Mick Wall - W.A.R.: The Unauthorized Biography of William Axl Rose

Like some Anne Rice vampire, it was always late at night when he called, always dark out there whenever you ran into him. You got the feeling he hardly ever saw daylight, didnt approve of it. On a completely different schedule to everyone else, always sleeping until four or five in the afternoon, these late night rendezvous had the incongruous effect of making you feel as though he was always a little bit more awake than you, or indeed anyone else around him. Not that it made him smarter or more fun to be withjust that it ensured things tended to be done on his terms, whether they be long, complicated meetings or simple phone conversations. Even an accidental collision on the street didnt seem to catch him off guard. It was as though he just expected strange things to happen to himall the time.

from W.A.R.

Part One
One In a Million

Part Two
Youre in the Jungle, Baby

Part Three
Ringside

Part Four
Chinese Curse

Like some Anne Rice vampire, it was always late at night when he called, always dark out there whenever you ran into him. You got the feeling he hardly ever saw daylight, didnt approve of it. On a completely different schedule to everyone else, always sleeping until four or five in the afternoon, these late night rendezvous had the incongruous effect of making you feel as though he was always a little bit more awake than you, or indeed anyone else around him. Not that it made him smarter or more fun to be with just that it ensured things tended to be done on his terms, whether they be long, complicated meetings or simple phone conversations. Even an accidental collision on the street didnt seem to catch him off-guard. It was as though he just expected strange things to happen to him all the time.

Of course, back then, this was exactly the sort of thing I most craved from my rock stars, but since it was the boring 1980s, hardly ever got that lurking sense ofnot danger exactly, nor even real excitement, just something additional . That creeping feeling that this was one rock star that might just bust out at any moment and say or do something no one else dared. Even though rock had officially been declared dead by the British music press almost ten years before, to the point where I felt I had actually seen the corpse rotting by the roadside many times during my own decade-long career working for that same press, I couldnt help but be seduced by the strange promise this driven individual with the long red hair and pinched little face seemed to hold out: that not only was rock not dead, but that, in the time-honoured phrase, we hadnt seen nuthin yet. In fact, he would make sure of it. That seemed to be the deal he was offering us anyway.

For a while he seemed to be able to deliver on it too. Even though we couldnt really be sure at the time, looking back now, twenty years later, it seems obvious: Guns N Roses were the last of the all-time great rock bands. That is, the last of the all-time great rock bands that didnt consider what they did was in any way ironic or perish the thought embarrassing. Not even on some subconscious level. Thats what the twentysomethings who now walk around in their post-modern GNR T-shirts never seem to have considered. That once upon a time, this stuff wasnt funny; it was real. Okay, maybe it was funny by the time Guns N Roses first became famous, but for those of us who were the twentysomethings back then the most pleasing aspect of this phenomenon was just how quickly they wiped the smiles off everybodys faces.

Watching the band perform in London at the Hammersmith Odeon, as it was still known in October 1987, there was no room for doubt: this was rock with a capital R. This was rock that did not give a fuck. Like Axl screamed in one of his most famous songs, you were in the jungle, baby. And you were gonna die

Even those NME -reading so-called pop sophisticates, who will still tell you The Smiths were the last great rock band, couldnt entirely deny the frightening reality of Guns N Roses. Deep down inside, they knew The Smiths were simply too self-conscious to be a truly transcendent rock band; that Morrisseys hand-wringing, ber-fan angst would always prevail over good-looking Johnny Marrs low-slung rock sensibility. Certainly, there appeared to be no such problems regarding W. Axl Rose the one that only came out at night or his leather-clad buddy Slash. Not then anyway. All that stuff would only become apparent later, when it was already over and none of us were supposed to care any more.

Needless to say, as time went by and the empty, unproductive years seemed to have cluttered up his mind like cigarette butts in an ashtray, it became clear just how ridiculous the whole last-great-rock-band premise was, both for Axl and for those of us that had once, just for a minute, actually believed in it or rather were seen to believe. Viewed from a distance, until his recent return to the stage his second comeback in the last five years, the previous one in 2002 having ended with the almost immediate collapse of his first US tour for ten years it seemed that things hadnt just fallen apart, they had dwindled to the point of near total obscurity.

Yet it must have been great being a teenage Guns N Roses fan in the late-1980s, finding a real-deal rock band to call your own that didnt belong to the generations before. Until then the arbiters of rock taste were a collection of older brothers and young dads who scoffed at the MTV-friendly, niche-driven likes of Def Leppard, Bon Jovi and their poodle-headed pals, throwing their Zeppelin, Sabbath and Purple albums on the table like a royal flush at a poker game for greenhorns. Now they had to admit it: that Guns N Roses song, Sweet Child O Mine, that their kid brother/son told them about, it was good fucking good. As was that other one theyd seen the video for, Paradise City. In fact, they might even invest in a copy of the album those tunes came from, Appetite for Destruction . Why not? Over thirty million other people would do exactly the same during that period thats more people than ever bought the Beatles Sgt. Pepper , more copies sold than any solitary album by U2 or the Rolling Stones; more albums sold, in fact, than Bob Dylan has managed in his entire career.

Even when the NME -reading, brother-dad axis appeared to get their own back with the grand-scale arrival in 1991 of Nirvana, the band that history now tells us made groups like Guns N Roses obsolete overnight, it didnt actually change a thing. The groups that looked and tried to sound like Guns N Roses the second-raters like Mtley Cre and Poison their flames were certainly extinguished by the wave of new grunge stars Nirvanas unforeseen success ushered in. Not Guns N Roses, though. They didnt become obsolete, though their career did grind to an ignominious halt a couple of years later.

But if things were somehow different now and that original five-man line-up actually got back together, or even if just four out of five of them could make it back into the studio, the odds are the album they produced would easily sell another twenty million copies. The fact that its been more than fifteen years since he last released an album of original material, yet W. Axl Rose can still headline arenas and festivals all over the world with a band that has absolutely nothing in common with Guns N Roses except its legal right to the name, proves just how strong the demand is for the original line-up. In fact, its such a no-brainer its amazing that even Axl has not yet succumbed to its lure.