Guns and Roses

I would like to talk about a band that had a big impact on me.

The once mighty Guns and Roses.

When Appetite for Destruction was released in 1987 it changed music for a lot of people, myself included. The metal scene at the time was dominated by Hair Metal bands. See my previous post about the ballads they released. Bands like Metallica, Slayer etc were much more underground than a lot of people will have you believe now. The point being there was Hair Metal and Thrash metal. So there was the quite obviously fake and all about having a good time, and the very earnestly real and hardcore.

Then came Appetite. It was huge, it eventually went on the sell 28 million copies and is considered by a great many people to be the best debut album of all time. People will also argue for Ten by Pearl Jam , but we will get to that in another post at some stage.

This album opens with Welcome To the Jungle. If ever there was the intent shown in the first song, then that has to be it. From the first , echo enhanced chords, is screams menace and you have to contrast it with what was around in 1987. Seriously, Bad by Michael Jackson, Who's that Girl by Madonna, Where the Streets have no Name by U2, Livin on a prayer by Bon Jovi. You can see how different it was. it is interesting that the teased hair and the clothes were all very 1987 hair metal, but that label somehow that didn't stick.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_gQOfF0Ymo&feature=fvw

There was definitely something about them that made them authentic as well as just a bit glam. The album holds up very well.

My favourite song from the album now is Rocket queen, i think mainly because it is a song of two distinct parts and the second part is about a mans love for a prostitute. Now, i have never been in this situation I am very pleased to say That must be a complete mind fuck. But it appeals to my sense of hopeless love which i must have got from all those French and Russian novels i read about this time.

 Anyway, there isn't  a bad song on this album. Really, every song has something to say for it.

So , every single person I knew would at least say that Guns were their favorite band at this time. Except for one guy who said Whitesnake - but I don't talk to him anymore. Since about 1988 in fact.

So we consumed everything Gunners that we could. Every bit of news, every time they were played on TV. Looking back on it we were no better than the teenage girls we mocked for liking Bros etc. To fill this gap the record company released GnR Lies. Which was basically a re-release of a four track EP called Live like a Suicide, and four acoustic tracks. The four tracks had been released in the US in 1986, but nothing had really taken off and it wasn't released anywhere else. The four acoustic tracks were quite funny. However one of the them was Patience. Which come to think of it now was much more a metal ballad than Sweet Child of mine. However, this was played on mainstream radio to death. it is a good song. it really is. But man did we get sick of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErvgV4P6Fzc&ob=av2el

It does show off what a good guitarist duff is though. So it meant that everyone who thought that Appetite was too metal for them, were able to get into Patience. So, now pretty much the entire world was a guns and roses fan.

Except perhaps now for me. I was sick of everyone, who clearly didn't know anything about music, saying how good they were. How much better than other bands whose albums they had never heard. I got into Anthrax and Metallica around this time. I was late to that party, but some of the guys at school had their tapes and so we all traded etc.

Anyway, in 1991 we finally got the next real Guns and Roses Album. To top it off we got two albums released on the same day. Use your Illusion I and II. They were very good albums, but , and I have had this conversation a lot, it would have been a great single album. So what happened is that everyone who was more than used to putting their own tapes together, made it into a single album, cut out the lower lights and just had the good stuff.

By now Gunners were properly huge. Easily the biggest band in the world. Their music seemed to reflect this though. it was far more grandiose and orchestrated. Not bad, but it had lost that dangerous rock and roll metal edge which had made it so appealing. Take November rain, it is as bad as the worst travails of 1970s prog. And what is the film clip about really? Slash leaves the church, which is very obviously mis sized, and goes outside to play a bit of guitar outside in a desert??? I mean really. Here it is for a bit of a laugh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SbUC-UaAxE&ob=av3el

Please do not misunderstand, it is a very good song. But not as good as anything on Appetite.

There is are some good songs on these albums, none better than You could be mine. This was the theme song to Terminator 2 , which was a great film, and this still had that Guns and Roses edge. it is great and still gets the blood pumping to this day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzB5hFINC_k



By this time the original band was falling apart. The original drummer Steve Adler had been kicked out prior to the recording of the Use Your illusions, purportedly for heroin use, but seriously , what did you have to do really to get kicked out of the band? the mind boggles. Gunners released the albums and then went on a massive world tour. Huge, arena's everywhere they went.

it all got too much for Izzy Stadlin, rhythm guitar. Who walked out, then the tour finished. And that was it. Grunge came along and Nirvana ridiculed Axl Rose at the MTV Music awards and the spell was broken. Gunners were nowhere anymore and it was incredibly uncool to still like them. To say they were then in the wilderness is a little of an understatement. in 1993 they released The Spaghetti Incident, which is an album of covers recorded at various times and isn't really that bad.

officially it says that Slash left in 1996, but to put it into perspective, that is five years after the last album of new songs was done. So the reality must have been different. You could get by with a new drummer, rythym guitar, even bass. But when Slash left it wasn't Guns and Roses anymore.

Chinese democracy came out last year. Do not bother with that. really. it is rubbish. It is an Axl Rose project, who owns the name. It took around 10 years plus to make. And it shows. it is so over produced. So much going on and so little real direction that it loses itself up its own ass. Instead get Slash's solo album, that is good. Even if it is a collection of every music style.

me? i will always remember the gunners as the coolest guys on the planet, making the coolest music and being about as dangerous as I could imagine. In 1988 me and my family were staying in a pub in the Yorkshire dales. One my dad had seen on TV, seriously, anyway, it was properly country English pub. Tiny . They had Welcome to the Jungle on the juke box and so my brother and I played it a few times. i seem to remember they actually turned it off because people weren't happy.

that's cool.