1998.02.03 - MTV News - Ex-GN'R Drummer Adler Pens Tell-All Book

EX-GN'R DRUMMER ADLER PENS TELL-ALL BOOK

MTV NEWS STAFF
02/03/1998

Former Guns n' Roses drummer Steven Adler is shopping a proposal for a tell-all book he's written with his mother that details his turbulent days before, during, and after Gn'R.

Adler holds the distinction of being canned live on the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards (while he was in detox the drummer says) by Axl Rose, who denounced Adler as a drug addict. Adler, who admits his seven-year addiction ate up the $2.3 million he received from the band in a 1993 settlement, is calling his book, "No Bed Of Roses," and in keeping with that tone, it is hardly a glamorous look at life in rock's fast lane. In the treatment he's written up, Adler says that he racked up 31 trips to the emergency rooms for overdoses, and suffered a heart attack and two strokes while he was strung out.

In one of the book's proposed passages, Adler describes his first drug-induced stroke after shooting a speedball (a potentially lethal combination of heroin and cocaine).

"I knew this was going to be some hellacious speedball trip and the only thing I could do was hang on for the ride," Adler writes. "In the next moment, I was on my stomach, my face uncontrollably hitting the tile floor. My eyes were open -- I was aware of what was happening -- but I couldn't stop. I could glance over to the tub where in arm's reach was a towel draped over it. All I had to do was grab the towel and shove it underneath my face. But I couldn't do it. I could feel my face hit the tile floor -- up and down, over and over again. And I couldn't stop as the convulsions swept over my body. I felt my teeth loosen as they broke away from the gums. I felt the lacerations on my face. The last thing I remember was pounding my face into a pool of blood."

As Adler slips into a coma after the seizure, his thoughts drift back to his youth when he met his childhood pal Saul Hudson, who later adopted the moniker Slash, and follow the two through a rough stint on the streets of Los Angeles when, according to Adler, the two would turn tricks to get by. The book then tells the tale of the dramatic rise and fall of Gn'R's original line-up, and the legal battle that pitted Adler against his longtime friend Slash.

The drummer's mother, Deanna Adler (a former deli waitress), gets to tell her side of the story as well as she watches her son's decent into drug addiction.

"No Bed Of Roses" has not yet been signed to any publisher, but Adler's agents say that he's already written a song that shares a title with the book, that he is talking to a "major record company" about starting his own label, and that several movie moguls have expressed interest in the book.

http://www.mtv.com/news/1429806/ex-gnr-drummer-adler-pens-tell-all-book/