Guns N' Roses Chronicles Part VI: That Time I Won a Contest to See GN'R at Castle Donington in England
Naivety can be a beautiful benefit of youth. When we’re young, we may have some sense that the odds are stacked against us. However, inexperience in the “real world” can also manifest in a youthful optimism that can never be matched later in life. Last year, at the height of the pandemic and the lead up to the presidential election, one of the members of my Girl Scout Troop thought it would be a great idea to invite Kamala Harris to Zoom in with us as we were working on the Inside Democracy badge. I let her down gently, reminding her that Harris might be too tied up with the election to attend our meeting. This reminded me of the time I called KNAC radio and asking for advice on getting Axl Rose to come to my school for an ASB election rally. I couldn’t understand why the person on the other end of the call seemed so amused.
Mainly, my naïve optimism came in the form of contests sponsored by MTV or radio stations. The first would have been 1985’s win a Halloween Party with Mötley Crüe. I think I waited until the last minute to enter that one and didn’t have high hopes about winning. Two years later however, I was admittedly disappointed when my name was not announced as the winner of the Mötley Crüise to Nowhere. I filled out over one hundred postcards for the MTV Hedonism Weekend in Jamaica with Bon Jovi and couldn’t wrap my head around how my name wasn’t pulled. Yet, none of it discouraged me.
Back in the late 1980s, I religiously listened to a syndicated radio show called Metal Shop that ran on Sunday nights. When they announced a contest to go to the 1988 Castle Donington Monsters of Rock Festival, I didn’t think twice about entering. The legendary music festival was held in annually in an English town a hundred or so miles north of London, and I had first become aware of it 1984 when Mötley Crüe was on the bill. When I found out Guns N’ Roses was in the 1988 line-up (along with Helloween, David Lee Roth, Megadeth, KISS, and Iron Maiden), entering the Metal Shop contest was a no-brainer.
True to my age, I figured my odds were pretty good. Sure, Metal Shop was broadcast around the country, but it certainly had a smaller audience than the behemoth that was MTV. Okay, the Bon Jovi Jamaica let-down had left me jaded enough to be unconvinced I would win the grand prize; an all-expense paid trip to London, along with tickets and transportation to the festival, and a pair of Levi’s 501 jeans (they were one of the contest sponsors). However, this venture had a second-place prize: headliner Iron Maiden’s entire catalog in CD, a major luxury item at the time. Plus, there were twenty-five third places: an Iron Maiden Seventh Son of a Seventh Son cassette tape which I considered a handsome prize. I could practically hear the sweet drones of “Only the Good Die Young” coming from my Walkman as I filled out the entry form.
I was especially optimistic because a requirement of the contest was to explain (on a postcard), why I should be chosen. “I deserve to go the Monsters of Rock Festival because I want to show those Brits how to party Los Angeles-American style,” was the sheer poetry I crafted for my entry. The previous December I had taken a trip to Disneyland with the Sandburg Middle School 8th Grade Honor Society. On our way out, my best friend Nova purchased a bunch of postcards to send out to, well I have no idea who she was planning on mailing them to, but it seemed like a nice idea. On the bus ride home, I admired her stash of postcards and she generously handed me one showing Mickey and Minnie sitting in a Tin Lizzy in front of Disneyland City Hall. Months later, I still had the card and deemed it the perfect (i.e. most convenient) option for the folks over at Metal Shop. I was so confident about my chances that not only was it was my lone entry, but I passed on entering MTV’s Iron Maiden/Donington Contest altogether.
There was one catch to it all – the winner had to be at least 18 years old, and I was only 14. This age restriction had in fact been a barrier to every one of these contests, so I entered my mom in all of them until my brother was old enough to claim the prize. And so, it was his name that went onto the Disneyland postcard. When he noticed the card sticking out of the mail slot in the front door, awaiting pickup, he read it and had a conniption. “YOU’RE NOT MAILING OUT THIS STUPID SHIT WITH MY NAME ON IT!” he roared as he stomped into my bedroom waving Mickey and Minnie around. “But it’s to win a trip to see GN’R at Donington,” came my innocent reply. He paused for a beat, shrugged his shoulders, and calmly replied, “Oh, okay,” before placing the postcard back in the slot.
A couple of weeks later, we were both at my dad’s house in Yorba Linda. When the phone rang. He answered, and I could immediately tell it was my mom (she talks loud). Later, he would convey her side of the conversation which went something like:
“Did your sister enter you in one of those contests to go to England?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I just got a phone call – and you won.”
All I heard was his side which went, “Oh my God, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”
I raced across the kitchen to him, convinced someone had died.
“What is it?” I pleaded.
He put down the phone on the counter, Mom still on the line, and shrieked, “WE WON!!”
We hugged. We NEVER hug, but we did on that balmy August day in Yorba Linda. We jumped up and down. We wooped and hee-hawed. It was exhilarating. But after that initial rush, something dawned on me.
I probably wasn’t going.
The promotors of the contest were not thrilled to hear a 14-year-old had entered her big brother. As it was, everything was very last minute, so my brother spent a couple of days down at the Federal Building in Westwood getting an expedited passport. And while I technically could have gone, the folks at Metal Shop discouraged it. Besides, there was no way my mom and stepdad were going to let me go to another continent with my brother who wasn’t exactly a pillar of responsibility.
All I wanted was a cassette tape, and instead got a trip to England. However, I did call dibs on the pair of Levi’s 501 jeans.
My brother ended up taking his best friend Paul to Donington, and while I won’t go into too many details about grand prize trip, it was about as fabulous as you can imagine. They were in the crowd during GN’R’s set, which was filmed and included in the “Paradise City” video. The band’s appearance at Donington should have been a triumph but was marred when two fans were crushed to death during their set. My brother was far enough back to not even be aware of what was taking place. It had only been two years since he first saw them at the L.A. Street scene and had declared “they were going nowhere.”
As it turned out, the winner of the MTV contest wasn’t much of an Iron Maiden fan, but my brother and Paul were, so the band’s publicist took a shine to them. She let them go onstage with the MTV winners to sing backup on “Heaven Can Wait,” and showed them around backstage. Somewhere, I still have a drunken Lars Ulrich signature they got which is barely legible and has “Fucked Up” written underneath it in parenthesis.
After GN’R’s set my brother saw Slash backstage, but the guitarist so quickly became besieged by people that an autograph was not obtained. The day of the concert, I had hung up a blacklight poster of the cross from the cover of Appetite and remember staring at it as my brother relayed over the phone that he was not able to get Slash’s signature or photo. For some reason, as a stared at a blacklight version of Slash’s skull, that struck me as especially tragic.
It was a quick trip. My brother and his friend were in England only three or four nights and then came back. I think he must have felt a little bad that he’d gone on this glorious adventure without me. He brought back a program, t-shirt, and bottle of “Eddie’s Evil Brew” (cheap wine with the label replaced) from the show, along with a Mötley Crüe demo bootleg and some photos of Marilyn Monroe, which helped dull some of my disappointment. However, when it came to his kid sister, his generosity certainly had bounds. Less than a month after Donington, GN’R was scheduled to come to town with Aerosmith. When I asked if we would take me, the reply was, “Why would I want to go see Guns N’ Roses in concert? I just saw them.”
Whether he liked it or not, he had enjoyed a once in a lifetime experience because of me, and everyone in our orbit was quick to remind him. “You should be really nice to your sister from now on because she got you that trip to England!” Being indebted to me was more than he could bear. A couple of weeks later, a local indie record store got in a copy of Mötley Crüe’s “Too Fast for Love” on their Leathür Records label which they had pressed before they signed with Electra. I’d pined for a copy for years, but now that it was in my grasp, the $125 price tag was too much. My brother was 19 and had a job, so he bought it for me. I told him I didn’t want it if he was going to hold it over my head that he had purchased it. “It’s yours, no strings attached, if you never mention Castle Fucking Donington again.” I never did.
As it turned out, my lone entry was randomly pulled from the piles of postcards Metal Shop received. What I wrote on the entry didn’t matter, so it wasn’t my brilliant writing that prevailed, but sheer luck of the draw. Yeah, it was a huge drag that I did not get to go, and I often feel like my brother was the least deserving person in my life to get to do something like this. Did I really think I would get to go if he won? Maybe. But again, naivety is a benefit, or sometimes a curse, of youth. If nothing else, I guess it was nice to have a direct tie to GN’R at Donington and it still makes for a good story at parties.
The next time I went to Disneyland, I bought a stack of those postcards and used them to enter all kinds of contests. I never won anything again and eventually became jaded enough to stop trying. I’d already won my prize.
As a postscript, I’m still waiting for my grand prize pair of jeans. What’s up with that Levi’s?