2011.04.28 - The Canadian Jewish News - Guns N’ Roses’ Drummer Returns With An Appetite

Guns N’ Roses’ drummer returns with an appetite

By ROBERT COLLINS, Special to The CJN

Steven Adler understands that he’s lucky to be alive.Two decades of heroin and crack cocaine addiction will take a toll on the toughest constitution.

“I tried killing myself,” the former Guns N’ Roses drummer admits. “It is not easy! A human body can put up with a lot. I had a stroke, a mild heart attack and I was in a coma for four days – all at once. My doctor said I’d be brain dead or lose the left side of my body. I was blessed because I can still play drums and I didn’t lose my brain.”

Adler, 46, can now laugh at his own expense. It’s part of a boundless enthusiasm for life that has been his constant companion since defeating his demons.

Twenty-one years ago Adler was musical royalty –– one-fifth of Guns N’ Roses, the biggest and best hard rock act of the late 1980s. Widely labeled as “the most dangerous band on earth,” Guns N’ Roses upped the ante to effectively destroy what would subsequently be called hair metal. They ditched the makeup and turned everything up, leaving behind a critically acclaimed masterpiece album, Appetite For Destruction still the best selling debut album of all time.

With the music came a distinctly decadent Los Angeles lifestyle. Appetite For Destruction’s lyrics of easy sex and hard drugs were born from experience, and Adler partied harder than anyone. So much so that in July 1990 he was fired from a band full of drug addicts for excessive drug use. It was the beginning of a downward spiral that took Adler over 20 years to pull himself out of.

“I wasn’t expecting to get kicked out of the band,” he says “That was unexpected. I was just doing the same drugs that the other guys were doing. That’s what all my idols did! “

Adler chronicled the many highs and near fatal lows in a fascinating autobiography, My Appetite For Destruction: Sex & Drugs & Guns N’ Roses, published by Harper Collins last summer. As an author, Adler held nothing back, whether detailing orgies orchestrated by Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler; the crushing realization that he’d been sacked by the people he considered his best friends; or the desperation and self-loathing of addiction, the many lowlights including smoking a crack pipe in the car as his mother drove him to rehab.

“Writing the book was emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually healing,” he declares. “I got to put everything in my life on paper. At the beginning of the book I talked about hanging out in nightclubs as a teenager and getting sexually abused by older men. I thought that if I said those words out loud I would feel worse and people would think bad of me.

It was the complete opposite. Once I said it and people understood, it was like a huge weight was lifted off of me.”

For Adler, moving forward included repairing his relationship with his family. Unrelentingly rebellious as a youngster, every time his mother kicked him out of the house he was taken in by her parents. Those grandparents are the first people thanked in the book’s dedications and they’re proudly included in its photo gallery in a shot taken at the 13-year-old Steven’s bar mitzvah.
“Like every young person you do what your family wants you to do,” he explains. “My grandmother was very spiritual, and she thought doing Jewish things was important for my life. They weren’t important for me, but she was older and wiser.”

Part of Adler’s physical and psychological revival is his commitment to his new band, Adler’s Appetite. It’s a chance for fans to enjoy old favourites from Guns N’ Roses’ heyday, paired with a few new tracks from the mature and newly sober rockers.

“When I’m on stage playing with my new band it totally reminds me of back in the day playing clubs on Sunset Strip. And the new songs go over just as great as the [Guns N’Roses] songs. It’s a kick ass rock and roll show. Every night we think, ‘God help whoever has to open up for us.’ We don’t care if we play for two or 2,000 or 200,000 people, you’re going to get the same thing.”

Two decades of squabbling egos and legal battles make a reformation of the original Guns N’ Roses’ line-up unlikely. Still, Adler makes a convincing argument why it should happen.

“There are two reasons why I want to do a tour with the original G’n’R guys,” he says. “There’s all the love I receive around the world. I have heard ‘Appetite For Destruction is the soundtrack to my life’ in so many languages. I’ve heard it thousands of times and that is the greatest thing anyone can say to me. We owe it to those fans. And two, the money we could make! The whole thing could make billions of dollars. All we have to do is get on stage with each other for 90 minutes.”

Adler is shortly embarking on a tour with his band Adler’s Appetite which will see him play in British Columbia in August.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110612080250/http://www.cjnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=21278&Itemid=86

This is a shortened version of this article: https://www.a-4-d.com/t6478-2011-02-17-the-jewish-chronicle-guns-n-roses-it-was-more-like-welcome-to-the-jungle-steven