Axl Rose: The frontman Billie Joe Armstrong called “the best ever”
The charisma that transforms someone into a frontman can’t be learned from a book. Despite artists’ efforts to emulate the swagger of icons like Mick Jagger or James Brown, it’s a quality that’s either innate or not, and many performers have honed their natural stage presence over the years. While Billie Joe Armstrong does his best with a guitar slung around his neck, he openly acknowledged that the pinnacle of stage presence he’s witnessed came from Guns N’ Roses.
For a young, impressionable kid, though, Guns N’ Roses pretty much had everything you were looking for. As opposed to making songs that sounded nice and pretty on the radio, the guitar riffs pouring out of Slash were the kind of things you would listen to because it sounded dangerous, especially with the album cover featuring the band members’ skulls on a cross.
This was a far cry from what the rest of the hair metal scene looked like. Since every other group was decking themselves out in lipstick and trying to write the most braindead rock and roll ever conceived by man, Guns N’ Roses actually felt like a band of brothers, making everyone else look like posers compared to what they were doing.
Even though Slash was the surefire rock star in the outfit, no one could hold a candle to what Axl Rose was doing. Influenced by everyone from Thin Lizzy to Iggy Pop to Elton John, Rose was the kind of magnetic rock star that was impossible to take your eyes off of. When he wasn’t screaming bloody murder on tracks like ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, his lyrics were the stuff ripped out of the diary of a madman, documenting the pitfalls of living at the bottom.
That’s not to say that Rose didn’t have his more sensitive moments as well. When the band finally got signed, Rose was the one doing most of the heavy lifting when working on their signature sound, eventually working on tracks like ‘November Rain’ and turning them into sweeping epics.
For Armstrong, this was what everything rock and roll was meant to be: spitting in the face of what had come before and doing whatever the hell you wanted to. Armstrong had yet to be converted by the millions of underground punk groups that he loved when forming Green Day, but Guns was still close to his heart when inducting them into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Although Rose would not be present at the ceremony, Armstrong said that no one could compare to Rose, saying, “This guy’s a badass fucking singer. One of the best frontmen to ever touch a microphone. Your lyrics are heartfelt, passionate, angry, and you tell the truth no matter what the cost.”
While Armstrong has never been able to touch the guitar chops of Slash or tried his hand at screaming in Rose’s bizarre vocal range, it’s easy to see where he got his ideas. Compared to the other bands on the California punk scene, Green Day were the ones willing to put melodic pieces back into rock and roll just like Rose did on songs like ‘Sweet Child O’Mine’. Trends might change, and bad blood may be spilt, but nothing can get in the way of the honesty that early Guns N’ Roses had.
