Doug Goldstein is disappointed about not being mentioned in the Appetite 30th anniversary box set

@FLebeis you guys are UNREAL!
Niven was with GNR for 3 years and hired a Satan specialist to cast spells on Axl and myself.. I was with Axl for 17 years and more than doubled the bands royalty rate. Niven gets thanked on the new boxset, and NOTHING mentioning me.. WOW

— doug goldstein (@dougbfdink) November 28, 2018

... hired a Satan specialist to cast spells on Axl and myself..

STATEMENT:

The former tour manager of Guns n Roses has an integrity that matches his math; my contract with Guns n Roses was finally signed October 1986. I had started working with the band in August. Mr. Rose walked away from his obligations to the extended contract in March of 1991.

To my eternal regret I backed Mr. Rose in recording ‘One In A Million’. At that point I still believed he was not a gratuitous artist in his composing. I still believed him to be an artist, for that matter. He did not wear Manson T.shirts under my watch. He did not wear T. shirts denigrating Christ.

Furthermore Mr. Goldstein had absolutely nothing to do with the manner in which I brought David Geffen to the renegotiation table. I did not participate in those re-negotiations, or sign off on their content, since, dismissed, I no longer had responsibility for such negotiations. In that period I also supervised the renegotiation of the Artemis and Brockum contracts and directed Bill Elson of ICM to contract the initial dates of the upcoming tour.

Without doubt we can all say that Mr Goldstein presided over the rapid disintegration of the band. I, myself, have no doubt my exit was designed to allow Mr. Rose, to take over name, copyrights, etc. depriving the rest of the band.

The only people casting spells were Sharon Maynard, of whom I was unaware, and Mr. Goldstein, who directed her as to whom he wanted out of the picture. Yoda obliged by dismissing certain people’s images to Rose, and Goldstein, who by his own admission, in a bizarre letter that was posted on the internet, paid her. In the end one usually finds that evil is actually more banal than we fear, and based in greed and ego.

Didn’t get an awful lot done after 1991, now did they? By contrast I took an unwanted band to Wembley Stadium, my last act being putting that London show on sale.

I am long married to a light worker, renown in this area, my friends know my spirituality and that our home is full of positive spiritual talismen. By contrast, just last month I was warned that Mr. Goldstein was roaming the Southwest in a mobile home full of weapons. Do I think Mr. Goldstein and Mr. Rose are banal? You might ask that but I could not possibly comment, beyond saying …

“his statement is just crazy pants.”

Alan Niven

Soulmonster wrote:Wow. They are both bonkers.

Soulmonster wrote:Wow. They are both bonkers.

A man on the verge of a breakdown, Niven was convinced by then that he was, as he puts is, ‘under psychic attack’ from Axl. Convinced that Axl was utilising the forces offered to him by Sharon Maynard and her circle of crystal-gazing, future-reading, aura-controlling followers, Niven had gone in search of his own form of magical defence. Stephanie Fanning, who had initially left to work with Niven, had firsthand knowledge of some of Niven’s occult intentions at this time. ‘I think he dabbled in some things when the band was gone,’ she says. ‘He was kind of talking to a couple of interesting people that I think were dabbling in that as well. But Axl was doing the same thing. I felt like they were duelling each other with a little bit of their whatever you want to call that – black magic, whatever. I think they were duelling each other. One would hear like, “I hear Axl’s doing this to me, I’m gonna do …” I feel like it was kind of going on between the two of them. I don’t know how much credence I place in that but, yeah, he was. He was. He definitely was. A little bit, for sure. I don’t know exactly if Alan was wishing Axl ill or hoping maybe to bring clarity between the two of them, cos to be honest as soon as I heard about it I kind of shut my ears off. I was like, I don’t want to get mixed up in any of that. I don’t know what that is. Maybe it scared me, I don’t know. I don’t know whether it was black or white, evil or good. Bring us back together; tear him apart … But I know he was talking to people who dealt in that world.’

Eventually, Fanning left Niven – to go and work with Doug Goldstein again. ‘Alan, he went kind of underground. He stayed in LA for a couple of years while he was building the house [in Arizona]. But I was really hoping he’d get back in the game. Like, get back in the game. I’d bring him music into the office like, hey, check this out. And he just couldn’t … He just wasn’t … I don’t know if something left him. Look, it was even hard for me to wake up the next morning when GN’R was over. There was a huge emptiness in my stomach. A huge emptiness in my soul not to be with that band any more. So I can imagine what it was like for him.’

‘I already knew that [Niven] was into the Crowley, Jimmy Page, that whole kind of thing,’ says Doug Goldstein. ‘Him and Izzy used to go into New Orleans quite a bit.’ When Steph went back to work with Doug, she felt obliged to tell Doug of some of Alan’s strange behaviour. ‘She said, “He hired a black-magic specialist from New Orleans and every single day after work before he would go home he would go over there and they would put on black robes, and the candles and the incense, and they would cast evil spells on you and Axl.’ I was like, what a rat bastard, man! I mean, a) what a waste of fucking money. But b) what an evil bastard.’

As far as Alan Niven is concerned now, though, ‘the psychic attack was definitely manifest in the deliberate undermining of [Izzy’s solo outfit] the JuJu Hounds by Goldstein and [Axl].’ He feels this ‘psychic attack’ was also manifest in the sharp decline of Great White’s fortunes: specifically by the arrival at their label, Capitol, of the former Zoo Entertainment promotions chief Ray Gmeiner, as replacement for Michael Prince, who had long been a supporter of Great White. ‘Gmeiner was Goldstein’s former roommate,’ he adds ominously.

This was the last straw, he says. He had been ‘on the dark side of the moon to everyone in West Hollywood’ since losing the GN’R gig. A couple of tentative feelers from big-name acts had come his way in the immediate aftermath of the split, but Niven wasn’t interested. The big one was when David Geffen invited him to work with Bon Jovi. But it nearly made him puke, he says, when Jon Bon Jovi turned up at their first meeting with his lawyer and accountant in tow. ‘How could I possibly get excited, it was diametrically opposed to the nature and essence of my passion? This is not a job to me. It’s something that I value beyond a job.’ He sighs. ‘It was a very dark period for me and it got darker and darker.’

Next he discovered that his wife had been having a long-term affair with Great White’s vocalist, Jack Russell. ‘He was terrified I was going to find out.’ It was a discovery that led to the overwhelming realisation that she had in fact ‘compromised pretty much every relationship that was of value to me. And who the hell would want a toxic individual like that in a business structure?’ With his marriage in tatters and his career being held back by what he was convinced were ‘psychic’ forces, he recalled a place in New Orleans he’d once visited with Izzy called Barrington’s: ‘A retail mausoleum of ritualistic cornucopia. That covered all kinds of spiritual expression, from elephants’ feet with weird things buried in them packed with mud, to drinking skulls … I still have a couple of items from there’, including a large wooden rosary, a cross made from the staff of a bishop … ‘I’m a fucking atheist. I’m managing a rock’n’roll band. I have very little knowledge but I’m curious … I have two Coptic Ethiopian healing scrolls. One of them is intact, about seven feet long. It’s very rare to find a whole one because they’re concertinaed. They’re stunningly beautiful. I bought two Coptic bibles there that were about 400 years old. The pages are like bark. All hand-constructed and handwritten …’

He stresses, though: ‘I’m curious but I’m always going towards the light. So when things were going bat shit and I couldn’t figure anything out … I got to this point of: “This is ridiculous. There’s something to all this. Maybe I’ve been hexed. Maybe someone’s put a fucking curse on me.” So I called the guy at Barrington’s …’

Niven was put in touch with someone who offered help – at a price. ‘I’d walked through the door. Whatever scepticism I had, I’d knocked on the door and it had been opened so I walked through it.’ For several months, he studied under ‘a mad monk – he was huge and looked like he’d been picked out of a medieval monastery. To this day I still don’t know how much of a bullshitter he was. I do know how much of a manipulator he was because I had to fly him here. I had to fly him there. I had to take care of him at this point. But he introduced me to a whole area of reading that I’d been oblivious to. Which was basically occult reading … the secret knowledge. I learned that the simple truth is that truth is simple. That you simply find the truth by simply being truthful.

‘At this point in my life I have a real clarity of darkness and light. But at that point I was just in pain. Isolated and confused. And this guy said, “I can ceremonially get rid of the negatives that are attacking you.” And I was being psychologically attacked and I was in a psychological and spiritual warfare. There was a lot of negativity being put my way. Goldstein is just one of the people who was putting out that energy in my direction. Axl was another who was putting out that energy in my direction. Yoda was probably another one that was putting out that energy because she wanted to exploit him.

‘I was his guard. Once I was out of the way they could feed off him like fucking maggots. So I had to go and have these special knives made, crudely, out of a particular copper. And there was going to be some ceremony of putting the knives in a certain way. And the fact that a water pipe broke was supposed to be symbolic. And I started to go, I think I’m being fucking had here. And I eventually cut myself off from this guy. But, yeah, my open mind, at that moment, to such as hexing and hoodoo was an act of defensive desperation … nothing was working and all felt unpleasant … I couldn’t figure what the hell was going on … and not going on …’

Misfit79 wrote:Niven makes it sound like Doug was driving round looking for him!