Ever since cracking the covers of Watch You Bleed I’ve been trying to come up with an intellectually solid reason for having always hated, hated, hated Guns N’ Roses. (The EYE WEEKLY style guide discourages all caps or italics for emphasis.) My instinctual reasons include the fact that “the Guns” were the constant sound emanating from those mullet-wearing, pickup-truck-driving death squads that prowled my homeland while growing up. But that’s not necessarily Guns N’ Roses’ fault.
What I’ve come up with is the band’s inherent phoniness. That’s not to say they weren’t “authentic” fuck-ups — Stephen Davis’ book provides ample proof that they were — but rather that they raced towards self-important pretentiousness faster than anyone before them. It took Bob Dylan 10 albums to arrive at Self Portrait and four albums for The Clash to make Sandinista! Guns N’ Roses fast-tracked to “November Rain” for their second album. From his calculated shock moments to his sub–Elton John balladry, Axl Rose was just the Jay Gatsby of rock.
Davis is also the author of Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, so don’t expect allusions to Gatsby in Watch You Bleed. Instead, Davis is the kind of music writer who drops adjectives like “Byronic” without shame while recounting every last indulgence of his subjects. The writing is sloppy, unreconstructed rockism (Wiki-like facts get repeated several times and buzzwords are misused), but otherwise Watch You Bleed is refreshingly sleazy and totally entertaining. Davis begins his story as Guns N’ Roses are living in a storage garage off the Sunset Strip. That era’s debauchery is often so vile the book should have a free clinic follow-up appointment card as part of its design: there is one slapstick moment in which ejaculate is literally flying through the air.
The story then moves into expected stadium territory with information that is unintentionally hilarious (“Red-eyed, unshaven, disheveled, distraught, Duff tried to get into the spirit of Bang Tango’s set”) to genuinely revealing. (Slash is a Louis-Ferdinand Céline fan and Duff is a multi-millionaire from investing early in Microsoft and Starbucks.) There’s much to giggle at but Davis does bring home the tragedy of a working band with three songwriters being whittled down to a Rose dictatorship within months of chart success. Ultimately, Davis’ unobtrusive narration allows the reader to pass judgment on the turfing of Izzy Stradlin for not moving on stage enough, or on Rose, a career misogynist and dyed-in-the-wool asshole, spending $75,000 to undergo a “new age exorcism ceremony.”
The exorcism didn’t work, as evidenced by the bulk of Davis’ research stopping cold at 1993. For the last 15 years, Rose has decayed into a release-date-TBA freak show. Will a “long-anticipated” album even matter in an age in which albums are obsolete? While the answer is more than likely no, Guns N’ Roses, who shot to stardom playing Aerosmith-derived boogie rock during grunge and post-rock’s ascendancy, has always done well at being inconsequential.