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08 May 2008
Guns N' Roses
I love the Sound of Guns N' Roses in the morning. Well, sometime during the day. They were a great band. Welcome To My Jungle and Sweet Child O' Mine are my favourite GNR songs.
GNR (which is what you call them when you get tired of typing the whole name) flat-out rocked. Appetite for
Destruction is a great, great album. At the time it came out, it was a refreshing alternative to the hair-metal bands like Poison and Motley Crüe. But if you look carefully at the liner notes and at some of the shots in the Welcome to the Jungle video, you will notice that GNR actually was, at first, hair metal. Axl totally had the big hair going on, but he appears to have changed it at the last possible second.
The videos from Appetite for Destruction were uncomplicated. The first video, Welcome to the Jungle, sort of had a plot, if you squint. It was sort of about a kid from Indiana coming to New York City, getting the Clockwork Orange treatment, and then getting a bunch of tattoos. But there was a lot of performance in the video. Then, after Sweet Child O' Mine broke loose and made the band really, really big, the videos were just performance. The Sweet Child O' Mine video was shot in a studio (or possibly "warehouse"), but it was primarily just cameras pointed at the band performing. There was plenty of opportunity to identify the band members: Slash was the guy with the hair and the hat, Izzy was the other guitarist, Duff was the obligatory bassist with the dopey smile, and Steve was the drummer. Oh, and Axl was the screeching guy with the snake dance.
By the time they did the Paradise City video, they were big enough to shoot the footage at a big ol' concert. MTV played that video all the time. To this day, when I hear the song, I cannot help but remember the spot in the lyrics where Axl spits (on, I am pretty sure, the guys in the audience). And the exciting "soundcheck sequence," where we saw Steve mouth the words "More bass!" at somebody offstage. At this point, the band was pretty darn big.
But that was then. After years of success, GNR bottomed. The new version of the band that I am familiar with has a clearly-botoxed Axl and some other guys, notably Tommy Stinson (Tommy Stinson!) and Buckethead (Buckethead!). Axl's been promising for years that a new GNR album will come out soon. They had a song in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie End of Days, and it sounded sort of electronic. They showed up on the MTV Video Music Awards, but Axl's voice was not really in shape for the Appetite for Destruction songs he dusted off.
People on the Internet like to argue about when a band jumped the shark. Some people think that GNR lost it when the big single from Lies featured acoustic guitar and whistling. Some people think that the overblown clearly-not-rock of Use Your Illusion finished them off. There are those that stuck with Axl and his buddies all the way until "The Spaghetti Incident?" Me, I am done with them and will stick to my memories of a once great band.
Here is a BBC documentary on the GNR dudes.
Destruction is a great, great album. At the time it came out, it was a refreshing alternative to the hair-metal bands like Poison and Motley Crüe. But if you look carefully at the liner notes and at some of the shots in the Welcome to the Jungle video, you will notice that GNR actually was, at first, hair metal. Axl totally had the big hair going on, but he appears to have changed it at the last possible second.The videos from Appetite for Destruction were uncomplicated. The first video, Welcome to the Jungle, sort of had a plot, if you squint. It was sort of about a kid from Indiana coming to New York City, getting the Clockwork Orange treatment, and then getting a bunch of tattoos. But there was a lot of performance in the video. Then, after Sweet Child O' Mine broke loose and made the band really, really big, the videos were just performance. The Sweet Child O' Mine video was shot in a studio (or possibly "warehouse"), but it was primarily just cameras pointed at the band performing. There was plenty of opportunity to identify the band members: Slash was the guy with the hair and the hat, Izzy was the other guitarist, Duff was the obligatory bassist with the dopey smile, and Steve was the drummer. Oh, and Axl was the screeching guy with the snake dance.
By the time they did the Paradise City video, they were big enough to shoot the footage at a big ol' concert. MTV played that video all the time. To this day, when I hear the song, I cannot help but remember the spot in the lyrics where Axl spits (on, I am pretty sure, the guys in the audience). And the exciting "soundcheck sequence," where we saw Steve mouth the words "More bass!" at somebody offstage. At this point, the band was pretty darn big.
But that was then. After years of success, GNR bottomed. The new version of the band that I am familiar with has a clearly-botoxed Axl and some other guys, notably Tommy Stinson (Tommy Stinson!) and Buckethead (Buckethead!). Axl's been promising for years that a new GNR album will come out soon. They had a song in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie End of Days, and it sounded sort of electronic. They showed up on the MTV Video Music Awards, but Axl's voice was not really in shape for the Appetite for Destruction songs he dusted off.
People on the Internet like to argue about when a band jumped the shark. Some people think that GNR lost it when the big single from Lies featured acoustic guitar and whistling. Some people think that the overblown clearly-not-rock of Use Your Illusion finished them off. There are those that stuck with Axl and his buddies all the way until "The Spaghetti Incident?" Me, I am done with them and will stick to my memories of a once great band.
Here is a BBC documentary on the GNR dudes.
06:00 Posted in Music | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: music, metal, success, rock, band
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