This is W.A.R

Guns Or Knives Motherfucker

"Like some Anne Rice vampire, it was always late at night when he called, always dark out there whenever you ran into him. You got the feeling he hardly ever saw daylight, didn't approve of it. On a completely different schedule to everyone else, always sleeping until four or five in the afternoon, these late night rendezvous had the incongruous effect of making you feel as though he was always a little bit more awake than you, or indeed anyone else around him. Not that it made him smarter or more fun to be with - just that it ensured things tended to be done on his terms, whether they be long, complicated meetings or simple phone conversations. Even an accidental collision on the street didn't seem to catch him off-guard. It was as thought he just expected strange things to happen to him - all the time.
(...) This was one rock star that might just bust out at any moment and say or do something no one else dared. (...) I couldn't help but be seduced by the strange promise this driven individual with long red hair and pinched little face seemed to hold out: that not only was rock not dead, but that, in the time-honoured phrase, we hadn't seen nuthin' yet. In fact, he would make sure of it. That seemed to be the deal he was offering us anyway. 

 Looking back now, twenty years later, it seems obvious: Guns N' Roses were the last of the all-time great rock bands. (...) Once upon a time, this stuff wasn't funny: it was real. (...) There was no room for doubt: this was rock with a capital 'R'. This was rock that did - not - give - a - fuck. Like Axl screamed in one of his most famous songs, you were in the jungle, baby. And you were gonna die...
Yet it must have been great being a teenage Guns N' Roses fan in the late-1980s, finding a real-deal rock band to call your own that didn't belong to the generations before. 
(...) Guns N' Roses might have been the last of the dinosaurs, or the last gunslinger in Dodge, or as Kerrang! memorably dubbed them in the first major article written about them outside America, 'the most dangerous band in the world'.

As far as Axl was concerned, you were either for him or against him. There was no middle-grown allowed. And therein lies a great deal of the problem with being Axl Rose. Here was a young guy from nowhere, arriving with a talent so effusive the impact he would make on the world was almost immediate. A young guy who appeared to be on his way to becoming the most significant, certainly the most successful, rock artist of his generation. And yet he often seemed willing to throw it all away. (...) He seemed  intelligent, approachable, a little over-serious perhaps, but then maybe that's what happened when you were the leader of a gang of party animals like Guns N' Roses. (...) Axl Rose remains one of the most intriguing rock stars. (...) His personality  appears to combine love and hate in such a way as to allow moments of fury, distrust and stubborn pride to co-exist, apparently without incongruity, with the thoughtful, generous feelings he shows to those few who have remained loyal to him and his cause, no matter what. (...) The story of W. Axl Rose remains a complete mystery to most people, even his most ardent fans.
Ultimately, this is not the story of a monster, though it would be easy to make it appear so. It is the story of what happened to a lonely badly treated boy from small-town America who grew up believing that rock music would provide not only an escape from childhood horrors but would sanctify his soul - and who was proved at least partly right. But a child, nevertheless, who never quite found the solution to his loneliness.
Once upon a time, W. Axl Rose was quite rightly regarded as the most famous, most talented, most sough-after young rock star in the world. (...) Indeed, there is little that is funny about this story and far too much that is simply tragic."

06 February 1962

Happy Birthday Sir Rose ❤

"We take it for granted we know the whole story - We judge a book by its cover and read what we want between selected lines." - W. Axl Rose