Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses (Hardcover)

by Stephen Davis (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
From the New York Times bestselling author, the complete story of the last rock supergroup— from their drugfueled blast-off in the 1980s to the turbulent life of legendary singer Axl Rose and his fifteen-year, multi-million dollar effort to make the perfect hardrock album.

With 90 million of the band’s records sold worldwide since 1987, Guns N’ Roses prolonged rock music past its sell-by date with controversial albums and immense, often riotous world tours. But the band’s complete story has never been fully told—until now. In his sixth major rock biography, Stephen Davis details the riveting story of a band that originated in the gutters of Sunset Strip and went on to set attendance records on the biggest stadiums on the planet.

Watch You Bleed documents the improbable story of W. Axl Rose, the biggest rock star of his generation. Taken from an abusive father in his infancy, he was raised as “Bill Bailey” in a strictly religious Indiana household by a stepfather who beat him for playing Led Zeppelin songs on the family piano. After quitting high school, and on the run from the police in his hometown, Axl arrived in Los Angeles in the midst of the street battles for supremacy among the top music genres of the eighties—post-punk, thrash, hair metal, and glam. The book also charts the backgrounds of every band member, especially Slash, a Hollywood street kid whose designer mother dated David Bowie.

Davis brilliantly captures the birth of Guns’ raw power, which—despite rape charges, drug-induced rampages, and a general appetite for destruction— launched the band into the pantheon of rock gods such as Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. With a wealth of detail, Davis looks at Axl’s unrelenting quest to release the long-awaited, mystery-shrouded Chinese Democracy album, as well as the further adventures of some of the Gunners under the banner of the hard-rocking band Velvet Revolver. For the first time, millions of Guns N’ Roses fans will learn the whole truth—sometimes funny, sometimes tragic—about the last of the great rock bands.

About the Author
Stephen Davis is one of America’s preeminent rock journalists. His many rock biographies include, most recently, Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend (Gotham Books, 2004) and the New York Times bestsellers Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith and Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Gotham (August 26, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592403778
• ISBN-13: 978-1592403776
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #146,575 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Sometimes I feel like Davis is beating a Dead Horse, September 2, 2008

By	Lifer73 (Texas) - See all my reviews

This book was a total disappointment.

This was my third Stephen Davis book. Maybe he set the bar too high in the first two. The problem with this book is that it offers no more insight than the VH1 Behind the Music on Guns N Roses that aired a few years ago. As a matter of fact, he quotes that episode throughout the entire book. It doesnt seem like he talked to anyone close to the band. It seemed to me that his research was limited to the Behind the Music, Mtv interviews, and Rolling Stone articles. All of which I had already seen or read. This book told me nothing that I didnt already know.

Davis mentions in his credits that most employees of GNR had to sign confidentiality agreements in order to keep their jobs and that 13 people interviewed for the book asked to remain anonymous. Maybe thats why this book lacks any punch. Nobody in the band wanted anything to do with it, and nobody that knows anything is talking. The inside information feeling that I got from his other books didnt show up this time around.

If you insist on buying this, I would recommend that you at least go to the bookstore and read the credits. When you see that its all from interviews that you remember watching or reading, you may think twice about spending your hard earned cash on a rerun.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Unbelievable Factual Errors , October 21, 2008

By	Fritz Montpelier (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews

Davis' book is passably written but marred by factual errors that even a 13 year old rock fan would pick out. Jimi Hendrix is described as lighting his Les Paul on fire (he played a Strat 99% of the time), Paul Stanley is apparently Kiss' bass player (even my mother knows Gene Simmons plays bass), Joe Perry and Brad Whitford typify a kind of guitar playing known as 'flash' (never heard of it) and didn't play on Get Your Wings, Slash showed up at the studio to record Appetite with the 'original strings on his guitar.' (absolutley unbelievable). Davis attempts a fly on the wall approach that never lets the truth get in the way of a good story...Axl apparently arrives in NYC where an old black wino yells "do you know where you are? You're in the jungle, baby! And you're going to die!" And on and on and on...

Having said that, the Guns' saga is too filthy and compelling to not read. Too bad a better writer willing to do the proper research (never mind a publisher that employs a fact-checker) hasn't picked up the ball yet.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Highly readable, but it's no The Dirt, September 11, 2008

By	Erik Ketzan (Orbis Tertius) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

First of all, I'm not a die-hard Guns n Roses fan. For those who, like the gentleman below, already know a ton about the band, I suspect this volume will add little to their understanding of the Guns for the simple reason that the book seems written mostly from library research, footage and interviews that were already out there along with original interviews with ancillary characters. There is no indication that Davis talked to the band at any time or knew them.

That said, since I knew little about Guns n Roses beyond fond teenage memories of Appetite for Destruction, Davis' book was a breezy, enjoyable read. He does a great job bringing those hundreds of interviews and insights together, and by the end I felt I knew Axl, Slash and the rest of the band as well as anyone not witnessing their wild lives first-hand ever could. The book is almost 80% about Appetite and the lives of the band until then. It devotes little time to Use Your Illusion and the lesser albums like Lies and Spaghetti Incident, and that's probably a good thing. I finished it in a few days.

If you are a general reader just looking for a great book about the glam-metal-rock era, there's a much better book out there: The Dirt, the story of Motley Crue, by Neil Strauss. It's hard not to compare the two works, and what makes The Dirt so great-- it's told largely in the voices of the band members, looking back on their years of debauchery-- highlights the weaknesses of Watch You Bleed.

By no means a must-read, but an enjoyable and easy trip into the insane lives of Guns n Roses. A whiskey bottle is thrown, on average, every ten pages.