Guns N’ Roses continues to be the rock band that keeps on giving (opportunities for its members to appear in court), as a former manager for the band has now sued it over claims that he’s been blocked from releasing a memoir about his time in the Axl Rose trenches. Specifically, Billboard reports that Alan Niven—who managed the group during six of the most pivotal years of its multi-decade run, including the period when 1987’s Appetite For Destruction saw them shoot up into international renown—is suing Guns N’ Roses, claiming that a non-disclosure settlement he signed while getting fired in 1991 doesn’t hold legal weight.
That’s relevant in so far as Niven (who also managed Great White from 1982 through 1985) has written a new book, Sound N’ Fury: Rock N’ Roll Stories, which is currently languishin’ in’ warehouses over threats of legal action’ from the band. (“Thousands of copies of Sound N’ Fury have been printed and continue to incur storage expenses,” according to legal documents.) While Niven admits he signed an agreement not to talk about Guns N’ Roses when he departed in 1991—after Rose reportedly refused to release Use Your Illusion until Niven was fired—he says the agreement is null for multiple reasons. For one, Rose himself has talked at least a bit of shit about Niven over the years, opening up room for the manager to rebut; more importantly, Niven claims that while most of the band’s members signed the termination agreement, Axl didn’t, which, yes, is extremely easy to imagine of 1990s-era Axl Rose.
Niven is clearly harboring his own negative feelings about all this—his legal filing include allegations that he was “betrayed” by the band—but basically just wants a judge to say it’s okay for him to release his book. (Among other things, his lawyers claim it’s not clear who’s actually trying to stop the release from the GNR camp, asserting, “It is unclear who is attempting to enforce the agreement now, and whether they have standing to do so.”) The band itself—currently on the tail end of a tour featuring Rose, Slash, and Duff McKagan, among others—hasn’t responded to Niven’s lawsuit as of yet.
