Guns n Roses

[naughty boy]

You loved 'em thirty years ago, didn't you?

Time for a reassessment?

[Goat Boy]

Better than Billy Joel but not as good as The Replacements

[Darkness_Fish]

Yeah, I did actually love them thirty years ago. I remember at school I had a taped copy of Appetite for Destruction which absolutely everyone copied off me when "Sweet Child o' Mine" hit the charts. That album had some proper rock songs, and a helluva lot of swagger about it. Hard rock at the time was increasingly clean and plastic sounding - Def Leppard, van Halen, all that unlistenable shit - and Guns n' Roses brought an energy, solid rock tunes, and a lot of low-down and dirty attitude with it.

Fuck all worth listening to after that, but it's fairly obvious that they stood out from the crowd of US shit-rock and hair-bobbins at the time.


I also had a copy of Rowan Atkinson's stand-up show that everyone nicked off me too. He also went shit shortly after.

[Dayodead]

Average back on their first album and average now..(Terrible after the first..)...Only good thing about them now is I can do a fairly decent imitation of Axl when prompted, though it shreds my voice afterward...lol..

[BARON CORNY DOG]

First album was great, GNR Lies or whatever was ok, and then crashing disappointment and utter failure. What a disaster.

A bit like Smashing Pumpkins.

[ChrisB]

I could never stand them, but Master SB saw them at the Download festival in France/Belgium last week and said they were excellent, although, by his own admission, only knew their better known tracks. He did, however, ask whether there has always been tension between Axyl and the rest of the band. He said it was noticeable on stage, and I thought "How astute, Master SB, how astute"

[harvey k-tel]

I hated them 30 years ago. Don't tell me what i thought. All the cute punk rock girls in my highschool suddenly got into GnR and Bon Fucking Jovi for some reason, and I was left broken-hearted in my PIL t-shirt.

[Matt Wilson]

First album was great, GNR Lies or whatever was ok, and then crashing disappointment and utter failure. What a disaster.

A bit like Smashing Pumpkins.

A certain prominent BCBer that you and I are both friends with was proclaiming the superiority of Use Your Illusion Vol One as their best LP just the other day.

He was about as right as he usually is, so I didn't push the issue.

[Bent Fabric]

I loved Appetite at the time. I can't possibly recreate the context of my own reaction to anything that ancient, but...yeah, it really did strike me as an exceptionally satisfying flashpoint of all sorts of things I didn't know I needed (songs, sound, energy, etc.). I hung in there for a long time (I remember bringing the cassette on tours for nearly a good fifteen years afterwards), but...today, I can't muster anything more than a Mona Lisa grade smile for the memories. It's like remembering a great meal of similar vintage - it surely nourished and satisfied me, but...it did its job and there's nothing really for me to gain from it in the present day. Some things wear off - I don't think there's anything horrible about that. Even impermanent value is still value.

Mind you, that was it. Everything afterwards was little more than (and often a great deal less than) a half-assed encore I hadn't asked for.

[BARON CORNY DOG]

I would probably be in the same boat as Mr. Fabric had I carried on flogging Appetite for 15 years. As it stands, I can still feel some enthusiasm.

First album was great, GNR Lies or whatever was ok, and then crashing disappointment and utter failure. What a disaster.

A bit like Smashing Pumpkins.

A certain prominent BCBer that you and I are both friends with was proclaiming the superiority of Use Your Illusion Vol One as their best LP just the other day.

He was about as right as he usually is, so I didn't push the issue.

The certain prominent BCBer is wrong. It is a disaster. Their hubris outpaced their actual capabilities.

[Tom Waits For No One]

If you've got a spare $1000 kicking about...and 18 minutes

[fange]

First album was great, GNR Lies or whatever was ok, and then crashing disappointment and utter failure. What a disaster.

Yep, that's pretty much it.

[toomanyhatz]

No and no.

[Davey the Fat Boy]

Never a fan.

[Charlie O.]

Could never stand Axl or Slash, although the rhythm section kicked pretty good.

[toomanyhatz]

Izzy's the secret weapon.

Not denying they had their successes, just saying I've pretty much gotten what I'm gonna get out of them. Which isn't nothing, but isn't much, either.

[Goat Boy]

I liked some of the debut as a teenager. Songs like Nighttrain sounded quite good after a few snakebites but then shit like Paradise City was always naff and redolent of people you’d absolutely cross the road to avoid. Even by 80s standards there was something so sartorially appalling about the whole thing it just seemed lame. It was the music kids who hung around outside chippys listened too. All spotty and greasy and denimy. Yuk

Use Your Illusion (volumes 1 and 2? Mr Rose you are spoiling us!) seemed moribund at the point of creation with the rise of Nirvana. Axl Rose indulging his 70s rock fantasies and channeling Elton John or some crap. I mean Estranged was like fucking Vegas rock compared to, say, Breed or On A Plain. Ridiculous

And then there were the videos of course. Silly, silly men.

[Matt Wilson]

Well, I'll still stick up for them. The first LP is a classic of the genre, Lies is merely OK, and I enjoy both of the Illusions. I could probably take the best tracks off of them and come up with an album almost as good as Appetite. Also saw them live in support of the Stones in '89.

[fange]

Izzy's the secret weapon.

I really should dig out the Izzy and the Ju Ju Hounds record. Been a looooooong time since I played it; wonder if it'd sound more endearingly charming now.

[bobzilla77]

I didn't love them at the time but I could tell they were better than the average hair metal shit. They had some appealing Sex Pistols ripoff parts (the intro to It's So Easy = the intro to Liar, almost note for note.) They had a lot of "juh-jungs" on the guitar, as Steve Jones would say.

But they were not my thing and I did pick up on some unpleasant vibe from them almost right away. That song One In A Million makes me think of the hip A&R guys at the record company wondering "Is this edgy, cool racism or is this end-my-career-right-now racism?" and making a commercial calculation based on the answer. Lucky for them, 1989 was kind of right at the end of the time when you could appear kind of charismatic, deep and complicated by expressing such ideas in music. Quentin Tarantino seems to have taken a lot of influence from that moment.