Submitting a photo to Axl for evaluation by Yoda, some say, coincided with employment in the GNR world. Band members, crew members, record-company executives - everybody did it. The procedure still goes on. Recalls one current employee, " I sent my picture in. Everybody gets a photo made for a pass. People made jokes about auras being read. What's this for? Nobody really knew. But I dont know anybody who got canned for anything other than not doing a good job". On ocassion, according to a music-industry figure, Axl recently worked with, Yoda even requests photographs of the sons and daughters of people in Axl's world.

In February 1998 in Arizona, Axl was carrying some presents he'd recently received - "going to the psychic for review," - in the words of one knowledgeable source. One item in Axl's bag was a large handblown glass sphere. Axl was apparently worried that the security personnel at the airpot might break it, and that led to his outburst and arrest.
How important is Yoda to Axl? One associate says Yoda's influence, while important, is tempered by the force of Axl's personality: "He wasn't turning his life over to somebody with a candle and a crystal. I say that with every confidence. It's just not consistent with who he is. He makes his own decisions."......

Still, Yoda showed up on tour. "She came with some of her pals," a crew member recalls. "Funny dudes: Southwestern people with funny shoes. Their look didnt fit in; they were like aliens." During a 1992 GN'R swing through the U.S. with Metallica, Yoda apparently became concerned about energy fields around Minneapolis and ordered that a date contemplated for the city not be booked. It was later rescheduled for a different Minneapolis venue. "Axl had trouble," a tour regular says, "in areas of the country that had a strong magnetic-field concentration."

Before some dates in Japan, presumably at Yoda's urging, information about atomic-power sources in the country and power sources for the Tokyo Dome had to be collected. A source involved in this mission says he never understood precisely what this data was used for: "It was something about the magnetic forces that exists in the Universe and where those things are in comparison to where Axl would be spending his time."

Axl also sometimes took a psychotherapist from Los Angeles, a Victoria Principal look-alike named Suzzy London, on the road. London maintained an area backstage for herself and Axl. He cast her as his therapist, wearing a black miniskirt, in the video for "Don't Cry". Members of the band and its entourage took different views of Axl's various counselors. Some showed them healthy respect. Others scorned them. "They had to accompany him to Japan to make sure that the bad energu waves didnt capture him there," a former employee recalls. "If it was any exotic, wonderful place around the world, (the advisers) generally had to be flown in at some point. But if it was going to be Kansas City, everything was really fine. I mean, it was St. Louise whre the riot happened." Were they with him in St. Louis? Angry at a fan with a camera at a July 2nd, 1991, show at the Riverport Amphitheatre, Rose launched himself into the crowd, touching off a riot that injured more than fifty people and caused more than $200,000 in damage...

Axl has spoken in the past about his experiences with past-life-regression therapy. A typical past-life-regression session begins with hypnosis. During traditional psychotherapy, a patient placed in a trance may be able to recall traumatic events that have been repressed and that may lie at the root of current emotional problems. Freudian theory holds that recognizing and understanding such traumas, which often occur in childhood, can promote healing.

Under hypnosis by a past-life expert, the playing fields expands. A patient may be able to remember back even further, to a life or lives that were lived hundreds if not thousands of years ago, and discover traumas that ocurred then. Some patients may speak in the voice or the language of that long-dead being, whether it be a Roman ruler or a Southern plantaton slave. Past-life adherents tend to believe that one lives one's life with different incarnations of the same group of people. Axl, according to a confident, believes he and Stephanie Seymour were together in fifteen or sixteen past lives.

After a shouting match with Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love backstage at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion, Axl told a friend that Love was trying to posses him. "He believes people are always trying to find a window through to control his energy," a friend says. How does Axl combat this? "By controlling the people who have access to him."
After he and Seymour broke up, in 1992, the model beagn dating Peter Brant. Axl, according to one friend, ordered subordinates to obtain a photograph of Brant's wife, Sandra. Axl intented to take it to Yoda for an specific purpose, according to a former Geffen employee: "Axl wanted to cast a spell around Sandra to protect her from Peter, because he felt that she, too, had been cuckolded as he had been, and he had a great deal of sympathy for her." Seymour, then 26, and Brant, 48, married in Paris in 1995.

Even by loose New Age standards, Axl has received some bizarre advice over the years. After Axl's ex-wife, Erin Everly, the daughter of singer Don Everly and the inspiraton for the GN'R hit "Sweet Child O' Mine", sued Axl in 1994, charging assault and sexual battery, Everly sat for a deposition. She testified that Axl believed that she and Seymour were sisters in a past life and were "trying to kill him". As far as her own relationship with Axl went, Everly said, "Axl had told me that in a past life we were Indians and that I killed our children, and that's why he was so mean to me in this life."
Everly was asked, "Had Axl ever told you that he was possessed?"

"Yes", she said.
"What did he say he was possessed by?"
"John Bonham"

Bonham, the rambunctious Led Zeppelin drummer, died in his sleep after a bender in 1980. Rose denies ever saying he was possessed by John Bonham.
"They are the ultimate controlled relationships," a friend says of Axl's various therapy sessions. "Stearts at a certain time, ends at a certain time, you pay for it, you can stop paying for it and stop going. And as long as you want somebody to listen to you, as long as you want somebody to say the things that you want to hear, you can pay them to do it."

Once in a while, in a New Age community, that embraces a certain number of charlatans, Axl got taken to the cleaners. During his marriage to Everly, Axl went for an exorcism. The exorcism apparently didn't involved the priests and crosses that viewers of prime-time television have come to expect. "Mainly it involved getting some kind of herbal wrap," Axl testified during the Everly case, some "work on my skin." The man who performed this procedure charged $72,000. Even Axl admitted, "I ended up getting ripped off for a lot of money in the long run."

UP ON AXL MOUNTAIN

Through a series of hairpin turns and steep grades, Latigo Canyon Road winds a couple of thousand feet up to the top of an arid hill near the Point Dume section of Malibu. The sun skims and slants and shimmers off the Pacific Ocean and the celebrity homes that crowd the beach below. Axl lives in a Mediterranean-style compound that was valued last year at $3,8 million, a price tag fairly typical for the neighborhood. He moved into the canyon in 1992, paying a mortgage of about $15,000 a month. Latigo was going to be the place he and Stephanie Seymour would live together as man and wife and raise their children.
Garderners assiduously tend Axl's four acres, which are hidden from public view by trees and a fence. A lighted star on the side of Axl's house can be seen for miles by drivers on the Pacific Coast highway. Axl's neighbors in the hill include the beach-volleyball star Gabrielle Reece.
The sound of falling water soothes the grounds, which also contain a tennis court and a pool. When Axl throws a party, the court doubles as a parking lot. The house itself is stocked with religious artifacts from Latin America, including Axl's vast collection of crucifixes. Axl plays pinball on the machine in his game room. Since the demise of GN'R, he has shared the Latigo Canyon estate with tanks full of snakes and spiders and lizards, and with various friends, family members and live-in help.
Axl's sister Amy Bailey, who used to run the GN'R fan club, and half-brother Stuart Bailey have stayed in the house at one time or another. Beta, who formerly worked as a nanny for Seymour, taking care of her son Dylan, doubles as chauffeur. She also travels with Axl; it was she by his side during th contretemps at the Phoenix Airport in '98. "Beta moms him," a friend says. "She's as close as he's ever had to a real mother."....

David Lank, a running buddy of Axl's from Indiana and an occasional GN'R collaborator (he co-wrote "Dont damn me", on Use Your Illusion I), bunked at Axl's place in Latigo Canyon for a while. Sabrina Okamoto, a masseuse, also stayed a time on the property. A strinking woman in here early thirties, Okamoto met the members of GN'R during their 1991 tour with Skid Row; she became the GN'R tour masseuse, then worked for Axl after GN'R split. "When his friends were in need, he often was there to bail them out," a former associate says.
Axl throws a costume party every Halloween for friends and their families. Enormous pumpkins ring the swimming pool, and spider webs hang in the trees. Specially built mazes and forts rattle with squealing children. Almost excited as a child, Axl himself has been known to dash around and toy with every attraction. One past guests gets the impression that Axl is trying to re-create his own childhood, albeit one better than his actually was. The Halloween scene in the past few years hasn't been what it once was. "His parties have been getting smaller and smaller," recalls one recent guest. "The ever-shrinking universe."
Last Halloween, Axl appeared outfitted as a pig, scaring a few of the children in attendance. Guests helped themselves to pasta and barbacued chicken; the loud rock & roll made conversation difficult.

Axl usually sleeps during the day and works at night. Beta or her son drives Axl to Rumbo Recorders in the San Fernando Valley, where sessions for the GN'R follow-up to Spaghetti Incident? Have been going on for years. More and more lately, Axl conducts most of his other business over the telephone.
Much of Axl's non-music and non-spiritual business concerns legal strategy. Besides his dispute with Everly, other matters have dragged on: He has ended up in court against Seymour; the band's original drummer, Steven Adler; the replacement guitarist Gilby Clarke; and various companies that did business with the band. Lately, Axl has been using threats of legal action to limit what people say about him. A few days after I talked with Alan Niven, GN'R former manager, who was fired in 1991, Doug Goldstein called me, threatening to sue Niven for allegedly breaching a confidentiality agreement. Niven later received a letter from Axl's personal lawyer in Los Angeles, demanding he contact ROLLING STONE and attempt to withdraw his comments. Failure to do so, Axl's lawyer warned, would result in "swift and sure legal action."