The nastiest hit song Axl Rose had ever heard
There’ll be fierce debate among Guns N’ Roses as to when exactly the magic began to ebb.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find fervent champions of 2008’s Chinese Democracy, the long-awaited LP flump that fancied itself as an industrial rocker. Perhaps 1993’s “The Spaghetti Incident?” covers record, or Guns N’ Roses’ unabashed deep dive into power balladry with the ‘November Rain’ soap opera two years earlier? The fact is, the band arrived so fully formed in Los Angeles’ hard rock scene that frontman Axl Rose and the gang had set a sky-high bar few fans would ever agree they matched after their much-loved debut.
It’s easy to forget that 1987’s Appetite for Destruction was heralded at the time as rock’s great saviour. While pop lore dictates that a certain little Seattle trio popped the hair metal bubble in 1991, spandex fatigue had already set in a few years before, the likes of Poison, Nitro, and Pretty Boy Floyd mugging the day’s MTV and spelling rock’s cartoonish curdle.
Scooping up a little of the city’s gutter grit, Guns N’ Roses cut a rawer score of the LA scene with grubbier authority than Ratt or even hellraisers Mötley Crüe.
There was another band that enjoyed a similar land in the hard rock climate over ten years earlier. Guns N’ Roses’ arguable predecessor was discussed on Rose’s surprise appearance on journalist and metalhead Eddie Trunk’s Q104.3 radio show back in 2006. Joining Skid Row’s Sebastian Bach, Trunk asked Rose his thoughts on New York greasepaint glam rockers Kiss.
“’Calling Dr Love’ has always been one of my favourite songs because they played it on AM radio,” Rose recalled. “And if you know Gene [Simmons] and you know Gene’s world, and you think about Gene’s world backstage and where his tongue was going, it just, I can’t believe they play that song on AM radio back in the day.”
During Appetite for Destruction’s heyday, Kiss had joined the likes of Whitesnake or Ozzy Osbourne as heavyweights with a certain hard rock pedigree who had lapsed into the 1980s’ hair metal parody. Yet, long before the unmasked ‘Lick It Up’ chapter, Kiss had landed with an arresting glam theatre of fake blood and engulfing pyrotechnics with the same slamming impact as Guns N’ Roses during America’s glam peak.
A song like ‘Calling Dr Love’ would have offered pointers for a young Rose. Penned by Simmons, a primal riff struts around a well-banged cowbell and lyrically largely sees the demon bassist eagerly administer his own medicine for any love in need of his romantic services, “And even though I’m full of sin / In the end you’ll let me in.”
While thematically little different from ‘Lick It Up’s lyrical ballpark, ‘Calling Dr Love’ and its Rock and Roll Over album spell the last time the Kiss quartet were firing on all glam cylinders, lapsing not long after into the stodgy disco and rock opera blunders, echoing Guns N’ Roses similar stumble away from the hard rock fire that cloaked Rose and his hard rock in the same alluring fire Kiss had sparked all those years back.
