The history of Guns N Roses is filled with tumultuous tales of lies and deceit
with Axl Rose and not uttering a word to each other since quit the band in 1996.
It's fair to say they're probably one of the only acts who've truly lived up
to the scandal and drama that permeates good old fashioned rock and roll.
More recently, the band's former manager,
Doug Goldstein, spoke about how his initial collaboration
with Michael Jackson marked the beginning of the end for the band.
He detailed how the collaboration came about shortly after, Axl Rose had revealed
to Interview magazine that he was sexually abused by his father as a child.
Goldstein refers to accusations made
against Jackson, highlighting his insensitivity to Rose's traumatic past.
So Axl does that huge interview.
He bears his deepest, darkest secret and comes to my room two
months later and says, hey, I'm going to play with Michael Jackson.
What's Snow? Said Goldstein.
So everybody in the industry knows
that Eddie Van Halen got one million dollars for B.
.
Did I say at least let me negotiate the deal?
I said it's already negotiated.
He's giving me a big screen TV. Hang on.
What?
He's going to give me one of those big 72 inch screen TVs
from Axle's point of view, that was the only problem.
He could ignore the drugs and the alcohol, but never the child abuse.
Goldstein ends with saying that after this
incident, Axl never again thought as his brother,
with Michael Jackson's mere presence pulling apart.
One of the most prolific rock groups of all time is quite the revelation
if it wasn't for the multiple inaccuracies in Doug Goldstein story.
Firstly, Michael Jackson was first accused of charges in August 1993 but worked
with for the first time two years prior to this in 1991.
Therefore, Axl Rose could not have possibly opposed to working
with Michael Jackson in 1991 due to child abuse allegations.
Secondly, the story Doug Goldstein alleged was that he was motivated to work
with Jackson because of the fact that Eddie Van Halen was paid one million
dollars to do the guitar solo for beating only.
Eddie Van Halen did not get paid back then
as he did the solo because he liked the song Free of Charge.
Recently revealed the truth behind how his first musical collaboration with Jackson
came about, that he had received the call one day
from his manager, who told him Michael is trying to get in touch
with you, to which his reply was a shocked wow.
The world famous guitarist said, so I called him back and he wanted me
to play on Dangerous and I was pretty starstruck.
You know what it's like really,
in a way, you get that feeling of like, I guess I have arrived, you know?
And so I had them give him my hotel number and he called me up to my room.
And it was that voice, you know, on the other end of the phone.
And he says, I'd like you to play on my record, you know?
So I was like, OK, you know, we made a date and I went down
to the record plant in Hollywood and he was there with Brooke Shields.
That was very surreal.
He continued, these were two people that I'd sort of grown up with in a way.
So we hung out for two minutes and they
went off to dinner and left me with a song.
I did my thing. He really dug it.
And afterwards he kept asking me if I'd be into doing this or doing that.
I do some shows here and there,
and it was fun because he was such a pro and he was such a young talent.
And I showed up there and and he was there and he was with Brooke Shields.
Right.
How they were dating or they had just started dating at that point.
And so he just so I met the two of them and then they
took off to go have dinner and he just left, gave me free reign in the studio.
So we got on great.
And he say much now?
He didn'tsay much.
What did he say? Like, here's a track to play with you.
Yeah. You know, that's basically it.
As a result of this initial meeting,
I played the lead guitar on Michael Jackson's given to me from his
dangerous album, stylistically given to me as a hard rock
track, but also considered a heavy metal ballad with an aggressive sexual flavor.
The music video for Given To Me features Jackson with his band, including Slash,
performing the song on stage at an indoor rock concert.
Loud explosions are later heard in the video with visuals of stylized
electrical arcs and Jackson dancing as they run down his body.
Michael Jackson debut the single's music
video during his landmark interview with Oprah Winfrey on February 10th, 1993.
The track was a modest hit for the artist
only being released in Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Speaking about, Jackson said
he was so amazingly, musically fluid, such a treat to be around.
When asked what it was like to be around, the megastar replied on stage.
His whole professional thing was really
where he clicked when he wasn't working or in production or whatever it was.
Then you could see that he was sort of at the mercy of his own success.
All the people he had around him, the tugging and the yes people.
You could tell that he knew, 90 percent of them were full of it.
I felt sorry for him in that sense.
Many mistakenly believe that Slash also played on Michael Jackson's black or white
from the same album, but the song's main riff was played
by another industry guitarist, Billy Bottrell.
I did not play on that song,
remarking that the guitars were not his sound,
but says that the confusion was made because he played the riff during live
performances of the song with everything he witnessed being around.
Jackson did say that he felt sorry for the late singer after making
a surprise appearance during a Dangerous World Tour concert in Japan.
I did a couple of shows with Michael
in Tokyo and saw how this whole massive thing worked, and he was the center of it.
The only time I felt like he was in any
kind of comfort zone was when he was actually on stage, he continued.
Right after that,
guns came to town and did our shows and our success was massive.
But it wasn't as overwhelming as what Michael was going through.
It was just an interesting light looking
at the two things and being careful about what you wished for.
At that point, Guns N Roses were getting
pretty big and beginning to live in the bubble that massive artists live in.
So it was interesting to see someone
who was already entrenched in that world, albeit with three times the entourage.
Everything just becomes bigger and bigger
and less realistic, the amount of bullshit surrounding it,
because there was nobody in his entourage that he could 100 percent trust.
Axl Rose fired their guitarist, Gilby Clark in 1994.
Guns and Roses, who were then heavily
addicted to drugs, were often one to two hours late for their shows,
not to mention when Axl attacked the fan who was recording their concert and as
a result caused mayhem at the arena and 10 fans were injured.
Guns N Roses split in 1996 as a result
of a dispute between Axl and Slash over who was to blame for their massive
commercial disappointment of their 1993 album, The Spaghetti Incident.
Soon after, their beef slash left the group to pursue a solo career,
and by 1997, Guns and Roses had lost their popularity and fell apart.
This ultimately had nothing to do with Michael Jackson and his musical
partnership, Axl Rose had problems with other band members, too, and not just.
On a positive note, Axelle had great admiration for Jackson
and declared his song Man in the Mirror as one of his favorite songs.
Michael Jackson and I continue to collaborate professionally when
in 1995, he played the guitar on D from Jackson's history album.
He also appeared on morphine from the 1997 remix album Blood on the Dance Floor.
And a few years later, in 2001,
when he played on privacy from Jackson's very last studio album, Invincible.
Also joined Michael Jackson on stage many
times over 50, to be exact, with the most notable being at the 1995
MTV Video Music Awards playing black or white and the intro to Billie Jean.
The very last time the two Giants shared
a stage together was on both the 2001 Michael Jackson 30th anniversary special
concerts that took place in New York City, where he played black or white and beat it
faced a medical crisis of his own while
appearing at Jackson's anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden.
Years of drinking had swollen my heart to the point of bursting, he recalls.
It reached the point where the doctors
gave me between six days and six weeks to live.
They installed a defibrillator to keep
my heart from stopping and keep it beating at a steady rate.
I was out of circulation for four months before I picked up a guitar.
But in 2001, I agreed to play at Michael's celebration.
Once I get up on stage, my heart rate skyrockets.
I was suddenly hit in the chest by a shark
and my vision flooded with electric blue light.
I thought I had a short circuit
in a guitar cable or a photographer's flash had popped in my eyes.
Each time it happened,
I had to stand there and make it look as if everything was normal.
I saw it later on TV and you couldn't tell.
So I guess I pulled it off.
It was extremely disconcerting until I figured out what was what.
Word is that when she was recording his first solo album in the summer of 2009,
he considered calling up his old friend and asking him to guest on the album.
Yes, that's true.
The thought did cross my mind,
and this was something he might have been interested to do.
Unfortunately, Jackson was in rehearsals
for his ill fated This Is It concert series in London at the time.
So Slash never made the call.
He put the idea on the long finger,
figuring he could return to it at some later date.
However, a couple of weeks later, Slash finds out that he was too late
and Jackson had in fact died at the age of 50.
Michael, you know, I mean, I only knew him for the most part, a professional level.
I don't even think when he attempted to be
any closer than that, I even allowed it because it just is too crazy.
You know, there's there's being famous and then there's being that kind of famous.
And that's that's a crazy world to be in because you have no sense of reality.
And Guns and Roses was probably the biggest stadium rock band at the time.
And then you have Michael, who is the sort of Elvis Presley of the period.
And it's like, that's scary.
And he was just dealing with it.
And I felt for him because he, as an artist, one of the genius artists,
most genius I'd ever really been around
and, you know, sort of stuck in this world where nobody is real, you know,
nobody will talk to him in a real fashion and everybody's sort of around him so they
can gain something from it and so on and so forth.
It's a very lonely situation.
Check out our other videos on Michael Jackson's musical rivalries
and also visit our M.J. store by clicking our link in the description.
Thank you for watching the detail.
We'll see you next time.