10 outrageous Guns N’ Roses stories
Guns N’ Roses’ “Not In This Lifetime Tour” is an appropriate name in more ways than one.
Guitarist Slash’s heart stopped for eight minutes following one of his multiple heroin overdoses. Bassist Duff McKagan drank so much that his pancreas burst. Frontman Axl Rose was notoriously erratic, starting shows late and creating strife within the band.
So it’s really a miracle that Guns is not only touring, but that the band’s infamous dysfunction isn’t affecting the new tour’s shows, which have lasted as long as three hours — and are starting on time.
With Slash and McKagan playing with Rose for the first time in two decades, it’s the top-grossing tour in the world this year, according to Billboard.
On Tuesday, Guns plays the BMO Harris Bradley Center, its first Milwaukee-area show since kicking off a North America tour in May 1991 at Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy.
Ahead of the concert, here’s a look back at 10 of the most outrageous Guns stories, drawn from Slash’s self-titled 2007 autobiography, and McKagan’s 2011 memoir, “It’s So Easy and Other Lies.”
1. On the band’s first tour, Guns’ Buick LeSabre broke down 105 miles outside Los Angeles. The band hitchhiked, riding much of the way with a semitrailer truck driver on speed. Starving and broke, the band members ate raw onions from a field, and played just one show in Seattle. The club owner refused to pay the band, coughing up $100 only after he was threatened.
2. Guns got into a spitting fight with fans at an L.A. festival in 1983. “We ended up with the green phlegm all over us. … The heat cooked the spit and made it start to smell pretty bad,” Slash wrote.
3. KISS’ Paul Stanley was interested in producing Guns’ debut album, suggesting they rewrite “Welcome to the Jungle.” The band quietly balked but strung him along, inviting Stanley to catch a set at a dive bar “that reeked of beer and piss.” Stanley showed up in an outfit “that probably cost more than the market value of the entire building,” Slash wrote. A drunk and high Slash threw up about eight times on stage, and Rose brawled with a guy in the crowd.
4. The band recorded Rose and a stripper having sex and added the audio to the “Appetite for Destruction” track “Rocket Queen.”
5. Slash and Nikki Sixx got into a drinking contest, and a fight, during a Motley Crue and Guns tour. Slash dislocating four vertebrae in his neck.
6. David Bowie caught a Guns set, but Rose repeatedly insulted him from the stage, thinking he had hit on his girlfriend. Bowie left in protest.
7. Slash and drummer Steven Adler were high and sloppy when the band opened for the Rolling Stones. Rose told the audience this would be Guns’ last show, implying some band members were junkies. “Once Axl took his concerns public, the times of being a gang — us against the world — were over,” McKagan wrote.
8. High on cocaine and heroin at an Arizona resort, Slash started seeing “shadow monsters” in the shower. He punched a glass door, cutting his hand and feet, and ran naked and bleeding through the resort. The band staged an intervention and Slash went to rehab.
9. “We’re going home,” Rose screamed at a St. Louis crowd when security didn’t take away a fan’s video camera. Fans rioted, causing $200,000 in damage, Slash wrote.
10. At a Metallica and Guns double bill in Montreal in 1992, James Hetfield was injured and Metallica’s set abruptly ended. Guns was asked to start early, but went on stage three hours behind schedule — Slash and McKagan both blame Rose — and performed for only 90 minutes. Another riot ensued.
“Only when our buses pulled out of the parking enclosure did we see the full extent of the situation — cop cars turned over, vehicles on fire, lots of broken windows,” McKagan said. “It didn’t have to be like this.”