Watch you bleed

About this book

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, multimilliondollar 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…

Themes & subjects

About the author

Stephen Davis

1947

**Stephen Davis** (1947-) Stephen Davis was born in New York City in 1947 and educated in Philadelphia and Boston. October of 1969 was an defining moment in Stephen's early life - the maverick Jack Kerouac had died of alcoholism and was being buried near Stephen in Massachusetts. Still at university and enthralled by the '*Rolling Stone*' newspaper he was asked to cover the funeral with his friend and photographer Peter Simon. At Kerouac's wake (in Lowell) were the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jimmy Breslin all from the '*New York Daily News*'... >"*So I wrote all this up and it was my first story in Rolling Stone, for 50 dollars and I went out…