the ultimate control he now had over Guns N’ Roses, just to make Slash and Duff happy. Instead, by the time Libertad was released in July, Guns N’ Roses had already taken off for shows in Mexico, followed by the rescheduled tours of Australia and the Far East.
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One show Axl Rose had pointedly declined to put it an appearance at was the one Steven Adler had decided to stage at Hollywood’s Key Club on 28 July, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the release of Appetite for Destruction. But then Steven had already announced that he expected both Slash and Duff and Izzy to make an appearance, and again Axl wasn’t going to be ambushed into getting up on a stage with them. Tracii Guns, though not actually having been part of the Appetite album, was also scheduled to appear, and Steven boasted on the Key Club’s website: ‘I’ll be down there with my band and Slash, Izzy and Duff will be there too. It’s gonna be great.’ Although he knew there was almost no chance of Axl being there, he cheerfully added that he had recently been discussing a reunion with the singer: ‘Axl and I spoke to each other in Las Vegas recently, and I know there’s a chance. It’s just too big. Whatever the Stones make when they play, we’d triple it. It’d be ridiculous not to do it. He can’t be that goofy.’
Come the big night, Izzy and Duff were there as promised to join Steven on stage for a blast through a few numbers. Slash was there, too, but not to play. He just wanted to watch, he said. ‘I believe I made it this far for some reason,’ Steven declared triumphantly after the show. ‘I want to finish what we started, and with the love and support I got from those guys, I think we can [reunite]. I’m gonna leave it up to Axl. That’s gonna be Axl’s call, and I love Axl and I know he’ll make the right call.’ Slash, though, had a more pragmatic take on the situation. ‘I went down there for a minute to say hi to Steven. What happened was Steven has finally come out of that sort of haze that he’s been in for the last seventeen years. I was sort of instrumental in getting him out of the place he was in, into a little bit more sober kind of environment. So I’ve been hanging out with him and supporting him and stuff. He had that gig that was about to happen, and I’m really jazzed that he’s gotten back on the drums and he’s gotten ambitious again and he’s gonna go out and play.’ But that didn’t mean the old gang was about to burst back in town, though. ‘Steven’s just an excitable guy and he meant well when he said it. But he said that there was gonna be this reunion, that I was gonna be there and Duff and Izzy and Axl possibly, and that just fuelled that already rapid-fire kind of Guns N’ Roses rumours that go on. Once I started getting phone calls and emails from all over the world about this gig, I said, “You know what? I can’t support it as such cos that’s not what it is.” So I went down there but I didn’t wanna get up and play because I didn’t wanna fuel that any further … Duff got up and played, and Izzy got up and played, and it was what it was, but I don’t see any reunion happening for real.’
With a release date for Chinese Democracy now no longer even being speculated on, by the start of 2008 most serious people had stopped even asking about it, demoting it to the same category in their minds as those other great ‘lost’ albums in the past, like The Who’s Lifehouse, or Smile by The Beach Boys. But not even those had inspired more bare-knuckled hammering. The album’s incessant delays, middling dramatic sub-plots and bloated, eight-figure budget had reduced the project to an industry punchline.
And then, on 23 November that year – miracle of miracles, and to almost no fanfare whatsoever, not even a video or a tour – Chinese Democracy was finally released. Distributed exclusively through the US electronics retail giant Best Buy – a deal struck by Irving Azoff similar to the one AC/DC struck with Wal-Mart the same year for their album Black Ice, and intended as a shrewd means of recouping at least some of the eye-watering $13 million that had been the estimated cost of the album. It was reported that Best Buy ordered 1.3 million copies up front in anticipation of a frenzied assault by GN’R fans.
The album debuted at Number 3 in the US and Number 2 in the UK, and made the Top 5 in eight other countries, selling over a million copies worldwide in the first week alone – impressive numbers in an era when physical CD and vinyl sales had declined drastically. Critically, opinions were generally favourable, too, with outlets like Spin and Allmusic awarding decidedly positive reviews. Few, though, were as effusive as long-time GN’R watcher David Fricke, who gushed in Rolling Stone, ‘The first Guns N’ Roses album of new, original songs since the first Bush administration is a great, audacious, unhinged and uncompromising hard rock record. In other words, it sounds a lot like the Guns N’ Roses you know.’ While Robert Christgau, the godfather of American music critics wrote, ‘This effort isn’t just pleasurable artistically. It’s touching on a human level. Noble, even. I didn’t think he had it in him.’
Note that ‘he’, as opposed to the ‘they’ a real band would have deserved. At the same time, the detractors were many, with the Village Voice calling the album ‘a hilariously painstaking attempt to synthesise that lightning, a lost cause taken to delirious extremes, a fascinating catastrophe inspiring equal parts awe and pity’. Others lambasted the album for a perceived excess of pretence and absence of heart. The acclaimed American biographer Stephen Davis described Chinese Democracy as simply ‘the worst album ever’. You had to wonder at such extreme views, though. The truth was, had Axl released Chinese Democracy within three or four years of the Use Your Illusion releases, it would have been hailed as a mature and sharply focused follow-up to the meandering over-indulgence of its evil-twin predecessors. Drawing deeply from its industrial, pop and classic rock influences and spangled with flourishes of keyboards, electronica and even flamenco, Chinese Democracy fitted awkwardly into the GN’R canon, no doubt, but only in that it is really an Axl Rose solo album in all but name. And, as such, was a masterwork of its type, towering over the Velvet Revolver albums, barely able to register such specs of dust as whatever Loaded or the Juju Hounds may have been up to these long gone years, it soared so much higher than they.
Thematically, Axl had tapped back into the jagged vulnerability, sneering resentment and embattled paranoia that dominated Use Your Illusion. Mighty salvos like ‘Riad n’ the Bedouins’ and ‘Scraped’ deliberately harked back to the pugnacity and wild a
bandon of the band’s early works, though what Axl meant exactly with lines like ‘Blame it on the Falun Gong’, from the aggressively romping title track, was anybody’s guess. Described as ‘a Chinese spiritual practice that combines meditation and qigong exercises with a moral philosophy centered on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion and forbearance’, it seems an odd addition to verses otherwise powered by words like ‘hate’, ‘iron fist’, ‘hell’ and ‘masturbation’. Perhaps Axl was merely applying a bit of yin to his yang?
It hardly mattered. Not when placed in the context of meatier fare such as ‘There was a Time’, with a breathtaking build-up that eclipses the song’s hopelessly puerile acronym, and the poppy tunefulness of ‘Catcher in the Rye’ revealed a provocative cinematic vision tailor-made for the new generation of ear-bud listeners.
Nevertheless Chinese Democracy was confounding for those who had been chomping at the bit to pass judgement on it; for many, it became a creeper album that divulged new secrets with each progressive listen. For others it was a mystery wrapped within a mania. Compared to historically similar overworked classics it yielded no obvious hits. When, in 1976, Fleetwood Mac had entered the studio with unlimited time and money at their disposal they emerged a year later with Rumours, one of the bestselling records in history.
This, though, was different. Notoriously averse to speaking with the media, Axl granted an interview to Jonathan Cohen of Billboard magazine in February 2009 in which the singer explained the album’s withering delay with a now familiar list of excuses. ‘There aren’t too many issues of the hundreds [we ran into] that happened as quickly as anyone would have preferred, from building my studio; finding the right players; never did find a producer; still don’t have real record company involvement or support; to getting it out and mixed and mastered.’