It's So Easy

The passion for destruction is a creative passion,” was a celebrated dictum of Mikhail Bakunin, the 19th-century anarchist who was echoed in the writing of Michael Leeden after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center about the “war on terror.” He called America the “only truly revolutionary country in the world… Creative destruction is our middle name.” Despite my extensive research (and by that I mean searching “the Google” and Wikipedia like Roilo Goilez) there’s nothing to suggest that these ideologies helped make the world a better place. Or if there was anything creative about the destruction they left in their wake. Not even a song.

For someone like Steven Adler, founding member and drummer for Guns N’ Roses, he at least contributed to two of the greatest rock albums of the past two decades, with songs like Welcome to the Jungle and Sweet Child O’ Mine. Also, if anything, the only victim of Adler’s “creative destruction” was himself. He was sacked from the band publicly by frontman Axl Rose on MTV and descended into heavy drug addiction. As he writes at the start of his autobiography, My Appetite for Destruction (co-written with Lawrence J. Spagnola), “I didn’t need the media to bury me; I’ll do that on my own.”

That, however, is not why people will want to read this book. After all, we’ve had enough of stuff like James Frey and other books about junkies detailing their battles with substance abuse. What Adler has in his is the fact that the other characters in his story include childhood friends like guitarist Slash as well as the rest of the GNR, not to mention George Michael, Alice Cooper, Flea, Heather Locklear, Tommy Lee, Paul Stanley of KISS, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith and whole lotta groupies. Unlike the others, this book’s got a killer soundtrack as well.

Rehearsing at a studio behind the Guitar Center on the Sunset Strip, Adler recounts that it was there that Slash came up with the opening riff to Sweet Child. He writes: “He (Slash) created it to limber up his fingers, get them loose before playing. He sort of made fun with it, saying that in his head it sounded like the notes you’d play for circus music, the kind you hear on one of those tinny pipe organs.” On not playing drums on Patience, he writes, “I actually thought it was a great idea to keep it strictly acoustic with no drums… Can you imagine the Stones’ Charlie Watts trying to wedge a drum part into Lady Jane?”

The book closes with their debut’s 20th anniversary wherein Adler played the songs with ex-GNR members Izzy Stradlin and Duff McKagan. Slash was in the audience but decided not to play because “playing with us would so enrage Axl that it would doom any hope of a future official GNR reunion.”

Adler may not be a great or even good writer — but man, has the guy got a glorious story to tell. It’s readable and that’s enough. And, unlike the more intelligent and eloquent personages cited in the first paragraph, Adler’s indeed contributed to making the world a bearable if not better place.

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My Appetite for Destruction: Sex, Drugs & Guns N’ Roses is available in Fully Booked.