Axl Rose is a larger-than-life figure in classic rock music. While he’s best known as Guns N’ Roses’ iconic frontman, he’s also known for getting into fights, beefing with other musicians, saying unsavory things, and generally getting into trouble on stage and off stage. Let’s look at a few times Axl Rose made headlines and not for good reasons.
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1. Inciting a Riot in 1991
Axl Rose made headlines back in 1991 for inciting a riot that actually could have been quite serious. While performing “Rocket Queen” at the Riverport Amphitheater in June of that year, Rose suddenly got quite angry at someone in the audience. Apparently, he didn’t want cameras there, and the fan had one. He jumped into the crowd and tackled the fan, landing a few blows to the offender and those around him before security dragged him away. After loudly blaming security for the show ending, a riot broke out and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to equipment and even landed 65 audience members in the hospital.
This wouldn’t be Rose’s last riot, either. He would incite another one just a couple of months later in Montreal, which would cause even more damage to the venue and surrounding area.
2. Countless Feuds With Other Musicians (And His Own Band)
This man has a temper; that much is certain. He’s let that temper get the best of him on multiple occasions, too. He famously chased David Bowie down after the latter allegedly flirted with Rose’s girlfriend. He got into a yelling match with Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe. Rose verbally abused actor Warren Beatty while on-stage in Paris, threatened Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, and even wrote diss tracks about writers and media figures like Spin Magazine’s publisher Bob Guccione Jr.
There are even more instances of Rose beefing with other people that are just too high in volume to list. The man even beefed with his own band, for crying out loud!
3. Using and Defending Racially-Charged Slurs
Well, this was inevitable. Axl Rose once made headlines for the 1988 song “One In A Million”. Throughout the song (which you can listen to at your own discretion via the video above), Rose uses racist, xenophobic, and homophobic slurs. To make matters worse for himself, Rose doubled down on his use of the poor-taste verbage in the song’s lyrics.
In one Rolling Stone interview, he said that it wasn’t fair that he couldn’t use the racist slurs in the song without being labelled as racist. He also went on to say that he had “bad experiences” with gay people and immigrants, and that felt justified in his use of the slurs in the song.
Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images for Stagecoach
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