Guns N'Roses Special: The Whole Outrageous Story

If anyone was wondering what the epic rock majesty of Led Zeppelin, the visceral thrills of the Sex Pistols and T-Rex’s make-up bag would look/sound like combined, they got their answer on July 21, 1987 when Guns N’ Roses unleashed Appetite For Destruction, their straight outta West Hollywood debut album, which has gone on to sell over 30 million copies.

“It became the battle cry for a lot of kids who picked up on the fact that it was five guys just doing what they wanted to do,” Slash told Hot Press a few years ago. “It wasn’t a music industry contrivance like a lot of stuff that was around at the time. We’d just gotten over the first half of the ‘80s, which was abysmal.”

Their five-man mission to make Los Angeles (un)safe for rock ‘n’ roll again was a rollicking success.

“It was a great fucking time!” Slash enthused. “The drugs, the girls, the characters… to be 19 years of age back then and in a band was awesome. We were doing our best to follow in the footsteps of Van Halen, the original Aerosmith and Motley Crue who, for better or for worse, were the most extreme rock ‘n’ roll band out there when we started.”

They may have been Grade ‘A’ filth-hounds on a night out – Steven Adler’s My Appetite For Destruction supplanted Led Zep’s Hammer Of The Gods in the debauchery department – but the band always made sure they had their shit together in the studio.

“The actual recording of Appetite… was pretty calm,” Slash insisted. “As crazy as our reputation was, we tried to be as professional as possible when it came to playing. For me, it was Jack Daniel’s and coffee in the morning; work from noon ‘til ten at night; and then go fucking crazy!” Corroborating that version of events, Duff McKagan said: “I wasn’t too bad during the Appetite… period because we were really going for it. There were rules like, in the studio, drink beer rather than vodka. Early on, Guns N’ Roses was so much fun it should have been illegal… and most of it was!”

Asked to pinpoint the moment when the band achieved greatness, Duff recalled with a boyish sense of wonderment: “When the five of us sat down, plugged in, turned up and played our very first chord together lightning struck. We knew that this was what we’d all been waiting for. Our intent wasn’t, ‘Oh, we’re going to sell millions of records!’ We didn’t write songs to be hits, we wrote them for ourselves. What fucking moved us. All the other shit was what ruined that band. The fame and getting huge just fucked it all up.”

Slash’s answer to the same question being: “For me, it was between 1988 and 1989. We did a small headlining tour after we’d finished with Alice Cooper, which was when as both musicians and performers we felt like we owned it. In particular, there were three shows at a place called the Perkins Palace in Pasadena where it was like, ‘Wow, this is a great band. There’s no end to where we can go.’ Right after that we opened for Aerosmith and became really big.”

How does their first 1992 visit to Slane rank in the pantheon of classic Guns N’ Roses gigs?

“I remember the place, but not the performance,” Slash confessed, “which is indicative of how blurred my life had become. It was certainly important in terms of us making the step up to outdoor venues, which we hadn’t seen coming. One minute you’re the perennial support band, and the next you’ve got 80,000 people coming to see you.”

Duff’s memories of that heady May night, when they were supported by Faith No More and Irish hopefuls My Little Funhouse, are far more vivid. “I don’t remember a lot of other things but I remember that ’cause it was the first time that I’d met my family,” he enthused. “I’m Irish-American, but I’d never been to Ireland to see my cousins up until we played Slane. It’s my Mom’s entire family, the Harringtons, from County Cork. The day before the gig we had a day off so I went down there and had a big party by the beach. My cousin Joe had taken me to I swear every pub on the way down. So by the time I got there I was completely out of my mind.”

We mustn’t forget that, in what was fast becoming band tradition, Guns N’ Roses were two hours late hitting the stage.

“If we were only two hours late that was a good night, you know?” he continued. “That had a lot to do with my drinking too, because the band would be there waiting for Axl to show up. You could hear the crowds getting pissed off and chanting ‘bullshit, bullshit, bullshit’. That didn’t feel too good to say the least. You had 50,000 fans or more out there, who’d paid good money to see the band, and they had to wait 2-4 hours to see ya play. It’s not good.

“But when I look back on Guns ‘N Roses’ past, I see the glass as half full. We accomplished a lot. You know, five guys basically from the street who wrote songs that meant something to millions of people. We wrote honest songs. We weren’t trying to write pop songs or singles. A whole generation of kids gravitated towards it and still do.”

In a trans-Atlantic precursor to Blur vs. Oasis, Guns N’ Roses spent a goodly part of the late ‘80s trading insults with Nirvana and their flannel-shirted mates.

“Contrary to what you read in the press, we were never anti-Kurt or anti-grunge,” Slash insisted. “There are only two times I can remember going out with Axl – one was to see your guys, U2, and the other to watch Nirvana who we thought were really great. We liked grunge, but grunge didn’t like us because we’d gone from clubs to stadiums and had a singer that desperately wanted to be a pop star. The only time there was really an issue was when Axl had a run in with Kurt and Courtney which wasn’t necessarily pleasant!”

In March 1994, Duff sat beside Kurt Cobain on a flight back to Seattle after the latter’s aborted stay at the Exodus rehab centre in LA. Days later, Cobain committed suicide, making McKagan one of the last people to see him alive.

“I suppose, at the time, we were in the same boat in a lot of ways,” McKagan proffered. “We were both in huge groups, and we were both completely lost to our addictions. He did seem down, and he was definitely at a crossroads, although I’m not sure he would have confided in me just how bad he felt. Still, when we got off the plane, I did say to my friend who picked me up that maybe we should invite Kurt back to the house. He went to talk to him, but he’d already left.”

While not suicidal, Duff was in a pretty dark place himself at the time.

“It was at the mid-point of the two-and-a-half-years we toured Use Your Illusion – we’re talking spring/summer ’92 - that it stopped being fun,” he reminisced none too fondly in 2008. “There were riots and cancelled gigs and having to appease Axl so that we could just play the fucking gig. As if that wasn’t bad enough, my pancreas burst which halted the enzyme you need to digest your food. ConsequentiallyI had third-degree burns all the way down from my intestines to my thigh muscles. If they didn’t slit you open to let the steam out you’d die.

“Then,” Dr. Duff continued, “I started getting the DTs, so I had morphine to stop the pancreas pains in one arm and Librium to fight the alcohol detox in the other. They were going to cut my pancreas out which would have left me a diabetic, but right before the surgery they did an ultrasound and discovered that it had miraculously started coming back down to size. I’ll never forget the doctor, whose face was white, saying, ‘You’ve been given a second chance, dude. Don’t fucking waste it!’”

That Duff grasped that second chance with both hands was evident in 2013 when, arriving in Dublin for a gig with his Walking Papers side-project, he made straight for Fairview and gatecrashed the yummy mummies’ 9am Bikram Yoga class.

Punctuated as it was by regular Axl temper tantrums and late arrivals on stage, the Use Your Illusion tour also made Slash question whether he still wanted to be in the band.

“Going on late is one of the rudest things you can do, and drove me crazy in the early days before all the other stuff started happening,” he wearily told us. “Maybe because I’m always down at street level – I’m more of a rock fan than I am a musician. I guess it’s a singer thing – having to rise to the occasion and walk out at a certain moment really fucks with their heads.

“It was because of Duff and Izzy that I was like, ‘Okay, we can make this work.’ We had a camaraderie that sort of buffered the whole Axl kind of thing. Losing Izzy and Steven later on had a lot to do with why I couldn’t hack it after a while.”

Slash eventually decided to walk in October 1996, with Duff hanging on for another ten months before deciding that he’d also had enough of his singer’s histrionics.

“He’s impossible to work with, otherwise we would have tried to keep it going,” a still seriously miffed McKagan informed Hot Press in 2004. “There was nobody with more passion and stick to it-ness than Slash and I. Unfortunately, the heart and soul of what Guns N’ Roses was, the family vibe of the thing, was gone.”

“If I’d owned a gun at the time I would’ve popped my head off,” was Slash’s take a year later on the band’s mid-‘90s implosion.

Nothing in his demeanour suggested that 12 years later, we’d be excitedly counting down to him, Axl and Duff riffing it up again at Lord Henry’s gaff.

A lot of people – us included – were highly sceptical in January 2016 when the trio announced they were reuniting for a $1 million a man Coachella headliner. Other dates were quickly added, with a secret April Fool Day’s gig in their old LA haunt, the Troubadour, the first time they’d got sweaty together in well over a decade.

What could have been a car crash turned out to be a triumph with Lenny Kravitz, David Arquette, Nicolas Cage, Jim Carrey and model/actress Emily Ratajkowski among those who got their A-List socks well and truly blown off.

SPOILER ALERT!!! Since then, Guns N’ Roses have been treating audiences to 25 song sets running the full gamut from Appetite For Destruction to Chinese Democracy – a far better record than it was ever given credit for – with some choice Who, Pink Floyd, Johnny Thunders, Stones and Damned covers thrown in for good measure. As a sold-out Slane will discover on Saturday May 27, they’re still one of the most kick-ass bands on the planet.

You can also read our other Guns N'Roses Special Feature with Richard Fortus below.

Richard Fortus