Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses

This book was a total disappointment.

This was my third Stephen Davis book. Maybe he set the bar too high in the first two. The problem with this book is that it offers no more insight than the VH1 Behind the Music on Guns N Roses that aired a few years ago. As a matter of fact, he quotes that episode throughout the entire book. It doesnt seem like he talked to anyone close to the band. It seemed to me that his research was limited to the Behind the Music, Mtv interviews, and Rolling Stone articles. All of which I had already seen or read. This book told me nothing that I didnt already know.

Davis mentions in his credits that most employees of GNR had to sign confidentiality agreements in order to keep their jobs and that 13 people interviewed for the book asked to remain anonymous. Maybe thats why this book lacks any punch. Nobody in the band wanted anything to do with it, and nobody that knows anything is talking. The inside information feeling that I got from his other books didnt show up this time around.

If you insist on buying this, I would recommend that you at least go to the bookstore and read the credits. When you see that its all from interviews that you remember watching or reading, you may think twice about spending your hard earned cash on a rerun.

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.

If you are a guns and roses fan, and you love GNR from appetite for construction, to patients, to use your illusion one and two, and you even love the spaghetti incident, then this book is for you! Very well written, with lots of insight a new revelations for the true guns and roses fan! I highly recommend this book; it's just so well written and easy to read.

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.

I'm certainly no Guns expert, but I can say that this book is not to be taken too seriously. Mr. Davis' text is peppered with significant inaccuracies. I'll mention two. Davis describes Guns opening slot for The Cult during their tour for the "Electric" album. He says, numerous times I believe, that this period was The Cult's most successful, that the band would never be bigger. Apparently he never listened to the radio or watched MTV after 1988 because The Cult's "Sonic Temple" was HUGE. Three successful singles, multi-platinum sales, an opening gig for Metallica and then their own headlinging tour. Davis also says that "Girls, Girls,Girls" was Motley Crue's shining moment. I don't have to remind Crue fans of "Dr. Feelgood", which charted at #1 on Billboard. Not to mention the fact that "Girls..." is a fair record at best, while "Dr. Feelgood" is a relatively high water mark for the band artistically as well as in terms of their popularity. Davis' silly editorializing at times borders on a teenager's hero worship. If you want to read a great book about rock n'roll, read "The Dirt". I never really liked Crue all that much, but this book depicts LA glam and hedonism better than anything else I've read. It pulls no punches and is not for the faint of heart. Read it at your own risk. As far as Guns N' Roses is concerned, I guess we'll have to wait for someone to write the definitive work. This ain't it.

I agree with those who say that this book is littered with factual errors. It's an entertaining read, but Davis lost me when he wrote that Axl's voice gave out, and the June 1988 Sacramento had to cancelled at the last minute.

That gave me a start because I distinctly remember attending that concert, and I didn't think I had hallucinated it. I researched the 1988 concert schedule myself, and discovered that it was the next concert after Sacramento (in Irvine) that was cancelled. GNR didn't tour with Iron Maiden again after that.

It's a bit odd, because I've read other works by Mr. Davis, and his research skills have always seemed impeccable in the past. This one definitely should have been edited more thoroughly.

Only half way through the book and I am really surprised by the lower quality. I have read Davis' other books, Walk this Way and Hammer of the Gods, which I thought were great. So this book was highly anticipated.

But now I am finding myself very disappointed. Besides the fact that most of the stories leave you hanging or wanting more details, the book reads like a pieces of stories were thrown together from the old Circus or Hit Parader mags with no semblance of order. Couple that with bad proof-reading. You have to know that Paul Stanley was not the bassist in KISS and that Slippery When Wet was not Bon Jovi's debut album if you are writing this book. Just 2 of the numerous errors that I noted and remember through the first half of the book.

I would highly recommend Slash's book if you want the story with many more details over this book.

If you're a GnR fan this is a must read although I would have liked some more insight into the bands break up such as from the members themselves but I'm just nit picking as I really enjoyed this book. So much I read it in two days.

Should be a good/ok read for those who dont know much about Guns n Roses. For the initiaded, like me, it is sort of superficial. Sadly, the great and definitive book about GNR has yet to be written...

Book is filled with insight into the personal lives of the band before and during their hay-day. It covers a little post original GnR. I don't know if there was that much new material, but it's always entertaining to hear the stories of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll...not withstanding Axl Rose's prima-donna persona...They were a band that somehow made one of the greatest rock albums ever!