The musical “war” that broke up Guns N’ Roses
Anyone who took one look at Guns N’ Roses during their rise would have assumed that half of them wouldn’t be among the living today.
The band’s debut record was practically a diary of every single excess that you could think of, but even decades after tearing up the Los Angeles rock and roll scene, they have all found a way to see the other side of mortality and make up with each other along the way. But their passion for playing with each other seemed to stall as soon as they got started becoming rock and roll stars.
It’s not like they didn’t have good reason to think that they were the best band in the world, either. Appetite for Destruction was the kind of badass record that every kid would have wanted back in 1987, and since the other bands at the time were people like Ratt and Warrant, there was no reason to think that anyone else in the Los Angeles area was going to come anywhere close to what they could do.
Even when they ducked into a studio to make their Lies EP, it sounded like they were on the same page, but Axl Rose didn’t want the band to become an unplugged band. They had proved to each other they could be a badass rock and roll outfit, but he knew that the next step was for them to take the reins and become the most extravagant pop rock anyone had ever seen.
And when you listen to interviews from the time, Rose seemed incredibly hopeful about the project, saying, “I just want to bury Appetite. I don’t want to have to live my life through that one album. So rather than making some songs that we think are fun, we’re going over them with a fine-toothed comb.” It’s only natural for someone to try and avoid that sophomore slump, but the rest of the band were hesitant once the pianos started coming out.
While it wasn’t out of the ordinary to add some keyboards to rock and roll tunes, this wasn’t like The Stones using a spare piano in between ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘Gimme Shelter’. This was Rose wanting to be Elton John, and while there’s certainly a place for that in rock and roll, getting the rest of the band on the same page to do that wasn’t going to be satisfying for every single member.
Even Slash admitted that it became a constant battle between everyone over how Use Your Illusion was going to sound, saying, “Duff was the first of us who didn’t feel like doing that anymore, and the whole thing became an essential problem for the band, because we, accomplished musicians, needed to be changed just because of ‘stylistic self-circumcision’. At a certain point, it was just a war, because Axl didn’t like anything anymore that came from us, the others.”
The band did everything they possibly could to stick together, but outside of the never-ending tour around the world twice over, they took a lot of damage in the process as well. It’s one thing not to be enjoying playing live, but when you find one of your bandmates legally dead in the middle of a hotel because he’s doping himself on everything he can get his hands on, it’s safe to say that everyone wasn’t exactly having the best time.
So when the band finally broke apart after “The Spaghetti Incident?”, it almost felt like an act of mercy that they put everything to bed. Rose would continue fronting the band for decades at a time before finally releasing Chinese Democracy, but it’s not like he was fooling anyone at that point. By the 2000s, there was a band named Guns N’ Roses, but the gang that had carried that banner for so long was officially finished.
