By LARRY GETLEN
Last updated: 7:03 am
August 31, 2008
Posted: 3:23 am
August 31, 2008
For Guns n' Roses, "Appetite for Destruction" was more than the title of a landmark album that sold 15 million copies in the US and turned the group into rock legends. It was also the perfect description of a hunger that, while catapulting them to stardom, also mired them in a miasma of degrading sex, lethal drugs and brutal violence that left them and their associates on the brink of death.
"Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses," an explosive new book by veteran music historian Stephen Davis, lays out the gory details, sin by sin.
Drawing on interviews with Davis and passages from his book, we examine the band's depraved rise and fall.
YOUNG GUNS
Axl Rose, born William Bruce Rose, was raised by a Pentecostal stepfather who shunned rock music and considered television satanic. He enforced his family values with brutal beatings.By his teens, Axl was angry. The first time he got drunk, at 16, he threw a beer at a cop, punched a guy so hard he "saw his teeth go down his throat," and fell out a two-story window, breaking his hand.
Other members of Guns had turbulent childhoods as well. Slash (born Saul Hudson) was raised in Hollywood by a costume designer mom who dated David Bowie and did lots of drugs. Drummer Steven Adler, another Hollywood kid, smoked weed for the first time at 8, and by 13 was getting oral sex from strange men on Santa Monica Boulevard.
A teenage Axl hitchhiked to LA to search for his friend Jeff Isbell (Izzy Stradlin), but on the way a man tried to rape him. When the man cornered him, Axl held a straight razor to the man's face.
Axl and Izzy eventually formed the band Hollywood Rose. Izzy survived by dealing brown Persian heroin, while Axl slept in abandoned apartments and behind dumpsters, living on $3.75 a day, enough for "biscuits and gravy at Denny's, plus a half-pint of cheap wine."
Axl's raging intensity made him the hottest singer on the Sunset Strip, but his stage presence was lousy. When a friend took him to see the band Shark Island, Axl "developed" his signature moves by stealing them, including his infamous snake dance, from the band's singer, Richard Black.
SEX, DRUGS & DEATH
Once Guns N' Roses' classic lineup coalesced, the group moved into a moldy 12-by-12-foot rehearsal space so nasty that Slash felt safer sleeping in a Tower Records parking lot. The shack became debauchery headquarters for the entire Strip. Aerosmith's Joe Perry would score heroin from Izzy there, and Eagle Don Henley's "Sunset Grill" was written about the evil that took place in the adjoining alley.
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