Goodbye, Guns N' Roses

The Crime, Beauty, and Amplified Chaos of America's Most Polarizing Band

Art Tavana

• Publisher: a misFit book
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781773057262
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

Goodbye, Guns N' Roses transports the reader into a mind-altering trip through the colors, scandals, nihilism, and mythology that make Guns N' Roses so much more than another "hair metal" band.

A valentine and a breakup letter to one of rock's most controversial bands.

Goodbye, Guns N' Roses is a genre-rattling attempt to explain the appeal of America's most divisive rock band. While it includes uncharted history and the self-lacerating connoisseurship of a Guns N' Roses fetishist, it is not a recycled chronicle — this book is a deconstruction of myth, one that blends high and low art sketches to examine how Guns N' Roses impacted popular culture. Unlike those who have penned other treatments of what might be considered a clichéd subject, Art Tavana is not writing as a GNR patriot or former employee. His book aims to provide an untethered exploration that machetes through the jungle of propaganda camouflaging GNR's explosive appeal.

After circling the band's three-decade plundering of American culture, Goodbye, Guns N' Roses uncovers a postmodern portrait that persuades its viewer to think differently about their symbolic importance. This is not a rock bio but a biography of taste that treats a former "hair metal" band like a decomposing masterpiece. This is the first Guns N' Roses book written for everyone; from the Sunset Strip to a hyper-digital generation's connection to "Woke Axl, " it is a pop investigation that dodges no bullets.

1
Failure to Communicate

“If I say it's safe to surf this beach, Captain, then it's safe to surf this beach!”

—Apocalypse Now (1979)

“All I could think of was getting back into the jungle,” Willard says to himself, with the sun bleeding through the venetian blinds of his Saigon hotel. What we see are the illuminated eyes of a caged animal. We hear Jim Morrison’s poetry echoing through the rotating blades of a ceiling fan. Willard looks at himself in a mirror and caresses himself like Axl Rose under the gaze of Herb Ritts. When he sees himself “getting softer,” he punches his reflection with his naked fist, shattering the glass, as the blood trickles into his palms—making a beast of himself to kill the pain, as Samuel Johnson may have described it. Willard smears the blood over his face. He does martial arts poses in his underwear. He’s forgotten how to live outside the theater of war. He’s transformed into the beast.

Actor Martin Sheen (Willard) wasn’t merely acting; he was showing us what it felt like as the walls began to close in on his stressed heart. Sheen was so deep in the method that he had begun to go mad. He was drinking himself blind, chain-smoking Camel cigarettes, and inching closer to his breaking point. One day on the set, he would feel a sharp pain in his elbow. The feeling slithered into his chest like the venom from a poisonous snake. It was 1976, and Martin Sheen would experience a nearly fatal heart attack on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). He was read his last rites by a Catholic priest. Sheen was 36 years old, which is roughly the same age Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash was when doctors discovered that his heart was swollen, giving him weeks to live before installing a defibrillator to keep his heart from going limp. In 2001, Slash, 36, nearly experienced a heart attack while playing with Michael Jackson in Madison Square Garden.

“Once I get up onstage my heart rate skyrockets,” Slash told a British reporter in 2009. “When I took the stage with Michael and got into it, I was suddenly hit in the chest by a shock and my vision flooded with electric blue light.” It was the first concert since his operation. The stage was Slash’s theater of war. Willard was lost without the theater of war. For Slash, an arena filled with roaring fans was his mission. “If I don’t play, I’ll be a junkie,” he told Kerrang! in 1996.

“I’ll stress over anything that slows me down,” Slash told Rolling Stone in 1991, referring to the end of their tour in 1988, and the bone-freezing anxiety of being a junkie without a distraction. Imagine, for a moment, Slash walking out of the shower with a white towel wrapped around his mane, like one of Helmut Newton’s models, with his wet curls dripping onto his brown skin. Picture him grabbing a rumpled pack of cigarettes and lighting one up like a crackling Marlboro ad, as he would often do, crossing his hairless legs like a painter studying the brushstrokes on his canvas. Slash would pinch the cigarette between his thick lips and use both hands to pull his hair into a ponytail. This is how I imagine Slash being interviewed by Rolling Stone in his hotel room. “All of a sudden we got off the road,” he told the reporter, “and it was like wind and fucking tumbleweed.”

During the doldrums following a series of concerts with the Rolling Stones in 1989, Slash would check into a luxurious bungalow in Arizona (on an exclusive golf resort), and professionally, as if he were a hitman unpacking his silencer, begin to shoot himself up with a speedball. “I could think of no better therapy than shooting coke and smack all night to soothe my soul,” he wrote in his 2008 autobiography. Slash would inject so much of it into his body that the shadows inside his bungalow began to animate across the walls. “I started shadowboxing with monsters . . . I was bobbing and weaving.” In the morning, Slash would take a hot shower and try to forget his hallucinogenic self-persecution. The curtains extinguished sunlight from illuminating his air-conditioned dungeon. As Slash showered, the steam triggered more hallucinations, as tiny shadows formed behind the thick fog of his glass shower door. “I wasn’t going to let them get me, so I punched them as hard as I could, sending the entire pane of glass into pieces all over the floor.” With his guitar-playing hands sliced and bleeding all over the floor, Slash once again began to see small creatures, who were now holding machine guns at the doorway. He was tripping on his own demons, like Willard in Saigon. “I decided to flee,” Slash wrote. “I broke through the sliding-glass door, cutting myself further and spraying debris all over the room.” He would run out of the bungalow and sprint into another bungalow, naked, grabbing an aghast hotel maid and using her as a shield. Sweating profusely, Slash would dash past the monsters and shelter himself inside a shed on a fairway, where he’d hide behind a lawnmower and wait for the creatures to disappear. Sweating, waiting, and wondering what was real, and was not, Slash’s Vietnam would become the purgatory between sober reality and druggified illusion (i.e., the jungle).

Apocalypse Now screenwriter John Milius once described Vietnam as a “psychedelic war.” The film uses tribal drums and saturated colors to create a surrealistic nightmare. For Slash, his “psychedelic war” was filled inside a needle. The film is introduced with colorful smoke that lulls the viewer into the narcotic and slithering guitar on The Doors’ “The End,” which trickles over the mustard-colored smoke rising towards the lush palm trees of Vietnam. This is the first scene, as a thrumming helicopter transforms into a musical instrument that accompanies Morrison as he reminds us that this is, in fact, the end, which was the lyrical progenitor of Axl Rose inviting us into his jungle, baby, and informing us that we were about to die. Axl once said that Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” shared a bloodline with “Welcome to the Jungle”; separated by two decades, “The End” could be viewed as the more Eastern-sounding prequel to “Welcome to the Jungle.” Though DNA evidence doesn’t directly link Coppola’s Apocalypse Now to Guns N’ Roses, it is a film that showed a side of Vietnam that was foreign to most Americans. “Welcome to the Jungle” showed a side of an urban jungle that was foreign to outsiders. It’s a song that doesn’t offer a shamanic voyage through Williams Blake’s doors of perception (later psychedelicized by Aldous Huxley). “Welcome to the Jungle” is a concrete death sentence in a suffocating dystopia. Los Angeles in 1985 was a hedonistic version of the sweaty Midwestern city in John Huston’s heist film The Asphalt Jungle (1950), where a professional safecracker informs us, “If you want fresh air, don’t look for it in this town.”

There was no fresh air in the polluted landscape of Los Angeles circa 1985. By 1987, lung autopsies showed that an estimated 27 percent of Angelenos would die with “severely damaged” lungs. “Welcome to the Jungle” is a song that fills your lungs like pollution in the city, or napalm in the jungle, as Slash’s guitar stabs your senses with a series of intense daggers. The opening riff is melted down by Axl Rose’s scorching yell. It’s a machine gun–like screech that sounds terrifying at close range, like the sound of a subway car whizzing past your nose. But Axl’s youthful falsetto was detached from any form of modern transit; it felt wobbly, with rivets popping off, as the windows exploded off the frames. He was using his voice to assert control over his uncontrollable moods—turning himself into a beast in the process. Axl wailing would boil his years of internalized trauma. If Jim Morrison was rewriting his childhood through French poetry and sloshed interpretations of the blues, 20 years later Axl Rose was hurling death threats at his audience. For Axl Rose, it began with a need to obliterate, not self-identify, or explore a childlike desire for adventure, like Morrison had. Axl Rose was Jim Morrison as an ex-con warning the cops, teachers, and priests that “no one here gets out alive.” He was Rorschach impolitely screaming at other prisoners that he wasn’t locked up with them, but that they were locked up with him. Morrison wanted us to find some kind of meaning in the melancholy. What Axl wanted was never entirely clear. His philosophy was nihilism as a moving target. He was collateral damage for Vietnam and America’s gun-toting military industrial complex. On “Welcome to the Jungle,” the transition from Axl’s flamethrower vocals is met with Steven Adler’s exploding drums, followed by Slash’s guitar rumbling like an army jeep bouncing around a charred war zone. “‘Welcome to the Jungle’ is an introduction to Guns N’ Roses,” Slash told a crowd at the Troubadour on July 20, 1985. Like Willard, Slash is a blunt instrument that burns through the jungle to reveal its hidden layers.

The tension in the opening scene of Apocalypse Now is transitioned by raining napalm that transforms a verdure jungle into a skin-melting succession of fireballs. The deeper we go into the jungle with Willard, the closer we get to accepting the lunacy of a lieutenant colonel who slaughters civilians to clear a beach for surfing. In the most exhilarating high spot of the film, we find ourselves hypnotized at the barrel of a machine gun being unleashed on a village of innocent schoolchildren, which is scored by Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” The nihilism is found in the safe distance between the celluloid experience and the reality of Vietnam as a homicidal playground. In the same way that a suspension of morality is required to digest the orgy of indecency included in Appetite for Destruction, there’s almost no way to savor the cinematic madness of Apocalypse Now without abandoning logical reasoning and simply allowing the blood to wash over you like a crimson ocean wave. Appetite for Destruction asks us not to “turn on, tune in, drop out” like Timothy Leary on LSD, but to disconnect from morality like a numb GI who’s submitted himself to General Westmoreland’s credo to “search and destroy.” Guns N’ Roses were completely devoid of psychedelia or any of its brain-altering benefits. They were more fascist than hippie (though they don’t fit neatly into either category).

To be able to appreciate this band, you have to be drunk; not literally drunk, but drunk like Baudelaire or the New Hollywood filmmaker who did not allow morality to inhibit their senses. You have to relinquish any sense of obligation you may have for the causalities and collateral damage found in the tracks on Appetite for Destruction, which include unsimulated sex on the bridge of “Rocket Queen,” the junky nightmare of “Mr. Brownstone,” and sexual sadism of “It’s So Easy,” which is a song Axl Rose would described as “art,” which bassist Duff McKagan co-wrote, along with both friend West Arkeen and Slash. Duff’s bumblebee bass, the most memorable instrument on the track, sounds like rounds being pumped out of an M60 machine gun. You want to dance along to it. It also feels wrong. It feels forbidden. You have to be drunk, as Baudelaire put it, so you don’t break your back under the weight of obscenity that reads like D.H. Lawrence without the camouflage of pipe-burning tobacco smoke rising over the winged tips of a Chesterfield chair. There’s no brandy snifter in the Guns N’ Roses drawing room; it offers only high camp, violence, exploding canons of cum, and the frustrated desk carvings of a juvenile delinquent still incapable of verbalizing his angst. It is a rejection of the puritanism of the religious right, which comes through in Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) in Apocalypse Now criticizing the US Army’s hypocrisy: “We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won’t allow them to write ‘fuck’ on their airplanes because it’s obscene.”

He sounds almost like a rock star protesting the military industrial complex. Bear in mind that while Guns N’ Roses are art, like Apocalypse Now, they’re a tawdry and exploitive form of art, like a lowbrow John Carpenter that should never be consumed with high-minded expectations. Guns N’ Roses produce adrenaline and a “time bomb of insanity,” which ticks through their canon, which is how Tom Snyder described Charles Manson in 1981. The lyrics of Appetite for Destruction are appalling in their view of women, as they practically promote sexual assault and general unlawfulness with the titillating insensitivity of an Andrew Dice Clay nursery rhyme. Prepare yourself for shock. In order to digest the fact that most of their lyrics are derived from a medieval view of the opposite sex, you have to translate it as absurdism or black humor, like Paul Verhoeven’s sociopathic criminal Clarence Boddicker walking into a room in RoboCop (1987) and saying, “Bitches, leave.” If you do not suspend your moral judgment when listening to Appetite for Destruction, at least temporarily, you simply cannot listen to Guns N’ Roses with any sense of authentic pleasure. To really dig their oeuvre, you have to put ethics in a subordinate position to guiltless pleasure, hyper-masculinity, and campy debauchery. It’s not an easy thing to do if you’re under the age of 40. But you must try to relinquish your sense of righteousness when consuming Guns N’ Roses. The reasons are myriad. Take for instance bassist Duff McKagan, who once described a night on the town with Guns N’ Roses as a hard-partying take on Westmoreland’s sickening motto: “Rape, pillage, search, destroy,” he told Music Connection reporter Karen Burch in 1986, which could have been a nod to the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy,” in which Iggy expresses his frustration with the system. Appetite for Destruction expresses disgust with the establishment while reveling in its collateral damage. It offers an apolitical and almost meaningless reaction to yuppies with gold cards, which had become a cliché in 1987 with the slicked-back ambition of Wall Street. Guns N’ Roses were the anti-Talking Heads. They were corporate America’s aborted fetus talking back to its target demographic the brutal satire of a Verhoeven film. “You’re all alone,” says an unemployed person in RoboCop. “It’s the law of the jungle.”

Appetite for Destruction is a morally bankrupt reaction to the intelligentsia, like the milkaholic “droogs” from A Clockwork Orange (1971) breaking into the home of an author and sexually assaulting his wife. To really listen to Guns N’ Roses, you have to accept them as lowbrow art in the lurid tradition of libidinous American cartoonist Robert Crumb and the sexist tropes found in 20th century pulp art. Appetite for Destruction is probably more nihilistic than the Stooges’ Raw Power, which was released on February 7, 1973. A few weeks earlier, President Richard Nixon had spoken to the American people from behind the Resolute desk, as the camera zoomed in on his face as he told us that he was bringing our boys home. In 1973, when combat units began to withdraw from Vietnam, Axl Rose was an 11-year-old product of the Pentecostal Church in Lafayette, a small town in Indiana that has gained mythological importance in the Guns N’ Roses story. Before going deeper into the jungle, it’s important that we retrace Axl’s path from Middle Indiana to the asphalt jungle of Los Angeles.

Lafayette is a dusty small town located in the corn belt of Middle Indiana, where the Wabash River separates the lower-middle-class east with the west. The west is the property of professionals and college students attending Purdue University. Axl Rose grew up in the east, which is littered with corn syrup plants and working-class white men working on greasy engine parts on their driveways. The Ku Klux Klan has old roots in Middle Indiana.

Gathering dust somewhere is a remarkable photo of Axl obediently reading the Bible in church. In the photo, Axl Rose is wearing a striped T-shirt, with ginger hair styled into a thick bowl cut. He’s probably 10 years old. When he was a teenager, Axl grew his red hair below his shoulders, which made him a target of intense bigotry. Axl was called both a “faggot” and a “punk” for looking the way he did (slender, green-eyed, feral, possessing a feminine allure) and for believing that the prog-tinged and majestic Queen II was the best album in history. When a fearlessly androgynous Mick Jagger tongued Ronnie Wood’s lips on Saturday Night Live in 1978, teens who listened to the Stones became victims of homophobic bullying. Axl Rose listened to the Stones. Middle Indiana was too small for an ambitious artist like Axl Rose. He felt unwelcome in his conservative village, like the gay men and women who’d walk into the West Hollywood Barney’s Beanery and notice a wooden sign hanging under a row of beer bottles: “Faggots—Stay Out.” (After years of protests, that sign was finally removed in 1985, right when Guns N’ Roses began to play clubs in Hollywood.)

This was the intolerant “Mayberry,” where Bill Bailey was born and raised. This was where he became the longhair backpacking through a small town, like John Rambo, who found himself handcuffed by a lawman who viewed him, and those like him, as the reason why America failed in Vietnam. To exorcise his internal rage, Axl would get wasted and throw trash cans through windows on Main Street, Lafayette. Tippecanoe County Court records show him spending 10 days in county jail between July 1980 and September 1982. Originally shared by John Jeremiah Sullivan in The Paris Review, there are two infamous mug shots of Axl Rose from those years: one shows him in a flannel shirt from July 1980, where he looks like David Cassidy as a gas station attendant, and another from 1982, where his hair is long and wavy and he’s wearing a denim jacket over a nude chest. In the second photo, he looks more like a stoned Leif Garrett. Axl Rose would be charged with battery, public drunkenness, and trespassing. He was arrested four times before his 18th birthday. In 2008, Larry Getlen at the New York Post reported that at 16, Axl got drunk and threw a beer bottle at a cop. Then he punched a guy so hard that his teeth fell down his throat. When he was around 18, according to his ex-girlfriend Gina Siler in a Spin interview from 1991, Axl showed up to her 17th birthday party wearing a long trench coat and black sunglasses, with his collar popped like Michael Douglas on the VHS cover of Black Rain (1989). Axl was try...