The album Duff McKagan and Axl Rose agree is a masterpiece: “They became mine”
Love them or loathe them, there’s no way that you could ever call Guns N’ Roses boring.
You’d only be lying, unless, of course, your definition of boring is a frontman with the greatest recording vocal range in classic rock history who once shot a moth with a shotgun, a guitarist who can shred 1000 notes a minute seemingly without even moving, and a bassist who claims that he didn’t drink once water for a decade.
A war against banality was pretty much their opening mission statement. Their very first tour was an utter disaster that probably made them wish things were a bit more stale. They might have begun with an appetite for destruction, but all that destruction amounted to was a broken-down tour van, abandoned instruments, and decimated bank accounts.
After conking out en route to their very first show, they had to ditch the bulk of their equipment, accept a sketchy hitchhiking ride, and deal with a venue paying them only half of their promised fee. Among the band, this was later deemed the “Hell Tour”, and the group were almost over before they began.
But looking back, we can learn a lot from this escapade. Mainly, that while we might view them as hard rock or even hair rock in retrospect, at the beginning, they were simply punks with a penchant for Prince’s wardrobe. They thrived on the DIY ethos of the movement and the excitement of its appeal.
For McKagan and Axl Rose, the whole purpose of rock ‘n’ roll, in fact, was embodied by one single punk masterpiece. “I’d been listening to Kiss’s Alive! a lot,” McKagan told Louder, showcasing his partiality for the more shocking side of music.
“Great three-chord rock,” he continued, “Strutter and Firehouse and all of that – and then somebody turned me on to the [Sex] Pistols. Kiss were a great introduction into the Pistols.” If Kiss had been parodies of rebellion, then the Sex Pistols were the real thing, and Christ knows what their cause was. It proved to the fledgling future Roses gang that you ought to just get out onto the road any play.
“I’m the last of eight kids, and really wanted something of my own,” McKagan said of his instant connection to Never Mind the Bollocks, the British punk’s only album. “No one in my family knew who the Sex Pistols were, so they became mine. I was too young to know what some of it meant, but it really had an impact.”
It had the same enlivening impact on Rose. “The two records I always buy if there’s a cassette deck around and I don’t have the tapes in my bag are Never Mind the Bollocks and Queen II,” the searing singer once said. It’s pretty easy to see how the former would appeal to his anarchic sensibilities.
Citing it as one of his three favourite albums of all time, Rose was shaped by its raw ferocity and drama as a frontman. Moreover, there’s an admiration for their spirit, which in some ways sent his own outfit out on the road for an ill-prepared tour, but they survived and soon conquered the world, all the while, indebted to a groundbreaking masterpiece from 1977.
Nevertheless, John Lydon wasn’t all that happy with the rare praise Guns N’ Roses heaped upon his band. “I don’t want the establishment to accept me in any shape or form,” he said, “Because I despise them so much.” If they ever expected anything less, then they weren’t listening to their favourite record closely enough.
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