Back before I’d ever spoken to him, I’d heard a few telling things about Alan Niven, the original manager of Guns N’ Roses.
He rarely gave interviews.
He (allegedly) gave the members of GN’R Uzis for Xmas.
He once invited Tom Zutaut, the A&R man who brought him GN’R, over for dinner one Friday, and laced his food with LSD. Tom didn’t make it home until Monday afternoon.
And when it was all over, and Axl Rose had Niven sacked, he moved to the desert – 25 miles north of Nowhere. (Literally, a town called Nowhere in Arizona.)
Niven, it seemed, was clearly as interesting and dangerous as peak-period GN’R – and had learned his culinary skills from a CIA cookbook.
Two of those stories are covered in Sound N’ Fury, a title that typographically leans into his GN’R past but is taken from MacBeth (“It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”) – a self-effacing mash up of high and low culture that is very Niven.
Niven didn’t give interviews back when he was in the thick of it and now he has stories to tell. Yes, he did treat Zutaut to a psychedelic lunch. “Roast chicken a la LSD” was a good way, he says, “to evaluate new friends by observing how well they tripped… The real soul could be exposed.”
And that trippy meal is part of the GN’R origin story: Zutaut passed the acid test, so Niven – who had already given Motley Crue and Berlin their first record deals – listened to Zoot when he pleaded with him to manage GN’R, a band of Hanoi Rocks-wannabes and junkies that no-one else would touch. And so it started. Welcome to the jungle.
Sound N’ Fury succeeds where most books about music fail: it doesn’t bother with where Niven was born, what school he went to, “and all that David Copperfield crap”. It moves from anecdote to anecdote, each chapter self-contained, in no apparent order, all killer, no filler.
Niven likens himself to an old jukebox, trotting out his anecdotal greatest hits, and the analogy is perfect: no-one wants to be stuck in the kitchen at a party with some old guy who starts his story with when he was born, after all.
It was something I noticed years ago when I was Editor of Classic Rock magazine and scored his first interview in years. He would do it, he said, but only by email. Most email interviews are dry, the answers abrupt: Niven’s were detailed, open, and very indiscrete.
Years later, he's still ruffling feathers. This book was originally scheduled to come out in July, but has been moved back to September, amid rumours that Axl's lawyers are trying to block publication. You can preorder it now on Amazon.
Niven tells it like it is/was – and writes like Mickey Spillane stubbing cigarettes out on the hard-boiled corpse of James Ellroy.
The stories in Sound N’ Fury are told with skill, wry detachment, wisdom – and humour drier than a Cohiba Behike.
Niven’s view of it all is almost Dickens-like: He takes you inside the chaos of Guns N’Roses and Great White (who he concurrently managed and wrote songs for), and into the boardroom. From the squalor of drug dens to lunch with David Geffen, to inside the courtroom for the Adler Vs GN’R battle, this is the music business from top to bottom – corrupt, crooked, and frequently funny and outrageous.
There’s the comical hunt to understand where Great White singer Jack Russell is hiding his drugs, or the time he had the LAPD arrest Axl Rose and bring him to the L.A. Coliseum, just so the singer would make the show on time. This is what it’s like to be the responsible grown-up in charge of a gang of reprobates.
In a chapter called The Missing Million, Izzy Stradlin, paranoid that someone has stolen a million dollars of GN’R money, goes AWOL with three-quarters of a million dollars in a cashier's cheque stuffed in his sock. Niven tracks him down to New Orleans where violence follows – and he realises the extent to which he’s losing his own mind.
Another chapter called The Calls In The Night, is about just that: The phone calls that disturb Niven’s sleep are to get people out of jail, or to visit people in hospital (“I’m just vomiting blood. Lots of it”), to listen to a panicked Slash after his friend Todd Crews dies in front of him from an overdose. Most biographies don't have this much drama in the whole book, let alone one chapter. Niven underplays it, which gives it more power.
There are snakes in the toilet, sharks in the board room, and coyotes ready to pick on your bones if you stay still long enough. “If you want it, you’re gonna bleed,” sang Axl and these pages are blood-soaked.
“No-one died on my watch,” says Niven, with pride. It’s a bloody miracle.
Sound N' Fury is scheduled to be published 18 September. Preorder it now on Amazon.
