Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon (51 page)

BOOK: Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon

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AXL ROSE

Welcome to the Jungle

A
t seventeen William Bruce Bailey found out that the man he believed to be his father was in fact his stepfather. When he discovered the shocking truth, Bill Bailey was devastated and enraged, tossing his old name out with the garbage, rechristening himself W Axl Rose. He once sang in the church choir and taught Sunday school, but Axl said that God had let him down. “If there’s somebody up there,” he said, “I don’t know him. I just don’t have a clue about it.” The eldest of three children, Axl was raised in Lafayette, Indiana, and had a difficult time in high school, dropping out in his junior year, growing his flaming-red hair long, and singing in rock bands. “When I was in school there were all these stereotypes,” Axl said. “If you liked the Stones, you were a faggot because of the time Jagger kissed Keith Richards on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ If you liked the Grateful Dead, you were a hippie. If you liked the Sex Pistols you were a punker. I guess that would make me a faggot hippie punk rocker.” Axl soon escaped the uptight Midwest in favor of the Sunset Strip. Thrown in jail many times, once for an entire summer, Axl finally left Indiana in 1980. Meeting up with another Lafayette boy, Izzy Stradlin, Axl formed various bands, struggling on the local circuit, eventually hooking up with guitarist Slash, drummer Steven Adler, and bassist Duff McKagan. In June 1985 Guns N’ Roses played their first gig at the Troubadour. Two people turned up for the show. It was rough going for a long time. The entire band lived and rehearsed in one funky room on Gardner Street. When a dollar could be scrounged up, they would get loaded on wino wine called Night-train. By day Axl sold God-knows-what on the telephone, and worked for a while as the night manager at Tower Video. But the buzz was brewing. Guns N’ Roses shows were angry and demanding—they created a frenzy, were axed from clubs, pissed off the other bands with their bravado. In March 1986 they signed with Geffen, spending the first half of their advance on clothes and equipment, the second half on drugs. It was right around this time that Axl met nineteen-year-old model Erin Everly, daughter of Don, the Everly Brother. “It was the first relationship I had had,” Erin told
People
magazine.” I felt like we were two people who didn’t have much but who had found each other.” According to Erin, police were called later that year by a friend after Axl became violent with Erin. But Erin dismissed it as a “false alarm.” She admitted later that her fear had been “bigger than you can imagine.”

Appetite for Destruction
was released in July 1987, but languished low in the charts. After a cameo by Axl in Clint Eastwood’s
The Dead Pool,
“Welcome to the Jungle” made it back on the radio and all hell broke loose. Cowritten with Slash, the song came from an incident Axl had while sleeping in a Bronx schoolyard. “This black guy came up to me and said, ‘You know where you are? You in the jungle, baby! You gonna die!’”
Appetite for Destruction
became the biggest-selling (seventeen million) debut album in history.

In January 1989 Axl was arrested for disorderly conduct and public drunkenness after hollering obscenties from Slash’s balcony. According to the police report, he asked the arresting officer, “Do you know who we are? I’m a millionaire. I can have your stupid ass!” Police detained Axl for several hours, but no charges were filed.

Erin’s friends and family tried to get her to leave Axl. One friend told
People
that she witnessed Axl slap Erin and pull her hair at a barbecue in the Hollywood Hills, saying that he was like a rabid dog. But Erin thought she could ease some of Axl’s childhood pain. He had revealed to Erin that he had been sexually abused by his real father at the age of two, and that his stepfather had beat him unmercifully. Erin never knew what might set off Axl’s raging temper. “I always thought things would get better,” she said, but had to cancel one of her modeling jobs because of the cuts and abrasions she received when Axl dragged her out of their apartment. “There was so much anger in him,” Erin told
People.
“Maybe I was this easy person to take it out on.”

Erin said that despite her misgivings, when Axl showed up at her door at four A.M. on April 27, 1990, telling her had a gun in the car and threatening to shoot himself if she didn’t marry him, she went with him to the Cupid Wedding Chapel in Vegas, where they tied the knot. Axl made solemn promises he would never divorce Erin and never hit her ever again, but according to Erin, he reneged on both counts, beating her so badly that she wound up in the hospital. While she recuperated, Axl brought her things back to his condo, and she gave her marriage another try. But Erin didn’t have her own key, and she said Axl wouldn’t give her any money. When she had a miscarriage in September, Erin said that she had to sell her Jeep to pay medical expenses. Once again Axl destroyed the house, causing $100,000 worth of damage.

Axl was arrested again in October 1990 for assaulting his female neighbor, supposedly smacking her over the head with a bottle of wine. Axl denied the accusation, claiming his neighbor was an obsessed fan. “She came at me with a wine bottle, she swung it at me, and I grabbed the bottle. I didn’t hit her with it—if I had, she wouldn’t be walking. She wouldn’t be alive.” Axl took a lie detector test, which he passed, and the charges were dropped.

In November, Erin told
People,
Axl slapped her around when he didn’t like the way she cleaned his CD collection. Erin finally moved out and went into
hiding. When Axl tracked her down, she just kept on moving. A year later the marriage was annulled.

In August 1991 Axl was issued a warrant for his arrest after being charged with four counts of misdemeanor assault and one count of property damage in connection with an aborted Guns N’ Roses concert in St. Louis that escalated into a riot. In December Axl threatened to sue
Spin
magazine for making “defamatory statements.” When asked if he would countersue, publisher Bob Guiccione Jr. replied, “You can’t countersue him for being a moron!”

Insisting on releasing two albums at once, Guns N’ Roses made history when
Use Your Illusion I
entered the
Billboard
chart at number one while its companion,
Use Your Illusion II,
charted at number two. Axl justified the offensive lyrics in “One in a Million” to
Rolling Stone:
“I used the word ‘nigger’ because it’s a word to describe somebody that is basically a pain in your life, a problem.” When asked about the word “faggot,” Axl recalled a bad experience he had with a homosexual who attempted to rape him, adding, “I’m not into gay or bisexual experiences. But that’s hypocritical of me, because I’d rather see two women together than just about anything else. That happens to be my personal favorite thing.” Meanwhile Axl kept missing his court dates in St. Louis while his lawyers negotiated with prosecutors, and was finally arrested in July 1992 at JFK Airport in New York and released on a hundred thousand dollars’ bail. In November Axl was fined fifty thousand dollars and placed on two years’ probation after being convicted of the assault and property damage charges. When told that his fine would be going to social service groups in the St. Louis area, Axl doubled the payment, saying, “If it’s going to a good cause, that’s great. We’ve already given millions to charity, so this is peanuts.”

Among his other legal difficulties stemming from the St. Louis concert, Axl was also sued by William Stephenson, a fan who said Axl attacked and injured him during the ruckus that ended the St. Louis concert. That suit was settled although Axl denied attacking the fan.

In August 1993 a twenty-year-old Australian fan hung himself while listening to Guns N’ Roses’ “Estranged.” Said his mother, “I believe this band is inciting kids to do this.”

In March 1994 Erin Everly filed suit in L.A., claiming “physical and emotional abuse, assault, sexual battery and false imprisonment” after being subpoenaed by another girlfriend of Axl’s, model Stephanie Seymour, who was actually countersuing Axl. Axl sued the supermodel for “kicking and grabbing” him at a 1992 Christmas party in their Malibu home, but it boomeranged on him when she countersued, alleging that Axl had attacked her first, kicking her down a flight of stairs, giving her a black eye and a bloody nose. Eventually, both suits were dropped. In court papers Axl claimed that his actions against Erin were also in self-defense. Erin, at the time of the
People
magazine story, weighed not much more than a hundred pounds.

Erin further accused Axl of “punching her, slapping her, shoving her, kicking her, tying her up, gagging her, spitting on her, striking her with foreign objects, throwing foreign objects at her, picking her up and throwing her and dragging her by her hair.” After one beating Erin claimed that she “awoke in a hospital to learn she had been injected with heroin and cocaine and had gone into cardiac arrest.” Another time Axl allegedly “caused a friend to break into Everly’s house and steal pictures of her dogs who had died, because Rose claimed he needed the pictures to ‘transfer the dead dogs’ souls to living dogs.”’ As of the time of this writing the suit was still pending.

I feel so alone sometimes.
The night is quiet for me.
I’d love to be able to sleep.
I am glad that everyone is
gone now. I’ll probably
not rest. I have no need
for all this. Help me Lord.

—a note written by ELVIS PRESLEY, December 1976

God let me come along at this time.

—ELVIS PRESLEY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

F
irst, I want to thank all the souls who gave up their earthly lives to rock and roll. I love you, Elvis. Jim, Moonie, Bonzo, Gram. But I also want to graciously thank those who didn’t find it necessary to split the scene—Lou Reed, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Joan Jett, Pete Townshend, James Brown, Ray Davies, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Elvis Costello, Robbie Robertson, the remaining Beatles, Ray Charles, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Keith Richards, Tina Turner, Ozzy Osbourne, Brian Wilson, Elton John, David Crosby, the Everly Brothers, Al Greene, Little Richard—who still live the life, but have managed somehow to hang on to their bodies and keep on rocking.

Thank you to my friend Gene Simmons, who gave me the idea for this book. He may have a very long majestic tongue, but he still thinks in dollar signs. Many thanks to Frankie Gaye, Eddie Cochran’s family, Johnny Thunders’s sister Marion, Sharon Sheeley, Richard Cole, the late Monika Danneman, Jan and Gertie Berry, Linda Alderetti, “Legs” Larry Smith, Sam Andrew, the Nelson family, Karen Lamm, Paul Ferrara, Todd Schifman, Nina Antonio,
Mr. Super Freak himself, Rick James, Nancy Parsons, Carol Clerk, Kathy Etchingham, B. P. Fallon, Merle Allin, and Miss Mercy, for opening hearts full of memories for me to poke into. Bravo to my editor, Jim Fitzgerald, for braving the rock-and-roll storm with me. Special thanks to Adam Wolf, David Portnow, Carol Clerk, and Chris Marlowe for much-needed assistance. And deep gratitude to those who carry the blazing rock torch into the twenty-first century: Terence Trent D’Arby, Oasis, Shirley Manson, Perry Farrell, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Dwight Yoakam, Beck, Rage Against the Machine, Supergrass, Courtney Love, Prince, Eddie Vedder, Springsteen (always), Kim Gordon, and Sean Lennon. And I bow to Bob Dylan. Thank you for being on the planet the same time as I am. Your presence has blessed my uproarious life.

Other Books by Pamela Des Barres

I’m with the Band

Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up

Clear Lake, Iowa. Rock-and-roll tragedy in the snow. Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper paid thirty-five dollars each for their fateful plane ride. (Elwin Musser, Globe Gazette)