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Guns N' Roses Their Wild Drunken Times in Chicago

432 views · Published 5 June 2016 · 1:19 · Indexed 8 November 2026

Channel: Rock N' Roll True Stories 2 · 2016 · Music

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Their wild drunken times in Chicago Article for Guns N' Roses

https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20160602/wrigleyville/guns-n-roses-chicago-their-wild-drunken-lost-summer-on-clark-street

LAKEVIEW — Guns N' Roses is coming back to Chicago in a month — but it's unlikely the visit will come close to rivaling the non-stop, two-month party the band secretly held here in the summer of 1989.

That's when GNR was still riding the high of its monster debut album "Appetite For Destruction." With money pouring in and booze and drugs piling up, the Los Angeles-based rockers needed somewhere to hide.

Somewhere quiet to work on a new album.

So they chose, somewhat inexplicably if they truly wanted peace and quiet, Wrigleyville.

For two months that summer, the band raised hell up and down Clark Street after booking a studio above the Metro and renting a pair of condos nearby.

 
There was a drunken Slash bunny-hopping everything in sight on Clark Street on his BMX bike. Cocaine was hidden in butter dishes back at the condos. Italian food was flung onto pesky fans from the balcony of the rented condos. Daughters of high-ranking cops were hit on. Squad cars were involved.

The bad boys of rock — regular "nobodys" to the Chicagoans they encountered, according to Slash — got into just about everything that summer ... except completing much music.

Several band members, in subsequent years, described their summer on the North Side as a wasted effort, mostly because frontman Axl Rose showed up weeks late as the band began to fracture.

It was a pivotal time, and not in a good way.

Now, after years apart, Slash, Axl and Duff McKagan are coming back to Chicago for two shows at Soldier Field (July 1 and 3) as part of a blockbuster summer reunion tour.

To mark their grand return, here are some highlights of 1989's Guns N' Roses' Clark Street Summer, culled from their own writings.

From lead guitarist Slash's 2007 best-selling autobiography "Slash":

"(Manager) Doug Goldstein and I went to Chicago to scope out where we would live and rehearse. We the chose the Cabaret Metro, the famous rock club on the north side of the city: it's a concert space that houses a separate club called the Smart Bar in the basement, and also has a theater upstairs. It was perfect; we took over the theater and when we were done for the day, the coolest bar in the city was waiting for us downstairs. We rented out a two-unit, brown brick apartment building a few miles down the road on Clark Street, right by the elevated train, to live on."

" ... Duff and I were such enthusiastically social boozers that the miles of bars along North Clark Street were a new playground for us — all within walking distance. My personal consumption at that point was a half-gallon bottle of Stoli per day, plus whatever I consumed when I was out at night. I'd wake up in the morning and fill a Solo cup 85 percent full with vodka, ice and a bit of cranberry juice. I called it breakfast of champions. Duff was in the same league."

"... We'd jam at the Metro for most of the afternoon, sometime into the evening, and then spend that rest of the night in and out of the bars."

"... In our plentiful free time, Duff and I also did our personal best to stay in shape. I had one of my BMX bikes out there and I used to ride it between the apartment and the rehearsal space, bunny-hopping over everything in sight, riding on the sidewalk. It was a good workout. Some days Duff and I even went to the gym, usually just after our morning vodkas. We'd go to one of those big public YMCAs with our security guard, Earl, to pump iron. We'd be down there in our jeans, doing sets between cigarette breaks — it was invigorating.

"We'd usually cool down afterward with cocktails at a sports bar. It didn't matter how big we were back home or how many records we'd sold or the shows we'd played; in Chicago, we were nobodys. We were just a couple of regular Joes to our fellow patrons; and there is not a bigger haven for regular Joes in America than the sports bars of North Clark Street.

"Every night we hung out at Smart Bar, which was very cool, but a much different rock scene than L.A. It was 1990, and that place was all about techno and industrial music like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. We didn't really gel with people there, because we were clearly of a different variety, but we made a circle of friends anyway. We had dozens of chicks; it was like a shooting gallery in that place, but eventually I settled on one."

"All things considered, we managed to produce a few good tunes: 'Estranged,' 'Bad Apples,' and 'Garden of Eden.' Over all, I found our time in Chicago to be a huge waste, which will always be a point of contention between Axl and I. He seemed to think that we were really getting somewhere and that I was the one who ruined it all."

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