Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses | 
| Author: Stephen Davis
Publisher: Gotham
Category: Book
List Price: $27.50
Buy Used: $9.60
You Save: $17.90 (65%)
New (35) Used (22) from $9.60
Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 116990
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 448
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.5
ISBN: 1592403778
Dewey Decimal Number: 782.421660922
EAN: 9781592403776
ASIN: 1592403778
Publication Date: August 26, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 17 more reviews...
 Big disappointment but a good "fluff" history of GNR June 23, 2009
Sean P. Miller (PA)
Overall I was disappointed with this book, maybe because I had high expectations from the author of "Hammer of the Gods".
My trouble began with the glaring errors that made me question the validity with the rest of the book. Most notably, he mentions Paul Stanley as the bass player for Kiss which is completely untrue as Gene Simmons is the bassist. Maybe it's a typo but I think it's pretty bad that an author covering rock music doesn't know who the bass player of Kiss is, especially since Gene Simmons is the most visible member of that group.
This error made me question the rest of the book. How could I know if what I was reading was true?
The author also spends a lot of time talking about the impending grunge movement that takes place in the 90's, almost saying the GNR's Use Your Illusion albums may have been more successful if it weren't for Nirvana. I don't know about you, but I remember how HUGE the Use Your Illusion albums were when they came out. MTV played November Rain almost hourly and there was a lot of press about the tour following the release. Grant it, the grunge movement impacted the music industry and put a lot of heavy metal acts into obscurity, but in 1992, heavy metal was alive and well. Plus, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" at first was lumped into the heavy metal genre (remember Kurt Cobain wearing a ball gown on Headbanger's Ball?) The author neglects the fact that Guns was so dysfunctional that they would have broken up even in Nirvana never existed.
Also, the author spends time actually reviewing, song-by-song, each album. While it's not a big deal, but this a biography, not a Rolling Stone review. I don't need your opinion on the songs.
My recommendation is to not buy this book and simply just enjoy the mystery behind Guns N' Roses because we will never know the full story.
Poor Research June 15, 2009
J. Sledge (Charleston, IL)
How does a supposed rock historian get away with printing Hendrix lit a Les Paul on fire and Paul Stanley played bass for KISS?
Davis claims fans showed up at the Rosemont Horizon gig in Chicago on April 9, 1992, and were surprised to find the show had been cancelled.
Ha ha! That's a lie because I was there, and the show was fantastic! I still have the ticket stub.
Such inexcusable mistakes make the reader believe the average GnR fan could write a better book considering we've seen and read all the same sources Davis has. And we wouldn't include the egregious errors.
The only insight this book offered me was what a true vagrant Axl was, sleeping on park benches and behind dumpsters, but then, I'm not sure how much of it I can believe, considering other HUGE factual errors in this book.
Poorly Written, but Fun to Read May 6, 2009
A. Rose (My mansion in Malibu)
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. It was a lot of fun to read about Axl's violent mood swings and all the crazy things he did like trying to shove his grand piano out the window of his house, and about the dirty and wild lives that the band members led. They all sound like kinda sick people, but it was entertaining to read about them, even if some of it wasn't true. The only problem I had with this book, (besides the sometimes false information), was that the author Stephen Davis seemed to think he's some major music critic, and expressed his views on all the Guns N' Roses songs ever released, which was annoying and boring. But besides that, it was an enjoyable, quick read that I finished in 1.5 hours, and had a splitting headache afterwards.
 Good book...not entirely accurate I think March 21, 2009
M. Mobley (Stephenville, TX)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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. I loved getting back into my youth, reading about my favorite band from high school. As somebody else stated, it seems like most of the "facts" are from old interviews and the author didn't really try to dig very far to get "the dirt" as it were. Overall, I loved the book...a great read for an old school fan that might have lost touch with the band over the years. My big problem is that Mr. Davis seemed to do a little too much reviewing of the albums/songs than doing a biography. I didn't spend $30 to read your opinions about old songs dude. Odds are I've heard them before & have my own opinion about them. It's rather insulting to read this guy rag on one of my favorite songs in a review 17-18 years after the song has been released.
Basically, if you can get past the author's egotistical "critic" mentality, and just want to relive old times...pick it up. Since I started reading I've started listening to Appetite all over again. (much to my wife's chagrin)
 Not The Real Deal January 29, 2009
Nick Coxon (Dublin)
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. People say the Wall book has nothing new in it yet I found all kinds of crazy of stuff in there I never knew - and all kinds of stuff in this I've read a thousand times before. Not cool.
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