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Review
AXL
GREASED AND READY TO ROLL
If their new tour is any indication, Guns N' Roses
are not on a nostalgia trip. The band, writes DOMINIC PATTEN,
looks set to smoke the competition.
By DOMINIC PATTEN
Saturday, August 24th, 2002 – Page R4
For years, like Elvis, there have been sporadic sightings
and reports that they're alive. And, like the King with his
1968 comeback special, that they're back. Well, after almost
10 years of rumours, lawsuits and recording, Guns N' Roses,
the all-time Sunset Strip bastards, poets, princes of rock
'n' roll, have climbed back in the ring. And, ladies and gentlemen,
they are ready to rumble!
Reports
are it's a knock-out punch in the first round. "I may
have just witnessed the best rock concert I've ever seen in
my life," wrote Ken Lau, on a fan-site message board,
after the GNR show on Aug. 14 in Hong Kong. Frontman Axl Rose,
in a statement released just before the band's Chinese Democracy
tour started, reflected, "it's a dream realized. A dream
come true." Another fan who saw the Hong Kong gig said:
"This band is going to take the world by storm, they
are simply amazing."
Yesterday,
GNR swung into the U.K. to headline the Carling Festival in
Leeds, and on Monday it will be playing in London. The tour,
says Rose, "is going to go off and on for the next two
or three years." This is not a band on a nostalgia trip.
In
fact, frontman Rose is the only original member of the band.
And while Axl and the new guys, including former Replacement
bassist Tommy Stinson, and the mysterious Buckethead on guitar,
are playing a lot of the old stuff, last week's gigs reveal
that they're poised to smoke the likes of Nickelback, the
Strokes, Eminem and Korn, and show them that giants do still
walk the Earth.
To
achieve its endgame, GNR is mixing it up with a strategically
planned rolling comeback of sorts. First, there was the release
of the Live Era double album a few years back, thereby clearing
the decks for the new stuff. Oh My God, featured on the soundtrack
to the Arnold Schwarzenegger flick End of Days, signaled the
hard-hitting but new technological direction the band was
going. Reviews were mixed, but interest proved high.
"The
curiosity factor is huge," says Tara Sloane, lead singer
of Canadian rockers Joydrop. "We're all dying to know
what Axl's been doing in his basement."
Bootlegs
of the new songs, performed during the band's two New Year's
shows in Las Vegas and its appearance at Rock in Rio III,
have been circulating the Net for months. And the new tunes,
especially in the case of the songs Chinese Democracy and
Silkworm, are equal if not superior to the band's older stuff.
If
GNR has a hit on its hands, and if it doesn't self-destruct,
industry executives are hopeful that the much-delayed new
album, Chinese Democracy,could prove the savior of the floundering
music business.
GNR,
unlike the Rolling Stones, the shameless Who, and the irrelevant
Pearl Jam, might just be entering its second decade more vital,
more daring and just plain better than it ever was before.
The
band has been part of the cultural lexicon for so long that
it's easy to forget that in the dim days of Don Henley, late
1980s' protest pop, GNR's major-label debut, Appetite for
Destruction,took the world like a force out of the Bible.
The
disturbing power ballad Sweet Child of Mine sent the album
to the top of the charts. Appetite went on to become one of
the best-selling debut albums of all time, shipping in excess
of 14 million copies Stateside alone. Sure some of it seemed
a bit contrived and melodramatic, but years later, you realize
that it was almost all killer, no filler.
"It
was the first record," says George Stroumboulopoulos,
host of The New Music, "I ever bought with a parental-advisory
sticker on it -- and I had to have that record."
Some
thought the excessive band's success was a case of too much,
too soon. In 1989, opening for the Rolling Stones in L.A.,
GNR went through a very public nervous breakdown on-stage,
with Axl admonishing fellow band members for their drug use.
And then the band played an amazing show, as if their demons
were fuelling more than their addictions. Afterward, Axl and
GNR rhythm guitarist Izzy Stralin came on-stage with the Stones
for a rendition of the rarely played Stones tune Salt of the
Earth,and almost effortlessly rendered Mick Jagger a sideman
in his own band.
After
that it was five long years of madness -- touring, drugs,
marriages, therapy, busts, riots, the Use Your Illusion double
album, more touring, accusations of racism and homophobia,
band members leaving, band members rejoining, and hired hacks.
Until finally the whole thing seemed to be an endless lunge
for the top cog on the star machine. And yet, as they proved
time again, when everyone showed up and they felt like flexing
a bit of muscle, GNR could on any night be the greatest rock
'n' roll band of all time. Along with 50,000-plus other fans,
Ladisu Lago, now a host on Canada's TeleLatino, saw the band
in Mexico City in 1992. "It was an amazing experience,"
she states, "we all loved them."
Feeding
off that devotion, GNR created the blueprint: sleaze and glitter
on a surface of barely controlled rage with hooks to burn.
Charges of misogyny, though almost laughable when one reads
the lyrics of most hip-hop hits today, can't be denied. But
the thing to remember about GNR, and the partial secret to
its success, is that, at one time or another, the band hated
everyone. It's a unique form of populism, but it is perhaps
the purest.
However,
by 1992 the success of Nirvana and the rise of grunge, as
well as hip-hop's emerging cultural dominance, was not proving
immediately forgiving to GNR. Suddenly, against the bands
of the Pacific Northwest -- many of whom had played with GNR
bassist Duff McKagan when he'd lived in Seattle -- Guns N'
Roses looked like the bloated, humourless dinosaurs they had
given the boot to only a few years earlier.
The
Use Your Illusion tour lumbered on. The band released The
Spaghetti Incident, a cover album featuring the songs of the
Damned, the Dead Boys and, stupidly, Charles Manson. Soon
Slash, Duff and Izzy all released solo albums, and it was
generally conceded that it was over. The obits were written,
but the glory remained. "They left with their legacy
intact," asserts Stroumboulopoulos, "which is more
than can be said for a lot of those bands that became the
punch line to every Beavis and Butthead joke." And week
after week, Appetite for Destruction, Lies and Use Your Illusion
keep selling regularly.
Like
a combination of Howard Hughes and the Beach Boy's tragic
genius, Brian Wilson, Axl seemed to hide behind a veil of
lawsuits, isolation and studio time. And in GNR's absence,
there have been many pretenders to the throne, but no real
contenders.
Only
Rammestein, with its German theatre metal, and Queens of the
Stone Age have come close to approaching the drama, dogma
and raw power of the Gunners. But neither have had the massive
popular appeal or the record sales.
And
those sales figures are not incidental to the legend. With
a fairly constant philosophy of "follow, lead or get
the hell out of my way," Axl Rose, knows that the only
way to come back is to return large.
"When
it comes to Guns N' Roses," noted Rose in his statement
of last week, "I may not always get everything right,
but I do have a good idea about getting things from point
A to point B, and know what the job is we have to do."
He has retained ownership of the band name, dumped the deadwood,
and is mastering the technology. Celebrated players and producers,
like techno whiz Moby, have been summoned, their usefulness
downloaded, and then shown the door. The record company has
been stared down and told to wait until the record is truly
ready.
The
timing for Chinese Democracy, claims Rose, is "right
-- we've sorted it down to what songs are on the record, what
the sequence of songs are, the cover art is ready." On-stage
last week, Axl showed a picture he'd come across of Guns N'
Roses spray-painted on a Beijing street. That, he told the
crowd, would be on the cover of the album. They lapped it
up.
In
The Last Tycoon,F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: "There are
no second acts in American lives." GNR seems prepared
to prove the great chronicler wrong. Spin magazine recently
voted Appetite for Destruction the greatest metal album of
all time. Ticket sales for the tour are swift. The show and
the new band is hot. And coming up to 40, Axl Rose remains
one of the great rock stars, roaring and stalking the stage.
And, like a high roller, he's playing to win.
"To
the ones who are negative," says the singer, "and
want to see either myself or the new band fall on their faces,
personally, I can't pass up an opportunity to upset so many
of them in one quick swoop." It's combat. Like the lyric
says, "Welcome to the jungle -- time to die." The
King, and Col. Parker, would have been proud.
Source:
GlobeandMail.ca
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