The Rolling Stone interviews

by edited by Jann S. Wenner

  For me, in my life, all kinds of drugs have been useful to me, and they have also definitely been a hindrance to me. So, as far as I’m concerned, the results are not in. Psychedelics showed me a whole other universe, hundreds and millions of universes. So that was an incredibly positive experience. But on the other hand, I can’t take psychedelics and perform as a professional. I might go out onstage and say, “Hey, fuck this, I want to go chase butterflies!”

  Does anyone in the Dead still take psychedelics?

  Oh, yeah. We all touch on them here and there. Mushrooms, things like that. It’s one of those things where every once in a while you want to blow out the pipes. For me, I just like to know they’re available, just because I don’t think there’s anything else in life apart from a near-death experience that shows you how extensive the mind is.

  And as far as the drugs that are dead-enders, like cocaine and heroin and so forth, if you could figure out how to do them without being strung out on them, or without having them completely dominate your personality . . . I mean, if drugs are making your decisions for you, they’re no fucking good. I can say that unequivocally. If you’re far enough into whatever your drug of choice is, then you are a slave to the drug, and the drug isn’t doing you any good. That’s not a good space to be in.

  Was that the case when you were doing heroin?

  Oh, yeah. Sure. I’m an addictive-personality kind of person. I’m sitting here smoking, you know what I mean? And with drugs, the danger is that they run you. Your soul isn’t your own. That’s the drug problem on a personal level.

  How long were you doing heroin?

  Oh, jeez. Well, on and off, I guess, for about eight years. Long enough, you know.

  Has it been difficult for you to leave heroin behind?

  Sure, it’s hard. Yeah, of course it is. But my real problem now is with cigarettes. I’ve been able to quit other drugs, but cigarettes . . . Smoking is one of the only things that’s okay. And in a few years it won’t be okay. They’re closing the door on smoking. So now I’m getting down to where I can only do one or two things anymore. My friends won’t let me take drugs anymore, and I don’t want to scare people anymore. Plus, I definitely have no interest in being an addict. But I’m always hopeful that they’re going to come up with good drugs, healthy drugs, drugs that make you feel good and make you smarter. . . . I still have that desire to change my consciousness, and in the last four years, I’ve gotten real seriously into scuba diving.

  Really?

  Yeah. For me, that satisfies a lot of everything. It’s physical, which is something I have a problem with. I can’t do exercise. I can’t jog. I can’t ride a bicycle. I can’t do any of that shit. And at this stage of my life, I have to do something that’s kind of healthy. And scuba diving is like an invisible workout; you’re not conscious of the work you’re doing. You focus on what’s out there, on the life and the beauty of things, and it’s incredible. So that’s what I do when the Grateful Dead aren’t working—I’m in Hawaii, diving.

  Your father, Joe Garcia, was a musician, wasn’t he?

  Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t get a chance to know him very well. He died when I was five years old, but it’s in the genes, I guess, that thing of being attracted to music. When I was little, we used to go to the Santa Cruz Mountains in the summer, and one of my earliest memories is of having a record, an old 78, and I remember playing it over and over on this wind-up Victrola. This was before they had electricity up there, and I played this record over and over and over, until I think they took it from me and broke it or hid it or something like that. I finally drove everybody completely crazy.

  What instrument did your father play?

  He played woodwinds, clarinet mainly. He was a jazz musician. He had a big band—like a forty-piece orchestra—in the Thirties. The whole deal, with strings, harpist, vocalists. My father’s sister says he was in a movie, some early talkie. So I’ve been trying to track that down, but I don’t know the name of it. Maybe I’ll be able to actually see my father play. I never saw him play with his band, but I remember him playing me to sleep at night. I just barely remember the sound of it. But I’m named after Jerome Kern, that’s how seriously the bug bit my father.

  How did he die?

  He drowned. He was fishing in one of those rivers in California, like the American River. We were on vacation, and I was there on the shore. I actually watched him go under. It was horrible. I was just a little kid, and I didn’t really understand what was going on, but then, of course, my life changed. It was one of those things that afflicted my childhood. I had all my bad luck back then, when I was young and could deal with it.

  Like when you lost your finger?

  Yeah, that happened when I was about five, too. My brother Tiff and I were chopping wood. And I would pick up the pieces of wood, take my hand away, pick up another piece, and boom! It was an accident. My brother felt perfectly awful about it.

  But we were up in the mountains at the time, and my father had to drive to Santa Cruz, maybe about thirty miles, and my mother had my hand all wrapped up in a towel. And I remember it didn’t hurt or anything. It was just a sort of buzzing sensation. I don’t associate any pain with it. For me, the traumatic part of it was after the doctor amputated it, I had this big cast and bandages on it. And they gradually got smaller and smaller, until I was down to like one little bandage. And I thought for sure my finger was under there. I just knew it was. And that was the worst part, when the bandage came off. “Oh, my God, my finger’s gone.” But after that, it was okay, because as a kid, if you have a few little things that make you different, it’s a good score. So I got a lot of mileage out of having a missing finger when I was a kid.

  What did your mother do for a living?

  She was a registered nurse, but after my father died, she took over his bar. He had this little bar right next door to the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, the merchant marines’ union, right at First and Harrison, in San Francisco. It was a daytime bar, a working guy’s bar, so I grew up with all these guys who were sailors. They went out and sailed to the Far East and the Persian Gulf, the Philippines and all that, and they would come and hang out in the bar all day long and talk to me when I was a kid. It was great fun for me.

  I mean, that’s my background. I grew up in a bar. And that was back in the days when the Orient was still the Orient, and it hadn’t been completely Americanized yet. They’d bring back all these weird things. Like one guy had the world’s largest private collection of photographs of square-riggers. He was an old sea captain, and he had a mint-condition 1947 Packard that he parked out front. And he had a huge wardrobe of these beautifully tailored double-breasted suits from the Thirties. And he’d tell these incredible stories. And that was one of the reasons I couldn’t stay in school. [Garcia dropped out of high school after about a year.] School was a little too boring. And these guys also gave me a glimpse into a larger universe that seemed so attractive and fun and, you know, crazy.

  But there were a couple of teachers who had a big impact on you, weren’t there?

  I had a great third-grade teacher, Miss Simon, who was just a peach. She was the first person who made me think it was okay to draw pictures. She’d say, “Oh, that’s lovely,” and she’d have me draw pictures and do murals and all this stuff. As soon as she saw I had some ability, she capitalized on it. She was very encouraging, and it was the first time I heard that the idea of being a creative person was a viable possibility in life. “You mean you can spend all day drawing pictures? Wow! What a great piece of news.”

  She enlarged the world for me, just like the sailors did. I had another good teacher, Dwight Johnson. He’s the guy that turned me into a freak. He was my seventh-grade teacher, and he was a wild guy. He had an old MG TC, you know, beautiful, man. And he also had a Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle, the fastest-accelerating motorcycle at the time. And he was out there. He opened lots and lots of doors. He’s the guy that got me reading deeper than science f
iction. He taught me that ideas are fun.

  You turn fifty next year. How does that feel?

  God, I never thought I’d make it. I didn’t think I’d get to be forty, to tell you the truth. Jeez, I feel like I’m a hundred million years old. Really, it’s amazing. Mostly because it puts all the things I associate with my childhood so far back. The Fifties are now like the way I used to think the Twenties were. They’re like lost in time somewhere back there.

  And I mean, here we are, we’re getting into our fifties, and where are these people who keep coming to our shows coming from? What do they find so fascinating about these middle-aged bastards playing basically the same thing we’ve always played? I mean, what do seventeen-year-olds find fascinating about this? I can’t believe it’s just because they’re interested in picking up on the Sixties, which they missed. Come on, hey, the Sixties were fun, but shit, it’s fun being young, you know, nobody really misses out on that. So what is it about the Nineties in America? There must be a dearth of fun out there in America. Or adventure. Maybe that’s it, maybe we’re just one of the last adventures in America. I don’t know.

  AXL ROSE

  by Kim Neely

  April 2, 1992

  What’s your earliest memory?

  My earliest conscious memory was of a feeling that I’d been here before and that I had a toy gun in my hand. I knew it was a toy gun, and I didn’t know how I knew. That was my first memory. But I’ve done regression therapy all the way back, just about to the point of conception. I kind of know what was going on then.

  Can you talk about what you’ve learned?

  Just that . . . my mom’s pregnancy wasn’t a welcome thing. My mom got a lot of problems out of it, and I was aware of those problems. That would tend to make you real fucking insecure about how the world felt about your ass. My real father was a pretty fucked-up individual. I didn’t care too much for him when I was born. I didn’t like the way he treated my mother. I didn’t like the way he treated me before I was born. So when I came out, I was just wishing the mother-fucker was dead.

  Talking about being conscious of things that happened before you were born might throw a few people.

  I don’t really care, because that’s regression therapy, and if they’ve got a problem with it, they can go fuck themselves. It’s major, and it’s legit, and it all fits together in my life. Everything is stored in your mind. And part of you is aware from very early on and is storing information and reacting. Every time I realize I have a problem with something, and I can finally admit it to myself, then we go, “Okay, now what were the earliest stages?” and we start going back through it.

  What have you figured out?

  I blacked out most of my childhood. I used to have severe nightmares when I was a child. We had bunk beds, and I’d roll out and put my teeth right through my bottom lip—I’d be having some violent nightmare in my bed. I had these for years.

  Do you remember what the nightmares were about?

  No, I only remember one dream. I dreamt I was a horse. You ever see those movies of wild mustangs running and how heavy that looks? I dreamt about that. I dreamt I was caught and then put in the movies. And in some really stupid movies. And it was totally against my will, and I could not handle it, and I freaked. I didn’t understand the dream. Back then, I was like, “I was a horse, they tried to put me in the movies!” You know, all I could think of at the time was Mr. Ed or Francis. But I always remembered that dream, and now I understand it real well. I didn’t know what my nightmares were about. My parents had always said something really tragic and dark and ugly happened. They wouldn’t say what happened—they always just freaked out whenever anything was mentioned about my real father. I wasn’t told I had a real father until I was seventeen. My real father was my stepdad, as far as I knew. But I found some insurance papers, and then I found my mom’s diploma, with the last name Rose. So I was never born Bill Bailey. I was born William Rose. I am W. Rose because William was an asshole.

  Your mother married your biological father when she was in high school?

  Yeah. My mom’s eyes actually turn black whenever it’s brought up how terrible this person was. And what I found out in therapy is, my mother and him weren’t getting along. And he kidnapped me, because someone wasn’t watching me. I remember a needle. I remember getting a shot. And I remember being sexually abused by this man and watching something horrible happen to my mother when she came to get me. I don’t know all the details. But I’ve had the physical reactions of that happening to me. I’ve had problems in my legs and stuff from muscles being damaged then. And I buried it and was a man somehow, ’cause the only way to deal with it was bury the shit. I buried it then to survive—I never accepted it. I got a lot of violent, abusive thoughts toward women out of watching my mom with this man. I was two years old, very impressionable, and saw this. I figured that’s how you treat a woman. And I basically put thoughts together about how sex is power and sex leaves you powerless, and picked up a lot of distorted views that I’ve had to live my life with. No matter what I was trying to be, there was this other thing telling me how it was, because of what I’d seen. Homophobic? I think I’ve got a problem, if my dad fucked me in the ass when I was two. I think I’ve got a problem about it.

  Yeah, I would imagine so. What happened later?

  After I was two, my mom remarried, and I was really upset by that. I thought I was the man in her life or something, because she got away from this man and now she was with me. You know, you’re a baby.

  She was yours.

  Yeah. And then she married someone else, and that bothered me. And this person basically tried to control me and discipline me because of the problems he’d had in his childhood. And then my mom had a daughter. And my stepfather molested her for about twenty years. And beat us. Beat me consistently. I thought these things were normal. I didn’t know my sister was molested until last year. We’ve been working on putting our lives together ever since and supporting each other. Now my sister works with me. She’s very happy, and it’s so nice to see her happy and that we get along. My dad tried to keep us at odds. And he was very successful at some points in our lives.

  Where is your real father?

  His brother called me right around the Stones shows, and I had my brother talk to him. I didn’t talk to him, ’cause I needed to keep that separation. I haven’t heard from him since. But I confronted my mom, and she finally talked to me a bit about it, and they told me that he was dead. It looks pretty much to be true that he is. He was pretty much headed for that anyway. A very unsavory character. I’ve had a problem with not wanting to be him. I had to be macho. I couldn’t allow myself to be a real man, because men were evil, and I didn’t want to be like my father. Around the Stones shows, some paper in L.A. wrote this piece about how “The truth will come out about Axl’s anger,” and they were making it look like I was trying to hide something. I wasn’t trying to hide it. I didn’t know what had happened to me. I wouldn’t allow myself to know. I wouldn’t have been able to handle it.

  How do you deal with knowing now?

  It’s not about going, “Well, I can handle it, I’m a man.” And it’s not about going, “Well, I forgive them now.” You have to reexperience it and mourn what happened to you and grieve for yourself and nurture yourself and put yourself all back together. And it’s a very strange, long chain. Because you find out your mother and father had their problems, and their mother and father had problems, and it goes back through the ages.

  How do you stop the cycle?

  I don’t know. It’s finding some way to break the chain. I’m trying to fix myself and turn around and help others. You can’t really save anyone. You can support them, but they have to save themselves. You know, you can live your life the way you have and just accept it, or you can try to change it. My life still has its extremes and ups and downs, but it is a lot better because of this work. I’m very interested in getting involved with child-abuse organizations. There’s dif
ferent methods of working with children, and I want to support the ones that I believe in.

  Have you talked to anyone yet?

  I’ve gone to one child-abuse center. When I went, the woman said that there was a little boy who wasn’t able to accept things that had happened to him and to deal with it, no matter how many children were around him who’d had the same problems. And apparently he saw something about me and childhood problems, and he said, “Well, Axl had problems, and he’s doing okay.” He started opening up, and he’s doing all right. And that’s more important to me than Guns n’ Roses, more important to me than anything I’ve done so far. Because I can relate to that more than anything. I’ve had such hatred for my father, for women, for . . .