“Chinese Democracy was a boring record. But calling it Guns N' Roses was not honest. It was totally a solo record”: GN’R’s ex manager takes aim at Axl Rose

Guns N’ Roses ex-manager has rubbished the band’s later years and made it plain who he thinks was to blame for the slow disintegration of their original line up: Axl Rose.

Alan Niven managed GN’R from 1986 to 1991 when he was ousted in what he describes as a “coup” by the band’s tour manager Doug Goldstein and lawyer Michele Anthony. Speaking to the Appetite for Distortion podcast, there seems to be no love lost between Niven and his successors.

“Goldstein was the tour manager,” Niven said. “He had nothing to do with forming the marketing strategy that I employed. He makes some rather extravagant claims of his significance, and the one thing I will say was, yeah, you were significant as the tour manager. You did a good job as a tour manager. And I could ride on the bus getting to the next gig, knowing he was on it."

He continued: "So, Doug is a tour manager. That's what he's good at. And let's get something else straight, because this is not an opinion. It's a matter of history we can all look at. And because it's history, it's incontrovertible. The fact the matter is, once he and Michele Anthony pulled their coup, what do we get out of Guns N' Roses? We get The Spaghetti Incident, (and) an Axl solo record masquerading under a GN'R logo."

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"The biggest sin of the record was that it was boring; that Chinese Democracy was a boring record. But calling it Guns N' Roses was not honest. It was totally a solo record, and that's all it has been since 1991.

"All those years were lost. Who knows what that band could have done had it stayed together; had it kept its chemical dynamic... Who knows what they would have written in those 10, 20, 30 years?"

So why did the original line up fall apart? There’s a simple explanation, according to Niven: "Axl got control of everything.”

To illustrate his point he recalled an incident from early on in his managerial tenure when they were touring with the Cult in the late '80s. "My joy in making rock and roll pretty much came to an end in September of '86, when I signed the contract with GN'R, because from then on, it was pressure, anxiety, and stress, all the time. We're in Toronto, second or third day on their very first tour with The Cult."

"I could only get to the third show, and I just dropped my bags on my bed, and there's a bang on the door. I go to the door, and there's Izzy, and he looks frazzled. He pushes past me, goes into the room, and flops onto the sofa. I go, 'Izzy, what's up? What's wrong?' 'That fu**er makes us fu**ing miserable every fu**ing day.' It's a quote I will never forget."