That was all. I couldn’t get too many beats into any particular topic with Gregory before his gaze would drift off, before he’d get pensive. I started to get the feeling that this—his being here, his decision to meet with me—was about something, that we had not yet gotten around to the subject he was here to discuss.
“You know,” he said, “I’ve never talked to a reporter before. I’ve always turned down requests.”
“Why’d you agree to this one?” I asked.
“I wasn’t going to call you back, but my dad said I should. You oughta thank my dad. My son said, ‘Tell him what an asshole that guy was, Dad.’ I said, ‘Ah, he knows all that shit, son.’”
“Is it that you feel it’s been long enough, and now you can talk about all that stuff?”
“Shit, I don’t know. I figure maybe he’ll see the article and give me a call. It’s been a long time. I’d really love just to talk to him and find out what he’s really been into.”
“Do you still consider him a friend?” I said.
“I don’t know. I miss the guy. I love him.”
We were quiet for a minute, and then Gregory leaned to the side and pulled out his wallet. He opened it and withdrew a folded piece of white notepaper. He placed it into my hand, still folded. “Put that in your story,” he said. “He’ll know what it means.” I went straight to the car after the interview and remembered about the note only when I was already on the plane. Written on it in pencil were a couple of lines from “Estranged,” off Use Your Illusion II:
But everything we’ve ever known’s here.
I never wanted it to die.
6.
Axl has said, “I sing in five or six different voices that are all part of me. It’s not contrived.” I agree. One of them is an unexpectedly competent baritone. The most important of the voices, though, is Devil Woman. Devil Woman comes from a deeper part of Axl than do any of the other voices. Often she will not enter until nearer the end of a song. In fact, the dramatic conflict between Devil Woman and her sweet, melodic yang—the Axl who sings such lines as “Her hair reminds me of a warm, safe place” and “If you want to love me, then darling, don’t refrain”—is precisely what resulted in Guns N’ Roses’ greatest songs. Take “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” It’s not that you don’t love it from the beginning, what with the killer riffs and the oddly antiquated-sounding chorus, yet a sword hangs over it. You think: This can’t be everything. Come on, I mean, “Now and then when I see her face / It takes me away to that special place”? What is that?
Then, around 5:04, she arrives. The song has veered minor-key by then, the clouds have begun to gather, and I never hear that awesome, intelligent solo that I don’t imagine Axl’s gone off somewhere at the start of it, to be by himself while his body undergoes certain changes. What I love is how when he comes back in, he comes in on top of himself (“five or six different voices that are all part of me”); he’s not yet all the way finished with I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I when that fearsome timbre tears itself open. And what does she say, this Devil Woman? What does she always say, for that matter? Have you ever thought about it? I hadn’t. “Sweet Child,” “Paradise City,” “November Rain,” “Patience,” they all come down to codas—Axl was a poet of the dark, unresolved coda—and to what do these codas themselves come down? “Everybody needs somebody.” “Don’t you think that you need someone?” “I need you. Oh, I need you.” “Where do we go? Where do we go now?” “I wanna go.” “Oh, won’t you please take me home?”
7.
When I was about seventeen, I drove back to Indiana with my oldest friend, Trent. We’d grown up in the same small river town there and both went off to school elsewhere at about the same time, so we romanticized our childhood haunts and playmates a little, the way you do. The summer before our senior year of high school, we made a sentimental journey home to drop in on everybody and see how each had fared. This is 1991, when Use Your Illusion came out. “Don’t Cry” was on the radio all the time and fun to imitate. Still, that turned out to be one of the more colossally bleak afternoons of my life.
To a man, our old chums divided along class lines. Those of us who’d grown up in Silver Hills, where kids were raised to finish high school and go to college, were finishing high school and applying to colleges. Those who hadn’t, weren’t. They weren’t doing anything. There were these two guys from our old gang, Brad Hope and Rick Sissy. Their fathers were working-class—one drove a bus and the other a concrete truck; the latter couldn’t read or write. But the public elementary where we met them was mixed in every sense. And there’s something about that age, from nine to eleven—your personality has appeared, but if you’re lucky you haven’t internalized yet the idea that you’re any different from anyone else, that there’s a ladder in life.
We stopped by Ricky’s house first. Ricky had been a kind of white-trash genius, into everything. You know those ads in the back of comics that say you can make a hovercraft out of vacuum-cleaner parts? Ricky was the kid who made the hovercraft. And souped it up. He was taller and chubbier than the rest of us and had a high-pitched voice and used some kind of oil in his hair. Trent would eventually get into the University of Chicago and wind up writing a two-hundred-page thesis on the Munich Conference, and even he would tell you: Ricky was the smartest. One time Ricky and I were shooting pellet guns at cars in the small junkyard his father maintained as a sort of sideline. We were spiderwebbing the glass. Suddenly Ricky’s dad, who had just been woken up from one of his epic diurnal naps between shifts, hollered from the window of his bedroom, “Ricky, you’d better not be shooting at that orange truck! I done sold the windshield on that.”
I’ll never forget; Ricky didn’t even look at me first. He just ran. Dropping the pistol at his feet, he ran into the forest. I followed. We spent the whole rest of the day up there. We found an old grave in the middle of a field. We climbed to the top of Slate Hill, the highest knob in our town, and Ricky gave me a whole talk on how slate formed, how it was and was not shale. I’ll never forget the scared, ecstatic freedom of those hours in the woods.
When Trent and I rediscovered Ricky, he was sitting alone in a darkened room watching a porn movie of a woman doing herself with a peeled banana. He said, “What the fuck is that thing on your head?” I was in a bandanna-wearing phase. This one was yellow. He said, “When I saw you get out of the car, I thought, Who the fuck is that? I ’bout shot you for a faggot.” We asked him what was going on. He said he’d just been expelled from school, for trying to destroy one of the boys’ restrooms by flushing lit waterproof M-80s down the toilets. Also, he’d just been in a bad jeep accident; his shoulder was messed up somehow. All scabbed over, maybe? This entire conversation unfolded as the woman with the banana worked away. Ricky’s dad was asleep in the next room. Retired now. We told him we were headed over to Brad’s next. He said, “I haven’t seen Brad in a while. Did you hear he dorked a spook?” That’s what he said: “dorked a spook.”
We were quiet on the way to Brad’s. He had a real mustache already. He’d always been an early bloomer. When we knew him well, he was constantly exposing himself. Once I watched him run around the perimeter of a campsite with his underpants at his ankles going, “Does this look like the penis of an eleven-year-old?” It did not. Brad used to plead with his mom to sing “Birmingham Sunday” for us, which she’d do, a cappella, in the kitchen. Now he was all nigger this, nigger that. Trent was dating a black girl in Louisville at the time. Neither of us knew how to behave. Brad must have noticed us squirming, because he looked at me at one point and said, “Ah, y’all probably got some good niggers in Ohio.” That’s where I was living. “We’re fixin’ to have a race war with the ones we got here.” He had dropped out of high school. It had been only four years since we’d been sleeping over at his house, doing séances and whatnot, and now we had no way to reach each other. A gulf had appeared. It opened the first day of seventh grade when some of us went into the “accelerated” program and others went int
o the “standard” program. By sheerest coincidence, I’m sure, this division ran perfectly parallel to the one between our respective parents’ income brackets. I remember Ricky and me running into each other in the hallway the first day of seventh grade and with a confusion that we were far too young to handle, both being like, “Why aren’t you in any of my classes?” When I think about it, I never saw those boys again, not after that day.
Axl got away.
9.
There were hundreds of blue flags draped along the south bank of the Nervión in Bilbao, and across the top of each it said GUNS N’ ROSES. The flags were of Moorish blue, and they shook against a spotless sky that was only barely more pale than that. Late that night, in the hills over the city, the band would begin headlining a three-day festival, and the river valley echoed the sound so clearly, so helplessly, people in the old part of town would be able, if they understood English, to make out the individual words, but for now Bilbao retained its slightly buttoned-up tranquillity and charm. There’s a fountain next to the Guggenheim that fires bursts of water every four or five seconds, and the olive-skinned kids jump up and down in it. They just strip to their underpants and go wild, male and female, and to watch them at it was lovely. Can you imagine, in the center of some major American city, a bunch of twelve-year-old girls in their panties capering in the water, their lank hair flinging arcs of droplets? Hard to say which would be greater: the level of parental paranoia or the actual volume of loitering pervs. Here things seemed so sane. Axl and the boys hadn’t landed yet. They were still in the air.
The district where they played is called Kobetamendi. It’s high up, and from there you could see the city, the river, the spires, the flashing titanium scales of the museum. When it got dark, you could see the lights. When there aren’t stages set up at Kobetamendi, it’s just a large empty field with a road and, across the road, some modest farmhouses.
As I reached the crest of the hill, a rap-rock band was playing. The justification for rap rock seems to be that if you take really bad rock and put really bad rap over it, the result is somehow good, provided the raps are being barked by an overweight white guy with cropped hair and forearm tattoos. The women from those few little farmhouses had gathered at their fence; they leaned and mumbled and dangled their canes. One of them was one of the oldest-looking old people I have ever seen, with stiff white hair and that face, like the inside of a walnut shell, that only truly ancient women get. She and her friends were actually listening to the rap rock, and part of me wanted to run over to them and assure them that after they died, there would still be people left in the world who knew how horrifying this music was, and that these people would transmit their knowledge to carefully chosen members of future generations, but the ladies did not appear worried. They were even laughing. I’m sure they remembered traveling circuses in that field in eighteen ninety something, and what was the difference, really?
That night I wheedled my way backstage by doing a small favor for the bassist’s Portuguese model girlfriend (I gave her buddy from home a spare media pass they’d accidentally given me). When the security guard on the back ramp leading up to the stage, who did not even make eye contact with the Portuguese model as she floated past him, put his palm against my chest, as if to say, “Whoa, that’s a little much,” she turned around briefly and said, “Está conmigo.” She said this with about the level of nervousness and uncertainty with which you might say, to a maître d’, “Smoking.” Before I could thank her, I was watching Axl dance from such an inconceivable propinquity that if I’d bent my knees, thrust my hands forward, and leapt, I’d have been on the front page of the entertainment section of El País the next day for assaulting him in front of twenty-five thousand people.
I’ve been a part of virtual seas of screaming sweaty kids before, but to see one from the stage, from just above, to see that many thousand people shaping with their mouths some words you made up in your head one time while you were brushing your teeth (needless to say, I was trying to imagine I’d written them), that was heady. “Guns and RO-SES, Guns and RO-SES” … Axl was pounding with the base of his mike stand on the stage in time to the chant. A kid with a beard looked at us, me and the model and her friend, every ten minutes or so, put his hands on his ears, and mouthed the word pyro. Then we were supposed to put our hands on our ears, because the explosion was about to take place ten feet away. Sometimes the kid would forget—he was busy—and then everyone would go, “Aaaarrrgh!” and clutch their head.
There was a sort of shambling older dude next to me in a newsboy cap, with a guitar in his hands—a tech, I figured. Then he ran out onto the stage, and I was like, “That’s Izzy Stradlin” (founding Guns N’ Roses guitarist).
Izzy, I know, is the reason the band sounds so much better tonight than they did two months ago in New York. He started joining them on three or four songs the very next night, after the debut, and has been showing up periodically ever since. His presence—or to put it more accurately, the presence of another original member of the band—seems to have made the other guys feel more like they are Guns N’ Roses and less like, as El Diario Vasco will put it tomorrow, “una bullanguera formación de mercenarios al servicio del ego del vocalista,” which means “a noisy bunch of mercenaries in the service of the vocalist’s ego.”
The Spanish press—they weren’t kind. They said Axl was a “grotesque spectacle”; they called him “el divo”; they talked about the endless, Nigel Tufnel–esque “solos absurdos” that he makes each of the band members play, in an effort to get the audience to invest emotionally in the new lineup (it’s true that these are fairly ill-advised, as has been the rock solo generally since Jimi died). One article says, “Las fotos de Axl dan miedo,” which translates literally and, I think, evocatively as “Pictures of Axl give fear,” with his “goatee that gives him the look of a Texas millionaire.” In a crowning moment, they say that he has “the voice of a priapic rooster.” They say he demands his room be covered in Oriental carpets and that he not be required to interact with the other band members. That he arrived on a separate plane. They say security guards have been ordered never to look him in the eye. They say the other band members also hate one another and demand to be placed on different floors of the hotel. They say he’s traveling with a tiny Asian guru named Sharon Maynard, “alias Yoda,” and that he does nothing without her guidance, that she chooses the people he should hire by examining their faces. But mostly the Spaniards are fixated, as have been all the European media gangs on this tour, with the secret oxygen chamber into which he supposedly disappears during the shows and from which he emerges “más fresco que una lechuga”—fresher than a head of lettuce.
I can’t confirm or deny the oxygen thing, and it’s hard to say whether the constant mentions of it in the press are evidence of its being real or just a sign that people are recycling the same rumor. The manager of a Hungarian band called Sex Action, which opened for G N’ R, claims to have seen the device itself, but Hungarians make up tales like that for entertainment.
What I can tell you, based on my model-side vantage, is that there is a square cell entirely covered in black curtains just to the rear of stage left. You cannot see as much as a crack of light through the curtains, and I tried. Axl runs into this thing about fifteen times during the course of a show. Sometimes he emerges with a new costume on—makes sense—but sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he goes in there when one of the guys is soloing or something—makes sense—but sometimes he goes in there at a moment when it’s really distracting not to have him onstage. I do not know whether Sharon Maynard is in this cell. I do not know what he does in there. If he’s huffing reconstituted gas, I don’t know whether it’s in a Michael Jackson “This is good for me” sort of way or if he has a legitimate lung problem. I don’t know anything about what goes on in the cell, only that it exists and that being in there is important to Axl.
Overall, I can’t agree with my fellow ink-stained wretches in the Old World about
this show. Axl is sounding fuller and fuller. Every now and then the sound guy, just to make sure the board is calibrated, pushes the vocal mike way up in the mix, and we hear nothing but Axl, and the notes are on. Nor is he fat at all. In fact, he looks pretty lithe. At one point, he puts on a rather skimpy T-shirt and sprints from one end of the stage to the other, and it’s the sprint of the cross-country runner he used to be. Dana Gregory told me Axl used to run everywhere. Just run and run. Dana Gregory said there was one time out west when G N’ R played in a stadium that had a track around it, and Axl just started sprinting around the track during a song. When a security guard, believing him to be a crazed fan, tried to tackle him, Axl kicked the guy in the face. “That happened ten feet in front of me,” Gregory said. And now here the bastard was, ten feet in front of me. The moon looked like she was yelling for help because some dark power was erasing her side. They brought out a piano so that he could do “November Rain,” and the way they positioned the piano, he was facing me directly. Like we were sitting across a table from each other. This is as close as I ever got to him. And what I noticed at this almost nonexistent remove was the peace in his features as he tinkled out the intro. Absolute peace. A warm slackness to the facial muscles way beyond what Botox can do, though I’m not saying it didn’t contribute. His face was for now beyond the reach of whatever it is that makes him crazy.
After the final encore, he and the rest of the band ran down a ramp, into the open door of a waiting van. Heavy men in black ran alongside them like drill instructors. The van squealed away, taking the model with it. Big, heavy black cars pulled out alongside the van. And then it was quiet. The Basque country. Next morning the flags were still flying by the river, the press was preparing the scathing reviews, but Axl was gone.
Pulphead: Essays Page 13