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

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2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)

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Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses + Slash + Reckless Road: Guns N' Roses and the Making of Appetite for Destruction
Price For All Three: $39.44

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  • This item: Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses by Stephen Davis

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Rampant rockin' sex ... a lurid tell-all."
-- New York Post

"The gold standard of rock biographers."
-- Boston Globe

"Stephen Davis - America's rock biographer."
-- ABC News.com

"Five stars! Stephen Davis's real coup is to show how Guns could be electrifying one moment and spectacularly stupid the next. You might not like Axl Rose upon finishing the book, but you may understand him better."
- Mojo

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.


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.

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 (23 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #149,629 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

More About the Author

Stephen Davis
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Customer Reviews

23 Reviews
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 (5)
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 (10)
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Average Customer Review
2.5 out of 5 stars (23 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
17 of 19 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.


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5 of 5 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.
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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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Could Have Been Better
I'm deeply dissapointed I bought this book. What you get is a bunch of quotes and interviews rather than a story. Read more
Published 1 day ago by J. White

2.0 out of 5 stars Big disappointment but a good "fluff" history of GNR
Overall I was disappointed with this book, maybe because I had high expectations from the author of "Hammer of the Gods". Read more
Published 4 months ago by Sean P. Miller

2.0 out of 5 stars Poor Research
How does a supposed rock historian get away with printing Hendrix lit a Les Paul on fire and Paul Stanley played bass for KISS? Read more
Published 4 months ago by J. Sledge

2.0 out of 5 stars Poorly Written, but Fun to Read
Even though this book was very poorly written and a lot of the information in it was false or skewed, I still found it to be an enjoyable read. Read more
Published 6 months ago by A. Rose

3.0 out of 5 stars Good book...not entirely accurate I think
I'm not quite done with the book yet, got about 75 more pages or so but I felt I had to go ahead & do this now. Read more
Published 7 months ago by M. Mobley

1.0 out of 5 stars Not The Real Deal
Started reading it, thinking if the Mick Wall book on Axl is good this will be great too. But it isn't. I was really disappointed. Read more
Published 9 months ago by Nick Coxon

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect transaction
Perfect transaction! Great prices and lightening fast shipping for the holidays!
I couldn't be happier
Published 10 months ago by Melissa Pommerening

2.0 out of 5 stars Short opinion
This book may be interestign for those who doesn't know much about the band. But I don't recommend it if you are searching for more additional information.
Published 10 months ago by P. Pazos

1.0 out of 5 stars A badly written book report
Where do I begin with this review? For starters, if you're considering buying this book...do NOT waste your time or money! Now, to further elaborate... Read more
Published 10 months ago by Joshua L. Johnson

1.0 out of 5 stars Another smashed bottle, another show starting late ... yawn.
WATCH YOU BLEED reads like a quickie bio that was researched by reading a bunch of articles on the band rather than actually talking first hand with anyone who was in Guns n'... Read more
Published 10 months ago by Mark Lansing

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