The Axl Rose Effect

When I was in high school I was a really big Guns an Rose fan. I love the music, lyrics an vieos an the way they looke, but I also loved their attitude, parts of it. They were on a real unstoppable self destruction path. They didn’t answer to anyone. They taped sounds of real sex on one of their songs. It kept getting worse, and more exciting.
Axl Rose was really bona fide crazy. He also kept digging up all this shit about his childhood that made me (and millions of other "me"s: troubled teenage girls all over the world from Vietnam to Czechoslovakia) feel sorry for him and want to hug him. He’s was also probably the mnore intelligent member of the band. Intelligent, charismatic and crazy.
The band got into internal feuds and fell apart. Axl Rose became a recluse. People said he was getting crazier and crazier (in addition to fatter and older). He never interviewed for years and years. He kept working on this album that never came out. Firing and changing his band members. No kinds, no wife, no girlfriend even that I’d heard of. It was no longer exciting, because there was nothing. No new music. no information.
Now it’s 2012. I’m 36. And Axl Rose, age 50, is getting his act together.
And watching this has been gratifying to me in a really weird way.
It started at the GNR show in Israel. I saw them on tour in 1992. They were breaking down just then and the show was bad. I didn’t know what to expect from a new show with the new band: only Axl and some new musicians I don’t know under the name of Guns and Roses. Everyone was wondering if Axl woul show up. Would he be able to hold a show, to perform? To sing? Would it be pathetic? Would he shoot up on stage? Would he sing the old songs, or just new songs, or maybe just incoherent slabs of music only his warped mind understands?
But no. The show started on time (!) he sand great version of the old songs, an new songs that were embarrassingly honest but otherwise nothing crazy about them – good songs, no less! The show was very well produced, quite long and it seemed that Acl and crew were doing everything they could to make sure the crowd was having a good time and getting a good return on their money.
What? Axl Rose trying? to make sure the crowd has a good time?
People said he went drinking at the pub undr his hotel in Tel Aviv that evening. Recluse?
Then I saw him on Jimmy Kimmel, on his first live televised performance in 20 years. He said his next record would come out soon, that he plans to goto all his next shows on time, he was hanging out there telling anecdotes from his wild times, but not complaining or cursing or getting into a fight or telling some weird possibly-true story about his crazy childhood.  
Somehow, at 50, Axl Rose has become un-crazy, which is just unbelievable. He was crazy since he was a kid and nevr let up until he was 40 at last., and then he disappeared and he reappeared un-crazy. I can’t help but wonder what kind of work was put into doing that unbelievable turnaround. How did they do it? (doctor? Shrink? girlfriend? His own will power? All of the togehte probably). How did he manage to come back out of seclusion after 20 years, finish his album, go back on stage and start getting there on time when he had never been able to do it before?
Some people may say that it’s sad. Mainstream has finally swalowed Axl Rose. But I don’t think it’s like that. It makes me severely optimistic that a damaged person can at least partically be put back together again. I had a very interesting time watching his antics when I was a teenager, but it’s even more fulfilling watching this. It’s like the twin towers – their collapse is the image everyone will remember, I’s more iconic, more shocking, but it’s much more inspiring to watch the rebuilding of the new towers.
I used to think it took a special person to be crazy. In a sense it does, but not really. Anyone can disintegrate, Anyone can destroy. Anyone can shoot up or shoot a hole in their head. To persist, to build, to keep hold of yourself when you face everything Axl has faced, always and lately – that’s harder.
And it’s interesting that there’s "more Axl" for me, more of what I liked in him – his intelligence, his music – now that he’s sewn back together again than when he was completely gone in the last 20 years. Turns out, the real Axl Rose isn’t in his craziness (at least not only in it) but rather in the pats of him that managed to manifest under the craziness. Because craziness that detaches you from the world, doesn’t really create art. It’s moments of clarity between  the craziness that allow unique and sensitive  people to create art. Something comes out coherently when they’ve got their act together and not when they don’t.
So now that Axl seems to have "grown up", I’m really looking forward to the music he creates and I hope it will still be timted with his crazy charisma, but I hope he himself  stays normal until the end.