GUNS N’ ROSES
ABUSE YOUR ILLUSION
No-shows, bomb scares, police intervention… GN’R’s Use Your Illusion tour was one of the most volatile to have ever hit Europe, and one that remained shrouded in mystery.Hammer’s sister mag,Classic Rock, tracked down the people who were there to get the full inside story
WORDS: GEORGE BIDMEAD
GETTY
★★★★★
FROM THE ARCHIVE
★★★★★
Duff: The King of Beers
Elton and Axl at the Freddie Mercury Tribute, Wembley Stadium, 1992
REXFEATURES
Axl Rose has had enough. It’s June 3, 1992 and we’re in Hanover at the Niedersachsen Stadium. He’s sitting on the drum riser, a sweaty, seething, 60,000-strong stadium rock crowd swarming in front of him. The band tore onto the stage (on time, for the first time on their massive Use Your Illusion tour), ripped through three songs, but now something’s not right. The petulant singer doesn’t say one word to the assembled throng, and he’s sitting down. Not the usual behaviour for a man who ordinarily races around like a maniac.
Slash, Duff, Matt and Gilby all share confused glances. They’re running around, doing their best to cover up, galloping around the stage. The monitors are checked. The teleprompter is checked. And rechecked. Nothing’s wrong. Except the singer’s behaviour. It’s all really strange.
Axl, meanwhile, doesn’t move. Then he does. He just wanders to the front of the stage, climbs into the security pit, looks at the audience, then returns to the drum riser and sits down again. And then starts to sing. But not for long…
Blame Bob Dylan. If he hadn’t written Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, GN’R would never have covered it, and Axl wouldn’t have berated the edgy Hannover crowd for not singing loudly enough. And then perhaps he wouldn’t have introduced Sweet Child O’ Mine as “a song about getting fucked up the ass by a Coke bottle”. But that’s exactly what he does. And then he storms off.
Incidents like these characterised Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion tour. It wasn’t an isolated episode, either. It would get weirder. GN’R were suffering from a media backlash after the massive success of Appetite For Destruction. And Axl was getting more and more paranoid. The GN’R on the Illusion tour wasn’t the same one we’d seen storm the Marquee in ’87 or stun the Donington crowd in ’88.
Think about it, a 12-piece Guns N’ Roses? It doesn’t make sense. Even now, when GN’R means whatever Axl wants it to mean, he’ll be stretching credulity if he walks onstage in Birmingham and Wembley this June with a dozen musicians in his band.
But the Guns N’ Roses that assembled in Dublin in mid-May 1992 for the start of a 20-date European tour consisted of 12 musicians. It was the culmination of the band’s transition from hedonistic heroes to stadium rockers.
It had been a traumatic adjustment costing two of the original members: drummer Steven Adler was fired from the band at the end of 1990 because, unlike the others, he did not cure his heroin addiction. A year later guitarist Izzy Stradlin quit because he could no longer cope with a “cleaned-up” Guns N’ Roses – even though he too had cleaned up.
They had been replaced by former Cult drummer Matt Sorum, who had experience of playing big gigs, and guitarist Gilby Clarke who did not have big show experience but had played in various Los Angeles bands like Candy and Kill For Thrills and came out of the same gritty club circuit that had spawned GN’R, Mötley Crüe, Quiet Riot and the rest.
To this reconstituted band had been added keyboard player Dizzy Reed, a female brass trio, a couple of backing singers (also ladies) and Teddy ‘ZigZag’ Andreadis, who was billed as an “emulator” but also played harmonica and keyboards.
It was Slash who had been mainly responsible for putting together the Guns N’ Roses big band.
“Around the time Gilby joined I was looking for some horn players to fill out songs like November Rain and get them to sound a bit more like the record,” he said in a TV interview.
“Axl really got into that idea too. I didn’t want anything corny like three guys in tuxedos all moving in unison, so I got some chicks to do it. But that hasn’t changed the way we play,” he added. “It’s as chaotic as it’s always been.”
Pressed about tensions within the band Slash replied, “This band’s always been tense because, you know, this isn’t like a day job. Most bands these days could go out and do their show in their sleep. We go out there all stirred up. We care about every show we do, so if something happens during a particular show then yeah, it can get pretty tense. The way we treat it is to go out and do the best show we possibly can. It’s not premeditated, we just go for it.”
Axl and Slash: star power
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Anyone thinking that a 12-piece band couldn’t “just go for it” was reckoning without Guns N’ Roses’ attitude. For a start, there was no setlist. Even the opening number wasn’t decided upon until a minute or two before the band hit the stage. Of course, that kind of spontaneity might be fine and dandy in a small, sweaty club packed with adoring fans, but in front of 50,000-100,000 people? Not to mention the lighting guy controlling 900 lights and half a dozen guys operating follow-spotlights precariously perched above the stage, each waiting for instructions.