Axl Rose: The Lost Years

People who have heard the new music say it sounds fantastic. "The tracks reminded me of the best moments of Seventies Pink Floyd or later Led Zeppelin," says Jim Barber, a former Geffen A&R executive who worked on the project. "There's nothing out there right now that has that kind of scope. Axl hasn't spent the last several years struggling to write Use Your Illusion over again." In the estimation of guitarist Zakk Wylde, who sat in with the new band a few times, "Axl is one fucking smart guy."

In recent months, though, guitarist Robin Finck and drummer Josh Freese both left the project, as did computer engineer Billy Howerdel. Queen guitarist Brian May spent a week recording with Axl and returned to England. Avant guitarist Buckethead, known for wearing an upside-down Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on his noggin, came on the scene, But as of now, it seems, there is no "new" G n' R.

Visiting Yoda

I'll punch your lights out right here and right now.... I don't give a fuck who you are. You are all little people on a power trip."

These are not lyrics to a bitter new G n' R track about lawyers, perhaps reminiscent of Axl's old rants on CD and from the stage against reporters and photographers and anybody else who failed to do his precise bidding. These words, the Phoenix Police Department reports, are what Axl shouted at security personnel at Sky Harbor International Airport in February 1998 after a screener asked to search his hand luggage. Threatened with arrest, Axl, traveling in jeans, a red sweat shirt and a gray stocking cap, rejoined, "I don't give a fuck. Just put me in fuckin' jail." He spent a couple of hours behind bars. The matter was resolved on February 18th, 1999, when Rose, via telephone, pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of disturbing the peace and paid a $500 fine.

Lost in the minor hoopla over the arrest was the matter of what, exactly, Axl was doing at the Phoenix airport. Was Axl coming back from a place where he often goes — Sedona, the New Age bastion in the red-rock canyons 115 miles north of Phoenix, where he sees one of the most important people in his world, a psychic known derisively in the G n' R camp as Yoda?

Though nobody knows precisely how he got involved, people who know him say Axl started visiting Sedona in the early Nineties, sometimes traveling with Beta, his housekeeper, or Earl, his bodyguard. Many believers in past lives, channeling, Ufos and the predictive power of crystals pass through Sedona. The town is so tuned in, vibewise, that certain canyons are understood to be vortexes for masculine energy and others for feminine forces. In the produce aisles of Sedona supermarkets, shoppers dangle crystals over the pints of strawberries.

For close to a decade, Rose has been a powerful, almost evangelical believer in homeopathic medicine. The world, in Axl's view, is a perilous place, populated by greedy doctors affiliated with the American Medical Association who prescribe dangerous synthetic medicines. When G n' R toured, homeopathic elixirs for Axl's throat were always on hand. He introduced echinacea and protein shakes to a G n' R more accustomed to vodka and heroin.

Axl's childhood woes are well documented; he does not come, as Axl himself might say, from a healthy place. In 1992, in this magazine, Axl talked about learning at the age of seventeen that the man he thought was his real father was in fact his stepfather. Axl's biological father, William Rose, abandoned the family when Axl was two and is believed to be dead. Through therapy, Axl said, he recovered memories of being beaten and sexually abused as a child. It is these traumas, primarily, that Axl wrestles with, and it is these experiences that may, in part, be blamed for his hostile attitude toward women and his consuming need for control. A friend says, "All that baggage, as he was being constructed, it all comes to bear. It's not an external issue. It's really core to his makeup."

Yoda's real name is Sharon Maynard. A rather plain Asian woman of middle age, Maynard stands about five feet five, and has a medium build and dark, curly hair. Since 1978 she has run a not-for-profit business in Sedona called Arcos Cielos Corp., which, loosely translated from the Spanish, means "sky arcs." The company, with assets of $241,602 in 1998, lists itself as an "educational" enterprise. Arcos Cielos operates out of Maynard's rural home in Sedona, which she shares with her husband, Elliott, a gentle gray-haired man. "Dr. Elliott and Sharon Maynard" are both thanked in the Use Your Illusion liner notes.

He seemed emotionally reserved and a little suspicious," says Techno Whiz Moby. "He seemed like a beaten dog."

Sharon Maynard keeps a low profile in town. "She is way under, low-key," says a local businessman with ties to the psychic community. None of the New Age booksellers or silversmiths I talked to knew her, and she wasn't listed in the phone book or with the Center for the New Age, where a thick three-ring binder full of psychics and past-life therapists is available for perusal — and many of those listed are available for immediate consultation in booths upstairs. This is not surprising. Much of the more high-end psychic work in Sedona is done by quiet figures like Yoda who work out of private homes.

While it is customary for tour employees to submit a photograph for a laminated pass, with Axl other things seemed to come into play. Doug Goldstein is said to gather photos at the singer's instruction for psychic assessment. In Sedona, some think, Yoda would examine these photos. What does so-and-so want out of Axl? Does this person have his best interests in mind? What kind of energy do they emit?