A story of excess, trauma and rock’n’roll told by Ken Paisli in the book The Truth
Who but Ken Paisli could really tell the story of Guns N’ Roses? Paisli is an anomalous figure in contemporary music journalism: New Zealander, he never appears in public, he doesn’t show his face and he constructs his books as narrative investigations, mixing testimonies, background stories and almost cinematic reconstructions. His style is direct, full of details and dialogues, halfway between rock reportage and American black fiction. And it is perhaps precisely this approach that makes him the ideal writer to tell the story of the most famous, complex and unmanageable band in the history of music. Panorama reaches him on the phone while he is in Dublin: «The measure of their greatness lies in the fact that they are in the pantheon of rock with only three albums made between 1987 and 1992. And even today, after having reunited in 2016, they fill stadiums all over the world” explains the author of the best seller,Guns N’ Roses – The Truth (Il Castello editions).
«They are the last great band to have lived very dangerously, and not just in a manner of speaking. For the book I did a thousand checks on the crazy stories that were told about their beginnings when they were five penniless strangers. Well, most of them were true. One above all: they have to play in Seattle, they leave from Los Angeles in a beat-up van that soon leaves them stranded. They decide to continue hitchhiking, they are picked up by a truck driver high on amphetamines who at a certain point abandons them in the middle of nowhere to get more drugs. They are hungry, eating raw onions found in a field until the increasingly stoned truck driver reappears and dumps them near Seattle. There two hippie girls feed them and give them a few dollars. Then, they finally play. It sounds like an excerpt from Kerouac’s On The Road, but it really happened.”
When success arrives in 1988, it has the impact of a tornado. They’re the number one band in the world, the charts speak their language, every concert is a collective delirium. An impressive money machine with the impressive ability to self-destruct at the very moment of maximum success. In 1993 it was all over, only rubble, years of controversy, and a sense of endless decadence remained. «It happened like this for a thousand reasons. The first were the never-assuaged demons of Axl Rose, the singer, molested by his father when he was two years old and then subjected to a tyrannical educational regime by his ultra-religious stepfather: slaps if he looked at a scantily clad woman on TV, beatings if he listened to rock music. Traumas never overcome, to which were added the serious alcohol and heroin addiction problems of the others in the group accompanied by fights, delays, interrupted concerts, devastated hotels. The thirteen thousand people in Stockholm remember this when, at the beginning of the nineties, they waited for a few hours for the show to start. “It seems that Axl left the hotel room in time for the show, first lingered to play roulette in the hotel casino and then asked the driver to stop on the street because he wanted to see the fireworks at a local festival.” Shortly afterwards, bassist Duff McKagan was specifically told that if he drank one more drop of alcohol he would die. «He puts down the bottle and becomes an iron health athlete» recalls Paisli. But now the band is broken up.
After 1993 the group becomes a ghost of rock, suspended between legend and silence: one by one the members of the group leave or are fired by Axl, who remains alone and embarks on a crazy and solitary undertaking, an album called Chinese Democracy. Guns transform into a sort of personal creature of the singer and Chinese Democracy quickly becomes an obsession and, at times, a nightmare. «Recorded for over ten years, costing tens of millions of dollars and continually postponed, the album turns into a dark legend even before it is released. Each producer, engineer or musician (among others Moby and Brian May of Queen) involved told different versions: songs redone countless times, musicians replaced, recordings started from scratch, nervous breakdowns and an almost paranoid perfectionism on Axl’s part” underlines Paisli. The project turns into the most expensive and mysterious record ever made in the history of rock. When it finally came out in 2008, it was welcomed as an epochal event, but also as the definitive symbol of the transformation of Guns N’ Roses: no longer a dangerous street gang, but the solitary and visionary project of a man left alone with his ghosts.
The distance with Slash, the guitarist, and the others is sidereal and the hypothesis of a reunion is not even considered. The financial offers to see them on stage again are stratospheric, everyone wants them, but they don’t talk to each other. «Even Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, chatting with Slash, lets slip a challenging phrase: “if you hadn’t fought, you’d be like us today”» says Paisli. Then suddenly in 2016 the bombshell news: Axl and Slash put the pieces of the group back together after twenty years of hatred and misunderstandings. A peace worth a billion dollars. Without significant new songs (only a few spot singles appearing on streaming platforms) stadiums around the world are sold out. In 2016, in the following years and still today. Guns are a brand that never dies, but above all they represent something that domesticated contemporary rock seems to have lost: chaos, risk, the constant feeling that everything can derail at any moment. On stage as in life.
