Published at 11:45 AM on October 23, 2008

By Steve LaBate

Finally: the first single from Guns N' Roses' comically overdue Chinese Democracy. But is there still a place in rock for Axl Rose?

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In the fourth grade, when I first became curious about rebellion and rock ’n’ roll, Guns N’ Roses seemed like the perfect fit. A friend of mine had a poster featuring the longhaired, tattooed rockers strewn drunken and shirtless behind police crime-scene tape, clad in leather pants and leather jackets, clutching bottles of Black Death vodka and looking like they did not give a shit about anything. Damn, I thought, these guys are pretty cool!

I can’t quite explain why this band held so much appeal for my 10-year-old, straight-A-student self. Maybe it was that—compared to the neon teeny bop of ’80s pop stars like Debbie Gibson and Paula Abdul—it was dangerous and uninhibited and loud and dirty and it fucking rocked.

So I became a huge Guns fan: I secretly acquired dubbed copies of all their albums from my friends who had less-strict parents (if I’d gotten busted with those boob-laden liner notes and profane lyrics, I would’ve been in big trouble); I hypothesized with my peers around the school-cafeteria lunch table about the band’s drug intake, and whether Axl and Slash would live to be 30; I doodled GN'R’s logo and skull iconography all over my Trapper Keeper during social studies; and when I got home, I marched straight up to the bonus room over my garage and sat in front of the box, glued to MTV, hoping to catch the latest Guns video. Of course, I had to be ready to flip the channel at a moment’s notice if I heard my parents coming up the stairs. (One day, my dad totally busted me watching the “Patience” video, and at the worst possible moment—the part where Slash is lying in bed in some hotel room, playing with a python as countless scantily clad women get in and out of bed with him in a time-lapse montage. “What the hell is this garbage?!” he hollered over my shoulder, nearly stopping my heart. After that, no more TV in the bonus room.)

As I went through middle school and high school (and Axl went underground to begin toiling away on Chinese Democracy), Seattle grunge rock—and, later, jam bands—became my music of choice. With the ironic, fuzzed-out onslaught of Nirvana, and then my discovery of the musical acrobatics of Phish, Axl and the boys began to seem more and more lame and dated. Finally, my junior year, I sold all my GN'R tapes to some used record store so I could buy a Grateful Dead bootleg.

Toward the end of college, though, enough time had passed to where I’d once again started listening to some of the late-’80s hard-rock bands I used to love (GN'R, Poison, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, etc.), purely for the irony and nostalgia of it. But after a while, something unexpected happened. I realized, “Sure, maybe Bon Jovi and Poison are cheesy fun, but, man, I really, really like Guns N’ Roses. They were a truly great rock band.” In hindsight, GN'R’s music was obviously on another plane when compared to their contemporaries: it was more timeless, the musicianship was more raw and passionate, and far less showy. The pissed-off lyrics might not have been the greatest, but they perfectly fit the music’s urgent, train-coming-off-the-tracks feel. 

Now, 14 years after the first Chinese Democracy session, with all of the band’s original members long gone (quitting in the late ’90s over Axl’s control issues), it’s just not the same. If all the demos I’ve heard over the last few years and the brand-new title track that was released yesterday are any indicator, the GN'R mojo is long gone, dissipated into the annals of rock like so much smoke wafting up to the ceiling at a mid-’80s Troubador gig. Somewhere along the way, Axl lost sight of what’s truly great about rock ’n’ roll: the off-the-cuff, reckless urgency that comes from nailing a liquored-up fireball-hot first take, live-in-the-studio with a handful of distinct musical personalities mingling and everyone playing all at once while feedback from the guitar amps filters over into the drum mics—you know, let it bleed, man! Let it be fleeting and nasty and filthy and real!

Guns N’ Roses was never a one-man show, it was a band. And what made them truly great was the way all the parts worked together—Axl’s screeching vocals and paranoid lyrics; Slash’s ripping yet tasteful guitar solos; the trebly, breakneck punk bass riffing of Duff McKagan; the thunderous rock drumming of Steven Adler, and later Matt Sorum; and the inventive rhythm playing and epic guitar hooks of Izzy Stradlin (who co-wrote most of the band’s songs, playing Keith Richards to Axl’s Mick Jagger). Sure, Axl was a big part of the equation, but he damn sure wasn’t all of it (like he seems to have psychotically convinced himself at some point during the mid ’90s). Imagine how much less cool Appetite for Destruction would’ve been if Axl had done it all by himself, slowly piecing the album together over a decade-and-a-half—painstakingly removing all of the blemishes, making sure every last note was in its place, and that every vocal take was just right until there wasn’t an ounce of soul left in the damn thing.

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