WATCH YOU BLEED: The Saga of Guns N Roses

by Stephen Davis

Published by Penguin

In his autobiography, Slash basically calls Stephen Davis' Led Zeppelin chronicle Hammer of the Gods self-indulgent bullshit. Davis most likely read that as part of his "research" for this, his 400-plus account of the career of the 1980s' last great rock band, which could account for why he spends so much of this book slagging off the guitarist and the rest of his dysfunctional crew of egotists, control freaks, junkies and boozehounds. Guns N' Roses may well have been among the most selfish and dispicable group of musicians ever to sleaze out of a Hollywood gutter -- misogynistic, drug-addled, violent, unrepentent, obnoxious and disgraceful -- but a biographer's job should be to provide balance. Whatever their faults, and there are many, Guns N' Roses still stands as one of the greatest bands of all time, a band whose Appetite for Destruction album is still the highest-selling debut record by any artist ever. 23 years after it came out. So GnR may well be scumbags, but they deserve a much better biography than this.

Watch You Bleed, for all its readability and occasional jaw-dropping moments, falls down on a number of levels. And it falls hard: Davis, the man who co-wrote an Aerosmith biography, incorrectly identifies the release year of that band's Draw the Line album as 1979. He refers to Paul Stanley as "the bass player from Kiss", calls Skid Row a trio from Philadelphia with a Canadian singer, and claims that Slippery When Wet was Bon Jovi's debut. He gets dates wrong (like Axl Rose's birthdate), misidentifies locations and even suggests Hendrix burned a Les Paul at Woodstock. I do more fact-checking when I write a review than this guy did writing an entire book. Worse, every mistake I just listed should simply have not even been made by a dude who wrote books about Zeppelin and Aerosmith. But really, Davis didn't so much as author a book as string together a bunch of interviews and chapter-long personal opinion pieces about their work.

I loved Guns N' Roses (still do!) and devoured everything I could find about them, so re-reading masses of quotes from Kerrang!, RIP and dozens of other mags from the period was a nice trip down memory lane, but nothing I didn't already know. Indeed, there's almost nothing here that a long-time Gunners fan wouldn't have read or heard about somewhere else: magazines, Slash's and Mick Wall's books, TV. Davis tries to compete with The Dirt by dedicating a few hundred pages to the various members' debaucheries, but it rings hollow because The Dirt was actually written by Mötley Crüe. No one from Guns N' Roses had any input into this book at all.

Not only is this an unofficial cash-in, originally released in hardback around the time Chinese Democracy was released, but it's a lazy one. Even with the possibly that Davis was probably only given months to complete this in time to coincide with the launch of the most anticipated album in rock history, Watch You Bleed is pretty half-arsed. It did make me want to listen to Appetite for Destruction again though, so some good did come out of it.