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I THINK IT TOOK TWO DAYS FOR DOUG Goldstein to be elected the official new manager of Guns N’ Roses. At the time we had not finished mixing the record, but Doug, from the start, wanted to make a name for himself in the industry and make money, and we were the perfect vehicle for that. We booked a series of gigs straightaway, and on strategic days off, would go into the studio to complete the albums. For a while, our tour schedule delayed the release of the albums indefinitely.

We certainly had our fun, though. Doug took us out of the studio to play Rock in Rio in Brazil in 1991, which would be Matt and Dizzy’s first show with Guns. It was incredible; we played two nights in a row to 180,000 fans in Maracanã Stadium. It was a festival that had gone on for weeks, where everyone from Megadeath to Faith No More, to INXS, Run-D.M.C., and Prince, had played. It was something else; I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a more insane Guns N’ Roses crowd—and that is saying something. When we kicked into the bridge of “Paradise City,” people swan-dived from the upper tier of the stadium—seemingly to their death. There aren’t words that can do their degree of intensity justice: we had had people stacked outside of our hotel so deep that we couldn’t leave. We couldn’t even go down to the pool, because when we did, somehow people would launch themselves over the fifteen-foot wall and run up and basically attack us. They didn’t want to hurt us, but they definitely wanted to break a piece of us off to keep for themselves. It was bizarre. We couldn’t leave our rooms, and our wives, or girlfriends, or any women seen in our company, were taunted and, basically, marked for death by these fans of ours.

We did a bunch more dates. We had three theater dates in L.A., San Francisco, and New York, with various bands opening for us, such as Blind Melon and Faith No More and Raging Slab. At the New York show we shot live footage, which made the basis of the video for The Terminator 2 soundtrack. That video also featured shots of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Terminator himself, at the Rainbow. We then started a tour with Skid Row in the United States, including two nights at the Inglewood Forum in L.A. I tell you, being that huge of a band was fucking killer . Having Skid Row was my kind of tour: total debauchery.

Way before we finished mixing and mastering the albums, Axl was committed to getting the right image for our cover art. Since he’d been the one who brought that brilliant Robert Williams painting in for Appetite, we trusted him to find the art for these two albums as well. Once again he did: the image for the nebulous mix of songs we’d worked up was by Mark Kostabi. It was a young Dutch-looking figure in a “thinker” pose that had been inspired by a Renaissance painting. At the time, Axl really wanted that image to be the two faces of those albums. In the end we had one in red, one in blue, and the rest of us were just like, “Okay, cool, man.” That made the two album concept more palatable.

That was one of what might be considered “big” decisions that, as a band, we were too quick to pass off to our lead singer. But I don’t regret it at all: if that was where Axl was going to throw down the gauntlet, it was all good. I was much more concerned that the Illusion albums would be released separately so that our fans didn’t have to spend thirty or forty bucks to get our new music: they could decide if they wanted one or the other album and buy accordingly. Hopefully they’d want both. In the end, Use Your Illusion I sold more than Use Your Illusion II .

When the albums went on sale, fans were lined up outside of record stores all around the country. I can vouch for the fact that there was a line down the block at Tower Records on Sunset that night because I drove past there on my way to the airport with Renee. I had the limo pull in and we snuck in the back door and were brought up to the same little office above the sales floor where I’d been detained for shoplifting when I was in junior high; I looked down at all the kids on line to buy the records through the same one-way glass that some manager had watched me through the day I got busted stealing. It was surreal.

The records went to number one and number two the week they were released, which was a record. And then they stayed there. There was fanfare everywhere, and we needed to get organized for our tour. It was going to be bigger than anything we’d done.

The new music was much more complicated, so bringing it to the stage was going to require added musicians. I was elected the unofficial music director, in charge of finding background vocalists and horn players. I had a hard time swallowing the concept of three guys in tuxes blowing brass, so I hired hot chicks instead. Of course, good-looking backup singers were a necessity as well. I sort of did it all tongue in cheek. We also brought in Teddy Zig Zag, this great blues player I’d jammed with countless times, to play additional piano and the harmonica. Actually I relied on Ted to recruit all of the female session players and he did an amazing job.

As we prepared to take off again, I had a lot to do with the stage design as well. I helped design a pretty efficient and good-looking stage that we would live on for the next two and a half years. There were ramps, little stages over the amps for the girls, a keyboard area, and a piano that came from under the floor for Axl. We also had a cool grating for a floor so that lights could shine from beneath us it.

We were hands-on for the whole development of that big-ass stage we ended up with. We had the Guns N’ Roses logo on the floor, which was cool, too. It was fucking incredible for us to have the money and the public demand to design our ultimate performance vehicle. It was a dream come true… but as we prepared for our monster tour, the last thing on our minds was being careful what we wished for.

I’ve experienced extreme highs and lows, and rode them all to the end. But when they’re so close together that they’re virtually interwoven, it is alienating. That is something else altogether; suddenly the once familiar seems strange, and nothing feels stable. As a kid, I’d stared in disbelief from the side of many stages that, to me, were bigger than life itself. Now I was playing on an even bigger one, with my band’s logo emblazoned on the floor beneath my feet. We had arenas full of fans waiting to see us everywhere we went, all around the world. We released two albums on the same day that debuted at number one and number two. It couldn’t have been going better. And backstage, behind it all, we were splitting apart like the atom in an A-bomb.

When I look back on it now, I can see the roots of the whole thing, but at the time I didn’t have that kind of perspective at all. It was always there, but in the post- Appetite era, the condition really came into its own: Axl became a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It was one thing during the recording of the Illusion records when he was holing up in the recording studio and being excessively overindulgent; none of us liked that much, but we were willing to allow it. We certainly didn’t think it could get worse. Those sessions were the times when the rest of us began to let those things happen against our better judgment. It was tedious yet still fun, but we were kidding ourselves thinking that situation was all going to be fine once the album was released. It was really tough for me because I felt very close to Axl for periods of time when we were working together toward a common goal, and then, not much later, I’d feel like we were on opposite sides of a fence. It started a real love/hate situation between us.