MEDIA MAELSTROM: Are rock stars too thin-skinned...

MEDIA MAELSTROM: Are rock stars too thin-skinned about their media image? Or is the rock press sometimes guilty of shoddy journalism? A look at Spin’s feature story on Axl Rose, titled “Axl Comes Clean to Danny Sugerman,” offers an intriguing glimpse at the often messy aftershocks of a celebrity profile. According to GNR manager Alan Niven, the piece was “full of inaccuracies and self-serving embellishments.”

And guess what--Sugerman agrees. “I don’t blame Alan for being upset,” says Sugerman. “Spin rushed the story out two months early and they totally misquoted Axl and me. They never showed me a final draft of the piece, and they didn’t make most of the corrections I’d suggested. In fact, they took sentences I’d written and put quotes around them and attributed them to Axl. I was livid about the whole thing.”

Sounds awful, doesn’t it? But Spin publisher-editor Bob Guccione Jr. insists that’s not what happened at all. “Actually Danny came in wildly late with his piece. His story was the only story in later than mine. We only made so many changes because the piece wasn’t very well written. We never changed any of Axl’s quotes, not a single one. The only fixes we made were so Danny’s language would be more understandable. Afterwards we discovered that the best part of his story (an account of a police raid on Axl’s apartment) turned out to have been lifted straight out of a People magazine story. So I had to run an apology in the next issue of Spin saying that we’d run portions of the People story without attributing it to them.”