I am so elated to hear that you are doing better. Survival, conquest, or stalemate. All victories, my friend. I won’t give up on my Guns friends. You are tattooed on my soul.

Eva. I lost touch with her after Hammerstein. She was close with Sal. I remember talking with her after her husband passed. Told her thet tragedy much like life is senseless:  there is no plan or direction or higher purpose at work. I supported her in her anger and a need to move forward because ‘life is’.

I appreciate the mention. The wait is very much embedded in the history of my life. Never did I imagine that the excitement, speculation, never ending frustration and re-kindled hope that Axl would take that new group of players to the top of the music world would be but forgotten footnote for the average fan. But to me, it was a brilliant film not realized, a Tarantino script not finished, and a dream from which I’d rather not woken up.

Bucket back stage at MSG talking to Loder through his hand puppet, ducking Chris Rock….

Robin in full cyberpunk costume, bending every note like a carbon fiber hull crackling under titanic ocean pressures.

Tommy, the drunken general, sweating through his plaid suit….

Brain…precision….quirky, perfection.

Tobias then our Adrian Brody doppelgänger and his centrifugal guitar strap.

And Chris….loved the panty house mask and the   elastic keyboard stand.

I dream of waiting in LV for that NYE show. A peak at the man who wrote the soundtrack my teens and twenties.

Hammerstein, meeting with and waiting for my friends….Sal, Eva, Dave, mymichelle …everyone.

I never left that moment even though life continued and time passed. Always dreamed of being there in line, singing ‘im still alive’ three times on the floor….

Since….

I graduated and found the job I had always dreamed about but realized it wasn’t sustainable.
I’ve been through a terrible divorce since then. My older son doesn’t wish to speak to me. Assaulted by my second wife’s in laws as I held my 1 year old daughter, arrested by police uninterested in figuring out truth and lies. My career shattered. Cheating from my spouse. Holding on to my kids, insulating them from my second wife’s mental illness, wishing that someday my three kids know how much I sacrificed my life and career to protect them from these people’s alcoholism and bipolar disorder.

Through it all, I return to the days of the 99 demos, the waiting, the line into Vegas, meeting some of you for the first and only time…..I’ve never left. You and this music are my ballast. 

If oblivion is a return to the time of your life when you had the most hope, creative adrenaline fueling your internal engine, your view of the world, your love for others, then I hope to see you all again.

I thought ‘anybody seen my baby?’ Was a strong effort by Mick and Keith.

So…I imagine Jumpin Jack Flash or Dead Flowers.

Yes!!  I think it was Bulgaria! Definitely on the Eastern Europe leg of that tour. He comes out of the solo shrieking:

I won’t be told any more….

He actually goes up a scale by the end of the line then cascades back down for the next verse….

It was so good…so good…