W.Axl Rose - Chapter Nine - You Are All
Little People (continued)
Meanwhile, both Use Your Illusion albums
were now seven times platinum in the US alone, with combined
worldwide sales for Illusions, plus Appetite and GN'R Lies now
teetering in excess of 70 million. Indeed, Appetite would
eventually sell more than half that amount just on its own. To
offer some perspective, that's a million more albums than Bob
Dylan has sold in his entire career. Even Led Zeppelin took
four albums to reach that sort of plateau. For Guns N' Roses it
had all happened immediately. Little wonder they and Axl had
such trouble hanging onto themselves.
Slash now identifies the summer tour of
1992 as the point of no return in Axl's relations with the rest
of the band. “At some point during the Metallica shows, I
just lost Axl,” he says. “I just didn't where he
was at anymore. I didn't know where I was at anymore! Steven
was already gone, and then losing Izzy… And it was all
nothing we had control of. Everything was kind of… out of
hand. Then all of a sudden, we got off the road after
two-and-a-half years of touring, and everything just kind
of… stopped. Dead.”
Not quite. Axl, for one, still had a great
deal of business to attend to, beginning, on August 23, with a
date at the Los Angeles Superior Court, where he testified
against Steven Adler in the drummer's ongoing legal action
against the band. Repeating his claim that he and the band were
left with no option but to drop the drummer when it became
apparent during the recording of 'Civil War' that Steven was
unable to perform his duties adequately anymore because of his
heroin addiction - insisting that he had needed more than 60
takes to get his part right - the judge still ruled against
Axl, taking an understandably dim view of the callous,
underhanded manner in which a founding member of the band had
been ousted from it, depriving him of royalties and income at a
time when it was well-known the rest of them had had their own
longstanding problems with drugs.
Another telling detail that emerged from
the court case concerned the way in which the original five-man
band had agreed to divvy up their earnings from the group, in
the days before they became so spectacularly successful. After
deducting a 17.5 percent management commission, Axl described
how he and Slash had come up with a very specific formula for
doling out the rest of the money. During pre-production for
Appetite, he said, “Slash devised a system of figuring
out who wrote what parts of [a] song or part of a song. There
were four categories, I believe. There was lyrics, melody,
music - meaning guitars, bass and drums - and accompaniment and
arrangement. And we split each one of those into twenty-five
percent.” He concluded: “When we had finished, I
had 41 percent [of overall takings], and other people had
dif¬ferent amounts.”
With the judge calculating that the
“different amount” Steven would have been on came
to roughly 15 percent, the case came to an abrupt end just six
weeks into its hearings when, on September 24, Axl instructed
his lawyers to make an out-of-court settlement, eventually
agreeing to a one-off payment of roughly $2.5 million to
Steven, plus a further agreement giving him 15 percent of all
future Guns N' Roses royalty payments related to the period he
was in the band - i.e. their first two albums. Steven now says
the actual cheque was for $2,250,000. “It wasn't [a] pay
off. It was what they owed me. And I got all my royalties
back.”
Despite the money, it is still a cause of
great regret for him, though, he says, that the original band
came to such a messy end. “I know myself, I know Slash
too cos we always talked about [how] we could've been like
Aerosmith, like the Stones. Dude, they've been together thirty,
forty fucking years.” He added that “the most
touching thing” had been how “at the end of the
trial, all the jurors hugged me and said, 'Good luck and take
care'. They hated [the other members of Guns N' Roses]. When
they were on the stand they'd be asked, 'How many times have
you overdosed?' and the reply would be twenty or thirty times
each. And there they were, throwing out this nice boy who was
getting treatment? It made them look bigger assholes than they
were.”
Predictably, Axl was outraged by the
decision, unable to concede that Steven had played a critical
part in the band's rise to stardom. “He didn't write one
goddamn note [of Appetite] but he calls me a selfish
dick!” he fumed. “He's been able to live off of
that money, buy a shit-load of drugs and hire lawyers to sue
me.” Still resenting to this day the 15 percent the
drummer receives, now referring to the agreement he made with
him as “one of the biggest mistakes I've made in my
life,” Axl's view is that, “In the long run I paid
very extensively” for having Steven Adler in Guns N'
Roses.” One might add that Adler also “paid
extensively” for being in the band. Within months of his
financial settlement he would overdose so badly it would induce
a stroke, leaving him partially paralysed. Apart from his own
occasional outfit, Adler's Appetite, with which he performs
intermittently these days, he has not worked seriously - or
been taken seriously - in the music business since his dumping
in 1990.
But if Axl was having his problems, for
the rest of Guns N' Roses, two months after the world tour
finally ended, it was back to business as usual, with Slash, in
particular, now working on a new set of songs. There was also
the imminent release to look forward to of a new album, titled
The Spaghetti Incident?, which was set to hit the stores in
November - an incongruous, poorly received collection of
ostensibly punk covers intended to establish the band's roots
beyond their obvious heavy metal connections but which had the
opposite effect of making them appear even more out of step
with the times than did the onset of grunge, now reaching its
zenith with the recent release of the new, brutally
uncompromising Nirvana album, In Utero. By comparison, The
Spaghetti Incident? was a confused, unsatisfying collection,
from its obscure title to its woefully literal album sleeve - a
close-up of a plate of canned spaghetti. As Rolling Stone
pointed out in its review, “Punk rock is sometimes best
read as a vigorous howl of complaint against one's own
powerlessness, but Axl doesn't quite connect to the punk rock
material on Spaghetti as anything but a conduit for pure
aggression. He can't even seem to curse right.”
Mismatching covers by obvious punk groups
like The Damned ('New Rose') and the Dead Boys ('Ain't It Fun')
with covers of songs by groups that had nothing to do with punk
like Nazareth ('Hair Of The Dog') and, most off-kilter, The
Skyliners (whose 1958 hit 'Since I Don't Have You' became the
next GN'R single) where it didn't miss the target completely,
the album simply tried way too hard. Notably when Axl adopts a
cringe-making Dick Van Dyke cockney accent for a version of the
UK Subs' demented bonehead classic 'Down On The Farm', but most
disastrously with the final track on the original collection, a
version of 'Look At Your Game, Girl', originally written by the
psychotic Charles Manson. Accompanied by his gardener, Carlos
Booy, on acoustic guitar, 'Look At Your Game, Girl' was
something Axl had recorded on his own late at night without
even telling the rest of the band. Slipping it onto the end of
the album as a “hidden” additional track not
included on the listing printed on the sleeve, it was, in fact,
his personal message to Stephanie Seymour who he had officially
broken up with while the finishing touches were being put to
the mix in September 1993, even going so far as to have her
name removed from the album's “immediate family”
credits - though he did keep her son Dylan's name on there.
“The split had an enormous effect on [Axl],” a
friend later commented. “That was the first time in his
life he had sta¬bility. And then he had nothing.”
Axl had often appeared onstage - and in
the 'Estranged' video - in a Charles Manson T-shirt, but
actually recording one of the convicted murderer's songs caused
even more outrage - not least amongst the band itself, who were
as dumbfounded as the critics to discover it on there - than
that which had greeted the release of 'One in a Million' five
years before. Despite the group's hastily-made pledge to donate
any royalties to the son of one of Manson's victims, the tracks
prompted calls for a boycott of all Geffen products. Of course,
Axl was hardly the first rock star to become childishly
enthralled by the cult of Charlie Manson. In Britain,
self-styled 'art terrorists' Psychic TV had sported Manson
T-shirts long before Axl had left Lafayette, going so far as to
spatter dressing room walls with the same gormless slogans left
in blood on the walls of murder victim Sharon Tate's home.
While in the US, self-anointed grunge godfathers Sonic Youth
had previously recorded another Manson song, 'Death Valley '69'
(also featuring punk poetess Lydia Lunch). When The Lemonheads
later recorded Manson's 'Home Is Where You're Happy', singer
Evan Dando claimed that “Charlie was just a good symbol
of the beginning of my life in America, of how messed up things
were getting.”
Recording a Manson song was nothing,
however, compared to the lengths Nine Inch Nails then went to,
to “acquaint” themselves with the Manson
“vibe,” with frontman Trent Reznor actually moving
into 10050 Cielo Drive - the address of the most infamous
Manson Family killings - with a mobile studio and recording his
multi-platinum 1994 album The Downward Spiral there.
“Everybody's looking for a hero,” said Reznor.
Manson was merely “your ultimate taboo icon.” Or as
Manson himself once astutely put it: “The myth of Charles
Manson has twisted more minds than I was ever accused of
touching.”
In Axl's case, he initially defended his
choice song by saying: “The song talks about how the girl
is insane and playing a mind game. I felt it was ironic that
such a song was recorded by someone who should know the inner
intricacies of madness.” It was a decision he would come
to regret, however. Speaking to Rolling Stone six years later,
he announced he had recently decided to remove both 'One in a
Million' and 'Look at Your Game, Girl' from all future copies
of their respective albums. Not that he was apologetic, just
that he felt they were “too easily misinterpreted.”
That said, almost seven years on from that proclamation, a
quick scroll through the pages of Amazon (on either side of the
Atlantic) reveals that both tracks still remain very much a
part of both albums.
What Stephanie thought of the song has
never been revealed. But the likelihood is she no longer cared
either way. The fight the previous Christmas had been the last
straw for her, and even though the relationship continued at a
distance while the band was on the road throughout the early
months of 1993, by the time Axl had returned to LA Stephanie
had resumed her modelling career and secretly begun dating
millionaire businessman, and publisher of Interview magazine,
Peter Brant. A development that so incensed Axl he ordered his
subordinates to obtain a photo¬graph of Brant's wife,
Sandra, which he took to Yoda, according to a for¬mer
Geffen employee, in order to “cast a spell around Sandra
to protect her from Peter, because he felt that she, too, had
been cuckolded as he had been, and he had a great deal of
sympathy for her.” continue reading
