Guns N' Roses' former manager recalls harrowing stories, calls Mötley Crüe ‘brutish entertainers'

Los Angeles Times

5 days ago

As the manager of Guns N' Roses during the band's debauched heyday, Alan Niven has no shortage of colorful stories.
The LAPD fetching Axl Rose from his West Hollywood condo and bringing him directly to the stage so Guns N' Roses could open for the Rolling Stones at the L.A. Coliseum.
Slash going off script and taking a Winnebago for a joyride — and then standing in rush hour traffic and brandishing a bottle of Jack Daniels — while filming the 'Welcome to the Jungle' music video.
Guitarist Izzy Stradlin carrying a $750,000 cashier's check that Niven had to take from him and hide in his own shoe for safekeeping during a raucous trip to New Orleans.
About 15 minutes into a thoughtful Zoom conversation, the garrulous Niven poses a question of his own: 'Why was I managing Guns N' Roses?'
Given what he describes, it is a good question.
'Because nobody else would do it,' he says, noting that the band's former management firm 'could not get away fast enough' from the group. 'No one else would deal with them. Literally, I was not bottom of the barrel, darling — I was underneath the barrel. It was desperation.'
Case in point: his very first Guns N' Roses band meeting. On the way into the house, Niven says, he passed by a broken toilet and 'one of the better-known strippers from [the] Sunset Strip.' Stradlin and Slash were the only ones who'd shown up. Once the meeting started, Stradlin nodded out at the table and Slash fed 'a little white bunny rabbit' to a massive pet python.
'And I'm sitting there going, 'Keep your cool. This may be a test. Just go with it and get through it.' But that was my first GNR meeting.'
These kinds of stranger-than-fiction anecdotes dominate Niven's wildly entertaining (and occasionally jaw-dropping) new book, 'Sound N' Fury: Rock N' Roll Stories.' With brutal honesty and vivid imagery, he describes the challenges of wrangling Guns N' Roses before and after the band's 1987 debut, 'Appetite for Destruction.' These include mundane business matters (like shooting music videos on a budget) and more stressful moments, such as navigating Rose's mercurial moods and ensuring that band members didn't take drugs on international flights.
But 'Sound N' Fury' also focuses extensively on Niven's time managing the bluesy hard rock band Great White, whose lead singer, the late Jack Russell, had his own struggles with severe addiction. To complicate the entanglement, Niven also produced and co-wrote dozens of the band's songs, including hits 'Rock Me' and 'House of Broken Love.'
Niven mixes delightful bits of insider gossip into these harrowing moments: firing for bad behavior future superstar director Michael Bay from filming Great White's 'Call It Rock 'n' Roll' music video; Berlin's Terri Nunn sending President Reagan an 8-by-10 photo with a saucy message; clandestinely buying Ozzy Osbourne drinks on an airplane behind Sharon Osbourne's back.
And his lifelong passion for championing promising artists also comes through, including his recent advocacy for guitarist Chris Buck of Cardinal Black.
Unsurprisingly, Niven says people had been asking him for 'decades' to write a book ('If I had $1 for every time somebody asked me that, I'd be living in a castle in Scotland'). He resisted because of his disdain for rock 'n' roll books: 'To me, they all have the same story arc and only the names change.'
A magazine editor paid him such a huge compliment that he finally felt compelled to write one.
'He said, 'I wish I could write like you,' ' Niven says. 'When he said that, it put an obligation on me that I couldn't shake. Now I had to be intelligent about it and go, 'Well, you hate rock 'n' roll books, so what are you going to do?' '
Niven's solution was to eschew the 'usual boring, chronological history' and structure 'Sound N' Fury' more like a collection of vignettes, all told with his usual dry sense of humor and razor-sharp wit.
'If you tell the stories well enough, they might be illuminating,' he says. 'I saw it more as a record than I did a book. And you hope that somebody will drop the needle in at the beginning of the record and stay with the record until it's over.
'For me, dialogue was key — and, fortunately, they were all more f— up than I was,' he adds. 'So my memory of the dialogue is pretty good. … There's some dialogue exchanges in there that imprinted themselves for as long as I live.'
One of the artists that doesn't get much ink in 'Sound N' Fury' is another group known for its hedonistic rock 'n' roll behavior, Mötley Crüe.
Niven promoted and facilitated distribution of the independent release of the band's 1981 debut, 'Too Fast for Love' and helped connect Mötley Crüe with Elektra Records. He doesn't mince words in the book or in conversation about the band, saying he feels 'very ambivalent about the small role I played in the progression of Mötley Crüe because I know who they are. I know what they've done to various people. I know how they've treated certain numbers of women. And I am not proud of contributing to that.
'And on top of that, someone needs to turn around and say, 'It's a thin catalog that they produced,' in terms of what they produced as music,' he continues. 'There's not much there and it's certainly not intellectually or spiritually illuminating in any way, shape or form. They are brutish entertainers, and that's it.'
Still, Niven says he didn't hesitate to include the stories that he did in 'Sound N' Fury,' and by explanation notes a conversation he had with journalist Mick Wall.
'He sent me an email the other day saying, 'Welcome to the club of authors,' ' he recalls. 'And I'm going, 'Yeah, right. You've been doing it all your life. I'm just an enthusiastic amateur.' And he said, 'Welcome to the club — and by the way, it's cursed.''
Niven pondered what that meant. 'A little light bulb went on in my head, and I went, 'Ah, yes, the curse is truth,' because a lot of people don't want to hear the truth and don't want to hear what truly happened.
'There are people in the Axl cult who won't be happy. There will be one or two other people who won't be happy, but there's no point in recording anything unless it's got a truth to it.'
Niven says when the book was done, he didn't necessarily gain any surprising insights or new perspectives on what he had documented.
'The fact that people are still interested in what you've got to say about things that happened 30 years ago is almost unimaginable,' he says. 'I never used to do interviews back in the day. But at this point, it would just be graceless and rank bad manners not to respond.
'Occasionally people go, 'Oh, he's bitter,'' Niven continues. 'No, I am not. I don't think the book comes off as bitter. Many times I've said it was actually a privilege to go through that period of time because I didn't have to spend my life saying to myself, 'I wonder what it would have been like to have had a No. 1. To have had a successful band.' Well, I found out firsthand.'
Niven stresses firmly that management was more than a job to him.
'It was my way of life,' he says. 'People who go into management and think it's a job that starts maybe at about half past 10 in the morning once you've had your coffee and then you check out at six, they're not true managers.
'They're not in management for the right reasons,' he adds. 'Rock 'n' roll is a way of f— life. It's 24/7, 365. And that was my approach to it.'