Axl Rose vs Vince Neil: The original influencer boxing match
They say that famous people remain the age they got famous at for the rest of their lives. While this is a pertinent and often true statement regarding the vast majority of famous people, I’d like to put Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose as a pitch-perfect example of how this isn’t always the case. GNR’s breakout came when Rose was about 25 with the release of his band’s debut album, Appetite for Destruction. Based on the behaviour he’s displayed for pretty much his entire career, one would assume he was 15 rather than 25.
Axl Rose has spent the lion’s share of his career acting like a petulant, bullying, overstimulated child with the entire world at his feet. Fundamentally unable to control his own impulses, desperate to be heard and obeyed, with all the time people telling him ‘no’, akin to some real Joffrey Baratheon tantrums. Granted, this makes for incredible rock star behaviour. The aura of danger and rebellion he and his band brought into the pillow-soft world of hard rock in the late 1980s was legitimate and incredibly exciting.
However, it’s also true that Guns N’ Roses could have had all the dazzling tunes their debut record has to offer without their singer being 12 tons of festering cock-sores stuffed in a sweatsock (apologies for the mental image). Without him, there’s a chance we could also have a world without influencer boxing matches. If you asked me whether I’d get rid of ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ to get rid of Logan and Jake Paul, I truly don’t know what my answer would be.
This is because, arguably, the first example of the concept came from a handbags at dawn situation between Rose and Mötley Crüe squawker-in-chief Vince Neil. Now, a rivalry between the two bands makes perfect sense. The Crüe were pretty much the proto-Guns, their brand of punked-up hair metal providing a slightly more raucous alternative to the radio-shagging likes of Def Leppard and Poison. The rise of Axl Rose and the gang must have felt to the Crüe like All About Eve but with more leopard print.
Why did Vince Neil and Axl Rose nearly come to blows?
The truth is, like most things about 1980s hair metal, a lot more depressing and ugly. According to legend, the true source of the conflict came not from Rose and Neil, but from Neil and GNR rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin. In 1989, Stradlin attacked Neil’s then-wife, Sharise Ruddell, at the notorious LA club, the Cathouse, when she turned down his advances. Quite rightly, the next time Neil saw Stradlin, he punched him full in the face.
The problem was, this was right in the middle of the MTV Awards, in full view of the rest of GNR and their entourage. Needless to say, Axl Rose took offence to this and in the brawl that ensued, had to be dragged away from Neil by his security team. However, perhaps he was being too easily dragged as the latter spent the next few months talking up Rose’s offer of a fight in the LA rock press, fights that Rose never showed up for. It got to the point that in a televised interview with MTV, Neil laid down the gauntlet once and for all.
“[Rose] said a lot of bad things about me last few years and a lot of threats,” Neil raged, “He said, ‘Well, any time any place.’ And right now, I wanna put an end to this, and what I want is, Axl, if you are watching this, I want to challenge you to a fight. I’m gonna give you time and I’m gonna give you the place. There’s no backing out now, buddy. It’s time to put up or shut up.”
In a chilling vision of the future of entertainment, he laid out a plan that the Paul brothers presumably were listening to too closely, a few decades down the line. “I’d like to do it at an arena where people can come and see. I’d like to have it televised. I want the whole world to see this fight. I think it’s gonna be great. I’m really psyched for it because I need to put an end to this. It’ll end it, once and for all, the bad blood between us. So let’s do it.”
The fight never came to pass. If you think it was because both realised how stupid and immature the whole ordeal was, within two years, Rose was telling rock critics by name to ‘Get in the Ring’ on the song of the same name. In true schoolyard bully fashion, Rose was too much of a chicken to actually pick on someone his own size and stuck to threatening people he knew wouldn’t fight back. Sharise Ruddell would divorce Neil in 1993, which is the only part of this that resembles a happy ending. Good on her for getting out of the whole rat’s nest.
