What were he and Sir Elton talking about? I still wonder sometimes. “Well, that’s because they don’t know Tea for the Tillerman,” he said into the phone at one point, referring to the classic Cat Stevens record. The manager kept pausing to answer cellphone calls from Elton John. I think at one point I actually said, “Give me thirty seconds.” Axl had by then become, as he remains, sealed off from the press to an almost Michael Jackson level. Before one show, in Spain, I sat at a coffee table with this person, struggling to explain how it might help justify the seven thousand words we were about to expend on the band if the front man would speak to me for a few seconds. I followed the band around Europe for a while, feeding cigarettes to the band members’ model girlfriends and failing to secure face time with “Ax.” His manager back then was a real specimen.

The story was, by turns, fun and frustrating to report. That stage in the singer’s career turned out to be neither a comeback (few people liked the record, and nobody played it much) nor final-a minute ago I ran his name through Google News and found he’s hard at work being Axl, showing up hours late to shows, getting pelted with bottles, making bizarre requests on tour riders (black napkins, Grolsch beer, honey in “bear-shaped tubes”). Q: When will Guns N’ Roses come out with something new? A: When there’s democracy in China. The album title was meant as a punch line.

Five years ago GQ assigned me to write about Axl Rose, who was mounting a “final comeback” with his Chinese Democracy, release of which had already been postponed by more than a decade.

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