Josh Freese hasn't been a member of GNR for nearly a decade (he left to become a founding member of A Perfect Circle) but the press is still fascinated with "Crazy" Axl stories, so it's no surprise that Spinner.com broached the subject with him. "Everyone always baits me to give them a crazy Axl story. I don't really have any," he told the online pub. "I spent two years in a studio with him [and] I never saw any mood swings. He was never not cool to me. So, I am always quick to defend the guy, even though I know his reality is different than mine. Then again, everyone has a different reality."

Freese auditioned for Axl's new version of GNR in 1997, albeit a little reluctantly. "I was pretty busy at the time, so I didn't really need the job necessarily," he says. "Then I decided that I should go down there because I wanted to meet him. At the time, no one had seen him for a couple of years and there were all these rumors. He had become the Howard Hughes of rock 'n' roll and I wanted to see it. I went down and I liked him. He wasn't the monster that was painted of him."
- Read the Spinner.com article for more

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