biography

More than even his serpentine hips and bandanas, the best representation of Axl Rose is the high-pitched wail that opens "Welcome to the Jungle." In those few moments at the start of Appetite For Destruction, Axl lets rip with his own primal scream, Sunset Strip-style. Inside that howl is the rage, the ambition, the frustration and the excess that was Guns N' Roses.

Axl's story starts long before he entered the jungle of West Hollywood. He was born Bill Bailey in Lafayette, IN, in 1962, to a strict Pentecostal family -- so strict that when young Bill sang along with Barry Manilow's "Mandy," he was told such music was "evil." At 17, Bill learned that his natural father was actually a drifter named William Rose. Soon Bill was going by the name W. Axl Rose, which may or may not have been an anagram of "oral sex."

In Lafayette, Axl made quite a name for himself, at least around the police station. He was thrown in jail more than twenty times for offenses ranging from underage drinking to trespassing. Fleeing the town he likened to Auschwitz, Axl hitchhiked to Los Angeles in 1980. In that land of glam hair and leather trousers, there was only one thing for a hick kid to do - form a band.

Rose met guitarist Izzy Stradlin, also of Indiana, and with guitarist Tracii Guns and drummer Rob Garner formed a quartet that had almost as many names as bookings. They began as AXL, then the Hollywood Roses, and finally L.A. Guns. Axl and Stradlin soon parted ways with Garner and Guns, who carried on the L.A. Guns name through several moderately successful metal albums.

English-born guitarist Saul "Slash" Hudson and drummer Steven Adler were playing in Road Crew when they joined what was now dubbed Guns N' Roses. In 1985 they recruited bassist Michael "Duff" McKagan, a graduate of Seattle's punk scene. Broke, the band shared a studio apartment, whose decadent repute earned it the nickname, "The Hellhouse".

While most of America rocked to the hair bands that exploded around Quiet Riot, GN'R crawled around its trashy underbelly. It was drunk, ugly and sometimes dangerous. In 1986, the band released a live four-song EP, "Live ?!*@ Like A Suicide", on its own Uzi Suicide label. The calling card poised them for success beyond the Sunset Strip. The group signed with Geffen in March 1986. In 1987, Guns N' Roses released Appetite for Destruction, which didn't sell well for almost a year. But G N' R kept busy supporting Aerosmith and Alice Cooper, nearly blowing them off stage every night. Then MTV put "Sweet Child O' Mine" into rotation. While Axl dreamed of "eyes of the bluest sky" on the hit ballad, not all of Appetite was so sweet - "Mr. Brownstone" was a Hollywood heroin dealer and "Nightrain" celebrated the cheap liquor that helped the struggling band through the night.

At the end of 1988, the band released GN'R Lies, which combined the first EP with new acoustic songs. Despite the prettiness of "Patience," the new material saw GN'R branded as misogynists ("Used To Love Her") and racists ("One In A Million."). Axl claimed "Million" was about the impressions of a small-town kid on first arriving in Los Angeles, but it was too late. Rose was later diagnosed as a manic depressive, and underwent daily five-hour therapy sessions to manage his anger.

In 1990, the band fired drummer Adler because of his drug use, and Matt Sorum gave up beating the skins for the Cult to replace him. Keyboardist Dizzy Reed also joined the soap opera. Adler sued for fraudulent dismissal, claiming GN'R had introduced him to hard drugs. He settled out of court for $2.5 million.

While the public furor over Lies was dying down, G N' R channeled their energies into new material. When Axl decided he had four new songs to throw in at the last minute - at least two of which weighed in at more than eight minutes each - GN'R decided to concurrently release two separate albums, Use Your Illusion I & II. Together they showed the breath of the band's ambitions and the depth of their artfulness, coming on Exile on Main Street and then surprising with Elton John-style ballads like "November Rain."

Things took a downturn at the end of 1991, when Stradlin left the band. The Spaghetti Incident? that followed in 1993 was a collection of punk cover songs that smacked of contractual obligation. By 1994, breakup rumors were swirling, and Slash left the band to pursue his other project, Snakepit. And then � ? Nothing until 1999, and even then it was a mere live album, although Live Era 87-93 was a potent reminder of G N' R's full-throttle glory. Somewhere in Los Angeles, Axl Rose plotted further glory. Still working under the Guns N' Roses moniker with a rotating cast of players - keyboardist Dizzy Reed was the only survivor - he told MTV's Kurt Loder of a new album he was relentlessly perfecting.

End of Days' "Oh My God" was a sneak peek at what that mythic album, tentatively titled Chinese Democracy, may hold: Axl's scream is as soul-rending as ever. Only now it's filtered through the industrial rock that followed his band's wake during their Nineties sabbatical.

Time has yet to tell how GN'R will play in the new millennium, but the band unarguably changed rock forever. Their sense of history and ability to rawk as mightily as their heroes even made Poison put down their blow dryers. No matter how messy they became, GN'R were - and still are - impossible to ignore. They remain the beasts in the jungle.


 

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