Everyone knows that Guns N’Roses frontman Axl Rose is a bit temperamental, to say the least. And who more to have a front seat to Rose’s eccentricities than his personal assistant during the Use Your Illusion years? Craig Duswalt, now a motivational speaker, has written a book about his years with Rose. Welcome to my Jungle, full title Welcome to my Jungle, An Unauthorized Account of how a Regular Guy Like Me Survived Years of Touring with Guns N’ Roses, Pet Wallabies, Crazed Groupies, Axl Rose’s Moth Extermination System, & Other Perils on the Road With One of the Greatest Rock Bands of All Time, will be out on May 13th. However, the New York Post got its hand on an advance copy of the book, and shared some of the stories from it.
As you can tell from the picture and the book title, Rose had an interesting manner of pest control. While in between legs of the Use Your Illusion tour at his house, the frontman got upset after a moth, which assistants tried to shoo away, flew up by a chandelier.
Fed up, Rose told his first assistant, Craig Duswalt — Rose’s life was busy enough that his assistant required his own assistant — to “keep a close eye on it.” Rose ran upstairs and returned with “a long gun … a rifle maybe, or even a shotgun.”
Rose instructed Duswalt to bring him a chair and “positioned himself under the chair, lying on his back.” He then told Duswalt to “make [the moth] go into the corner” so that Rose didn’t shoot out the light.
Duswalt stood on a chair and batted the moth. He mentioned that he could probably reach it with a flyswatter, but Rose just laughed, saying, “Not going to happen.”
That’s among several stories that’s recounted during the Post writeup. There’s also a pretty entertaining story about room service and how Duswalt got Rose to a show on time, a story about the singer booking a $10,000 flight on the Concorde for a stuffed animal he’d gotten as a present, and a few groupie stories as well. If the article only has a fraction of the stories in the book, it seems like it’ll be a fun read when it’s out. As an aside, it’s kind of interesting that when perusing Duswalt’s web site, you can see that he also was Air Supply’s personal assistant. Wonder who had better road stories?
