Latest news with #SoundN'Fury:RockN'RollStories
Express Tribune
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Former Guns N' Roses manager Alan Niven recalls challenges managing band
Former Guns N' Roses manager Alan Niven has shared his experiences working with the band, detailing early challenges and the band's behaviour during the 1980s. Niven, who has managed artists including Great White and Mötley Crüe, discusses his time with Guns N' Roses in his upcoming book, Sound N' Fury: Rock N' Roll Stories, which will be released on August 5. Niven explained how guitarist Slash persuaded him to take on the management role after he initially declined multiple times. 'No one wanted Guns N' Roses. They'd been through at least two other management situations,' Niven told the Daily Mail, describing the group as 'a nightmare.' He credited Slash for eventually convincing him, noting his intelligence and charm during their first meetings. Reflecting on the band's rise to fame, Niven described incidents such as being approached by fans while driving Slash around town, observing, 'Everybody knows you're famous before you do.' He shared memories of an early band meeting where Izzy Stradlin fell asleep at the table, leaving Niven alone with Slash, who then showed him a snake feeding on a rabbit in the bedroom. Niven also spoke about Axl Rose, describing him as a 'narcissist' and noting that fame 'amplified' Rose's personality. He recalled his departure from the band in 1991, which came via an unexpected phone call from Rose, stating, 'I never heard from him again.'
Los Angeles Times
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Guns N' Roses' former manager recalls harrowing stories, calls Mötley Crüe ‘brutish entertainers'
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.'
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Former Guns N' Roses manager claims Axl Rose now takes 50% of the band's income
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Former Guns N' Roses manager Alan Niven has claimed that frontman Axl Rose now collects 50% of the band's income. Niven was speaking with Appetite For Distortion, the Guns N' Roses-themed podcast hosted by Brando Weissle. "It's a control thing with Axl," says Niven. "Here's another little snapshot that is illuminating and goes to forming a correct perception. Axl takes 50% of the income of Guns N' Roses now. 50%, okay? That, to me, is anathema. He is not Guns N' Roses. "They were five individuals. It was a chemistry. It was a moment. But Axl wants to be in control of everything all the time. And look what that gets you. A boring solo record and a shitty thing of punk covers. And that's it." Niven is presumably referring to the last two Guns N' Roses albums, 1993's covers album, "The Spaghetti Incident?", and 2008's famously long-awaited Chinese Democracy. This isn't the first time Niven – who managed Guns N' Roses from 1986 to 1991 and oversaw their chaotic rise to prominence – has criticised Axl Rose. "I have no hope of, or interest in, a new Guns N' Roses album," he told Classic Rock in 2022. "The tantrums of youth look absurd on a 60-year-old. It's a shame they have been creatively impotent since 1991." Alan Niven's book Sound N' Fury: Rock N' Roll Stories is published on June 24 and can be pre-ordered now. Guns N' Roses' Because What You Want & What You Get Are Two Completely Different Things Tour kicks off at Songdo Moonlight Park in Incheon, South Korea, on May 1. Full dates below. May 01: Incheon Songdo Moonlight Park, South KoreaMay 05: Yokohama K Arena, JapanMay 10: Taoyuan Sunlight Arena, TaiwanMay 13: Bangkok Thunderdome Stadium, ThailandMay 17: Mumbai Mahalaxmi Racecourse, IndiaMay 23: Riyadh Kingdom Arena, Saudi ArabiaMay 27: Abu Dhabi Etihad Arena, UAEMay 30: Shekvetili Parka, Georgia^Jun 02: Istanbul Tüpraş Stadyumu, Turkey^Jun 06: Coimbra Estádio Cidade de Coimbra, Portugal^Jun 09: Barcelona Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys, SpainJun 12: Florence Firenze Rocks, Italy*^Jun 15: Hradec Kralove Rock For People, Czech Republic*^Jun 18: Dusseldorf Merkur Spiel-Arena, Germany^Jun 20: Munich Allianz Arena, Germany^Jun 23: Birmingham Villa Park, UKJun 26: London Wembley Stadium, UKJun 29: Aarhus Eskelunden, Denmark+Jul 02: Trondheim Granåsen Ski Centre, Norway+Jul 04: Stockholm Strawberry Aren, Sweden+Jul 07: Tampere Ratina Stadium, Finland+Jul 10: Kaunas Darius and Girėnas Stadium, Lithuania+Jul 12: Warsaw PGE Nardowy, Poland+Jul 15: Budapest Puskás Aréna, Hungary+Jul 18: Belgrade Ušće Park, Serbia+Jul 21: Sofia Vasil Levski Stadium, Bulgaria+Jul 24: Vienna Ernst Happel Stadion, Austria#Jul 28: Luxembourg Open Air, Luxembourg#Jul 31: Wacken Festival, Germany* * = Festival appearance+ = with Public Enemy^ = with Rival Sons# = with Sex Pistols featuring Frank Carter Tickets are on sale now.
