WHEN GUNS N' ROSES GUITARIST SAUL Hudson, 27, better known as Slash, wed 27-year-old actress-model Renée Suran in Marina Del Rey, Calif., on Oct. 10, it was by rock standards a downright conventional affair. The groom wore leather, the bride wore while (including fishnet tights), and "the ceremony was very romantic," says one guest, "like in the movies." Or at least in a darn touching rock video.

Source: People.com Archive

"KNOW WHAT I want to do? Really want to do? Go over to Japan and pollute it. I'm not talking about drugs, I'm talking about teenage sex, bring over some crazy porn magazines and drop them from the tops of tall buildings. There's no beaver shots in Japan..."

Guns n' Roses, born in a bottle and spilled into the streets of Los Angeles. A cocktail of Aerosmith, the Pistols, early Stones, Ramones and the New York Dolls; the worm at the bottom's their own. The nearest thing to a street band in a city where there's nothing but boulevards and freeways and if you sit in the gutter long enough a mobile lavatory-brush truck will come along and suck you up to kingdom come.

"There's a picture of Lemmy in some magazine, opening a bottle of Jack Daniels. He's so cool! Lemmy's cool! Lemmy reminds me of someone who'd, like, crawl right out of someone's asshole and take a shower and then make it really big and have the last laugh..."

Guns n 'Roses, Lines n' Noses, Wine n' Poses, "The only real rock 'n' roll band to came out of LA in the last ten years" (Axel). "The sleaziest to come out of Smog Angeles since Crue's 'Too Fast For Love'" (Xavier R.). Delinquent, delicious, decadent, Excess All Areas rock. Guns n' Roses stalk through your every silk scarf fantasy and rub you raw like Piranhas in a jacuzzi.

"I watch MTV and it's hard not to throw shit at the TV set because it's so f**king boring. Even the bands around here in LA are the same way, the whole music industry. It's new to us, this business, and we meet these people and they say, 'do this, do that'. And we go, 'f**k it, f**k you! Because it's just not us. We do whatever we want to..."

WE PULL up in the parking lot by the Winnetka Animal Clinic: Rumbo Studios, home of Captain and Tennille. The band's already here, sitting in a back room all in a row like Hitchcock's birds, by a table layered with bottles and frozen food: Steven Adler, drums and Duff McKagan, bass, beachbum rhythm section with bleach-blond hair and easy smiles; Izzy Stradlin and Slash, guitars, Izzy looking like a rock 'n' roller, sharp and languid all at the same time, Slash a mean mop of hair, only the lips move, killer pout and faraway eyes. Axel, vocalist, salt-rubber into the wound of rock 'n' roll, joins in later.

In the other room, Mike Clink is leaning over a control-board and looking slightly anxious. Ron Nevison's engineer on several projects and veteran of bands like Triumph, UFO, Airplane, he's producing Guns n' Roses' debut Geffen album and follow-up to the delirious, indie EP Live - Like A Suicide, a greasy, lemon-squeezy slice of smirking, strutting vinyl. The album Appetite For Destruction has every indication of being a killer. When it's out (soon) they're coming over to play the Marquee (the first date will be June 19 with one other to follow).

"Everyone's from everywhere: Indiana, Ohio, Seattle. Slash was born in England somewhere" - Stoke-on-Trent has the honour - "and moved here when he was a little kid. Duff's from up north. Axel and I," says Izzy, "are from the Midwest." Indiana. A place I've been to twice and can't remember, a place whose jails they know only too well - the wrong drinks at the wrong time, in the wrong places. But LA's, well, where you end up.

"When you watch the news and you see what's going on everywhere else, it is f**king Paradise, this place. You can get away with murder here. I'm just waiting for this place to self-destruct and the record companies to drop off into the ocean and everything," says Slash, "will mean nothing."

LA, like Heaven, is a place where nothing much ever happens; LA, like Heaven, is a place where it helps if you're, dead. LA is a good place for record companies. Izzy, Axel, Duff, Steven and Slash came for the big deal; they've been in "lots" of bands, but this is the only one they'd go all the way for.

"Everybody's been through the wringer," says Duff, who came out uncreased. "You go through a lot of bands when you start playing at 15, and in the beginning you don't really know what you want to do. You just want to play. Eventually, you into each other and the chemistry is just right".

"And the first thing we did when we got together is we hit the road to Seattle." Izzy grins a wicked grin.

"The Treacherous journey," says Slash.

"The car we were driving busted down," says Izzy. "So we said, 'f**k it!' and grabbed our guitars and jumped out and hitched a ride."

"And we were dressed to the f**king hilt," says Slash, "on the highway, man, with our guitar cases!"

A truck-driver picked them up, dumped them off on the side of the road 20 hours north, "and then two ex-hippy girls from San Francisco picked us up - they passed us and then they remembered back in the hippy days when nobody would pick them up, so they came around and we piled in" and they fed them some "radical pot brownies" and "it was cool, we hadn't rehearsed that much, and we went out and played using the other band's equipment. And to me," says Izzy, "that was the whole spirit of it.

"And it just took off from there. There was just like a 'f**k it' attitude. Not 'f**k it, in a negative way, just 'f**k it, we're going to play, we're going to do what we're going to do'. After that, you get back to the city and it's like, 'This is a piece of cake."

"A lot of guys who might have been in the band at the time would have wimped out," says Steven, "gotten on the plane home before we were halfway there."

"No-one died, no-one fainted, we all survived," says Slash. "And we've been pushing ourselves that way ever since."

"AT THAT time - this is when Motley Crüe's first album came out and everyone was in leather and studs, Izzy and I," says Axel, "walked into the Roxy one of our first times and I remember Vince (Neil) and Nikki (Sixx) leaning over a rail trying to figure out who the f**k we were! It took three years to start getting accepted in LA."

Just what the town needed; another band with radical hair and a '70s album collection.

"I remember for two years standing at the Troubadour and people wouldn't talk to me; I didn't know what to say to them, so you just watched and learned for a long, long time."

They lived off girls and drugs and scams, "you drifted around," says Axel, you stayed in friends' garages, cars, stayed one step ahead of the sheriffs."

They lived with a woman who tried managing them and "destroyed her apartment. It was like five bags of garbage - all of us in one room and the girls coming over. There was eight people living there, and dog. It got really crazy, really crazy, It got," Axel laughs, "really rude. These two girls were like guy-crazy and bandcrazy and there was no way any guy in any band was going to be caught dead with either of them, especially," a dirty laugh, "us. So Slash would milk that for everything it was worth - free drinks, free food, everything without ever having to do anything. Which eventually caused big problems!"

I'd tell you but I can't afford the lawsuits!

They moved into a studio next: "No showers, no food, nothing," says Slash. "A very uncomfortable prison cell. But God, did we sound good in there! We're a really loud band and we don't compromise the volume for anything! We'd bash away with a couple of Marshalls in this tiny room, and it was cool because all the losers from Sunset and all the bands would come over and hang out there every night. We used to rehearse in there and sleep in there. It got hectic. But at least we didn't get fat and lazy.

"Basically, it's just down to a poverty thing, that's where that kind of 'f**k you' attitude comes from, because you're not showering, you're not getting food or nothing, you do what you have to survive."

That's how the buzz started. Getting it loud enough to be heard in the Ivegotnoidea Towers of the record biz took more legwork, having thousands of flyers made ("We still owe the flyer place tons of money") and walking and hitching from Hollywood to the Valley, shirtless with a staplegun and a bottle for company, desecrating trees and spreading the word.

"We just kept playing," says Izzy, "and we made so much noise in the city, there were so many things happening around us, that the labels started to come to us. They came to us! They would come over to the studio and come in the alley and see drunks - there was this drunk with a bottle of Thunderbird," vicious, "on top of his head - and next thing you know we're going to their office! We made them take us all out for dinner for like a week or two and we started eating good! We'd order all this food and drink and say, 'OK, talk!'"

"The buzz got out", says Slash "and we kept getting invited down to see these idiots. One label - I swear - we were talking to, I was saying, 'It kind of sounds like Steven Tyler'; and the chick said, 'Steven who?' And all of us just looked at each other and said, 'Can we have another one of those drinks?' And we started eating good and none of our clothes would fit us any more!"

Before, Guns n' Roses looked like any other LA flash merchants you care to name. When Izzy and Axel ran an ad in The Recycler to find Slash they asked for 'a Heavy Punk Metal Glam guitarist'. They wanted, says Axel, "someone who wore make-up and put their hair up. That was the first glam ad I think I ever saw. And then we quickly got rid of that but it stuck."

"We're a lot more down-to-earth now," says Slash, who looks positively seedy. "They still try and label us as a glam band but I don't give a shit because we're not."

"We don't want to associate ourselves with glam and the main reason," says Axel, "is because that's what Poison associates themselves with." They don't like Poison. "I've told those guys personally that they can lock me in a room with all of them and I'll be the only one who walks out! They used to come to our shows before they ever played a gig. Everybody copying them? Sorry I don't see it. Poison came out in an article saying they started glam - I don't know where they were in the '70s," Axel laughs. "The only reason I put my hair up is because Izzy had these pictures of Hanoi Rocks and they were cool, and because we hung out with this guy who studied Vogue magazine hairstyles and was really into doing hair..."

ARE GUNS n' Roses personal crusaders for the return of sleaze?

"No," laughs Axel. "That's just a by-product. I think a lot of other bands are really wimpy."

"I don't know what people expect from us," says Slash.

"We don't really care," says Izzy. "We never set out to do anything buy play."

"Metal stems from sexual frustration," murmurs Slash. "We come from an amazing background of repression, stifled childhoods..."

Slash, you said in an interview that the only two bands in Metal that are worthwhile are Metallica and WASP. Justify WASP.

"I can't!" The eyes narrow. "I never said that, I hate WASP! I might have said Megadeth maybe and I might have said Metallica but I didn't say WASP! They're f**king ugly, man! That's really in there? God, that's f**ked!"

What records do they all have in their collections, then?

"We've all got Never Mind The Bollocks and Aerosmith's Rocks and right now," says Axel, "we listen to Exile On Main Street a lot. The Ramones - back in '78 Izzy and I had all the tapes and learnt all the songs. Duff is a real big Johnny Thunders fanatic." They all like the Beastie Boys and Motorhead. As for Guns n Roses...

"We have pieces of everything in our band," says Axel, "and we try and find a way to bring it all out rather than limit ourselves into one frame. You don't see a lot of that any more - Queen used to do it, and Zeppelin, but nowadays people tend to stay in one vein.

"With our record right now - it's like there's a lot of barriers that need to be broken down because people have got used to what they're supposed to hear. A lot of bands - look, even Judas Priest did it, they decide, okay, we're going to try selling out and see if that works, they toned their music down and tried to appease somebody else besides themselves and it cost them. But the public is conditioned on what they're allowed to like, and if something's too far out of the norm, even if it's cool, they won't - we want people to realise man, just play whatever the f**k you want to play, not what someone else thinks you should play, so that's what we've done.

"I sing in about five or six different voices - that are all part of me, it's not contrived - and there's a ballad, there's one song that's kind of like Black Sabbath goes to Ireland, there's two guitar players that play very different from each other - one plays an '80s blues electric guitar and the other guy's completely into Andy McCoy and Keith Richards - and they've figured out a way to fit it together."

"I think it's going to kick ass," says Izzy, "listening to the playback. It's against the - mainstream grain. It's definitely a case of you'll either love it or hate it - which is good, as long as you notice it."

"You couldn't really hate us," says Slash, "because the band's real. Regardless of whether you like us or not, we're going to go on and still do what we do."

What they want us to do is:

"We want to tour, travel, continue the big Guns n' Roses adventure, And indulge ourselves. And f**k a lot!"

And while you're waiting for them to get here with their album, check out the EP. Rawer than a whore's thighs, and toxic as rock 'n' roll was always meant to be.

http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/rocksb … olt-heroes

ONLY DAYS INTO Guns N' Roses' world tour and there was trouble. At a St Louis stadium Axl Rose jumped into the audience to snatch a camera from a fan, sparking off a riot that caused $200,000 worth of damage and injured more than 60 people.

It happened because Axl returned to the stage, slagged off the security staff (cameras were not permitted at the show) and stormed off stage. Although G N' R were 90 minutes into the concert, the set was by no means finished and the crowd erupted.

"I didn't plan on jumping off stage to grab a biker and his camera," Axl said a couple of days later. "I didn't plan on having security turn on me. The security guys knew exactly what was happening and they were doing everything they could to let that guy go - which fueled my fire to make sure that didn't happen."

The tussle is a typical G N' R story, where hype and facts merge into one and their reputation as the world's baddest rock and roll band gains more and more stature.

In early '89, as sales of their first album Appetite For Destruction and the G N' R Lies EP passed the 15 million mark, Guns N' Roses were telling the world to expect a new 37-track double album by September. It's only now, exactly two years late, that Use Your Illusion I and II are upon us - well, nearly. The first of the two albums should be released this September. In the meantime, while actually doing precious little, they have single-handedly resuscitated "rock 'n' roll" and become the most talked about band of the last decade.

Guns N' Roses' responsibility for rock's upswing has far less to do with the $125 million they generated in '88/'89 - though that must have made a lot of radio, retail and record executives happy - than with the havoc caused making it. Guns N' Roses lived the lifestyle to back up every posture they struck. As country rocker Steve Earle put it, "Guns N' Roses are what every band in LA pretends to be."

Guns N' Roses were serious trouble and could be relied upon to make a drama out of every crisis. Like LA's street gangs, they seemed to have no respect for their own lives, so you knew they couldn't respect anybody else's. Their triumph was to make rock 'n' roll look dangerous again - though how long they remain alive to enjoy that triumph remains to be seen.

At first glance it's hard to see how Guns N' Roses could have become the biggest rock band in the world. Physically none of them would merit a second look from all but the most star-struck American groupie, and in Axl Rose they've got a frontman whose body language is so cringingly unsexy it makes David Byrne look like Fred Astaire. If you're looking for the musical dexterity and daring of a Led Zeppelin you won't find it here - by Slash's own admission their sound is nothing new. And if you want lyrics that provide life's big answers, forget this bunch - they aren't even asking interesting questions.

The one thing Guns N' Roses indisputably have is attitude, an asset no amount of money can buy. They leave nobody in any doubt that they really are the destructive, thrill-seeking brain dead yobbos they come across as. They may be thick, apolitical, old-fashioned spoilt rock brats, but somehow that's still more endearing than the posturing corporate yes-men who make up most of the current rock scene.

Axl once said that "rock 'n' roll in general has just sucked a big fucking dick since the Pistols" and, although Gun N'Roses are retro retards compared to The Sex Pistols, it's fair to see them as America's equivalent. Despite its Neanderthal stupidity, Appetite For Destruction bristled with authentic rage, and they certainly share the Pistols' disgust for contemporary pop culture.

Guns N' Roses are the saviours of every kid who still wants their record collection to annoy their parents. But the tag "the world's most dangerous band" is a preposterous overstatement - what's so dangerous about a handful of overpaid, oversexed, overdrugged musicians?

All the rock musicians in the world who've got anything to say for themselves can easily be counted on the fingers of one hand. Here's a group who live by deed, not word - sacking each other onstage, smashing up everything from their instruments to their own homes, going out boar hunting while drunk, offending everybody they meet and trying to give new meaning to the word wasted.

For a band who look so naturally right - or wrong - together, Guns N' Roses had a long and fairly dull birth. Having gone to school together in Lafayette, Indiana, Axl contacted guitarist Izzy Stradin when he arrived in LA, and they played together in LA Guns. Slash and drummer Steve Adler went to school together in LA and played in a band called Road Crew, which Seattle bassist Duff McKagan joined after Slash advertised in an LA paper. Duff had previously been in 31 bands and, in general, they'd all been hanging around the LA rock scene for about 10 years when they got together in '85.

Only two people turned up to their first official LA gig. But the violent behaviour that accompanied their lurching, primeval sound soon made them hated by every club owner and rival band on the scene and their grassroots following swelled with every show until, after a year, Geffen Records snapped them up.

After signing to Geffen, Guns N' Roses pretended to be still wavering so that rival companies would continue to lunch them and, still in need of a manager, they tried to woo Aerosmith's Tim Collins to represent them. But after the show they made such a rumpus at his hotel that he had to hire a second room to get some peace. In the morning, when he discovered that Guns N' Roses had ordered $450 worth of drink and food on his bill, Collins decided not to manage them.

The group's appetite for heroin, cocaine and hard liquor emboldened them to ever wilder feats of excess and, in a city still living in Keith Richards' shadow, boosted their credibility. But it is also made them a pathetic sight. Pissing on your tour manager as he carries you, unconscious, to bed is hardly very big behaviour, and when Slash made free with the F-word at a televised awards ceremony. It wasn't a cunning re-run of the Pistols' notorious behaviour on TV, he was just too off his face to tame his usual vocabulary. Of course, in LA, the world capital of the rock 'n' roll cliché, being a junkie was still seen as glamorous, and club ads for the group's local shows routinely read, FRESH FROM DETOX, or ADDICTED: ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE.

Axl Rose was the perfect focus for a group who'd all been outcasts and troublemakers at school. He had not only been to jail 20 times before coming to LA, but also suffered from a mental disorder, manic depressive schizophrenia, which made him prone to violent mood swings between delirious bliss and aggressive depression. He took the drug Lithium to keep him "balanced", but it didn't work. While the others got drugged-up to escape boredom, Axl had real pain to ease.

Because he can go from being calm and caring to blind rage in minutes, even his closest friends are a bit scared of him. He gives the group their credible, dangerous edge and - unlike Prince - he doesn't have to avoid doing interviews to maintain his perfect rock star mystique. A Geffen A&R man recently commented that, "talking to Axl is currently about as easy as talking to the Dalai Lama", and even his day-to-day companions are never quite sure what's going on in Axl's mind.

Izzy remembers the young Axl as being far more troublesome. "If it wasn't for the band," he says, "I have to think what he might've done." And Axl's own thoughts about his temperament reveal just how extreme it is. "When I get stressed, I get violent and take it out on myself. I've pulled razor blades on myself but then realized that having a scar is more detrimental than not having a stereo. I'd rather kick my stereo in than cut my arm or go punch somebody in the face. Did you ever see that movie - I think it was Frances[about the actress institutionalized for her emotional outbursts]? I always wonder if, like, somebody's gonna slide the knife underneath my eye and give me the lobotomy. I think about that a lot."

Their first two singles, 'Welcome To The Jungle' and 'Sweet Child O' Mine', were enormous worldwide hits and, when sales of Appetite For Destruction began to orbit the planet, the media caught on and started obsessively reporting every increasingly rare fart of activity the group emitted - riots and near-riots at shows, drug-induced tantrums and punch-ups, weddings, divorces and mutual, public ultimatums. Opening for the Rolling Stones in LA, a newly detoxified Axl informed the rest of the band onstage that he was going to quit if they didn't kick their habits. All of them now say they are clean (for the moment), except for Steve Adler, whom they have reluctantly replaced with Cult drummer Matt Sorum because of the former's heroin addiction.

But the most undying controversy surrounding Guns N' Roses has been their song 'One In A Million', with its openly racist and homophobic lyrics. It crops up in every major interview, and got them kicked off their headlining slot at an AIDS benefit in New York (quite rightly). Axl has never satisfactorily explained the song - except as his reaction to things that happened to him when he was new in LA - and he hasn't been so un-rock 'n' roll as to apologise for it.

At the Stones' LA gig, after ranting about the stick he'd got for that song, Axl rushed up to one of Living Colour, the other opening act, and said: "Hey, you know I'm talking about a certain type of person when I use the word nigger. I don't see you guys as niggers at all." Guns N' Roses' tour manager then took the speechless Living Colour aside and said, "Don't mind Axl. He's from Indiana." That may sound a bit glib, but maybe it's the only way to take the song: as the irrelevant views of an ignorant twat.

So far G N' R have smashed their way to the top of the rock world, thanks to their uncanny synthesis of the contradictory elements of adolescence - sexual obsession paranoia, rage, self-doubt, insecurity and arrogance.

They've lived this lifestyle large enough for the whole world to see, without (amazingly) any of them dying. But can Use Your Illusion take them beyond that initial meteoric starburst of energy? The band promise it will display a previously unsuspected musical diversity, and with a lead singer whose favourite bands are Queen. The Sex Pistols and ELO (?!), that could mean anything.

One bizarre aspect of Guns N' Roses' career has been the way they've got so enormous without ever headlining a major tour. They've toured with all their peers, but always as the support. This year's Rock In Rio festival was their first major headlining show, and their forthcoming dates mark the first time they'll be playing a stage set designed and built for themselves.

When Guns N' Roses previewed their new show at a secret gig at LA's Pantages Theatre, they implemented an experimental and convoluted scheme to foil the LA ticket touts they know and despise. The tout scene, used to scoring over $100 a shout at local shows, must have been buzzing about the financial prospects of a G N' R show in the intimacy of a 2,700 seat theatre, but in the event they made nothing.

At 5 am on the morning of the show a queue was already forming at the theatre, thanks to leaked rumours. At noon the gig was officially announced on local radio, fans in the queue were issued with numbered yellow indestructible wristbands (hospital-style). They then had to queue for vouchers, which were given out at 2.30 pm to those with wristbands and photo ID cards. At 6.30pm tickets went on sale to people with wristbands, vouchers bearing the same number as the wristband and photo ID to validate the name on the voucher. Ticket-holders had to enter the auditorium immediately and there was no re-admittance. The wristband (and absence of touts with detachable arms) meant that every seat went to a genuine fan for $20, but this system is far from perfect. Some people would rather pay $100 than queue for 12 hours. And whatever next? Birth Certificate? Three character references? A G N'R trivia test?

This tour is set to last for almost two years, and at Guns N' Roses shows the crowd always returns the group's unfettered, aggressive energy. That means we can look forward to two years of lucrative chaos, disgraceful debauchery and wild stories.