1992.10.DD - Rock World - "Mick Wall, You Can Suck My Dick"

Transcript:
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Mick Wall, you can suck my dick

So screams Axl Rose on 'Get In The Ring', from the Guns N' Roses album, 'Use Your Illusion'. One year later, MICK WALL, now writing with Rock World, delivers his RSVP.

Before I get started I want to make it clear that I am writing this not because I want to, but because I feel I no longer have any choice. It's been over a year since Guns N’ Roses released 'Use Your Illusion II', on which Axl Rose accused me and all the other ‘punks in the press' of wanting to 'start shit by printin' lies' and, worse still, 'rippin' off the fuckin' kids’.

Such huffing and puffing about a rock journalist from on over- indulged rock star is not unusual, of course. It comes with the turf and any writer who fears his or her subjects isn’t worth reading.

But singing about something I had written - well, that was something different. Though, to be fair, I should point out that Axl is not the first singer to mention my name in one of his songs - Gary Numan, 12 years earlier, had enjoyed that particular distinction, when he hissingly inserted my moniker into the chorus of the title track to his 'Replicas' album. But that's another shitstick altogether...

To get to the point, when I first heard 'Get In The Ring', I laughed. I took it as a huge joke; a backhanded compliment to mv own integrity. Axl felt cheated because he couldn’t manipulate me the way he did his other cronies in the media. Well, boo hoo, bad boy, why don’t you go and write a song about the wicked writer who wouldn’t play ball. "Suck my fuckin' dick!" screams Axl Rose petulantly in 'Get In The Ring'. "Perhaps if I had he would still be talking to me now,” smiles Mick Wall playfully in Rock World.

Whatever... I wasn't about to lose any sleep over it. And then the phone started ringing. First it was magazines like Q and Select, then the net spread wider and my machine was suddenly answering calls from newspapers and magazines in America - National Enquirer, the Los Angeles Times, even some creep from Rolling Stone wanting to get my side, he said, "of what really went down between you and Guns N' Roses".

Nothing, I told them. Nothing went down between me and Guns N' Roses, except that their singer got so famous he turned into the Son of Christ, or at least Jim Morrison, and now it wasn't OK any more to discuss reality in connection with his name. Sounds like sour grapes to us, they said. Axl Rose is a talented guy, a genius even, you don't expect us to believe that he would have written a vitriolic song like 'Get In The Ring' for no good reason at all.

Well, that was precisely what I was telling them, all right. Only, of course, nobody believed me. Sour grapes, they said. What are you hiding... what did you do to poor Axl? On and on it went, like jungle drums in a dipshit old black and white movie. Everybody seemed to take it so seriously. I wasn't surprised though, never having been one to underestimate most people's gullibility, not entirely so.

Time passed and I started to get letters. Mostly from confused Guns N' Roses fans who had either enjoyed articles I had written about the band over the years or had listened to me playing their records on the radio, or putting their videos on television, and who simply couldn't understand what I had done to provoke such anger and bitterness from their heroes. Indeed, it's more than a year since 'Get In The Ring' appeared and I still get dozens of phone calls every time  I do my Friday night show on Greater London Radio, from Guns N’ Roses-cum-Mick Wall fans who, in the words of Fiona from Hampstead, Big Charlie from Putney, and everybody else who rings in every week, "just don't get it".

All right, enough. It's time to come clean. One last time, for the boys at the back who passed out and missed it the first time, here’s what happened when the car marked r-e-a-l-i-t-y hit that nasty bump in the road back there, and why that red-haired boy in the corner is pulling those funny faces and making all those horrid squawking noises...

Familiarity breeds contempt, they say, and for once they are right. I first met the members of Guns N' Roses when I showed up at one of their shows on their first U.K. tour, in October 1987. They were appearing, with Faster Pussycat in tow, at the Apollo, in Manchester.

The house was half empty, as I recall, but that didn't stop both bands pretending it was just another Saturday night at the Troubadour in L.A. Impressed, I pushed backstage to congratulate them and see if I couldn't get a quote or two to go with the review I decided I was going to write. But the door to their dressing room stayed firmly closed and I finally retired to my hotel, minus a quote, but intrigued nonetheless.

The next day I tried to arrange an interview and their then manager, an urbane, New Zealand-born, cheroot-sucking beard by the name of Alan Niven, promised me we'd 'get something together' within the next couple of days. But, as I was later to lament in my book, 'Guns N’Roses: The Most Dangerous Band In The World', "...the days turned into weeks and the weeks grew into months and eventually it was nearly a year later before I finally got my first interview with Guns N' Roses. Not that it mattered. It was understood early on that to expect to schedule an appointment to meet anybody in Guns N' Roses was to miss the point entirely... You didn't arrange anything with Guns N' Roses any more than you arranged a good time for the sun to rise; you just had to he there."

All right. Well and good. So they weren't just another Mötley Crüe. And through a combination of fortune and farce, I ended up just happening to be there quite a lot over the next two years.

In those days, I was spending a lot of my time in Los Angeles, chasing stories like a dog chasing its own tail. And whenever I ran into Slash, or Duff or whoever, it brightened my night. What's more, they liked having me around. They weren't like... the others. And neither was I. We had a bargain-based relationship: I didn't ask too many stoopid questions and they did their best not to tell me too many lies.

Ironically, this was mostly during the period when the band were off the road and doing a lot of drugs. Slash, in particular, had a real problem with heroin. He was strung out all the time and even his close friends were beginning to openly express their concern about him.

Slash had been told by a mutual friend that I had conquered my own smack wars some years before and would occasionally confide his problems to me. I wasn't always sure how to deal with this. I felt that what he was doing was misguided, to say the least, but felt that the nervous, fretful-eyed guitarist would clam up completely if I appeared too judgmental. Nevertheless, I recommended several things he might try if he ever did get the urge to pull himself back together, including the names and numbers of certain doctors in London that I knew would be able to help cure him -physically, at least - of his addictions.

Axl, however, was always an enigma. We would bump into each other at a club or something and though we would stop and say hello, his eyes were always afraid to meet mine. I didn't ask for an interview and he didn't offer. I decided that, as I wrote in 'The Most Dangerous Band In The World', “Axl knew all about me anyway - one night at the Cathouse [in L.A.] he told me how much he had enjoyed reading the 'continuing adventures of Slash', as he put it, that I had written up from the interviews we had done together. I figured that when Axl wanted to talk - if he wanted to talk -he'd know where to find me. He did..."

And that’s when the trouble began. Axl called me up in LA. very late one night and absolutely insisted that I drive straight over to his apartment in West  Hollywood, where he would, he said, 'make a statement' about the thing that happened to be bugging him the most at that particular moment - Vince Neil, the then singer in Mötley Crüe.

The whole thing is too tedious to repeat here, but basically Axl needed someone to rant and rave at after reading some disparaging comments that Vince had made about Guns N' Roses in an already ancient copy of Kerrang! magazine.

I agreed to go along with the whole charade, hoping that once he calmed down and had got Vince Neil off his chest I might be able to steer the torpedo of his mind into less murky waters. Which is exactly what happened, of course, and when I departed Axl's apartment in the early hours of the following morning, I left having obtained some entertaining, not to mention exclusive, interviews. Everybody happy. The world was an entertaining, not to mention exclusive place...

A few weeks later I was back in L.A., and I decided to drop Axl off a cassette of a show I was presenting on Capital Radio at the time -1990 - where excerpts of the interviews we had done together that night had been broadcast.

I drove over early one night, intending to drop off a package - the tape and some books I had offered to get for him in London - in his mailbox. Then, as I was about to leave, I bumped into Axl and his pretty young wife, Erin. They had just returned from Paris, they said, where the couple had got into a fight, in a cafe on the Champs Elysées, of all places. I asked how that had happened and Axl grinned that grin, shrugged and said he didn’t know. "They were Arabs, or somethin', and I dunno, things just suddenly got outta hand..." His eyes roamed the darkness. Life was just like that, they seemed to say.

The next time we spoke was a couple of weeks later. I called him to let him know that I was about to hand in the - cue dramatic music -'Vince Neil piece', as it soon became known, for publication, but that 1 was concerned that what Axl had said that night - ranting on about how he was gonna "take him out" and smash those "plastic fuckin’ cheeks of his!" etc etc - looked so heavy in print that I wanted to give Axl a chance to detract some of those comments, now that he’d had time to cool off (and get worked up all over again about whatever was on today's menu).

What happened next is well documented in my book - Axl said, sure, he felt "a little childish about some of his comments," but that basically he still stuck by "every single word". What happened after that, however, isn't so well covered in the book. To cut a long, drawn-out saga short, Axl read the Vince Neil story and freaked, eventually denying that he had said any of the things he was quoted as saying about Vince, and - surprise! surprise! - claiming that "the fucking journalist" had made the whole thing up.

At first, though, he kept his dismay to himself and got one of his publicists to call me and request a copy of the interview tape so that it could be used on a special Guns N' Roses phone line that was being set up in the States.

"Uh huh," I said, "I tell you what, I'll give a copy to that pig flying by my window and he can drop it all for you."

Next I got a call from the same boot-licker explaining that Axl didn't have a problem with the interview quotes, as such, it was just that - ho! ho! - he just couldn't believe that he'd said he was going to give Vince -chuckle chuckle - a "good ass whippin", and how about sending him a copy of the tape so that he could stop his friends making fun of him.

"But I told you," I said, "I gave it to that pig..."

You might ask why I just didn't send them the goddamned tape and have done with it. Well, if they’d come clean and told me that Axl was suffering from selective amnesia, a complaint common to stars of every size - I might have been more amenable.

But they didn't and I wasn't. Besides, I was worried what he would do if he got that tape. Doctor it to make it look like I really had made the whole thing up? I decided not to take any chances. I told Axl's gofers that I was perfectly willing to send them a verbatim transcript of the interview but that they could whistle as far as the tape went. That was my property and they had no right to demand it, let alone lie and smarm and try to coerce it out of me.

And that is when the shutters came down. As of that point, I was dead meat as far as Guns N' Roses was concerned. Axl had snapped his fingers, I had not jumped. End of story.

Well, almost. There is a strange and surreal PS to this anti- story, which, in fairness, I feel I should mention here. An incident that probably fuelled Axl's antipathy towards me as much as his embarrassment when the Vince Neil story broke like rotten eggs over his head.

Three or four months before the 'Most Dangerous Band...' book appeared in Britain, I happened to be staying in the same hotel in Los Angeles as Axl - he had recently moved out of his own apartment after his much-publicised fracas with his neighbour (which, funnily, also ended up as a Guns N’ Roses song on 'Use Your Illusion I' called 'Right Next Door To Hell') - when, out of the blue, he rang my room one night.

"Hey, Mick, this is Ax," he drawled. "We need to talk. Can I see you in the bar... say, in about five minutes?"

"Sure," I replied. "Why not?" Five minutes later I was in the bar. Axl was seated at a table with three other people - his brother Stuart, and a couple of his pals, one I knew, one I didn't. They all looked pissed off. I mean, like their mothers had just all gone over the same cliff together.

"Hi," I said. Nothing came back. I sat down next to Axl.

"What's up?"

"Well..." started Axl, avoiding my eyes. "It's about this book..." Axl and his pals wanted to know if it was true that I was writing a Guns N' Roses book. Without waiting for an answer they launched into graphic details of all the things they were going to do to me if it was true.

"I don't care if I go to jail," snarled Axl. "If you bring out a book with my picture on the cover, I'll track you down, man. I'll track you down..."

I recall one of his pals promised to bring down all manner of unnameable hells on my head if I dared dip my literary dickywicky into the protected outlands of the Guns N' Roses myth.

Or something like that anyway. Of course, what I should have done was told them all to go fuck themselves and offer to take them all on, one by one or together, and then spread what was left of their miserable remains across my breakfast toast in the morning... Except, I got scared - it's not easy to be John Wayne when there are four bad-tempered redskins rattling their spears in your face -and I ended up not exactly lying but telling some of the truth, not all of the truth, which amounts to the same thing.

What I said was that I was working on a book compiled of some of my most famous interviews and that, yes, it contained most of the Guns N' Roses interviews I had done, Axl's interview included.

All of which was true - up to ao point. What I feared to mention was that the publishers - in a last minute fit of recessionary fever - had decided it would be a more profitable idea to merely extract the Guns N' Roses chapters, get me to top and tail them with a few ums and ahs, and give it a snappy title.

Anyhow, I doubt Axl would have believed me. I doubt he even believes himself sometimes.

There may have been other reasons why Axl and Slash and Duff and whatever the extras call themselves these days got pissed off at me. Living in a charmed circle like the gang surrounding Guns N' Roses is a bit like I imagine it used to be when King Henry VIII was still beheading fair maidens for forgetting to put sugar in his tea - a lot of ass-sucks and never-beens all jostling for space beneath the giant shadow of the band members' collective egos. And when somebody close to the King slips, the others are quick to move in and bury him.

In that respect, what Axl Rose and Guns N' Roses are really saying when they record a song as hackneyed and one-eyed as 'Get In The Ring' is that they really are as clueless and dumbstruck as the rest of us.

Ain't it great?

And have you seen the vi-de-o...?

The interview in Kerrang with the controversial quotes about Vince Neil which, according to Mick Wall, was the reason his name was included in Get In The Ring:

https://www.a-4-d.com/t536-1990-04-21-28-kerrang-stick-to-your-guns-axl

and the extended/unedited version of the same interview from Mick Wall's book that was published in 1991, (and which he promotes in the Rock World article):

https://www.a-4-d.com/t536-1990-04-21-28-kerrang-stick-to-your-guns-axl#12456

Another, later article by Mick Wall telling his side of the story:

https://www.a-4-d.com/t4496-1998-11-dd-classic-rock-guns-n-roses-get-in-the-ring-the-true-story

I'm copying part of our discussion about Mick Wall's claims in the comments under the 1990 Kerrang interview thread:

Blackstar wrote:1. From what Mick Wall says [in the 1998 Classic Rock article], but also even from the [Kerrang] interview itself, it's evident that the contentious quotes about Vince Neil in the beginning weren't recorded. Mick Wall says that those quotes were from the notes he had kept before the "record" button was pressed.

But then, later in his story, when he mentions that Axl's publicist asked him for a copy of the recording for verification, Wall claims that part of the reason he refused to give the tape was that he was afraid that Axl might "doctor" it. Since, however, the parts about Vince Neil Axl weren't recorded at all, what was there for Axl to "doctor"? Moreover, Wall would have just given Axl a copy of the recording and not the original, of course; so, even if Axl had also issues with parts that were on the tape and edited them or erased them, Mick Wall would always have the original recording that could expose Axl. What was Mick Wall afraid of, then?

Mick Wall also claims that he called Axl and got his approval before he included those quotes about Vince Neil in the article. In a later interview, Wall said that he had recorded that phone call (odd that the forgot to mention it in this article). If that's true, what was he afraid of, again, about giving the interview tape to Axl? And even if he was really afraid of something back then, why he hasn't released the phone call recording yet, instead of just talking about it in interviews all these years and writing bad books about Axl?

I think the real reason Wall didn't want to give a copy of the tape to Axl was that he couldn't prove that Axl said those things. The tape would have clearly shown that the quotes about Vince Neil weren't part of the actual interview. So, regardless of whether Axl actually said those things or not, or of whether he said them exactly as quoted in the article, he could easily deny them, since he wasn't on tape saying them. Wall's alleged notes wouldn't have consisted enough proof (and I find it hard to believe that exact quotes can be reproduced based merely on notes). [...]

2. Axl didn't stop talking about Vince Neil after this interview. In later interviews (e.g. Famous Last Words, MTV, August 1990 and Rockline, November 1991) he repeated that he had challenged Vince Neil into a fight, though with a more tongue-in-cheek language than the one he appears to use in the Mick Wall piece. Wouldn't Axl have avoided talking about the issue, if his problem had merely been realising that he had started an unwanted "war" with Motley Crue, like Mick Wall claims [in the 1998 Classic Rock article]? [...]

Blackstar wrote:I got Mick Wall's old book from 1991 (Mick Wall, GUNS N' ROSES: The Most Dangerous Band in the World, Sidgwick & Jackson, U.K. 1991, 1993). It has an extended (with more quotes) and differently edited version of this interview. [...] In the book version some of the quotes about Vince Neil are different. The question about Steven's status is not part of the main interview, recorded in January according to Mick Wall, and appears as part of a phone conversation that took place later, before the Kerrang piece was printed, when Wall says he asked Axl about the Vince Neil quotes.

Soulmonster wrote:It makes a lot more sense when you read the full interview in the book. Then it is clear that the comments on Steven was said on the phone with Mick Wall just before the issue was published, so likely in early April (which fits well when Steven was handed the probation contract. The book interview also presents Axl in a less aggressive light re: Vince Neil. It is almost like Wall decides to tone down the parts that couldn't have been on the record.

The question still remains: What is it that Axl objects to? Why did he attack Wall in Get in the Ring? Was he seriously angry with Wall, or just slightly angry with him at the time and decided to name him in the lyrics? If it was due to this interview, what part did he object to? The fact that Wall had obviously pieced together stuff from different times (the Steven quote being an example)?

It is really annoying to not know what -- if anything -- is contested by Axl here. As it reads right now in the book, it is hard to find much that sounds wrong. Axl even admits he almost regretted the challenge of Vince.

If I was to guess, I would think Axl objected to how childish he came across in the first interview that was published in Kerrang! He comes off as a crazy, blood-thirsty maniac, whereas in the book, especially when you read the epilogue, he seems more okay. So maybe it is the optics that Axl disagreed with, how Wall wrote it up, emphasized and likely embellished the parts not on record, to make Al come off as more immature and volatile than he perhaps was.

Blackstar wrote:I think it was that, more or less. Axl doesn't like being paraphrased or misquoted. Since the part about Vince Neil wasn't on record, Wall paraphrased it and probably, as you say, embellished it for the Kerrang piece. For example, in the book there's nothing about "guns and knives"; and in some of the quotes in the Kerrang version there are expressions that really don't sound to me like expressions Axl would use, like "I'm the boy who will give it to him."

[...]

In the book, in the beginning of the phone interview, Axl asks if it's being taped, so he maybe expected that what he said would be included; and, although he told Wall that he could live with the childish stuff he had said about Vince Neil originally, what he read in the released interview wasn't what he remembered saying.

So I think Axl was angry because Wall ignored parts that were on the record but printed off record stuff paraphrasing it. [...] Moreover, as Mick Wall admits, he refused to "cooperate" afterwards when Axl asked him for the tape and that also factored. Wall said that Axl later told him that he didn't want him to put a book out and claims that he even threatened him. Axl had issues with Danny Sugerman's November 1990 piece for Spin too (which was an excerpt from his upcoming book), but then Sugerman agreed to let Axl proof read the final draft of the book and correct factual mistakes in it before it was released, so Axl didn't have a problem with Sugerman's book.

Wall also claims [in the 1998 Classic Rock article] that Axl probably was further pissed of because of his piece on Rock in Rio.

Blackstar wrote:Axl seemingly was referring to Mick Wall's Kerrang article in this quote from the interview with MTV in May 1991:

Axl: [...] And that was a test contract basically because of certain situations we’ve had with the English press that we tested in Rio. And the most outrage that we really got was from the magazines that we were having problems with to begin with, you know. And because we weren’t going to talk to them anyway, then they saw that and went running with it. But no, we’re not trying to control everything. We just want what we said or anything we say to be in the proper context, to be something that we really said. And we’ve had certain things that may not hit the world on a big scale, but dealing with smaller magazines and stuff, where they’ve run all kinds of interviews we never did and where they said I said things. Like, I may have said something hostile towards a member of another band, but they’ve turned it around and said I said all kinds of things I didn’t say. And it’s like, the things I said were even meaner (chuckles), but I knew what limb I was going out on it, and then somebody cuts down the tree and then hits me. And it’s like, it’s not really fair, because I do take the time to try to answer the questions and talk about things as honestly as I can; and then I have someone distort that, you know?

1991.05.25 - MTV - Interview with Axl.

Wall's big problem is that he refused to send a copy of the tape to Axl. I find little credibility in his reasons for not doing it. Afraid it would be doctored? Then just make an un-doctoered version available to the public if Axl did it. As it stands now, it is word against word, and Wall refusing to make the tape available that would clear it up.

I think, despite of what Mick Wall says, that the real reason he didn't give the tape to Axl was that he simply didn't have him on tape saying those things about Vince Neil. The quotes were created from his notes.

After all, if he had a recording of Axl saying those exact things he printed, he could have released the clips later for the public to hear them.

And of course, there is the issue of the differences (in tone, expressions etc.) between the quotes in Kerrang and the quotes in Mick Wall's 1991 book.