Ain't It Fun

hellobeatle wrote:Michael Monroe and Mike Staggs?? They're on it, right?

nastja gregoric wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9kDN2y1JkA

Monroe first met Axl Rose in New York in 1989 when the Guns N’ Roses frontman gatecrashed Monroe’s video shoot for Dead, Jail or Rock ’N’ Roll to tell the singer that he was a huge fan of Hanoi Rocks. The two men bonded over a shared love of Scottish hard rockers Nazareth after Monroe explained that the title track of his 1989 solo album Not Fakin’ It was a Nazareth cover, and Rose ended up guesting in the video for Dead, Jail or Rock ’N’ Roll. “A mutually beneficial, and truly great friendship started from there,” remembers Monroe.

“We got along really well, and he was a really nice guy, and even though it’s Little Steven [Van Zandt] who sings backing vocals on Dead, Jail or Rock ‘N’ Roll, I asked Axl if he wanted to come up and do a couple of takes with us for the video. He said, ‘Sure.’ And as nice a guy as he was, he let us use the footage for the video, which got me a little more fame, and maybe I got him a little bit more street credibility in return.”

“Axl and I had many great conversations over the years. He’s highly evolved, very spiritual, and we talked about some pretty heavy stuff. He’s a really interesting personality, and he’s very smart. He’d always call me up whenever he was in New York, and we’d go out to dinner, and he was never late - he always a gentleman. I have nothing but good things to say about him.”

During the recording of Guns N’ Roses epic Use Your Illusion double albums, Rose invited Monroe to Los Angeles to play harmonica and saxophone on the Gn’R song Bad Obsession, which ultimately also led to the two singers duetting on a cover of the Dead Boys’ Ain’t It Fun on Guns N’ Roses’ 1993 covers album “The Spaghetti Incident?”

“He told me over the phone that he’d never heard the Dead Boys before,” Monroe recalls, “so I made a tape of their first album [Young Loud and Snotty] and the best of the second album [We Have Come for Your Children], and we listened to the tape in Hollywood, driving around in Axl’s car.”

“That was when he first heard Ain’t It Fun. He was like, ‘Wow! We have to do this song - we’re doing a covers album next.’ They [Guns N’ Roses] were already working on ‘The Spaghetti Incident?’, and I suggested that we did the song as a duet, in memory of Stiv Bators - which we did. And it became the first single off the album.”

“Axl really sounded like Stiv when he sang on that song, too. After we’d finished recording the vocals, there was a piano in the studio, and I was sitting there playing it. All of a sudden, The Rolling Stones and Kiss pinball machines behind me started going off by themselves. When I got back into the control room, I asked Axl, ‘Do those pinball machines ever go off by themselves?’ He said, ‘Oh, no. Never.’ I said it must’ve been Stiv getting his wings, like in It’s a Wonderful Life: ‘Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.’ Axl said, ‘That must be the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard anybody say about anybody else.’

“Stiv Bators is one of the best kept secrets in rock ‘n’ roll,” Monroe adds. “I always felt a spiritual connection to him. When Hanoi Rocks was breaking up after [drummer] Razzle died, I moved in with Stiv in London in 1985, and we lived together for a year before I moved to New York. Johnny Thunders moved in with us as well. There was definitely never a dull moment.”

“God bless Axl for putting ‘In memory of Stiv Bators’ on the [‘The Spaghetti Incident?’] record sleeve. I didn’t want any money for my involvement in the song; I just asked that they mention Stiv Bators on the album, to honour his memory, which they kindly did.”