He arrived in this world as William Bruce Rose Jr., a red‑haired boy in Lafayette, Indiana, trapped between a violent home and a suffocating church. His father vanished after abducting and abusing him, later murdered miles away. His stepfather preached salvation while dealing out beatings, and his mother, the person meant to protect him, mostly watched in silence. That betrayal carved itself into his psyche, twisting his ideas of love, authority, and women, and leaving him simmering with rage he didn’t yet understand.

Music became the one place he could breathe. From church choirs to piano lessons, then to the raw electricity of Queen and Aerosmith, he discovered a way to turn pain into power. In Los Angeles, William Bailey shed his past and became Axl Rose, fronting Guns N’ Roses with a voice that sounded like a wound and a weapon at once. The success was explosive, but the damage underneath never fully disappeared:

arrests, riots, broken relationships, and the haunting repetition of the violence he’d known as a child. Therapy, time, and survival forced him to face what Indiana had done to him. He didn’t become a hero; he became something more human and more frightening — proof that even a shattered beginning can forge an artist whose echo refuses to die.