1991.09.20 - Entertainment Weekly - Axl Rose fights back

Axl Rose fights backs

JANISS GARZA  
September 20, 1991

On ”Get in the Ring,” a song from Use Your Illusion II, Guns N’ Roses not only lambastes ”punks in the press” for allegedly printing lies, but also names names — among them Bob Guccione Jr., editor and publisher of Spin, and Mick Wall, a free-lance writer for the British rock magazine Kerrang! ”Well, it’s not the first time I was immortalized in a song,” shrugs Wall. Gary Numan took a dig at him 12 years ago on the title track of Replicas for panning Numan’s previous album. Wall thinks Axl Rose got upset with how the singer came off in a Kerrang! series of stories, and with the recent publication in Britain of an unauthorized book containing Wall’s interviews with the band. Guccione thinks the band took offense at Spin‘s publication in its June issue of a remarkably restrictive contract the band once required journalists seeking interviews to sign. ”It was the right retort to something that asinine,” Guccione says of the disclosure. Part of the lyric regarding Guccione says, ”What, you pissed off cuz your dad (Bob Guccione Sr., founder and editor of Penthouse) gets more p—- than you?” Guccione Jr. refuses to take it personally. ”A lyric like that is its own response,” he sniffs. Such remarks are likely to anger the band even further. Will Guns N’ Roses ever realize that these petty feuds detract from their music and there’s no need to ”get in the ring” at all?

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