Nate carries water for Axl Rose on his blog:
Say you don’t like them. Say you hate the music and what they stood for. But don’t call them posers. They don’t come more real than GnR.
It depends which GnR you’re talking about. I happened to spend two evenings partying with the original five in Tokyo not long after the release of Appetite for Destruction. I got along quite well with Steve, the drummer, and Duff, the bassist. They were both good guys, friendly and pretty much up for anything. We killed more than a few beers together that weekend. Snake was a complete bore, as he sat in the corner, hid behind his hair and didn’t talk to anyone or do anything for two solid evenings. I don’t remember what was going on with Axl – but I nearly got in a fight with Izzy Stradlin the second night, as he was trying to physically drag a girl with whom I’d had dinner that night out of the bar with him. She didn’t want to go, but he wouldn’t release her, so I had to grab her arm and cuss him out before he finally let her alone.
I remember thinking at the time that I was probably going to have to pop him one in the face and wondered a) what Japanese jails were like, and b) if the altercation would make MTV News. But when she started screaming, Stradlin let her go before I decided to risk it and let loose on him. A few months later, Axl started dating another friend of mine from my Tokyo dayz; she’s in the Patience video, if I recall correctly.
GnR were real rockers, sure enough, but the band was a complete fraud in at least one sense. Their “independent” label was a fake; there never was any Uzi Suicide label. It was just a packaging deal dreamed up by their record label to give them more “cred”. Apparently that seems to have worked in Nate’s case.
I’ll take Metallica, Soundgarden or Nirvana over them any day. I was more of an industrial guy, though, and although they weren’t really rockers, for my money, there was no band that brought the Apocalypse better than Ministry.