The dissolution of the classic Guns N’ Roses lineup — the five musicians who made Appetite for Destruction and Use Your Illusion and who constituted, by the assessment of their commercial peak, the most dangerous and most exciting band in the world — happened not in a single dramatic confrontation but in the specific way that things end when neither party is willing to formally acknowledge the ending until it has become undeniable.
It was a slow disappearance punctuated by moments of acute crisis, and the acute moments are the ones that the participants have addressed in their memoirs and their interviews with the partial honesty of people who understand that the full honesty is available but have decided against it.
Slash left the band in 1996. He has given accounts of the decision — the accumulated weight of Axl Rose’s behavior, the creative direction the band had taken, the specific quality of the relationship between the two of them in the years following the Use Your Illusion tour that made continuation feel impossible.
He has described these accounts in his memoir with the directness of a man who has processed the material sufficiently to discuss it without the immediate heat of the period in question.
Axl Rose’s account is less available — he has given fewer interviews across his career than Slash, has been more protective of the specific interior of what happened, and has addressed the dissolution in terms that acknowledge the fact of it without providing the detail that would constitute a full account.
What has emerged from people adjacent to both men during the period of the breakdown is a picture of two people who had built something together that neither could sustain alone and neither could sustain together and who had no available category for what to do with that specific impasse.
The letter — described in partial accounts by people who were around Axl during the mid-1990s, the period of maximum tension before Slash’s formal departure — was apparently drafted during a period when the relationship between the two had deteriorated to the point where direct conversation was no longer possible and written communication was the available alternative.
The accounts of its existence converge on a consistent characterization of its content: that it contained what Axl wanted to say to Slash without the performance of anger that their face-to-face communications had required, that it was more honest about both parties than the public accounts either man gave, and that it attempted something that the subsequent history suggests was not attempted — a direct acknowledgment of what they had been to each other and what the ending of that relationship actually cost.
It was not sent. The decision not to send it has been described by the people who know about its existence in terms that suggest Axl made the decision himself rather than being persuaded out of sending it. Whether the decision was protective — of himself, of Slash, of the specific quality of what their public relationship had been — or whether it was the product of the same incapacity for vulnerability that had made the direct conversations impossible is not something the available accounts establish.
Slash and Axl reunited in 2016 for the Not in This Lifetime tour — a reunion that its own title, borrowed from Axl’s characterization of the likelihood of such a reunion in a 2012 interview, made its own kind of statement.
The tour became one of the highest-grossing in rock history. Both men performed with the professional commitment that their reputations and their audiences required. What the letter contained has not been disclosed.