All anybody talks about with Axl anymore is his strange new appearance, but it is hard to get past the unusual impression he makes. To me he looks like he’s wearing an Axl Rose mask. He looks like a man I saw eating by himself at a truck stop in Monteagle, Tennessee, at two o’clock in the morning about twelve years ago. He looks increasingly like the albino reggae legend Yellowman. His mane evokes a gathering of strawberry-red intricately braided hempen fibers, the sharply twisted ends of which have been punched, individually, a half inch into his scalp. His chest hair is the color of a new penny. With the wasp-man sunglasses and the braids and the goatee, he reminds one of the monster in Predator, or of that monster’s wife on its home planet. When he first came onto the scene, he often looked, in photographs, like a beautiful, slender, redheaded twenty-year-old girl. Now he has thickened through the middle—muscly thickness, not the lard-ass thickness of some years back. He grabs his package tightly, and his package is huge. Only reporting. Now he plants his feet apart. “You know where you are?” he asks, and we bellow that we do, we do know, but he tells us anyway. “You’re in the jungle, baby,” he says, and then he tells us that we are going to die.
He must be pleased, not only at the extreme way that we are freaking out to see him but also at the age range on view: there are hipsters who were probably born around the time Appetite got released, all the way up to aging heads who’ve handed in their giant rock hair for grizzled rattails, with plenty of microgenerations in between. But why should I even find this worth remarking? The readers of Teen magazine, less than one year ago, put him at number two (behind “Grandparents”) on the list of the “100 Coolest Old People” … Axl Rose, who hasn’t released a legitimate recording in thirteen years and who, during that time, turned into an almost Howard Hughes–like character—only ordering in, transmitting sporadic promises that a new album, titled Chinese Democracy, was about to drop, making occasional startling appearances at sporting events and fashion shows, stuff like that—looking a little feral, a little lost, looking not unlike a man who’s been given his first day’s unsupervised leave from a state facility. Now he has returned. The guitarists dig in, the drummer starts his I-Am-BUil-DINg-UP-TO-THE!-VERSE! pounding section, and at the risk of revealing certain weaknesses of taste on my own part, I have to say, the sinister perfection of that opening riff has aged not a day.
There’s only one thing to do, and you can feel everybody doing it: comparing this with the MTV thing in 2002. If you’ve seen that, you may find a recounting here of its grotesqueries tedious, but to that I say, never forget. About the guitar player Buckethead. About the other guitar player. About Axl’s billowing tentlike football jersey or the heartbreaking way he aborted his snaky slide-foot dance after only a few seconds on the stage projection, like, “You wanna see my snaky dance? Here, I’ll do my snaky dance. Oh, no, I think I just had a small stroke. Run away.” The audible gasp for oxygen on the second “knees” in Sh-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na knees, kn[gasp!]ees. The running and singing that came more and more to resemble stumbling and squawking as the interminable minutes groaned by. The constant, geriatric-seeming messing with the earpiece monitor.
My point is, it’s different tonight. For one thing, these guys can handle or choose to handle Slash’s parts. They aren’t fake-booking, like happened on MTV. Buckethead has been replaced by a guy called Bumblefoot, and Bumblefoot can shred. So can Robin Finck, formerly of Nine Inch Nails. Everything’s note for note. And although we could get into the whole problem of virtuosity as it applies to popular music—namely, that for some reason people who can play anything will, nine times out of ten, when asked to make something up, play something terrible—still, if you mean to replace your entire band one instrument at a time and tell them, “Do it like this,” you’ll be wanting to find some monster players.
The whole arc of the show has this very straightforward plot. Crudity is in the service of truth-telling here: it’s a battle between the dissonance of seeing all these guys who were not in Guns N’ Roses jumping around with Axl and playing Guns N’ Roses songs—between the off-putting and even disturbing uncanny dissonance of that—and the enduring qualities of the songs themselves. The outcome will determine whether tonight was badass or “Sort of sad, but hey, it’s Axl.” For what it’s worth, I thought he won. His voice is back, for starters. He was inhabiting the notes. And his dancing—I don’t quite know how else to say this. It has matured. From the beginning, he’s been the only indispensable white male rock dancer of his generation, the only one worth imitating in mockery. I consider the moment in the “Patience” video when he does the slow-motion snaky slide-foot dance while letting his hands float down as if they were feathers in a draftless room—one fleeting near-pause in their descent for each note that Slash emphasizes in his transition to the coda—the greatest white male rock dance moment of the video age. What Axl does is lovely, I’m sorry. If I could, I would be doing that as I walk to the store. I would wake up and dance every morning like William Byrd of Westover, and that would be my dance. And while I cannot say Axl is dancing as well tonight as he used to, that so fluidly are his heels gliding out and away from his center they look each to have been tapped with a wand that absolved them of resistance and weight, and although he does at particular moments remind one of one’s wasted redneck uncle trying to “do his Axl Rose” after a Super Bowl party, he is nevertheless acquitting himself honorably. He is doing “dammit just dropped a bowling ball on my foot spin-with-mike-stand” dance; he is doing “prance sideways with mike stand like an attacking staff-wielding ritual warrior” between-verses dance. And after each line he is gazing at the crowd with those strangely startled yet fearless eyes, as though we had just surprised him in his den, tearing into some carrion.
3.
Conversation with wife, Mariana, June 27, 2006:
ME: Oh, my God.
HER: What?
ME: Axl just bit a security guard’s leg in Sweden. He’s in jail.
HER: Is that gonna affect your interview with him?
ME: No, I don’t think they ever really considered letting me talk to him … Biting somebody on the leg, though—it forces you to picture him in such a, like a, disgraced position.
HER: Does anybody help Axl when that happens?
4.
I’d been shuffling around a surprisingly pretty, sunny, newly renovated downtown Lafayette for a couple of days, scraping at whatever I could find. I saw the house where he grew up. I looked at his old yearbook pictures in the public library. Everyone had his or her Axl story. He stole a TV from that house there. Here’s where he tried to ride his skateboard on the back of a car and fell and got road rash all up his arm. He came out of this motel with a half-naked woman and some older guys were looking at her and one of ’em threw down a cigarette, not meaning anything by it, but Axl freaked out and flipped ’em off and they beat the crap out of him. Hard to document any of this stuff. Still, enough Wanted On Warrant reports exist for Axl’s Indiana years to lend credence to the claim that the city cops and county troopers pretty much felt justified, and technically speaking were justified, in picking him up and hassling him whenever they spotted him out. One doubts he left the house much that they didn’t spot him, what with the long, fine, flowing red hair. Not always fun to be Axl.
I went to the city cops. They’ve mellowed with the town. In fact, they were friendly. They found and processed the negatives of some never-before-seen mug shots for me, from ’80 and ’82, the former of which (where he’s only eighteen) is an unknown American masterpiece of the saddest, crappiest kind. The ladies in the records department rummaged some and came back with the report connected to that picture, as well, which I’d never seen mentioned in any of the bios or online or anything. It’s written by an officer signing himself “1–4.” I took it back to the Holiday Inn and spent the rest of the afternoon reading. Call it the Sheidler Incident. It begins:
FULL NAME: BAILEY, WILLIAM BRUCE …
ALIASES: BILL BAI
LEY …
CURRENT PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT: SELF EMPLOYED—BAND
CHARGE: W[ANTED]O[N]W[ARRANT] BATTERY …
AGE: 18; HEIGHT: 5'9" WEIGHT: 149; HAIR: RED; EYES: GRN; BUILD: SLENDER; COMPLEXION: FAIR …
Here’s how it went down that day—“allegedly” (I’ll cherry-pick the good bits for you). A little kid named Scott Sheidler was riding his bike in front of the house of an older kid named Dana Gregory. Scott made skid marks on the sidewalk. Dana Gregory ran out, picked Scott up under the armpits, kicked over his bike, and ordered the boy TO GET ON HIS HANDS AND KNEES AND SCRUB THE SKID MARKS OFF THE SIDEWALK. The kid went squealing to his old man, Tom Sheidler. Tom Sheidler went to young Dana Gregory and asked if it was true, what Scotty had said. Dana Gregory said, “YES AND I’M GOING TO BEAT THE FUCK OUT OF YOU.” The mom, Marleen, then ran up to the scene and began to shout. Around the same time, BILL BAILEY appeared, red, green, slender, and fair. And here I need to let the report take over, if only temporarily, as I can’t begin to simulate its succinctness or authority:
M. Sheidler stated that BAILEY was also arguing with SHEIDLER and that he was using the “F” WORD in front of her kids. M. SHEIDLER stated that she went up to BAILEY and pointed her finger at BAILEY and told him not to use the “F” WORD in front of her kids. M. SHEIDLER stated that BAILEY, who has a SPLINT ON HIS ARM, then struck her on the arm and neck with the splint. I looked at M. SHEIDLER and could see some RED MARKS on her ARM and NECK which could have been made by being struck.
This matter of which hand it was takes over the narrative for a stretch. Marleen Sheidler says “with the SPLINT,” and little Scott says “with a SPLINT,” but Dana Gregory’s younger brother CHRIS 15 says “with the opposite hand that his SPLINT is on” (adding that Bailey struck Sheidler in response to “SHEIDLER STRIKEING [sic]” him). Bill Bailey himself then goes on to say that he “struck M. SHEIDLER in the FACE with his LEFT HAND the hand with out the SPLINT.” Once again, this only after “MARLEEN SHEIDLER struck him in the face” (though seconds earlier, by his own admission, he’d told her “to keep her fucking brats at home”). The story ends with a strangely affecting suddenness: “BAILEY stated SHEIDLER then jumped at him and fell on his face, he then left and went home…”
The thing I couldn’t stop wondering as I read it over was: Why were they so freaked out about the skid marks? Is making skid marks on the sidewalk a bad thing to do? It makes me think I spent half my childhood inadvertently infuriating my entire neighborhood.
* * *
The local Lafayette morning-rock DJ Jeff Strange, on Axl’s extremely brief but much-reported fisticuffs with the diminutive and seemingly gentle designer of mall clothes Tommy Hilfiger; actually, “fisticuffs” is strong—accounts suggest that the fight consisted mostly of Hilfiger slapping Axl on the arm many times, and photos show Axl staring at Hilfiger with an improbable fifty-fifty mixture of rage and amused disbelief, like, “Should I … hurt it?”:
“Man, I saw that, and I thought, That is straight Lafayette.”
5.
I found Dana Gregory. I called his stepmom. He’s Axl’s oldest friend and worked for him at one time in L.A., after Guns had gotten big. When I sat down at the table in the back-patio area of a pub-type place called Sgt. Preston’s, he had sunglasses on. When he pushed them up into his bushy gray hair, he had unnervingly pale mineral-blue eyes that had seen plenty of sunrises. He’d been there. You knew it before he even spoke. He’d done a spectacular amount of crazy shit in his life, and the rest of his life would be spent remembering and reflecting on that shit and focusing on taking it day by day. The metamorphosis of Bill, the friend of his youth, in whose mother’s kitchen he ate breakfast every morning, his Cub Scouts buddy (a coin was tossed: Bill would be Raggedy Ann in the parade; Dana, Raggedy Andy), into—for a while—the biggest rock star on the planet, a man who started riots in more than one country and dumped a supermodel and duetted with Mick Jagger and then did even stranger shit like telling Rolling Stone he’d recovered memories of being sodomized by his stepfather at the age of two, a man who took as his legal name and made into a household word the name of a band (Axl) that Gregory was once in, on bass, and that Bill was never even in, man … This event had appeared in Gregory’s life like a supernova to a prescientific culture. What was he supposed to do with it?
I said, “Do you call him Bill or Axl?”
He smiled: “I call him Ax.”
“Still talk to him much?”
“Haven’t talked to him since 1992. We had sort of a falling-out.”
“Over what?”
He looked away. “Bullshit.” Then, after a few pulls and drags, “It might have been over a woman.”
He was nervous, but nervous in the way that any decent person is when you sit down in front of him with a notebook and are basically like, “I have to make a two-thirty flight. Can you tell me about the heaviest things in your life? Order more spinach-’n’-artichoke dip, I can expense it.”
He finished beers quickly. He used, repeatedly, without the slightest self-consciousness, an idiom I’ve always loved—“Right on,” spoken quickly and with the intonation a half octave higher on “Right,” to mean not “That’s correct” or “Exactly” but simply “Yes,” as in “Hey, you like to party?” Right on.
“Tell me about L.A.,” I said. “You said you were working for him out there. What kind of stuff?”
“Fixing shit that he broke,” Gregory said.
“Did he break a lot of shit?” I said.
“His condo had these giant mirrors going all around it. And every now and then, he’d take that spaceman statue they give you when you win an award on MTV and smash up the mirrors with it. Well, he slept till four o’clock in the afternoon every day. Somebody had to let the guy in when he came to fix the mirrors. Shit like that.”
He told me another L.A. story, about the time Axl picked up Slash’s beloved albino boa constrictor and it shat all over Axl. And Axl had on some expensive clothes. He got so mad he wanted to hurt the snake. He was cussing at it. But Slash picked up his guitar—here Dana imitated a tree-chopping backswing pose—and said, “Don’t. Hurt. My. Snake.” Axl backed off.
I guess we sat there a pretty long time. Dana has four children and four grandchildren. When I said he seemed young for that (can you imagine Axl with four grandchildren?), he said, “Started young. Like I was saying, there was a lot of experimentation.” His ex-wife, Monica Gregory, also knew Axl. She gave him his first PA. Gregory said he talks to her only once a year, “when I have to.” He said what he wants is to lower the level of dysfunction for the next generation. He told me about how he and Axl and Monica and their group of friends used to go to a park in Lafayette after dark, Columbian Park—“We ruled that place at night”—and pick the lock on the piano case that was built into the outdoor stage and play for themselves till the small hours. I’d wandered around Columbian Park. It’s more or less across the street from where those boys grew up. Not twenty feet from the stage, there’s a memorial to the sons of Lafayette who “made the supreme sacrifice in defense of our country,” and it includes the name of William Rose, probably Axl’s great-great-great-grandpa, killed in the Civil War, which I suppose was fought in defense of our country in some not quite precise way. And now, as Gregory talked, I thought about how weird it was, all those years of Axl probably reading that name a hundred times, not making anything of it, not knowing that it was his own name—he who one day, having discovered his original name while going through some of his mother’s papers and taking it as his own, would sing, “I don’t need your Civil War,” and ask the still-unanswered question, “What’s so civil about war, anyway?”
Back then, Gregory said, Axl played all kinds of stuff. He mentioned Thin Lizzy. “But the only time I ever really heard him sing was in the bathroom. He’d be in there for an hour doing God knows what. Prancing around like a woman, for all I know.”
“So, what is there of Lafayette in his music, do you think?”
“He used to get beat up a lot, right?” (More than one person had told me this since I’d come to town.)
“I beat him up a lot,” Gregory said. “Well, I’d win one year, he’d win the next. One time we was fighting in his backyard, and I was winning. My dad saw what was going on and tried to stop it, but his mom said, ‘No, let ’em fight it out.’ We always hashed it out, though. When you get older, it takes longer to heal.”
It was awkward, trying incessantly to steer the conversation back toward the Sheidler business without being too obvious about it. Did Dana honestly have no memory of the fracas? He kept answering elliptically. “I remember the cops wanted to know who’d spray-painted all over the street,” he said, smiling.
“The night Axl left for L.A., he wrote, ‘Kiss my ass, Lafayette. I’m out of here.’ I wish I’d taken a picture of that.”
Finally, I grew impatient and said, “Mr. Gregory, you can’t possibly not remember this. Listen: You. A kid with a bike. Axl and a woman got into a fight. He had a splint on his arm.”
“I can tell you how he got the splint,” he said. “It was from holding on to an M-80 too long. We thought they were pretty harmless, but I guess they weren’t, ’cause it ’bout blew his fucking hand off.”
“But why were you so mad about the skid marks in the first place?” I asked.
“My dad was in construction. Still is. That’s what I do. It’s Gregory and Sons—me and my brother are the sons. Mostly residential concrete. My brother, he’s dead now. He was thirty-nine. A heart thing. My dad still can’t bring himself to get rid of the ‘Sons.’ Anyway, see, we poured that sidewalk. He’d get so pissed if he saw it was scuffed up— ‘Goddamm it, you know how hard it is to get that off?’ He’d think we done it and beat our ass. So, I saw [little Scott Sheidler’s handiwork], and I said, ‘No, I don’t think that’s gonna do.’”
Pulphead: Essays Page 12