Former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Tracii Guns discussed seeing Axl Rose get fired at one point from LA Guns in a new interview with Ultimate-Guitar’s David Slavković.
I was always very fascinated by the earliest days of Guns N’ Roses. There were two members, people usually don’t know things about them – drummer Rob Gardner and bassist Ole Beich. There’s almost no info about the bassist, Ole Beich. How long did he stay in the band and why did he leave?
“Ole, he came over to LA in about 1982 from Denmark. He’s from Denmark, he had played with Mercyful Fate and I think he may have also played with some King Diamond solo stuff.
“He came over and I met him through a friend. He wanted to be in LA Guns because we were a heavy band at that time. That was when Axl was singing in LA Guns. And Rob Gardner too, the drummer – he’s somebody I went to high school with and we basically started LA Guns together [in 1983].
“Our manager had fired Axl at one of our shows. And that same night, after he was fired… We all lived together – we decided we were just gonna carry on and we changed the name of the band, we changed our name to Guns N’ Roses.
“And we added Izzy [Stradlin, guitar], that was the only real difference in the beginning. So it was Rob Gardner, Ole Beich, me, Izzy, and Axl.
“I think Ole was the first to go. He really wanted to play metal and we had turned into more of a blues-influenced heavy-rock band with a little bit of tinge of glam-rock in there.
“And he didn’t really want to do that, he wanted to do something else. Unfortunately, he never found what he was looking for. And by the time I have left Guns N’ Roses [in 1985] and started LA Guns, both bands were doing really well.
“Over time, he battled depression. Eventually, he drowned in a body of water in Denmark in the early ’90s.
“I really loved that guy – very serious guy, had a great sense of humor. He helped me with a lot of things. He was about 10 years older than me. Good guy.
“And then Rob… Rob was a great drummer. And his girlfriend gave him an ultimatum when we were in Guns N’ Roses: ‘It’s either the band or me.’ So he left the band and then she left him. So that didn’t work out very well, really.”
