In the Jungle: My Axl Rose Years

When Guns N' Roses released their debut album Appetite for Destruction in 1987, I was thirteen years old, an angst-ridden young man in the making. My parents had divorced several years earlier, and I was in my final year at a conservative Catholic grade school called Christ the King. My father took on the tremendous burden of raising three kids after my mother left, and my relationship with him was typically antagonistic, marked by weekly battles of shouting and shoving—battles my younger sister, in a fit of tears, had to break up more than once. I was insane to think that I could win a shouting/shoving match with my father: he was almost twice my weight and a one-time champion wrestler. As far as Catholic school was concerned, I was much too cynical to be bamboozled by the weekly doses of piety and dogma disseminated by the nuns, and so I was ripe for another kind of religious experience.

As soon as I heard their first single, "Welcome to the Jungle," Axl Rose's voice and lyrics struck me as the perfect manifestation of every frustrated feeling I had bottled up in me. Here was a force that had been born into the world to address my particular woes. It felt like speed; it sounded like truth. I had never heard a singer with the energy and strange power of Axl's voice. I stood in my bedroom, singing along in the mirror, confident that something important had found me. I had no way of knowing then that this mercurial, mesmerizing, impulsive rock-n-roll bard with the tattoos, bandana, and raspy howl would come to dominate my life for the next six years. Just as Bob Dylan had inspired countless admirers to pick up their pens and write down their stories, so Axl Rose prompted me to express myself through words, a journey that began with him and would later culminate in the discovery of William Wordsworth and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. Incredibly rock-n-roll paved the way for literature.

My father had recently bought a high-fidelity Kenwood stereo with five-foot speakers—one of the few extravagances he allowed himself during this tense time of fiscal burdens—and I gave him Appetite on cassette for his birthday. I suppose it was my way of communicating with him, of making him privy to the bellicose bent I found so endlessly fascinating and which I identified with so strongly. Axl was telling the world to go to hell; he did most things his own way and found compromise nearly impossible. Megalomaniacal and ego-driven, when Axl could not get his way the result was usually explosive. Magazine reports had him throwing hotel room furniture off the balcony into the swimming pool, getting arrested for violent outbursts, and kicking naked women out of his room, and I found all this so enviable, so worthy of my eager teenage worship. (In fairness to Axl the professional, when the band was about to self-destruct from drug abuse in 1989, it was he who forced the other members to get clean, and when the drummer, Steven Adler, failed to kick his heroin habit, Axl fired him.)

I could not—for a multitude of reasons—go to my father and say, "Dad, I'm a teenager and I'm confused and angry about the way things have turned out," and so I gave him Axl Rose instead. I wanted so badly for him to hear it. He listened on his new Kenwood stereo and, if I remember correctly, even enjoyed some of the songs. Each time I heard Axl's voice coming from my father's bedroom it sounded to me like a small triumph, as if he was getting closer to the inner turmoil that disrupted me every day. This inner turmoil had me baffled, but when I read that Axl had been diagnosed with manic depression, I decided that it was the perfect description of what ailed me, as well—never mind that many teenage lives are tossed up...