by Mick Wall
Slash’s third solo album, World on Fire, was released in September 2014. A double album, it gave him another Top 10 hit in several countries, including America, Britain and Germany. Since his stint as an unlikely stand-in as Guns N’ Roses’ bassist had come to an end, Duff had kept himself similarly busy, playing with his low-key side project the Walking Papers and the altogether higher-profile Kings of Chaos, an all-star collective featuring a rotating cast of musicians that included Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, ZZ Top’s frontman, Billy Gibbons, and his own ex-bandmates Matt Sorum, Gilby Clarke and Slash. With the latter in the line-up, the Kings of Chaos were the closest the world were going to get now to a classic Guns N’ Roses reunion.
Over in the GN’R camp, things were altogether quieter after Vegas – suspiciously so, in fact. Concerned that their gravy train was about to grind to a halt, the current line-up kept their own counsel. The exception was the guitarist Ron ‘Bumblefoot’ Thal. Always the square peg in the round hole that was GN’R, in December 2014 Bumblefoot hinted that all might not have been well within that world, and that his future and the band’s future weren’t exactly travelling in the same direction. ‘I’m focusing on my stuff,’ he said at a press conference to announce a new solo album. ‘I’m sure it’s going to be an exciting, interesting year for everybody – for Guns, for me, for everybody. A lot of stokes in the fire … for them, for me. We’ll see what happens in 2015.’ The unspoken message was clear – Bumblefoot was no longer a member of Guns N’ Roses. He just wasn’t going to talk about it. When I contacted him for an interview for this book in January 2016, he was open and friendly, wondering in an email ‘what I can add that isn’t shrouded in unpleasantness, if anything’. But then he became paranoid when I asked if he’d signed a confidentiality agreement as part of his contract with Axl? He emailed me again, writing in block caps: ‘I DON’T WANT TO HURT ANYBODY.’ Adding, ‘I already don’t like the feeling in my gut from all this. I’M OUT.’
But there was a much more seismic event for the future of Guns N’ Roses on the horizon after Thal left, though as with many things related to the on-going Guns N’ Roses soap opera, it was only obvious at the time if you were paying close attention. On 30 December 2014, Slash filed for divorce from his wife of 13 years, Perla Hudson. The pair had split once before, in 2010, but had soon reconciled. This time it was to be permanent. According to legal documents, the pair had separated six months earlier. Soon afterwards, Slash had hooked up with a new girlfriend, Meegan Hodges – the same Meegan Hodges whom Slash had first fallen in love with as a teenager, but who had walked away for the sake of her own sanity when things began to take off in earnest with Guns N’ Roses, and the same Meegan Hodges who had been such a good friend to Erin Everly, and who was about to play a pivotal part in the future of both the guitarist and his old enemy, Axl Rose.
‘Meegan was his nineteen-year-old girlfriend in 1988,’ says Alan Niven. ‘But Meegan bailed on him because it was so fucking crazy. And well done, Meegan, for having a sense of self-preservation and getting her ass out of there. Meegan coming back into his life now was sufficient for him to finally get out of a relationship that he was very unhappy with. But falling in love again with Meegan and having her support he could get out of the relationship.’
Coming back together with Meegan unlocked another door for Slash, says Niven. ‘So Meegan has a best friend who lives in Atlanta. And that best friend is called Erin Everly.’ Suddenly, ‘Erin and Axl are talking again. That was the seed for getting Axl and Slash back together. It was Erin and Meegan.’
The idea of Axl considering a reunion was backed up by Ricky Warwick, the former Almighty singer who now fronted the resurrected Irish rockers Thin Lizzy. When Lizzy supported Guns N’ Roses in 2012, Ricky and Axl had become friends, Warwick told Classic Rock magazine, ‘Axl was quite realistic about the possibility of a reunion, saying: “Who knows?” He had fond memories of it. It was always a case of: “we’ll see where the road takes us.” It was never: “Over my dead body.”’
Unbeknown to the public, by the summer of 2015 Axl, Slash and Duff were already in communication – albeit via their lawyers and business managers. Though according to Alan Niven, who remains close to Slash, ‘Duff did most of the spadework at that stage’, a statement backed up by the band’s old friend Marc Canter, who said the bassist had acted as the main peacemaker. Just as it had been Duff who helped broker the deal with the DVDs a year earlier. ‘Duff was a big part in getting them back together,’ Canter told the Mail. ‘He was working with Axl again and is a good middle man. There was no one else who communicated with Slash and Axl. When Axl was venting about Slash, Duff was able to help him see things through Slash’s eyes.’
Both the Axl-led GN’R and Slash’s solo band were set to release their own live DVDs. Both featured classic Guns N’ Roses songs that required the other party to sign off on. Whereas in the past Axl would most likely never have allowed his old nemesis the privilege, this time he agreed to it seemingly without objection. The thaw had started. All that was going on in private. To the outside world, it was business as usual – that is, no business at all. At least it was until a single tweet set the alley cat amongst the pigeons. On 6 February 2015, Axl Rose celebrated his fifty-third birthday. Anyone watching his Twitter feed closely would have seen a string of birthday greetings from fans around the world, people the singer would have never met. But there was one tweet that stood out:
Happy Birthday @AxlRose iiii];)’
The message was from the very man that Axl had spent the best part of 20 years disparaging and publicly maligning: Slash. The crudely rendered top-hat-and-winking-face ‘emoji’ suggested the message was light-hearted but entirely serious. After two decades of acrimony, could the most damaged friendship in rock’n’roll have finally been repaired? And if it had, what did that mean for the greatest rock’n’roll band of its era? Slash himself wasn’t letting on, at least not in public. Interviewed on the US TV show CBS This Morning in early May, he played his cards close to his chest. Asked about the rumours that he and Axl had finally made up, he chose his words carefully. ‘Well, we haven’t really talked in a long time, but a lot of the tension has dissipated,’ he said. ‘We don’t have all those issues any more. It’s not a lot of controversy. It’s something that is more perpetuated by the media, more than anything.’
When he was asked directly if he wanted the classic Guns N’ Roses line-up to get back together, he was no less cagey. Though what he didn’t say said as much as what he did. ‘I got to be careful what I say there. I mean, if everybody wanted to do it and do it for the right reasons, I think the fans would love it. I think it might be fun at some point to try and do that.’ His erstwhile bandmates were no less forthcoming. In June, Duff was asked for his thoughts on a potential reunion. ‘It could happen and it could not,’ the ever-diplomatic bassist told the US radio station WIND-FM. ‘And I think it would be wonderful, one day, if we reconciled, first and foremost. That alone would be cool.’
Amusingly, some members of the most recent Guns N’ Roses line-up were still holding out that there was a new record in the pipeline. ‘We’re going to be doing stuff next year,’ insisted Richard Fortus, the guitarist on Chinese Democracy, in June 2015. ‘We’re not going to have anything out this year. Next year it should be out and we’ll be touring.’ Whether Fortus was being disingenuous or just misguided wasn’t clear. But at least one of his colleagues had had enough. In July, DJ Ashba confirmed that he was no longer a member of Guns N’ Roses, citing family commitments as well as his renewed work with Mötley Crüe’s bassist, Nikki Sixx, in the latter’s Sixx:A.M. side project as reasons for his departure. ‘It is with a very heavy heart and yet great pride that I announce that I’ve decided to close this chapter of my life and encapsulate the wonderful times that I’ve shared with Guns N’ Roses into fond memories,’ said Ashba in a suitably buttock-clenching press release, before losing control of himself completely. ‘I was blessed with
the opportunity to not only work with one of the most talented bands but also to share the stage with a living legend and a truly gifted human being, Axl Rose. The amount of confidence and trust that Axl placed in me was genuinely heart-warming and truly career-defining.’ The same month, Bumblefoot also made it official. ‘That is the thing I am not prepared to elaborate on,’ he told journalist Gary Graff, when asked why he now wanted out. ‘I think there’s enough clues out there for you to figure out what I’m up to now …’
Everything pointed to the fact that ‘new’ Guns N’ Roses was falling apart, and that it left the door open for a reunion of the original incarnation – or at least a version of it. Slash then fuelled the rumours even further during an interview with a Swedish newspaper, Afronbladet, in August 2015. Asked if he’d made up with Axl, the guitarist finally confirmed the pair were on speaking terms. ‘It was probably way overdue, you know,’ he said. ‘But it’s, you know, very cool at this point … dispel some of that negative energy that was going on for so long.’ He still refused to go the whole nine yards and talk about the likelihood of a reunion, but by now only a blind man couldn’t see a pattern merging. ‘Oh, I couldn’t answer that one,’ he said. ‘Let’s get off the subject because that’s an old one.’
Frank Ferrer, who drummed for the Chinese Democracy line-up, also dropped an oblique hint. ‘I am a member of Guns, and Guns still exists,’ he told the US radio DJ Mitch Lafon. ‘Guns definitely has a lot of moving parts, and there’s a lot of things in the works. And once we’re ready to announce something, the whole world will know. But everything is moving forward.’ Tommy Stinson, who hadn’t played with Guns N’ Roses since their second Vegas residency, also fuelled the speculation. Confirming that he was no longer part of the band, he expressed a desire to see the classic line-up get back together. ‘I hope they do because when you go back to where you started from and just check that out, and feel that for a moment after you’ve gone on and done all these other things, you know, there’s a reward that comes with that, and I had that with The Replacements,’ he told the website The Current. ‘It’s a good thing. And I hope it works out for them, if it actually happens.’
In November, a film crew captured a US reality TV personality, Brandi Glanville, yelling, ‘Guns N’ Roses is coming back, motherfuckers!’ The fact that Glanville was a close friend of Duff’s wife, Susan Holmes-McKagan, prompted a series of cryptic tweets from the Guns N’ Roses camp: ‘Whatever happened to no news is good news? Of course today, everyone is a journalist. If only they could read lips. Surely they’ll read between the lines.’ A few days after that, Nikki Sixx chipped in with his own opinion. Responding to a question on Twitter as to whether Guns N’ Roses were reuniting, he responded, ‘THEY ARE. EVERYBODY KNOWS.’ Given that his other band, Sixx:A.M., featured DJ Ashba on guitar, it was a safe bet that Nikki had inside information. There was the odd red herring. When Duff was spotted in the studio with his old bandmate, Izzy Stradlin, observers suggested they were working up material for a new Guns N’ Roses record. Not true – the pair had connected earlier that summer, but the songs were for Izzy’s latest solo album. ‘We were talking on the phone and Izzy said, “Let’s go record a song,”’ Duff explained. ‘We’ll probably do it some more. We just enjoy making music together and enjoy each other’s company. We’re allowed to do that.’
According to Alan Niven, though, looking on from his mountain in Arizona, where he is now happily ensconced with his beautiful mystic wife, Heather, there was more to it than that. ‘Um … I could not possibly confirm that but if I were to speculate I would say that they realised that they needed an Izzy song or two – if it’s going to be Guns N’ Roses. And if I know Izzy at all, I think Izzy would have gone, “Yeah, OK, I don’t mind writing something and recording with you guys.”’
Would Axl really go for that, though? Just singing over music they’ve already made?
‘Oh, absolutely. It’s not like they haven’t gone through that process before.’
But the biggest sign of a reunion of all was yet to come. In December, the much-anticipated new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, was released in cinemas. To the surprise of US cinemagoers, the film was preceded by an unannounced and unexplained trailer featuring snippets of ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ playing over black-and-white footage of a crowd at a Guns N’ Roses gig. At the same time, the band’s website was redesigned to feature the classic GN’R logo of two pistols wrapped in a rose. All the ‘new’ GN’R merchandising was also replaced by ‘classic’ GN’R merch from the Appetite and Illusion eras. Clearly, something was about to happen.
And then, finally, it did. On 4 January, the worst-kept secret in music was confirmed: Guns N’ Roses were reuniting to headline the Coachella festival in April 2016. ‘Upholding a three-decade tradition of breaking ground, creating trends and forever changing the face of rock’n’roll, Guns N’ Roses announce the most significant and anxiously awaited musical event of this century,’ announced a breathless press release that read like it was put together by committee. And then the rub: ‘Founder Axl Rose and former members Slash and Duff McKagan will regroup to headline the Coachella Music & Arts Festival (April 15–17 & April 22–24) …’
The world immediately began to parse the statement for clues. ‘Founder’ Axl Rose and ‘former members Slash and Duff McKagan’? Did that mean Axl was still in charge and the other two were barely more than hired hands? Would they revisit Appetite in its entirety, or would Slash and Duff be forced to pick up numbers from Chinese Democracy? Most important of all, where were the two men who, to many, were the heart of the band: Izzy Stradlin and Steven Adler. Nobody was saying. With such huge amounts of money at stake – on their last go-round, Guns N’ Roses were being paid around $350,000 per show, according to a report in Billboard. For the reunion shows, though, estimates put their fees at ten times that number, at least – and with even bigger egos at play, the GN’R camp were understandably unwilling to risk any stray comment demolishing this house of cards. Everyone from the band members down to their publicists were in lockdown. Nothing was allowed in, nothing allowed out. As well as the two Coachella shows, the promoters, AEG, had also done a deal for the reunited band to play two arena shows in Las Vegas. According to insiders, they would be paid $26 million for all four shows.
Lots of unexpected people now came forward to snatch some the credit for this astonishing development. Chief among them was Steven Tyler. ‘I did meet Axl in a couple of clubs, a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, and I’d bump into him and I’d have that talk,’ the Aerosmith frontman told the US DJ Howard Stern. ‘I said, “You need to get the fuck back together again soon, because we all miss you.” Same thing someone said to me when [Aerosmith guitarist] Joe [Perry] and I were fighting.’ Amusingly, Tyler’s claims were swiftly shot down by the GN’R camp in a Facebook post: ‘[We] would like to respectfully thank the many people taking credit for our upcoming shows and everything in between. Especially those whom we haven’t spoken to in numerous years …’
Others merely wanted to carp. When Chris Pitman was told he wasn’t going to be involved in the reunion, he tweeted, calling the tour ‘a money grab’. Less than forty-eight hours later, though, he had taken the message down, sparking rumours that maybe he was involved after all. In the event, Pitman had blown any chance he might have had. He was now further out than ever before.
Their appearance at Coachella was unsurprising. The biggest music festival in the US and one of the biggest in the world, Coachella had built a reputation as being the place where bands reunited – and for big money. Guns N’ Roses were no exception. Billboard claimed that the band would earn $7 million for each of their two Coachella appearances, and that it would be followed by a full US tour that would earn them another £3 million a show. ‘You’d have to look at [the promoters] Golden Voice and AEG, sitting there with a festival that last year generated eighty million dollars in profits,’ Tom Zutaut told Classic Rock. ‘Axl Rose has never done anything for
money in his life. Nor has Slash or Duff. But when the entire music world is clamouring to see you, the rush of that experience is hard to resist, especially when AEG is waving all those large wads of money at you. Coachella is considered one of the biggest and most influential festivals in the world … Suddenly it might have felt right for all of them to test the waters.’
In the absence of hard facts, speculation continued to spread like a virus. With that kind of money floating around, it was no wonder the members of GN’R were keeping quiet. Ironically, the first person to break ranks was one who, as far as anyone knew, wasn’t actually involved in the reunion. In late February, Izzy Stradlin finally launched a Twitter account, apparently in response to rumours that he would/wouldn’t (delete as applicable) appear at Coachella. His first tweet clarified his position: ‘At this point in time, I’ve no involvement in the upcoming April 2016 GNR show.’ That didn’t stop the rumour mill from turning, though. Quite the opposite: multiple sources now claimed that the guitarist was offered $40,000–50,000 to appear for a few songs at each of the shows, but that Izzy wanted either a full-time spot in the band or nothing at all. But the splits had already been agreed with experts suggesting Axl would receive as much as 50 per cent of all the revenue generated by the reunion, while Slash and Duff would agree a share of the other 50 per cent. Bringing Izzy in meant diluting everybody’s payday. Maybe next time then …
A few weeks later, however, Steven Adler, happy to accept any deal that saw him back onstage with the band again, seemed to confirm that he would be involved in the upcoming circus when he cancelled a show by his band, Adler’s Appetite, due to take place on 1 April at the legendary Sunset Strip venue the Whisky, promising a ‘big announcement’ was imminent instead. All the signs pointed to a secret Guns N’ Roses reunion warm-up show, with Adler on drums. Things were now approaching fever pitch.