W.Axl Rose - Chapter Nine - You Are All
Little People (continued)
“As you are aware, Gilby has been
fired at least three times by the band in the past month and
has been re-hired at least two times,” Light wrote on
April 14, in a letter to the band's then lawyer, Laurie
Sori¬ano. By June, when Gilby's solo album, Pawnshop
Guitars, was released, his position was made crystal clear: he
was officially off the GN'R payroll, this despite the fact that
Axl - along with Slash and Duff - makes a guest appearance on
Gilby's album. When royalties for the Spaghetti Incident? album
then failed to arrive on time, Gilby instructed Light to sue
the band. Once again, Axl fought the action initially before
eventually agreeing to settle out of court with an undisclosed
payment to the guitarist.
Watching these developments from a
distance, Slash already feared the worst. “When I first
got home, I just put together this funky little studio and just
had a good time, you know? Had some fun. I didn't have a thing
in my mind about quitting the band, it was just the band wasn't
really functioning. Matt was still there, but Gilby had been
fired, and Axl was… off somewhere.”
Where Axl was really at, when he wasn't
consulting lawyers over the latest legal action he had allowed
himself to become embroiled in, was a question he, too, had
lately become obsessed with. Stung by grunge's wholesale
rejection of the precepts he held most dear - laughed at for
his 'conceptual' videos, ridiculed for releasing two double
albums simultaneously, despised for the elements of homophobia,
racism and sexism that polluted his lyrics, however artfully
ascribed - he was smart enough to realise how out of step Guns
N' Roses suddenly seemed to great swathes of the media.
Concerned more than ever with the damage done to his image by
the lawsuits Erin and Stephanie had successfully brought
against him, not to mention his very public fallings out with
Steven, Izzy, Gilby, and his former manager Alan Niven, for the
first time since he'd arrived in LA from Lafayette, Axl found
himself flailing around, angry with everybody, yet unsure how
to deal with it. As well as firing Gilby, he also ordered a
halt to the publication of the band biography Del James had
been working on, Shattered Illusion, which was to have been
published by Bantam/ Doubleday in June 1995, and he withdrew
into the same tight circle of yes-men and paid assistants that
had supported him on tour - James, his siblings, Stuart and
Amy, his housekeeper Beta, bodyguard Earl, as well as the usual
chorus of supportive voices, not least Suzzy London and Sharon
Maynard - brooding out at his Malibu mansion as he plotted his
next move. “Axl's anger had quadrupled from the person I
used to hang out with,” recalls Michelle Young, who
bumped into him around this time.”
According to Slash, it around now that Axl
first considered making his own solo album. Newly obsessed with
the electronica of Nine Inch Nails - he told friends he'd love
to hear Nine Inch Nails cover 'Estranged' - he planned to write
and record with a “dream team” comprising NIN
frontman, Trent Reznor, Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro
and Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl. “Then he changed his
mind,” says Slash, “and thought, why do a solo
record if he could do it with Guns N' Roses…”
Meanwhile, Axl's obsession with electronic
music continued to grow. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich recalls
him eulogising about Nine Inch Nails long before anyone else.
“He was saying, 'This is the coolest thing I've ever
heard'. And we were all sitting there going, 'What the fuck are
you talking about?' He had Nine Inch Nails support Guns N'
Roses in Europe, and I remember hearing how they got booed off
the stage. But he was there when the rest of us were still
listening to fucking Judas Priest.”
Slash, who didn't share Axl's new musical
preoccupations, filled in the time “doing, like, a
hundred solo gigs, just clubs and shit [with the Snakepit
band]. Stuff I never made a dime off of. When I came back, I
thought, 'I don't really like my day job anymore'. I was
frustrated, cos nothing was happening. But I hung in there for
a little while, then finally got disillusioned with the whole
thing. And that's when I started thinking about doing my own
thing again.”
He wasn't the only one. When Slash was
invited by Axl to join him and the rest of the band at LA's
Complex studios in August 1994 for the recording of the Rolling
Stones' 'Sympathy For The Devil' intended for the soundtrack to
the forthcoming Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt movie, Interview With
The Vampire, he was astonished to find that Axl had once again
taken things into his own hands, this time hiring a replacement
for Gilby - Paul Huge, his old friend from Lafayette.
Put out that neither of them had been
consulted about Huge's sudden appointment, neither Slash nor
Duff got on with the new guitarist. As one mutual friend later
recalled, Huge was a “nice-enough guy,” but as he
put it, “they're Guns N' Ros¬es, for God's
sake.” Huge was simply “not that good” and
didn't have “the chops.” Or as Sash later put it,
pulling no punches: “Paul is in my mind completely
useless. I hate that guy. I'm sorry, I'm sure he's very nice
but in a rock'n'roll context he's pathetic. As far as his
relationship with [Axl], they're Indiana kids, I can understand
he feels comfortable, but I refuse to ever play with [Paul]
again.”
Though not even Axl realised it yet, the
antipathy towards Huge would become the thread which eventually
unravelled the whole band, with Slash putting Axl into the
position where he more or less had to choose between his
original, and arguably most important musical partner, or his
old school pal. Feeling cornered, Axl did what he always does
in those situations and simply dug in. He chose his old school
pal.
Speaking about it almost eight years
later, after Huge had also left the band, Axl's recollections
of why he brought the guitarist in differed from those of the
band mates the decision alienated. “At the time,”
he insisted, “Paul was one of the best people we knew who
was both available and capable of complimenting Slash's style.
You could bring in a better guitar player than Paul. You could
bring in a monster. I tried putting [Ozzy Osbourne guitarist]
Zakk Wylde with Slash and that didn't work… Paul was only
interested in complimenting Slash, laying down a foundation of
a riff or something. That would accent or encourage Slash's
lead playing.”
Slash now claims, however, that he decided
to leave the day after discovering Huge in the studio, saying
he couldn't even sleep that night he was so distraught.
“I was suicidal. If I'd had a gun with me at that time, I
probably would have done myself in. If I'd had a half-ounce of
fucking heroin with me, I probably just would've gone. It was
heavy. It was a headspace I'd never been in before. Somehow I
managed to go back to sleep. Then, when I woke up later that
morning, I made a decision.” At which point, “I
felt the whole weight of the world drop.”
It wasn't just Huge, he says now; it was
the general malaise Axl had plunged the band into by insisting
they pursue a more contemporary, post-grunge, more
electronica-centric direction. By then, Axl had ordered a
massive soundstage to be constructed at the Complex, replete
with pool table, pinball machines and a huge barrage of new
equipment. Other than the presence of Huge at these sessions,
the main problem, says Slash, was that Axl was now openly
acting as self-anointed leader, “It seemed like a
dictatorship. We didn't spend a lot of time collaborating. He'd
sit back in the chair, watching. There'd be a riff here, a riff
there. But I didn't know where it was going.”
After several months, Slash decided he'd
had enough. “There's a certain personal side to it
too,” he told me. “I can't relate to Axl. Maybe I
never could. I mean, Axl came with Izzy, I came with Steven,
and then we all hooked up with Duff.” With Axl now in
sole charge, though, “I realised I was out alone, and
that meant me and Axl had to come to terms with… not our
animosity, but having a different opinion about everything.
And, I mean, you know, Axl works as hard as anybody else but
only on what he wants to work on, and I… I just lost
interest.”
There was also what he calls
“bitterness down to mismanagement.” Ultimately,
though, “It all comes down to this: if I hadn't quit, I
would have died, hanging round with nothing to do, no mutual
artistic relationship, nothing. I mean, I tried to hang on in
there, but it was like a big, revolving door, from really
hi-tech equipment, guitar players, all kinds of shit going
on… I was just waiting for the dust to clear. Eventually,
I thought, we'll never be able to put this on the right
path.”
Furious at Slash's decision to throw in
the towel, at first Axl tried to keep the news quiet. But when,
in October 1996, Slash did an online interview where he
admitted that “right now, Axl and I are deliberating over
the future of our relationship”, Axl rushed to get his
side of the story out first, sending a fax to MTV on October 30
in which he suggested it was his decision that Slash should
leave, one he had actually made as far back as 1995. He could
no longer work with him, he said, because the guitarist had
lost his “dive in and find the monkey” attitude.
“Axl had a vision that GN'R should
change and Slash had an attitude that Guns N' Roses was Guns N'
Fucking Roses and that's who they were,” recalls Tom
Zutaut. “I don't think they could get over their
breakdown in communication. It wasn't announced publicly
[initially] because nobody wanted to say the band had broken
up.”
To Axl, though, Slash's decision had less
to do with loyalty to one side or the other, and far more to do
with his own stubbornness. Already arguing over the musical
direction the next album should take, in then rejecting Huge as
a replacement for Gilby, Slash had questioned not just Axl's
choice, but, indirectly, his authority. As so many had
discovered before, putting Axl into a position where he was
being asked to retreat from one of his unilateral decisions was
only ever likely to result in one possible outcome.
Speaking about the split to the official
GN'R website in 2002, Axl was even more forthright on the
subject. “Originally I intended to do more of an Appetite
style recording,” he explained. “So I opted for
what I thought would or should've made the band and especially
Slash very happy. [But] it seemed to me that anytime we got
close to something that would work, it wasn't out of opinion
that Slash would go 'Hey, it doesn't work', but it was nixed
simply because it did work. In other words, 'Whoa, wait a
minute. That actually might be successful, we can't do
that'.”
A strange claim to make, as success was
never something Slash had knowingly shrunk from before. But as
Axl added: “People like to call me paranoid. It has
nothing to do with paranoia; it was to do with reality…
Slash chose not to be here over control issues. Now people can
say 'Well, Axl, you're after control of the band too'. You're
damn skippy. That's right. I am the one held responsible since
day one. When it comes to Guns N' Roses, I may not always get
everything right but I do have a good idea about getting things
from point A to point B and knowing what the job is that we
have to do.” continue reading
