Axl Rose, the voice of Guns N’ Roses turns 60


“He was so strict. [el ambiente en la casa familiar] that everything you did was wrong,” the singer recalled of his childhood and adolescence in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1991. “There was a lot of censorship. You were not allowed to make any decisions. The sex was bad, the music was bad. I ended up leaving, but many guys stay. I wanted to tell them… that they can walk away too”, about the message of some of their songs.

When he left he was 17 years old and he left Lafayette, Indiana, where he was born and raised, for Los Angeles, where he began his career as a musician. William Bruce Rose Jr., the name he was given at birth, left behind a turbulent childhood that he has spoken about on different occasions. His biological father died when he was little and when his mother remarried, he changed his last name.

“My real father was my stepfather, as far as I knew,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1992. The singer did not know that his mother’s husband was his stepfather until he was 17 years old. After discovering it, he reacquired his last name and replaced his name with Axl. “My real father was a pretty fucked up individual,” he told the magazine.

In that same interview, the lead singer of Guns N’ Roses stated that during a regressive hypnosis session he remembered that his father had abused him when he was two years old. “I remember a needle. I remember getting an injection and I remember being sexually abused by this man and seeing something horrible happen to my mother when she came for me.”

Things did not seem to improve with his mother’s second husband, who, he said, mistreated him and his siblings. He also maintained a religious discipline at home in which restrictions were customary. For example, it was not allowed to listen rock ‘n’roll. “Music was my best friend,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “She was everything, so I found ways to listen to her. I remember one time my friend Dave called me and put Supertramp on the other end of the phone. I acted like I was talking to him so no one would notice.” The then young William rebelled against authority and began to get into trouble.

Already in Los Angeles, Rose began to play with various bands until in 1985 Rose and Izzy Stradlin founded Guns N’ Roses, whose classic composition was completed by Slash, Duff McKagan and Steven Adler. In 1986 they signed with Geffen Records.

They released their first album in 1987: “Appetite for Destruction”, which contained the hits “Sweet Child o’ Mine”, “Welcome To the Jungle” and “Paradise City”. A year later “GN’ R Lies” was released, in which “Patience” could be found, followed three years later by “Use Your Illusion I”, with “Don’t Cry” and “November Rain”, and “Use Your Illusion II.”

In 1993, they released the album “The Spaghetti Incident?”, which included a song written by the notorious killer Charles Manson. This fact was added to other controversies derived from the behavior of the stars, violence in concerts or related to the consumption of substances. They also received criticism for some songs such as “One In a Million”, accused of being racist and homophobic. Others of his lyrics were sexist.

His latest work so far

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Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose turns 60. (EFE/GIORGIO BENVENUTI)

By then, Guns N’ Roses it no longer had two of its original members, Adler and Stradlin. Slash left in 1996 and two years later, McKagan did. Fans of the band, or at least what was left of it, had to wait until 2008 to see a record on the shelves bearing their name again. The work was called “Chinese Democracy” and it is his last work so far.

“It’s a very complex record,” he told Rolling Stone in 2006 about the long period of time it took to prepare for that work. “I’m trying to do something different. Some of the arrangements are something like Queen. Some people are going to say ‘It doesn’t sound like Axl Rose, it doesn’t sound like Guns N’ Roses‘. But you will like at least some songs.”

In 2016, at a crossroads between bands, Axl Rose joined Australians AC/DC on their world tour “Rock or Bust.” Rose replaced the vocalist, Brian Johnson, who had to leave the concerts on medical advice due to his hearing problems.

“We met very early, at the beginning of Guns N’ Roses, in the first couple of years at the Forum in LA I met him [Angus Young] and Brian backstage,” Rose told NME in 2016. “Wasn’t it at the police station?” Young asked, “No…well, that was the second time!” In that same interview, he said that he had been a fan of AC/DC since he was a child and that the band had influenced his own: “It was a great influence on Izzy [Stradlin] and mine. And then it was something we had in common when we met Slash.”

Rose married Erin Everly, on whom “Sweet Child o’ Mine” is inspired and in whose video he appears, in a Las Vegas chapel in 1990. It is said that, shortly after the wedding, she already wanted to annul the marriage, but the definitive dissolution did not come until a few months later, in 1991. In 1994, she denounced him for gender violence and they reached an out-of-court settlement.

Source-www.diariolibre.com