Guns N’ Roses’ announces a devastating News; THE BITTER TRUTH

What ever happened to Axl Rose’s re-recorded version of Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction?

The vocalist confirmed in the late ’90s that he’d worked on another version of the legendary 1987 album with new musicians, but it was never released publicly. Now that Slash and Duff McKagan are back in the band, it’s doubtful that it ever will be.

But it did exist.

Why Axl Rose Re-Recorded Appetite for Destruction

In November of ’99, Guns N’ Roses released a double live album titled Live Era ’87 – ’93, which featured recordings from various performances between those years. Rose told MTV’s Kurt Loder in a 1999 interview that the live record was meant to serve as a farewell release from the old lineup to their fans.

When the singer was asked if the new Guns N’ Roses lineup would continue to play the old material, he assured they would, and added that he re-recorded all of Appetite with the exception of two songs, which they replaced with “You Could Be Mine” and “Patience.”

“Well, we had to rehearse them anyway to be able to perform them live again, and there were a lot of recording techniques and certain subtle styles and drum fills and things like that that are kind of ’80s signatures that subtly could use a little sprucing up… a little less reverb and a little less double bass and things like that,” Rose elaborated.

Only a short clip of the audio from the interview was ever shared online, which you can listen to below.

Axl Rose Interview With Kurt Loder (1999)

The Musicians on the Alternate Version of Appetite

Rose stated that Josh Freese (Nine Inch Nails), Tommy Stinson (The Replacements), Paul “Huge” Tobias and Robin Finck (Nine Inch Nails) were the musicians he re-recorded the record with.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, exactly, when I would be putting that out. But you know, it has a lot of energy. Learning the old Guns songs and getting them up, you know, putting them on tape, really forced everybody to get them up to the quality that they needed to be at,” Rose added.

“Once the energy was figured out by the new guys, how much energy was needed to get the songs right, then it really helped in the writing and recording process of the new record.”

Only One of the Recordings Has Ever Been Shared Publicly

You may recall Sheryl Crow’s cover of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” in the 1999 Adam Sandler film Big Daddy, but part of Rose’s alternate version of the song was also featured during the movie’s credits.

A live version of “Sweet Child” plays at first, then it switches over to the re-recorded rendition. It’s the only clip from the re-recorded version of Appetite that’s ever been officially shared. The alternate recording of the song starts at about 3:07. You’ll notice Rose sings the “Where do we go now?” section differently from the ’87 version.

Listen below.

Guns N’ Roses, ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ (Big Daddy Credits)

Guns N’ Roses’ Wildest Pre-‘Appetite for Destruction’ Stories

Axl Rose + Slash Become Wanted for Rape

There are many, many different accounts from what actually happened with this situation. But what we know is that a 15-year-old girl found herself in the Gardner Studio one day, and then was thrown out by Axl Rose, without any of her clothes. She ventured through Los Angeles, naked, and sought assistance from the police.

In Slash’s 2007 self-titled autobiography, he wrote, “My memory of the events is hazy but from what I remember she had sex with Axl up in the loft. Towards the end of the night, maybe as the drugs and booze wore off, she lost her mind and freaked out intensely. Axl told her to leave and tried throwing her out. I attempted to help mediate the situation to get her out quietly, but that wasn’t happening.”

When the LAPD raided the Gardner Studio in search of Rose, the singer hid behind some of the band’s equipment. The authorities told the band to have Rose turn himself in, and they were eventually informed that the girl and her parents were pressing charges against both Rose and Slash for statutory rape. As a result, they stopped playing shows for a little while in order to avoid getting arrested, and Slash eventually called Vicky Hamilton, who’d been helping the band out for a while and later managed them, to see if she’d let Rose crash at her apartment.

This led to the whole band moving into her apartment, and essentially treating it the same way that they treated the Gardner Studio.

Eventually, the rape charges were dropped.

“The truth was, Axl had definitely had sex with the girl, but it had been consensual and no one had raped her. For my part I hadn’t even touched her!” Slash added in his book.

They Turn Down an Enormous Label Offer

As they worked their way toward the weekend headlining slot on the Sunset Strip, Guns N’ Roses became one of the hottest bands in L.A. More and more labels became interested in them, despite their notorious reputation for danger and debauchery, and Tom Zutaut was trying to get them signed to Geffen Records, which would give them a $75,000 advance.

Upon meeting with another label, Chrysalis, they were offered around $400,000 [as noted in McKagan’s autobiography It’s So Easy and Other Lies], but turned it down because they wanted more creative control than the label was willing to give them. Rose did, however, agree that they would accept the offer if Susan Collins, the A&R rep, ran down Sunset Boulevard naked.

“[Axl] called me and said, ‘Look, man, we told the A&R person at Chrysalis that if she walked naked down Sunset Boulevard from her office to Tower Records, we’d sign with her,'” Zutaut later told Spin. “He was dead serious. And I remember thinking, ‘My office is on Sunset-I’m going to have to watch until Friday at 6 o’clock, because if she does the nude walk, I’m going to lose the band.'”

Collins didn’t accept the trade.

The Band Is Late to Their Record Deal Signing Because of a Contact Lens

After all of the dinners with label reps, Rose almost jeopardized Guns’ signing with Geffen over his missing contact lenses.

“We were at the apartment and we were supposed to meet everyone at Geffen at 6:00pm. Axl couldn’t find his contact lenses. So he got very upset, and he says, ‘I’m not going down there until I find my contacts,’ and he went storming out of the house.” Hamilton recalled in photographer Marc Canter’s book Reckless Road.

“So we started going through Axl’s clothes and we found the contact lenses inside a pair of pants that he’d had on a couple days prior,” she continued. “By then, we couldn’t find Axl. Meanwhile, time is elapsing, we’re supposed to be there and I think it was Steven that grabbed me and was said, ‘Oh my God, come look.’ And I went outside and looked and there was Axl sitting yogic on top of the Whisky A-Go-Go.”

They celebrated the signing later that night at L.A.’s Hamburger Hamlet.

Guns vs. Paul Stanley

In May of 1986, the band was in search of a producer for their debut. Adler was an enormous KISS fan, so when Zutaut suggested Paul Stanley as a potential producer, it seemed like a dream come true for the young drummer. However, the meeting between Stanley and Guns didn’t exactly go smoothly.

“Izzy was unconscious, with drool coming out of the side of his mouth. It wasn’t clear whether he was sleeping or dead—that’s how rough he looked. Duff and Steven were very nice, and Steven was just flowing about what a big KISS fan he was,” Stanley detailed in his autobiography Face the Music: A Life Exposed.

“I didn’t realize that the half-comatose, curly-headed lead guitar player who called himself Slash was what had become of the sweet kid I’d spoken to during the interviews before the recording of Creatures a few years earlier. Then Axl chatted with me and played a few songs on a crappy cassette player they had lying around.”

However, upon hearing “Nightrain,” Stanley suggested a couple of changes to the song.

“That was the last time he ever spoke to me. Ever,” Stanley added.

After the meeting, Slash reportedly spread rumors that the KISS leader was gay — and they haven’t had great relations with each other ever since.

Axl Rose Fights Thelonius Monster’s Bob Forrest

Fights and violence weren’t anything new to Guns N’ Roses, especially Rose, but on one particular night in May of 1986, the singer got into it with a fellow musician — Thelonious Monster frontman Bob Forrest. The show took place at Raji’s in Central Hollywood. Apparently, a girl in the audience was spraying her beer and throwing bottles at the stage, so Rose hit her with the mic stand.

The girl was Forrest’s girlfriend, which was a connection that Rose didn’t make until after the show when he was being introduced to the Thelonious Monster singer.

“All of a sudden he goes, ‘Wait, you hit my girlfriend? I’m gonna kill you!’ And that was it, I started tearing him to shreds,” Rose remembered during a 1988 interview with Rock Scene.

“Robert, our photographer, jumped in the way, fell down, I went to kick the guy and kicked Robert instead. Then the guy got loose, he came at me, Robert jumped in the way again and got kicked in the nuts! He wasn’t having a very good time,” he continued. “The guy had grabbed one of Steven’s drum stands by then, and the security guard had grabbed me. I had this security guy pinned against the wall, and my hands were filled with the other guy’s hair. It was a huge mess.”

Axl Rose + Steven Adler’s “Rocket Queen”

While Appetite was being mixed in New York, Rose decided the closing track “Rocket Queen” needed a little extra something — he literally wanted sex noises to overlay the bridge. What Axl Rose wants, Axl Rose gets, and Adriana Smith, a dancer who’d been dating Adler (but wanted to get back at him for going out with another girl) was the one for the job.

“Axl propositioned me to do something ‘not even his girlfriend would do.’ He sat me down and was all serious. ‘Erin [Everly] won’t do this, nobody will do this.’ And I was like: ‘Fuck yeah, I’ll do it – for the band, dude!’ So I directed it. We went into the studio and kicked everybody out except for a couple of sound guys. I made them turn out the lights. They took the microphones down close to the floor, and there was wood panelling halfway up the wall and then the glass window, so nobody could actually see us,” Smith described to Classic Rock in 2007.

“Me and Axl got to it, had sex on the floor of the voice room. Apparently there was, like, three and a half hours of audio on the reel to reel. We just kind laid down and did it. I was having fun and Axl would be like: ‘C’mon Adriana, quit fucking faking it!’ It was probably a comedy of errors for the most part. I told them to destroy the tape.”

She had been worried that Adler would be upset if he found out. Upon hearing the song, the drummer shared his sentiments.

“I said, ‘That’s cool, who’s that?’ Slash said: ‘It’s Adriana.’ She wasn’t like my girlfriend exactly…but, we had some good, long nights. Axl came up with this idea to fuck some girl in the studio and record it for ‘Rocket Queen,’ so he called Adriana. They put up a divider, laid a blanket down, and recorded it. I just felt that out of all the girls around us, he just had to pick the one that I was hanging out with. He knew we were close. But it came out good, it worked.” [via Classic Rock].

‘Appetite for Destruction’ Performs Poorly Upon Its Release

Perhaps the wildest thing that Guns N’ Roses endured in their early years was that after all of the chaos, all of the shows they played up and down the Sunset Strip, all the hype they received from fans and interest from record labels, Appetite for Destruction did not perform well upon its release. And considering how widely-known and how many copies it has sold as of today, it’s even more surprising.

Firstly, the original artwork was considered too graphic by a lot of stores, and they refused to stock it. So, they changed it to the black cover with the cross and skulls of the band members. It didn’t land on the Billboard 200 until over a month after it came out, and when it did, it was at No. 182. It had only sold 200,000 copies by then (which wasn’t a lot of the time), and MTV wouldn’t play their videos, so Geffen was ready to pull the plug.

Zutaut eventually convinced David Geffen to put a call into MTV himself, and “Welcome to the Jungle” was finally given a single time slot in September of 1987 at 4AM ET. Zutaut recalled to BBC in 2016 that the band threw a party as they awaited the video’s airing — with cookies and milk.

“Before the video comes on, maybe like 11 at night, there’s a knock on the door and it’s the LA Country Sheriffs,” he said, noting that everyone was eating cookies and drinking milk when they arrived. “We have no idea why your neighbors are complaining,” the officers said, and then left.

The airing was a success, and MTV eventually put “Welcome to the Jungle” into its heavy rotation. Months later, they did the same with “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” and a year after Appetite’s release, it reached No. 1. Since then, it’s sold over 30 million copies worldwide.