@motley-queen Anyone please feel free to add to this and correct anything that's incorrect.
-Slash really likes snakes. He had two named Clyde and Cranston that were mentioned on the Appetite for Destruction liner notes.
-Axl gave Steven the nickname 'Popcorn' when introducing him at their concert at the Ritz in 1988 because of the way his hair bounced around while he played.
-Steven loves pugs.
-Axl recorded Appetite for Destruction line by line.
-GNR used to be friends with Mötley Crüe and one of their first big tours was opening for them during their Girls, Girls, Girls tour.
-Axl and Izzy are both kind of reclusive, so they didn't hang out with the Crüe much. I believe Steven and Nikki are still friends now. You may have noticed in the Dirt movie Slash and Steven were present at the gathering where Nikki died.
-One time Steven got kicked out of a bar for being too drunk and he got mad an punched a light and broke his hand so he couldn't play and Fred Coury from Cinderella had to fill in for him for a while.
-Axl was late to their label signing. The band spent a long time looking for him and eventually found him on the roof, meditating.
-Axl's feud with Vince Neil happened because Izzy had made an inappropriate comment about Vince's wife, Sharise. Axl decided he had to get involved and defend his bandmate. Izzy apologized to Vince afterward, but Axl and Vince kept threatening to fight each other but never did.
-An early friend of the band (maybe Barbie Von Grief) said that Axl talks a lot about people who've hurt him, which is why he spent so much time badmouthing Slash after Slash quit.
-Axl and Izzy are actually country hicks from Indiana.
-In the albume liner notes for Use Your Illusion they have "fuck you St. Louis" in reference to the St. Louis riot. During Rocket Queen, there was a guy with a camera who was taunting Axl and Axl told the security to take the camera and they didn't, so he launched himself into the crowd to take it himself. He then got back on stage and announced "thanks to the lameass security, I'm going home" and smashed the microphone on the ground and left. Fans rioted because the show was cut short and Axl was blamed and GNR was banned from playing St. Louis again. There's video of this incident.
-All of them abused drugs, but Steven had the worst problem. It got to the point where the rest of the band wanted to kick him out because he couldn't clean up his act, but they didn't have an explicit reason to. The last concert they played together was Farm Aid in 1990. Steven tripped and fell while coming onstage. They did two songs, Civil War, which was new and they had only rehearsed it in the studio a few times, and a UK Subs cover Down On the Farm, which Steven had never heard before. Duff clapped the beat for him and Steven managed to play the song (well enough that I wouldn't have known he'd never heard it). He happened to be going through a period of trying to get clean (which, like Nikki Sixx he tried and failed many many times before finally getting clean in 2010) and he was super sick from withdrawal when they fired him. They made him come in to record Civil War and he could barely get through the song (the final version of his part had to be heavily edited to be a cohesive song) because he was so sick. They claimed it was evidence that he was too jacked up to be in the band and fired him.
-Axl was married twice. Once to Erin Everly, who Sweet Child O' Mine is about, and once to Stephanie Seymour who appeared in the November Rain music video (I believe that's where they started dating) and likely many of the songs on Chinese Democracy are about her (and/or Slash). In both relationships, they were abusive to each other.
-I believe it was Stephanie that Axl proposed to by threatening to shoot himself if she didn't marry him.
-The bromance is strong in this band. Slash/Axl, Slash/Steven, Slash/Duff, Duff/Steven, and Axl/Izzy were all BFF pairs.
-Axl and Izzy were actually BFFs from school. Steven and Slash were too. They met when Steven fell off his skateboard and Slash came and asked if he was ok.
-Axl's singing career began as a child when he sang in the church choir.
-Welcome to the Jungle was written about when Axl left home and went to New York City (it might have been LA, but I think it was NYC the first time) and got off the bus and as he tells it in the intro from the Ritz '88 concert "this little old black man comes up to me and my friend with our backpacks and about ten bucks between us and he goes, 'do you know where you are? you're in the jungle, baby, you're gonna die!"
-Axl wanted real sex sounds for Rocket Queen, so that's him and Steven's girlfriend Adrianna (which Steven was pissed about).
-Their first tour together was known as the Hell Tour. Duff had a band with some shows scheduled up in Seattle (where he's from) so they were going to play them but their car broke down and they had to hitchike there and leave all their equipment behind.
-They at one point lived in what was essentially a garage with a loft.
-Axl has bipolar disorder and is generally a very intense person. He's described as both a huge asshole and an incredibly sweet, caring guy. He's also actually very quiet and shy.
-For example, one time when Steven overdosed and was in the hospital, Axl was the only one who came to visit him.
-One time Axl was with some girls and wanted to go to one of Mötley Crüe's parties, but he was too shy to ask so he sent the girls and Nikki decided to let the girls in but not Axl just to be a dick.
-The start of the whole "Axl is a control-freak dictator" thing is from when they toured with the Rolling Stones. Axl was so impressed with how the Stone's tour was such a well-oiled machine and he wanted GNR to be like that (I think it was GNR that Metallica said they learned everything what not to do from touring with GNR). Suposedly Axl forced Slash and Duff to sign away all the rights to everything GNR to Axl or else he refused to go on stage. They quit shortly after that.
-Freddie Mercury and Elton John were Axl's idols (hence all the grandiose piano songs).
-At Donington in 1988, two fans were killed during their set. That show is where some of the footage for the Paradise City music video comes from. The band didn't find out until afterward and they were devestated. The crowd had been rowdy and they could see people were getting injured and Axl had been trying to get the crowd to calm down, but the two bodies weren't found until after the show (it had been raining so much it was super muddy and they were partially buried in the mud).
-Izzy is basically a recluse and no one knows where he is or what he's doing. But he does have a solo career. I don't think he ever wanted to be in a band as big as GNR became.
-Slash and Duff founded Velvet Revolver together. Sebastian Bach auditioned, but they rejected him because they said they sounded like Skid Roses (so they went with Scott Weiland and sounded like Stone Temple Roses instead).
-The first ideas for the music for November Rain came to Axl while he was on a bus in the early-mid 80s.
-They didn't used to have a setlist. Axl would just pick songs based on the mood of the crowd. During the Use Your Illusion tour this meant that all the backing musicians and dancers had to be just waiting backstage for their song to be announced.
-Axl threw ridiculously extravagant afterparties on the Use Your Illusion tour.
-Slash proposed the original lyrics for Paradise City: "where the girls are cute and they've got big titties"
-Right Next Door to Hell was written about Axl's neighbor who claimed that he attacked her with a wine bottle and there was a lengthy legal battle about it.
-They were an overnight sensation basically. The Welcome to the Jungle music video was played on MTV at midnight or 3am or something ridiculous but fans loved it so much they kept calling in and asking for it to be played again.
-They used to be glam in their early days. Steven argued against it became the makeup would run in his eyes while playing.
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