The story of Guns N' Roses

From Lafayette to Hollywood

The story of Guns N' Roses starts in Lafayette, Indiana, where William Bruce Rose Junior was born on the sixth of February 1962. His mother was sixteen. His father left when the boy was about two, and Axl later said that his father had abducted and molested him before disappearing. His mother remarried a man named Stephen Bailey, and the boy grew up as Bill Bailey, believing Bailey was his real father. The household was strictly Pentecostal. Rose later accused his stepfather of beating the family and abusing his sister. Music was his refuge. He sang in the church choir from the age of five, studied piano at Jefferson High School, and at seventeen found papers revealing his birth name.[1]

At Jefferson High, Bill Bailey had a friend named Jeff Isbell, a long haired kid who played drums and who would become Izzy Stradlin. They played covers in a garage and never made it further. Izzy graduated in 1980, the only original Guns N' Roses member with a high school diploma, and headed for Los Angeles. Bill stayed behind and got into trouble. He was arrested more than twenty times in Lafayette and served jail terms of up to three months. After he was threatened with habitual offender charges, he left for Los Angeles in December 1982. His biological father, William Rose, was murdered in Illinois in 1984, something Axl only learned years later.[1] [2]

Across town in Los Angeles, a boy named Saul Hudson was growing up among artists. He was born in Hampstead, London, on the twenty third of July 1965, to an English father who designed album covers and an African American mother who made costumes for stars like John Lennon. He moved to Los Angeles at about six. Actor Seymour Cassel nicknamed him Slash because he was always in a hurry. In 1979 his school friend Steven Adler wanted to form a band. Adler claimed guitar, so Slash tried bass, until a teacher at the Fairfax Music School played the Rolling Stones' Brown Sugar and Slash switched to guitar on the spot. He then practiced up to twelve hours a day.[1] [2]

Steven Adler was born Michael Coletti in Cleveland in 1965 and took his stepfather's surname after his mother moved the family to California. He met Slash after a skateboarding accident, when Slash stopped to help him. By 1983 Adler had taught himself drums, and the two formed a band called Road Crew. They advertised for a bass player, and the answer came from Michael McKagan, known since childhood as Duff. He was the youngest of eight children from Seattle and a veteran of that city's punk scene. Road Crew never found a singer, but it wrote the riff that would become Rocket Queen.[1] [2] [3]

The birth of Guns N' Roses

Once in Hollywood, Bill Bailey began calling himself Axl. With Izzy he formed Hollywood Rose, and Slash and Adler passed through that band before it fell apart in 1984. Axl also sang for a while in L.A. Guns, the band of guitarist Tracii Guns. In March 1985 the two outfits merged. The new group took one word from each band name and became Guns N' Roses, beating rejected ideas such as Heads of Amazon. The first lineup was Axl, Izzy, Tracii Guns, drummer Rob Gardner and bassist Ole Beich. Within weeks Beich was replaced by Duff McKagan, and the band played its first show at the Troubadour on the twenty sixth of March 1985.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The first lineup did not last. Tracii Guns left after an argument with Axl, and Slash took his place. Rob Gardner departed too, and Steven Adler stepped in. On the fourth of June 1985 the classic lineup was complete, with Axl Rose, Slash, Izzy Stradlin, Duff McKagan and Steven Adler. They played their first show two days later, then set off on a tour from Sacramento to Duff's hometown of Seattle. Both vans broke down, and the band hitchhiked the rest of the way carrying only their guitars. Duff later called this Hell Tour the moment the band became a band. Back in Hollywood they moved into a shared rehearsal space they called the Hell House.[1] [2]

The early days were desperate and often ugly. Izzy later admitted that the band sold drugs and worse to raise money. In 1985 Axl and Slash were charged with felony statutory rape after a fifteen year old girl, Michelle Rhoades, went to the police about an incident at their rehearsal studio. Police raided the studio while Axl hid, and the two spent weeks as fugitives, with Axl sleeping at the home of their manager Vicky Hamilton. The charges were later dropped for lack of evidence. Slash wrote in his memoir that the encounter had been consensual. Rhoades would tell a very different story almost forty years later.[1] [2] [3]

By early 1986 the band had a devoted following on the club circuit at venues like the Troubadour, the Roxy and the Whisky a Go Go. Major labels came calling. In March 1986 they signed with Geffen Records, turning down a richer offer from Chrysalis, which wanted to change their image. Geffen offered creative control and an advance of seventy five thousand dollars. Axl legally became W. Axl Rose before signing. In December the label released an EP called Live Like a Suicide, meant to keep fans interested while the band worked in the studio. Despite the name, it was studio demos dressed up with crowd noise, and only ten thousand copies were pressed.[1] [2] [3]

Appetite for Destruction

Finding a producer took time. Paul Stanley of Kiss was considered, but he wanted to change Steven Adler's drum kit, and that ended it. The band settled on Mike Clink, who had worked with Triumph. In January 1987 they went into Rumbo Recorders, a studio owned by Daryl Dragon of the Captain and Tennille. The basic tracks took about two weeks. Adler finished his drums in six days, but Axl recorded his vocals one line at a time, and the perfectionism drove his bandmates out of the room. Slash struggled to find his sound until he settled on a replica of a 1959 Les Paul plugged into a Marshall. The whole album cost about three hundred and seventy thousand dollars.[1] [2] [3]

Appetite for Destruction came out on the twenty first of July 1987. The original cover, a Robert Williams painting of a robot rapist about to be punished by a metal avenger, was too much for many shops, so Geffen moved it inside and replaced it with a cross of five skulls, one for each band member, based on a tattoo design. The songs came straight from the band's lives. Welcome to the Jungle was about the dark side of Los Angeles. Mr. Brownstone was about heroin. Out ta Get Me was about Axl's run ins with the police in Indiana. On vinyl and cassette the sides were labeled G and R instead of A and B.[1] [2] [3]

For almost a year the album went nowhere. It entered the chart at number one hundred and eighty two and sold around two hundred thousand copies in its first months, and Geffen considered walking away. Radio would not play Welcome to the Jungle and MTV would not show the video. Then the label persuaded MTV to air it in the small hours of a Sunday morning. Viewers phoned in demanding to see it again, and it became the channel's most requested video. Radio followed. On the sixth of August 1988, more than a year after release, Appetite for Destruction reached number one on the Billboard 200.[1] [2] [3]

The song that tipped it over was Sweet Child o' Mine. It began as a joke. Slash was warming up with a circus sounding melody and making faces at Steven Adler, Izzy asked him to play it again, and within an hour the whole band had built a song around it. Axl, listening upstairs, wrote the words about his girlfriend Erin Everly, daughter of Don Everly of the Everly Brothers. Producer Spencer Proffer heard Axl muttering where do we go now over a demo and told him to sing it. On the tenth of September 1988 it became the band's only American number one. Paradise City, written in the back of a rented van, reached number five.[1] [2] [3]

The band toured Appetite for sixteen months, opening for the Cult, Motley Crue, Alice Cooper, Iron Maiden and Aerosmith. Aerosmith's manager said that by the end the opening act was bigger than his band. Appetite for Destruction went on to sell more than thirty million copies worldwide, including eighteen million in the United States, making it the best selling debut album in American history. In 2018 a lavish box set called Locked N' Loaded took it back into the top ten, more than thirty years after it first appeared. Critics who had been lukewarm in 1987 came to rank it among the greatest hard rock records ever made.[1] [2]

The most dangerous band in the world

Success came with chaos. In November 1987 in Atlanta, Axl attacked security guards during a show and was taken into custody, while a roadie finished the song on vocals. Then came tragedy. On the twentieth of August 1988 the band played the Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington in England, in front of about one hundred and seven thousand people. As the crowd surged and slam danced to It's So Easy, two young fans were crushed to death in the mud. Axl had stopped the show several times to calm people down. The festival did not take place the following year, and from then on Axl became known for halting concerts to confront troublemakers himself.[1] [2] [3]

In November 1988 the band released G N' R Lies, pairing the old Live Like a Suicide tracks with four new acoustic songs. Patience, recorded with three acoustic guitars and Axl whistling, went to number four. But the album also held One in a Million, in which Axl used racial and homophobic slurs, based on his first days at a Los Angeles bus station. It was widely condemned as racist and homophobic. Axl first defended his language, and later admitted he had used the racial slur because it was taboo, after an attempted robbery. His bandmates had doubts before release, but the song stayed at his insistence.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The drugs were taking over. In January 1989 Steven Adler was in rehab when the band played the American Music Awards, so Don Henley of the Eagles sat in on drums. In October 1989 Guns N' Roses opened four shows for the Rolling Stones at the Los Angeles Coliseum. On stage Axl told the crowd this would be his last show with the band unless certain members stopped dancing with Mr. Brownstone, their own song title for heroin. Slash and Adler were the targets. Izzy, meanwhile, had been sentenced to probation for urinating on a plane, earning the nickname Whizzy, and he went home to Indiana to get clean.[1] [2] [3] [4]

When the band went back into the studio in 1990, Steven Adler could not keep up. He had already been fired once and brought back after signing a contract promising to stay off drugs. Recording Civil War, he needed around thirty takes, and the drum track had to be heavily edited. On the eleventh of July 1990 he was fired for good. His last show with the band had been Farm Aid in April. Izzy Stradlin later said something vital left with him, because the songs had been written around his swing. Adler sued, and in 1993 he settled for about two and a quarter million dollars and fifteen percent of royalties on his recordings.[1] [2] [3]

Use Your Illusion

Slash had seen drummer Matt Sorum playing with the Cult and brought him in. Keyboard player Dizzy Reed, whose band had rehearsed next door to Guns N' Roses back in 1985, joined at Axl's invitation, making the group a six piece. They played their first show together at Rock in Rio in January 1991. That May the band fired its manager, Alan Niven. According to Rolling Stone, Axl refused to finish the albums until Niven was gone, against the wishes of some of his bandmates. He was replaced by Doug Goldstein. The mixing was just as fraught. The band scrapped mixes by Bob Clearmountain and started again with Bill Price, who had worked with the Sex Pistols.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The tour started before the albums were finished. On the second of July 1991, at the Riverport Amphitheatre near St. Louis, Axl spotted a fan with a camera during Rocket Queen. When security did not act, he dived into the crowd, grabbed at the man and fought with people, then told the crowd that thanks to the lame security he was going home, slammed down his microphone and walked off. A riot broke out and dozens were injured. Axl was charged, and in 1992 he was sentenced to two years of probation and ordered to pay fifty thousand dollars. The Use Your Illusion liner notes carried a rude message to St. Louis in place of thanks.[1] [2] [3]

On the seventeenth of September 1991 the band released two albums at once, Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II. They debuted at numbers two and one on the Billboard 200, with II selling seven hundred and seventy thousand copies in its first week. No act had held the top two spots since Jim Croce in 1974. The records were sprawling and ambitious, with pianos, horns, a cover of Live and Let Die, a take on Bob Dylan's Knockin' on Heaven's Door, and the ten minute Coma, which Axl said came from his own overdose. You Could Be Mine went into Terminator 2. Together the albums sold around thirty five million copies.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

November Rain became the defining image of the era. Axl had been working on it since the early eighties, and an eighteen minute version was demoed in 1986. The finished song ran almost nine minutes, with an orchestral arrangement Axl wrote himself. Its video, inspired by a short story by the band's friend Del James, starred Axl's girlfriend Stephanie Seymour as a bride who dies, and cost well over a million dollars. It reached number three in America, the longest song ever to reach the top ten at the time, and in 1992 the band played it at the MTV Video Music Awards with Elton John on piano.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Izzy Stradlin had had enough. Now sober, he found the chaos, the late starts and his bandmates' addictions hard to live with, and he objected to a new contract that would cut his share of royalties. He played his last show at Wembley in August 1991 and quit on the seventh of November. Gilby Clarke took his place. In April 1992 the band played the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley, despite protests over One in a Million. Queen's Brian May defended their presence, and Axl sang Bohemian Rhapsody with Elton John. Axl had asked for Nirvana as an opening act, but Kurt Cobain refused.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That summer the band co headlined stadiums with Metallica. On the eighth of August 1992 in Montreal, James Hetfield was badly burned by pyrotechnics and Metallica had to stop. Guns N' Roses came on after a long wait, but the monitors had not been set up properly and Axl said his throat hurt, so they left early. Another riot followed, with injuries and arrests, and the stadium banned the band for life. In April 1993 in Sacramento, Duff was hit on the head by a bottle full of urine and taken to hospital. The tour finally ended in Buenos Aires on the seventeenth of July 1993, after one hundred and ninety two shows in twenty seven countries.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Falling apart

In November 1993 the band released The Spaghetti Incident, an album of punk and glam covers by bands they loved, from the Damned and the New York Dolls to the Misfits and the Stooges. They joked about calling it Pension Fund, since the royalties would help their heroes pay the rent. It debuted at number four but became their weakest seller. The row was over a hidden track, a song written by Charles Manson. Law enforcement and victims' groups were outraged. The band agreed that royalties would go to the son of one of Manson's victims, and David Geffen said Axl would never have recorded it had he known how offensive people would find it.[1] [2] [3]

The band's excesses were catching up with them. On the tenth of May 1994, Duff McKagan, then thirty, was rushed to hospital in Seattle with acute pancreatitis caused by alcohol. His pancreas had swollen to the size of a football, and doctors told him he would be dead within a month if he kept drinking. He got sober and stayed sober, crediting mountain biking and martial arts. Around the same time he enrolled in a finance class, because as a millionaire he could not make sense of the band's accounts. Steven Adler, meanwhile, was arrested for heroin possession in 1995, and in 1996 suffered a stroke after a speedball that left him with a speech impediment.[1] [2]

Work on a new album went nowhere. Slash wrote songs that Axl rejected, and he put them out instead with his side project, Slash's Snakepit. Axl was drawn to industrial music and brought in his childhood friend Paul Tobias, known as Paul Huge, without asking the others. Gilby Clarke was let go, and learned of it partly by being left off a 1994 cover of Sympathy for the Devil. In August 1995 Axl legally left the band's partnership and formed a new one under the Guns N' Roses name, later buying the full rights. He said he did it to salvage the band, not to steal it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In October 1996 Slash quit. He said he and Axl had not seen eye to eye for some time, and that Axl's lateness, the fight over the name and the loss of Adler and Izzy had worn him down. Matt Sorum was fired in 1997 after arguing with Axl about Paul Tobias, whom he later called the Yoko Ono of Guns N' Roses. In August 1997 Duff, now a father, left too. He wrote that the band had been paying for studios for three years and still did not have a single song. Of the Use Your Illusion lineup, only Axl and Dizzy Reed remained.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Axl rebuilt the band around Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck, drummer Josh Freese, former Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson and keyboardist Chris Pitman alongside Tobias and Reed. He withdrew from public life, spending his nights in his Malibu mansion writing and rehearsing, and the press called him the Howard Hughes of rock. Death hit the old circle hard. Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon, Axl's friend from Lafayette who had sung on Don't Cry, died of an overdose in October 1995. West Arkeen, who had co written songs including It's So Easy, was found dead of an overdose in May 1997.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The long road to Chinese Democracy

In November 1999 Axl announced the new album's title, Chinese Democracy, and released a single, the industrial Oh My God, for the film End of Days. The next year he hired the masked guitarist Buckethead, who performed with a fried chicken bucket on his head, and drummer Brain from Primus. Producers came and went. Roy Thomas Baker, who had worked with Queen, persuaded Axl to record the whole album again. Parts were redone over and over, and bassist Tommy Stinson said he re recorded his parts five or six times. Staff sat idle for weeks when Axl did not come in. A psychic was even used to read the auras of potential hires.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the first of January 2001 the new Guns N' Roses played Las Vegas, and on the fourteenth they headlined Rock in Rio in front of around one hundred and ninety thousand people. From the stage Axl said former friends had worked hard to stop him being there. In 2002 they surprised everyone by closing the MTV Video Music Awards. But a North American tour that November collapsed. When Axl failed to arrive in Vancouver, the show was cancelled and fans rioted. A second no show in Philadelphia brought another riot, and the promoter cancelled the rest of the tour. Paul Tobias had left that year, replaced by guitarist Richard Fortus.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By 2004 Geffen had run out of patience. The label said Axl had exceeded the budget by millions and that finishing the album was now his job, and it cut off funding. The New York Times reported that thirteen million dollars had been spent in the studio, making Chinese Democracy the most expensive album never made. Buckethead quit in March 2004, and a show in Lisbon was cancelled. That same month Geffen released a Greatest Hits album. Axl, Slash and Duff joined forces to sue to stop it and lost. It went on to become one of the longest charting albums of the era.[1] [2] [3]

The former members had moved on. In 2002 Slash, Duff and Matt Sorum played a tribute concert for drummer Randy Castillo and found the old chemistry was still there. They formed Velvet Revolver with guitarist Dave Kushner and the Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland. Their 2004 debut, Contraband, went to number one and won a Grammy for Slither. Slash had also survived a health scare. In 2001, at thirty five, he was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy caused by years of drinking and drugs and given weeks to live. A defibrillator was implanted in his chest. He has been sober since 2006. Weiland was fired in 2008 amid his own addiction.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In March 2008 Dr Pepper offered a free can of soda to everyone in America, except former guitarists Slash and Buckethead, if the album came out that year. Axl said he would share his with Buckethead. It finally arrived on the twenty third of November 2008 as a Best Buy exclusive in the United States, after being streamed more than three million times on MySpace. Only Axl remained from the classic lineup, alongside players such as Finck, Fortus, Stinson, Reed, Pitman, Buckethead and Ron Thal, known as Bumblefoot. It debuted at number three, sold below expectations, won respectable reviews, and was banned in China over its title song.[1] [2]

Feuds and the Hall of Fame

In February 2009 Axl gave his first interview in nine years, to Billboard, and made it clear there would be no reunion with Slash. One of them, he said, would die before that happened. He called Slash a cancer that same year. Still, he said he could imagine working with Izzy or Duff. The band kept touring through the late 2000s and early 2010s with a changing cast, now including guitarist DJ Ashba. Shows often began very late. At the Reading Festival in 2010 they came on nearly an hour late and ran into the curfew. In Dublin that year Axl walked off after bottles were thrown, and returned an hour later to finish.[1] [2] [3]

Steven Adler's struggles continued in public. In the late 1990s he served jail time and probation after pleading no contest in domestic violence cases involving women he had lived with or attacked. In 2008 and again in 2011 he appeared on the reality show Celebrity Rehab, where Dr Drew Pinsky described his behavior as suicidal, and on its spin off Sober House he was arrested after a violent outburst. Between relapses he formed Adler's Appetite, playing the old songs. In 2010 he published a memoir, My Appetite for Destruction, and played on Slash's first solo album alongside Slash's other old friends.[1]

There were signs of thaw. On the fourteenth of October 2010, at the O2 Arena in London, Duff McKagan walked on stage with Guns N' Roses for the first time since 1993. He and Axl happened to be staying at the same hotel, and Axl joked about the loud music coming from the end of his hallway. Duff played four songs, including Patience. Izzy Stradlin guested on a run of European dates in 2006 and again in 2012. But the Slash wound stayed open. In 2012 NME reported that tour security had been told to keep out anyone wearing a Slash T shirt.[1] [2] [3]

On the fourteenth of April 2012, Guns N' Roses were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility. Axl did not go. Three days earlier he had published an open letter asking not to be inducted, saying the Hall did not seem to be a place where he was wanted or respected. Izzy and Dizzy Reed stayed away as well. Slash, Duff, Steven Adler, Matt Sorum and Gilby Clarke took the stage together, with Myles Kennedy singing, and played Mr. Brownstone, Sweet Child o' Mine and Paradise City. When Axl's name was read out, the crowd booed. It seemed any real reunion was further away than ever.[1] [2] [3]

Not in this lifetime

In 2012 Axl had been asked when a reunion might happen and replied, not in this lifetime. Three years later things quietly changed. Slash said the tension had dissipated, and that he and Axl had spoken on the phone in 2015 after almost twenty years of silence. DJ Ashba, Bumblefoot and Tommy Stinson all left. On Christmas Day 2015 a teaser played in cinemas before the new Star Wars film, showing a crowd and the opening of Welcome to the Jungle. In January 2016 Guns N' Roses were confirmed as headliners at Coachella, with Slash and Duff McKagan back in the band.[1] [2] [3]

On the first of April 2016 the band played a surprise warm up at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, where it had all begun. Tickets cost ten dollars. It was the first time Axl and Slash had shared a stage in almost twenty three years. Melissa Reese joined on keyboards, replacing Chris Pitman. During the show Axl fell off a monitor and broke his foot, so for the first shows he sat on a throne borrowed from Dave Grohl, who had built it after breaking his own leg. The tour was named Not in This Lifetime, a knowing wink at Axl's old words.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In April 2016 Axl took on a second job. AC/DC's singer Brian Johnson had been ordered to stop touring because of his hearing, and Axl stepped in as their lead singer for the rest of the Rock or Bust tour, performing around two dozen shows. Angus Young in turn guested with Guns N' Roses. In July 2016 in Cincinnati, Steven Adler joined the band for Out ta Get Me and My Michelle, his first time playing with them since 1990. He returned for shows in Nashville, Los Angeles and Buenos Aires.[1] [2] [3]

The tour ran from 2016 to the end of 2019 and covered every continent except Antarctica. By the end of 2018 it had grossed more than five hundred and sixty million dollars, at the time second only to U2's 360 tour. There were tributes along the way. After Prince died in April 2016, Duff played Coachella with Prince's symbol on his bass. The band covered Black Hole Sun for Chris Cornell and Wichita Lineman for Glen Campbell. Izzy Stradlin never joined. He said the others did not want to split the money equally. The band also played an incident free show in St. Louis in 2017, its first in the area since the Riverport riot.[1] [2] [3]

The later years

The band kept touring after the reunion and began releasing songs again. In August 2021 came Absurd, their first new music since 2008, followed by Hard Skool. Both were reworked songs from the Chinese Democracy sessions, now with Slash and Duff playing on them. Absurd had started life as Silkworms, written by the keyboard players. In 2022 a deluxe box set of Use Your Illusion appeared, with a newly recorded fifty piece orchestra on November Rain. In June 2023 the band headlined Glastonbury for the first time. Some reviews called it one of the festival's weakest headline sets, and the band blamed a poor mix. That August they released the piano ballad Perhaps.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Old accusations resurfaced in these years. In November 2023 Sheila Kennedy, a former model, sued Axl under a New York law that briefly lifted time limits, alleging he sexually assaulted her in a hotel suite in 1989. Axl denied it, saying he had no memory of ever meeting her, and his lawyers pointed to her own earlier accounts. The case was privately settled in December 2024, with Axl repeating that there was no assault. In 2024 Michelle Rhoades gave a new account of the 1985 incident, alleging rape and abuse. No legal action followed. Axl had earlier settled abuse suits brought by Erin Everly and Stephanie Seymour in the 1990s.[1] [2]

Other troubles came from the crowd. For more than thirty years Axl had ended shows by tossing his microphone into the audience. After a woman was hurt by it in Adelaide in November 2022, he announced he would stop throwing anything to fans. In November 2023 the band's former photographer Katarina Benzova sued, claiming they falsely took ownership of her photos and that manager Fernando Lebeis made repeated unwanted advances. Personal grief touched the band too. In July 2024 Slash's stepdaughter Lucy Bleu Knight, daughter of his partner Meegan Hodges, died at twenty five, and he postponed shows on his own tour.[1] [2] [3] [4]

After taking 2024 off, the band returned to the road in 2025 with a tour that opened in Saudi Arabia and closed at Germany's Wacken festival. That July they played at Black Sabbath's farewell show, Back to the Beginning. At the end of 2025 they released two more songs from the Chinese Democracy vaults, Nothin' and Atlas, the latter once known as Atlas Shrugged, and announced a world tour for 2026. As of 2026 a full new album is still talked about rather than delivered. Slash said there was so much material that it was a matter of finding the discipline to sit down and finish it.[1] [2] [3]

Guns N' Roses have sold more than one hundred million records. Their music mixed punk, blues and metal and helped drag late eighties rock away from glam, and bands from Pearl Jam and Green Day to Avenged Sevenfold and the Strokes are said to have been influenced by them. They were also criticised for violence at shows, sexist lyrics, lateness and long silences. Their videos still reach new listeners. In 2018 November Rain became the first video from the nineties to pass one billion YouTube views, and in 2019 Sweet Child o' Mine did the same for the eighties. Axl is still the only member who has been there from the very first show.[1] [2] [3]

The people around Guns N' Roses

Axl Rose and Slash. They were the heart of the band, the voice and the guitar, but they were very different men. Slash wanted to play riffs and tour, while Axl pursued a grander vision. After Slash left in 1996 they did not speak for almost twenty years. Axl called him a cancer and said one of them would die before a reunion. They reconnected by phone in 2015, and Slash later said most of their issues had been blown up by third parties and by the silence itself.[1] [2] [3]

Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin. They were teenage friends in Lafayette, Indiana, playing covers in a garage, and Izzy went to Los Angeles first. Together they formed Hollywood Rose and then Guns N' Roses, and Izzy wrote or co wrote much of Appetite for Destruction. After getting sober he quit in 1991. Axl took a dig at him from the stage, but they reconnected by phone in 2006 and Izzy guested on several tours, though he stayed out of the 2016 reunion.[1] [2] [3]

Axl Rose and Erin Everly. Erin Everly, daughter of Don Everly of the Everly Brothers, began dating Axl in early 1986, and Sweet Child o' Mine was written for her. They married in Las Vegas on the twenty eighth of April 1990, and within a month Axl filed for divorce. They reconciled, she became pregnant and miscarried that October, and the marriage was annulled in January 1991. In 1994 she sued him alleging physical and emotional abuse, and the case was settled privately.[1] [2] [3]

Axl Rose and Stephanie Seymour. The supermodel Stephanie Seymour dated Axl from 1991 and starred in the videos for Don't Cry and November Rain. Axl grew close to her young son Dylan and tried to be a father figure. They became engaged in February 1993 and split three weeks later, which forced a rewrite of the Estranged video. Afterwards they sued each other over alleged assaults at a holiday gathering, and both suits were settled out of court.[1] [2] [3]

Slash and Steven Adler. They met as boys when Adler fell off his skateboard and Slash stopped to help. Adler's idea of a band pushed Slash to pick up a guitar, and together they formed Road Crew, where the Rocket Queen riff was born. When heroin cost Adler his place in 1990, Slash was part of the band that let him go, but they stayed in touch. Slash guested on Adler's later records, and Adler played on Slash's solo album in 2010.[1] [2]

Slash and Duff McKagan. Duff answered Slash's newspaper ad for a bass player in 1984, and they became the band's rhythm backbone. Both battled addiction, and both left Axl's Guns N' Roses in the late nineties. They reunited in Velvet Revolver with Matt Sorum, which went to number one in 2004, and returned together to Guns N' Roses in 2016. Duff even joined Slash in suing Axl in 2006 over songwriting credits, before they all made peace.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain. Axl was an early admirer and wanted Nirvana to open for Guns N' Roses in 1992, but Kurt Cobain refused. Cobain called Axl sexist, racist and homophobic and said fans could not be on both sides. Axl hit back that Nirvana would rather stay home with drugs than tour with them, and the two clashed backstage at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards. The feud came to stand for the collision between hair era rock and grunge.[1] [2]

Axl Rose and Beta Lebeis. Beta Lebeis first met Axl in 1991 while babysitting Stephanie Seymour's son. She became his assistant and, in his words, the mother he never had. At Rock in Rio in 2001 he thanked her Brazilian family from the stage for looking after him for seven years. By the late 2000s Beta and her son Fernando were effectively running the band's management, known as Team Brazil, after a string of clashes with professional managers.[1] [2]

Axl Rose and Alan Niven. Alan Niven, a New Zealander who had also managed Great White, steered Guns N' Roses from 1986 through the Appetite years and their rise. According to Rolling Stone, Axl refused to finish the Use Your Illusion albums until Niven was fired in May 1991, against the wishes of some bandmates, and his former partner Doug Goldstein took over. Niven went on to manage Izzy Stradlin's solo band, and in 2018 he was still talking publicly about Guns N' Roses, describing Izzy's aborted soundcheck with them.[1] [2]

Axl Rose and Paul Tobias. Paul Tobias, known as Paul Huge, was Axl's childhood friend from Indiana who co wrote early songs like Back Off Bitch. In 1994 Axl brought him in as a guitarist without consulting the others, and his presence helped drive out Slash and Matt Sorum, who called him the Yoko Ono of Guns N' Roses. Axl considered him vital to the new songs, but Tobias disliked touring and left in 2002.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum and Scott Weiland. After years apart from Axl, the three former Guns N' Roses members found their singer in Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots. As Velvet Revolver they topped the chart with Contraband and won a Grammy for Slither. Weiland's addictions caused turmoil, and he was fired in 2008, with Slash blaming chemical issues. Weiland was found dead on his tour bus from an accidental overdose on the third of December 2015, aged forty eight.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Guns N' Roses

• Before fame, Axl and Izzy were paid about eight dollars an hour to smoke cigarettes for a scientific study at UCLA. While struggling in Hollywood, the two friends took part in a UCLA smoking study for about eight dollars an hour. Axl also worked as night manager at the Tower Records store on Sunset Boulevard.[1]
• Slash's famous top hat was shoplifted from a store on Melrose Avenue in 1985. Before a club show in 1985, Slash stole a black top hat and a silver concho belt from two shops on Melrose Avenue. He combined them into custom headwear, felt really cool, and it became his trademark.[1]
• Slash designed the band's circular logo himself. A keen artist since childhood, Slash drew logos for his pre fame bands and created the famous circular Guns N' Roses logo. A picture he drew of Aerosmith as a teenager was later used in one of their albums.[1]
• One of the names the band rejected before settling on Guns N' Roses was Heads of Amazon. Guns N' Roses was simply a merger of L.A. Guns and Hollywood Rose, and the name was first meant for a record label. Other names considered and dropped included Heads of Amazon.[1]
• On Appetite for Destruction's vinyl and cassette, the sides were labeled G and R instead of A and B. The G side, for Guns, held six songs about drugs and hard city life. The R side, for Roses, held the songs about love, sex and relationships.[1]
• Axl first wanted the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion as the cover of Appetite for Destruction. In a 2011 television interview, Axl said his first idea for the cover was the Time magazine photo of the Challenger explosion. Geffen rejected it as in bad taste.[1]
• The band's first EP, Live Like a Suicide, was not live at all. Released in December 1986 on Geffen's Uzi Suicide imprint, the four songs were studio demos with crowd noise added. Only ten thousand vinyl copies were pressed.[1] [2]
• Paul Stanley of Kiss almost produced Appetite for Destruction. Stanley was considered as producer, but he wanted to change Steven Adler's drum kit more than Adler would accept. Mutt Lange was also considered, but the label balked at the cost.[1]
• Appetite for Destruction was recorded in a studio owned by Daryl Dragon of the Captain and Tennille. The band entered Rumbo Recorders in January 1987. The whole album cost about three hundred and seventy thousand dollars.[1] [2]
• Izzy Stradlin was the only original member of Guns N' Roses with a high school diploma. Izzy graduated in 1980 with a D average and moved straight to Los Angeles, where his first punk show ended with the audience attacking the band.[1]
• The Patience video was filmed at the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. The Los Angeles hotel was closed and awaiting demolition when Nigel Dick shot the video on Valentine's Day 1989. It was Steven Adler's last video with the band, although he did not play on the song.[1] [2]
• Don Henley of the Eagles once played drums with Guns N' Roses. Steven Adler was in rehab at the time of the American Music Awards in January 1989, so Henley filled in on Patience. The absence was first blamed on flu.[1] [2] [3]
• Arnold Schwarzenegger invited the band to dinner at his house to secure You Could Be Mine for Terminator 2. The song's writing dated back to the Appetite sessions. In the video, the Terminator scans Axl and decides killing him would be a waste of ammo.[1] [2]
• The band fired their mixing engineer after finding his notes on replacing Matt Sorum's drums with samples. According to Slash, the band discovered a notepad in which Bob Clearmountain had planned the drum samples. They scrapped his mixes of twenty one tracks and started again.[1] [2]
• The Use Your Illusion covers are details from Raphael's painting The School of Athens. Artist Mark Kostabi adapted the Renaissance fresco, using yellow and red for the first album and blue and purple for the second.[1] [2]
• Right Next Door to Hell was inspired by a fight with Axl's neighbour over a wine bottle. His West Hollywood neighbour accused him of hitting her with a bottle of Chardonnay. He was briefly jailed, and the charges were dismissed for lack of evidence.[1] [2]
• Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon sang on Don't Cry because his sister went to high school with Axl. Hoon was also from Lafayette, Indiana. Axl invited him into the Use Your Illusion sessions and into the Don't Cry video, before Blind Melon broke through.[1]
• In Bogota in 1992, rain started falling as the band began November Rain and stopped when it ended. Axl called it a special moment, because the song had been number one in Colombia for sixty weeks. The wet stage then forced a break over fears of electrocution.[1]
• A message on the cover of The Spaghetti Incident is written in the Zodiac Killer's code. The line of symbols at the bottom of the cover was later decoded as a crude phrase telling everyone to get lost, in stronger words.[1] [2]
• The band left a Hanoi Rocks cover off The Spaghetti Incident to avoid paying its writer. They recorded the music for Beer and a Cigarette but never added vocals, because they did not want the songwriter Andy McCoy to receive royalties.[1]
• Axl Rose was the DJ of the classic rock station in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. During his years away from the stage he voiced the host of the station K D S T, and Welcome to the Jungle also appears in the game.[1] [2]
• Duff McKagan sat next to Kurt Cobain on a flight days before Cobain died. On the first of April 1994 they flew together from Los Angeles to Seattle, making Duff one of the last people confirmed to have seen him alive.[1]
• Duff McKagan took a finance course because he could not read the band's accounts. In 1994 he enrolled at Santa Monica Community College, later studied business at Seattle University and founded a wealth management firm called Meridian Rock.[1]
• Bob Dylan told Slash to play like Django Reinhardt on one of his songs. Slash played on Wiggle Wiggle, the opening track of Dylan's 1990 album Under the Red Sky. He also played on Michael Jackson's Give In to Me.[1]
• A studio was built for Buckethead in the shape of a chicken coop. To coax the guitarist back during the Chinese Democracy sessions, Tom Zutaut had a coop built of straw, wire and rubber chickens. Only assistant engineers were allowed in.[1] [2]
• Brian May of Queen played guitar on sessions for Chinese Democracy. May recorded parts in 1999, and a leaked early version of Atlas was reported to feature him.[1] [2]
• Chinese Democracy set a MySpace record before it was even in shops. The band streamed the full album on its MySpace page days before release, and it was played more than three million times.[1]
• In 1999 Axl had his new band rerecord all of Appetite for Destruction, but it was never released. Axl had the late nineties lineup rerecord the album to learn modern techniques. Half of a new Sweet Child o' Mine can be heard in the end credits of Big Daddy.[1] [2]
• Steven Adler says he lost a chance to join AC/DC after Axl called him a drug addict on television. Adler says an offer to audition for AC/DC was withdrawn after Axl announced his firing on stage at the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards. Decades later, Axl himself sang for AC/DC.[1] [2]
• In 2016 the band was detained at the Canadian border because a gun was on board. Axl told a Toronto crowd they were detained, not arrested, and joked that you can forget you had one. A spokesman said the gun belonged to nobody in the band.[1]
• Axl wrote to Indonesia's president in 2015 asking for mercy for two men facing execution. He urged Joko Widodo to drop the death penalty in the Bali Nine case and criticised him after the executions went ahead.[1]
• Sheryl Crow won a Grammy for her cover of Sweet Child o' Mine. She recorded it for the film Big Daddy in 1999 and won Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. It is the most covered song Slash has written.[1]
• US versions of the video game Mega Man X5 renamed its bosses after members of Guns N' Roses. The 2000 release gave the robot bosses names drawn from the band. The manga JoJo's Bizarre Adventure later named a power November Rain.[1]
• After Donington 1988, the next Monsters of Rock was cancelled and later crowds were capped. When the festival returned in 1990 the crowd was limited to seventy five thousand, down from about one hundred and seven thousand the night two fans died.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.