If you’ve been following Guns N’ Roses for the past three decades, like journalist Mick Wall has, the idea of getting it all between the pages of a single tome must have been both thrilling and agonising in equal measure. The agony of where to start? (Quite late into the saga, as it happens). Who to interview – or, more importantly, who is willing to speak to you? (Not many of the band in any great depth, it seems – understandable, perhaps, given three of them have already issued their own biographies and Axl Rose doesn’t really seem to speak with anyone very much if he can help it). Which bits to leave out? (A lot of the messy, debauched, drug-addled bits, you may not be pleased to hear). And, finally, how to handle the thorny issue that some might regard as central to Wall’s testimony – that this was one case when the journalist himself actually became part of the story.
Not so agonising as being an actual Guns N’ Roses fan, of course. Sticking with the band through the painfully inevitable break-up, the laughable delays to the release of Chinese Democracy and the reunion which makes Last of the Giants so perfectly timed. Now clean (or trying to be), with girlfriends, various ever-proliferating side projects and personalities almost as big as the band itself – it feels like we know these excessively drug-fried rock heroes from the pages of Kerrang! so well already.
Randomly, I was handed this book about a week after I had just finished reading a slightly yellowed, second-hand copy of Steven Adler’s biography My Appetite For Destruction which I’d found in the back of a charity shop (all of which seemed appropriate to the subject matter). If there ever was a warning about the dangers of the rock star lifestyle – particularly to an individual who arrived into it already emotionally screwed and with a bent for addiction – that was it. It reads like a car crash (or perhaps drug crash) version of Groundhog Day.
Much of that gruesome fine detail we’re now used to from these rock biographies (The Dirt, for anyone who unimaginably hasn’t discovered it, is the place to start on that road) is left out. Yes, we touch upon the questionable behaviour towards the female of the species (including incidents that it’s still hard to imagine no one did time for), the mountains and mountains of drugs – and the deaths. It’s hard to do all that unless you had first hand experience, of course. But I was a little disappointed that Adler, who made up for whatever failings he had in the early days with sheer life-and-soul enthusiasm, barely rates more than a few mentions in this version by Wall – who almost seems dismissive of his contributions.
So this is definitely one of the cleaner versions of the band’s history – and very much a history of the band itself rather than an attempt at a collective biography. It starts oddly late into the band’s evolution – Appetite For Destruction is released on page 84 of these 463 pages. But what this book does extremely well is as a who-did-what-where-and-how to contribute to Guns N’ Roses’ rise and subsequent flat-lining. Wall (who has already published ‘W. Axl Rose: The Unauthorized Biography’ back in 2007) has picked material up from interviews he did through time and, more latterly, extensive conversations with the book’s main contributors, which turn out to be band managers Alan Niven (from 1986 to 1991 and who can clearly be credited with getting the band off the ground) followed by Doug Goldstein – who comes across as a hard-working, hard-headed survivor who tied himself firmly to Axl.
And it is impeccably written, deftly sewn together and painfully hard to put down even if it feels like there’s too much focus on the band after it split rather than before. But what we learn will no doubt help add some links to the chain for new and old fans alike. We get some insight to the mentality of Axl Rose which Wall presents in a way that I could only describe as positively balanced. More the tortured soul than petulant child (Axl himself has described how he was abused). But we still never quite get to the bottom of Axl’s prolonged mental struggles or why he suddenly lightens up towards the end of this history. But, we are told, notably by Goldstein, that his 4-hour preparations for each show are the obsessions of a nervous perfectionist rather than megalomaniac rock star.
Wall closes in on the Axl phenomenon later in the book to the extent that it made me wonder whether Wall has his eye on another prize here – angling for a more in depth shot at the Axl Rose biography with this at times slightly superfluous edition, perhaps? Because one of the issues for me with this biography is that Wall feels a little too close to his subject matter and yet at the same time too far away. His obsession with Axl over the rest of the band is clear – the front man famously immortalising Wall in song lyrics with his invite to ‘Get In The Ring’. I also couldn’t escape the feeling that his two managers both still had their own personal gripes and personal flaws which I thought might have been worth delving into further since it’s their testimony we’re relying on for much of the time.
As the book progressed, I even became a little irritated that Goldstein’s testimony wasn’t rounded off by input from others the band. There’s at least one time when versions of events don’t quite match or that we get a glimpse into why one or the other might have his own reasons for presenting one particular version of events over another. Maybe there are only so many people you can speak with about these situations – but the lack of serious input from the band is telling right the way through. At times this is more like ‘What it was Like To Manage The Most Dangerous Band In The World…’ rather than the ultimate biography.
But even then it’s still often gripping stuff that will be hard to resist for most fans. And, as Adler’s biography is like a car crash of his heroin and crack addictions, this is like the car crash of a man – Axl – given complete control of the biggest rock band in the world as he railroads the other (admittedly dysfunctional) band members and finally forces them off the track altogether and so perhaps is almost inevitably more about Axl Rose than it is about the rest.
The detail is great – but there are so many questions left unanswered I think more focus over what we were actually getting here might have helped other than a comprehensive history of the band. Because I also feel like you wouldn’t have a much of a clue who this original band was if you just read Wall’s version. Some of the main members feel distant throughout and it feels as though even Axl’s part is played by someone sitting behind a locked door – as, in fact, for most of the time he was.
At one point we even get a nice detour into the Velvet Revolver-Scott Weiland years which actually gave us more of an insight into Weiland than most members of Guns N Roses get during the book. For that reason The Last of the Giants sometimes feels like arriving at a party but having to experience it from the outside while peering in through a dirty window. You know there’s some shit happening inside but you can never quite make out what it is and you are certainly not there in the room surrounded by members of the band other than for fleeting moments.
(7/10 Reverend Darkstanley)
https://www.orionbooks.co.uk/books/detail.page?isbn=9781409167242
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