1989.12.DD - MTV To Go Magazine - Everything’s Coming Up Axl

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Everything’s Coming Up Axl

By Carol Donovan

Seems like it was only yesterday that the only axles anybody knew about were the ones that determined how much you had to pay on a toll bridge. But now, one out of every two toll takers in the United States wears a baseball hat backwards and possesses no less than fourteen tattoos. And all because of Axl Rose, the mercurial lead singer of Guns N’ Roses. Few bands in the last decade have skyrocketed to fame as spectacularly as GN’R, and fewer still have displayed the kind of (?) impact with which this band has delivered the hard rock goods. In this first of a two-part interview, MTV’s Carol Donovan takes us behind the bandanas and the leather to uncover the real Axl Rose.

You guys haven’t rushed back to the recording studio. Do you feel the timing is better now for a new album than, say, a year ago?

One of the biggest problems we had is that we said a lot of things on that first record. Townsend said it best in a song – I think it’s called “New Song” – “I write the same old song with new lines and everybody wants to hear it.” That’s exactly what I don’t want to do, but it’s hard to avoid it, because there are deadlines and contracts, people want a record, they want to try to keep the momentum up. It takes time to find a new space, the new place where your head’s at. I’m just not the same person that wrote Appetite, you know? That was me three years ago. It’s been three years and you have to move on. But it’s hard to move on when you’re touring an album and you’re just pounding the same thoughts and memories into your head every night. I’ve been trying to break away from that and go to the next record and make it something different. But now, it’s something new, we’ve never had to do it before, so it’s completely new to us.

I was listening to Appetite again the other night and the mood of it…

It’s a weird record.

It’s very dark, very sexual, very violent, and there’s a sense there that someone is feeling like they’ve gotta break something…

That was Hollywood when we were there for – what, six years? – before things began to happen. So there was a six-year struggle to break out of that and get on top of it, you know.

So what do you think – will the same mood be on the next album? Will it sound like a struggle?

I was walkin’ around thinking about the next one; before, we were prepared to fight to the death and go down in flames to make it. We were gonna do anything to make it. The majority of bands that we had grown up around had gone down in flames or broke out without being financially successful in the business. And then, all of a sudden, we did succeed, financially and everything.

I think we were more unprepared for that than anything. So, the next record’s gonna be about trying to deal with everything and staying alive and moving on. I don’t think Townsend thought he’d be around, I mean, “I hope I die before I get old.” Now it’s, I hope I die before I get oldest (laughs). I think it’s funny, and so we’re trying to deal with that… moving on.

It sounds like in some ways success – or the things you have to deal with now – is a lot harder to handle than you ever dreamed.

It can eat you alive. I mean, we’ve never known how to deal with money or anything like that. Our families didn’t have it. We’re inexperienced. But now we just have to be on top of it. We have to learn the business because there’s always someone when you least expect it who’s real quick with a new plan on how to get you money and how to get you involved in their project. So we’ve been doing the business to try and preserve and not lose what we’ve got, what we’ve achieved, instead of working on songs.

When this band actually became Guns N’ Roses with this line-up, it was because we realized – okay, we fight all the time, we definitely can’t hang together that often – but we realized that we’re the only five people we know that are so committed to playing our own style and our own heart, and there seems to be a chemistry. So we’ll just live with it and try to make it work.

Well, we’ve done that. Now we have to deal with the fact that if we get on each other’s nerves, I can always fly out of here. I can just go to New York or Chicago or New Orleans. Or wherever. Se we have to work at pulling things together, because we definitely have our own lives and individual personalities and dreams and goals.

Then what you do is try and find a way to make all those things fit together, and it’s not necessarily easy. None of us is trained to psychology. Maybe we need a child psychologist on the road. She could look great, too – that would help (laughs).

Did you have any nicknames growing up?

Not really. Not really at all. It’s like, I always wanted one but nothing ever stuck. I new in first grade I was gonna change my name. And I decided then that I wasn’t gonna grow up past 18. But success is forcing growth on me right now. I’ve had to realize that. I’ve put it all in writing. I can remember crystal clear the day I decided I would never grow past 18. It’s still so strong in my subconscious that when I’m feeling really good, or if I’m feeling really bad, I revert to a wild, psycho 18-year-old who is confused and a mess. Because that’s my safety route. Because anything’s okay when you’re 18. You just do all this stuff and you don’t necessarily know why you’re doing it, and then a few days later you have to live with what happened.

So if I’m really happy or something, I’ll revert to being 18 without even thinking. I just click. I’ll get wild and stuff like that. But it’s okay and I’ll have fun with it, but then I have to live with all the stuff I go through and try to learn from what I did while I was in that mindset.

Or if I’m really upset and mad, you know, I’ll instantly revert to that wild, psycho 18-year-old who’s gonna run over your car and kick your windows in and stuff like that. That’s how I was at 18. And, regardless of the consequences, I’ll run to that.

This article contains additional quotes from these MTV interviews with Axl in 1989 that were also used in the MTV Rockumentary of that year:

https://www.a-4-d.com/t503-1989-mm-dd-mtv-interview-with-axl

https://www.a-4-d.com/t3596-1989-07-dd-mtv-interview-clips-axl

https://www.a-4-d.com/t3181-1989-11-04-mtv-guns-n-roses-documentary

Here is part 2:

https://www.a-4-d.com/t7442-1990-01-dd-mtv-to-go-magazine-double-axl