Product Description

From the New York Times bestselling author, the complete story of the last rock supergroup— from their drugfueled blast-off in the 1980s to the turbulent life of legendary singer Axl Rose and his fifteen-year, multi-million dollar effort to make the perfect hardrock album.

With 90 million of the band’s records sold worldwide since 1987, Guns N’ Roses prolonged rock music past its sell-by date with controversial albums and immense, often riotous world tours. But the band’s complete story has never been fully told—until now. In his sixth major rock biography, Stephen Davis details the riveting story of a band that originated in the gutters of Sunset Strip and went on to set attendance records on the biggest stadiums on the planet.

Watch You Bleed documents the improbable story of W. Axl Rose, the biggest rock star of his generation. Taken from an abusive father in his infancy, he was raised as “Bill Bailey” in a strictly religious Indiana household by a stepfather who beat him for playing Led Zeppelin songs on the family piano. After quitting high school, and on the run from the police in his hometown, Axl arrived in Los Angeles in the midst of the street battles for supremacy among the top music genres of the eighties—post-punk, thrash, hair metal, and glam. The book also charts the backgrounds of every band member, especially Slash, a Hollywood street kid whose designer mother dated David Bowie.

Davis brilliantly captures the birth of Guns’ raw power, which—despite rape charges, drug-induced rampages, and a general appetite for destruction— launched the band into the pantheon of rock gods such as Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. With a wealth of detail, Davis looks at Axl’s unrelenting quest to release the long-awaited, mystery-shrouded Chinese Democracy album, as well as the further adventures of some of the Gunners under the banner of the hard-rocking band Velvet Revolver. For the first time, millions of Guns N’ Roses fans will learn the whole truth—sometimes funny, sometimes tragic—about the last of the great rock bands.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #332378 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 448 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781592403776
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Review
"Rampant rockin' sex ... a lurid tell-all."
-- New York Post

"The gold standard of rock biographers."
-- Boston Globe

"Stephen Davis - America's rock biographer."
-- ABC News.com

"Five stars! Stephen Davis's real coup is to show how Guns could be electrifying one moment and spectacularly stupid the next. You might not like Axl Rose upon finishing the book, but you may understand him better."
- Mojo

Review
"Rampant rockin' sex ... a lurid tell-all."
-- New York Post

"The gold standard of rock biographers."
-- Boston Globe

"Stephen Davis - America's rock biographer."
-- ABC News.com

"Five stars! Stephen Davis's real coup is to show how Guns could be electrifying one moment and spectacularly stupid the next. You might not like Axl Rose upon finishing the book, but you may understand him better."
- Mojo

About the Author
Stephen Davis is one of America’s preeminent rock journalists. His many rock biographies include, most recently, Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend (Gotham Books, 2004) and the New York Times bestsellers Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith and Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga.

Customer Reviews

Sometimes I feel like Davis is beating a Dead Horse
This book was a total disappointment.

This was my third Stephen Davis book. Maybe he set the bar too high in the first two. The problem with this book is that it offers no more insight than the VH1 Behind the Music on Guns N Roses that aired a few years ago. As a matter of fact, he quotes that episode throughout the entire book. It doesnt seem like he talked to anyone close to the band. It seemed to me that his research was limited to the Behind the Music, Mtv interviews, and Rolling Stone articles. All of which I had already seen or read. This book told me nothing that I didnt already know.

Davis mentions in his credits that most employees of GNR had to sign confidentiality agreements in order to keep their jobs and that 13 people interviewed for the book asked to remain anonymous. Maybe thats why this book lacks any punch. Nobody in the band wanted anything to do with it, and nobody that knows anything is talking. The inside information feeling that I got from his other books didnt show up this time around.

If you insist on buying this, I would recommend that you at least go to the bookstore and read the credits. When you see that its all from interviews that you remember watching or reading, you may think twice about spending your hard earned cash on a rerun.

Highly readable, but it's no The Dirt
First of all, I'm not a die-hard Guns n Roses fan. For those who, like the gentleman below, already know a ton about the band, I suspect this volume will add little to their understanding of the Guns for the simple reason that the book seems written mostly from library research, footage and interviews that were already out there along with original interviews with ancillary characters. There is no indication that Davis talked to the band at any time or knew them.

That said, since I knew little about Guns n Roses beyond fond teenage memories of Appetite for Destruction, Davis' book was a breezy, enjoyable read. He does a great job bringing those hundreds of interviews and insights together, and by the end I felt I knew Axl, Slash and the rest of the band as well as anyone not witnessing their wild lives first-hand ever could. The book is almost 80% about Appetite and the lives of the band until then. It devotes little time to Use Your Illusion and the lesser albums like Lies and Spaghetti Incident, and that's probably a good thing. I finished it in a few days.

If you are a general reader just looking for a great book about the glam-metal-rock era, there's a much better book out there: The Dirt, the story of Motley Crue, by Neil Strauss. It's hard not to compare the two works, and what makes The Dirt so great-- it's told largely in the voices of the band members, looking back on their years of debauchery-- highlights the weaknesses of Watch You Bleed.

By no means a must-read, but an enjoyable and easy trip into the insane lives of Guns n Roses. A whiskey bottle is thrown, on average, every ten pages.

A badly written book report
Where do I begin with this review? For starters, if you're considering buying this book...do NOT waste your time or money! Now, to further elaborate...
We all know that the TRUE story of GN'R will never be told because there are way too many sides to this sordid tale, how and why it ended, and why it is allowed to continue. However, if you want something close to a true account from an insider's perspective, read Slash's book.
While I did enjoy reading some of the text offered here, for the most part, it was all stuff I had heard, read, or watched before. This book, essentially, offered NO new revelations or information. Speaking of information...
Whoever fact checked this tome needs to be fired. Off the top of my head I found the following errors...Jimi Hendrix did not burn his "Les Paul", he burned (and played almost exclusively) a Fender Strat. Aerosmith's "Draw The Line" album was released in 1977, NOT 1979. This mistake is completely and totally inexcusable because Stephen Davis WROTE A BOOK ABOUT AEROSMITH! Skid Row was not, to paraphrase the book, a trio from Philadelphia who added a white hot Canadian singer. They were a quartet from New Jersey who added a white hot Canadian singer. Oh, and the final one that lead me to even write this review about what a waste this book was...Sebastian Bach (known as Baz, not Bas) did not turn down the Velvet Revolver vocal slot. He jammed with them and Slash decided his sound wasn't right for the band (Skid Roses was the term he used). Bach's behavior after VR chose Scott Weiland is all the proof you need that the didn't turn the gig down, they turned him down.
The bottom line of all of this is that Stephen Davis has written at least three bar setting rock n' roll biographies...Hammer of the Gods, Walk This Way, and Jim Morrison. This excuse for him to spout his opinions (which were way outta line within the context of a biography) on GN'R is completely and totally unacceptable. Simple fact checking alone could've saved this book from being a total disaster. Unfortunately, that never happened and, as a result, more die-hard GN'R fans like myself wasted time and money on something that could've been so much better considering who the author is.