Uzis for Christmas and LSD for dinner: Guns N’ Roses manager Alan Niven was wilder than the band
While Axl Rose was notorious for hair-flipping divadom, Slash was entrenched in his own substance issues, and the rest of the band fizzled with internal friction that’d often seep into their playing and recording process, so because of this, not just any Tom, Dick, or Harry could control Guns N’ Roses, who would always be hard to manage.
To beat Guns N’ Roses at their own game of hedonism, heated rivalry, and harassment, one had to master their way for themselves, and thus, enter Alan Niven, the band’s original manager. From 1986 to 1991, Niven used unorthodox, wild methods to lead the band into the stratosphere before Axl Rose could take no more of his outlandish personality and fired him over the phone.
Now, he spends his days in the middle of the desert in Arizona, barely giving interviews, not that he did much of it back in the day, so fantastical stories that’ve been drip-fed through the upper echelons of the alternative music scene provide most of our knowledge foundation of that tumultuous half-decade.
Some things we know to be true: one Friday night, Niven was feeling nefarious and invited Tom Zutaut, the otherwise put-together A&R man who had set up his partnership with Guns N’ Roses, over for dinner. A sprinkle of LSD, and Zutaut wasn’t seen until Monday afternoon, having ingested the psychedelic and tripped out to the max on Niven’s couch, with the manager whooping cheerfully and the phantasmagorical hallucinations infesting both of their visions.
Despite Niven’s own foray into the world of altered consciousness, he had to use wry, unorthodox methods to keep the band members’ own drug usage in check. He’d give word of a special press interview happening in Hawaii, and all of a sudden would pounce, shepherding the drummer, guitarist, and anyone else off to a rehab facility to clean up away from the cameras and the questions. Kidnapping in action.
He butted heads hugely with Axl and was fired by the frontman despite most of the band believing in Niven and his crazy, but clever, management style. So when Christmas 1992 came around, and one of the band members opened up the stocky wooden boxes laid to rest by Niven under their tree, what they uncovered there could’ve easily been deemed a threat.
In one of the containers was a deadly Uzi submachine gun. The weapon wasn’t just for show; stuffed in the other two boxes were rounds and rounds of ammo. Niven wasn’t just gesturing towards violence for the sake of it. His caretaking tendencies sprang back into action in light of the LA riots, where 53 people died in six days of rioting in response to the acquittal of four LAPD officers involved in the beating of Rodney King, an African American man. Despite the bad blood, the sagacious Niven wanted the band to stay safe in a time of political unrest.
Despite his evident need to have control in his own hands, he did lean on the police once or twice; in one tale, he set the cops on his very own Axl Rose, to bring him back to the LA Coliseum in an effort to make the singer, finally, on time for a show.
Despite the funny, free-wheeling antics, things have recently soured; from backstage to boardrooms, Niven is suing the band for allegedly trying to block his tell-all memoir. Not so nice now, huh?
