1987.06.DD - Chris Tetley interview with Axl and Slash

by **Soulmonster** Fri 27 Apr 2018 - 11:51

The interviewer says he did the interview "earlier this year" in London, and it is implied this was before the release of Appetite. In other words, this must have been in June when the band was in London for their gigs at the Marquee.

Transcription (in progress):

Interviewer: The Guns N' Roses album 'Appetite for Destruction' has been really quite amazing. I don't know what it is, but in America anything seems to go we in the UK [?] will seem to be really struggling just to get one band recognized. In the States it doesn't really seem to matter what form of music you go for, it somehow works! And things have really happened for the Beastie Boys and Run DMC with their pointed rapping music. Things are also working for the likes of Cinderella, Tesla, and Poison, I suppose that's mainly due to the likes of Mötley Crüe and Ratts and, of course, formerly Kiss. And the thrash scene seem to have really gone off with an almighty bang as well, I mean, just look at Metallica, look at Slayer, Overkill, Asian Steel [?] and Nuclear Assault, I suppose for that matter as well. And also, of course, heavy metal rock is still thriving, look at Malice, look at Metal Church and Crimson Glory. And now the Aerosmith type boogie, if you'll pardon the expression, our black foot Doc Holliday [?] and Skynyrd have been brought forth into the 1980s while the L.A. Guns and Faster Pussycat and probably the most successful so far, the band Guns N' Roses. I don't know whether all these emergencies have been due to the press hype or what. I really haven't a clue. Maybe it's television, maybe it's MTV, I don't know. I know one thing's for certain, since I started featuring the Guns N' Roses album on my show in Manchester, the album was proven to be one of the best-selling units so far in 1987. What really turned me onto the band, I suppose, was meeting up with the boys - that was slash and Axl - down in London earlier this year, and I think you'll agree that they're certainly characters. So let's wind the tape back and let the boys themselves illustrate exactly what makes Guns N' Roses take:

Interviewer: How did the band come together?

Slash: Just, on the club scene in L.A., word of mouth, stuff like that.

Axl: Hanging out ads and everything but you know, we all went through various bands back and forth. And we kept ending up around each other because we all play, we all like and play what we want to do we all have the same goals. There's a lot of people who aren't, you know, necessarily goal-oriented, they just want to be stars, you know.

Slash: We basically honed in on each other.

Interviewer: So you all come from different parts of America. Where do you come from Slash?

Slash: I was born in London

Interviewer: Oh yeah?

Slash: I lived up north, for ten [?] - eleven years.

Interviewer: Where about? Where about?

Slash: Stoke-on-Trent.

Interviewer: Stoke-on-Trent, not too far from Manchester, that.

Slash: No, no, just a little ways off the road.

Interviewer: That's right, yes, yes. Where about do you come from, Axl?

Axl: I'm from the Midwest, from Indiana.

Interviewer: Yeah? What about the other boys in the band?

Axl: Uhm, Izzy, the other guitar player, him and I grew up and had a garage band together in Indiana and both moved to California. Uhm, Steve originally came from Cleveland, like he was born there, and then moved and lived in California like all his life. Duff comes from Seattle and was in a lot of punk bands up there, bands like '10 Minute Warning', 'The Farts', and other things like that and put on a lot of records

Slash: That's the reason Hollywood was [?] [Axl and interviewer laughs]

Interviewer: Of course it must have been a really big struggle because when you first started, right when Guns N' Roses first started, must have been loads and loads of bands on the L.A. scene and you got to make you sort of impact.

Axl: When I first got to, you know, L.A., sort of speak, because I was in other parts of California, when I first got to L.A., you know, Motley Crue was just getting signed and you know there was W.A.S.P, there was Ratt, it was Dokken, Great White, all those bands, you know, and then it kind of died, you know, after those bands left and it was dead for a long time and it was just a lot of heavy metal bands that weren't really, they were kind of like copy heavy metal bands, kind of fake metal, and there was a few good things happen but not much, and then you know we started working on our project in different bands and just kept, you know, working on it the whole time until finally, you know, we got it down [interrupted]

Interviewer: When did you get it started?

Axl, continuing: and then set up our own program.

Interviewer: Yeah? How do you get yourself started? Because, a combination [interrupted]

Axl: Everything we listen to, everything we listen to we're influenced by, we just try to, you know, we try to play a song that we want to hear. We try to play our own favorite material.

Slash: It's a [?] of the five of us and our individual influences and the the similarities that we all have. That's what made us all get together in the first place.

Interviewer: Right.

Slash: We were there only five guys to end up together to make this band, which is when you look at how many people are in L.A. and how many bands, are not sustainable, so [interrupted]

Axl: Yeah, I mean, we got we have the lineup that, you know, we're gonna keep unless someone dies and then it's like, "How we're gonna replace that person?" You know. That's gonna take a lot of work because there's nobody we want.

Interviewer: All right. You're early influences then?

Axl: My early influences? Uhm, how early? I grew up as a kid listening to Elvis Presley and gospel records, you know, and then when I got older I got into greatest hits in the 70s and all that stuff, and I played piano for years so I was really into anything to do with piano, Elton John and Billy Joel and stuff like that. But then when I started singing, you know, hardcore rock and roll I was really into Dan McCafferty of Nazareth. He's my favorite singer and, you know, maybe on the next record, possibly on the next record, I've talked to him about doing a song with him and he wants to do it, and we've got the song picked out, and if it works out we'll do it.

Interviewer: Great stuff, yeah, yeah.

Axl: Yeah, he's great.

Interviewer: Yeah. And what about you then Slash?

Slash: Uhm, well, I mean, I came up in music, you know, basically, but when I first started playing I'd say I started with the newer stuff and went backwards, and started out with, like, Aerosmith and Cheap Trick being the two main ones, in my first year. And then I went backwards, I went through Jeff Beck, was a big major influence, Zeppelin, Stars [?], you know, sort of all the same stuff

Axl: You know, just pick up a book of rock history and, you know, and anything back to the blues and anything and then get into top 40 and pick a bunch of stuff out of that, and all of it we've, you know, listened to and played.

Slash: Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's like really good that we wouldn't exactly listen to as a whole, you know, but you picture [?] [interrupted]

Axl: I listen to everything from Wham to Motorhead, you know, you can find good stuff, you know, you can find a lot of things you hate, but the trick is finding what's good in it.

Interviewer: Yeah, sure, sure.

Axl: There is something good in anything you listen to

Interviewer: There is a tremendous variety in your music. I was just saying a little bit earlier that I like the way you've sort of introduced a bit of, well, Doc Holliday, almost Blackfoot, Molly Hatchet, into the very hard core [interrupted]

Axl: I wasn't necessarily into it but, you know, being from the Midwest you get that shoved down your throat, okay, I mean, you hear so much of Lynyrd Skynyrd and stuff that you begin to hate it, but then later on when you're writing songs that stuff starts coming back to you, you know.

Interviewer: It's good boogie music, it's good rhythm, you know?

Slash: Yeah, except for that smell [?], I hate that stuff. [laughs]

Interviewer: Hey, they might not like your smell, too, you never know. [laughs]

Slash: I don't sing about it.

Interviewer: How extensively have you toured in the United States of America? Because that's all you've been, is it so far?

Axl: We haven't. We started out, when we when we got this lineup we loaded all of ourselves up into into a car with a U-haul, seven of us in one car, and drove up to, we're headed to Seattle from from L.A., you know, like 1,200 miles or something, and the car broke down 175 miles out of town so we just grabbed the guitars and some clothes and we hitchhiked all the way there, played a few shows, came back to LA and just basically we've been playing the clubs there and setting up, you know, getting on top of the scene there and working on the press and stuff, and releasing, and we released our own independent EP distributed by Warner, and we put that out and, basically, we haven't really toured and so this is like our first tour. Playing three shows as the Marquee is the first time [interrupted]

Slash: This is basically the first leg of Guns N' Roses on the road.

Interviewer: Brilliant, brilliant, but I mean, you are very determined guys, I mean, from what I've read about you [interrupted]

Axl: Oh yeah, you get good press, you get bad press, and none of it matters because we're gonna do it anyway, you can't stop us.

Slash: The band's never been one to do anything but go, you know, basically focus on playing [interrupted]

Axl: I mean, even when you're trying to get into clubs, no one wants you to play, they don't want to pay you, they don't want to give you what you deserve, and basically you just do it anyway until you get what you want.

Slash: Till you get enough respect to be, you know [interrupted]

Axl: And then all sudden everybody that was blowing you crap is also your best friend, you know, they can't wait for you to play, yeah well, you're the one who owes me 250 bucks for this last show [interrupted]

Slash: CC from Poison came up to me the other day like he was like my last best friend in the whole world, and came to me shake my hand I told him to get the hell out of my face [laughs]. Like all of the sudden [interrupted]

Axl: He [?] goes, "You're just jealous," you know, and that's the, you know, that shows how far the guys are off base because that's the last place anybody wants to be.

Slash: We hate [?] [laughs]

Axl: It's interesting. I think it has its place.

Interviewer: It does, it does.

Axl: I think it's a, I mean, you know, it's some of the best teeny bopper rock and roll out, you know, so that's really good, you know, that's cute, that's nice.

Slash: I think [?] the Bay City Rollers is better.

Axl: Bay City Rollers were much better.

Interviewer: We're going back a long long time [interrupted]

Slash: I know, but I'm just saying [interrupted]

Axl: Bay City Rollers had good songs for what they did.

Slash: Things are supposed to progress with time.

Interviewer: The boys, what I really like about Guns N' Roses though, as I said previously, you're all individuals, I mean, you look outrageous, totally sort of [laughs]

Axl: Yeah, but it's nothing really new, it's just something we've been doing, you know, like I'm wearing cowboy boots. In L.A. everybody wears cowboy boots, and I look like I'm jumping on a bandwagon but when I came to L.A. six years ago wearing cowboy boots, everybody said I just look like I just got off the boat, now it's a fad.

Slash: The cool thing is, since we've been here I haven't seen one person with cowboy boots.

Axl: Yeah, I know, that's really nice. That's kinda nice.

Interviewer: You're gonna help to make England your [?]

Axl: Same way around New York, the only person was Carly Simon [laughs]

Interviewer: [?] Carly Simon. Tell me about the album. Okay, how did you get your deal with Geffen in the first place, right?

Axl: Well, what we did is we shopped the tape around and some other people were doing it for us and they got it to Elektra and we thought, "Wait," and there was such an interest we thought, "Wait a minute, well, if they got an interest maybe someone else have some interest, too?". And we started getting around and there's a guy in L.A., there's two of them, Joseph and Henry, they're DJs and they run all these after-hours clubs and stuff and all the best dance clubs, they're the DJs at all these clubs. And they have a record store called Vinyl Fetish which handles all the imports, especially from London, and the rest of the world, and they introduced our tape to Tom Zutaut of Geffen Records who signed Mötley Crüe and Dokken when he was at Elektra, and he signed Tesla at Geffen. And they introduced our tape to him and he came down to the show and we started talking with him. And we also talked with, you know, every other label there was and we had all these other labels and we had everybody offering us this and that, but Tom knew what to do with us and wanted a rock and roll band. And none of the other labels, they liked it but they didn't know what to do with it, and we went where we felt we were in the best hands and we got everything we wanted, you know, money-wise, anyway, so someone else could have came up with more money but, you know, what good is it to get a half a million dollars when they're gonna just blow it, and they don't know to spend it right.

Interviewer: Very, very good company Geffen, aren't they? Massive!

Axl: Very.

Slash: A major thing is, like with a lot of other people in this business, you know, in the majority of this business, it's real hard to find someone who understands rock and roll for what it really is and when we met Tom he was one of the persons who really understood what we were about, whereas the other guys that wanted to sign us saw, you know, the full house and enthusiasm towards the band, well we figured, "We can take a chance on this, but if it doesn't happen we can always drop them [?] and write it off," you know what I mean? So it was more or less then trying to pick up on something that looked like it was viable, you know, financially, and Tom was just into it for the attitude.

Interviewer: What is this I read in the press about you, Slash, [?] pinched Cobalt Stargazer's girlfriend [interrupted]

Slash: She was the first decent-looking girl I saw when I got here [laughs]

Interviewer: That guy is a mean guy, isn't he. You know the guy?

Slash: No, he knew me, I didn't know him.

Interviewer: What's the album called?

Axl: The album's called Appetite for Destruction.

Interviewer: Who's produced it?

Axl: Again, Mike Clink, and then it was mixed by Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero who produced the latest Tesla record.

Interviewer: Yes, Steve Thompson, great lad, yeah.

Axl: They've done some Stones stuff and they did the Harlem Shuffle and stuff like that.

Interviewer: Who's Michael Clink worked with then?

Axl: Michael Clink did the live UFO record and [interrupted]

Slash: He was the studio house too [?]

Axl: He's like Ron Nevison's main man and does a lot of stuff like that and then we got him to engineer and produce our record.

Interviewer: Of course Ronnie's working on, or has just finished, working on the new Kiss album, and he did Ozzy Osbourne's album before that

Slash: Yeah, yes, he is a big guy.

Axl: Mike is really, really good. He let us have a lot of freedom to do what we wanted to do. We were basically in the production of this record, you know, we were there like every step of the way, every step of the way. When we went to mix it, you know, usually these people don't have anybody there, we went there with the mixing, we were there when they mastered, we were there. And so when you get this record, you know, maybe it's not produced as well as something else you might hear that's done by the best people in the world, but that's because this is more real, this is us. This isn't somebody else doing it, this is us. It's our work.

Slash: [?] that's why we put together.

Interviewer: That's great.

Slash: We went our own road and picked everybody we wanted to work with from day one, why stop now?

Interviewer: That's right, yeah, yeah.

Slash: We [?] through, I mean, everybody, everybody.

Interviewer: Right. Now you're obviously gonna have to promote the album, which means getting out on the road again, proper.

Slash: That's what we're supposed to be doing anyway, we're a live band [?].

Axl: We found we've ended up working with a lot of English people, too, our manager is English, Alan Niven, our road manager, Colin Gardner, is is from Europe here, and you know we and the press person were working with now, Arlette, here, we brought her from L.A. but you know she's basically European.

Interviewer: She's worked with the [?] on the road in the UK so she knows the thing, yeah.

Axl: And with Geffen we work with a fella named Bryn Breidenthal. It's weird how we end up working with a lot of English people because English people seem not to, they don't want to deal with any garbage. They go straight for the heart. We like that [?].

Interviewer: We're delighted to have you here. We can get the album when?

Axl: The 20th or 21st of July

Interviewer: Great.

Axl: It'll be out here.

Interviewer: And you'll be back touring again?

Axl: We're back in September, like, September 13th, I believe it is, we'll be back doing England with Aerosmith.

Interviewer: Great stuff!

Axl: Six or seven gigs with Aerosmith and then we'll be going on European tour with them.

Interviewer: Brilliant! We'll look forward to see you when you come back. Great talking to you now.

Axl. Great talking to you.

by **Soulmonster** Thu 3 May 2018 - 15:31

Done! And it is obvious this interview was done in June 1987, before the first Marquee show. I will update the lists (the drop-down, the interview index, and the first post).