2018.11.28 - Twitter/Metalhead Zone - Doug Goldstein accuses Alan Niven of casting spells; Niven responds

Metalhead Zone, Nov. 29, 2018:
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Ex- Guns N’ Roses Manager Claims A Satan Specialist Cast Spell on Axl Rose

Former Guns N’ Roses manager Doug Goldstein has revealed an interesting claim about the band on his Twitter account. That was very very interesting…

He talked about an another former Guns N’ Roses manager, Alan Niven (who managed GN’R between 1987 and 1991) and claimed that Niven hired a satan specialist to cast spells Axl Rose.

Here’s the statement:
“[Current GN’R manager] Fernando Lebeis, you guys are unreal! Niven was with GN’R for three years and hired a Satan specialist to cast spells on Axl and myself… I was with Axl for 17 years and more than doubled the band’s royalty rate. Niven gets thanked on the new box set and nothing mentioning me… Wow.”

A fan said:
“I have never trusted certain people around Axl! Praise and respect to you Doug! A Satan specialist, that is insane and so evil! I am a Christian and I have a very good Christian friend who is also an Astrologer, she told me a long time ago Axl needs to wake up to cons around him.”

Doug talked again:
“I’m a Christian as well, Sean!. Thank you”

https://web.archive.org/web/20201108140954/https://metalheadzone.com/ex-guns-n-roses-manager-claims-a-satan-specialist-cast-spell-on-axl-rose/

Alan Niven's response (via Metalhead Zone), November 30, 2018:
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Ex- Guns N’ Roses Manager Alan Niven Reacts to Claims of ‘Cast Spells on Axl Rose’

Former Guns N’ Roses manager Alan Niven, who managed GN’R between 1986 and 1991, has reacted to those claiming that he hired a ‘satan specialist’ and cast spells on Axl Rose.

Yesterday, former Guns N’ Roses manager Doug Goldstein claimed that Alan Niven hired a satan specialist to cast spells on GN’R frontman Axl Rose.

Today, Alan Niven said “Godstein’s statement is just crazy pants” and issued the following response:

“The former tour manager of Guns n Roses has an integrity that matches his math; my contract with Guns n Roses was finally signed October 1986. I had started working with the band in August. Mr. Rose walked away from his obligations to the extended contract in March of 1991.

To my eternal regret I backed Mr. Rose in recording ‘One In A Million’. At that point I still believed he was not a gratuitous artist in his composing. I still believed him to be an artist, for that matter. He did not wear Manson T.shirts under my watch. He did not wear T. shirts denigrating Christ.

Furthermore Mr. Goldstein had absolutely nothing to do with the manner in which I brought David Geffen to the renegotiation table. I did not participate in those re-negotiations, or sign off on their content, since, dismissed, I no longer had responsibility for such negotiations. In that period I also supervised the renegotiation of the Artemis and Brockum contracts and directed Bill Elson of ICM to contract the initial dates of the upcoming tour.

Without doubt we can all say that Mr Goldstein presided over the rapid disintegration of the band. I, myself, have no doubt my exit was designed to allow Mr. Rose, to take over name, copyrights, etc. depriving the rest of the band.

The only people casting spells were Sharon Maynard, of whom I was unaware, and Mr. Goldstein, who directed her as to whom he wanted out of the picture. Yoda obliged by dismissing certain people’s images to Rose, and Goldstein, who by his own admission, in a bizarre letter that was posted on the internet, paid her. In the end one usually finds that evil is actually more banal than we fear, and based in greed and ego.

Didn’t get an awful lot done after 1991, now did they? By contrast I took an unwanted band to Wembley Stadium, my last act being putting that London show on sale.

I am long married to a light worker, renown in this area, my friends know my spirituality and that our home is full of positive spiritual talismen. By contrast, just last month I was warned that Mr. Goldstein was roaming the Southwest in a mobile home full of weapons. Do I think Mr. Goldstein and Mr. Rose are banal? You might ask that but I could not possibly comment, beyond saying …

“his statement is just crazy pants.”

– Alan Niven”

https://web.archive.org/web/20210123083023/https://metalheadzone.com/ex-guns-n-roses-manager-alan-niven-reacts-to-claims-of-cast-spells-on-axl-rose/

Alan Niven and Doug Goldstein on the spell casting; source: Mick Wall, Last of the Giants: The True Story of Guns N’ Roses, July 2017:

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In fact, Alan Niven hadn’t been ‘in the best of spirits’ since being fired. The brutal nature of his firing from Guns N’ Roses had caused him to descend into an emotional black hole.

As he puts it now: ‘It took me ten years of accumulating experience and contacts to form a skillset that I could apply to, amongst others, Guns N’ Roses. It took five years to get them to selling out Wembley Stadium, and that was done under my watch. I put Wembley up for sale. Which was kind of sweet, in a way, because it’s English. One of my heartbreaks was, that was going to be the moment when I was going to have my mother driven down from Wales, I was gonna put her in a box at Wembley and let her see it and let her understand what I do. And that was denied of me and that’s sad but . . . anyway, it took ten years to acquire the skillset, five years to do the work. It took [Goldstein] three months to break it. Because of Izzy leaving three months after me means that it’s broken. It took [Goldstein] only two and a half years to completely destroy it after that. Two and a half years after Izzy leaving, it was just Axl and totally, totally destroyed.’

It would take years for Alan Niven to recover. Meanwhile, things got worse before they could get better. The first Great White album that followed his split with GN’R, Psycho City, in 1992, had been a total flop, not even cracking the US Top 100. Co-produced and co-written by Niven, it had a cover featuring a gaudy neon sign with a big advertisement for the Rose Motel. The title track also featured a snippet of an answering phone message Erin once left for Niven, allegedly while Axl was being violent towards her. ‘Yes, I did use Erin,’ he admitted in an interview with the LA Times in 2016, ‘but I was hurt and angry and in the process of writing my anti-LA, anti-betrayal, anti-Goldstein content for the Psycho City album. So now you know.’

A man on the verge of a breakdown, Niven was convinced by then that he was, as he puts is, ‘under psychic attack’ from Axl. Convinced that Axl was utilising the forces offered to him by Sharon Maynard and her circle of crystal-gazing, future-reading, aura-controlling followers, Niven had gone in search of his own form of magical defence. Stephanie Fanning, who had initially left to work with Niven, had firsthand knowledge of some of Niven’s occult intentions at this time. ‘I think he dabbled in some things when the band was gone,’ she says. ‘He was kind of talking to a couple of interesting people that I think were dabbling in that as well. But Axl was doing the same thing. I felt like they were duelling each other with a little bit of their whatever you want to call that – black magic, whatever. I think they were duelling each other. One would hear like, “I hear Axl’s doing this to me, I’m gonna do . . .” I feel like it was kind of going on between the two of them. I don’t know how much credence I place in that but, yeah, he was. He was. He definitely was. A little bit, for sure. I don’t know exactly if Alan was wishing Axl ill or hoping maybe to bring clarity between the two of them, cos to be honest as soon as I heard about it I kind of shut my ears off. I was like, I don’t want to get mixed up in any of that. I don’t know what that is. Maybe it scared me, I don’t know. I don’t know whether it was black or white, evil or good. Bring us back together; tear him apart . . . But I know he was talking to people who dealt in that world.’

Eventually, Fanning left Niven – to go and work with Doug Goldstein again. ‘Alan, he went kind of underground. He stayed in LA for a couple of years while he was building the house [in Arizona]. But I was really hoping he’d get back in the game. Like, get back in the game. I’d bring him music into the office like, hey, check this out. And he just couldn’t . . . He just wasn’t . . . I don’t know if something left him. Look, it was even hard for me to wake up the next morning when GN’R was over. There was a huge emptiness in my stomach. A huge emptiness in my soul not to be with that band any more. So I can imagine what it was like for him.’

‘I already knew that [Niven] was into the Crowley, Jimmy Page, that whole kind of thing,’ says Doug Goldstein. ‘Him and Izzy used to go into New Orleans quite a bit.’ When Steph went back to work with Doug, she felt obliged to tell Doug of some of Alan’s strange behaviour. ‘She said, “He hired a black-magic specialist from New Orleans and every single day after work before he would go home he would go over there and they would put on black robes, and the candles and the incense, and they would cast evil spells on you and Axl.’ I was like, what a rat bastard, man! I mean, a) what a waste of fucking money. But b) what an evil bastard.’

As far as Alan Niven is concerned now, though, ‘the psychic attack was definitely manifest in the deliberate undermining of [Izzy’s solo outfit] the JuJu Hounds by Goldstein and [Axl].’ He feels this ‘psychic attack’ was also manifest in the sharp decline of Great White’s fortunes: specifically by the arrival at their label, Capitol, of the former Zoo Entertainment promotions chief Ray Gmeiner, as replacement for Michael Prince, who had long been a supporter of Great White. ‘Gmeiner was Goldstein’s former roommate,’ he adds ominously.

This was the last straw, he says. He had been ‘on the dark side of the moon to everyone in West Hollywood’ since losing the GN’R gig. A couple of tentative feelers from big-name acts had come his way in the immediate aftermath of the split, but Niven wasn’t interested. The big one was when David Geffen invited him to work with Bon Jovi. But it nearly made him puke, he says, when Jon Bon Jovi turned up at their first meeting with his lawyer and accountant in tow. ‘How could I possibly get excited, it was diametrically opposed to the nature and essence of my passion? This is not a job to me. It’s something that I value beyond a job.’ He sighs. ‘It was a very dark period for me and it got darker and darker.’

Next he discovered that his wife had been having a long-term affair with Great White’s vocalist, Jack Russell. ‘He was terrified I was going to find out.’ It was a discovery that led to the overwhelming realisation that she had in fact ‘compromised pretty much every relationship that was of value to me. And who the hell would want a toxic individual like that in a business structure?’

With his marriage in tatters and his career being held back by what he was convinced were ‘psychic’ forces, he recalled a place in New Orleans he’d once visited with Izzy called Barrington’s: ‘A retail mausoleum of ritualistic cornucopia. That covered all kinds of spiritual expression, from elephants’ feet with weird things buried in them packed with mud, to drinking skulls . . . I still have a couple of items from there’, including a large wooden rosary, a cross made from the staff of a bishop . . . ‘I’m a fucking atheist. I’m managing a rock’n’roll band. I have very little knowledge but I’m curious . . . I have two Coptic Ethiopian healing scrolls. One of them is intact, about seven feet long. It’s very rare to find a whole one because they’re concertinaed. They’re stunningly beautiful. I bought two Coptic bibles there that were about 400 years old. The pages are like bark. All hand-constructed and handwritten . . .’

He stresses, though: ‘I’m curious but I’m always going towards the light. So when things were going bat shit and I couldn’t figure anything out . . . I got to this point of: “This is ridiculous. There’s something to all this. Maybe I’ve been hexed. Maybe someone’s put a fucking curse on me.” So I called the guy at Barrington’s . . .’

Niven was put in touch with someone who offered help – at a price. ‘I’d walked through the door. Whatever scepticism I had, I’d knocked on the door and it had been opened so I walked through it.’ For several months, he studied under ‘a mad monk – he was huge and looked like he’d been picked out of a medieval monastery. To this day I still don’t know how much of a bullshitter he was. I do know how much of a manipulator he was because I had to fly him here. I had to fly him there. I had to take care of him at this point. But he introduced me to a whole area of reading that I’d been oblivious to. Which was basically occult reading . . . the secret knowledge. I learned that the simple truth is that truth is simple. That you simply find the truth by simply being truthful.

‘At this point in my life I have a real clarity of darkness and light. But at that point I was just in pain. Isolated and confused. And this guy said, “I can ceremonially get rid of the negatives that are attacking you.” And I was being psychologically attacked and I was in a psychological and spiritual warfare. There was a lot of negativity being put my way. Goldstein is just one of the people who was putting out that energy in my direction. Axl was another who was putting out that energy in my direction. Yoda was probably another one that was putting out that energy because she wanted to exploit him.

‘I was his guard. Once I was out of the way they could feed off him like fucking maggots. So I had to go and have these special knives made, crudely, out of a particular copper. And there was going to be some ceremony of putting the knives in a certain way. And the fact that a water pipe broke was supposed to be symbolic. And I started to go, I think I’m being fucking had here. And I eventually cut myself off from this guy. But, yeah, my open mind, at that moment, to such as hexing and hoodoo was an act of defensive desperation . . . nothing was working and all felt unpleasant . . . I couldn’t figure what the hell was going on . . . and not going on . . .’

Meanwhile, things got worse before they could get better. The first Great White album that followed his split with GN’R, Psycho City, in 1992, had been a total flop, not even cracking the US Top 100. Co-produced and co-written by Niven, it had a cover featuring a gaudy neon sign with a big advertisement for the Rose Motel. The title track also featured a snippet of an answering phone message Erin once left for Niven, allegedly while Axl was being violent towards her. ‘Yes, I did use Erin,’ he admitted in an interview with the LA Times in 2016, ‘but I was hurt and angry and in the process of writing my anti-LA, anti-betrayal, anti-Goldstein content for the Psycho City album. So now you know.’

I haven't found any interviews with this quote from Alan Niven, either in the LA Times or elsewhere. Moreover, the answering machine message snippet in the beginning of Great White's Psycho City track is by a man. And Alan Niven talked about the source of it in this interview (Sleaze Roxx, June 17, 2017):

Alan Niven: [...] Oh, the opening of “Psycho City” — the recorded message that is heard on the song… I actually got a chance to find out who that was eventually.

Sleaze Roxx: So who was that?

Alan Niven: I’m not going to go into it because it’s a long story. It was a little too close to home and it was a psychotic person. I found out that when he was in the military, they would call him ‘psycho.’ He was proud that he left that death threat on my answering machine. In short, he was ‘messing around’ where he should have been messing around. You come into work Ruben, and then you hear something like that, “I’m going to pull the hammer back.” He’s basically saying he’s going to blow you away. You look around and ask yourself, “Where are we? Why are we here? What are we doing in this city?” It was just fucking insane! There it is “Psycho City.”

Sleaze Roxx: So to clarify, the message was left on your machine for you not for Jack?

Alan Niven: It was left at my office on my answering machine, and yes I still have the tape [laughs]! I put that on the record as a ‘fuck you.’ You want to leave a death threat or threaten me? Guess what? I get to put you on a fucking record! Fuck you! That was my thinking at the time. Of course, it fit perfectly in that song. I did eventually find out who left it and I found out his motivations and he’s ‘psycho.’

https://sleazeroxx.com/interviews/interview-with-former-great-white-and-guns-n-roses-manager-alan-niven/

However, there is something that sounds like a woman's voice at the very end of the track.

Just incredible. I feel bad for Niven. He was really put through the wringer. Seems like he lost his mind. And Goldstein does come across as a sycophantic scumbag.

Soulmonster wrote:Just incredible. I feel bad for Niven. He was really put through the wringer. Seems like he lost his mind. And Goldstein does come across as a sycophantic scumbag.

Also poor Izzy was likely caught in the middle, because I think this quote from Axl in the 1992 Rolling Stone interview should be read in the light of all that taking place at the time:

So you're angry with [Izzy] because he didn't want to be what you wanted him to be?

No. That's not it. I'm angry with him because he left in a very shitty way, and he tries to act like everything's cool. He put his trust in people that I consider my enemies. People like (former G n' R manager) Alan Niven, who I think is his manager now. I don't need Alan Niven knowing jack shit about Guns n' Roses. Everybody has a lot of good and bad, and with Alan, I just got sick of his fucking combo platter. It's like "If you're involved with these people, we can't talk to you."

https://www.a-4-d.com/t544-1992-04-02-rolling-stone-the-gn-r-leader-discusses-his-appetite-for-destruction-axl