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The Gunners stick to the serious business of rock 'n' roll, synthesizing the Stones and the Sex Pistols to produce Aerosmith for the '90s. They never drift very far from the jackhammer style that began to dominate the idiom two decades ago. This is the main reason their audience is not entirely limited to 16-year-old boys with baseball caps worn backward. Guns N' Roses tenaciously clings to hard rock's tradition of being loud, mean and obvious. No one alive looks more like rock stars than Rose, 29, and guitarist Slash, 26, with their tattoos, their headgear, their emotional problems (Slash has frequently used heroin, and Rose is a manic-depressive) and their we-sold-our-soul-to-rock-' n'-roll attitudes.
The Gunners' success is giving the kiss of life to a moribund record industry, and has kept rock 'n' roll from doing what it keeps threatening to do: expire. Veering between creaking dinosaurs like the Grateful Dead (the hottest concert act of the past summer), pious scolds like Sinead O'Connor, and mopey '60s retreads like R.E.M., rock 'n' roll is in need of the juice that only true believers like Guns N' Roses can supply.
The Gunners certainly know how to stay in the news. With Rose's brief marriage to Erin Everly, daughter of singer Don Everly, Slash's drunken, profanity-spewed acceptance speech at the 1990 American Music Awards (carried on live TV), Rose's annulment of his marriage, guitarist Izzy Stradlin's arrest for urinating in an airplane galley, and Rose's arrest last November after allegedly hitting a female neighbor on the head with a wine bottle (the charges were later dropped), you have the makings of a mythology that Keith Moon would envy.
On July 2 at a concert not far from St. Louis, Rose got into a fight with a camera-toting biker (cameras are banned at Guns concerts) and ended up storming off the stage, to the dismay of 20,000 fans. In the ensuing riot, 16 people were arrested, 60 were injured, and $200,000 in property damage was sustained.
The band's exploits bring to mind Rob Reiner's priceless 1984 film This Is Spinal Tap, a pseudo-rock documentary chronicling the disastrous final American tour of the world's stupidest rock band. Surveying the Gunners' career, one gets the impression that the band may have seen the film, entirely missed the satirical thrust, and elected to pattern themselves after Reiner's brain-dead metalheads.
It's hard, for example, not to question the intelligence of a band that uses the word niggers even though its lead guitarist, Slash, is half black. It's hard not to be puzzled by a band that agrees to appear at a benefit for the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City, only to get bounced off the program because its latest record contains the word faggots. It's hard not to be mystified by a band that goes on a 25-city tour after a two-year absence and puts out two new albums after the tour is over. And it's hard not to chuckle at a band whose lead guitarist spends a sizable chunk of his Rolling Stone interview discussing the death of his pet snake Clyde. ("Had he been sick for a long time?" inquired Rolling Stone, in arguably the most unforgettable rock-'n'-roll interview question of all time. Yes, the snake had.)