There are about half a hundred funny things about Guns n’ Roses’ superhyped pair of new albums, Use Your Illusion I and II, the band’s first real output since their 1987 debut. One funny thing is that the first record starts off with a song called “Right Next Door to Hell,” which takes its title from lead singer Axl Rose’s well-publicized disputes with a neighbor in his West Hollywood apartment complex. It’s anybody’s guess what the argument is really about, much less whose fault it is, but my hunch is that the person who should be writing a song called “Right Next Door to Hell” is the person living next to Axl Rose.
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In just a few years Rose has established himself as the all-time biggest complainer in rock ‘n’ roll. It’s fun to watch him get excited, but his antics sometimes take on tragedic effects. At a recent show in Saint Louis, Axl jumped an illicit photographer and then shut down the show, prompting a riot that wounded dozens and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. Reportedly he’s been diagnosed as manic-depressive and at one time was on a regular dose of lithium. (His bandmates probably wish he still was.) While he’s certainly more than intermittently rational, he spends far too much time on and off stage obsessing about problems, plots, and conspiracies, constructing grandiose justifications for himself and wholly ludicrous explanations for his unpleasant activities.
They make no sense to me
They talk so many goddamn ways
The first track that lives up to the records’ hype is “November Rain,” one of Axl’s epics. One of the things that makes Guns n’ Roses tolerable is an almost endearing fixation–it seems to come mostly from Rose and Slash–with matching the great rock ‘n’ roll epics of their childhood. Guns n’ Roses’ existence is predicated almost entirely on a desire to record a song as good as Aerosmith’s “Dream On.” They don’t have the operatic sensibilities that produced “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the chops to make another “Layla,” or anything like the sheer personal authority on which Jimmy Page based “Stairway to Heaven,” but they do understand the thrill of those ambitious constructions, with their abrupt changes in direction, extended lyrical codas, and stirring dynamics, and they’ve been trying to create their own versions from the start. “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” the magnificent six-minute single that kicked off Appetite’s selling spree, is a fabulous song: after constructing the guitar intro, an off-kilter, gently propulsive riff that fuels the verses, Slash launches into one of the most captivating solos since Page’s heyday, and the song builds up steam to a long dramatic coda, with Axl moaning the words “Where do we go now?” While there’s little else in the band’s early work that can match the sheer joy of this undertaking, you can see them working on similar tricks in other places. At the end of “Rocket Queen” there’s another terrific coda, with Axl doing some serviceable crooning: I really like the extravagant way he sings the lines “So don’t chastise me / Or think I, I mean you harm.” One more incidence: On “Patience,” a fairly dopey song on G n’ R Lies, there’s a wonderful moment after Slash’s long acoustic solo where Axl comes sauntering back into the song to do a throaty, ragged-voiced addendum.
