During an appearance on The Bad Decisions Podcast with Scott Nathan last month, L.A. Guns guitarist and Guns N’ Roses founder Tracii Guns was asked about what it was like to be roommates with frontman Axl Rose back in the day, to which he replied:
“He was a great roommate. The interesting thing about Axl is he really knows right from wrong. Let’s just start there. He’s smart, he’s responsible, he is not afraid to ask for help when he needs help, he’s always ready to give help. A really solid person. We really had a great friendship. We were inseparable for a few years.”
He went on to reveal that while he was a great roommate, Rose struggled with his mental health.
“The thing that changed — and I had known; he had told me — he had… What did we call it back then? Manic depression is what he called? ‘Well, yeah, I have manic depression,’ blah, blah, blah. ‘I’m supposed to be taking these meds, but I’m okay.’
“And I would have never known — until the one day. And the one day was, he was off with a junior high school friend of mine. And he had taken some ecstasy, and we didn’t see him for, like, a week and he showed up at this gig and he was just like a completely different person. I was, like, ‘Whoa. Who are you? Who’s this guy?’ And that’s when the other side of that kind of kicked in,” Guns said.
“I knew I wasn’t gonna… I couldn’t deal with that. I loved him on the one side, the person I knew, and we were creative together, we were funny together, but at that time, he really wanted to take control over everything around him. And that’s when we were getting really popular.”
He continued: “Before that, he was more aware and taking in information and kind of sorting out what we were doing and how this is going and all that stuff. But once we knew, once he knew that we were locked, that Guns N’ Roses was going only one direction… I mean, sometimes he would talk for 40 minutes out of a 60-minute set on stage, stuff like that. And I would look at Izzy [Stradlin, Guns N’ Roses guitarist] and Izzy would be very passive about it. I’d be, like, ‘F*ck that, man. I’m here to play guitar.’”
“And so that’s when that whole thing started, the platform, the Axl Rose platform, and I think people really connected with it, obviously, and I think they still do,” Guns added. “The things that he has to say, the things that are interesting to people, and his very — what’s the word? — loud and confident opinions on things like that. People latch to them, and it’s very heartfelt, and he’s very sincere when he says things, even if later he kind of might backtrack a little bit and say, ‘Well, I really meant it then, but humans grow and we move on.’ He’s very in [his head], and that’s what makes him great. But at that point, it just scared the sh*t out of me. I was just, like, ‘This isn’t a fun rock and roll band anymore. This is something else.'”
