During an appearance on the podcast “Appetite for Distortion,” former Guns N’ Roses manager Alan Niven revealed that the band’s 1987 tour with Aerosmith almost never happened because frontman Axl Rose wanted to cancel it. As Niven describes, Axl’s behavior was often quite unpredictable.
“Axl was always threatening to fire people or quit,” Niven explained. “He had me banned from the Aerosmith tour for three weeks at the beginning of it because I refused to cancel the tour. The problem was, Axl, I didn’t sign a contract just for you and your whim. I signed a contract with five individuals, collectively known as Guns N’ Roses, and I have a responsibility to five people, not just one. The other four wanted to go on tour.”
“As it was, I chose a very strange way to – off the wall way – to get out of that conundrum. When he called me and said, ‘Cancel the tour’ because I’ve got Izzy in the room, he said, ‘Niv, we gotta go.’ And everybody else wants to go and do the tour, but Axl says ‘Cancel it.’ So I picked up a pair of dice and threw them.”
Niven went on to explain that sometime later while at Axl’s birthday party, he realized who was influencing the frontman’s erratic behavior:
“It’s Axl’s birthday. And I actually go around to his apartment that morning, and I take him a really nice white Ovation guitar as a birthday present. And then I had a dinner for him at Le Dome – the dump, as we used to call it. Doug [Goldstein, later GN’R manager] and Tom [Zutaut, music executive ] went up to Axl’s apartment to pick him up and bring him down to dinner. Everybody else is there. We were all there, all seated at the table.”
“I sat at the end of the table, and I felt a hand go on my shoulder, and then Tom’s head was right here, and he whispered in my ear, ‘Doug Goldstein is not your friend,’ which was the first time I had a third party tell me that he is putting poison in Axl’s ear all the time. Slash, in his own book, said it was obvious to him that Goldstein wanted to snatch the brass ring. He was a treacherous individual.”
