It’s a sweet day for Springsteen. “Wrecking Ball” is the No. 1 album in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom, passing Adele’s blockbuster “21.” “This is great news, but we’ll see where we are in a few weeks,” Landau says. Springsteen will never again have huge sellers like “Born in the U.S.A.,” but he will always get an initial burst of sales from his fan base. How sales sustain over time is the question. (The answer is that they don’t: after a month, “Wrecking Ball” dropped to No. 19. By summer, it had fallen off the charts.) What makes Springsteen an economic power at this point is his status as a live performer.

The key to Axl's personality, reckons Izzy, still lies back in Lafayette. "In high school, you know, Axl, he had long, red hair, he was a little guy and he got a lot of shit [because of it]. I think he never got laid, too, in school. I hate to bring this up cos this is getting nasty," he laughs. "But he never got no pussy at school, Axl.

..."I thought, well, here's a guy who's completely crazy, he'd be a fucking great singer. We had to coax him a bit [and] it didn't go so well in the early days. Sometimes he would just come over and stand around, like he was embarrassed. Or he'd start to sing and then he'd just leave. Walk out and I wouldn't see him again for like three days! Some things didn't change, huh?" he adds with a rueful smile.

"So now the guy's a big fucking rock star, he's got the chicks lined up, he's got money and he's got people... and the power went to this guy's head. I mean, he was a fucking monster! Nuts! Crazy! And I never saw it coming. I mean, this is my side of it, he'd probably say I'm completely fucking crazy, but I think he went power mad. Suddenly he was trying to control everything. Did you ever see those fucked up contracts for the journalists to sign?" he asks, referring to notorious 'consent forms' that Axl foolishly tried to foist on the media in 1991.

"The control issue just became worse and worse and eventually it filtered down to the band. He was trying to draw up contracts for everybody! And this guy, he's not a Harvard graduate, Axl. He's just a guy, just a little guy, who sings, is talented. But man, he turned into this fucking maniac. And I did, too, but it was a different kind of maniac. I was paranoid about the business aspect - I was the one freaking out going, 'Where's all the money?'"

..."The shows were completely erratic. I never knew whether we'd be able to finish the show from day-to-day, cos [Axl] would walk off..."

- Classic Rock, 2001

We'd started out as a garage band and it became like a huge band, which was fine. But everything was so magnified... Drug addictions, personalities... it just became... too much. Plus, my friends, these guys... I'm basically watching them kill themselves. Not so much Axl, but Slash and Duff, man - these guys were on my top ten list of guys that might die this week. And I'm thinking, you know what, I just don't want to be part of it. It didn't feel like it was good."

...They say that in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king, but for Izzy, returning to the road with Guns N' Roses, in 1991, was "a nightmare." Axl's 'mood swings' had become so regular. "I said to Duff and Slash, we gotta learn a cover song or something, for when [Axl} leaves the stage. They were like, 'Ah, let's have another beer...' They didn't care."

...These were his final shows with Guns N' Roses. He left without saying goodbye. "I didn't actually say 'see you' cos they were all fucked up. They didn't even recognize me. It was really bizarre. It was like playing with zombies. Ah man, it was just horrible. Nobody was laughing anymore..."

BTW Axl has never been "upfront" in his interviews (except his crazy name callings), he's always trying to say a lot without saying anything. Cause reality is his biggest enemy. Truth is the truth hurts.