Well we'd always heard talk of Yoda and Axl screening people's aura before they work for him, rumours he thought himself or slash possessed and all this kinda stuff.

I put it down as fan crazy talk mixed with a bit of "Axl is an unusual guy".

But then I read later in one of the autobiographies, I think it was Alan Niven's book (but its been a while) , where he casually mentions going down south to meet up Izzy to try and regroup things (I forget where it was without re-reading it but it was something like Louisiana or New Orleans where Izzy had shot through to) and he mentions casually that Izzy was there getting some voodoo spell cast on Axl.

To me this puts a different spin on Axl's behaviour too, like sure he's quirky with belief stuff, but it's sort of forgivable to be a bit quirky when dudes are actively cursing you or whatever in their spare time I guess what I mean is - whether or not it actually works - it's not just that Axl thinks the spiritual world is after him - one of his best mates actually IS trying to put spells on him. Sort of spreads the odd behaviours more evenly if you see what i mean. 

On a side note, it's actually kinda weird how many bands have at some stage fooled around in such things, like Motley did some stuff, Megadeth did some things, I guess it was a fad in the 1980s but it's weird these days to read about this stuff as if its a normal thing to go do.

A man on the verge of a breakdown, Niven was convinced by then that he was, as he puts is, ‘under psychic attack’ from Axl. Convinced that Axl was utilising the forces offered to him by Sharon Maynard and her circle of crystal-gazing, future-reading, aura-controlling followers, Niven had gone in search of his own form of magical defence. Stephanie Fanning, who had initially left to work with Niven, had firsthand knowledge of some of Niven’s occult intentions at this time. ‘I think he dabbled in some things when the band was gone,’ she says. ‘He was kind of talking to a couple of interesting people that I think were dabbling in that as well. But Axl was doing the same thing. I felt like they were duelling each other with a little bit of their whatever you want to call that – black magic, whatever. I think they were duelling each other. One would hear like, “I hear Axl’s doing this to me, I’m gonna do …” I feel like it was kind of going on between the two of them. I don’t know how much credence I place in that but, yeah, he was. He was. He definitely was. A little bit, for sure. I don’t know exactly if Alan was wishing Axl ill or hoping maybe to bring clarity between the two of them, cos to be honest as soon as I heard about it I kind of shut my ears off. I was like, I don’t want to get mixed up in any of that. I don’t know what that is. Maybe it scared me, I don’t know. I don’t know whether it was black or white, evil or good. Bring us back together; tear him apart … But I know he was talking to people who dealt in that world.’

Eventually, Fanning left Niven – to go and work with Doug Goldstein again. ‘Alan, he went kind of underground. He stayed in LA for a couple of years while he was building the house [in Arizona]. But I was really hoping he’d get back in the game. Like, get back in the game. I’d bring him music into the office like, hey, check this out. And he just couldn’t … He just wasn’t … I don’t know if something left him. Look, it was even hard for me to wake up the next morning when GN’R was over. There was a huge emptiness in my stomach. A huge emptiness in my soul not to be with that band any more. So I can imagine what it was like for him.’

‘I already knew that [Niven] was into the Crowley, Jimmy Page, that whole kind of thing,’ says Doug Goldstein. ‘Him and Izzy used to go into New Orleans quite a bit.’ When Steph went back to work with Doug, she felt obliged to tell Doug of some of Alan’s strange behaviour. ‘She said, “He hired a black-magic specialist from New Orleans and every single day after work before he would go home he would go over there and they would put on black robes, and the candles and the incense, and they would cast evil spells on you and Axl.’ I was like, what a rat bastard, man! I mean, a) what a waste of fucking money. But b) what an evil bastard.’

As far as Alan Niven is concerned now, though, ‘the psychic attack was definitely manifest in the deliberate undermining of [Izzy’s solo outfit] the JuJu Hounds by Goldstein and [Axl].’ He feels this ‘psychic attack’ was also manifest in the sharp decline of Great White’s fortunes: specifically by the arrival at their label, Capitol, of the former Zoo Entertainment promotions chief Ray Gmeiner, as replacement for Michael Prince, who had long been a supporter of Great White. ‘Gmeiner was Goldstein’s former roommate,’ he adds ominously.

This was the last straw, he says. He had been ‘on the dark side of the moon to everyone in West Hollywood’ since losing the GN’R gig. A couple of tentative feelers from big-name acts had come his way in the immediate aftermath of the split, but Niven wasn’t interested. The big one was when David Geffen invited him to work with Bon Jovi. But it nearly made him puke, he says, when Jon Bon Jovi turned up at their first meeting with his lawyer and accountant in tow. ‘How could I possibly get excited, it was diametrically opposed to the nature and essence of my passion? This is not a job to me. It’s something that I value beyond a job.’ He sighs. ‘It was a very dark period for me and it got darker and darker.’

Next he discovered that his wife had been having a long-term affair with Great White’s vocalist, Jack Russell. ‘He was terrified I was going to find out.’ It was a discovery that led to the overwhelming realisation that she had in fact ‘compromised pretty much every relationship that was of value to me. And who the hell would want a toxic individual like that in a business structure?’ With his marriage in tatters and his career being held back by what he was convinced were ‘psychic’ forces, he recalled a place in New Orleans he’d once visited with Izzy called Barrington’s: ‘A retail mausoleum of ritualistic cornucopia. That covered all kinds of spiritual expression, from elephants’ feet with weird things buried in them packed with mud, to drinking skulls … I still have a couple of items from there’, including a large wooden rosary, a cross made from the staff of a bishop … ‘I’m a fucking atheist. I’m managing a rock’n’roll band. I have very little knowledge but I’m curious … I have two Coptic Ethiopian healing scrolls. One of them is intact, about seven feet long. It’s very rare to find a whole one because they’re concertinaed. They’re stunningly beautiful. I bought two Coptic bibles there that were about 400 years old. The pages are like bark. All hand-constructed and handwritten …’

He stresses, though: ‘I’m curious but I’m always going towards the light. So when things were going bat shit and I couldn’t figure anything out … I got to this point of: “This is ridiculous. There’s something to all this. Maybe I’ve been hexed. Maybe someone’s put a fucking curse on me.” So I called the guy at Barrington’s …’

Niven was put in touch with someone who offered help – at a price. ‘I’d walked through the door. Whatever scepticism I had, I’d knocked on the door and it had been opened so I walked through it.’ For several months, he studied under ‘a mad monk – he was huge and looked like he’d been picked out of a medieval monastery. To this day I still don’t know how much of a bullshitter he was. I do know how much of a manipulator he was because I had to fly him here. I had to fly him there. I had to take care of him at this point. But he introduced me to a whole area of reading that I’d been oblivious to. Which was basically occult reading … the secret knowledge. I learned that the simple truth is that truth is simple. That you simply find the truth by simply being truthful.

‘At this point in my life I have a real clarity of darkness and light. But at that point I was just in pain. Isolated and confused. And this guy said, “I can ceremonially get rid of the negatives that are attacking you.” And I was being psychologically attacked and I was in a psychological and spiritual warfare. There was a lot of negativity being put my way. Goldstein is just one of the people who was putting out that energy in my direction. Axl was another who was putting out that energy in my direction. Yoda was probably another one that was putting out that energy because she wanted to exploit him.

‘I was his guard. Once I was out of the way they could feed off him like fucking maggots. So I had to go and have these special knives made, crudely, out of a particular copper. And there was going to be some ceremony of putting the knives in a certain way. And the fact that a water pipe broke was supposed to be symbolic. And I started to go, I think I’m being fucking had here. And I eventually cut myself off from this guy. But, yeah, my open mind, at that moment, to such as hexing and hoodoo was an act of defensive desperation … nothing was working and all felt unpleasant … I couldn’t figure what the hell was going on … and not going on …’

The other two clips from that soundcheck didn't sound like either The General or Oklahoma.

Probably wishful thinking, but I think they'd fit more to Oklahoma than to what we can hear on the cell phone recording of The General.

Anyone have a link to the exact clip I'm referring to? There's too many clips online.

I want the CD era to come to an end but that would require releasing everything that’s left

It's unfortunate he couldn't tackle such themes in his prime more or just the world in general. Something... anything...

Civil War
Catcher In The Rye

Those are anomalies in the discography. Lyrically they show so much promise.