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List Price: $16.00 | | Publisher: Gotham
Salesrank: 44446
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| Our Price: $5.85 |
| Used Price: $5.16 |
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| Media: Paperback |
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Editorial Review:
The New York Times bestselling epic tale of the last great rock band
From the bestselling author of Hammer of the Gods comes the complete story of Guns N' Roses - from their drug-fueled blastoff in the 80s to the turbulent life of legendary singer Axl Rose, and his fifteen-year, multimillion dollar quest to make the perfect hard rock album.
Riotous world tours. Drug-induced rampages. One hundred millions albums sold. In his sixth major rock biography, Stephen Davis details the riveting story of the last great rock band. Watch You Bleed documents the life of every band member, including the improbable story of W. Axl Rose. Davis brilliantly captures the Guns' raw power - from the gutters of Sunset Strip to the biggest stadiums on the planet. Based on exclusive interviews, private archives, and packed with stunning revelations, Watch You Bleed is the savage, definitive, and highly unauthorized story of Guns N' Roses. For the first time, millions of fans will learn the whole truth about this legendary band.
Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses Reviews:
Band was a train wreck 
2009-11-22 - I found the book very readable but the story of this band was just so depressing at times. But the band was the last great rock band before Alternative took the scene, so if you're into rock history it might be considered compulsory reading. It did cause me to revisit their music, but after scratching the surface we see some real lack of depth to the lyrics. Save your money and shop for something more relevant and less mired in the heroin culture of the 80s and 90s.
Could Have Been Better 
2009-11-09 - I'm deeply dissapointed I bought this book. What you get is a bunch of quotes and interviews rather than a story. Which makes me believe that the author was not a fan of G&R and did not know how to write a story about them as he did with Led Zepplin.
Big disappointment but a good "fluff" history of GNR
2009-06-23 - Overall I was disappointed with this book, maybe because I had high expectations from the author of "Hammer of the Gods".
My trouble began with the glaring errors that made me question the validity with the rest of the book. Most notably, he mentions Paul Stanley as the bass player for Kiss which is completely untrue as Gene Simmons is the bassist. Maybe it's a typo but I think it's pretty bad that an author covering rock music doesn't know who the bass player of Kiss is, especially since Gene Simmons is the most visible member of that group.
This error made me question the rest of the book. How could I know if what I was reading was true?
The author also spends a lot of time talking about the impending grunge movement that takes place in the 90's, almost saying the GNR's Use Your Illusion albums may have been more successful if it weren't for Nirvana. I don't know about you, but I remember how HUGE the Use Your Illusion albums were when they came out. MTV played November Rain almost hourly and there was a lot of press about the tour following the release. Grant it, the grunge movement impacted the music industry and put a lot of heavy metal acts into obscurity, but in 1992, heavy metal was alive and well. Plus, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" at first was lumped into the heavy metal genre (remember Kurt Cobain wearing a ball gown on Headbanger's Ball?) The author neglects the fact that Guns was so dysfunctional that they would have broken up even in Nirvana never existed.
Also, the author spends time actually reviewing, song-by-song, each album. While it's not a big deal, but this a biography, not a Rolling Stone review. I don't need your opinion on the songs.
My recommendation is to not buy this book and simply just enjoy the mystery behind Guns N' Roses because we will never know the full story.
Poor Research
2009-06-15 - How does a supposed rock historian get away with printing Hendrix lit a Les Paul on fire and Paul Stanley played bass for KISS?
Davis claims fans showed up at the Rosemont Horizon gig in Chicago on April 9, 1992, and were surprised to find the show had been cancelled.
Ha ha! That's a lie because I was there, and the show was fantastic! I still have the ticket stub.
Such inexcusable mistakes make the reader believe the average GnR fan could write a better book considering we've seen and read all the same sources Davis has. And we wouldn't include the egregious errors.
The only insight this book offered me was what a true vagrant Axl was, sleeping on park benches and behind dumpsters, but then, I'm not sure how much of it I can believe, considering other HUGE factual errors in this book.
Poorly Written, but Fun to Read
2009-05-06 - Even though this book was very poorly written and a lot of the information in it was false or skewed, I still found it to be an enjoyable read. It was a lot of fun to read about Axl's violent mood swings and all the crazy things he did like trying to shove his grand piano out the window of his house, and about the dirty and wild lives that the band members led. They all sound like kinda sick people, but it was entertaining to read about them, even if some of it wasn't true. The only problem I had with this book, (besides the sometimes false information), was that the author Stephen Davis seemed to think he's some major music critic, and expressed his views on all the Guns N' Roses songs ever released, which was annoying and boring. But besides that, it was an enjoyable, quick read that I finished in 1.5 hours, and had a splitting headache afterwards.
