You will not believe Guns N’ Roses’ origin story.
Flashback to 1985. The craze of hair metal takes five Los Angeles kids, with the dream of becoming rockstars, to do their first tour to Seattle in a crappy 77 Oldsmobile that will break down in the middle of the road. This will then result in the band hitchhiking during a 40 hour trip and missing several of their shows. Coming back from the tour, the band members, unemployed and broke, make themselves their own piece of hell in an LA alley. Located in West Hollywood behind Sunset Boulevard, this space of about 12 square feet that was not even fitted to be a warehouse. It’s lack of air conditioning, bathroom, and kitchen made it just about the perfect dwelling place for a bunch of tattered musicians who wanted to go on with their crazy dream of becoming a relevant band. In resonance to its lovely conditions, the band called it the Hell House, as it was a living inferno of a place. Although it couldn’t stand more than three people sleeping in a wooden gallery built up by rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin, it wasn’t just the dwelling space for most of the band members, but also quite a parade of offbeat visitors: junkies, teen girls, and other aspiring musicians with nowhere to go.
To get to the closest bathroom, the hell dwellers had to walk 50 yards up the street. But it got to be so disgusting that front-man Axl Rose has even stated that at times he had to use cat-like measures such as a box to relief his bowels.
Naturally, the band’s nutrition wasn’t at its best. Only having bassist Duff Mackagan gaining an income to support the others, they lived on a budget of 3.75 USD a day. They knew their way to spend a buck, though, and looked for ways to spend half of their money on lunch and save up the other half so they could afford a bottle of a hard booze named “Night Train”. However, living in these unbearable conditions ended boosting up the band’s repertoire. After a night of fun with a bottle of the cheap liquor at Lizzie Grey’s place, inspiration overflowed among the band, and they wrote a song right after the experience. The result was a gritty narrative where Rose speaks in second person to a girl that he can’t get off his mind, inviting her to meet him after hours to listen to the “night train”. Isn’t that a classy way to tell a person to get wasted together?
Surprisingly, living among garbage somehow boosted the creativity and the sound of these future rockstars. Their trashy life experience, in a way, translated into the gritty raw vibes that made their debut album Appetite For Destruction (1987) stand out from the rest of hair metal bands of their time. It was among the decrepit walls of the Hell House that Slash came up with the riff for one of the band’s most distinctive songs “Welcome to the Jungle”. Perhaps, while Axl sang about this wildly fun place he calls the “jungle”, he was actually talking about the shithole where he and his bandmates would get drunk out of their minds at.
Although they didn’t have a cent to spare and their abode was in worse condition than Splinter’s den under the gutter, the rowdy boys had constant female visitors to their palace of filth. Attracted by the grit of their music and their glossy hard rock looks, these women would be accommodated as guests on the forsaken facilities. Many of the women who walked along in this never-ending parade of groupies would become a source of inspiration for the rising band.
Fatefully, two girls that went by the same name —Michelle— would be of great importance to the band and their lifestyle. The first one of them was a sort of girlfriend to Axl Rose and inspired one of the band’s most powerful songs from their first album: “My Michelle”. The story says that Axl and rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin where in the car with the young woman when Elton John’s cornily enchanting “Your Song” came up. She remarked how she would love for someone to write a song for her. Rose and Stradlin put their hands to the task and did it. However, the result was anything but flattering. It’s ruthless and utterly sincere, throwing out some heavy facts from the muse’s personal history: “Your daddy works in porno / Now that mommy’s not around/ She used to love her heroin / But now she’s underground.” Despite all of this, the girl liked the song, but asked the band that her identity would remain anonymous afterwards.
The case with the second Michelle is way more delicate and it gave way to the end of the Hell House era. According to Axl Rose, she was a “hippie chick” who would hang out periodically at the place, and one night she and the front-man had sex in the so-called “loft” of the rat’s den. The girl was barely fifteen years old. When the booze and drugs wore off, she freaked out and started messing with the band’s equipment. She then streaked down Sunset Boulevard, running towards a policeman claiming she had been raped by the frontman of the band. Such an alarming sight took the LAPD to the door of their trashy den, and Axl was caught up against the wall: either he left their beloved dirthole, or he’d spend years behind bars.
Once Axl went on the run, the rat’s den came to an end. He found asylum at the place of Vicky Hamilton, a close friend’s of Slash, while Michelle’s family charged him for statutory rape. For some reason, during Axl’s hiding, the family decided to drop the charges. The band would even mock the event with a flyer that read: “Send donations to Guns N’ Roses — Keep us out of jail fund.”
Looking back at the mid eighties, one thing is for certain: Guns’s past is as murky as their music.
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