It's So Easy: And Other Lies (27 page)

But I soon realized this was
not
going to be awesome.

I’m not sure exactly which gig it was when Axl first showed up late to the venue, but it was very early in the tour. Don’t get me wrong, I had never been a taskmaster about start times. I was as anti-establishment as the best of them, and going onstage right at the exact contractually obligated time wasn’t on the top of my list of things to do each day. But as the fans became more and more upset about the late starts, it dawned on me that they were upset because they had to go to work or school the next day or had a babysitter at home watching their kids. Sometimes we came on so late that a significant percentage of the crowd had gone home.

A headlining band usually went on about 9 p.m. When we had opened for other bands in 1987 and 1988 and there had been any nervousness about us starting on time, the tour managers—the headliners’ tour managers, that is—used to say, “I don’t know when you’re going on, but I know when you’re going off.” That was because most venues had 11 p.m. curfews and the headliners had to get their sets in by then. Curfews existed for any number of reasons: the venue might have a deal with its union workers or legal compromises with the surrounding residential neighborhoods; there were noise ordinances; the local public-transport schedule might play a role. Broken curfews often entailed a fine for the performer. Sometimes it was a set fee, other times it could be $1,000 per minute in overtime fees. In the most financially extreme cases, the band was on the hook for a huge fine
and
all the additional double-time wages for union stagehands and police and security. Obviously, unless you just loved to piss away your hard-earned money, you tried to wrap your show up within curfew times.

We kept going on later and later, and the crowds became restless and angry after our opener, Skid Row, finished and we failed to appear. Slash, Matt, and I ended up pushing our drinking and drug use to the extreme as the tour went on and things got worse and worse. Under normal circumstances, we were trying to get to the perfect level of buzz before a show started. When the shows began to start later and later, we ended up going way past that point.

Tension mounted within the band as we waited for Axl to show up and agree to go on. And because ticket holders also had to wait, tension mounted between the band and the audience. Some nights we would go on forty-five minutes late. Other times, one, two, or even three hours late. The only way I could bear the chants of “bullshit” from crowds of 20,000 people for an hour or two was to guzzle more booze. Inevitably, given the constantly changing amount of time I had to kill and the shifting magnitude of band strife and audience annoyance, I would drink too much. Then I’d have to do some coke to come up off the floor. Then,
oops,
too much coke, better drink some more. It was a vicious cycle.

I guess I hoped management would handle the lateness so we could avoid intraband strife. That’s what I thought managers did, the very reason we paid them. But Axl had become a dictator before whom everyone—crew, promoters, even management now that Axl had switched us from Alan Niven to Doug Goldstein—quivered in fear. Doug seemed more concerned with the short-term goal of placating Axl than with making things run well for the long term. So I silently fumed at others, building up black resentment.

Izzy’s sobriety functioned only if he traveled separately and stayed in different hotels from us. I had gotten used to not having him around, but it was still a blow to the band. From day one, Izzy and I had shared the right side of the stage. We had seen everything—from our rise through the L.A. clubs to these massive arena shows—from the exact same perspective. The perception in popular culture is that the singer and the lead guitar player are generally the artistic brain trust of any band. In our case, Izzy was probably the most significant force—without his initial vision and his songwriting cues, there would have been no Guns N’ Roses. He and I still had our time together on the right side of the stage. But those moments made me think Izzy was extremely uncomfortable with the way we were treating our fans.

Still, I didn’t have the self-confidence—or whatever—to do anything about it. Mostly because that would have meant looking in the mirror. I couldn’t start calling people out—
that guy’s always late, that guy’s always high
—without eventually coming back around to my own drinking. So I just threw up my hands.
It’s all fucked.
The situation made me angry,
really angry;
I’ve never dealt well with anger.

I began to have panic attacks all the time, bad ones. The attacks felt like being on a merry-go-round just starting up, then going faster and faster until it was too fast; then the ride turned into a Gravitron, where you are spinning so fast you are pinned to the walls and the bottom drops—you’re unable to move, unable to make it stop, unable to get off.
I’m trapped.
The sugar in alcohol exacerbated panic attacks, as did cocaine. But drinking even more was the only way I knew to combat the attacks. It was a harrowing experience each time I arrived at a concert venue.

There were transcendent moments onstage. Some nights we were so “on” that it was otherworldly. A few nights we got into such a groove that we played three-hour sets. But we never aired what was bothering us about one another. Nobody ever stated outright to Axl how much we resented going on late or having him stop shows. Nobody told me I was drinking too much or doing too much cocaine. We were all kept separate and that is the way we began to like it. We each had our own security guards. We each had our own twenty-four hour limos picking us up planeside and taking us to the hotel and anywhere else we wished to go. We rode separately to and from the gigs. We had separate dressing rooms. A sense of band unity was evident only when we were onstage. Otherwise it was every man for himself.

Then came a gig at the Riverport Amphitheatre outside St. Louis on July 2, 1991.

The show started about an hour late—which by this point almost counted as on time. We played about an hour and a half, and were in the middle of “Rocket Queen” when all hell broke loose. For reasons that don’t matter—they were immediately eclipsed not only by the coverage of the incident but also in the moment, onstage, as events unfolded—Axl dove into the audience to try to address something the house security had not. His foray didn’t last long, and I helped pull him upright as he lunged back up onstage. He then strode to the mic and announced that because security hadn’t done their job, he was leaving. He slammed the mic down and stormed off. We quickly followed.

For about ten minutes, we waited in the wings, unsure what to do. Since we all had our own dressing rooms and staff and Axl had hurried off to his, we didn’t know whether or not he was planning to return. We thought he probably would. The crowd seemed to think so, too.

Unlike a lot of venues, this one had a huge set of sliding doors at the back of the stage that could be closed and locked with chains. Most of the equipment not visible from the audience was already in a position to be locked backstage. After that first ten minutes, the tone of the crowd changed and people began to throw stuff at the stage. The crew started to shift some of the items in front of our set out of harm’s way—guitars, amp racks.

Every time crew members went out now to grab something, all sorts of shit rained down. It was coming steadily. Most dangerous of all were the venue’s plastic chairs with pieces of their metal frames still attached. Those were heavy. I could hear the thuds as they landed on the stage and bounced off the walls.

We had been in a riot once before, when we played the Street Scene festival in L.A. in 1986, opening for Fear. That day cops had come through on horseback and cleared the audience as we were about to go on. But we didn’t lose any equipment, and nobody got hurt. We were shuttled over to a different stage at the festival and opened for Social Distortion instead. Just a fun story for a band like ours, another notch on the bedpost in a way. Now, scanning the scene from the backstage area in Missouri, we began to worry about the scale of what we were witnessing. Much of the venue was already in ruins. Were people getting hurt?

Axl re-emerged from his dressing room and we offered to go back out and play to calm things down. It was too late.

Security tried to push the crowd back from the stage with a fire hose. But the crowd got the hose and backed our entire crew, the house security, and all the local cops behind the sliding doors. The crowd now had total control of everything in front of the stage. Kids were climbing our hanging speaker towers, destroying our monitors, smashing lights.

We hunkered down backstage. We were lucky. In a lot of venues there is no chained door and the crowd would have taken over the entire venue. Once the gates were closed and the kids had the stage, the crew did not go back out—there was no reason for anyone to risk opening a door and poking their head out to see what was going on.

But we could hear it all. Screams, crashes, the thunder of thousands of feet.
Boom, boom, boom, WHOOSH. Rumble, rumble, boom, AAAAAAAAAH!
Shouts, more thunder, the scraping groan of large objects being pushed around.

Another twenty minutes went by before forty or fifty police cars came screaming in and backup police stormed and retook the venue.

The band was shoved into a small van and told to get on the floor so we weren’t visible. Slash’s hat was sticking up. The driver asked him to take it off. When the van drove out of the enclosed part of the venue and into the parking lot, I could hear that the mayhem had spread outside. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I peeked out the back window—I could see speaker cabinets and pieces of our pianos. Kids had gotten tired of carrying them or dumped them when the cops showed. Clots of cops ran around with batons and pepper spray. Kids ran this way and that. Medics rushed around treating bloodied fans. Police had people in cuffs. It looked like a war zone.

Oh, no. Fuck, no. Fans hurt—again. Please don’t let anyone die.

The van took us to our hotel, we ran in and grabbed our bags, and then we got back in and headed across the state line into Illinois to avoid any legal difficulties. We drove all the way to Chicago—management figured the cops would go straight to our plane if they were going to try to arrest us.

Every gig after Riverport, the threat of violence hung in the air—or at least it felt that way to me as I sat around stewing, waiting for our singer to turn up each night, listening nervously for the festive noise of the arena to transform into the low rumble of a big, angry crowd. A crowd could turn and you could hear it. I knew that sound now. I knew that if you were at the wrong end of that, it was scary. And I knew it meant more than a bit of property damage. It meant casualties.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Once the crew was able to take stock of our gear in the wake of the riot, we canceled three shows. We flew to Irving, Texas, to put things back together, hoping to restart the tour with two shows in Dallas. The stage set itself was pretty strong and for the most part survived. Our crew called sound and lighting companies to try to reassemble the gear and we waited for things to come in. We also had to replace the two pianos.

We looked at venues differently now. In fact, a crew catchphrase came out of the Riverport riot:
Know your exits.

We continued the tour the second week of July, in Dallas. The first night back, Axl wouldn’t go on until two hours after we were supposed to start. But it’s not as if I went to him and said, “Come on, buddy, let’s go.” I just grabbed another plastic cup filled with vodka and a tiny splash of cranberry juice. And another. And another. And so it went.

At the very end of July, we had a four-night home stand at the Great Western Forum in L.A. We also
finally
completed the mixing of the two
Use Your Illusion
albums at the same time we arrived back in L.A. We celebrated with a four-hour show the last night of the Great Western Forum run, August 3, 1991.

It felt awesome for a change. The records were a
band
accomplishment.
We
were moving forward together—even if only on vinyl.

The rest of the band took off for Europe after the L.A. shows. I stayed behind for my brother Matt’s wedding. Robert John, our photographer, agreed to stick with me and help me make it through the flights, since I would have to fly commercial to catch up with our band jet in Europe. I needed to fly with a bro, someone who knew about my panic attacks. I gave the best man’s toast and then had to leave.

Robert and I flew first to Paris and then had to take a smaller flight from Paris to Helsinki, Finland, where we were kicking off the first European leg of the tour. When we went to board the plane to Helsinki, the entire flight was full of schoolkids. Apparently in Europe whole school classes took field trips to other countries. So there we were—me and Robert, and a huge metal tube full of French schoolkids staring at us. I was so fucked up by the time we took that flight that Robert just put a coat over my head.