Speaking to The Bad Decisions Podcast With Scott Nathan, former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Tracii Guns said that he had some issues dealing with Axl back in the mid-1980s. He said Axl was a great friend and “always ready to give help” and “a really solid person.” Tracii said that Rose was having issues with mental health (possibly manic depression) and the way he has dealt with it is a strain on their friendship.
“And I would have never known — until one day. And the one day was… He was off with a junior high school friend of mine. And he had taken some ecstasy, and we didn’t see him for, like, a week, and he showed up at this gig, and he was just like a completely different person.”
“I was, like, ‘Whoa. Who are you? Who’s this guy?’ And that’s when the other side of that kind of kicked in.”
“I couldn’t deal with that. I loved him on the one side, the person I knew, and we were creative together, we were funny together. But at that time, he wanted to control everything around him.”
“And that’s when we were getting really popular,” he added. “Before that, he was more aware and taking in information and kind of sorting out what we were doing and how this is going and all that stuff. But once we knew, once he knew that we were locked, that Guns N’ Roses was going only one direction…”
“I mean, sometimes, he would talk for 40 minutes out of a 60-minute set on stage, stuff like that. And I would look at Izzy [Stradlin] and Izzy would be very passive about it. I’d be, like, ‘Fuck that, man. I’m here to play guitar.’”
“And so, that’s when that whole thing started, the platform, the Axl Rose platform, and I think people really connected with it, obviously, and I think they still do. The things that he has to say, the things that are interesting to people, and his very — what’s the word — loud and confident opinions on things like that.”
“People latch to them, and it’s very heartfelt, and he’s very sincere when he says things, even if later he kind of might backtrack a little bit and say, ‘Well, I really meant it then, but humans grow, and we move on.’”
“He’s very in [his head], and that’s what makes him great. But at that point, it just scared the shit out of me. I was just, like, ‘This isn’t a fun rock and roll band anymore. This is something else.’”
