Who didn’t love Guns ‘N Roses when they first exploded in the late eighties? Appetite For Destruction was one of those amazing, soundtrack of your life albums, and it’s hard to believe it’s been over twenty-five years now since it first hit store shelves.
And it’s too bad the band collapsed like it did, although considering how drugged out and volatile Guns were, it’s a miracle they lasted as long as they did.
It’s usually difficult to get through a week without Axl Rose making a jackass out of himself, and recently you may have read that he was suing Activision because Slash is in Guitar Hero III, and Axl claimed he wasn’t aware of this before he allowed Welcome to the Jungle to be used in the game. Yet as the Hollywood Reporter speculates, Axl’s probably not going to win his $20 million lawsuit against the game company because he didn’t file it soon enough, and the statute of limitations may be up.
Axl’s not big on doing things on time. It’s taken him over a decade to release his Chinese Democracy album, and he’s infamous for keeping audiences waiting for hours until he feels like gracing the stage. He waited so long to release Chinese Democracy the music business collapsed from under him, and now this lawsuit comes years after the music game market has died off.
Rose sued for fraud and breach of contract, and in a deposition Rose claimed, “The reason I did not file a lawsuit – through my managers and representatives – offered me a separate video game and other business proposals worth millions of dollars to resolve and settle my claims relating to GHIII. Activision was offering me a Guns N’ Roses-dedicated video game, a game dedicated to music from the Chinese Democracy album, and other proposals.”
Nearly twenty years after he left the band, Axl still blames Slash for the demise of Guns N Roses, hence this ridiculous suit, and contrary to Axl’s claims that there was an agreement in writing not to include Velvet Revolver songs, or anything having to do with Slash, the judge has stated, “The only extrinsic evidence supports Activision’s interpretation and does not support Rose’s interpretation.”
Axl’s threatened many lawsuits over the years, and lost just about as many of them in court, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to predict the outcome of all of this. And if Activision ever truly offered Axl his own game (please remember Rose has a very broad interpretation of the truth), they’d still be waiting for him to show up to this day.
