Former Guns N’ Roses manager Alan Niven has filed a lawsuit against the band to prevent them from blocking the release of his new memoir, Sound N’ Fury: Rock N’ Roll Stories.

Sound N’ Fury was initially set for a July 2025 release. It was postponed to September and is now scheduled for a March 31 release on Amazon. However, in a lawsuit filed on Nov. 3 in the United States District Court for the District of Arizona, Niven claims that Guns N’ Roses — particularly frontman Axl Rose — have threatened him and publisher ECW Press to hinder the book’s release.

Details of Alan Niven’s Lawsuit Against Guns N’ Roses

Niven — a music industry veteran who worked with Motley Crue in their early days and managed both Guns N’ Roses and Great White — summarized the contents of Sound N’ Fury and explained the reasons for its delay in his lawsuit.

“Sound N’ Fury consists of anecdotes about [Niven’s] career, including distributing the first Sex Pistols singles in the U.S., cooking a dinner for guitarist Robert Fripp, advocating for a scruffy musician named Frank Feranna (later known as Nikki Sixx), and reinventing Great White twice,” the complaint states. “It also includes stories involving the members [of] GNR, while he represented the five individuals who made up the classic lineup of the band.”

The lawsuit continues: “Now, however, due to GNR’s threats, Sound N’ Fury languishes in a warehouse. In a letter written in May 2025, GNR invoked the confidentiality clause in its 1991 buyout Agreement with Niven (the ‘Agreement’) and has blocked publication of the book through repeated threats to Niven and contact with ECW.”

The lawsuit asserts that “GNR takes this position despite several facts (among others): the Agreement was not signed by all its members (a material term); GNR’s members have publicly commented on Niven; one member encouraged him to write the book; and he has been discussing his time in GNR for over a decade. Sound N’ Fury‘s publication has been delayed for months, even though it received a favorable review from the Los Angeles Times and has garnered many preorders.”

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Niven often clashed with Rose during his tenure as GNR’s manager, which ended in 1991. “It was Axl’s battle to take complete control and most of the money. The more control he gained, the less productive they became and the worse the material got,” Niven writes in Sound N’ Fury. “Whatever, it’s all in the rear-view mirror.”