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 The New York Post reports that for Guns n' Roses, "Appetite for Destruction" was more than the title of
a landmark album that sold 15 million copies in the US and turned the
group into rock legends. It was also the perfect description of a
hunger that, while catapulting them to stardom, also mired them in a
miasma of degrading sex, lethal drugs and brutal violence that left
them and their associates on the brink of death.
"Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses," an explosive new book
by veteran music historian Stephen Davis, lays out the gory details,
sin by sin.
Drawing on interviews with Davis and passages from his book, we examine the band's depraved rise and fall.
Axl Rose, born William Bruce Rose, was raised by a Pentecostal
stepfather who shunned rock music and considered television satanic. He
enforced his family values with brutal beatings.By his teens, Axl was
angry. The first time he got drunk, at 16, he threw a beer at a cop,
punched a guy so hard he "saw his teeth go down his throat," and fell
out a two-story window, breaking his hand.
Other members of Guns had turbulent childhoods as well. Slash (born
Saul Hudson) was raised in Hollywood by a costume designer mom who
dated David Bowie and did lots of drugs. Drummer Steven Adler, another
Hollywood kid, smoked weed for the first time at 8, and by 13 was
getting oral sex from strange men on Santa Monica Boulevard.
A teenage Axl hitchhiked to LA to search for his friend Jeff Isbell
(Izzy Stradlin), but on the way a man tried to rape him. When the man
cornered him, Axl held a straight razor to the man's face.
Axl and Izzy eventually formed the band Hollywood Rose. Izzy
survived by dealing brown Persian heroin, while Axl slept in abandoned
apartments and behind dumpsters, living on $3.75 a day, enough for
"biscuits and gravy at Denny's, plus a half-pint of cheap wine."
Read the full story here.
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