Wall - Last of the Giants : the true story of Guns n’ Roses

LAST OF THE GIANTS

The True Story of
Guns N Roses

MICK WALL

For Axl, you won

CONTENTS

Give up all hope, all illusion, all desire Ive tried and still I desire, I still desire not to desire and hope to be without hope and have the illusion I can be without illusions. Give up, I say. Give up everything, including the desire to be saved.

Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

Los Angeles is full of ghosts. Take a drive through West Hollywood, along Sunset Boulevard and its many tributaries, and names and places from the past return, some urgent, some distant, all able to conjure those ghosts by their mere mention. Tower Records, bankrupt since 2006; the Hyatt on Sunset, once known and feared as the Riot House, now a sanitised boutique hotel called the Andaz West Hollywood; the Roxy, the Rainbow Bar and Grill, the Whisky a Go-Go, the Troubadour all still standing, but existing on the fumes of their shared, impossible to replicate pasts; nasty joints like the Coconut Teaszer and Gazzarris, now long gone; Sunset Strip Tattoo, relocated from its ramshackle shop opposite the Hyatt some way further down Sunset; the buildings that once housed the Starwood and the Tropicana and the Cathouse and the Seventh Veil now rebranded and reused; the 24-hour Ralphs supermarket that had so many aspiring musos walking its aisles it was known as Rocknroll Ralphs; the Capitol Records building, the Geffen Records building, each monuments to a vanished industry. And the side streets with their stories: North Clark, where once both Mtley Cre and Guns N Roses lived in the cheap apartments that lined it; Alto Loma, where the hidden oasis of the Sunset Marquis hotel lay Hunter S. Thompson used to call that place the Losers Hilton, so many and varied were the touring bandsand LA rich that partied in the cabanas by the rippling pool

West Hollywood is a different place now, and ironically, given the turbo-charged, try-hard heterosexuality of the late 1980s, one of the citys best-known LGBT districts. But for anyone who remembers its ghosts and who saw the place in its 1980s heyday, this is the town where anything that could happen did happen. Where everything was coooool, baby, one minute, then out of control the next.

Imagine arriving here, as W. Axl Rose and many thousands of others did, from the Greyhound Bus terminal in North Hollywood and seeing the Strip for the first time at night. The atmosphere of the place came at you like a bullet in the back, a supercharged mix of ambition and abandon, hedonism and desperation: it was like a permanent first night away from home, no responsibility, no tomorrow, no fucker telling you what to do or what to wear or where to go, a heady blast of freedom, intoxicating and scary. The levels of bullshit and testosterone were off the charts. Everyone was in a band, or starting a band or thinking about it, or else they were a budding promoter or a DJ or a VJ or a manager. In a pre-internet age, cheap photocopied flyers were the best form of communicating who you were and when you were playing by the end of the night, discarded A5s would be blowing down Sunset like tumbleweed. Bands formed and broke up and reformed again with this guy replacing that guy, this name instead of that one, one crazy dude after another. Loose collectives looking for the magic formula, the glory moment at which the touchpaper would ignite and they could begin their climb from a paid-for slot on the bottom of the bill.

It could happen, and it did: look around and you could even see the people that it had happened to David Lee Roth, singer with LAs biggest home-grown band, Van Halen, ligging with his manager, Pete Angelus, in the Rainbow; Vince Neil, a Mexican kid from the wrong side of town now somehow singing his way toplatinum heaven with Mtley Cre, dragging the mud-wrestling girls from the Tropicana back to his house to party; Robbin Crosby, Ratts blond bombshell of a guitarist, propping up the bar at the Troubadour, surrounded by chicks and chicks-with-dicks and until the gods pointed their fingers and decided that this was your fate, there was an itinerant life of cheap places to crash, sofas to surf, rehearsal space to find. There was some movie doing the rounds saying lunch is for wimps well, so were breakfast and dinner out in Hollyweird, California. Any spare dollars and who had those? were allocated to booze, partying and flyers long before loose change was scraped up for fast food or whatever cheap shit was left on the shelves after midnight at Ralphs. The true Hollywood vampires knew girls who would buy their groceries and offer up their beds while they were busy trying to climb the greasy KY pole

This was a very particular life in a very particular time and place and it was being projected outwards from these few neon streets to the rest of the world. Rock rags like Hit Parader, Circus, RIP, Spin and Kerrang! helped build the myth. Video clips that began on Headbangers Ball then crept onto mainstream, daytime MTV. Radio stations like KNAC blasting out Poison, W.A.S.P., Ozzy Osbourne saw their playlists picked up across America. People saw and people heard and they came in their thousands to be part of it. Axl stayed only a few weeks, freaked out by the place and its people, walking around with a can of mace in one hand, a piece of steel in the other like the hayseed Indiana boy he was, but somehow he knew that he had to come back

Young Bill Bailey, just turned 18 years old and not yet W. Axl Rose, was a smalltown cops nightmare. In Lafayette, Indiana, in the late 1970s, most of the teenage troublemakers were of the usual sort: bored, drunk, pumped full of hormones and not particularlybright. It didnt take the FBI to catch them. Bill Bailey was different. He was bright very, in fact and his rebellion had both a root and a reason. It wasnt that they couldnt arrest him. It was that they couldnt stop him, couldnt make him respect their authority, or anyone elses. He ran up 20 arrests by his estimate (I was guilty on five), although Tippecanoe County Court records state that he spent a total of ten days in the county jail as an adult over a period from July 1980 through September 1982, on charges of battery, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, public intoxication, criminal trespass and mischief. When he finally hitchhiked out of town, back to LA and away from the torture of his early years, he was technically skipping judges bail. He would not return for a very long time.

If Axl Rose is the last great rock star, then Bill Bailey is the sad, sweet, clever, abused and angry child that Axl left behind in Lafayette. Yet he lives on in every onstage meltdown and backstage bust-up, in every act of intransigence and temper. And he surfaces in the untold moments of kindness and vulnerability, in the love songs with which he lays himself open and protects so fiercely. Hes there in the lyric to One in a Million Police and niggers thats right / Get out of my way and to Sweet Child o Mine Shes got a smile that it seems to me / Reminds me of childhood memories . Hes there in his choice to cover a Charles Manson song on the Spaghetti Incident? album, and hes there again in his need to emulate the songwriting of Elton John and Freddie Mercury. Hes there in the desire to control every element of Guns N Roses, from the ownership of the name to the safeguarding of the musical legacy. Its easy enough to make the link between a young Bill Bailey dreaming of one day having the freedom to sing somewhere other than the bathroom of his family home out of earshot of his religious zealot father, and the glistening edifice of