2013.05.DD - Excerpts from 'Louder than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal', by Wiederhorn and Turman

A collection of GN'R related excerpts from the book 'Louder than Hell' found in different articles on the net:

RIKI RACHTMAN (DJ, VJ, Cathouse nightclub founder): The very first live performance at Cathouse was Guns N' Roses, Jet Boy, LA Guns, and Faster Pussycat, all taking turns playing acoustic; nobody had record deals. We probably had five hundred people there. Nobody knew Guns N' Roses would become the biggest band in the world.

VICKY HAMILTON (ex-Geffen A&R, manager): [GN'R] ended up living with me because Slash called one day and said, "The police are looking for Axl [on rape charges]. Can he come sleep on your couch for a couple of days?" This was before I was their manager. Axl moved in, then a few days later they were, like, "The police are still coming around. Can we move in?" So the rest of Guns is living with me, with the exception of Duff, who always lived with his girlfriend. I felt like I was having a heart attack every day because there was always something going on--the cops were beating at my door, or whatever. At one point, Howie Hubberman, who backed me on Poison and Guns N' Roses financially, said, "Here's a few hundred dollars. You and [roommate and concert promoter] Jennifer [Perry] need to go check in a hotel. I think you're gonna have a nervous breakdown and die." [The rape charges against Rose were ultimately dropped.]

STEVEN ADLER: We lived there for three months; the five of us and Vicky and Jennifer. We destroyed this apartment. The last day we were there, Axl and I got into a fight and he pushed me into this fire extinguisher outside the front door. The glass broke and then I grabbed him in the living room, because he pushed me out the door. I pushed him on this coffee table; everything was destroyed.

VICKY HAMILTON: The building we lived in was the first apartment building on Clark Street, across from the Whisky. I wasn't present when that fight happened, but I did return to the broken window and my apartment being even more trashed than when I left. Once Steven was trying to help me pick up empty Jack Daniel's bottles and beer cans while Axl was sleeping on the couch. We woke him up and he was so mad he picked up the heavy wood coffee table (which I still have, complete with cigarette burns and water rings) and heaved it at Steven with everything on it. Then he started punching him. It was the day before a showcase and I said, "Great, you want to kill your drummer the day before an industry showcase. Perfect!"

SLASH: I hated Gazzarri's. I never would set foot in there. But I did actually play there with Guns N' Roses, once, right after we got a record deal, and Paul Stanley did sound for us, because he was courting us to produce us at that time. When [Geffen A&R man] Tom Zutaut was bending over backwards trying to find people to work with Guns N' Roses in '85, '86, no one really wanted to work with us; anybody that we met would disappear. They'd show up at a meeting and go to the bathroom and never come back.

DUFF McKAGAN: Finally, at the end of April of 1986, we got signed. There was heavy interest by all the majors, five or six. We were personally dealing with them.

IZZY STRADLIN: We were staying at a place with a phone, and they'd call and leave messages. We'd say, "Yeah, we've been talking to Capitol, EMI, and Geffen, but we'll meet you down at, uh, yeah, Le Dome. Yeah, for dinner. We'll talk some more." We went from eating fucking bean burritos to steak and lobster in a matter of a few days. That lasted about two weeks, and we got bored with that, so we said, "We'd better sign with somebody." Geffen was very hip to what was going on. They know about rock and roll. There were labels we went to who wanted to sign us but they didn't know who Aerosmith was. We're in this office with big plants and desks and something came up about Steven Tyler, and the chick goes, "Who's that?"

VICKY HAMILTON: John Kalodner said to me after I went to work at Geffen, "Yeah, you brought me Stryper, you brought me Mötley Crüe, you brought me Poison--then of course the day you wanted to bring me Guns N' Roses at Columbia, I wasn't here." I took 'em to Tom Zutaut at Geffen at that point.

W. AXL ROSE: We got two firm, and a six-album deal. That's good, because they wanted a lot more, and we didn't want to be tied for that long. The deal is the best thing we could have fucking hoped for from any label, and we wouldn't have gotten any more support from another label.

SLASH: I know David [Geffen] from when I was a little kid. My dad used to work for Geffen & Roberts, a management company, and we lived next door to Joni Mitchell. Any time Guns did anything bad--I wrecked our apartment, I wrecked our van--I'd call David and go, "I'm not such a bad guy and the band really likes this company."

W. AXL ROSE: I spent my advance on clothes. I took out everybody I'd known for the last few months. Every time we went out, I paid for it because everybody used to do that for me.

RIKI RACHTMAN: Axl was the guy; the key word is was. If there was an opportunity for him to help a friend, he would. Axl and [GN'R manager] Doug Goldstein called MTV to get me the audition for Headbangers Ball. For the audition, Axl came with me to New York. We flew together, he paid for the hotel--the Mayflower Hotel. When I walked into my audition, I walked in with Axl. I was horrible. Is it who you know? Yeah. Did I care? No.

VICKY HAMILTON: The last time I saw Axl was at Hamburger Hamlet and he acted like he didn't even know me, which was better than him screaming, "I'm gonna kill you, bitch!" He left [that message] on my answering machine. I took the tape out of my machine and said to [friend and journalist] Janiss Garza, "Put this somewhere. If I ever end up missing, take this to the police." I think she still has it somewhere.

STEVEN ADLER: I love Vicky. We got signed because of her. She got us a record deal, and then Axl and the guys wanted to get rid of her. I was devastated because I loved her and she did everything for us, and they didn't want her working for us because she was a girl. It was the eighties and some people still thought women weren't as strong or powerful as men. It was bullshit. I was very disappointed in the band because she deserved to be with us.

VICKY HAMILTON: The day that Axl was screaming he was going to kill me was over something I said to Musician magazine. I believe the quote was, "Axl has two very distinctive personalities; one is a sweet, fun-loving boy, and the other is a demon
dog from hell." But that wasn't what caused the break. The break happened when Tom Zutaut brought in Alan Niven to manage the band. The reason according to Tom was, "The band needs major management." Funny how I was major enough to do A&R for a major label [Geffen] but not major enough to manage the band I brought in.

TRACII GUNS (L.A. Guns, ex–Guns N’ Roses): I started seeing live music when I was about fifteen or sixteen. The first band I ever saw was at the Troubadour. I was a lot younger than those bands I was seeing, but Starwood gigs were more of the beginning of the L.A. punk rock scene. I saw the Crowd and the Weirdos at the Starwood. Rock bands that were happening played Florentine Gardens and clubs like that. Then I saw White Sister, London, Mötley Crüe, and Sarge, Angelus, Dante Fox — that’s my whole rock-and-roll education as far as what went into putting L.A. Guns together. We came out around 1983, ’84, and those bands were all around since ’79, ’80. Then there were the bigger ones before L.A. Guns, like W.A.S.P. and Ratt. By the time we put Guns N’ Roses together out of L.A. Guns, we perfected this kind of heavy, but bluesy, but a little bit punk attitude ingredients to make this perfect cake.

SLASH (Velvet Revolver, ex–Guns N’ Roses): [Ex–Guns N’ Roses drummer] Steve [Adler] started me on guitar. I met him in my early years of junior high and I wasn’t doing really well, and he wasn’t either, so we started ditching Bancroft Junior High in eighth grade together and hanging out. I went to Steve’s house one day, and he had an amp. I didn’t know what lead guitar was, but I always wanted to do something musical. He had some KISS records, and the amp and guitar, and we blasted all of it at the same time. I decided I was going to play bass and he was going to play guitar, then somehow we switched and I started playing guitar, and he started playing drums.

STEVEN ADLER (Adler’s Appetite, ex–Guns N’ Roses): [In my teens] I was the one guy hanging at the Starwood. I was there every day because it was two blocks away from my house. I would hang there for sound check, and that’s where I learned to play drums. I never took a lesson until recently. I learned from the drummers in the bands playing there.

SLASH: Steven and I used to get into clubs. I saw Nikki Sixx’s band London back then, I saw Snow and Quiet Riot. I never saw Van Halen then, though. Simultaneously, there was this punk scene that was going on, so those were actually mixed, the beginning of the metal scene in L.A. was the tail end of the punk scene, so I was around for both of those. For young, impressionable musicians who aspired to rock stardom, Hollywood could be as intoxicating and dangerous as it was for hot eighteen-year-old actress wannabes just off the bus from the Midwest. Rockers rarely ended up in porn but were nonetheless taken advantage of financially, emotionally — even sexually. And if they had an ounce of talent and a taste for drugs and alcohol, their unhealthy appetites were easily sated.

STEVEN ADLER: People would pull up beside me in their cars and ask me if I wanted to smoke a joint. I’d be like, “Hell yeah!” The next thing you know, you’re completely baked and they’re touching you all over and you don’t know what the fuck’s going on. All you know is that an orgasm feels good. Anybody can make you come, and in that state, I didn’t have the presence of mind to give a damn. I was used, abused, whatever. Let’s get high, let’s party. One time I was walking along Santa Monica Boulevard and ran into two clean-cut guys who must have been in their twenties. We started talking and they said they had some bitchin’ weed back at their pad, so I went with them to smoke. We arrived at this dumpy little apartment and there was another guy there, only he was in his forties, a completely scruffy-looking loser. Right away, I felt uneasy. I’ll spare you the details, but they hurt me pretty badly. Part of my mind just kind of shut down, and that day my reality became a bad dream. They didn’t beat me up, but they did everything else, and it was pretty devastating. I was just fourteen at the time.

SLASH: I got nabbed [shoplifting] at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, which was my parents’ favorite record shop. I was hired at the very same store six years later in the video division, and during every shift for the first six months, I was convinced someone was going to remember that I’d been caught stealing and have me fired.

From my understanding, this book included quotes found in more than 200 interviews. So similar to what we are doing in the history section, it is a collection of quotes form other sources.

This quote from Axl puzzled me: "We got two firm, and a six-album deal. That's good, because they wanted a lot more, and we didn't want to be tied for that long. The deal is the best thing we could have fucking hoped for from any label, and we wouldn't have gotten any more support from another label."

I looked through my sources but could not find the original source, I did, though, find this article where the contract with Geffen is described and where it is mentioned the information came from Axl: https://www.a-4-d.com/t3118-1987-09-dd-rock-scene-l-a-s-newest-rock-hot-shots-izzy-axl-slash-duff-steven

"They basically inked a six-album deal, with two albums firm, explained lead singer Rose in our later conversation."

So, did the authors of Louder Than Hell just make up a quote to fit the information? Or did they have access to another Rock Scene article? Then I realized that Turman, the journalist behind the Rock Scene article from 1987 is also one of the authors of the Louder Than Hell book, so presumably she had kept the actual quote from Axl, or at least could reconstruct it based on notes.