Slash

moment he found out that Alan also managed and produced and cowrote Great White. There was also the fact that Alan was opinionated about a lot of things and Axl didn’t always agree with his point of view. So at times Axl felt like he was being forced to do things that he didn’t necessarily want to do. Axl thought that Alan had developed an ego, that he’d gone from a Malcolm McClaren to a Peter Grant. And really, Alan’s ego was as inflated as ours.

I had been Alan’s champion, however, until one incident swayed me against him. One night when Renee and I were at his house with him and his wife, Camilla, Alan said something really inappropriate to Renee. I don’t remember what it was exactly, but it was creepy enough that we left immediately. I never forgot it, and I won’t repeat it here. As much as I loved Alan for what he’d done to help us, I didn’t protest too much when Axl moved to oust him. I knew it was going to happen but I didn’t think it would be the tipping point. Looking back, I feel that shift was the moment, the pause at the pinnacle of the band’s success… and the start of its downfall.

All the same, I saw Doug coming. He had made a place for himself in Axl’s life, and once Axl had made his feelings about Alan clear, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Doug was right there to pick up the reins. He had been strategically moving up the ladder from the beginning. He was like an ambush predator. Though at the end of the day no one is more responsible for the demise of Guns N’ Roses than Guns N’ Roses, Doug Goldstein was a catalyst. His divide-and-conquer techniques were instrumental in achieving our end.

If you run down the history of the demise of great rock bands, more often than not you’ll discover that many of them dumped their original manager on their way to grasping the brass ring, and once they did, it all got fucked up. I’m kind of pissed off that we followed that tradition.

As self-destructive as we may or may not have been, and despite the communication barriers between the members, we had the desire to play music and move forward at all costs. That an outside influence completely disrupted the band really is a shame.

It was a dream come true… but as we prepared for our monster tour, the last thing on our minds was being careful what we wished for.

I THINK IT TOOK TWO DAYS FOR DOUG Goldstein to be elected the official new manager of Guns N’ Roses. At the time we had not finished mixing the record, but Doug, from the start, wanted to make a name for himself in the industry and make money, and we were the perfect vehicle for that. We booked a series of gigs straightaway, and on strategic days off, would go into the studio to complete the albums. For a while, our tour schedule delayed the release of the albums indefinitely.

We certainly had our fun, though. Doug took us out of the studio to play Rock in Rio in Brazil in 1991, which would be Matt and Dizzy’s first show with Guns. It was incredible; we played two nights in a row to 180,000 fans in Maracana Stadium. It was a festival that had gone on for weeks, where everyone from Megadeath to Faith No More, to INXS, Run-D.M.C., and Prince, had played. It was something else; I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a more insane Guns N’ Roses crowd—and that is saying something. When we kicked into the bridge of “Paradise City,” people swan-dived from the upper tier of the stadium—seemingly to their death. There aren’t words that can do their degree of intensity justice: we had had people stacked outside of our hotel so deep that we couldn’t leave. We couldn’t even go down to the pool, because when we did, somehow people would launch themselves over the fifteen-foot wall and run up and basically attack us. They didn’t want to hurt us, but they definitely wanted to break a piece of us off to keep for themselves. It was bizarre. We couldn’t leave our rooms, and our wives, or girlfriends, or any women seen in our company, were taunted and, basically, marked for death by these fans of ours.

We did a bunch more dates. We had three theater dates in L.A., San Francisco, and New York, with various bands opening for us, such as Blind Melon and Faith No More and Raging Slab. At the New York show we shot live footage, which made the basis of the video for The Terminator 2 soundtrack. That video also featured shots of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Terminator himself, at the Rainbow. We then started a tour with Skid Row in the United States, including two nights at the Inglewood Forum in L.A. I tell you, being that huge of a band was fucking killer. Having Skid Row was my kind of tour: total debauchery.

Way before we finished mixing and mastering the albums, Axl was committed to getting the right image for our cover art. Since he’d been the one who brought that brilliant Robert Williams painting in for Appetite, we trusted him to find the art for these two albums as well. Once again he did: the image for the nebulous mix of songs we’d worked up was by Mark Kostabi. It was a young Dutch-looking figure in a “thinker” pose that had been inspired by a Renaissance painting. At the time, Axl really wanted that image to be the two faces of those albums. In the end we had one in red, one in blue, and the rest of us were just like, “Okay, cool, man.” That made the two album concept more palatable.

That was one of what might be considered “big” decisions that, as a band, we were too quick to pass off to our lead singer. But I don’t regret it at all: if that was where Axl was going to throw down the gauntlet, it was all good. I was much more concerned that the Illusion albums would be released separately so that our fans didn’t have to spend thirty or forty bucks to get our new music: they could decide if they wanted one or the other album and buy accordingly. Hopefully they’d want both. In the end, Use Your Illusion I sold more than Use Your Illusion II.

When the albums went on sale, fans were lined up outside of record stores all around the country. I can vouch for the fact that there was a line down the block at Tower Records on Sunset that night because I drove past there on my way to the airport with Renee. I had the limo pull in and we snuck in the back door and were brought up to the same little office above the sales floor where I’d been detained for shoplifting when I was in junior high; I looked down at all the kids on line to buy the records through the same one-way glass that some manager had watched me through the day I got busted stealing. It was surreal.

The records went to number one and number two the week they were released, which was a record. And then they stayed there. There was fanfare everywhere, and we needed to get organized for our tour. It was going to be bigger than anything we’d done.

The new music was much more complicated, so bringing it to the stage was going to require added musicians. I was elected the unofficial music director, in charge of finding background vocalists and horn players. I had a hard time swallowing the concept of three guys in tuxes blowing brass, so I hired hot chicks instead. Of course, good-looking backup singers were a necessity as well. I sort of did it all tongue in cheek. We also brought in Teddy Zig Zag, this great blues player I’d jammed with countless times, to play additional piano and the harmonica. Actually I relied on Ted to recruit all of the female session players and he did an amazing job.

As we prepared to take off again, I had a lot to do with the stage design as well. I helped design a pretty efficient and good-looking stage that we would live on for the next two and a half years. There were ramps, little stages over the amps for the girls, a keyboard area, and a piano that came from under the floor for Axl. We also had a cool grating for a floor so that lights could shine from beneath us it.

We were hands-on for the whole development of that big-ass stage we ended up with. We had the Guns N’ Roses logo on the floor, which was cool, too. It was fucking incredible for us to have the money and the public demand to design our ultimate performance vehicle. It was a dream come true… but as we prepared for our monster tour, the last thing on our minds was being careful what we wished for.

11. Choose Your Illusion

^{Slash integrates his BMX moves into his guitar playing on the Illusions tour.}

I’ve experienced extreme highs and lows, and rode them all to the end. But when they’re so close together that they’re virtually interwoven, it is alienating. That is something else altogether; suddenly the once familiar seems strange, and nothing feels stable. As a kid, I’d stared in disbelief from the side of many stages that, to me, were bigger than life itself. Now I was playing on an even bigger one, with my band’s logo emblazoned on the floor beneath my feet. We had arenas full of fans waiting to see us everywhere we went, all around the world. We released two albums on the same day that debuted at number one and number two. It couldn’t have been going better. And backstage, behind it all, we were splitting apart like the atom in an A-bomb.