On the Shelf
Sound N’ Fury: Rock N’ Roll Tales
By Alan NivenECW Press: 240 pages, $23If you purchase books linked on our web site, The Occasions could earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges help unbiased bookstores.
Because the supervisor of Weapons N’ Roses throughout the band’s debauched heyday, Alan Niven has no scarcity of colourful tales.
The LAPD fetching Axl Rose from his West Hollywood apartment and bringing him on to the stage so Weapons N’ Roses might open for the Rolling Stones on the L.A. Coliseum.
Slash going off script and taking a Winnebago for a joyride — after which standing in rush hour site visitors and brandishing a bottle of Jack Daniels — whereas filming the “Welcome to the Jungle” music video.
Guitarist Izzy Stradlin carrying a $750,000 cashier’s test that Niven needed to take from him and conceal in his personal shoe for safekeeping throughout a raucous journey to New Orleans.
About quarter-hour right into a considerate Zoom dialog, the garrulous Niven poses a query of his personal: “Why was I managing Guns N’ Roses?”
Given what he describes, it’s a good query.
“Because nobody else would do it,” he says, noting that the band’s former administration agency “could not get away fast enough” from the group. “No one else would deal with them. Literally, I was not bottom of the barrel, darling — I was underneath the barrel. It was desperation.”
Working example: his very first Weapons N’ Roses band assembly. On the best way into the home, Niven says, he handed by a damaged rest room and “one of the better-known strippers from [the] Sunset Strip.” Stradlin and Slash had been the one ones who’d proven up. As soon as the assembly began, Stradlin nodded out on the desk and Slash fed “a little white bunny rabbit” to an enormous 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.”
These sorts of stranger-than-fiction anecdotes dominate Niven’s wildly entertaining (and sometimes jaw-dropping) new e book, “Sound N’ Fury: Rock N’ Roll Stories.” With brutal honesty and vivid imagery, he describes the challenges of wrangling Weapons N’ Roses earlier than and after the band’s 1987 debut, “Appetite for Destruction.” These embrace mundane enterprise issues (like capturing music movies on a price range) and extra traumatic moments, resembling navigating Rose’s mercurial moods and guaranteeing that band members didn’t take medicine on worldwide flights.
However “Sound N’ Fury” additionally focuses extensively on Niven’s time managing the bluesy arduous rock band Nice White, whose lead singer, the late Jack Russell, had his personal struggles with extreme dependancy. To complicate the entanglement, Niven additionally produced and co-wrote dozens of the band’s songs, together with hits “Rock Me” and “House of Broken Love.”
Niven mixes pleasant bits of insider gossip into these harrowing moments: firing for unhealthy conduct future celebrity director Michael Bay from filming Nice White’s “Call It Rock ’n’ Roll” music video; Berlin’s Terri Nunn sending President Reagan an 8-by-10 picture with a saucy message; clandestinely shopping for Ozzy Osbourne drinks on an airplane behind Sharon Osbourne’s again.
And his lifelong ardour for championing promising artists additionally comes by, together with his latest advocacy for guitarist Chris Buck of Cardinal Black.
Unsurprisingly, Niven says folks had been asking him for “decades” to write down a e book (“If I had $1 for every time somebody asked me that, I’d be living in a castle in Scotland”). He resisted due to his disdain for rock ‘n’ roll books: “To me, they all have the same story arc and only the names change.”
{A magazine} editor paid him such an enormous praise that he lastly felt compelled to write down one.
“He said, ‘I wish I could write like you,’ ” Niven says. “When he said that, it put an obligation on me that I couldn’t shake. Now I had to be intelligent about it and go, ‘Well, you hate rock ‘n’ roll books, so what are you going to do?’ ”
Niven’s resolution was to eschew the “usual boring, chronological history” and construction “Sound N’ Fury” extra like a group of vignettes, all informed along with his normal dry humorousness and razor-sharp wit.
“If you tell the stories well enough, they might be illuminating,” he says. “I saw it more as a record than I did a book. And you hope that somebody will drop the needle in at the beginning of the record and stay with the record until it’s over.
“For me, dialogue was key — and, fortunately, they were all more f— up than I was,” he provides. “So my memory of the dialogue is pretty good. … There’s some dialogue exchanges in there that imprinted themselves for as long as I live.”
One of many artists that doesn’t get a lot ink in “Sound N’ Fury” is one other group identified for its hedonistic rock ‘n’ roll conduct, Mötley Crüe.
“The fact that people are still interested in what you’ve got to say about things that happened 30 years ago is almost unimaginable,” Alan Niven says.
(ECW Press)
Niven promoted and facilitated distribution of the unbiased launch of the band’s 1981 debut, “Too Fast for Love” and helped join Mötley Crüe with Elektra Data. He doesn’t mince phrases within the e book or in dialog concerning the band, saying he feels “very ambivalent about the small role I played in the progression of Mötley Crüe because I know who they are. I know what they’ve done to various people. I know how they’ve treated certain numbers of women. And I am not proud of contributing to that.
“And on top of that, someone needs to turn around and say, ‘It’s a thin catalog that they produced,’ in terms of what they produced as music,” he continues. “There’s not much there and it’s certainly not intellectually or spiritually illuminating in any way, shape or form. They are brutish entertainers, and that’s it.”
Nonetheless, Niven says he didn’t hesitate to incorporate the tales that he did in “Sound N’ Fury,” and by rationalization notes a dialog he had with journalist Mick Wall.
Niven contemplated what that meant. “A little light bulb went on in my head, and I went, ‘Ah, yes, the curse is truth,’ because a lot of people don’t want to hear the truth and don’t want to hear what truly happened.
“There are people in the Axl cult who won’t be happy. There will be one or two other people who won’t be happy, but there’s no point in recording anything unless it’s got a truth to it.”
Niven says when the e book was finished, he didn’t essentially acquire any stunning insights or new views on what he had documented.
“The fact that people are still interested in what you’ve got to say about things that happened 30 years ago is almost unimaginable,” he says. “I never used to do interviews back in the day. But at this point, it would just be graceless and rank bad manners not to respond.
“Occasionally people go, ‘Oh, he’s bitter,’” Niven continues. “No, I am not. I don’t think the book comes off as bitter. Many times I’ve said it was actually a privilege to go through that period of time because I didn’t have to spend my life saying to myself, ‘I wonder what it would have been like to have had a No. 1. To have had a successful band.’ Well, I found out firsthand.”
Niven stresses firmly that administration was greater than a job to him.
“It was my way of life,” he says. “People who go into management and think it’s a job that starts maybe at about half past 10 in the morning once you’ve had your coffee and then you check out at six, they’re not true managers.
“They’re not in management for the right reasons,” he provides. “Rock ‘n’ roll is a way of f— life. It’s 24/7, 365. And that was my approach to it.”
