W.A.R.: The Unauthorized Biography of William Axl Rose by Wall Mick

Author:Wall, Mick [Wall, Mick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2008-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three

Ringside

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal

with the intent of throwing it at someone else;

you are the one who gets burned.

BUDDHA

Chapter Seven

The Red-Headed Dictator

Despite Axl’s best efforts to get the band moving forward again, for Guns N’ Roses the 1990s began just as the 1980s had ended: dissolute, distracted, no nearer to starting work on their next album. Attending the same Hollywood party as a surprisingly subdued Slash and a spectacularly drunk Duff, we saw the New Year in together by sharing a bottle of Dom Perignon and counting in the chimes on MTV. Axl was also supposed to be there but it was no surprise when he didn’t show up. As he later told me, he had been ‘hibernating’ all through the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Izzy had spent the night in alone with his new girlfriend Anneka, glad not to have to fight temptation. Newly sober but still on probation, as he says now, this was the period when he was at his most fragile. ‘I’d come in for rehearsals and there’s one of the guys on a road case with a big line of coke. “Hey, Iz – you want some coke?” Ah, no thanks, I just got back from my probation officer, you know? To get sober is really [tough] but to do it like that, in a situation where everybody’s still using…’He shook his head.

Steven, meanwhile, was still living life at the opposite end of the drug spectrum. Speaking to Classic Rock magazine in 2005, he recalled how his habit had grown significantly worse throughout 1989, ‘until after a month of doing heroin every day this one day came along when I didn’t do heroin and I was sick as a dog. I couldn’t understand it, so I called the manager [Doug Goldstein], who took me to a doctor that gave me an opiate blocker. I didn’t know that you couldn’t take opiate blockers with opiates in your system. It only made me worse. I literally had to crawl to the bathroom.’

Nevertheless, seemingly without trying, controversy and public outcry kept their names consistently in the news. On 22 January, Slash and Duff attended the American Music Awards, a staid music-industry event held annually at LA’s Shrine Auditorium and televised live across America. Staggering up to the podium to accept the first of two awards they’d been nominated for, each clutching a bottle of wine, Slash had the buttoned-up patrons tut-tutting loudly when he uttered the word ‘shit’. Then, when he began his speech with the words, ‘I want to thank fuckin’ – oops!’ the invited crowd grew visibly agitated. As if to rub it in, he continued by thanking Alan Niven and Doug Goldstein ‘for fuckin’ getting us there’. At which point the TV director panicked and cut to a commercial break. ABC, the network that aired the show, logged hundreds of complaints and the following morning the story made the front pages of both the Los Angeles and New York Times.

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