The one band Axl Rose never liked touring with: “They do a lot of bitching”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why some people have a problem with Axl Rose.
Although he is still one of the finest singers to come out of the late 1980s, not all of those Guns N’ Roses shows were bound to go off without a hitch whenever Rose started to show up late for his performances. He was operating on his own schedule half the time the band was playing, and while he did eventually show up to deliver the goods half the time, that wasn’t earning him any points with the people that were really putting in the work.
Then again, that’s not fair if you look at everything that Rose did leading up to Guns N’ Roses becoming a success. They had gone through some of the lowest points that any band had to deal with when they were putting their debut together, and a lot of the songs are practically a diary of a band that was trying their best to make a record and hanging onto their own sanity by a thread.
It was a lot more dangerous than everything else, but that’s the whole reason why it worked so well. Everyone had grown tired of listening to the same cookie-cutter hair bands that were happening around that time, and while Guns weren’t that far away from that kind of style, their inspirations had a lot more to do with Aerosmith and punk rock than whatever was coming out of Cosmo magazine at the time. So if they were the biggest band in the world, why not put them together with the other biggest band in the world for a tour?
After all, Metallica were among the biggest underground sensations in the world, and even if they didn’t have that many videos to their name, they were already playing arenas way before they needed MTV. Lars Ulrich had even suggested getting the same sound Guns N’ Roses had when working on And Justice For All, but when they saw them up close, there was bound to be a little bit of friction.
Metallica were no-nonsense every single time they performed, and even if they were the ultimate road dog band, dealing with Rose was going to be a few steps over the line. Not only did Rose arrive late or even not show up at all on some nights, but the massive snafu during their Montreal date where he accidentally incited a riot wasn’t exactly helping his case for being unreliable.
But even after Ulrich and James Hetfield said their piece about Rose, the frontman wasn’t going to roll over, saying to a crowd later on in the tour, saying, “We used to like to think that we were friends or something. But let me tell you something about them. They do a lot of bitching for a band that was getting paid a whole lot more than they deserved at a show. I thought I was friends with these people. I don’t know how long they were on the road, but there was nobody in their crew that got a bonus for working their ass off. I saw people getting treated like shit and it wasn’t very enjoyable.”
Granted, having someone like Rose saying that a band wasn’t being that accommodating is the equivalent of Alice Cooper teaching rockstars the art of subtlety. The frontman was notorious for leaving so many people hanging, and when looking at the amount of extravagant parties that he put on backstage and the wild nights where they had to be escorted out of the venue before they got arrested, it’s not like every member of their crew was getting treated with the utmost respect because of his behaviour, either.
Both bands certainly had drawbacks to them, but seeing them come together like oil and water is still the stuff of rock and roll legend. Everything seemed lined up to be one of the greatest rock and roll tours of all time, but all Guns N’ Roses proved was that the nickname ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Band’ wasn’t just an exciting name anymore. They were causing mayhem everywhere they went, and things were only going to get worse once they eventually stopped touring.
