The wild moment Axl Rose killed a beetle with a shotgun
The numerous stories of riotous behaviour from one of the foremost monarchs of the rock and roll royalty, Guns N’ Roses’ leading man and the most iconic, and often pouting face of hair metal, Axl Rose are varied and always just a little bit vulgar.
Those stories, all feathered with varying degrees of the truth as they are, often involve the singer being late to shows because he was spending time watching Teenage Mutant Turtles, getting punched by David Bowie after fighting over a girl, or just your average run-of-the-mill rock star abandon of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.
Far fewer involve him yielding a deadly weapon against a household bug. And it was in his own bloody home, for that matter. I doubt you can claim on the insurance for that, though I suppose he might be alright, given the estimated 100million records that his gaudy band have sold over the years.
Of course, Axl Rose couldn’t just swat the moth away, or try and catch and release it. No, Rose had to kick things up a notch, and that meant reaching for his firearm to blast the tiny insect into a new world, like a fucking madman.
Craig Duswalt, Rose’s former assistant – or one of the many, at least – revealed the singer’s staunch need for a bug-free house was less about Raid and more about straight gun-smoking warfare. Rose was at his Malibu home during a break from the Use Your Illusion tour of 1993 – one of the longest tours in history, no less – when a moth had the audacity to intrude on his abode.
He instructed Duswalt to “keep an eye” on the moth as the singer ran upstairs. Rose then came back downstairs with “a long gun… a rifle maybe, or even a shotgun.” It took a moment for his assistant to connect the incongruous dots. As the flying insect nestled in and around the home’s chandelier, Rose instructed his assistant to ‘move’ the moth into the corner so he didn’t shoot out the expensive light, making sure to keep it in his crosshairs.
The ‘Paradise City’ singer made Duswalt fetch him a chair. But puzzlingly, he didn’t intend to stand on it, instead he “positioned himself under the chair, lying on his back”, whatever that means, aiming firmly at the multi-eyed invader all the while. As Duswalt made a last valiant attempt to remove the light-lover in a more measured manner, he told Axl that he thought he could reach the moth with a flyswatter. Rose’s simple reply? “Not going to happen.”
And POW! The moth was no more, gone without a trace – unless you count the large hole in the ceiling and the tinnitus. But aside from, it was as though it had never been in the house at all.
It’s one of the more curious Axl Rose stories you’ll hear and is an insight into the carefree nature he was enjoying at the time. It’s one of many legendary tales of rock star excess and the highs and lows that can be found in Duswalt’s book Welcome To My Jungle as he chronicles the time he spent on tour with the band between 1991 and 1993.
The book captures the final moments of Guns ‘N’ Roses as their implosion came soon after and it was hedonistic acts like this which highlighted the individuals in the band’s slow downfall. Things had gotten out of hand. The moment someone enjoys a break from work by blasting a moth into their wall with a shotgun is the moment that they should ‘break’ from work entirely.
Bomb threats, excess boozing, and crowds booing, increasing unruliness had all taken their toll on the frontman. So, I suppose we can be thankful that on this occasion, it was just an aged moth that at least enjoyed a brief moment in a mansion that paid for it.
