Disgraceland

by Jake Brennan

  Fucking with the cops was always fun, but music was becoming the main focus for Axl. And for Izzy. They put a little band together and played when they could, but mostly they studied and listened to the masters whenever they got the chance.

  Their latest obsession was the soundtrack album from the film Over the Edge, an adolescent crime drama set in the fictional suburb of “Granada” where the town’s kids, bored and tired of being neglected by their parents and other authority figures finally rebel, setting about to destroy and terrorize their town through a fiery crime spree. He could relate to the teenage wasteland/anti-authority vibe it portrayed. Just like the kids in Granada, Axl felt neglected, ignored, and oppressed, and was compelled to vent his unhappiness through violence. Plus, the movie’s soundtrack was the shit: Cheap Trick, Van Halen, the Cars, Jimi Hendrix, and even that ballad at the end, the one by Valerie Carter that played while the kids were bused off to juvenile hall—it was all right up Axl’s alley.

  But Axl wouldn’t be shipped off to juvie. He’d soon be on a bus headed for a different kind of jungle altogether: Los Angeles, California.

  In the mid-1980s, on the side of Los Angeles where a mile-and-a-half stretch of Sunset Boulevard curves through West Hollywood and is known as “the Strip” or “Sunset Strip,” a new kind of heavy metal was doing everything it could to put LA on the musical map: glam metal.

  Glam metal took its musical cues from British glam rock; the sounds of bands like Sweet, Slade, T-Rex, and Mott the Hoople traded on big, crunchy guitar riffs, deep-pocket grooves, sex-laden vocals, and hedonistic lyrics. British glam rock was a sophisticated kind of cool that owed much to David Bowie and Queen, but its American offshoot, glam metal, kept one foot planted in the concrete jungles of Iggy Pop and Alice Cooper while peacocking through the glitzed streets of Los Angeles. Fashion threaded the two styles together, but the U.S. version was more masculine, tougher, and a touch violent. LA glam bands like Mötley Crüe would meld the androgyny of Marc Bolan with the apocalyptic look of Mad Max. The result was something wildly unique and somehow representative of the violence tearing through the streets of Los Angeles at the time.

  In 1985 violent crime in LA exploded to unprecedented levels due to the city’s heavy trafficking of crack cocaine. You couldn’t avoid the headlines if you tried, but glam metalheads did their best to ignore the harsh reality enveloping their city by setting up their own bacchanalia on Sunset, where every night they drank, drugged, and fucked away their worries to the sounds of the Strip’s hottest bands at the time: W.A.S.P., Ratt, Poison, and the aforementioned Mötley Crüe. There was no mistaking what LA’s new music scene was all about: debauchery. And their fans loved it. They showed up every night en masse, packing clubs like the Starwood and the Whisky a Go Go to get a glimpse of the hedonism up close and personal. Glam music was an escape from reality, unlike the music being made on the other end of town.

  Down in South Central Los Angeles, where the effects of the crack epidemic were being felt most severely, rap music—up until that point mostly an East Coast export—was taking on a new identity, one that mirrored the harsh circumstances of Los Angeles street life. It would come to be known as “gangsta rap,” and where LA’s glam ran from reality, LA’s gangsta rap ran straight toward it and smacked it in its mouth with the butt of a Glock.

  In Compton, about twenty miles south of the Strip in Hollywood, a local drug dealer named Eric Wright watched his cousin get shot and killed over a drug beef and decided it was time to find a new job. He took the quarter million in cash he had stashed from selling coke and invested it into the formation of a new record label with a music promoter named Jerry Heller. They called the label Ruthless Records, and Eric started calling himself “Eazy-E.” After releasing a record under his own name, Eazy formed the group N.W.A. with producer and rapper Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren, and DJ Yella. N.W.A., along with the rapper Ice-T, would force America to pay attention to their neighborhoods that were being destroyed by drugs and violence. Streets where their neighbors clashed violently with police, who were supposedly there to protect them, frequently and oftentimes to deadly ends.

  The beats these LA rappers made were bigger than anything from the East Coast and the lyrics they spat out were more direct, honest, and profane than anything anyone had heard in music before, anywhere.

  And Axl Rose loved it. All of it. Mid-1980s LA music was as fraught with tension and manic energy as he was. It was bipolar. On one end, a low-down slap of unforgiving reality; a gut punch to authority. And on the other end, a high-flying, endless party; distraction via debauchery. He could appreciate the scene up on Sunset, but in his heart he knew that there wasn’t one band among them who could fuck with what he and his new bandmates were about to bring to the party.

  Axl Rose, product of Los Angeles.

  Once Axl Rose arrived in Hollywood from Lafayette, Indiana, the transformation from small-town delinquent to streetwalking cheetah was quick. After a few false starts and along with his hometown bud, Izzy, Axl formed Guns N’ Roses.

  Out on the streets and in the clubs, the band quickly developed a reputation as the nastiest hard rock ’n’ roll band on the Sunset Strip. Let those other LA bands call themselves “glam.” Guns, or “GNR,” was going to stand out in the scene by separating themselves from the scene. They weren’t “glam,” they were “hard.” And they weren’t “metal,” they were “rock.” Hard rock. A simple but novel distinction to bring to the stage on the Strip. And offstage, Axl, Izzy, and their new bandmates, Slash, Duff, and Steven, lived the life authentically: They drank and drugged harder than Mötley Crüe. They fucked more strippers than Poison. They got into it with the LA County Sheriff’s Department whenever they could and were quick to brawl with posers, yuppies, squares, or whoever else got in their faces. They were the real deal.

  And their songs were great. Totally authentic, and as such the band’s appeal was undeniable. They packed them in at the Troubadour, the Starwood, and the Whisky. In 1986 GNR signed to Geffen Records, despite fears from executives that the band would be dead before their record was even released. The thinking among Geffen employees was that if the drink and drugs didn’t get them, then they’d self-destruct via Axl’s wild temper.

  The band was generally a mess. They were basically homeless. Guns N’ Roses squatted in their rehearsal space. A one-car-sized storage unit off Sunset Boulevard behind the Sunset Grill. They slept among their gear. There was no kitchen and no bathroom. But there was a constant party. When not rehearsing, which they did constantly, they’d get high and get drunk on Nightrain with the whores from down on Hollywood Boulevard, and party with members of Faster Pussycat, Redd Kross, and Thelonious Monster.

  Soon young kids from the Valley started showing up to listen to the band rehearse. Steven and Slash would play nice for a bit and scam them out of their money under the guise of procuring drugs for them. Axl didn’t have time for such pretenses. He would just roll them for whatever cash he could get. Young women—valley girls and prostitutes alike—were subjected to a “Get Naked or Leave” policy. The fucking would spill out into the alley, and while little suburban valley boys realized their fantasies and got with the professionals from Hollywood and Vine, the guys in the band would empty their pants pockets for their cash and clean out the purses of the less-suspecting prostitutes.

  Word on the strip spread: There was a party going on. And it was wild.

  One time, Don Henley from the Eagles showed up. Impressed and horrified by the debauchery, Henley was moved to write “Sunset Grill,” a song he would include on his second solo album:

  You see a lot more meanness in the city

  It’s the kind that eats you up inside

  Hard to come away with anything that feels like dignity.

  Their party grew. The band was sounding great but still wasn’t making any money, so Izzy started slinging dope to bring in cash. People were talking; Guns N’ Roses were fucking nuts and their parties were awesome, plus they had great he
roin. Eventually, even Izzy’s hero, Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, showed up to score.

  There were too many scantily clad spandex prostitutes and groupies to count, and telling them apart from one another was becoming a real problem for Slash. When it came to women, Slash was largely indiscriminate, but he did like the good girls; they usually had apartments he could crash at, and those apartments had running water and toilets.

  The party raged, and soon enough the West Hollywood sheriff’s deputies started coming around to restore order. Axl would give ’em lip, and the next thing you knew, he’d be bent over, face smashed sideways on the hood of a cruiser, his wrists cuffed behind him. They’d either haul him in or smack him around or sometimes both. It was just like the old days in Lafayette. Nothing had really changed, and why should it have? Axl was no less pissed off.

  Violence followed the band wherever it went. Bar fights, alley fights; they were the rule, not the exception. Even jumping off the stage midset to crack a wiseacre in the grill was fast becoming just part of the gig for members of GNR with Axl at the helm. The band took no shit.

  Ever.

  On July 21, 1987, the band’s debut album, Appetite for Destruction, was released. Their star started to slowly rise, but growing fame didn’t curtail the band’s behavior. It only intensified it. Newfound celebrity and notoriety started to create a sense of isolation for Axl. A feeling that his lyrics for “Out ta Get Me” were a self-fulfilling prophecy:

  Sometimes it’s easy to forget where you’re goin’

  Sometimes it’s harder to leave

  And every time you think you know just what you’re doin’

  That’s when your troubles exceed.

  Axl wrote it mainly about Lafayette, but increasingly it seemed to be about the people around him now. Wherever he went, he believed, they were trying to keep him down. Just like authority figures back home, nowadays the cops, the record label, the promoters, and increasingly the press were trying to bleed out of him what it was that made him special in the first place. To get him to tone it down. To conform to their bullshit.

  It was making him paranoid. And causing very dramatic mood swings. The mood swings were always there, but when the band was starting out, they’d derail a rehearsal or a party. Maybe a show. But as the band grew, so did the stakes, and mood swings at this stage of Axl’s career were much harder for everyone to deal with.

  In February 1988, just after their triumphant show at the Ritz in NYC, Guns N’ Roses embarked on their first headlining tour. It was a big deal. And Axl was a big mess. He was jankier than usual and emotionally volatile. Some believed it was because of his relationship with girlfriend Erin Everly (daughter of rock ’n’ roll royalty, Don Everly, one half of rock ’n’ roll pioneers the Everly Brothers), but it was more likely that Axl’s intensity was simply increasing in proportion to the growing stature of his band.

  On February 12, for unspecified reasons, Axl blew off one of the band’s first headlining shows in Phoenix, Arizona. He went missing. No one knew where he was. The second show in Phoenix, the next night, was also canceled. The band was immediately bounced by promoters from an upcoming opening slot on the highly coveted David Lee Roth tour. Further, they were eliminated from consideration for the opening slot on the even more highly coveted Jimmy Page tour. Opportunities that would have exposed them to larger audiences. Axl’s bandmates were incensed. You don’t pull a no-show. Not in the music business. It’s a death sentence. A career killer. They contemplated kicking Axl out of the band for the offense. He had little contrition and less in the way of an excuse. He simply didn’t show. And he simply didn’t care if they wanted to kick him out of the band. Go ahead, he told them. Who are you going to get to replace me? He knew his place in the band was secure, but not without one major concession. Axl had to agree with his band, management, and label to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.

  Axl submitted to tests at UCLA Medical Center. The doctors, in their evaluation, considered not only Axl’s present state of almost constant emotional volatility but also the oppressive childhood that he detailed for them along with his twenty arrests. He presented a clinical diagnosis of manic-depressive disease, or what is commonly referred to today as bipolar disorder.

  It made sense to Axl. And the prescribed lithium helped at times, but there was little he could do to completely quell the beast within. The mood swings continued. Bandmates weren’t the only ones subjected to them. Fans and civilians weren’t immune from the swings in mood that would sometimes escalate to full-on violent outbursts.

  Axl beat a businessman senseless in a hotel bar for calling him a “Bon Jovi look-alike.”

  He nearly baited eighteen thousand fans into a full-scale riot at the Philadelphia Spectrum, fighting with the local cops patrolling the crowd because he thought they were harassing him before the show.

  He was arrested for cracking his female neighbor over the head with a wine bottle because she complained about the noise.

  The press took note. And bad press began popping up. So Axl added the media to his shit list. Second to the cops and third to his fucked-up stepdad, but prominently placed nonetheless. But nothing did more to undermine Axl Rose’s already low opinion of the press than the reaction to the events that took place during Guns N’ Roses’ set at the Donington Monsters of Rock festival.

  Anticipation for GNR’s performance was peaked. Security was lax. Capacity was maxed. One hundred thousand rain-soaked bodies standing in the mud. Most of them drunk. The sun was buried behind dark, ominous clouds. The band knew something was wrong and began their set with trepidation. It mattered little. The crowd went apeshit. Barely into their second song, the audience lurched forward as one giant wave. Then a hole in the middle of the crowd opened up. Within seconds, bodies were sucked into an undertow of humanity. A massive mosh pit began. Izzy freaked out and stopped playing. The rest of the band followed suit. Axl tried his best from the front of the stage to chill the crowd out. Bodies began to be pulled out of the muddy melee, injured and in need of medical attention but alive. Once it looked as though order had been restored, the band kicked back into their set with “Paradise City,” and shit got real. The crowd’s moshing became violent and relentless. Thousands and thousands of people were worked into a fit, slamming wildly into each other to the sounds of the most dangerous band on the planet. The crowd swayed uncontrollably as one, and with a single false move it could overtake the stage or collapse in on itself at any moment. The band was frightened. They tried cooling things down with a new acoustic number, “Patience,” and then gave it one more shot with “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” but it was no use. The crowd was too intense. Too terrifying. After the tune, the band bailed. Axl spat into the mic before leaving the stage, “Have a great fucking day and try not to fucking kill yourselves.”

  Little did he know, a few of them had already been killed. Later that night, in the hotel bar, the band was told that two of their fans at Donington had died. Trampled underfoot during their set. Both were so mangled they needed to be identified by the papers in their pockets and the tattoos on their bodies.

  The press blamed the band. The story being printed and reprinted over and over was that GNR refused to stop playing despite the obvious danger in the air. Of course, Axl had stopped the show twice and eventually cut the entire set short. This was never reported. There was no advantage to the truth for the press. The story sold better if the dangerous junkies from Sunset Strip caught the blame.

  None of this was lost on Axl. The deaths at Donington by themselves were hard enough to swallow. These were kids. Fans. And now they were dead and the press was blaming the band.

  TWO DEAD AT DONINGTON, screamed the headlines. That was one more than Altamont.

  His rage intensified. It seemed that whatever he did, authorities were out to get him. And the notoriety caused the band’s popularity to grow. And the more his own fame and celebrity grew, the more shit he seemed to have to take from the press, from the cops, from whoeve
r.

  He tried retreating into himself, but by now MTV had begun playing the band’s videos in heavy rotation, and their popularity skyrocketed. A new album was needed quickly to capitalize on their success, but a proper full length was impossible to put together with the band’s touring schedule (not to mention the near-debilitating heroin habits of Izzy, Slash, and Steven and the general growing dysfunction of the band as a unit). So it was decided that an EP called G N’ R Lies would be released as a stopgap. The concept was tabloid trash, a world that the band was becoming all too familiar with. The artwork was a National Enquirer–like cover that poked fun at the press and its growing fascination with the band. The music was a mix of covers and unreleased old and new tunes that the band had been working up live.

  To Axl, G N’ R Lies scanned the world of celebrity decadence and tawdry gossip against a tough-talking, hard-living, unseen street reality. As a record, it was bipolar. Like his LA. Like him.

  Axl saw himself as a voice for this reality. Just as he believed Eazy-E saw himself as a voice for his reality. So he was going to spare none of the details and none of the reality he’d come to learn and to live around in Los Angeles. On the song “One in a Million” he sang out:

  Police and niggers, that’s right

  Get outta my way.