Steven Adler

Steven Adler—along with four uniquely talented but very complicated and demanding musicians—helped form Guns N' Roses. They emerged from the streets, primal artists who obliterated glam rock and its big hair to resurrect rock's truer blues roots . . . and took "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll" to obscene levels of reckless abandon. By the late 1980s, GN'R was the biggest rock band in the world, grabbing headlines and awards while selling out huge arenas. But there was a price to pay. For Adler, it was his health and sanity, culminating in his brutal public banishment by his once-beloved musical brothers—a humiliating act of betrayal that caused him to plunge into the dark side and spend most of the next twenty years in a drug-fueled hell.