Craig Duswalt, now an Amazon Best-Selling author and speaker, once toured with Guns N’ Roses as Axl Rose’s assistant during the band’s ‘Use Your Illusion’ tour. To share his lived experiences with the band, Duswalt wrote a book called ‘Welcome to My Jungle: An Unauthorized Narrative of How an Ordinary Man Like Me Survived Years of Tour with Guns N’ Roses.’
According to New York Post’s article that quoted several stories from Craig’s book, it included one of the author’s lived experiences, that included Axl’s baby wallaby. The author wrote:
“He [Axl Rose] named him Freddie [Mercury] after the lead singer of Queen. Axl built a sling to mimic the baby wallaby mother’s pouch and carried his pet around.”
Besides Rose carrying around a baby wallaby he named Freddie, Duswalt also recalled a scary moment he experienced outside his San Francisco hotel room. Craig wrote about the time that he saw Slash almost ‘die’ in front of his eyes. He wrote:
“He [Slash] basically died from an overdose, [but] they revived him, and we played a concert that night as if nothing happened.”
Even though Craig described the tour as something he had to survive, Slash had also revealed that the creative sessions for ‘Use Your Illusion I’ as a time filled with ‘heroin deliriums.’ Even though the drugs might have helped with creativity at times, it especially hit Axl when the singer felt insecure when penning down the track ‘Coma.’ The guitarist explained:
“Axl loved it [Coma,] but at first, it was the one song that he couldn’t come up with the lyrics for. He was very proud of his gift for lyrics, so he was pretty frustrated by it until one night months later when the words just came to him.”
