The 1988 Guns N’ Roses concert Slash will always regret being part of: “I still have nightmares”
Despite not necessarily always firing on all cylinders in the years since, Guns N’ Roses have maintained their position as one of the biggest rock acts to emerge from the 1980s, and a large amount of that is down to how solid their earlier material was.
There aren’t many other acts that can reasonably claim to have kept their spot at the top despite having performed much below expectations for around three decades, and that just goes to show just how entertaining they were as a prospect when they first burst into people’s consciousness with a brand of stadium-ready hard rock and heavy metal that was hard to ignore.
Appetite For Destruction, the band’s 1987 debut album, arguably changed the face of rock music, ushering in a creative high mark for a glam metal sound that had been creeping its way into the mainstream for well over a decade at this point. While many saw their rise out of nowhere as the sign of a band who were going to be around for a considerable amount of time at the highest levels of popularity, there were still some flaws that needed to be ironed out, especially when it came to their live performances.
Only a year later, the band found themselves performing live at the Texas Stadium, a venue with a capacity of well over 60,000, which would undoubtedly have been a daunting prospect for a band who had risen to such heights in a short period of time. However, the mounting pressure would prove itself to be far too great for the new saviours of rock to handle, and ended up being a catastrophic performance that they would collectively come to regret.
In a 2014 interview with Ultimate Classic Rock, guitarist Slash reflected upon their dreadful showing at the stadium by stating that the performance wasn’t unlike the sort of display you’d expect to see in This Is Spinal Tap, full of rock clichés and moments of awkward embarrassment.
Only four years prior, the Rob Reiner mockumentary had lampooned the ridiculousness of a fictional rock band who weren’t dissimilar in style to Guns N’ Roses, but who were considerably more inept than their real-life counterparts, or so it would initially have seemed.
However, Slash’s regrets don’t stem from the fact that they came across as a pastiche of the genre, but more to do with the fact that they put in one of the shoddiest performances of their entire career. “I still have nightmares about it,” the guitarist claimed. “We just went out there and couldn’t pull it together. Completely just fell apart. Couldn’t hear what the other guy was doing. Everybody was just in a completely different place.”
“It was literally just horrible. I think we went on late and left the stage early. It started raining. Just the most miserable gig.”
Slash
While this could have been seen as a learning curve for the band, it’s far from the last time that the band have found themselves experiencing technical difficulties on the biggest stage, with Axl Rose seemingly struggling to keep composed when the band headlined Glastonbury in 2023.
Granted, people still lap it all up despite the band having showcased their flaws in such glaringly obvious fashion, but had fans taken note of just how prone they were to error, then perhaps their decline in quality shouldn’t have come as such a surprise.
