![]() ![]() When he was a no-show at the music video shoot for “Don't Cry,” a Use Your Illusion power ballad he co-wrote with singer Axl Rose, it was the beginning of the end. “I’m just not into the big production videos,” he told his hometown paper, the Lafayette Journal & Courier in 1993.īy then, he had long since left the band, disenchanted by Axl's Jagger-esque power play that began in the late ‘80s, as Stradlin - Izzy, to his fans - was strung-out and losing veto power in the band he had co-founded. In the lead-up to the Monsters of Rock Festival in England in 1988, Axl told a reporter that a band is a “political thing.” Izzy never wanted to be like The Rolling Stones - rock's biggest political machine - he just wanted to play like Keith Richards. ![]() To his critics, Stradlin is a deserter to the purveyors of his cult, a purist, an unwilling arena rocker whose integrity was bruised by GNR's success. It's that or a trip back to his hometown of Lafayette, Indiana, in the middle of nowhere, on a visit to McGuire Music & Sound - where some of his equipment has been up for sale since last October, according to screenwriter John Miller, who's penning a script on the early years of the band. He leaves it only when the surf report dictates it, or when he needs a new stick, like his flat-top Gibson SJ-200 acoustic, the one that became famous on the cover of Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline, or wrapped tightly under Jimmy Page’s mighty grip. He’s holed up there in a midcentury home hidden behind a wrought-iron gate and hot pink rose bushes the same hue as the jacket he wore to a Judas Priest concert at the Long Beach Arena in 1984. While his old gang reunites for a world tour, the co-founder of Guns N' Roses is semi-retired in California’s secluded Mayberry: the quaint Ojai Valley. Izzy Stradlin now lives where nothing moves. ![]()
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