Axl Rose: The Rolling Stone Interview

No. That's not it. I'm angry with him because he left in a very shitty way, and he tries to act like everything's cool. He put his trust in people that I consider my enemies. People like [former G n' R manager] Alan Niven, who I think is his manager now. I don't need Alan Niven knowing jack shit about Guns n' Roses. Everybody has a lot of good and bad, and with Alan, I just got sick of his fucking combo platter. It's like "If you're involved with these people, we can't talk to you."

Let's move on. The media contract that was put into effect before Guns n' Roses started the tour outraged a lot of journalists who felt that you were trying to control what was printed about the band. And I think that's a legitimate gripe on the part of the press.

Yeah. But I don't think they understood what we were trying to do. We were trying to cut down on our exposure. There is such a thing as overexposure. We were also trying to weed out the assholes from the people who were gonna be cool. You know, if you were willing to put your ass on the line and sign the damn thing, then we pretty much figured you weren't gonna try and screw us. There were people who agreed to sign it and then we told them they didn't have to.

Can you understand why even a reporter who wasn't out to get you would refuse to sign something like that?

I don't know. I guess only if they thought that we wanted everything to look peachy keen.

That's the way it came across, because the contract gave you the right of final approval over everything that was written by anyone who signed it.

I'm not that way. I want the real story. I never wanted "Steven Adler's on vacation." I wanted "Steven Adler's in a fucking rehab." [Adler, G n' R's former drummer, was fired from the group for excessive drug use.] I wanted the reality. Maybe I'd like it a bit optimistic, but I've always been more into the reality of the situations, because that's what I wanted to read about the band. I can see where it would look like we just wanted everything to be right about us. But it was also trying to find a way to work with certain metal magazines. There are a lot of kids who collect those, and we'd rather they have real stories than bullshit stories. I haven't done an interview with Hit Parader or Circus in three or four years.

You've said you can't trust them to print what you actually say.

Yeah. And it's not that what they print is so bad. It's just that when someone puts corny little words in that you didn't say . . . like Slash saying something about "Well, we're gonna just shake it up and see what happens." Slash would never say that, and it made him feel really dorky. Looking back at it and reading it, it may not be that bad. But we know that we would've come off a lot better if it had been what we really said. I think I've got a pretty good track record of not lying.

When you were in New York recently, you took offense at a review Jon Pareles wrote in the `New York Times' and invited him to come onstage to talk about it. [Pareles, reviewing a December G n' R show at Madison Square Garden, described the audience as "oddly restrained." Pareles was invited to come to the following night's show and "tell the crowd why they weren't having a good time."]

I was actually just going to sit down and talk. I wasn't going to make him look like an ass.

Still, he would've been walking into a minefield. No matter what he said, they'd boo him and cheer you.

He didn't have the balls to stand behind what he wrote, and he got exposed.

A lot of people would say that in inviting him to talk about that on your turf, you were the one who didn't have the balls. Why didn't you call him and talk about it personally on neutral territory?

I'm not gonna make the New York Times any more money. It was an obnoxious piece. It was shit journalism. He could've written: "I didn't like the show, personally. I think they suck." Okay, fine. Cool. You can think we suck, and I can think you're an asshole. But don't just try to make it look like nobody enjoyed it.

Couldn't he have been just calling it like he saw it?

Then that's a person with some severe fucking personal problems, and he has no business being there writing about our show. It's a different crowd at a G n' R show now than it used to be. He didn't understand it. Most people that have been into G n' R for years don't understand it, but they can feel it. Having a nice time is weird for people that don't have nice times in their lives. When you don't really know what a nice time is, a nice time is for pussies.

Where do you think that nice feeling is coming from, being that most of the songs can't really be described as "nice" songs?

Because that's the truth underneath all of it. It's the underlying message. We'll do a certain song because we want to express that anger, get that feeling out. "We did it, okay, now I can deal with the person that I just called an asshole." You know, that's healthy. But that's not how the world works. The world doesn't want you to do that.