From the writer of Gabba Gabba Hey! The Graphic Story of The Ramones and Metallica: Nothing Else Matters comes an explosive new graphic novel about The Most Dangerous Band in the World: Guns N' Roses.
Having sold over 100 million albums, recorded the most expensive album ever, endlessly courted controversy with their lyrics and a full-on hedonistic lifestyle, Guns N' Roses are well acquainted with rock 'n' roll excess. And it's all here in Reckless Life: the feud between Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain, the riots during concerts, Rose's interest in Charles Manson, the acrimonious departure of Slash, the drugs, the groupies and, of course, the music.
Marc Olivent's stunning artwork and Jim McCarthy's incisive script perfectly capture the rollercoaster tale of Axl Rose, Slash, Izzy Stradlin, Duff McKagan, Steve Adler and the many others who have passed through the Guns N' Roses story.
(Music Sales America). When teenager and amateur photographer Marc Canter set out to document his best friend Saul Hudson's rise as a rock guitarist in 1982, he never imagined he was documenting the genesis of the next great rock 'n' roll band. His friend became the legendary guitarist Slash, and Canter found himself witnessing the creation of Guns N' Roses front and center. The candid shots contained in Reckless Road, taken as the band toured in 1985-1987 and made the legendary album Appetite for Destruction, capture their raw, blood-sweat-and-tears performances as well as their intimate moments. Containing original gig memorabilia including show flyers, ticket stubs, set lists, press clippings, and handwritten lyrics as well as in-depth interviews with band members and the people closest to them, Reckless Road offers an explicit, first-person perspective readers won't find anywhere else. This book covers the first 50 gigs that Guns N Roses did. with 1000 plus unseen photos. Interviews with over 20 people including band members, roadies strippers, girlfriends, Tom Zutaut the A&R guy that signed the band, Mike Clink the guy who produced the record, Steve Thompson & Mike Barbiero the guys that mixed the record, and close friends of the band. The book is well designed and is a must for any GNR fan. This book covers 10 of the 12 songs off Appetite for Destruction the first time they were played!
They've sold over 100 million albums, recorded the most expensive album ever, endlessly courted controversy with their lyrics, and embrace a full-on hedonistic lifestyle: Guns N' Roses are well acquainted with rock 'n' roll excess. In this spectacular new graphic biography, Marc Olivent's stunning artwork and Jim McCarthy's incisive script perfectly capture the rollercoaster tale of Axl Rose, Slash, Izzy Stradlin, Duff McKagan, Steve Adler and the many others who have passed through the Guns 'n' Roses story. And it's all here: the feud between Axl and Kurt Cobain, the riots during concerts, the acrimonious departure of Slash from the band, the inevitable drugs and groupies and, of course, the music.
From the creator of Godspeed: The Kurt Cobain Graphic and Eminem: In My Skin comes an explosive new graphic novel about the rise and fall of The Sex Pistols. Thanks to Steve Parkhouse’s wonderfully vivid illustrations and Jim McCarthy’s clever distillation of the script that rewrote rock ‘n’ roll and much else besides, the Pistols’ story returns to the rough and tumble of the comic strip from which it derived so much of its initial inspiration. England’s original punks explode from the pages with the same disrespect for authority that had the British establishment up in arms during the Queen’s 25th anniversary jubilee. And no one would have enjoyed this take on the Pistols more than the tale’s real casualty, Sid Vicious, who devoured comics almost as much as he did the destructive stuff.
Soon to be a Paramount+ exclusive docuseries! The New York Times Bestseller The Explosive National Bestseller "A backstage pass to the wildest and loudest party in rock history—you'll feel like you were right there with us!" —Bret Michaels of Poison Nothin' But a Good Time is the definitive, no-holds-barred oral history of 1980s hard rock and hair metal, told by the musicians and industry insiders who lived it. Hard rock in the 1980s was a hedonistic and often intensely creative wellspring of escapism that perfectly encapsulated—and maybe even helped to define—a spectacularly over-the-top decade. Indeed, fist-pumping hits like Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” Mötley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls,” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” are as inextricably linked to the era as Reaganomics, PAC-MAN, and E.T. From the do-or-die early days of self-financed recordings and D.I.Y. concert productions that were as flashy as they were foolhardy, to the multi-Platinum, MTV-powered glory years of stadium-shaking anthems and chart-topping power ballads, to the ultimate crash when grunge bands like Nirvana forever altered the entire climate of the business, Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock's Nothin' But a Good Time captures the energy and excess of the hair metal years in the words of the musicians, managers, producers, engineers, label executives, publicists, stylists, costume designers, photographers, journalists, magazine publishers, video directors, club bookers, roadies, groupies, and hangers-on who lived it. Featuring an impassioned foreword by Slipknot and Stone Sour vocalist and avowed glam metal fanatic Corey Taylor, and drawn from over two hundred author interviews with members of Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, Poison, Guns N’ Roses, Skid Row, Bon Jovi, Ratt, Twisted Sister, Winger, Warrant, Cinderella, Quiet Riot and others, as well as Ozzy Osbourne, Lita Ford, and many more, this is the ultimate, uncensored, and often unhinged, chronicle of a time where excess and success walked hand in hand, told by the men and women who created a sound and style that came to define a musical era—one in which the bands and their fans went looking for nothin’ but a good time...and found it.
Guns N' Roses fans know the Use Your Illusion tour went on nonstop from 1991 to 1993. They know that concerts sold out in minutes all over the world so fans could hear chart-topping singles Welcome to the Jungle, Sweet Child of Mine, Paradise City, and November Rain live. They know the Use Your Illusion tour was the last for the band with Slash and Duff. But they've only heard rumors of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans. Fortunately for fans, Craig Duswalt hasn't just heard rumors—he knows what went on backstage on one of the longest and most popular music events because he lived it. As Axl Rose's personal assistant during the ridiculously long world tour, Duswalt experienced things that would make most people run the other way and never look back. And in Welcome to My Jungle, he shares the sometimes hilarious, sometimes just plain reckless, and always insane actual happenings on the tour. A true must-read for Guns N' Roses fans, Welcome to My Jungle delights readers with hilarious and entertaining exclusive firsthand stories like: •The day Axl Rose, Kurt Cobain, and Courtney Love got into a “huge war" backstage at the MTV Awards •Why Guns N' Roses are forever linked to Charles Manson •The night Liz Taylor walked in on a very nude Slash—and stayed a while Featuring little-known facts for the ultimate GN'R fan, Welcome To My Jungle gives an inside look at what it's really like to live and work with a hugely popular band, from the middle of a rock and roll hurricane.
For the generation coming of age in the years from 1987 to 1994, RIP magazine was every bit as crucial as Rolling Stone. Life on Planet Rock describes how Friend, the editor of RIP, became the Zelig-like chronicler of the biggest musical moments of that time—from introducing Guns N’ Roses (in nothing but a top hat, underwear, and cowboy boots) to sitting in during the making of Metallica’s "Black Album." Life on Planet Rock provides revealing portraits of artists as varied as Kurt Cobain, Gene Simmons, Alice Cooper, Axl Rose, James Hetfield, Steven Tyler, and many more. Part oral history, part candid and humorous memoir, it is a wormhole back to a fast-moving time in music that saw tastes flash from new wave to hair metal to grunge, told as only someone who was there through it all could tell it.
In her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Quick and the Dead, the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic. "She practices ... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams’s imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen’s failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at a “resort” on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call “Big Girl.” In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature’s beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this “gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth”? Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams’s searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons—against all reasonableness—to try and recover something of it.
Musician Duff McKagan shares details about his life and career, discussing the creation and rise of Guns n' Roses, his struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction, his path to sobriety, and more.
'Last Of the Giants is the mad, funny, dark and often painful story of a lost band from a now-distant time' CLASSIC ROCK MAGAZINE INCLUDES BRAND NEW CHAPTER COVERING GUNS N' ROSES EPIC WORLD TOUR 'Any story about Guns is worth reading. But when the author is Mick Wall it's absolutely essential' KERRANG Many millions of words have already been written about Guns N' Roses, the old line-up, the new line-up. But none of them have ever really gotten to the truth. Which is this: Guns N' Roses has always been a band out of time, the Last of the Giants. They are what every rock band since the Rolling Stones has tried and nearly always failed to be: dangerous. At a time when smiling, MTV-friendly, safe-sex, just-say-no Bon Jovi was the biggest band in the world, here was a band that seemed to have leapt straight out of the coke-smothered pages of the original, golden-age, late-sixties rock scene. 'Live like a suicide', the band used to say when they all lived together in the Hell House, their notorious LA home. And this is where Mick Wall first met them, and became part of their inner circle, before famously being denounced by name by Axl Rose in the song 'Get in the Ring'. But this book isn't about settling old scores. Written with the clear head that 25 years later brings you, this is a celebration of Guns N' Roses the band, and of Axl Rose the frontman who really is that thing we so desperately want him to be: the last of the truly extraordinary, all-time great, no apologies, no explanations, no giving-a-shit rock stars. The last of his kind.
