Fire, faith and forgiveness: Former Great White manager Alan Niven on the self-destructive Jack Russell

Great White manager Alan Niven with singer Jack Russell — (Image credit: Alan Niven)

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench along a plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There is also a negative side." - Hunter S Thompson

"I got the call today/I didn’t want to hear." - Don Henley

There was a time, not so very long ago, when I would have beaten Jack Russell like a dog. In a fury of incandescent anger. For all the outrages he had inflicted on so many.

Supremely self-destructive, he left disasters in his wake as casually as the thoughtless toss fast food wrappers out of moving vehicles. If Icarus had dared the sun, Russell had strapped a rocket onto his ass and launched himself into its burning core. As others manoeuvred with deceitful calculation along the cruel trenches of the music biz, Jack exuberantly led a charge and yelled "over the top," determined to find deeper troughs to plunder. K'pan Jack was the personification of the pyrat.

Jack's self-destructive appetites were unquenchable. There wasn't a drug he had not taken and I became convinced he could smell coke from a quarter mile away. Jack once asked if I minded if he didn't attend sound checks. Assuming this was inconvenient to his vocal 'warm up' schedule it was of no concern to me. Later, his personal assistant, the notorious Wookie, pulled me aside and asked, "Do ya know why he doesn't do soundchecks? It's because he knows where the band is at that moment and he can fuck their wives and girlfriends." He fucked 'em all. Jack never knew a pussy he didn't want.

Disasters? I was forced to abandon Great White's first headline tour, supported by MSG and Havana Black, after finding him in Phoenix, Arizona, deep in conversation with a poolside saguaro cactus. "Hey Niv, I got some high for you too," he smilingly offered. “This cactus has some mighty wisdoms.”

He was supposed to be in Midland, Texas, preparing for that night's show. He'd jumped on a plane to return to his dealers in L.A.. Obliterated, in Phoenix he had been removed from the flight. He was in no condition to continue the tour so I had to clean him up and employ a 'minder'.

Great White Manager Alan Niven sits at a piano smoking with singer Jack Russell — Alan Niven and Jack Russell, on a video shoot (Image credit: Alan Niven)

The transition from great support act to solid headliner is the most difficult development in a band's progression. Great White never got another chance to make that move. The inconvenienced and pissed-off promoters never forgave the cancellation losses. Worse was the fact that the tour was selling, entirely sold out in the North East, a difficult market even in the best of times. Worse still was the fact that all the bands on the bill were Capitol acts - a marketing perfection for the company. Cancellation of the tour, however, undermined not just one record, but three. Capitol were less than thrilled and thus disinclined to support the band in the future. Catastrophic consequence courtesy of Russell indulgence.

Car wrecks, fights and multiple arrests, Jack left a trail of destruction in his wake. One night Jack thought it imperative to place his bare ass up against a window partition in the rock’n’roll Denny's on Sunset. In the next booth were some of L.A's finest law officers. They took him outside and showed him what a riot stick was for.

I should have known what to expect. One of the first things I did as his manager was to cut my hair, put on a suit and attend a parole hearing. Jack had shot a woman during an attempt to rob a dealer of their drugs. Jack had informed the court he intended to be a singer. They were unimpressed with this ambition. They wanted to keep him off the streets. In my best PBS Oxford/English diction I informed the court that, “In my estimation, Mr Russell has the ability to have a very successful career in entertainment." That carried the day - no one contradicts a Downton Abbey accent. In a suit.

No longer his manager, my anger boiled over on February 20th, 2003. I could not believe the vain stupidity of using pyro in a club. I was crushed by all the dead and injured. For some time I felt guilty, for if I had not taken the band out of the stinking clubs of Orange County, if I had not co-composed so many of their original songs, had I not produced their successful albums, those people might still be alive. I was also furious because this tragedy would, and did, have a profoundly negative effect on my own creative legacy.

Jack Russell onstage in 2013 (Image credit: Chelsea Lauren/WireImage via Getty Images)

And yet, today, I have only love for Russell. We reminisced almost every month. The hatchet had been buried. Wrapped in the shroud of hindsight’s laughter. I have always understood that life is not a matter of reaching destinations, but of making journeys. We are here to learn, develop our comprehensions, of the self and others, and to faithfully attend to the health of our souls. After all, the highest purpose in music is to suspend alienation and bring people together, by their own consent. Rock musicians are symbols of freedom, personifications of that myth, and representatives of togetherness.

Tony Montana, and my wife Heather, had made me go to one of Jack's concerts. There, I found someone profoundly changed – he’d become spiritually enlightened, a symbolic representative.

Jack had truly progressed. Made the journey. One we had shared. Consequently, I in turn, was able to progress to forgiveness.

At the end of the day, isn't that the heart of the matter?

Alan Niven is a New Zealand-born band manager best known for his time as manager of Guns N' Roses and Great White. He was manager of GN'R from 1986 to 1991, overseeing the band's affairs as they recorded Appetite For Destruction, but was fired by Axl Rose before the completion of Use Your Illusion. He also worked with the likes of Dokken, Berlin and Mötley Crüe.