“It’s been a dream”: the one country Axl Rose wanted to play the most
Everyone even slightly thinking about touring with Guns N’ Roses needed to know what they were getting themselves into with Axl Rose.
As much as the frontman was one of the greatest vocalists of his generation, there were more than a few times when he could have been either an insufferable diva towards the end of their glory years or one of the most feral musical figures when he first started playing the stadium circuit. The band definitely earned their reputation for being dangerous, but Rose felt that some of their best playing came when they started moving outside the US.
Then again, Los Angeles was always going to be their home whenever they got back to California. It took them a long time going around the world twice to get back to their old stomping grounds, but even if they managed to be one of the biggest bands on the planet, nothing could have prepared them for what they were greeted with when they first started playing in Japan.
If you look at the country’s history with rock and roll artists, though, having someone like Guns play there wasn’t anything new. The Beatles had already introduced the world to what a rock and roll could be like when they entered Tokyo to play Budokan, and when looking at Guns’ track record for putting on a spectacular show, they were going to give every one of their fans something to remember when they traveled to the other side of the world.
But even before Rose touched ground there, he already knew that Japan was going to be the benchmark that everything else was measured against, saying, “It’s been a dream, going to Japan and playing the shows in Japan. Our favorite records were Cheap Trick At Budokan and Unleashed in the East. You hear the screaming Japanese people and we go, “You know, we have to go there! We have to go!” Hopefully we will have the people be like that for us and we’ll have fun with them.”
And when you listen to those records, you can hear exactly what Rose is talking about. Cheap Trick might not have been one of the biggest names in rock at the time when they first started putting out their records, but when everyone heard the live version of a song like ‘I Want You To Want Me’, the rest of the band found out that the one instrument that was missing was the audience whenever they kicked into one of their songs.
Which is why Guns took that same approach whenever they played live. They had the same punk rock spirit about them when they started playing clubs in Los Angeles, and even at the height of the glam movement, there was no one else that was going to touch them when they started working on tracks like ‘Paradise City’, especially when they kicked into the fast part at the end.
Those songs were made to be performed live, and while the Use Your Illusion is still one of the most debaucherous tours anyone has ever undergone, it’s not like the band didn’t come to play in the live footage. In most of the professionally shot songs from that time, Rose is in rare form when singing the old songs like ‘Nightrain’, and even if Slash looked inebriated throughout everything, there was nothing stopping him from playing the best solos he knew how.
The band had become much bigger than any of them had intended, but by the time that they got around to showtime, the whole thing had turned into a well-oiled machine. They were willing to do anything they could to make great records, but their true strength in their prime was turning every single stadium gig into the sweatiest club that you have ever seen whenever ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ started.
