In the early nineties, Axl demanded and was granted sole control of the Guns N' Roses name. As to precisely where and when this happened, memories are fuzzy and contradictory, perhaps lost in the mists of rock & roll tour memory. Axl, backstage somewhere, is said to have basically issued an ultimatum: He'd get the name of the band or he wouldn't perform. Papers memoralizing this transfer were drawn up, and guitarist Slash and bassist Duff McKagan signed them.

What would it matter really? Axl, Slash and Duff would always be, it seemed, the inseparable three. Money was everywhere. Guns N' Roses grossed $57,9 million right out of the gate, in the four years from 1988 to 1992, according to documents produced during the Adler litgation. Overhead was enormous - expensive video shoots, first-class everything on the road, all the cliched rock-star excess - but a $57,9 million gross in that time span for a relatively new band is almost unheard of in rock & roll history. The Rolling Stone didn't make this kind of money until years deep into their career. David Bowie raised $55 million in 1997 selling bonds tied to the earnings of his first twenty-five albums. The Grateful Dead earned $40 million dollar to $50 million a year touring, but until the 1990's, after they'd been together more than twenty years.

After a 17,5 percent commision to management, Axl and his bandmates divvied up the money according to a specific formula, which Axl described once in court. During pre- production for Appetite, Axl said, "Slash devised a system of figuring out who wrote what parts of [a] song or part of a song. There were four categories, I believe. There was lyrics, melody, music - meaning guitars, bass and drums - and accompaniment and arrangement. And we split each one of those into twenty-five percent..... When we had finished, I had forty-one percent, and other people had different amounts."

Axl, with Slash, had always controlled most of: the band's affairs. By this time, Axl had full control. GN'R began work on a new album of original material, drawing from a Geffen advance thought to be: around $10 million - Madonna kind of money.
Guns N' Roses released their fifth record, The Spaghetti Inciden?, in November 1993. It sold well, but nothing like Appetite or the Illusion records. The band began to unravel as Axl spent more time in court. He and Seymour argued violently at home in Malibu and broke up. Axl was desvastated; he had wanted to marry her. "The split had an enormous effect on him," a friend says. "That was the first time in his life he had estability. And then he had nothing." Lawsuits flew back and forth. Seymour charged that Axl had beaten her. Axl alleged it was she who had attacked him.

According to Seymour's version of events, after an argument in their kitchen Axl shattered some bottles on the floor, grabbed Seymour by the throat, put her in a headlock adn then dragged her barefoot through the broken glass "while he repeatedly hitting her about the head and upper body and kicking her in the abdomen." Axl's story was that Seymour grabbed his balls and he was just defending himself..

Erin Everly, long gone from Axl's life, soon joined the fray, filing a suit o her own in 1994. In a deposition, Everly's roommate, Meegan Hodges-Knight, Slash's former girlfriend, recalled some disturbing encounters with Axl.
"I'd wake up to Erin saying, 'Please stop, don't hurt me', and Axl screaming at her," Hodges-Knight said. And then all of a sudden, he'd come out and he'd, like, break all of her really precious antiques, and she would be, 'Please, dont break them, please', and trying to get them back from him. And he'd push her and he'd break everything that he could get his hands on.
"I remember sleeping and waking up to crystal flying over my head, shattering on the floor." Sometimes Slash was there when Axl went off Erin. "I remember asking Slash to do something, or I was going to do something," Hodges-Knight remembered. "I said, 'I have to do something', or something like that. And he said, 'No, you are going to make it worse.' " Hodges-knight testified that Axl kicked Everly with his cowboy boots, adn dragged her around by the hair one night while she was wearing a see - through tank top and panties, threw a televisiont set at her (it missed) and spit on her. "That pig," she said. "He spit on her."

Everly herself claimed Axl sexually assaulted her. She described a day when Axl ordered her to take off a bathing suit she was wearing, after which he tied her hands to her ankles from behind, put masking tape over her mouth and a bandanna around her eyes, and led her, naked, into a closet, where she remained for several hours while Axl talked to a friend of hers in the living room.

Later, according to Everly, Axl untied her, picked her up and tied her, face down, to a convertible bed. And then, "he forced himself on me anally really hard. Really hard."
"Were you screaming?", she was asked.
"Yes."
"How long did that last?"
"I dont remember."
"What happened when it was over?"
"He took it out and stuck it in my mouth."

An unreleased version of the video for the GN'R song "It's so easy", directed by Englishman Nigel Dick, features Everly in bondage gear, with a red ball in her mouth, as Axl screams, "See me hit you! You fall down!" The singer, according to a former associate, went to some lenghs to gather up the few existing copies of the tape after Everly went to Court against him....

Rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin's replacement, Gilby Clarke, meanwhile, left the band. And rejoined. And left again. "As you are aware, Gilby has been fired at least three times by the band in the past month and has been rehired at least two times," Clarke's lawyer, Jeffrey Light, wrote in an April 14th, 1994, letter to GN'R lawyer Laurie Soriano. After failing to receive royalties, he claimed were due him, Clarke sued the band in 1995. Clarke says he didn't want to go to court but decided he had to because nobody in the GN'R camp would call him back. GN'R countersued. The matter was settled with an undisclosed payment to Clark.

Unsure of Axl's intentions, Slash and Duff drifted into other projects. Slash, Duff and drummer Matt Sorum participated in numerous sessions for the new record. Complementing this ensemble were the loyal GN'R keyboard player, Dizzy Reed and Axl's old friend from Indiana, guitarist Paul Huge. Paul is part of the Axl and David Lank crew. Slash and Duff didn't click with him. "Nice-enough guy," says a friend of the three musicians. "But they are GN'R, for God's sake - great band, great players. He's not that good. Doesn't have th chops." In 1996, Slash walked away. Sorum was fired. Duff hung on until the end of 1997, then quit in disgust. "The record wasn't going anywhere," says a Guns N' Roses source. "Duff reached a point where he said, ' I dont need this in my life anymore. This is too insane. This is rock & roll. It's supposed to be fun."

Slash is angry, now, about giving up rights to the GN'R name. "I was blindsided by it, more or less a legal faux pas," he complained to the Internet news service Addicted to Noise in January 1997. "I'd be lying to say I wasn't a little bit peeved at that. It'd be one thing if I quit altogether. But I haven't, and the fact that he can actually go and record a new GN'R record without the consent of the other members of the band...."

Slash continued, "Axl's whole visionary style, as far as his input in Guns N' Roses, is completely different from mine. I just like to play guitar, write a good riff, go out there and play, as opposed to presenting an image." The relationship between Axl and Slash, the cornerstone of the band, remains deeply fractured, though Slash has never closed the door on getting back together. The two men have not spoken to each other in four years. When work was under way last year on a long-overdue live GN'R double album, Live Era '87-'93, Axl and Slash interacted only through their respective managers, Goldstein and Tom Maher. "It was all very odd", says a source. "Slash and Duff would get together and work on it and Axl would be sent CD's. He never came to the studio when they were there. It was done in shifts"

It seems that beyond a connection Axl has with Beta, Yoda and Bert Deixler, his lawyer, Axl's relationship with Doug Goldstein is one of the few that the singer has gone out of his way to maintain. A former security guard for Air Supply, Goldstein joined the GN'R camp as tour manager in 1987 and eventually took over management of the band upon Niven's 1991 firing. Goldstein operates Big F.D. Entertainment in Newport Beach, California. Besides Axl, BFD's clients include Chris Perez, Selena's widower, and the metal band Jack Off Jill. Mostly, Goldstein concentrates on Axl. "Is Axl says 'Jump', he says, 'Fine,' " says a music-industry source. "If he's in the air, he says, 'How much higher?' ."

Finally released last November after long delays, Live Era was not the blockbuster everyone had hope it would be. Sales have been underwhelming: 403,000 unit as of early April. Promotion of the record was limited to television and print advertising. There was barely a peep from any of the old band members - following, some believe, an Axl decree.

For the new Guns N' Roses studio record, Axl hired a legion of talented players from across the popular-music spectrum: Tommy Stinson, the former Replacement; Dave Abbruzzese, Pearl Jam's former drummer; Robin Finck of Nine Inch Nails; Dave Navarro, former Jane's Addiction guitarist; Josh Freese of the Vandals; and Zakk Wylde from Ozzy Ozbourne's band.
They jammed at the Complex in Los Angeles and at Rumbo Recorders for weeks and months at a time, usually at night. Axl brought in a showroom full of guitars and effects. "It's a musical -instrument convention," one observer says. "He has more knobs and keyboards and string and wire and wood in there than you could possibly imagine could even be manufactured."
Of Axl's guitar set up, Abbruzzese recalls, "You could hunt Buffalo with his rig. It had a lot of lights, a lot of blinking lights,a lot of things that you stepped on. It sounded like a freight train that was somehow playable."

Axl was distracted by events tragic, potentially tragic and strange. His mother, Sharon Bailey, died in May 1996 at the age of fifty-one. Wildfires nipped at the edges of Axl's Latigo Canyon property the same year. The following May, Axl's old friend and songwriting partner West Arkeen died from a drug overdose at the age of thirty-six. A frequent visitor to the studio says, "When Stephanie Seymour's birthday came around, Axl seemed to shut down for weeks. A lot of this record is about Stephanie. She was his perfect woman, at least his image of what she should be."

Though plenty of nights passed when little was accomplished, Axl was usually all business in the studio. Excessive use of drugs or alcohol was frowned upon. Axl composed at the piano. The other musicians contributed ideas and riffs, but Axl was clearly in charge...