Izzy Stradlin Quotes

"(Axl)`s a great rock singer. How can I get anybody that`s gonna top that?"

"Axl was like a serious lunatic when I met him. He was just really bent on fighting and destroying things. Somebody`d look at him wrong and he`d just like start a fight."

"Axl wants to do stuff his way, at his pace, in his time."

"(Axl)`s completely crazy... Without the other four of us around, I wouldn`t even want to imagine what the fuck would go on in his head. Or his life."

"(Axl) can still be a tyrant, but then he can turn around and be the nicest guy in the world."

"Slash was born in Stock... Uh, Stoke-on-Trent, when he was just a little kid, you know what I`m sayin`."

"(Duff) plays sort of like a rhythm bass sort of thing, y`know."

"Y`now Motley Crue? Sick fuckin` guys, man! Real sick fucks, those guys!"

"We got a call sayin` Alice Cooper had like two weeks of support dates in the Midwest. We said, `Alice Cooper... Fuckin` A!` Hey, I grew up listening to y`know "Sick Things", "I Love the Dead". It was a lot better than fuckin` reality. So we did `em. Alice was cool. He`s still... Y`know... "Alice"."

"We take out our aggressions while we`re playing. It`s like therapy."

"What`s more boring than a drum solo?"

"In Guns N` Roses, I would come up with an idea for a song and the first thing that would always happen was Slash getting hold of it and going chunka-chunka-chunka! I`d be going, `OK, it`s already changed a little bit.` Then Axl would come in and go, `We`ve gotta dd more lyrics, we`ve gotta have more vocals, more back-ups, let`s layer this`. So by the time it was finished it was like, `holy shit! What a monster!`"

"Music gave me something to do in my life."

"I`ve read that Alice Cooper created this thing that was Alice Cooper, so onstage he`s Alice Cooper, but if he`s going to buy a car, he`s Vincent Furnier - the other guy! Last year, I was thinking, "Man, that`s pretty clever, if you could sub-divide into two separate entities…" But… it`s me, you know?!"

"I have a phobia about being barefoot!"

"I hate to take showers! Guitarists don`t like showers `cause we like the grease to build up on our fingers, makes playing more fluid."

"Duff got me inspired to start running. He ran a marathon! This is a guy I used to see in the hallways of hotels and wouldn`t recognise him, because he was so fucked up from alcohol - vodka, specifically. Here`s a guy who almost died from having something blow up inside him - I forget what it was, but it was something important! So he inspired me to take up running, and that`s a great escape for me."

"That`s a tough one… music or sex? I`d say sex, if I gotta choose!"

"Originally I don`t think Slash ever wanted to play with another guitarist. But we both really loved Aerosmith and the Stones and we just used that idea to make it all work. At some point he and I hooked up and we started making it work. It became fun, just working with another guy like him, opposites attrack, I suppose."

"And me, as everybody knows, I used to be in the Bee Gees. Sorry, I always get confused, I meant Guns N` Roses!"

"Well, Axl and high school... He must have spent at least two days there! Yeah, I saw him briefly there."

"I`m proud of the songs we managed to knock together. And what we did... Everything! We smoked everything, drank everything, ate everything! Yeah, everything! I won`t say more, we broke havok, and that was great, we were the walking revolution! Only one thing was happening, and we were this thing. I remember the gigs in England, the first time, it was complete hysteria!"

"We have quite a few lawsuits already, but our attorney says you`re not a real band until you have at least a dozen of `em, so we have about eight more to go."

"The fact that I`m from Indiana has no business being in my career."

"We didn`t even imagine that one day we could play outside of Los Angeles!"

"We`re not as crazy as we used to be. Nobody`s laid out with a jones anymore. Now we know what we have to do and we do it. What`s fun is getting to meet all the people whose music we listen to. It`s a gas! We met Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick ... he was the greatest! He hung out with us when we played Rockford, Illinois and he got totally plastered! No more tequila for you Rick! When he pulled that stuff out, I knew there`d be problems. What a wild guy. We loved him. When we left him, he was sacked out on the floor."

"Ah...it...it`s okay. I`ve known other bands, and they always talk about, `We looked at this singer but his hair was too short,` or his hair was too long, or he didn`t dress right. Oh fuck it, ya know? After being in Guns N` Roses and Axl being the singer, who the fuck could I get that would even approach him? I can`t, but I figured I can sing enough."

"I guess in some ways I was sort of a balancing factor between Axl and the rest of the guys at one point. I don`t know how it evolved to where it is now. I don`t know what goes on with them now."

"A lot of the time when I was using (drugs), I`d just end up with a guitar, writing or recording some pretty depressing songs. I thought they were good at the time, and a couple are not too bad, but a lot of the shit I listen back to and think, ugh, that`s fucking depressing."

Axl isn`t really 24, he`s a million of years... he`s seen everything.

I knew deep inside that it didn`t feel right. I didn`t understand any more what was happening or what direction it was taking. - On leaving Guns N` Roses

"We do what we want. We have a raunchy type attitude. I don`t wanna say punk` attitude, but we definitely are raunchy."

"That night at the Felt Forum in New York was a particularly good night. I mean, sometimes we make bad mistakes onstage. I remember in the old days we`d go so nuts we`d fall right off the stage. Sometimes we`d jump off the stage on purpose. You can`t stay too tight when you do that."

"Many times I`ll be playing and some big kid will be hurling through the air at 100 miles per hour right at me. I can`t imagine what that must look like from the audience but I`m sure it adds excitement to the show. When these kids go flying past me and I never see them coming, it gives me a rush of adrenalin like you wouldn`t believe."

"We don`t really care if people think we`ve got a bad attitude. We`re the only band to come out of L.A. recently that`s real. And the kids know it."

"I Used To Love Her But I Had to Kill Her is a joke. I was sitting around listening to the radio and some guy was whining about a broad who was treating him bad. I wanted take the radio and smash it against the wall! Such self pity! So, we rewrote that same song we heard with a better ending, it`s a real New York-type of song."

"The blues are real important. It`s where most of the hard rock `n` roll came from."

"The feeling stays with you long after you leave that stage. It makes you not able to sleep and keeps you pumped up for hours afterwards. There`s no feeling like it in the world. On an average tourday, I try to get about four or five hours sleep. Sometimes it`s just not possible so I sleep only two or three hours and then on an offday, I`ll sleep all day. That gets your body back to normal."

"We constantly disagree and keep changing our minds about everything from one day to the next."

“It is difficult to maintain your mental health when you are surrounded by madness”

"At some point in the mid-`80s, I heard a song of mine on the radio and for the first time, I felt that something really important had happened. Still, from time to time I listen to songs that I composed and recorded in the `80s on the radio, and I to say myself "Wow, incredible, there I am, but I was still just a teenager who just wanted to play the guitar."

“You know, we’re not your normal band. We’re definitely not a product of the industry. We are going to leave some heavy marks on the music scene.”

“Our music it’s a summary of our lives. We just put into a song whatever comes out. You know, like getting up at about seven o’clock, but I don’t get out of bed until about nine. That’s seven o’clock at night.”

I don`t really enjoy being a center of attention. I`m more into the music and what`s happening with that. I enjoy having those guys (Axl and Slash) take care of the publicity.
It suits me fine. I don`t even have to think about actually planning out what I want to say in interviews, or what topics I`m gonna talk about. It`s funny, because I can walk through a club without anybody recognizing me, knowing me or bothering me, whenever I want to. Those guys, they`re so out front, no matter where they go they get spotted."

“It`s hard to say what the next album is gonna sound like, It`ll definitely be interesting. (“Lies”). I don`t think anyone`s given any thought to it, so we`ll just go and see what comes out. It`ll definitely be varied. I think the first album has diversity to it, but the next one will have even more. We`ve got a ton of stuff to sort through. It`ll be a rock & roll album, that`s for sure."

“Interviewer: When you have your first platinum album, how are you going to celebrate?
Izzy: I’m going to buy a Maserati and drive 500 miles per hour into a brick wall.”

“Duff loves his vodka!!”

To arrive on time at the concert hall is an adventure for me. The rock adventure exists if you want it, if you take it in your own hands by not letting others direct you.

The blues are above all the music of the blacks. No one will ever equal the music of Muddy Waters or Howlin` Wolf... especially not whites. A white man can play the blues, sometimes even with talent, but he misses the gripping element that the blacks inject into it. The creators and forebears of the blues had a really hard life when they tried to take themselves of it with their music, and you can feel it. Among the very rare white musicians who understood the blues for its emotional aspect, I`ll mention Eric Clapton and Keith Richards.

I never met him (Kurt Cobain), but I wouldn`t like to be in his place. He has a lot talent with composition. Since the Sex Pistols, I never enjoyed a record that had as much passion as "Nevermind". The media hell that he lives is like what I went through at the time Guns N’ Roses, and I don`t envy Kurt, that`s for sure!

I especially like the European public because, unlike Americans, they (pogote)! In addition, the Europeans sing your songs, which isn`t the case in the U.S.A.

My biggest heroes are The Partridge Family, and I would like to see them reunite with Alice Cooper singing. Otherwise, I would see Truman Capote well joining them and doing a saxophone solo to the recording!

Then another half-a-year went by and I found myself driving down the 101 freeway in LA and I`m seeing snow, cos I`ve been up for like days, doing coke. Oh, man... And then that fuckin` worm thing came up! I was staying with this coke dealer. I`d been up for five fucking days, and I was out in his garage, for what reason I`ll never know. And I pulled open this drawer of nuts and screws, and sure enough, man, they were turning into maggots! I thought, I gotta get the fuck out of here...

It`s while I`m playing that I`m honest. Now, it`s even stronger at home, because I go back to my beginnings. To be honest, it`s sharing your pleasure of living with others, and that passes through my music...

(Jamaica) It`s the fatherland of reggae, and I love this music. I can listen some anywhere and any time, because it gives me good vibrations, peace and well-being. It`s the rhyhmic aspect of reggae which I`m crazy about, and it`s like therapy. I love the old reggae, like Bob Marley, Toots, Jimmy Cliff and Peter Tosh, and their messages are timeless.

At the moment, I`m a happy guy, but I`m the same man I`ve always been. I didn`t change anything with my personality, except that from now on, I`m not directed by people who exploit me anymore, which was the case in the recent past. Today, paradoxically, I have more responsibilities than before, but a huge weight has been taken off my shoulders.

(The management ) It`s very important, and I have to say that since 1985, Alan Niven always dealt admirably with me. When he was fired by GN’R, that really annoyed me, and that definitely precipitated my decision to leave the band. What`s more, Niven knows rock music like the back of his hand, and that counts for a lot...

I love their two albums, and escpecially the sound of the guitars. This group had real courage. Their image and their music went like hand and glove and their vision of New York was authentic. (About the rock band New York Dolls).

(Punk rock) It was big during its short period of life. What I like so much about the music was the "stick it to you" attitude of `77 punk rock. The Pistols` album, it was the immediate energy, and I remember listening to it for a long time while skateboarding. Punk rock was an enormous rush of adrenalin for me, and still is.

I discovered them (the Ramones) late, from the album "Road To Ruin", and it`s an absolutely great group. This group understood everything about rock `n` roll, and their new disc "Mondo Bizarro" is killer. I`d like to tour with them.

I know well the complecations of playing in a stadium. It is there hard to find a sound there that agrees, everything is fliqu and it smells too much like hot dogs. Rock shouldn`t be combined with sitting down!

I`m satisfied with the way I sing, because it corresponds with my idea of rock. I don`t plan to hire a fully-fledged singer, because it`s too many worries. The song has to come from the gut and I believe that I have some; as far as that goes...

I`m convinced that by putting a warning sticker on a record, the kids are going to throw themselves at it. It`s reverse psychology, and typically hypocritical, but it`s very American...

We`d started out (Guns N’ Roses) as a garage band and it became like a huge band, which was fine. But everything was so magnified... Drug addictions, personalities... it just became... too much.

During our first concert in London (Donnington), kids died during the show. What the fuck is that? Is that rock `n` roll? It`s to have fun and then read in the newspaper of an airport that kids died during your concert? It`s fun to play in stadiums every evening and to start a riot in Saint Louis because the singer threw a fit? You really manage at some point to say to yourself: "none of this is funny anymore."

I stopped everything (drugs and alcohol) a year before leaving the band. So, during this year, I attended the spectacle of my friends killing themselves. I didn`t
want to be an accomplice to that, I didn`t want to wake up one day next to Slash`s corpse telling myself that indirectly, I`d participated in it. And so, I left.

I`d returned to Indiana, I lived peacefully, and one day, Axl called me. He asked me whether, effectively, I could help them on some concerts (in 1993, when Gilby Clarke broke his hand). I asked where these shows would take place, and it answered in Istanbul, in Athens, in London... you think that I hesitated (laughter)?! I love to travel and see new countries! I did these shows and I didn`t enjoy myself a lot because Duff and Slash were always still wasted. I don`t want to pretend I`m a saint, `cause I did everything, but when you`re clean, there`s nothing funny about seeing your friends like that.

I was on probation during one year in Los Angeles because I pissed in aisle of a plane! I had to go to see a psychologist every week, and, constantly, I could be controlled by the cops, namely that they could check my urine to see if I`d been drinking or taking drugs. And if you get it all wrong, if they discover that you`ve fucked up, you go directly to jail for quite some time. I didn`t want that. So I had to stop. Steven Tyler of Aerosmith also me helped a lot during this period: he told me his stories, and if, on the base, that can be funny, at the bottom, it`s more flippant than the other matter.

"The shows were completely erratic. I never knew whether we`d be able to finish the show from day-to-day, cos (Axl) would walk off... I said to Duff and Slash, we gotta learn a cover song or something, for when (Axl) leaves the stage. They were like, `Ah, let`s have another beer...` They didn`t care. The music had taken a back seat, there was nothing new coming from us. We didn`t sit around and play accoustic guitars anymore. It was like, oh, time to go on - where`s the singer? The singer walked off? Now what do we do?”

We made so much noise in the city, there were so many things happening around us, that the labels started to come to us. They came to us! They would come over to the studio and come in the alley and see drunks - there was this drunk with a bottle of Thunderbird," vicious, "on top of his head - and next thing you know we`re going to their office! We made them take us all out for dinner for like a week or two and we started eating good! We`d order all this food and drink and say, `OK, talk!`"

We love to take care of women - we love to treat them great... but right now we don`t have any money so we treat them like shit.

We don`t care if people think we have a bad attitude.

We had to eat shit to get were we are.

We didn`t go out and look for a record contract. It came to us. We signed with Geffen because they were the coolest company.

"I`ve known other bands, and they always talk about, `We looked this singer but his hair was too short,` or he didn`t dress right. Oh fuck it, ya know? After being in Guns N` Roses and Axl being the singer, who the fuck could I get that would even approach him? I can`t, but I figured I can sing enough".

(Duff)’s face has gone the way of Jimmy Page in the sense that he used to be beautiful and now he`s lost his chin to toxic bloat. The doctors talked to him two years ago, they said your liver is supposed to be this big, in the shape of a hardball. They said his liver was this big, in the shape of a softball. When his liver gets this big, it`s all over... (he holds his hands in the shape of a cantaloupe).