#del james

AXL: Okay, the song . . . When I sang the song it was the first time I'd ever sang it. Izzy basically wrote most of the words, except for the ending part. And then Slash and Duff got it on, rearranging and rewriting parts—the music parts of it, the guitar parts. But even then, one reason the song was written was about needing patience and having a lack of it. And, you know, Duff's written his version of Patience, it's kind of a comedy version which may be out sometime. Izzy has a new song and it says—let's see, how does that go?—Double-talking jive/get the money, motherfucker/’cause I got no more patience [laughs]. You know, I can't stand to watch the video of it or anything.  I'm proud of the video; it's just—when I hear it, it just makes me think about how I don’t have any patience now.  Same way for basically everybody in the band. It's like, it depresses us because we go, “Man, we thought we were getting closer to finding some peace of mind,” and we are farther from it than we’ve ever been—or at least that’s the way it seems.  

DEL: When you say that you would’ve thought you'd be closer to getting some sort of patience or peace of mind, what in reality is your life, somewhat likened, in a few seconds?

AXL: It's strange. I mean, it's like, to everybody else we’re viewed as what they see, what Guns N’ Roses means to them, and that's how we're treated to these people. At the same time, we've all been pretty much private in our lives, except when we go out and get crazy, which isn't every day. Now it's few and far between, because you don't have the mental ability or whatever, the patience to go out and deal with lots of people you don't know. And you gotta be so careful with what you say. You can't say, “Look, get the fuck away from me." And people that are just—they're fans of yours, they like what you do and it's like, they don't understand if you had a bad day or something like that, you know. It’s . . . I can't really find the easy answers right now.

DEL: Okay. Well, looking around the apartment I see what once was a beautifully mirrored wall that is now destroyed. What brings out the violent side of Axl Rose?

AXL: Frustration and not being able to handle a situation that you feel you should be able to take control of, which can be anything with dealing with our success in any way; dealing with, you know, money, interviews, fans, record companies, radio stations, all of that; and not really knowing how to do it. I mean, a lot of strange things happen to piss you off, and you’d like to smash somebody with that, but that's gonna get you in a lawsuit or something like that. So, you know, it's just pent-up frustration, not knowing what to do, and releasing it. And it's not, like, okay, yeah, now I've got money so I’ll just break things all the time, dah dah dah. I've always broke things. 

DEL: This is true.  It's gotten to the point where . . .

AXL: I feel a lot like that character in The Godfather, Sonny, who gets pissed off and he goes and does something, you know; and then, eventually, he has that used against him, and he goes out, and it's a setup, and he gets shot. And that fear also breeds frustration of, like, okay, I'm mad, I want to do something, I want to take action and I wanna get even with this person that just screwed me over; and you know you can't, because you know that there's gonna be consequences that you're gonna have to face up to out of whatever you do; and you can't pinpoint all of them, you know, to make sure you can get away with whatever action you decide to take. So, instead, I'll just break something of my own, and that depresses me too, but it's better than sitting in jail, I guess.

DEL: This is true. Are you a patient person? Does it take a lot to piss you off?

AXL: To a lot of people, no. To me, yeah, because they may say something in a conversation that might set me off. But it might be something that, you know, 200 people over the last three years infinitely have been saying or doing, and the act that they do is the one that sets me off. Lately I've been running into people who . . . decide, and a crowd of people that they're gonna get out verbally whatever they want to say to me, and this and that, and try and shoot us down, you know. And it's like, my words to these people are like, “Don't you be—don't let me make you an example of the new way."  In other words, that like, you know, don’t be the stupid person who’s gonna get in the way and let me make an example of you that I'm not going to take any shit anymore and I’m tired of it. 

DEL: Okay. Do you have any more feelings on the song Patience?

AXL: I've read in interviews, where they titled the articles “Patience is a virtue,” talking about our videos like that. And that's the truth. It's a virtue, it's something that we try and strive for and try to gain more of it; and the more we think we have it, the less we actually do. It's kind of like time. But it's also saying that we know that a lot of situations just need more patience to make them work; you know, not just from us, from anybody involved in a situation. It takes patience on all parts to get to reach an understanding, and that's what - it can make something work ,and that's what we're trying to achieve at different times. The world could use a bit more patience. 

DEL: The band's ready to start pre-production for the follow-up to the EP GN’R Lies. Any comments?

AXL: We're all very excited about it. I just, you know, hope that we can be left alone enough that we can... and we sit around and we don't get bored. Boredom is a major killer of patience and everything else [chuckles]. But we've got a lot of ideas, and a lot of songs, a lot of parts of songs; and if we sit around and can keep a creative fire going, we're just gonna record as many things as we possibly can this time around. That could be anything from 10 songs to 30 songs. Goodbye, Ax.

AXL: It was a fictional story that my friend Del wrote based off—you know, I inspired him to write this story, because, you know, we’re a rock band, and we were working on our first album—it wasn’t even out yet—and I was pretty much out of control, and we were all into the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. And he wrote this story about this guy who just becomes bigger than life, and the troubles he has in his relationship and keeping that together, and basically about this couple in this relationship, and trying to deal with this lifestyle, and how—and what happens to them. And so, little by little, we think about it, figure out how the next part of the story and stuff—we’d talk about it and he’ll write a little bit more. And all of a sudden it was kind of like, we sold 8 million records, and all of a sudden, I was becoming what he had written about. He called me really upset one day, going “I wrote my friend’s death.” You know? It was like, we’re in that one video where I find my gravestone and stuff like that, and that really freaked him out and he writes four other stories. So it’s kind of like a fictional story which had autobiographical and based off things that happened in real life. And now it’s like, with Stephanie, it’s a real trip because some things are based off my relationship—my previous relationship, and some things are fictional, but I’m in relationship with her.

VOICE-OVER: Axl’s girlfriend, model Stephanie Seymour, co-stars in ‘Don’t Cry’ and ‘November Rain’. In both music videos Stephanie takes on roles partially inspired by Axl’s ex-wife, Erin Everly, one of the women in the Sweet Child O’ Mine clip. 

AXL: It’s really strange, you know. It’s a bit difficult for her, but she gets into the parts and understands what we’re doing. But sometimes it’s very surreal, like when we got married it was—I mean, Slash looked at me and said, “Dude, I just watched you get married 9 times.” 

VOICE-OVER: Surreal is one thing, but for some viewers the videos for ‘Don’t Cry’ and ‘November Rain’ are just plain confusing. And the fans aren’t the only people wondering what the videos are about.

GILBY: I have no idea what it means at all. I mean, just the obvious of what anybody that watches it gets, but, you know, when you’re doing it—

TABITHA: You’re supposed to be on the inside.

GILBY: I know! I was on the inside and I’m still confused. I’m waiting for the movie to come out.

SLASH: Both those videos, even if you don’t understand them or you can’t make any sense of them, they’re very compelling to watch, because you wanna try and figure it out, you know? I mean, I catch myself, like, flipping through channels and I hit MTV, and I see one of our songs, and I’ll stop for a minute, you know, and look at it, and it means something new to me every time I see it. 

AXL: I’m really proud of ‘Don’t Cry’ and ‘November Rain.’ I really like the writing of the story and putting all the scenes together. And “Why did she die?” “How did she die?” “What happened?” And it’s like, we’ll tell you later. [Chuckles].

[BREAK]

TABITHA: Thanks John. I’m actually back by Axl Rose’s dressing room. He has been on tour with Guns N’ Roses for the past year and they’ve gotten in all sorts of trouble. Axl is getting very well known for his antics, and I talked to him in Houston, and here’s part two of our interview.

VOICE-OVER: Guns N’ Roses has spent the past 15 months on tour playing to sellout crowds and being involved in more than their fair share of controversy. For starters, the band had a little trouble with punctuality, sometimes showing up two hours late for a concert. Axl says it took him a while to get back into the grind of touring.

AXL: That was a whole change of life. You know, realizing, “Okay, now we’re out on tour;” I haven’t toured, I’ve been sitting on my ass at home or whatever. And then I’ve been out, you know, running around and rocking out; and had to, basically, like change my whole life in order to be able to keep doing this. And so, you do a show and then you’d be shot, you know, where you’d be, kind of like, shot for three weeks. But no, you’ve got a show tomorrow. So then it’d take, like, all these hours of preparation, where now it doesn’t take me near as long to be ready for a show.  

VOICE-OVER: During the course of the tour Axl has been involved in heavy-duty psychotherapy in an attempt to deal with the sexual abuse he suffered as a child, among other problems.

AXL: Last year, I was doing extensive emotional work on myself, so when I go out to do a show, if something—I was, you know, uncovering something in my unconscious mind or in my mind, or whatever, and kind of experiencing it, it’d be really hard to go out and do the show, where that took, like, a year to get things under control. I’d come off stage, and either get on the phone or have the person fly out personally into four or five hours right after stage. You know, where someone goes, like, once a week to work out their problems for half-hour or an hour, I was doing four-five hours a day; like, every day.

TABITHA: Is it helping?

AXL: You were at the show tonight. It seems to be fine. I’m in a good mood now. [Chuckles].

TABITHA: Do you feel like your fans are sort of understanding you better or take your problem seriously?

AXL: I think some people understand it, but a lot of people, you know, they want what they want, even if they understand. And it’s like, if there’s a problem on stage and you have to stop the show, they don’t really care at that point. They’re still upset ‘cause they didn’t get satiated. They came to see something, and . . . you know, there was technical difficulties in Montreal and we had to leave, and the crowd was really upset about that and they didn’t really, like, take the time to think about what went on for us. Now, that’s kind of hard to take sometimes. I don’t feel responsible for that.

VOICE-OVER: The ensuing riot in Montreal started after Axl walked off stage and stopped the concert because of a problem with their PA system. Axl says they’ve been having technical problems the whole tour and it was damaging his voice.

AXL: So, basically, I was happening to, like, sing over 50 kilowatts of sound or something. I didn’t do major damage to my vocal cords, but I did enough that if I sang anymore under those conditions, I wouldn’t be singing. In order to hear myself, to see if I’m on key and tell how loud or how hard I need to push to sing a song properly, I have to try to sing all over the PA, which was impossible. 

VOICE-OVER: After the riot in Montreal, the crew was able to fix the PA problem, but troubles aside, Axl feels like Guns N’ Roses pulled off a major feat, but putting together a stadium tour with their old friends, Metallica.