Axl Rose’s former personal assistant Craig Duswalt has broken his silence after more than a decade. He opened up about his time working with the Guns N’ Roses frontman in a recent interview.
Duswalt wrote the book Welcome To My Jungle about his experiences on the road with the band. He explained why he stopped giving interviews for 12 years — and why it all came down to defending Axl Rose’s character.
When asked, “Why was that book — I mean why did it make you 12 years to speak with somebody? Was it planned that way?” Duswalt gave a candid and detailed response.
“No no. This is the book right here. Welcome To My Jungle. Biggest mistake I ever made. Oh huge gigantic. So this is what happened. I wrote the book as just like you know Axl gets a lot of bad press. Everyone thinks he’s a bad guy, not a nice guy,” he said.
“I swear to you, he is the sweetest man you will ever meet. But if he’s in public, and you know when you’re in public sometimes and you don’t feel like talking or hanging out, we get to just hide. He doesn’t. And so if he lashes out once, it’s just because like ‘Leave me alone, dude.'”
Duswalt went on to describe the close bond he shared with Rose and the rest of the Guns N’ Roses circle.
“But here’s the deal. My wife, he loves my wife. He loved me. It was such a close-knit family. So anyway, when I wrote the book, I said to myself, I’m not going to treat it like a thing for Axl to write that he’s really a nice person. That’s not why I wrote it. It just came out that way, though, because I shared stories that were just funny and interesting that happened to me on the road,” he continued.
“It wasn’t even about Guns N’ Roses. It was about things that happened to me on the road with Guns N’ Roses. Just happened some of the players were Axl, Slash, Matt, Duff and you know all those guys, Gilby, Izzy.”
He then explained how the media’s line of questioning pushed him to walk away from all interviews entirely.
“So anyway I write the book and now I’m going to do all these interviews cuz I got a publisher for the book and they set me up with all these radio shows all over. I was doing interview after interview and every interview was like, ‘So is it really true that Axl’s an asshole?’ Stuff like that. I’m like that was like the first question and I kept saying no,” he said.
“Like no he was a really nice guy. He was a great guy really nice to me my family everybody. In our world, he was the sweetest guy and I just said I’m not doing another interview and to this day I have not done another interview because Axl at the time was a very dear friend. Yes, I worked for him but no one was closer to Axl than me or Doug Goldstein — that was it. And like I was with him 24/7.”
“So I got offended that my book allowed people to ask why he was not a nice person and I hated that cuz that’s not why I wrote the book. I wrote the book just to write funny stories. I never do an interview. You know how many documentaries, you know how many interviews I’ve turned down over the last 12 years? It’s in the thousands. I mean, it’s ridiculous. To this day, I still get asked to interview because John Reese and I are together again now. We’re doing some stuff. So, it’s rekindled again,” he concluded.
Duswalt’s remarks came during Craig Duswalt: Remembering Doug Goldstein | Ep. 568 on Appetite for Distortion. It marked a rare public appearance after years of deliberate silence. This was his first Guns N’ Roses-related interview in 12 years, underscoring just how significant his return to public discourse truly is.
The episode title points to another layer of the story. Doug Goldstein was the longtime manager of Guns N’ Roses and a central figure in the band’s inner circle during their peak years. Duswalt named him as one of only two people as close to Axl as he was. His reconnection with that world appears to have been the catalyst that finally brought him back out.
Welcome To My Jungle is subtitled An Unauthorized Account of How a Regular Guy Like Me Survived Years of Touring with Guns N’ Roses. It is widely regarded as one of the most insightful behind-the-scenes accounts of the band’s Use Your Illusion tour, which ran from 1991 to 1993. The book was never intended as a defense of Axl Rose. That is exactly how it was received, and that reception is what drove Duswalt away from the spotlight.
One of the more revealing details from the book directly challenges the rock-and-roll myth surrounding the band. While Guns N’ Roses had a well-documented reputation for excess, Axl Rose’s pre-show routine told a different story. Before every concert, Rose would spend two and a half to three hours preparing. He warmed up his voice in the shower, received a massage, got adjusted by a chiropractor, and taped his ankles due to the physical demands of his performances. After each show, he would return to the shower to warm his voice back down for another half hour.
“Don’t get me wrong, they partied,” Duswalt noted in the book. “But, before a show, Axl would warm up for an hour in the shower doing vocal exercises. He would get a massage, he would get adjusted by a chiropractor. He would tape up his ankles because he ran around so much. He prepared for two-and-a-half to three hours before a show. And then after each show he would go back into the shower and warm down his voice for a half hour.”
That level of dedication is consistent with what Duswalt has always maintained about Rose’s character — that the public image and the private person were two very different things. For Duswalt, the book was never about setting the record straight. It was about telling funny road stories. The fact that it ended up inviting questions about whether Axl Rose was a bad person is what made it, in his own words, the biggest mistake he ever made.
