Guns N' Roses burst onto the music scene in 1987 with the hard-charging hit,
"Welcome to the Jungle." Over the next few years, the band took hard rock to the next level,
with offstage antics to match. This is the untold truth of Guns N' Roses.
We can thank two schools for inadvertently laying the foundations of Guns N' Roses.
Izzy Stradlin and Axl Rose met while attending the same high school in Lafayette, Indiana.
They bonded over a love of music and hatred of their small town. Stradlin later described
their teenage friendship to Louder as, quote, "pretty 'Beavis And Butt-Head."
"Beavis likes all his duties."
A few years earlier, Steven Adler and Slash had become friends at middle school in Los Angeles.
They briefly formed a band at Fairfax High, before they both dropped out. Stradlin graduated from
high school in 1980 and moved to LA, where he joined and left various bands. Two years later,
Rose moved to LA, too. Alongside guitarist Chris Weber, Stradlin and Rose formed a band
they eventually named Hollywood Rose and started writing songs that would later be released by GNR.
Meanwhile, Adler and Slash had reunited, playing together in a band called Road Crew.
Adler later told Rolling Stone that they learned about Hollywood Rose from a flyer
they saw on Sunset Boulevard. After watching the band perform,
Adler and Slash briefly joined. But it took another split and a reunion before GNR was born.
In the fall of 1984, Slash and Steven Adler put out a classified ad for Road Crew recruits.
They met bassist and self-described "punk kid from Seattle" Michael Andrew McKagan,
aka Duff. Recalling the first time he heard Slash play, Duff later said to Rolling Stone,
"I'd never been in a room with a guy my age who played guitar like that."
However, he was looking for something more organized. They stayed friends,
and Slash and Adler concentrated on Hollywood Rose until the band split.
According to Tracii Guns, a guitarist who was friends with Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin,
he invited Rose to join his band, L.A. Guns. Rose was eventually fired by the manager,
and he and Guns teamed up, combining their surnames to create Guns N' Roses.
Rose asked Stradlin to join, and he brought along his new neighbor – some kid from Seattle
who played bass and went by "Duff." Still keen to avoid wasting time, McKagan organized a West
Coast tour to test his new bandmates' commitment. Tracii Guns and the drummer dropped out — and
Rose and Stradlin replaced them with their ex-Hollywood Rose bandmates, Slash and Adler.
It was June 1985. After a few studio rehearsals, Guns N' Roses hit the road. And then they stood at
the side of the road, because their car broke down almost immediately. Hitchhiking for 1,100 miles
cemented their bond — and potentially served as an omen of the chaotic magic to come.
Guns N' Roses started attracting local attention immediately,
partly for their high-energy performances and partly for their offstage antics.
Despite the hype, some labels were wary of the band's unpredictable reputation.
GNR ultimately signed with Geffen in 1986 and started working on their first studio album,
Appetite for Destruction. The band drew on the sex, drugs, and rock n' roll that was all around
them, especially the first two. Adler maintains that the band was tight-knit and relatively
clean-living when recording Appetite, which began in January 1987. He said that they all
lived and partied together and that although he smoked weed and drank "a little alcohol,"
he didn't use heroin. He said that Slash and Izzy Stradlin occasionally used the latter,
but overall, they all focused on making, quote, "the greatest record ever."
Others remember it differently. Engineer Micajah Ryan told Billboard that the bandmates
all recorded at different times. Axl Rose, in particular, liked to track his vocals alone.
According to GNR accomplice Marc Canter, while working on the EP
that preceded the album, the band was, quote, "completely out of control,"
including the usually relatively sober Rose. They were also
regularly arrested for public drunkenness, resulting in 5 a.m. calls to management.
Although people working on Appetite for Destruction knew they were creating
something special, they didn't predict how special. Izzy Stradlin hoped to sell
2 million copies, while engineer Micajah Ryan predicted a less optimistic 200,000,
given that the frequent use of the F-word limited potential radio play.
Ryan's suspicions nearly proved correct. When the album was released in July 21, 1987, the
cover alone had already caused controversy. It was a 1978 artwork from which the album took its name,
one that appears to depict sexual assault. The cover was replaced, although manager
Alan Niven later told Billboard that a ban was the plan, intended to stoke publicity.
Some of that intentional provocation initially hurt the album. MTV refused to play the video
for "Welcome to the Jungle," concerned that the song's not-exactly-wholesome
themes would see it dropped by the local cable providers it relied on.
Despite Rose's dismissal of the network as, quote, "boring," without MTV's audience, sales stalled.
Niven launched a campaign to convince MTV to play the video, deploying various underhanded
tactics. Ultimately, he believes it was a strongly worded letter he wrote to the
head of programming that worked. MTV played it at 4 a.m. on a Sunday — and immediately,
viewers started calling in endless requests for more. From then on,
the video became an MTV mainstay, and album sales soared. Appetite is still the
best-selling debut album of all time, according to Billboard, with 30 million sales to date.
"The actual success part happened so quick, that it was such a mindblower."
Guns N' Roses followed the explosive success of Appetite with the mostly forgotten GNR Lies in
1988. They returned to groundbreaking form — and mayhem — with 1991's two-volume Use Your Illusion.
GNR started working on Illusion in June 1989. At a dysfunctional session in Chicago,
they realized that they had about 35 songs. But Izzy Stradlin, Steven Adler,
and Axl Rose consistently failed to show up. In August, Stradlin was arrested and
court-ordered to get sober. He did — which alienated him from the rest of the band,
who were using heavily. Rose was also frustrated. In October 1989, he had called
out his bandmates' heroin use live on stage while supporting the Rolling Stones, causing tension.
Despite the friction, the band wrote most of the Illusion songs between that summer
and January 1990, when they went to the studio. But the drug issue spilled
into the sessions. When heroin-addled Adler couldn't play the drum tracks anymore, he was
kicked out and replaced with the Cult drummer Matt Sorum. Rose also added keyboardist Dizzy Reed.
Again, despite the chaos, the band was efficient at recording the basic tracks,
only needing two or three takes. In addition to the new songs, they recorded covers that
were ultimately released on 1993's The Spaghetti Incident? and revisited songs that had been cut
from Appetite. However, Rose's obsessive production irritated Slash and Stradlin.
Izzy Stradlin had started to feel alienated from his bandmates even before he got sober. He told
Louder that they had stopped just "hanging out" and messing around with music. As each started
using drugs and alcohol more frequently and more intensely, the substances took over their lives.
After getting sober, Stradlin tried to distance himself from the band as much as he could while
still being on tour with them. He traveled separately on the road while
they took planes and found it difficult to watch what he perceived as his friends'
self-destruction. Even though Rose was usually relatively sober,
at least compared to his bandmates, the frontman's outbursts and walkouts put Stradlin on edge.
"You get to the point where you're like, you know,
'Am I gonna carry on like this or am I not?' And I said I'm not."
Stradlin quit Guns N' Roses in November 1991. The first thing he did was hit the road again,
taking a cross-country vacation that included seeing the Grand Canyon and surfing in Florida.
After that, he formed his own band, Izzy Stradlin and the JuJu Hounds, replacing thrashing guitars
and screaming vocals with a more '60s vibe. Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones even made
a guest appearance on the band's self-titled album. Stradlin went back on tour, happily
trading arenas for clubs. Meanwhile, his GNR spot was taken by Gilby Clarke, who was fired in 1994.
By 1995, Guns N' Roses hadn't released new studio music since 1993's cover
album The Spaghetti Incident? The duo considered the core of the band — Slash
and Axl Rose — were at loggerheads. In 1997, a year after he officially left,
Slash blamed a difference of opinion as far the band's musical direction was concerned.
This was partly true, but Rose's controlling behavior contributed to the tension.
He'd reportedly forced his bandmates to sign contracts, and had fired Gilby Clarke
without their input. Slash didn't like Clarke's replacement, Paul Tobias. The breaking point
came when Rose asked Tobias to re-record some of Slash's guitar parts on GNR's cover of "Sympathy
for the Devil" for the film Interview With the Vampire — a song Slash didn't want to make.
"We ended up doing another cover song, a song that didn't need to be covered, for a lame movie,
and it didn't do anything for the band."
After a break, Slash briefly rejoined GNR. But on October 31, 1996,
Rose sent a fax to MTV that announced:
"[Slash] has been 'OFFICIALLY and LEGALLY' outside of the Guns N'
Roses Partnership since December 31, 1995."
Slash was followed out the door in 1997 by drummer Matt Sorum, whom Rose fired, and
original bassist Duff McKagan. McKagan's alcohol and cocaine consumption escalated on and after the
Illusion tour. In 1994, he was hospitalized for a ruptured pancreas and told that if he drank again,
he would die. Three years later, McKagan had gotten sober and became a father,
while GNR stalled. He quit the band to focus on parenthood and other projects,
including business school and mountain biking.
After Duff McKagan's departure in 1997, Axl Rose was the only original Guns N' Roses member left.
Even then, GNR became a constantly revolving door over the next few years.
Although the band played live, often to huge crowds, Chinese Democracy — the long-promised
follow-up album to The Spaghetti Incident? — failed to materialize.
Just as material written for the original GNR's previous bands
ended up on Appetite for Destruction, and songs for that album ultimately ended up on Illusion,
GNR had started working on Democracy in 1994, before everyone but Rose left. Former Geffen
A&R executive Tom Zutaut, who had been fired and then rehired specifically to help with Democracy,
told Louder that by 2001, there were 50 to 60 songs in the draft stage. The problem was
editing that down to an album's worth and then finishing those songs to Rose's satisfaction.
Rose blamed GNR's ever-changing member list for the delays. It didn't help that
he didn't want band members who weren't in the current lineup to appear on the record,
which led to re-recordings of various parts. Rose constantly changed his mind over what to include
and how to edit tracks. Zutaut was fired again. GNR went through six producers — and $13 million.
In 2004, Geffen told Rose he would have to fund the rest of the album.
When Chinese Democracy was finally released in 2008, it sold well but received mixed reviews.
There have been plenty of mini Guns N' Roses reunions under different names.
Duff McKagan, Slash, and Matt Sorum played together in supergroup Velvet Revolver.
McKagan and Clarke opened for Slash with their respective bands in 2015 and joined him for
a few songs. In 2012, when GNR was inducted into the Rock 'N' Roll Hall of Fame, McKagan,
Clarke, Sorum, Slash and Steven Adler performed three songs at the ceremony. Rose didn't attend.
A key feature of revolving doors is that they turn full circle. The moment GNR fans had been dreaming
about finally happened on April Fool's Day 2016. McKagan and Slash played with Rose and GNR
for the first time since 1993. The venue was also poignant, taking place at the iconic Hollywood
club the Troubadour, which had hosted the debut of the classic GNR lineup on June 6, 1985.
The new-old lineup embarked on a tour aptly named Not in This Lifetime. It sold over 5
million tickets and made $548.2 million. Stradlin declined to join in 2016 because he felt the
money wasn't being split fairly. But McKagan, Slash, and Rose are, as of 2021, still touring.
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