2000.02.19 - Channel 4 - Stadium Rock (Slash, Duff, Matt)

Transcript:
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[Intro – Clip from Sweet Child O’ Mine video]

Matt: It was a real rock ‘n’ roll band. It wasn’t contrived in any way.

[Clip from Sweet Child O’ Mine video]

Sebastian Bach: In the years that we were touring with Guns N’ Roses... fuck, my nose still hearts thinking about it.

Duff: Throughout the whole thing we played for ourselves.

Slash: I mean, we had our bad habits, but for the most part I don’t think we were that scary.

Axl [from short interview at Donington 1988]: Our music comes first.

[Clip from Sweet Child O’ Mine video]

Voice-over: Guns were an unlikely combination. William Axl Rose had come from the Midwest to find his fortune with best friend and guitarist Izzy Stradlin. Guitar genius Slash, originally from Stoke-On-Trent, soon found them. L.A. hair rocker Steven Adler played drums, and a punk from Seattle, Duff McKagan, completed this raggedy-arse bunch.

Duff: The first time we played there was something, you could feel it immediately. There was, like, this electricity.

[Clip from Paradise City video]

Voice-over: It wasn’t long before Guns conquered the Los Angeles club scene, and the record companies embarked on a frenzied chase to sign them, much to their delight.

Slash: We decided, when the bidding war started, that we would just lead everybody on; we would just keep getting free lunch every day.

Duff: And to us it was great. It’s like, free lunch. We were poor, man! We were dirt poor.

Slash: You know, a couple of us had, like, this sort of little drug dependency things, so we had, like, free petty cash when we could get it - ten companies thinking that we were gonna sign with them, when we were already set with one.

Voice-over: Out of the blagging and the partying, Appetite For Destruction was recorded and changed musical history.

Neil Jeffries (Kerrang! Magazine, 1981-1990): A lot of it reminded people of Aerosmith when it first came out. People said the Stones, as well, but if you roll bands like Aerosmith and the Stones together, you’re coming up with something very special, indeed. It was an awesome record.

[Clip from Welcome To The Jungle video]

Voice-over: The album started to sell slowly and took a year to reach number one, but when it hit the top spot, the Guns phenomenon exploded and the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle kicked in. Drummer Steven Adler was the first to burn out.

Matt: Steven Adler, the original drummer, had quite a drug problem and the rest of the band was going pretty hard too, you know. So I used to describe it as like walking into an opium den.

[Clip from Welcome To The Jungle video]

Matt: Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. A little rock, a little sex, you know...

Duff: There was nothing better.

Matt: The combo (?) nice, you know (laughs).

Slash: We were just out of control.

Matt: Dump your shit, you know, the feds are here (laughs).

Duff: I mean, I’ve been all through the United States; I just don’t remember it.

Voice-over: Madness surrounded the band, and Axl seemed to retreat from the others. Something had to blow. It happened in St. Louis with an incident that became one of the most expensive and bloody in rock history.

Voice-over from TV news report, 1991: Police stopped short of using tear gas to control the crowd of about 20,000 rowdy fans.

Fan at the St. Louis concert (from TV news report, 1991): This guy from the audience started taking pictures of him. Axl Rose got mad cuz he didn’t want the guy taking pictures of him, so he jumped out in the audience and started beating up the guy.

Official, St. Louis (from TV news report, 1991): Early reports are that he used profanity and insulted the audience, and he then turned the audience into a mob.

Slash: They destroyed all our fucking equipment (laughs).

Matt: The riot squad came in. There was about 600 police officers and, you know, tear gas and... the whole bit, man.

Slash: Nothing shocks me, and that’s shocking. I’ve got a videotape of the whole thing and I’ve never been able to watch it from end to end.

Matt: It was kind of scary and I was like, we’d all just get a little out of hand. We had a couple of those.

Slash: I mean, St. Louis, by right, is an awesome rock ‘n’ roll town, you know? It really is.

[Clip from live performance of Civil War]

Voice-over: Band members thought Axl seemed isolated by success. He even appeared to be coming to gigs straight from swimming practice.

Neil Jeffries (Kerrang! Magazine, 1981-1990): Axl was crazy and angry, and just bitching absolutely everything in the world.

Voice-over: Axl’s attitude came to dominate the band.

Sebastian Bach: We played with them at Nassau Coliseum. We opened up and we were only booked for a 45-minute show. At the end of the set, Guns N’ Roses’ managers are looking at us going, “Keep going! Keep going!” I go, “We did all our songs! We’ve only got two records.” We’re up there for two hours and the crowd doesn’t know what’s going on. We come off stage, finally, and Axl is not even in the building. By midnight, he’s still not there. Everybody’s freaking out, the whole place is almost falling down, and he’s not even in the building! And I look down the hallway and there’s this big commotion going on. I look and it’s Stephanie Seymour, the model, holding hands with Axl. He’s walking down the hall like nothing happened. And I go, “Dude, where were you?!” and he goes, “I was taking a shower.” (Laughing) I was like, “Okay!”

[Clip from live performance of November Rain]

Voice-over: And it was his vision to turn Guns into a band with more than just hard rock to their name. That would spawn something so big, it would destroy them. Two double albums, released on the same day, became the biggest fastest selling rock albums in history.

[Clip from live performance of November Rain]

Matt: Axl really wanted to see how far we could take the tour. We really were on a mission to sell as many records as we possibly could. He wanted to break 35 million on Use Your Illusions worldwide. And we were at about 32 million, and I remember all of us looking at each other going, “Man, this gotta stop soon,” because we were all feeling pretty beat.

[Clip from live performance of November Rain]

Duff: We got off that tour and I, like, woke up one morning and I kind of hurt, you know? And then going from kind of hurt to I can’t move or even dial 911, you know? Luckily, a friend of mine came over to my house and I heard him downstairs, “Hey, where are you?” And he came upstairs and he said, “Fuck, it finally happened.” So my pancreas had burst.

[Clip from live performance of November Rain]

Slash: Then the tour ended, and they dropped me off and they said, “Okay, that’s that.” I was like, “Now what?”

Voice-over: For Axl it was distrust of the band and the desire to change Guns further. An album of punk covers slipped out, but it was over.

[Clip from Sweet Child O’ Mine video, “Where do we go” part]

?: And then my joke on my radio show was that he’s kicked everybody out of the band and he tried to kick himself out but he wouldn’t leave.

Voice-over: The band split and Axl surfaced only once in five years, an arrest in ’98 for public disturbance at Phoenix airport. This year he’ll be back with the Guns N’ Roses lineup of hired hands.

Slash: There’s a lot of very loyal fans out there that think Guns is not Guns without the original members that started it and so on and so forth, and I can understand that.

Matt: I don’t know if I’ll be comfortable watching the other guys play, you know, Sweet Child O’ Mine. I don’t know how that’s gonna come off. But he seems to know what he’s doing. It’s taken him a while, but I hope it works out for him.

Duff: I really have no regrets, you know? I don’t think I ever will.