Steven Adler: The “dangerous and scary” Guns N’ Roses member Axl Rose firmly cut off
Most artists have those bandmates who seem to fall by the wayside. Even if there was some sort of connection there in the first place, time always changes things, and the best of friends can sometimes find themselves at odds if they are on the wrong side of history. But even for a band that got turned into a circus as much as Guns N’ Roses had, Axl Rose knew that as the group unravelled, some members were more carefree than others.
Then again, Guns N’ Roses always operated as a band bound to blow up too quickly. Their massive rise to fame in the late 1980s threw everyone for a loop, but the minute that a bunch of LA street rats were given access to the biggest paycheques in the music world, it didn’t take them long to get a few more bad habits and more than a few enlarged heads in the process.
GNR Lies is a nice pitstop for the band in between their biggest records, but Use Your Illusion was always bound to be the moment where things got bloated. Whereas most people are aware of what a sophomore slump is, the band’s double album of material feels like a sophomore car crash. Despite having some great songs scattered throughout the record, the whole thing is like a lesser hard rock version of The Beatles’ The White Album, with all of the band’s best and worst traits brought to the forefront.
Before the band even recorded, though, they had to deal with some unfinished business. They had already been playing pieces of the record live and had perfected their version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ years before they went into the studio, but the minute that the red light came on, Steven Adler began to crack up.
Despite being the perfect drummer for Appetite for Destruction, Adler became one of the most unreliable people in the band, developing a massive heroin addiction and refusing to get clean while working on the record. Even if the rest of the band were far from sober during the recording, Adler kept lying about his problems until he eventually had to leave the band when he couldn’t pull off the tracks.
While the thought of anyone needing to be fired for Guns N’ Roses for doing too many drugs feels like an oxymoron, Rose was deadly serious when talking about cutting him off, saying, “He just couldn’t leave his drugs, but there are other things besides the band that he was involved in with his drugs that are very dangerous and scary, so I want nothing to do with him.”
But by letting Adler go, the band practically lost its core heartbeat as well. Even though Matt Sorum is a fantastic drummer and did phenomenal work fine-tuning most of the songs on Use Your Illusion, there’s a certain swing to songs like ‘Rocket Queen’ and ‘Paradise City’ that could have only come from Adler, almost like a more grizzled version of what someone like Peter Criss would have done.
Then again, Adler’s dismissal was only the beginning of the unravelling process. Most people could have settled with a drummer leaving, but the next few years would see the band spiral to the point where they were unrecognisable outside of Rose at the front. Slash’s departure may have finalised their breakup in most fans’ minds, but that initial spark from their original recordings was gone the minute they decided Adler couldn’t get clean.
