Guns N Roses 2016??

[Fairwrning]

ZERO interest without this guy..

[Jérôme Frenchise]

To me it's ZERO interest with this one:

[twonabomber]

Today's rumor:

Axl is going to replace Brian Johnson for the remaining AC/DC shows.

[FORD]

Today's rumor:

Axl is going to replace Brian Johnson for the remaining AC/DC shows.

Well... he knows at least one of their songs.....

[FORD]

TMZ says Axl/DC is a real thing.....

[Green Manalishi]

I saw the confirmed tour dates . Guns-N-Roses in St. Louis ?!?!? What a riot !!!!!

[THEDOCTOR]

I saw GnR way back when....to this day everyone I know that went to that show feels the same way. Worst band they ever saw live. They were God Awful. I have never seen that many people leaving a venue while a band played to go get drinks or use the facilities. The albums may have been spectacular(the first 2) but their live performance was just horrible. I doubt that Axl will be a professional and make it on time to shows playing with his own band,much less performing with ACDC as well. They would have to be losing their minds to think they can count on him to be a viable replacement for Brian Johnson.

[Terry]

I saw GnR way back when....to this day everyone I know that went to that show feels the same way. Worst band they ever saw live. They were God Awful. I have never seen that many people leaving a venue while a band played to go get drinks or use the facilities. The albums may have been spectacular(the first 2) but their live performance was just horrible. I doubt that Axl will be a professional and make it on time to shows playing with his own band,much less performing with ACDC as well. They would have to be losing their minds to think they can count on him to be a viable replacement for Brian Johnson.

When I saw them open for Aerosmith in 1988, they really weren't all that great live. Ostensibly Guns and Roses were the main draw on the bill for that show, because Appetite was starting to break big and Aerosmith back then hadn't really solidified their comeback yet. Permanent Vacation was doing well, but the general consensus was that Aerosmith were only headlining on the strength of their 1970s history rather than anything they had been doing in the 1980s up to that point: that Aerosmith had Guns and Roses on the bill to help sell tickets that Aerosmith might not have otherwise have sold without them.

Guns and Roses were okay to good that night. Nothing astounding. Appetite was a breath of fresh air when it was released in terms of the song content, style and performance. It was refreshing to see a lead guitarist who didn't play a Charvel or a Kramer and felt compelled to wank out 2nd rate EVH type solos. Axl's voice and lyrics were unique in terms of US commercial hard rock in the late 1980s. Their sound was certainly unpolished and gritty when compared to their contemporaries like Poison, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Warrant, Winger and the like.

They just got overhyped and everything about them became overblown, especially Axl's ego. By the time the Illusions albums were released, the band was being talked about in the same breath as the Stones, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, etc. And I never quite understood why, because they didn't have anything near the body of work any of those other bands did when those comparisons were being made. Axl blathering on about how November Rain was going to be a song on the level of Stairway To Heaven or Layla...before it was even released!

Their notoriety as a live act has more to do with crowd riots, very late starts, cancellations and Axl walking off before they finished a set than anything involving excellence of performance. I got better things to do than pay $100 a pop to see the Axl/Slash/Duff show begin a few hours after the scheduled start time these days. I'd sooner rub one out to net pron...at least at the end of that I'd have something to show for it.

[vandeleur]

Illusions as a single album no crybaby ballads would be a canny second album. Coma is still a cool toon.

[Seshmeister]

It's definitely not two double albums worth of good material but then in hindsight they kind of got it right.

By bringing out 4 albums all at once before the inevitable self destruction, they made a lot of money while they could.

Plus if they hadn't then there would have been the usual 25 years of people complaining saying they wanted to hear all the unreleased material...

My objection was the number of people that ended up onstage on that tour - talk about bloated. Within a few years a five piece dangerous punk metal band looked like a Celinie Dion show with 20 backup singers and so on.

[vandeleur]

Good point about getting it all out before it goes tits up.

[Terry]

Illusions wasn't a bad follow-up to Appetite (am discounting Lies, although that was a good release, too). [Illusions] just suffered from too much bloat. Too many tracks rather than paring them down to the best tracks. I agree with the general assertion that the best of the Illusions tracks could have been put out as one great album, rather than 2 decent-to-good albums.

The Illusions tour and the amount of additional musicians onstage alongside the core band was just another example of the bloat. Success happened a bit too quick for the band to absorb. I mean, they go from being nobodys in 1987 to playing with the Rolling Stones onstage in 1989. Their first album for a major label was this massive success, and they didn't have enough time to develop a bit more slowly. Too much drink, drugs, fame, control issues...plus Axl is a nutter.

It was a case where...well, you compare the relative simplicity of Appetite to the more complex arrangements on the Illusions albums, and to me less was definitely more. They kinda tried to get back to that with The Spaghetti Incident, but by then Izzy was gone, Adler was gone...the band and Axl had went over the top in every aspect, and there just was no turning back.

[DLR Bridge]

Yeah, I agree with all of that. I remember having decent seats at the Meadowlands show where they used footage for the Paradise City video. I felt like I was witnessing the birth of the next Led Zeppelin when it was happening. By the time the Illusion CDs came out, I was by and large, disappointed in them. Two original members gone, 6 or 7 people on stage, zero chemistry between any of them, and Axl huffing and puffing while running around in white cyclist shorts and combat boots. So the wheels fall completely off and we witness 27 line up changes and 1 CD in, what, 18 years? There is no way in hell that any of those songs from Appetite will sound remotely proper from this current batch of goons. Sure, Dave can plod out RWTD, but in no way can Axl re-visit Paradise City. The train left the station decades ago.

[Terry]

Yeah, I agree with all of that. I remember having decent seats at the Meadowlands show where they used footage for the Paradise City video. I felt like I was witnessing the birth of the next Led Zeppelin when it was happening. By the time the Illusion CDs came out, I was by and large, disappointed in them. Two original members gone, 6 or 7 people on stage, zero chemistry between any of them, and Axl huffing and puffing while running around in white cyclist shorts and combat boots. So the wheels fall completely off and we witness 27 line up changes and 1 CD in, what, 18 years? There is no way in hell that any of those songs from Appetite will sound remotely proper from this current batch of goons. Sure, Dave can plod out RWTD, but in no way can Axl re-visit Paradise City. The train left the station decades ago.

I mean, shit, 1987-1991, it DID feel like Guns and Roses were on their way to becoming one of the biggest rock bands of all time...and also one of the better rock bands of all time, as well. Appetite was killer, Lies was a very good stop-gap release, they were opening for the Stones and playing onstage with them, they had heavy rotation for the You Could Be Mine single for the Terminator 2 movie in advance of the Illusions releases...

And then it all went sideways on them. Too many drugs, band members getting canned/quitting, cancelled gigs, letting audiences sit there for hours past the promoted start time, walking off in the middle of shows, two self-indulgent albums that should have been paired down to one release...

By 1994 it was basically over. By 2004, Axl had spent ten years fronting a band that was Guns in name only, couldn't get his shit together enough to release an album and his lead guitarist had a KFC bucket on his head.

As big as they were from 1988 to 1992, I always got the feeling they could have been even bigger and better, but it all came too fast, too soon for them and none of them could handle it.

[DLR Bridge]

I'll never get that bucket head thing. Absurd and not befitting of the band's image. If it even had one at that point.