Why the ‘Use Your Illusion’ tour is the most infamous in rock history
The man born William Bruce Rose Jr, more commonly known as Axl Rose, has employed Buckethead, a virtuoso prog metal guitarist whose stage get-up is a Michael Myers-esque blank face mask and a KFC Family Bucket worn as a hat, and is still probably the strangest person to have ever been a part of the Guns N’ Roses lineup. Although God knows the entire band made him earn it, Slash did run straight through a glass shower door in a drug-fuelled haze as he thought The Predator was chasing him.
Rose takes it on sheer, blinding ego, though. At the very least, being in the biggest band on the planet does give you license to throw your weight around. Their 1987 debut album, Appetite for Destruction, made them worldwide megastars. Even after a decade that had seen hard rock become a featherlight, chart-topping commercial concern, Rose’s boys showed that a band could be sexy and dangerous and still sell records by the truckload while they’re at it.
What people didn’t know was that a few years later, they’d get even bigger. In 1991, the band released not one but two follow-ups. The dual release of Use Your Illusion one and two turned them into one of the world’s biggest pop acts, let alone rock bands. The tour that followed is still one of the longest in rock history at 192 dates over two and a half years in 27 countries. More importantly, though, it probably warrants in its own chapter in Dante’s Inferno for how utterly hellish it was for the band and some poor members of the audience for those shows.
In July 1991, Rose spotted a punter filming the show in Missouri. After deciding that the security team weren’t trying to eject him hard enough, Rose leapt into the crowd to dispense his own branding of squawking vigilante justice. After one of the world’s most famous people had a literal fistfight with a fan, he got back on stage and said, “Well, thanks to the lame-ass security, I’m going home!” The riot that followed injured over 60 fans, and a warrant was issued for Rose’s arrest.
In the wake of the band’s rise, though, Rose’s head had swelled so intensely that no bandana smaller than a galleon’s mainsail could possibly fit. So, his bandmates were arguably getting screwed over even worse than any audience member by his ego.
Axl Rose saw himself as the sole creative force in Guns N’ Roses, no matter how many bangers like ‘Patience’ Izzy Stradlin wrote. He’d use the band’s constant haze of drugs and alcohol to bully them into signing contracts that greatly decreased their royalties and songwriting sway. Stradlin himself, who’d recently got clean, took this as a sign to get the hell out of the band while he still could, even though the tour itself wasn’t even half over.
In 1992, the band would embark on one of the most infamous legs of the tour, co-headlining stadiums with metal gods Metallica, fresh off The Black Album. The curse that seemed to follow GNR around also affected Lars and co. as a mere eight shows into the tour in Montreal, a catastrophic pyrotechnics miscommunication saw James Hetfield engulfed in flames, giving him third-degree burns and ending the set immediately afterwards.
Guns N’ Roses didn’t see any need to quiet the clearly disturbed audience and let them wait for nearly two and a half hours until they were good and ready. Then Axl Rose stormed offstage nine songs in due to audio problems. You’d best believe another riot happened after that, but the chaos doesn’t stop there.
Another riot occurred in Chile. Faith No More were kicked off the tour because of Mike Patton pissing on Rose’s teleprompter. The group found time on the tour to join the Freddie Mercury tribute concert. The band, as anything other than Axl Rose and a bunch of hired hands, was over by the end of the tour, which blessedly came in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 1993. It’s more than just the most infamous tour in rock history. It’s a warning sign. It’s a fable warning everyone that no matter how big you get, unchecked ego can make even the greatest rock bands nothing compared to what they could have been.
