Davis - Watch you bleed: the saga of Guns n Roses

Table of Contents

ALSO BY STEPHEN DAVIS:

For Vicky Hamilton

Women hold up half the sky.
Mao

Some think the legend of Guns N Roses began in the nighttime Los Angeles of 1985, a distant echo of West Hollywoods neon-lit Sunset Strip. Others think it should begin ten years earlier, at the confluence of two Indiana rivers, the Wabash and the Tippecanoe, in the 1970s. But in this telling, the GNR saga begins in gritty New York, in upper Manhattan, on a sweltering, run-down street in the late afternoon of a summer day in 1980.

Actually it could begin way below the actual city street, in the deeply recessed concrete canyon of the Cross Bronx Expressway, which is where the two young hitchhikers from Indiana decided to get out of the car. It had been a good ride until then, a straight shot from the Ohio line across I-80, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. Bill Bailey and his friend Paul, both eighteen, had left central Indiana via I-65 thirty hours earlier and were making good hitching time toward their first visit to New York City.

The Ford Econoline van that had picked them up crossed the Hudson over the majestic George Washington Bridge. They were on I-95 now. Crossing on the upper deck, looking south, they could see the Empire State Building and the twin towers of the World Trade Center shimmering in the summer haze. Bill Bailey looked up and saw they were passing a sign that said LAST EXIT IN MANHATTAN. He said, Hey, man. Let us off, OK?

I cant pull over, the driver said. He was an electronics salesman on his way to Providence. They were now headed east in the deep-walled pit of the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Bill asked, Wheres the next exit?

Way the hell up in the East Bronx.

The hitchers looked at each other. All they had were their backpacks and maybe thirty bucks between them. Let us off here, Bill said.

Man, are you sure? Itll be hard to get out of here.

Yeah, let us out. Just then, traffic slowed into the constipation typical of I-95 as it crosses New York City. The boys jumped out. Cars honked at them as they inched along the sheer walls, looking for a way out. Drivers laughed at them, told them they were fucking insane. A trucker blasted his air horn and they jumped at the sound. The walls of the roadway were at least a hundred feet high, and all they could see were the tops of the buildings up at street level.

After a while they found the service ladder and scaled the wall, a thousand horns blaring far below, emerging into immigrant New York City, circa 1980: Calcutta on the Hudson.

To Bill and his friend, it was bedlam, a Caribbean neighborhood in Washington Heights with a funky street scene of bodegas and shouting kids playing under open hydrants, crones yelling out of windows in Spanish, idlers under shop awnings, hustlers working the corners of 177th and Broadway. Bill and Paul, from Tippecanoe County in Indiana, were the only white faces in a sea of black people, Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans, Dominicans, Muslim women in veils, Haitians, Hindus, Chinese shopkeepers, and lots of kids immediately picking up on two white boys whod just climbed out of the hellish Cross Bronx like hayseed mountaineers in cowboy boots, blue jeans, and very long straight hair. The boys just stood and gaped, checking out this scene. Rappers Delight, bass-heavy hip-hop, blasted out of a bodega speaker. Lurid graffiti covered every flat surface. Kids were busting movesbreak-dancingon the sidewalk. Bill Bailey had never seen this before. Basically, there werent any black people in his part of Indiana, so they might as well have been in Senegal.

Now an old man limped over to them. He gave them the once-over, seeming to linger over Bills cowboy boots. Bill was becoming uneasy now, his friend noticed, which was never a good thing, because, when agitated or upset, Bills behavior could get a little out there. Finally the old man spoke, or rather squawked, in a high-pitched shriek.

DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?

The boys, taken aback, just looked at him.

I SAID, DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?

Bill Bailey said, Uh, were just trying to get to...

Bill Baileythe future W. Axl Rosejust stared at him in wonderment. And then the little old man wound himself up to his full fury and told these white boys what they could expect from New York City at the tail end of the seventies: years of bankruptcy, endemic crime, corruption, decadencethe gateway to the eighties and the scourge of AIDS. He told it to them straight from the gut:

Sometimes, legends come from true stories, and this is one of them.

Rainer Maria Rilke.

Chapter One

And as Led Zeppelin floated over America in the seventies, its shadow darkened the countrys heartland the deepest. All the great English bands of that erathe Stones, The Who, Bowie, Queenfound their largest, most slavering audiences in the middle of the country. It was no accident that the greatest American rock stars of the eighties were born in the Midwest and grew up with lethal doses of the mighty Zeppelin and the other rock bands. Madonna was from Michigan. Prince was from Minnesota. Michael Jackson was born in Gary, Indiana, in 1958.

Four years later, Axl Rose was born a hundred miles south of there, in Lafayette, Indiana, on February 12, 1962. His mother, Sharon Lintner, was unmarried, only seventeen, and still in high school. Her pregnancy was an accident and unwanted, at least by her family. The father was William Rose, a troubled and charismatic local delinquent of maybe nineteen. The baby, born with bright red hair, was baptized William Bruce Rose.

It is not known whether Axls parents ever married, since a marriage certificate has proved elusive to researchers, but if they did, it was probably a shotgun-type affair and the marital relationship was an on-and-off thing. The baby was often cared for at his Lintner grandparents house in Lafayette, in an atmosphere of barely stifled hostility toward his no-account father.

In 1964, when the little boy was two, his young parents split up, and the father acted out his own scenario of revenge when banned from the house for hurting Axls mother. He apparently abducted his son, and may even have molested him. Whatever really happened to the little boy, it was never spoken of again by the family, which treated these incidents with denial and shame. Bill Rose then disappeared from Lafayette, and never returned.

The following year, Axls mother married a man named Stephen Bailey and moved with him to a house on 24th Street, on the east side of Lafayette. Bailey adopted his pretty young wifes son and gave him his last name. So William Rose became William Bailey, an identity he lived with until he angrily cast it away, fifteen years later. His mother had two more children with her husband, so Bill was raised with brother Stuart and sister Amy. They lived in town but worshipped at a clap-and-shout country church on a gravel farm road in another part of Tippecanoe County. Bill Baileys stepfather was deep into Pentecostalism, the old-time religion that forbade drinking and listening to rock and roll, as well as most of lifes other pleasures. His almost total immersion in hyperpuritanism would prove crucial for the child who became the greatest rock star of his generation.