“Keep your cool. This may be a test”: Guns N’ Roses manager claims Slash fed a “little white bunny rabbit” to his pet python during their first meeting
While Guns N’ Roses have calmed down a bit nowadays, they had a reputation for debauchery in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. And manager Alan Niven has seen it all.
In his new book Sound N’ Fury, Niven charts some of the craziest stories from the rock juggernauts’ heyday, including the time Slash and Izzy Stradlin avoiding getting busted by airport security by taking their entire drug stash in one go. “That’s a fuckin’ waste of good smack,” Stradlin is quoted as saying.
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Now, in a new interview with the LA Times, Niven recalls landing the GNR gig, and remembers his rather eventful first meeting with the band.
“Why was I managing Guns N’ Roses? Because nobody else would do it,” he asserts, adding that the firm previously managing the band “could not get away fast enough”.
“No one else would deal with them,” Niven goes on. “Literally, I was not bottom of the barrel, darling – I was underneath the barrel. It was desperation.”
Niven remembers his first meeting with the rockers, and what he now believes was a test by Slash to see if he could hack the job.
He explains how as he entered the house where the meeting was taking place, he walked past a broken toilet and “one of the better-known strippers from [the] Sunset Strip”, before encountering Slash and Stradlin. As the story supposedly goes, after the meeting began, Slash fed a “little white bunny rabbit” to his pet python.
“And I’m sitting there going, ‘Keep your cool. This may be a test. Just go with it and get through it.’ But that was my first GNR meeting,” he concludes.
The members of Guns N’ Roses have left that level of mayhem in the past, and nowadays Slash prefers to spend his time watching YouTube guitar tutorials, apparently – at least according to YouTube instructor Marty Schwartz.
“He said he had some of my instructional stuff saved on his computer and there were some really cool blues-style techniques that he learned from some of my stuff,” Schwartz said. “He was so nice and complimentary… That was one of [those] moments in my life where everything felt validated.”
Alan Niven’s new book Sound N’ Fury is out now.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
