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Re: Watch You Bleed: The Saga Of Guns N Roses
# Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
# Pub. Date: August 26, 2008
From the New York Times bestselling author, the complete story of the last rock supergroup'” from their drug-fueled blast-off in the 1980s to the turbulent life of legendary singer Axl Rose and his fifteen-year, multi-million dollar effort to make the perfect hardrock album.
With 90 million of the band's records sold worldwide since 1987, Guns N' Roses prolonged rock music past its sell-by date with controversial albums and immense, often riotous world tours. But the band's complete story has never been fully told'”until now. In his sixth major rock biography, Stephen Davis details the riveting story of a band that originated in the gutters of Sunset Strip and went on to set attendance records on the biggest stadiums on the planet.
Watch You Bleed documents the improbable story of W. Axl Rose, the biggest rock star of his generation. Taken from an abusive father in his infancy, he was raised as "Bill Bailey" in a strictly religious Indiana household by a stepfather who beat him for playing Led Zeppelin songs on the family piano. After quitting high school, and on the run from the police in his hometown, Axl arrived in Los Angeles in the midst of the street battles for supremacy among the top music genres of the eighties'”post-punk, thrash, hair metal, and glam. The book also charts the backgrounds of every band member, especially Slash, a Hollywood street kid whose designer mother dated David Bowie.
Davis brilliantly captures the birth of Guns' raw power, which'”despite rape charges, drug-induced rampages, and a general appetite for destruction'” launched the band into the pantheon of rock gods such as LedZeppelin and the Rolling Stones. With a wealth of detail, Davis looks at Axl's unrelenting quest to release the long-awaited, mystery-shrouded Chinese Democracy album, as well as the further adventures of some of the Gunners under the banner of the hard-rocking band Velvet Revolver. For the first time, millions of Guns N' Roses fans will learn the whole truth'”sometimes funny, sometimes tragic'”about the last of the great rock bands.
Anyone planning to pick this up today? Most unauthorised books aren't worth the paper they're printed on but I've heard great things about his Led Zep book Hammer Of The Gods.
- A Private Eye
- Rep: 77
Re: Watch You Bleed: The Saga Of Guns N Roses
Probably not. It might be very good but until Axl gives his story I'm not sure there are many tales left worth telling that we haven't already heard 
- monkeychow
- Rep: 661
Re: Watch You Bleed: The Saga Of Guns N Roses
On a side note, I was at Chapters one day (in a rare, rare fucking visit!) and I saw an unauthorized bio of Axl Rose and the other was none other than Mick Wall. I was like... what the fuck!?
Yeah that's this one:
I'd be interested to pick up both at some stage...although an unauthorised account always needs a lot of salt with it....
- Bright Eyes 2005
- Rep: 27
Re: Watch You Bleed: The Saga Of Guns N Roses
I am going to buy Stephen Davis book tomorrow--Hammer of the Gods is possibly the greatest rock book ever written! It's a huge compliment to the legacy of GN'R that he chose them as a subject.
Re: Watch You Bleed: The Saga Of Guns N Roses
Excerpt: Stephen Davis' Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses
Some think the legend of Guns N' Roses began in the nighttime Los Angeles of 1985, a distant echo of West Hollywood's neon-lit Sunset Strip. Others think it should begin ten years earlier, at the confluence of two Indiana rivers, the Wabash and the Tippecanoe, in the 1970s. But in this telling, the GN'R saga begins in gritty New York, in upper Manhattan, on a sweltering, run-down street in the late afternoon of a summer day in 1980.
Actually it could begin way below the actual city street, in the deeply recessed concrete canyon of the Cross Bronx Expressway, which is where the two young hitchhikers from Indiana decided to get out of the car. It had been a good ride until then, a straight shot from the Ohio line across I-80, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. Bill Bailey and his friend Paul, both eighteen, had left central Indiana via I-65 thirty hours earlier and were making good hitching time toward their first visit to New York City.
The Ford Econoline van that had packed them up crossed the Hudson over the majestic George Washington Bridge. They were on I-95 now. Crossing on the upper deck, looking south, they could see the Empire State Building and the twin towers of the World Trade Center shimmering in the summer haze. Bill Bailey looked up and saw they were passing a sign that said LAST EXIT IN MANHATTAN. He said, "Hey, man. Let us off, OK?"
"I can't pull over," the driver said. He was an electronics salesman on his way to Providence. They were now headed east in the deep-walled pit of the Cross Bronx Expressway.
Bill asked, "Where's the next exit?"
"Way the hell up in the East Bronx."
The hitchers looked at each other. All they had were their backpacks and maybe thirty bucks between them. "Let us off here," Bill said.
"Man, are you sure? It'll be hard to get out of here."
"Yeah, let us out." Just then, traffic slowed into the constipation typical of I-95 as it crosses New York City. The boys jumped out. Cars honked at them as they inched along the sheer walls, looking for a way out. Drivers laughed at them, told them they were fucking insane. A trucker blasted his air horn and they jumped at the sound. The walls of the roadway were at least a hundred feet high, and all they could see were the tops of the buildings up at street level.
After a while they found the service ladder and scaled the wall, a thousand horns blaring far below, emerging into immigrant New York City, circa 1980: Calcutta on the Hudson.
To Bill and his friend, it was bedlam, a Caribbean neighborhood in Washington Heights with a funky street scene of bodegas and shouting kids playing under open hydrants, crones yelling out of windows in Spanish, idlers under shop awnings, hustlers working the corners of 177th and Broadway. Bill and Paul, from Tippecanoe County in Indiana, were the only white faces in a sea of black people, Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans, Dominicans, Muslim women in veils, Haitians, Hindus, Chinese shopkeepers, and lots of kids immediately picking up on two white boys who'd just climbed out of the hellish Cross Bronx like hayseed mountaineers in cowboy boots, blue jeans, and very long straight hair. The boys just stood and gaped, checking out this scene. "Rapper's Delight," bass-heavy hip-hop, blasted out of a bodega speaker. Lurid graffiti covered every flat surface. Kids were busting moves '” break dancing '” on the sidewalk. Bill Bailey had never seen this before. Basically, there weren't any black people in his part of Indiana, so they might as well have been in Senegal.
Now an old man limped over to them. He gave them the once-over, seeming to linger over Bill's cowboy boots. Bill was becoming uneasy now, his friend noticed, which was never a good thing, because, when agitated or upset, Bill's behavior could get a little out there. Finally, the old man spoke, or rather squawked, in a high-pitched shriek.
"DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?"
The boys, taken aback, just looked at him.
"I SAID, DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?"
Bill Bailey said, "Uh, we're just trying to get to'¦"
"YOU'RE IN THE JUNGLE, BABY!"
Bill Bailey '” the future W. Axl Rose '” just stared at him in wonderment. And then the little old man wound himself up to his full fury and told these white boys what they could expect from New York City at the tail end of the seventies: years of bankruptcy, endemic crime, corruption, decadence '” the gateway to the eighties and the scourge of AIDS. He told it to them straight from the gut:
"YOU'RE GONNA DIE!"
Sometimes, legends come from true stories, and this is one of them.
Welcome to the jungle.
From WATCH YOU BLEED by Stephen Davis. Published by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) 2008 by Stephen Davis.
