The Night Axl Rose Dove Into the Crowd and Sparked the Infamous Riverport Riot

How one fan’s camera, lax security, and a volatile frontman turned a Guns N’ Roses show into chaos in St. Louis — Part 1 of 2

It was July 2, 1991. Guns N’ Roses were over an hour and 20 minutes into their set at the Riverport Amphitheatre outside St. Louis. They’d wrapped up the first half of “Rocket Queen” when Axl looked out toward the crowd. There had been issues during the set. Bottles had been hurled onto the stage. Cameras were flashing, and fans were grabbing at his ankles. Security was supposed to handle these things.

As the band worked their way into the groovy instrumental bit of “Rocket Queen,” Axl’s eyes locked onto a guy who’d been photographing him all night. The guy still had his camera. That was it. He’d had enough. Seething with anger, Axl pointed straight toward the guy, raised his mic and shouted. “Hey — take that, take that,” he yelled. “Get that guy and take that,” he continued.

Izzy, just behind him, looked out at the audience, as if he was trying to get a grasp of what was happening. Now everything went quickly. A second passed, and then Axl made his decision. No one else had handled the problem with cameras in the crowd. He was going to take care of the situation himself. “I’ll take it god damn it,” he shouted into the microphone. Then he dove, head-first into the crowd, where the fans soon engulfed him in chaos.

Riverport Amphitheatre

Earlier that evening, as the band had come in to the venue, they were met by the organizer of the show. “This is gonna be great,” he said to the band. It looked as if it might be, at least for a while. The place they were playing, the Riverport Amphitheatre, was almost completely new. A few artists had performed at the venue already, including Steve Winwood and Jimmy Buffett. Now it faced an entirely different beast: Guns N’ Roses, known for their aggressive nature and volatile frontman. The band had caused havoc across the US during the month or so that had passed since the summer had kicked off back in May. Now, the time had come to play in Maryland Heights, where 19,000 fans soon packed the amphitheater and thousands pressed tight against the stage barriers.

The band kicked off with “Perfect Crime” that night. They were only an hour late, which, at that point of the tour, was not particularly late. But as the band worked their way though the set, featuring a mixture of old and new songs, trouble quickly started looming out in the crowd. Up front a group of bikers from the local motorcycle club, the Saddle Tramps, had gathered near the stage. Throughout the night Axl saw them shoving people around and intimidating other fans. He’d seen a young boy and girl who were being shoved over. Security didn’t help them. As Axl later put it, security “really didn’t have a clue what they were doing.” He felt the biker gang was allowed to go too far.

There were other things happening too: Duff had been hit by two bottles. Camera flashes were constant. Earl Gabbidon, GN’R’s ex-NFL security chief, warned venue security four times over the headset: security should confiscate the cameras. Otherwise, the show could be cut short. At one point, the band’s crew also asked to have one of the bikers removed. Security wouldn’t do it.

To Axl things were simply weird. The band paid the salaries of the venue’s security. Why weren’t they on the band’s side? Or the fans’?

Stump

One of the members of the Saddle Tramps, Bill “Stump” Stephenson, had been a nuisance to Axl throughout the show. He wanted Axl’s attention. He craved it. He had been screaming to get it. And as Axl said, he was loud — “almost as loud as my monitor,” as he told Rolling Stone in 1991. At one point during the show, Stump held up a card. He wanted Axl to take it. Axl took it, glanced at it, and snapped. “Okay, you’re Stump from the Saddle Tramps,” he said angrily. “Was that worth interrupting the show for?” Back home Stump had a rock ’n’ roll scrapbook that he wanted to add to. And so, Stump had been taking photo after photo during the set too. And soon enough, he’d become the target of Axl’s wrath. Stump had felt Axl’s finger pointing at him. And moments later, after Axl had jumped into the crowd, he’d seen him coming towards him. He knew Axl was after the camera, so he handed it behind him, to a friend of his.

On stage, the band kept on playing. None of them stopped. As Slash told Metal Hammer that year, it was all intentional. “We kept this cool beat going, just chugging along and I thought we’d just heroically continue to play the song,” he said. They were in the funkiest parts of “Rocket Queen,” and it wasn’t easy to maintain focus with things unfolding in front of their eyes. “I remember that my jaw dropped as I tried to keep up the beat,” Matt later wrote in his autobiography. Still, hope lingered. They figured that keeping the groove going might save the day.

In the audience things were chaotic. Stump felt Axl grabbing him. He was holding onto his vest. Security tried to pull Axl off, but he wouldn’t let go. The way Axl saw it, they wanted the biker to get away. Security later argued that they tried to get him away because it was too risky for Axl to be there. Other bikers could come to Stump’s defense. Then all hell could break loose. Eventually security got Axl to let go. He swung at a security guard, then scrambled back toward the stage. There, Duff gave him a hand, pulling him up again.

The band stopped playing as Axl got hold of his microphone. He was boiling over now. “Thanks to the lame-ass security,” Axl screamed into the mic, “I’m going home!” He then slammed the microphone into the stage floor and walked off.

Slash got up to the microphone too. “We’re outta here,” he said, and he too walked off. The rest of the band followed suit. Getting up from his drum kit, Matt took a quick look at the crowd. They were not pleased. “It was obvious that they weren’t happy we had stopped the show — they were booing and shouting all kinds of stuff,” he recalled in his autobiography.

Backstage

Axl went straight to his dressing room after leaving the stage. During the altercation in the crowd, he had lost his contact lenses. He was half-blind and his shirt was ripped. In his dressing room he took his anger out on a mirror.

The band soon gathered in their own dressing room. The mood was tense. They had no idea what would happen. Slash felt he needed a drink and went to his guitar tuning room to get something to calm him down. He later acknowledged in his autobiography that he “would have done anything to get Axl back onstage at that point.”

They heard the crowd chanting out in the venue. “Guns N’ Roses. Guns N’ Roses,” they chanted, to try to get the band to go back out on stage. The houselights remained off. The guys in the band were not sure if Axl would return to the stage. But they knew that it was a good idea to try to get back out there. To try to help make it happen, Matt went into Axl’s dressing room. He found Axl searching through a bag. Matt checked on his troubled frontman. “Are you okay?” he asked. Axl turned to him and told him that he’d lost his contact lenses. “I think we should get back out there,” Matt said. Axl agreed. “Okay, just let me find some contacts.”

Matt headed back to the side of the stage, where the band was waiting. Outside, the crowd’s mood was changing. The “Guns N’ Roses” chants were dying out. In their place came something harsher. “Bullshit, bullshit,” the crowd started to chant. Sporadically things were thrown onto the stage. At some point one of the fans even got up on stage, to loud cheers by the audience. The atmosphere was tense. What had for some time been containable was quickly far less so.

The band and crew sensed the situation could worsen. Gear was at risk, so they rushed to move it to safety. In the back of the venue, there were two sliding doors that could be locked with chains. Much of the band’s equipment was already stored behind those doors. But too much was still out in the open on the stage. The crew dashed out, dodging projectiles, to pull gear to safety behind the sliding doors. It was risky. Every time they went out, they were pelted. The crowd was simply enraged.

Soon, Axl came out of his dressing room. He had found a new pair of contact lenses and was ready. “Let’s go back on,” he said, as Slash recalled in his autobiography. And with Axl back, the band offered to go back on stage. It signaled hope. Maybe the band could still go out there and save the day.

They sent out Axl’s security man, Earl Gabbidon. On the stage, Earl grabbed a microphone and said that the band would go on stage again if the audience could just calm down. It didn’t help. It was too late. People had started throwing chairs at this point. “The kids just started pulling out the chairs,” Robert John, who was there with the band, told the Prettiest Star documentary. He continued: “[They] started carrying them down to the front and then throwing them up onto the stage.” The band heard the thuds — dull, hollow impacts — as chairs landed on the stage and bounced off the walls.

Things were increasingly chaotic. More fans got up on the stage. A “code 1000,” the riot call, was dispatched to every major police department in St. Louis County. Over 500 police officers were called in.

Tour manager John Reese made the decision that the band couldn’t go back out. “It’s not safe,” he concluded. It would have been impossible at this stage anyway, which the local police chief later confirmed. “By that point,” police chief Neil Kurlander said, “it was too out of hand.”

The band watched as more people came up on the stage. They saw their equipment being taken away. They stood there watching people taking the amps. They could do nothing but watch as two guys were carrying Axl’s piano away. At one point, Matt’s drum tech, Tim Doyle, found himself battling a fan over a piece of Matt’s drum kit. Matt had to scream to Doyle that he should let it go. The kit had been given to him, and it just wasn’t worth it.

Around 11:30 p.m. the house lights went on. An announcement was made that the show was over. The angry fans got even angrier. They were booing and throwing cups of beer and soda towards the stage.

The Riot Unfolds

With the announcement fueling the fury, the situation escalated into full riot mode. While most of the people in attendance that night left, 2,500 or so fans stayed behind to partake in the riots. At this stage police had arrived at the scene. They converged on the stage to try to hold back the crowds,. The security of the venue, B&D Concert Services, had spread across the venue, but they were unable to offer much help. To try to contain the angry audience, police officers used a fire hose. Though the police would later on deny it, reports at the time said that pepper spray was used. It was the kind of response reserved for situations already slipping out of control.

But the cops were unsuccessful. The enraged fans fought back, and eventually got control of the hose. The police, the venue security team and the band and crew had to flee backstage. “The crowd now had total control of everything in front of the stage,” Duff wrote in his autobiography. Uncontrolled, they took their rage out on the band’s equipment. Hundreds of people gathered on stage, tearing it apart and taking stage equipment with them. They destroyed the band’s drums and amps, ripped shrubs out of the outdoor theater, and tore down chain-link fences.

Backstage, behind locked doors, the band was safe. From there they heard the riots unfolding outside. “Kids were climbing our hanging speaker towers, destroying our monitors, smashing lights,” Duff wrote in his autobiography. Rioters even tore down the stage screens. More gear was stolen — one man even ran off with guitars, though he was caught. More officers poured in. It took an hour and a half before the police regained control of the situation. And as the crowds left the venue, they could be seen taking with them parts of the band’s stage, speaker cabinets, drum set and anything else they could claim as a souvenir. Some fans were spotted rolling amps up a grassy hill outside the venue. Others had secured a memorable souvenir: a seat from the venue.

Outside the venue, the chaos continued. Trees were uprooted and burned. Trash cans were emptied and their contents set aflame. Windows at the ticket booths were smashed. Signs designating parking sections were torn down. It was chaos — but not the kind most had foreseen.

Band In Shock

Backstage that night, Slash was worried. “I was so scared somebody was going to die,” Slash told Rip in 1992. “It was completely out of hand.” All they could do now was observe. There were screams. They heard things crashing and breaking. They heard the heavy, stomping sound of hundreds of feet moving. It was the sound of chaos. The force they dealt with was obvious to them at that point. They had seen people bleeding. They had seen people on stretchers, cops and fans alike. It was a surreal experience for the guys in the band. “It was like, ‘Fuck — how could this be happening?’” as Slash told Rip in 1992.

The experience had brought Izzy straight back to the events that had happened at Donington a few years before. They’d played there on August 20, 1988, and throughout the set, the crowd had been rowdy. They’d seen the chaos in the crowd, where the muddy conditions made it hard to stay on your feet. Later that night, after the show, the band members found out that the worst had happened. Two people in the crowd had paid with their lives. The last thing they experienced was that gig. The last thing they heard was the sound of Guns N’ Roses. It was hard to handle.

Izzy went right back to that day. “When something like that happens, you can’t help but think back to Donington,” he told Classic Rock in 2001. He reflected further: “What’s to stop us from having more people trampled — just because the singer doesn’t like something? Like, what’s the point? What are we getting at here?”

For Izzy, Riverport wasn’t just a bad night. It was a warning of what the band’s chaos could truly cost.

Part 2 coming soon, with the band’s flight from the venue and the aftermath. Follow for more rock history.

Sources

Chicago Tribune. “Guns N’ Roses Cancels.” July 4, 1991. Classic Rock. “In too deep.” June 2001. Guitar Player. “The Hands Behind the Hype.” December 1991. It’s So Easy and Other Lies (DVD). 2015. Los Angeles Times. “GNR Tour Disrupted After Melee: Axl Rose Apologizes for Missouri Concert Riot.” July 4, 1991. McKagan, Duff. It’s So Easy (and Other Lies). 2011. Metal Hammer. “Delusions & Illusions.” September 1991. Musician Magazine. “There’s a Riot Going On.” September 1991. RIP Magazine. “Guns N’ Roses: From the Inside.” March 1992. Riverfront Times. “Appetite for Destruction: Inside the Guns N’ Roses Riot.” July 10, 1991. Rolling Stone. “Fans Riot at Guns Show.” August 22, 1991. Slash with Bozza, Anthony. Slash. 2007. Sorum, Matt with Eriksson, Leif and Svensson, Martin. Double Talkin’ Jive: True Rock ’n’ Roll Stories from the Drummer of Guns N’ Roses, the Cult and Velvet Revolver. Rare Birds Books, 2021. The Prettiest Star (DVD documentary). 2005. Welcome to the Riot Show (documentary). 2011.