2016.04.08 - The Desert Sun - How The Coachella Music Festival Reunited Guns N' Roses

How the Coachella music festival reunited Guns N' Roses

Bruce Fessier   | The Desert Sun

Paul Tollett's go-to way to improve the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival or give it a boost is to add an exciting band.

“I love anytime you can get, I don’t want to say a better (band), but a fresher one that hasn’t been around,” the Coachella fest founder said in his house on a hill overlooking his Eldorado Polo Club in Indio. “It kind of moves into the reuniting topic. I just want bands that haven’t played in a while. If you just played last month, it’s not as exciting for me.”

This year’s festival has one of the biggest “reuniting” things he’s ever pulled off. After more than two years of trying, Tollett booked a reunion of Guns N’ Roses with frontman Axl Rose performing with original members Slash on lead guitar and Duff McKagan on bass for the first time since July 17, 1993.

The festival, which has won the Pollstar award for Best Major Festival 10 of the past 11 years, also will include a reunion of LCD Soundsystem, which had announced their disbandment in 2011, and electronic artist Calvin Harris, who arguably drew Coachella’s biggest crowd in 2014 and who has received additional buzz recently as Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.

But the GNR reunion is one of those get-togethers few people could have imagined like The Eagles “Hell Freezes Over” Tour. In fact, after GNR announced their appearance at Coachella, they unveiled a “Not In This Life” tour.

Billboard has reported GNR has asked for as much as $3 million per show on that tour with “the Coachella payday likely significantly higher.” One site reported that GNR was getting $14 million for their two Coachella appearances, but Goldenvoice Vice President Skip Paige scoffed at that rumor, saying “Do the math.”

With 170 bands booked and the total gross from last year’s festival eclipsing $84 million, excluding sponsorship deals, it’s not inconceivable to think GNR might get $5 million from Goldenvoice.

Tollett doesn't talk numbers, but he did discuss the challenge of negotiating with all of the GNR parties, including the current GNR incarnation and Rose’s partners on the 1987 GNR album, “Appetite For Destruction,” which is still the best-selling U.S. debut album of all time.

“I made a list of 10 people I needed to get on our side to make this happen and just worked through the list,” Tollett said in a rare look into his behind-the-scenes workings. “Some I’m really close to, some I’m not so close to and some I didn’t know, and then the band members. So I had to work through all of that.”

The original GNR lineup featured Rose, Slash and McKagan, plus rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin and drummer Steven Adler. Adler was fired after violating an agreement to refrain from recording while high on drugs, which even Slash, a recovering heroin addict, admitted in his eponymous autobiography was “kind of ridiculous and excessively harsh.” Adler sued the band for improper termination and won a settlement of $2.25 million plus 15 percent of the royalties for his GNR recordings.

Stradlin quit after a 1991 European tour, leaving Rose, Slash and McKagan as band partners and the others as band employees. But Rose owned a higher percentage of the band than his partners and apparently interpreted that to mean he had more creative control. He hired a keyboard player, Dizzy Reed, despite Slash’s desire to be solely guitar-driven. Reed is now being supplemented by Chris Pittman on keys and Melissa Reese on synthesizer.

When Rose and a new GNR manager insisted on a new ownership agreement in 1995, Slash wrote that the inequity of the deal, combined with Rose’s habit of showing up late for gigs and rehearsals, or not showing up at all, prompted him to quit the band. McKagan quit the next year, leaving Rose with full ownership of the band’s name.

Stradlin, Adler and McKagan have performed with Rose’s GNR since 2006, but Rose refused to be inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame with them and Slash in 2012. He said in a letter to the Hall, “There’s a seemingly endless amount of revisionism and fantasies out there for the sake of self-promotion and business opportunities masking the actual realities.”

Tollett, who produces Coachella with his company, Goldenvoice, and its umbrella corporation, AEG Live!, said he heard rumblings around 2013 that the original GNR might consider reuniting.

“It’s hard to say whose idea it was because I’ve been trying to get them for a long time,” he said. “A band’s got their own life. It’s got to be on their time schedule, not mine. And I’ve learned to really like that camp a lot. When I saw how many managers were involved and the potential soupy mess? But when I got in there, I saw it’s actually pretty well run. It’s been pretty mellow for me.”

Tollett shares a personal attorney with one of the GNR musicians and he’s worked with their booking agent for 25 years. So that, plus his professional relationship with them as a promoter, gave him an inside track to sign them for Coachella.

“We had a little leg up in that 30 years ago and, one month, we (Goldenvoice) promoted Johnny Thunders and Guns N’ Roses at Fender’s Ballroom (in Long Beach) and then we did them with Cheap Trick,” Tollett said. “They were our go-to band anytime we had anything rock related because we were doing mostly punk rock at the time. So, we’ve had a relationship all these years. But we wanted to make sure everyone in their camp believed in Coachella because there’s a lot of opportunity if a band is going to get back together.”

He went to see their preview show for less than 300 people last weekend at the Troubadour in Hollywood and any doubts he might have had about the band dissipated.

“It was phenomenal,” he said. “I forgot how great they were. It just seemed so right, maybe because we’ve seen them for so long. I remember the night they played ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ at Fender’s. I had actually seen them before that, opening for The Unforgiven at Stardust Ballroom. Everyone around us, it was like, ‘Wow, this is serious!’ Before they were signed, you could just see it. I saw it last (weekend). Slash plays guitar like a madman and Axl was hitting the button on the vocals. Together, they’re magic.”

https://eu.desertsun.com/story/life/entertainment/music/coachella/2016/04/08/coachella-music-festival-guns-n-roses/82793922/