Axel Broken

A salute of the finger to the classiest man in rock ‘n roll, formerly menacing head-and-body-banger Axel F. Rose, who's celebrating a birthday today. The impolite, megalomaniacal fashion disaster responsible for the inexplicable pairing of the backwards ball cap and the kerchief headband, Axel F. first began throwing out his vocal cords and storming off stage in drug-ridden Hollywood USA, a blight on the landscape where despair and delusion are always in style. Never one to shy away from insulting the people who paid to see him perform, Rose somehow managed to avoid getting the living shite kicked out of him long enough to achieve notoriety, at which point the scrawny sorta-singer began surrounding himself with a posse of paid hangers-on for protection. Rose and his bandmates almost single-handedly kept open the Lost Angeles tattoo parlors and Kanetucky distilleries runnin' 'round the bloody clock for the better part of a decade, until band infighting, angry hookers and flannel-shirted grungers put a final nail in the bacchanalia, sending Rose back under the rock from which he sprung. One imagines the never-punctual performer was born late on this day, February 6, 1962 — to a 16-yr. old mum, no surprise — in the redneck environs of Indy-Annapolis. Many happy returns and, you'll allow us, fuck you, too, Axel F. Rose.