I can't see him over there

Maybe their mods deleted it??

Here is a quote I received from Alan Niven regarding some of the information Stephen Davis has written in this book.  He has given me permission to post his email comments:

"Having dipped into Mr Davis' book I can only say that he remains a trash rummaging hack.

It is quite apparent that he has no intent to truth but is determined to sensationalise and fabricate for the single purpose of personal profit.

For one thing, regurgitating the shameless crap from a well acknowledged drama queen and liar like Tim Collins serves no useful purpose whatsoever. For another thing I never hit Collins, although the notion crossed my mind. My infuriation with him was due to his airing of GnR laundry in a post tour BAM interview. A tawdry betrayal given how much money we made for him and his band.

Furthermore, a deal is a deal. I had no intention of blackmailing him for more money. That may be his idea of business ethics but not mine. Touring with Aerosmith was a critical move and a great moment in rock n roll. It remains the high watermark in the original Guns' live activity. I will always appreciate the opportunity that the band Aerosmith provided to Guns, even if Geffen did twist Collins' arm to get it.

And for the record, I prevailed on Rosenblatt to instruct Collins to take GnR out. Collins had reputation of being afraid of David Geffen and would do as instructed by the label, whatever they commanded. After Axl's meltdown in Phoenix in 1988, we were having a hard time getting anyone to take the band out. ACDC and DL Roth both pulled away offers to open as a result of that incident.

Furthermore I never supplied porn or anything like to the band.

I stand by the fact I quite obviously did my job and did it well. For example, whilst Collins failed to persuade Geffen to better the Aerosmith contract, I did manage to get David to improve the GnR contract. No other manager has had as productive relationship with GnR and the original band members still function on the results achieved during our relationship.

All Mr Davis's references to myself are erroneous. I can only imagine what other unadulterated garbage the rest of his worthless book contains. His sources seem to be old interviews, and the books of others, along with conversations with marginal characters, parasites and assorted hangers-on, some of whom are well known to be self inflated and self important blowhards who have made careers out of their willingness to talk tripe to anyone who knows their name.

All in all I would recommend Mr Davis's book only to anyone who has run out of toilet paper."

Alan Niven

That vote wasn't a time for cheap political points scoring, it needed bipartisan support.  Yeah in an ideal world they wouldnt' have bailed out the companies but the bigger picture of the flow on effect from not doing it had to be considered.

I know throwing money from tax paypers (who had nothing to do with these companies and their greed and at times fraudulent lending practices etc) would be pretty hard to swallow, but unfortunately not doing this could ultimately effect the innocent taxpayer even more.

I can see some major regulation coming coming after an extended period of essentially deregulation of the financial sector.  I believe there also needs to be some prosecutions of directors of these companies (past and present) that let these things occur on their watch.

One thing that has always astounded me is that in the US you guys can say borrow $500,000 to buy a house.  If the house drops in value to $300,000 you can simply hand the keys back to the bank and walk away and they have no recourse for the lost $200,000.

In Australia - you the investor are still liable for the $200,000, so bascially you have to sell everything (car, personal belongings, any other assets) or in the worse case declare bankruptcy (which is really bad because you can't do a lot of things if you have ever been bankrupt, such as borrow money again or become a director of a company etc etc for 7 years).  This to a certain extent means that people who borrow the money have to take a certain degree of responsiblity as to whether they can repay a loan.  It also means they will do whatever they can to continue to meet the loan repayments (e.g. stop wasting money on LCD widescreen TV's, new cars, holidsay etc etc).  And simply cut back to meet the mortgage payments.

We're feeling it here in Oz although our market has been booming along for aboiut the last 5 years with it only slowing this year.  That's mainly due to our heavy resources focus and exports to China of things like Iron Ore and other raw materials.  That said if the US consumer ain't buying as much shit from China, that will eventually reduce demand for our resources by China and India etc.

Yeah if you keep an eye out locally or even ebay sometimes you can score them cheaper now and then.

Cheers for posting, I didn't know they had a new album coming up.  I will be interested to hear it.  I don't mind a bit of Screaming Jets, last time I saw them was when they played along with Rose Tattoo and the Angels at "The Bon Scott Tribute Concert" here in Perth 2 years ago.

The concerts were to help raise money to erect a statue of Bon Scott in Fremantle.