Journalist and writer Mick Wall has posted an excerpt from his new book, Last Of The Giants: The True Story Of Guns N’ Roses, which was released on November 17th, 2016:

After the Hell Tour came the Hell House. And like the creation of a star, the Hell House was to suck in a lot of dark matter before it emitted the white heat and light of the Guns N’ Roses who were ready to make their first records. There are always torrid tales that surround the creation of a rock & roll legend, but in the Hell House bad things happened, things that do not reflect well on anyone involved —however famous and lauded they were to become.

The building was located in West Hollywood, behind 7508 Sunset Boulevard near the junction of North Gardner Street, a one-room space of around 12 feet by 12 feet that was officially designated a “storage area” (it’s now behind a shop called the Russian Bookstore). Just over the road was the Guitar Center, and nearby the Mesa/Boogie amp showroom. It wasn’t a dwelling space at all: it had a roll-up aluminium door, no bathroom, kitchen or air conditioning, and until Izzy and a couple of friends found some lumber abandoned behind the unit and used it to build a rudimentary gallery that just about slept three if you lay very still, was entirely unrecognisable as one.

Anyone needing the toilet had to use the communal facility 50 yards up the street. It was a terrible place, one you’d only consider if you were young, broke and living day to day with some fucked-up dream in your head. Izzy described it as “a fucking living hell…” Slash, having lost a job working on a newsstand and its attendant chance to crash at the apartment of the stand’s manager, was forced to choose between the Hell House or homelessness and even then sometimes took the latter option, sleeping in the Tower Records parking lot rather than the squalid, overcrowded nightmare that the House became.

It started out as a rehearsal space. They had been getting by using a room in Silver Lake owned by Nicky Beat, a Strip-scene drummer who’d spent about ten minutes in LA Guns. “Nicky wasn’t necessarily seedy,” Slash recalled. “But he had a lot of seedy friends…” Guns N’ Roses connected with various of those — the “underbelly” as Slash called it — and some would follow them back to the Hell House. Their lives were chaotic and becoming more so, and yet the chaos fired them. In the Hell House they wrote and worked up most of the songs that would appear on Appetite for Destruction, plus a few that would hold over for Use Your Illusion, too. Izzy had the riffs for “Think About You” and “Out ta Get Me”; Slash had the opening chords and riff to “Welcome to the Jungle.” “That song, if anything,’ Slash explained, “was the first real tune that the band wrote together…”

Read the complete excerpt from the book here.

Many millions of words have already been written about Guns N' Roses, the old line-up, the new line-up. But none of them have ever really gotten to the truth. Which is this: Guns N' Roses has always been a band out of time, the Last of the Giants. They are what every rock band since the Rolling Stones has tried and nearly always failed to be: dangerous. At a time when smiling, MTV-friendly, safe-sex, just-say-no Bon Jovi was the biggest band in the world, here was a band that seemed to have leapt straight out of the coke-smothered pages of the original, golden-age, late-sixties rock scene.

'Live like a suicide', the band used to say when they all lived together in the Hell House, their notorious LA home. And this is where Mick Wall first met them, and became part of their inner circle, before famously being denounced by name by Axl Rose in the song 'Get in the Ring'.

But this book isn't about settling old scores. Written with the clear head that 25 years later brings you, this is a celebration of Guns N' Roses the band, and of Axl Rose the frontman who really is that thing we so desperately want him to be: the last of the truly extraordinary, all-time great, no apologies, no explanations, no giving-a-shit rock stars. The last of his kind.