The daring moment for which Axl Rose kept The Rolling Stones waiting for three hours
Perhaps the only way that rock music’s survived after the 1960s and ’70s has been through pure guts alone. As the hippie era came crashing to an end, the question of how the genre would manage was hot, but as the 1980s kicked off, things only seemed to get louder, broader and more interesting – arguably thanks to people like Axl Rose, who were going to make it work no matter what.
And Axl Rose was going to make it work his way. Despite showing up to the party two decades late, the singer who emerged to notoriety in 1985 was every bit the rock messiah as the leaders of the ‘60s had been. He harnessed the same energy as someone like Jim Morrison or Mick Jagger, powered by an unshakable confidence and fuelled by a clear recklessness.
Recklessness in rock is a delicate balance, as, to some degree, it seems necessary, for the form thrives on risk-taking in a don’t-ask don’t-get world. To thrive in any creative industry, you need that attitude to some extent, as the northern idiom goes, shy bairns get nowt. Shy kids get nothing.
But confident ones can have it all, and as Rose’s band kicked off, it was his go-getting, no-fucks-given, in-it-to-win-it attitude that kicked the door down and truly let them in. One look at Rose and his star power was locked in, and something that seemed inevitable to him and those around him was that the band would succeed, so when he did eventually land at the top, he was definitely lacking in a certain humility.
There’s no greater showing of that than in 1989, when the band were still relatively new with their debut album just out; however, their name was already getting known through hits like ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ and ‘Paradise City’, as well as a strong run of tours supporting other names of the time, like Mötley Crüe and Aerosmith.
Aerosmith were the first to get hit by the sonic boom of the band, with their manager remarking, “By the end of the tour, Guns N’ Roses were huge. They basically just exploded. We were all pissed that Rolling Stone magazine showed up to do a story on Aerosmith, but Guns N’ Roses ended up on the cover of the magazine. Suddenly, the opening act was bigger than we were.”
After that, the band seemed to believe that would happen anywhere they went, and so they started behaving like the headliners no matter what, even if they were simply supporting a great, like The Rolling Stones.
Fair that in 1989, The Rolling Stones were flailing on the brink of complete collapse, but with the release of Steel Wheels, and the kicking off of their Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle Tour, they launched their biggest live show to date and a comeback to be awed by. And realistically, even through a bad patch, they were still The Rolling Stones, who didn’t need to prove their worth or win people back over. They were, and always will be, the ultimate rock and roll band, but that didn’t stop Rose from disrespecting them.
Guns N’ Roses supported the Stones on a run of that tour, and Jagger decided it would be nice to invite Rose to do a duet with him, singing his track ‘Salt Of The Earth’. “To me, Mick Jagger is one of the greatest athletes who ever lived,” he once said, so his respect for Jagger was never in question, but in the haze of youthful ego, he kept the icon waiting, for hours, turning up to their rehearsal way, way later than his call time.
On the afternoon of the show, when they were supposed to sing it that night, Rose didn’t show up to practice until three hours later, daring to keep one of history’s biggest and best-loved bands waiting when he was really just a new starter. It’s wild and disrespectful, but maybe that attitude is also why it worked as the 1980s emerged with true gall.
