1988.08.DD - Rock Scene - Knock, Knock, Knockin' On Hell's Door

Live From Minnesota, It’s Late Night Madness With Guns N’ Roses
by Beth "what me, boring?" Nussbaum.

“Been a long time since I Rock & Rolled..." Yeah, that’s right. Just when music couldn’t get any more prosaic (banal), Guns N’ Roses came along with the ultimate cure for Rock & Roll senility; explosive audio excitement’

But, I’m not going to go on and hype them cause they know how good they are. However, bet they don’t realize how really “fucked up” they are. After reading the following transcription of our Late Night Bull-session, maybe they’ll get the message Hey, partings cool, but it’s not cool when your too “fucked” up to fucking’ Rock & Roll.

And so begins our social intercourse:

Duff: We were all in this bar the other day and this guy came and sat next to me and he goes, ‘You know, I went to the doctor, and he gave me these pills that I’m gonna have to take the rest of my life.’ So I told the guy that at least he was fit, and heck a lot of people have to take pills for the rest of their life, no big deal. I told him it was O.K. and everything. Then he said, “Well, the doctor only gave me three pills.”

Slash: Next.

Duff: I asked my honey if she’d run away with me and get married and she said, “No, I can’t elope."
Then I was talking to my pal Slash about it and he says, “Well, that’s weird cause my honey do.'

Steve: Can we get on with this. You know how long a ride we’ve got tonight.

Duff: You know Hart’s new campaign slogan? NoMoreBush!

Rock Scene: Everyone wants to know the juice on this band, the intimate details, the tried and true Guns N’ Roses. So, tell me.

Duff: Describe the truth, and juice.

Slash: The juice, get it?

Duff: I think kids know the truth when they come and see us live.

Slash: Or if they just come and meet the band. I don’t think we do anything that’s falsified.

Duff: There’s nothing mystical about the band, if that’s what you mean. Come and see us live, and you’ll see the truth.

Slash: What kind of intimate details?

RS: Like, what do you eat for breakfast?

Duff: We don’t eat breakfast

Slash: No, actually, lately, I’ve been getting up and having tea. That’s true.

Duff: See, here’s how it happens, especially with me and Slash. We’ll go through a period where we don’t eat at all, and then there’s a period where we’ll just eat and eat and eat.

Slash: We do that. It just depends on how we feel. But, we’ll always drink.

RS: Aren’t you worried about the repercussions of living to excess?

Slash: No, next.

RS: What kind of toothpaste do you use?

Duff: Are you joking me?

Slash: Aim.

Duff: I use Aim too.

Slash: I use an Aim toothbrush too.

RS: What does your room at home look like?

Slash: It’s got four walls and a window. It’s got a bed in there, some posters, and..

Duff: It’s got a little pink TV set cause my girlfriend likes pink. There’s like pink stuff and girls stuff on one side, and my side’s got boy stuff like Seattle Sea Hawks stuff, rock posters, and my clothes thrown all over the place. It’s got a big bed so I can have sex all the time, in comfort.

Slash: My room is huge! It’s gigantic.

Duff: His room is the world! That’s what he’s trying to say. He has no room. His room is my living room.

Slash: But I’m getting my own place now.

Duff: That’s good, but his snakes still live in my house.

RS: Snakes?

Slash: Yeah, I got three snakes.

Duff: One of them is fucked! We gotta kill it.

Slash: I won’t kill it.

Duff: We should bump off the fucking thing!

RS: Is this a hobby?

Slash: Yeah. I used to have about nineteen of them, but you know, when we got road-worthy and stuff.

Duff: He lets them slither up his asshole!

Slash: I like big snakes cause there’s something very phallic about it.

RS: Like, Alice’s snakes? (They were on tour Alice Cooper for a while).

Slash: Yeah. I got a real boner when I saw Alice’s snakes.

Duff: It just came out. I’m sorry Slash.

RS: Slash, why do you always sleep on the floor after a gig?

Slash: Cause there’s so many fuckers in the room that there’s no where else to sleep! I always sleep on the floor. It’s traditional.

Duff: You woke up the other night- you were naked, but you had your dick under the covers. You were just talking in your sleep going, "What the fuck, fuck you" And I said, Slash, you’re talking to yourself,” and you go, ‘fuck you, motherfucker. ‘You almost pissed in your pants, and you wouldn’t get up.

RS: Do you two room together on the road?

Slash: Yes, because we’re probably the only two people in the band that can tolerate each other when we’re drunk.

Duff: Plus we drink so much; we just get there and pass out.

Slash: It’s true. It’s like, Axl doesn’t drink that much because he’s gotta preserve his voice. We just basically play our instruments, and I try to refrain from singing so that I can just drink all that much more.

Duff: I try to refrain from singing too, but we need backup vocals.

Slash: Hey, wait a second. Did anybody hear me singing on “Paradise City”? I do that every night now.

Duff: You were singing? You did that pretty good.

RS: You guys got a big major label deal, and yet you didn’t go with a “name” metal producer.

Slash: Tom Werman didn’t work. We tried out a whole bunch of those fuckers, and the reason we went with Mike Clink was because we’re so set in our ways that we didn’t want anybody to re-write our songs. So what we did for the album was, we signed up with an engineer, who was really hot shit. He produced the album. Basically he just got all the sounds, and produced it. He just basically got Guns N’ Roses on tape.

Duff: When you get like a Tom Werman (not putting him down-he did a great job on the last Crue album), when you get a “producer” they’re gonna try to do something of their own, when they haven’t been around the whole time you’re bands’ been playing in the dirt. Therefore, where do they get the right to tell you to change this lyric or that riff? You know what I’m saying? That makes sense, right? So, we found a guy who would parlay our sound onto a tape, therefore onto a record, therefore into a record store, and therefore into somebody’s house, onto their turntable.

Slash: Therefore, generating massive platinum status sales. Which we have, mega. See, it’s a secret, between you and I, we have four platinum albums. We’ve sold four million records.

Duff: Well, we haven’t actually sold four million, we have four platinum albums but. .. they’re not ours! We went to this like junkyard place down the street “dude, you can put some platinum on here?” We have four of em.

Slash: All with Axl's name on them. He wanted it that way.

RS: As we were discussing earlier, what do you mean, that you tried out producers?

Slash: You go in the studio, waste money, and do a couple of songs with them. Then it doesn’t work and you go, “Oh, fuck,”

Duff: Tom Werman came down to our rehearsal like this (puts his hands over his ears) going, ‘Fuck.’ We never heard from him again.

Slash: He left. That’s o.k. Tell Tom it was nice to meet him, though. It was a wonderful relationship while it lasted.

Duff: He brought us LIGHT beer too!

RS: So, are you gonna stick with Mike Clink?

Slash: Yeah. I talked to him the other day.

Duff: What did he say?

Slash: Hi.

RS: Where did you get him from?

Slash: Don’t ask that question. It’s too involved. He just came up.

Duff: The funny thing about him is, he’s a non-smoker.

Slash: Yeah, we all smoke a lot, and we were in the studio for a couple of months. He went to his doctor one day and he said, “Man, you gotta stop smoking.”

Duff: We used to get him all drunk and shit.

Slash: You should have seen him. When we first met him he was Mike Clink and then after a while with us he was Mike Clink plus 15-20 years. After we finished the album there was a complete difference. Then he started going out, he started screwing around with all these different girls, he broke up with his girlfriend. Then he started getting difficult about jobs. He started getting real picky.

RS: What is Guns N’ Roses like in the studio?

Slash: Same.

Duff: Each song on the album was done in maybe two or three takes. We just went in and played.

RS: Then how come it didn’t take you a week to do it?

Slash: That was just for the basic tracks. The bass, drums, rhythm guitar, and the song structure. Then we went into the studio and I played leads on top of that. At the time the basic tracks were being recorded, I put dummy guitar tracks on there (cause I don’t like to wear headphones) then went back into the studio and just ripped through the whole album, with it coming out through the monitors real loud.

Duff: He was like in the actual booth.

RS: Why don’t you like headphones?

Slash: Cause they’re little and they sound puny. I like a big sound.

Duff: I’m a bit less picky.

Slash: He just wanted to get out of the studio so he could get more beer. He was glad when the basic tracks were over. He was like, “o.k., see ya. I’m gonna get drunk for the next six weeks.”

Duff: As it turned out, I kinda got drunk for the next year. . . until now.

RS: What kind of experience was it, recording?

Slash: It was an experience, like recording.

Duff: It was astral.

Slash: What do you want?

Duff: You go in and you play.

RS: Wasn’t it cool? Here you were recording your first album for a major label; something you practically worked your whole lives for.

Slash: Yeah, of course it was cool.

Duff: Oh, I know what you’re saying. We knew what we wanted to do, so we went in there and kicked ass on the record, and we got done with it.

Slash: Then it’s like, when we go do the second record; “oh, wow, bitchin man! We get to do a second one now. They let us do another one.”

Duff: Recording is actually pretty boring.

Slash: The whole thing is great.

Duff: You said great and I said boring!

Slash: No. Being in the studio is not exactly it’s pretty fuckin’ regimented, straight type shit, but you know, it’s not that bad.

Duff: It’s boring until you get to play your tracks. See, you only get to play your tracks once in a while. The rest of the time your just working on getting the equipment right. So you sit there and watch TV.

Slash: And eat and watch TV and eat, and smoke cigarettes and get drunk. Then you go and play your tracks and the producer’s like, ‘You guys are lacking a little.’

Duff: Do we still have that cut of you on “Paradise City?” He was so drunk man. It was one of his dummy guitar tracks-just wasted man. You know at the end of “Paradise City” how it speeds up and shit, remember that?

Slash: No, Ha, ha! I want to tell you something. We’re so serious about our record that when we went and mixed “Paradise City-I got real drunk, and what happened was ...When they were mixing it, they put ‘Paradise City” down and at the very end this drum thing that goes, ‘bte bte bte” (something like that), and when they taped it they put one cut on a track, and another cut right after it so they intertwined, so the drums went once and they came back again.

Duff: Have you ever listened to our record?

RS: Have I ever listened to your record? Please!

Slash: It only goes once live. You ever notice?

RS: That’s one of my least favorite songs.

Slash: “Paradise City?”

RS: Sorry. My favorite’s “Night Train.”

Slash: Anyway, so listen. I went into the studio and I got so drunk that I thought it sounded good repeating like that, by mistake. And now, it’s on the record. Duff never declines to tell me how stupid a mistake that was. Personally, I don’t really notice.

RS: It sounds good.

Duff: Yeah, because it’s your least favorite song. It sounds like the record’s skipping.

Slash: That’s probably why it’s your least favorite song. It doesn’t matter to us if you like it or not. Well, it’s time for an ‘indulgence” break.

RS: O.K., I’ll turn my tape recorder off.

Minutes later.

Slash: You wanted the real Guns N’ Roses! You asked for it! Let me tell you this story. One day we’re doing this gig in New York (I think) and Duff pisses in three cups. After he pisses in the cups, after the show they’re sitting on the table and Duff goes, ‘that’s my piss.” Then Axl takes the tucking cups and gives them to some groupie girl and she drank them, all three.

Steve Adler: She was a fine looking girl too. She was beautiful. She drank ‘em.

Duff: We should probably tell the story about the duo-drummer situation here.

Steve: Let’s tell ‘em what we had to give Fred Coury from Cinderella in order to do it.

Slash: I gave him all my PD’s for the next six years.

Duff: I gave him all my points on the album.

Fred Coury: Plus I got a serious bonus of $25,000 a show.

Steve: I’ll explain to you very basically what happened with my hand. I went to this bar in Michigan for lunch, and I had 14 Kamikaze’s (7 but they were doubles). Anyway, I got drunk, got a little out of hand, got into this fight with the manager, no, what do they call them?

Duff: Bouncers?

Slash: Shit-kickers?

Steve: No. Lumberjacks. This big old dude just pushed me around, tossed me out of the door of the bar. There was this lamppost outside, I got mad, punched it, kinda missed and hit the metal part. I wasn’t the nicest guy in the universe after that.

Slash: You should have seen the other guys, they were bent over laughing.

Duff: So, we were up in the northern part of the country a maple of months ago and we met the likes of this character right here (points to Fred). He came to a few of our shows. You know, he told us that he practiced to our album. Drummers do that, Steve practices to Frankie Vallie and Fred practices to our album. We thought, Stevie broke his hand but we’re obligated to finish this tour. We’re obligated to a lot of things actually. So we called Fred Coury and he was gracious enough to come out and do this for us.

Slash: Which just goes to show you that this whole “Guns N’ Roses hates everybody thing,” isn’t really true. We pretty much get along with a lot of hands. There’s that whole camaraderie among us.

Steve: When I went down to Philly I walked into their rehearsal and they were playing some of our songs.

Slash: I got a story to tell you. I made Steve feel bad just now because I thought how stupid his story was.

Steve: You didn’t make me feel bad.

Slash: I’ve got an even stupider one. I broke the same. . .I did the same thing by punching a floor in Seattle, to get the record across the floor to stop skipping. It didn’t stop skipping and I had to have a cast on for eight weeks. I was in the middle of this thing, I was on my back, or on my stomach (we know what thing), and I didn’t want to get up so I punched the floor.

RS: So what’s your stupid story Duff?

Duff: You want my stupid story. The funny thing is, I’m always so drunk I can’t remember them! Oh, you want to hear a stupid story? Here’s one. When I was in eighth grade I got kicked out of my junior high and was sent to another one (a rival one). They all knew why I got kicked out of my other school. Anyway, I had this jacket with strands hanging off the front of it and I went to lunch one day... it was one of my first days there and everybody was staring at me. You know, I was the new kid -- junior high school, that’s where the peer pressure really is fuckin’ heavy. Everybody was staring at me and shit. So, I was eating my sandwich sitting by myself, with the strands hanging off my jacket and one of the strands got into my sandwich. So, not to look like I had to take shit out of my sandwich (cause that would look stupid)...

Slash: He ate his entire jacket!

Duff: Yeah, I ate part of my jacket. I ate it until that particular strand was no more. I didn’t want to look like I was disgusting, taking shit out of my mouth.

Slash: Which is something that I probably would have done.

Duff: That’s a true fuckin’ story!

Slash: Next.

RS: Myself and many other people feel that your Appetite For Destruction album is brilliant.

Slash: Brilliant?

Steve: That’s nice of you to say.

Slash: Brilliant? Interesting, maybe, cool, maybe, but brilliant?

RS: Yes. But what parts of the album (if any) are you unhappy with?

Slash: Unhappy about? It’s like, why get unhappy about it? Why spend that much time being unhappy about it? Fuck it! If there’s something that we aren’t exactly pleased with, it’s twelve songs. Twelve songs to get exactly perfect. . . It doesn’t matter, it’s like there’s little things here and there, where you know you would have liked it a bit different, but it doesn’t matter cause it’s done. It’s there, and you might as well like it cause if you don’t you can put yourself into an early grave worrying about something that you can’t do shit about.

RS: What wouldn’t you do for this band?

Slash: I wouldn’t suck all their dicks collectively-only one a time. I don’t know, I wouldn’t drink his (Duff’s) piss.

Duff: I wouldn’t introduce him (Slash) to my mom.

Slash: Yeah, you would.

Duff: I did, didn’t I?

Slash: No, you never did. I never met your mom.

Duff: Oh, I didn’t even tell my mom I was in town, did I? Remember that?

Slash: Yeah, we went on a little party spree to Seattle.

Duff: We went to Seattle and I didn’t even tell my family I was in town.

Slash: My mom loves him!

Steve: I just want to say that I watched my band play tonight - my family - and they rocked my world completely. It was awesome. And Freddy pulled it off.

Duff: I know what I wouldn’t do for this band. I would never wear a pair of Steven’s pants because I’d get crabs.

Slash: Steven’s loving you right now in a big way.

Steve: The fun part’s when you get the crabs in your cast and you can’t get the shit out.

Slash: You know what I decided is good. The one thing about having crabs is that if you have AIDS, the AIDS kills the crabs before you have to do anything. So, you don’t have to worry about having crabs.

Duff: Did you see that picture in U.S.A. Today? They had an actual picture of the AIDS virus. It’s like a little ball with spikes all over it. Spikes! It was fuckin scary looking.

RS: So, how do you guys feel about the AIDS threat?

Steve: Well, obviously, thank god I don’t have it because the crabs aren’t dying!

RS: You can’t be as promiscuous as you’d like to be.

Duff: We just get blow-jobs.

Slash: Yeah, seriously, because, why put out all that effort?

Duff: I just jack off and think about sexual things.

Steve: I’ve been saving it up. I can’t wait to get home to my woman.

Duff: Jacking off is like my savior to AIDS.

Steve: You don’t say ‘jacking off, its “tossing off.”

Duff: We stayed at the Sheraton the other day and we had these silk-like comforters, I rapped them around me and well, you know. . . all over the place.

RS: The bad-ass trip has gotten worse, hasn’t it?

Slash: No, actually the bad-ass trip. . . to be completely honest, it’s sorta mellowed out a bit. I noticed that people are starting to talk about our music more, and are starting to talk about more realistic-type to the point things. That’s what I’ve noticed.

RS: You know how people say, oh, Guns N’ Roses, they’re difficult.

Slash: We aren’t difficult.

Steve: I heard stories how difficult I was when this happened (points to his arm).

Duff: Show us your scars you got when we had to drag you across the street.

(Steve lifts up his shirt and pulls down his pants.)

Duff: We had to drag him across the street.

Steve: It was horrible, I was real upset.

Slash: It was a very uptight night. He was out of it and he was being a prick.

Duff: He was out of it, obnoxiously gone. We had to drag him to the hospital. We took him to two hospitals.

Steve: I only remember one.

Slash: We had Doug (our tour-manager) do it. We weren’t exactly happy with him at this point because we knew he was stretching our night out.

Duff: We were stuck in nowheresville..

Slash: See, there’s Steven Adler, our drummer, then there’s Lewis Cifer, our fuckin tasmanian devil!

Steve: Highly satanic.

RS: I don’t understand.

Duff: Lewis Cifer, LUCIFER!

RS: When he gets drunk?

Slash: It depends.

Steve: Like they told me, I’m a nice guy, but a bad drunk.

Slash: When he gets drunk sometimes and everything’s going great, it’s fine. We just happened to have spent a very up and down, start and go day, in a nowhere town, and we were stuck there because we almost got off this Alice Cooper tour. But, everything worked out.

Duff: See, we can’t afford to stay off the road for five days in a row cause we just live from gig to gig. We get a certain amount of money that pays for our hotels, our roadies, what little shit we get...

Steve: We are not rich. We have no money.

Slash: But, we do get taken care of well. Just to say something nice about our record company.

Duff: I must say that our manager, our road manager and our security guy are the best.

Slash: Everybody in our organization is great. Ronnie, Toddy, Mike, Bill (Bartholomew Augustus Cezar), are great. Then we have Dave Kehrer, McBob, and Doug Goldstein.

RS: So what are the rest of you like when you’re drunk?

Slash: C’mon, you’ve seen us drunk.

Steve: Highly satanic, is all I can say.

Slash: When I get drunk I get like he (Steve) does but I still manage to keep enough up here (in his head­) and to not fuck up things that concern my ultimate surroundings.

Steve: That’s a lie.

Slash: My most immediate surroundings I fuck up, but not the band stuff. Just my own personal shit. And, when Duff gets drunk he just gets very jovial, nice, and short-tempered. See, we take everything very unseriously, very lightly because, how really important (no matter what), in the general scheme of things (life in general), how important is a Rock & Roll band?

Just bought an original copy of this magazine. So now we know it was released in August 1988 and not December 1987. I will upload the images later.

The interview seems to have been recorded after the Dec. 17, 1987 show when Steven had broken his arm and was replaced by Fred Coury. Maybe that's why it was dated December 1987 in the "original" online source.
It's odd though that it took so long for it to be released. It's a long time between Dec. '87 and Aug. '88. Maybe it was published earlier and this is a reprint of it?

Added images to first post.

Fred Coury recently posted this image of him and Steven, obviously taken at the same time as the picture in the article: