Biography - N.I.R.

Axl was born as William Bruce Rose on February 6, 1962 in Lafayette, Indiana. According to himself, he didn't quite exactly have a nice childhood... Axl's father, William Rose, left the family when Axl was two, and in 1992 Axl talked to Rolling Stone about his memories of him: "And what I found out in therapy is, my mother and him weren't getting along. And he kidnapped me, because someone wasn't watching me. I remember a needle. I remember getting a shot. And I remember being sexually abused by this man and watching something horrible happen to my mother when she came to get me."¹
   A couple of years after William had left the family Axl's mother Sharon remarried with a religious fanatic named Stephen Bailey. Axl's upbringing became strict, to say the least... "I was brainwashed in a Pentecostal church. I'm not against churches or religion, but I do believe, like I said in "Garden of Eden," that most organized religions make a mockery of humanity. My particular church was filled with self-righteous hypocrites who were child abusers and child molesters. These were people who'd been damaged in their own childhoods and in their lives. These were people who were finding God but still living with their damage and inflicting it upon their children. I had to go to church anywhere from three to eight times a week. I even taught Bible school while l was being beaten and my sister was being molested. We'd have televisions one week, then my stepdad would throw them out because they were satanic. l wasn't allowed to listen to music. Women were evil. Everything was evil. I had a really distorted view of sexuality and women. I remember the first time l got smacked for looking at a woman. I didn't know what I was looking at, and I don't remember how old I was, but it was a cigarette advertisement with two girls coming out of the water in bikinis. I was just staring at the TV - not thinking, just watching - and my dad smacked me in the mouth, and l went flying across the floor. Someone can say, "Dude, just get over it." Yeah? Fuck you! Whether l wanted it there or not, that incident was locked into my unconscious mind. Whenever there was any form of sex, like a kissing scene, on TV, we weren't allowed to look. Whenever anything like that happened, we had to turn our heads. Dad had us so brainwashed that we started turning our heads on our own. We scolded each other. My mom allowed all of this to happen because she was too insecure to be without my stepfather. She assisted in me being damaged on a consistent basis by not being there for me or my sister or my brother." ²
   Axl found an escape in music: "It wasn't necessarily the words in the songs but the melody and the feelings expressed in songs that somehow became a friend of mine when I was a child. The feeling that came out of the words, or the music, became my friend, my understanding friend, and then I knew that I could feel that way. I was denied feeling any way other than how my stepfather told me I should feel continually, about anything and everything. But in music, I could listen and realize you could feel other ways or new ways; it was O.K., because here were manifestations of those other feelings."³
   During his teens, Axl got in trouble a lot in Lafayette and was arrested numerous times. Eventually he left the town and hitch-hiked all over the US and in 1982⁴ he ended up in Hollywood, CA. His childhood friend Jeff Isbelle, who went by the name of Izzy Stradlin had went there a few years before Axl, and quite naturally the two of them hooked up and started playing together as Axl. Between 1982 and 1985 they drifted in and out of different bands, of which LA Guns, Hollywood Rose and London were three of them.
   In early 1985 Axl and Izzy first took the name Guns N' Roses, combining the names Hollywood Rose and LA Guns. In the summer that year Duff McKagan had joined the band and two new guys entered. Slash and Steven Adler. The five of them embarked on the infamous Hell Tour up the east coast, and from there on the road to success lay open. Well, an open road might be the wrong way to describe the conditions the band lived under in the beginning...
   Axl has explained that he always had a vision of Guns N' Roses making it big, and during the Use Your Illusion years it became obvious that his vision wasn't shared by everyone. In November 1991 Izzy left the band. The Use Your Illusion album also seemed to be more Axl-dominated than "Appetite" had been.
   When the tour finally ended in July 1993, Slash started working on songs for a new album. In the beginning of 1994 he presented these to Axl, whom didn't like it, so Slash took them back and began working on what eventually became Snakepit's 1995 album "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere".
   What Axl did during the second half of the nineties is mostly unknown. He didn't do any interviews from January of 1994 to November 1999 when he talked with MTV's Kurt Loder over the phone. He did send to faxes to MTV, though. One when Slash was out of the band and one explaining the song "Oh My God" that appeared on the "End Of Days" soundtrack. He did a very surprising guest appearance live with Gilby Clarke's band The Starfuckers on June 22, 2000, and was arrested at the Phoenix Airport on February 11, 1998.
   Apart from these sporadic appearances, Axl was involved in a lot of lawsuits, and one after the other in Guns N' Roses dropped out. Duff was the last one from the classic line up to leave in the summer of 1997. With all this going on it maybe isn't so hard to understand it took some time for Axl to regroup Guns N' Roses. There were also rumours about Axl pursuing his "spiritual activities" that supposedly had begun with therapy in 1991. How much truth there is to these rumours is highly uncertain since Axl hasn't really touched the subject when he's said something.
   On New Years Eve 2000 the whole new band was finally unveiled when they did their first show at the Las Vegas House Of Blues. Two weeks later they did the enormous gig at the Rock In Rio III festival. It seemed as if Axl had returned for real, and a European tour was booked for the summer. However, the tour was rescheduled then later cancelled. With this as background a lot of people were surprised when Guns N' Roses did two shows in late December in Las Vegas. One that certainly was surprised was Slash, who had come to see the show, but was denied entrance. GN'R manager Doug Goldstein gave this explanation to LA Times: "We didn't know what his intentions were. If nothing else, it would have been a distraction. Axl was really nervous about these shows. We decided on our own not to take any risk."⁵