“Chaos”: The hellish tour that broke up Guns N’ Roses
It was fight or flight from the start for Guns N’ Roses. Their very first tour was an utter disaster. They might have begun with an appetite for destruction, but all that destruction amounted to was a broken-down tour van, abandoned instruments, and decimated bank accounts. After conking out en route to their first show, they had to ditch the bulk of their equipment, accept a sketchy hitchhiking ride, and deal with a venue paying them only half of their promised fee.
Among the band, this was later deemed the “Hell Tour”, and the group were almost over before they began. Perhaps it was a portent that they should’ve heeded. After all, the road has never been kind to the hard rockers. That much was self-evident during the “chaos” of the Use Your Illusion tour—the car crash that pretty much brought an end to the band as a functioning force.
The tale of the tour pretty much begins with their very first concert. While it might have nearly killed them off from the get-go, they did still play. This decision wove its way into the mindset of the band; their fight-or-flight response was to fight, and they never put down their gloves once thereafter. They grew up on a gritty circuit that kept rock ‘n’ roll alive when the 1980s were hurling salvo after synth salvo towards its destitution.
Guns N’ Roses bore this barrage bravely and prise hard rock from the rubble. Given that there has always been an appetite for rock ‘n’ roll, it’s no surprise that they quickly found huge audiences around the world. But by the time Use Your Illusion came around, they had only been a band for a quick, dysfunctional seven years, and they weren’t quite ready for stadiums.
They thought they could stick with their slapdash attitude, as Slash proclaimed at the time, “It’s as chaotic as it’s always been.” But this was by design. ”Most bands these days could go out and do their show in their sleep. We go out there all stirred up. We care about every show we do, so if something happens during a particular show then yeah, it can get pretty tense. The way we treat it is to go out and do the best show we possibly can. It’s not pre-meditated, we just go for it,” he continued.
It’s a beautiful concept he endeavoured to uphold, but any band who has been playing stadiums for any degree of time will tell you that it is also a tragically romanticised view. The tour accompanying the album consisted of a whopping 192 shows in 27 countries, playing to huge audiences each night. You simply can’t do that on a whim. You also simply can’t do that in a state of disarray. Finally, you simply can’t do that without the necessary preparation. Guns N’ Roses were purposefully trying to defy all three.
Not only had the band very recently been rearranged after Steven Adler couldn’t hack the strain of getting sober and Izzy Stradlin was struggling to hack the strain of being sobriety, but also Slash, on a dangerous whim, decided to expand the band into a 12-piece to bolster their sound for stadia. Yet, they would enter these demanding arenas without a setlist, let alone any rehearsal time in the tank. Everyone from the horn section to the lighting department had to respond to Axl Roses’ increasingly volatile flights of fancy.
When one of these flights of fancy found him saying that ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine‘, the group’s reliable signature tune, was a song about ”getting fucked up the ass by a coke bottle”, nobody knew how to respond at all. It simply dawned that the end was nigh. This chaos couldn’t continue—that the second law of thermodynamics decrees much.
Millions of people watched on as the madness unfurled, left sadly assured by the showings on stage that Rose had reached a public breaking point. This continued for an unsustainable 28 months. Magic might have unspoiled in equal measure, but these defining magnificent moments were always, in part, entwined with the chaos. Kids would murmur in the front row about another no-show. Strange tales of Rose travelling with a hypnotherapist and an army of assistants abounded, rumours ran riot that Slash was never more than six feet from a bottle of Jack Daniels, and McKagan hadn’t drunk a drop of water for years. By and large, these were all true.
In some respects, the band were faced with keeping up appearances on this front. But this became a self-fulling downward spiral, and they couldn’t afford to get any deeper. The wilder they got, the more hotels would cancel on them, adding to the stress, the heavier the interference from local authorities would become, and with bomb threats and being caught up in a military coup in Venezuela thrown into the mix, the stress upon Roses’ shoulders became too much.
They had an appetite for destruction, but their eyes were bigger than their belly. Somehow, a band never really made for life outside of grubby dive bars became the ultimate stadium band and burnt out in a blazing style befitting of their very beginnings.
