1992.07.22 - Hoosier Dome, Indianapolis, USA

HEADBANGERS' HEAVEN

Mega-tour stomps into Hoosier Dome this week

By DAVE BANGERT
Journal and Courier

Guns N’ Roses, meet Metallica.

“Actually,” Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett says, “we met those guys when their album (Appetite for Destruction in 1988) first came out, you know, before it went on to sell umpteen millions. Back then, we had to buy them drinks.”

Unlikely success stories four years ago — one an unknown Hollywood hard rock band, the other the darlings of the underground speed metal scene — Guns N’ Roses and Metallica are drinking in sold out stadiums across this great land on a tour advertised as the ultimate double bill.

Pinch them. America’s headbangers must be dreaming.

The dream — or at least the really big show — comes to the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis on Wednesday. Both bands promise to play at least two hours. Faith No More is the opening act. Showtime is 6:30 p.m.

“I don’t think it touches last year’s Anthrax/ Slayer/Megadeth tour as far as the heavy of the heavy metal fans go,” says Deena Weinstein, a DePaul University professor and author of Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology.

“But, oh, I really want to see this show,” she says. “I mean these are both mega-selling bands that theoretically should be able to sell out stadiums on their own.”

Guns Ν’ Roses has sold 17 million copies of Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II and is probably the most celebrated rock ’n’ roll band of the day. Metallica’s latest self-titled release has been in the Top 20 since Christmastime and was one of the top grossing touring acts of the past year.

Why tour together?

One: There’s the fear left over from last summer’s slow-selling tour season.

“I think we’re both at the crest of doing it by ourselves,” Hammett said from Washington on the eve of the tour kickoff last week. “Put it this way, it just assures that we can do it right.

“As for us, I think it’s a good kick up the backside as far as going out there and creaming the audience and giving it all we got. I mean, we certainly had that attitude on our own headlining tour. Now we have two bands to worry about. So I think it’ll be good for us from that angle.”

Weinstein says that most importantly, hard rock fans are value conscious. They like package deals. Especially big package deals.

“I take (GN'R lead singer) Axl Rose seriously when he says he really wants to give the fans their money’s worth,” Weinstein says. “He really has staked his identity on being a consummate performer. I think he’s putting this great performer identity as the thing that keeps him together.”

Lafayette teens reflect on city’s most infamous favorite son

By DAVE BANGERT
Journal and Courier

Getting an idea why Guns N’ Roses rules in Lafayette is kind of like trying to take your pulse with your thumb — you’ll get a reading, but chances are it might not be all that accurate.

“Why does a kid love pizza? I don’t know,” says Dane Stafford, a 14-year-old Sunnyside student. “They play good music.

“I think it’s kind of cool that the best singer’s from Lafayette. They always think of Indiana as a corn state. I guess I think there’s more than corn in Indiana,” Dane says, laughing and rolling backward on his skateboard until he falls off.

That’s exactly what Axl Rose has made clear in no uncertain terms. This is a corn state. Lafayette — the place where he grew up as Bill Bailey, went to high school and where he says his big ideas were run down by small town values — wasn’t his kind of place. Like a vendetta, he made it big.

It’s nothing the Chamber of Commerce is plastering on billboards outside of town: “Lafayette: We made Axl Rose dis-functional! Now he’s a star! Make Lafayette work for you!”

But the kids are all right on that. They aren’t holding a grudge against Axl Rose. If anything, they understand what he’s saying. They’re just as bored as he was. Or at least they think they’re just as bored.

Those are the kind of inexplicable ties that bind.

Just regular kids looking for things to do — “Don’t you think Lafayette gets boring?” Dane asks, not really joking around now — they’re into Guns N’ Roses for the crunching rock ’n’ roll, the big sound and the leave-us-out-of-it lyrics. That Axl Rose is from here is a bonus.

“Look around the country,” Dane says. “They don’t like him because he’s from Indiana or Lafayette. They like him because he’s a great singer and it’s a great band and they’re great artists. You know what I mean?” Dane and Richard LaFon, his skateboarding bud, aren’t going to the show. It’s not that they don’t want to, it’s just that they can’t scrounge up the cash and a way down to Indianapolis.

“No, but you giving away a ticket? They’re $27.50 or something like that,” says Richard, who wears a Guns N’ Roses patch on the back of his Buffalo Bills baseball hat.

Twenty-seven-fifty is on the money — if you forget the extra four-buck service charge. That kind of cash would go a long way toward a new deck for their skateboards.

But plenty of people were willing to chunk out the change for the Guns N’ Roses/Metallica double bill, billed as the ultimate hard rock show of the year. The 60,000-seat Hoosier Dome nearly sold out a week before Wednesday’s show.

“Most heavy metal fans, one of them — Guns or Metallica — is your top band and the other isn’t too far behind,” says Mark Siemers, 18, a Central Catholic High School graduate. He waited in line at Ayres to buy tickets at 6 a.m. the morning tickets went on sale.

And then, as always, there’s
the Axl’s-from-here quotient.

“Everybody just talks about him and how they used to know him and how they used to work with him or go to school with him when he was here,” says Robin Olson, 20, of Lafayette. “I just want to see him in person for myself.”

Olson sugar-loaded and stayed up all night calling WKHY radio for tickets. She finally won on the third night.

“I just like the music and the way they act,” she says. “All the trouble they get into, that doesn’t bother me. That’s their business.”

Siemers adds: “Being teenagers in a little town like Lafayette, you think if Axl could make it, then anybody could. I like how he says what he thinks and he says it in his music. I don’t know, everybody gets all uptight about it, but I think it’s cool.”

ROCKIN' HARD AT THE DOME

Wednesday’s concert will be one of the biggest of the year in Indy, and we’re setting the stage with interviews of each band.

Stories by MARC D. ALLAN

Despite the constant turmoil that dogs Guns N’ Roses, the band lives a surprisingly peaceful existence, two members say. In separate telephone interviews, drummer Matt Sorum and guitarist Gilby Clarke said they’ve learned to live with the daily media scrutiny and repercussions that come with being in one of rock’s biggest acts.

“I think I’ll turn on MTV today and see what’s going on with my band," Sorum, describing a typical day, said in an interview to promote Wednesday's Guns N’ Roses/Metallica/Faith No More show at the Hoosier Dome.

"Like yesterday. I turned on the radio to find out Axl (Rose, the lead singer) had been arrested. I didn't even know. I stay out of that.

“We deal with it"

"It's not like I avoid it. but it seems to come to Axl more than anything, and Slash gets a bit of it here and there. And Duff (McKagan, the bass player), too, sometimes. It’s part of the band and it keeps us what we are. It's not like we try to get arrested or we try to start riots. That just happens, so we deal with it.”

Sorum joined the band two years ago, replacing Steve Adler. Adler claimed the band encouraged him to use heroin.

Clarke replaced founding member and Lafayette, Ind., native Izzy Stradlin, who quit last year because he got tired of touring.

The band has weathered lineup changes, arrests, ragged concerts, canceled concerts and concerts that didn’t start until 1 a.m. In return, fans rewarded Guns Ν' Roses by buying 17 million copies of its two latest albums, Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II.

Since their last central Indiana performance, in May 1991 at Deer Creek Music Center, the band has added three female saxophone players, two backup singers and a keyboard/harmonica player for what Sorum called “that extra added oomph.”

A serious band, now

He said Guns Ν' Roses will be much tighter than in its past performances here.

“After touring Europe twice and going around the United States a couple of times, we’re much more of a unit than we were,” he said. “We’re definitely a serious band now. Then. I think we were feeling out what songs were working. When you come out this time, you’ll see the difference.”

Sorum, who recorded earlier this year with Eazy-E of the rap group NWA and a new rock band called Johnny Crash, said he feels he’s given Guns N'

Roses the ability to play more styles.

The man known inside the band as “Matt the Mediator” said he’s had no trouble replacing Adler.

“I didn’t even think about him when I came into the band. The only time I ever think about him is when I see his face in magazines still, after almost two years. To me, he was just a drummer that blew it and I was there to step in. I hope he gets something else going, but it doesn’t seem like he can.

“I'm trying to forget him, to be honest with you. I am the drummer and I don’t need to hear about that guy. I did two records that were probably four times the magnitude of Appetite (for Destruction, the group’s first full-length record). Even though Appetite was a great record, I just feel that the past is the past and we’re looking toward the future now.”

As for Clarke, he also likes the future with Guns Ν' Roses. Before joining the group, the Cleveland native kicked around in two bands, Candy and Kill for Thrills, making three albums that flopped.

When he joined Guns N’ Roses, Clarke had two weeks to learn 50 songs.

"I don’t know how I did it,” he recalled. “I didn’t have song books to do it with and nobody even knew what Izzy played. They gave me the records. I'd be learning five songs a day and then remembering the five songs I learned from the day before. I'd rehearse with them during the day. At night, I would learn five new songs.

“When I played the first date, there were only two songs that I had cheat-sheets for. I actually memorized all of them. And to this day, I still have those same two cheat-sheets. Coma and Estranged I cheat on. I still don’t know them.”

Clarke said he gives the band a bit heavier rhythm guitar sound than Stradlin did and expects to provide a different songwriting influence when the group makes its next record.

Asked what people should understand about Guns N’ Roses that they don’t, Clarke and Sorum each offered suggestions.

“The band is freedom,” Clarke said. “The band’s always lived on its own terms, it’s always played on its own terms. Therefore, people can mistake that for an arrogance.

“It’s like, 'Oh, they’re late going on stage. What an arrogant bunch of guys.' And that’s not it. The reason a lot of people like the band is that the band says and does what it wants all the time. That’s the charm of it.”

“All they need to understand,” Sorum said, “is that we’re a rock ’n’ roll band. You don’t have to read much into it.

If you want someone to come and rock out, we’re the guys to do it. We’re just trying to be ourselves and play good rock ’n’ roll.”

***

Metallica agreed to tour with Guns N’ Roses for two reasons: exposure and money. And Metallica was nowhere near underexposed or undercapitalized.

"When it comes right down to it. If we worked for the same amount of time on our own, we wouldn't play to as many people and we wouldn’t earn as much money," bassist Jason Newsted says bluntly — which is the same way his band plays.

“We would have made plenty of money on our own and everybody gets taken care of real well in our organization. But if we’re looking at the big picture and we have a chance to make a few more million dollars over a six-week period, then we’re going to do it.”

This from a band that has sold 5 million copies of its current record, Metallica, and already played about 150 concerts since hitting the road nine months ago.

Unlike co-headliners Guns Ν' Roses, Metallica takes a no-nonsense approach to music and business.

While Gunners’ singer Axl Rose’s exploits have made him a notorious international celebrity, it’s unlikely than anyone who’s not a Metallica fan could name any of the band’s four members: James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett and Newsted.

As Newsted says: “We go out, take care of business and we’re done. We get on the stage when we say we’re gonna get on the stage, we play what we say we’re gonna play.”

He offers a couple of reasons why Metallica doesn’t make the gossip pages.

“The people that we have working for us are the same people who have worked for us for many, many years — from stage carpenters to our guys that work on our guitars to our management. Metallica is a very fine-tuned machine. When we say we’re going to go do something, we go do it . . . We stick to our contracts and we fulfill them.

“And the music is much different. I’d say Metallica fans are a bit more loyal and a bit more rabid than Guns N’ Roses fans. I’m sure there are Guns N’ Roses fans that go crazy, but I don’t think they have the unity and the touch we have with our people.”

Newsted says Metallica’s concert here will be especially businesslike.

“Our plan is to go out and play for a couple of hours and Just pummel. There’s not going to be too much talking or long solos. We plan on going out, song-to-song-to-song, and just crush. That’ll be that. Take care of business and get off stage and then they can do what they want to do.”

After this, the next time we hear from Metallica will be sometime next year. The band will continue to tour until March 1993 and may release a live album next year — though “anything can happen in Metallica-land.”

They also plan to take several months off before writing and recording the next studio album in late ’93.

***

Faith No More’s keyboard player, Roddy Bottum, sounds anything but nervous about trying to repeat the band's success of the last two years.

Sitting in his northern California home last week, reading a magazine and trying to avoid packing for the group’s two-month tour with Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, he remains one of the band's five antagonists.

Bottum, who’ll be here Wednesday when the year's biggest hard-rock tour stops at the Hoosier Dome, sums up the Faith No More philosophy when he says, "As long as we're making someone nervous, I think we're doing a good job."

Shattering expectations

The band did just that by bringing its new album, Angel Dust, to a record company that expected a rehash of The Real Thing, its 1989 breakthrough effort.

Angel Dust, while not radically different, sounded like enough of a departure to make the record company uncomfortable. The label "accused the band of alienating our public," Bottum says.

"We knew that all these expectations were out there. It just presented a new challenge for us to shatter those expectations and do what we wanted to do. In that sense, it was kind of fun, knowing these bigwig record company people were expecting one thing and wanting one thing. "Knowing that they would be out there, waiting for that made it a lot easier to go the complete opposite direction.”

Faith No More's only recording between the two albums was to rearrange an old song, The Perfect Crime, for the soundtrack of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey. Guitarist Jim Martin had a minor role in the movie.

Bottum says the band’s schedule required so much touring that it didn’t have time to do much else.

‘‘When the record starts to sell really well, you have to go out and tour it some more,” he says. "I think more than anything, we really resented the fact that it didn’t catch on for as long as it did.”

The disc took about a year to make an impact. The key turned out to be the eye-popping video Epic, which featured the band playing in a driving rain and close-ups of a fish flopping and dying in a small puddle.

Bottum acknowledges that the band relied heavily on images, not music, to make its initial point. Eventually, though, radio and audiences caught on to its thunderous sound.

The Real Thing went on to sell 2 million copies, causing Bottum’s friends to ‘‘deal with me on a lot more cynical basis. When I was struggling and not being very successful, I would get a lot of smiles from my friends. Now I’m getting a lot more sneers.”

Bottum and Faith No More sneer right back. Figuring that audiences now know what to expect from the group’s videos, it has decided to change directions.

The members returned from New York earlier this month after shooting a video for the song Small Victory. They used the same personnel who made C+C Music Factory’s videos.

‘‘The song is the most slicksounding pop thing we’ve ever done, so we decided we’d go as far as we can with that,” Bottum says. “Just go all the way and further alienate our public and confuse people.”

***

Marc D. Allan covers rock music for The Star.

Guns Ν' Roses:
Axl's unrestrained ego bigger than Hoosier Dome

By PETER AGOSTINELLI
Journal and Courier

The way Guns N’ Roses lead singer Axl Rose sees it, the world is a pretty messed up place.

A lot of the fans at Wednesday night’s Guns N’ Roses/ Metallica/Faith No More mega show couldn’t care less how Axl sees it.

And vice versa.

The biggest rock ’n’ roll touring act in the business today — both logistically and musically — did whatever it pleased Wednesday night at Indianapolis’ Hoosier Dome. So what if thousands of people were miffed by the lead singer’s between-song banter? What if the Gunners’ we’ll-start-when-we-please ego was bigger than the cavernous Hoosier Dome?

That, friends, is the beauty of rock ’n’ roll.

All controversy and rock star pyrotechnics aside, Guns N’ Roses was one rabid rock ’n’ roll outfit Wednesday. And that’s no easy feat for any band left with the aftermath of two sets by two other heavy contenders in the hard rock arena.

The 45-minute Faith No More set began at 6:30 p.m. and was compact and appropriately brief. Vocalist Mike Patton's spastic stage act neatly set up Metallica’s fist-in-the-air machine gun assault, which began at 8 p.m. and lasted almost 2 1/2  hours. Unfortunately, a bottom-heavy sound system muddled both bands’ music beyond repair.

Those first two acts in turn aptly served to prime the bighaired, leather and denim-clad body of concert goers. In the wake of a two-hour wait between Metallica’s brutal set and the first glimmer of Guns N’ Roses, the Hoosier Dome was a literal teen-age wasteland.

The odor and fog hanging visibly in the air after the house lights were turned on proved what fans were smoking when the lights were off.

The army of cops and security guards escorting injured, intoxicated and overly excited people — many hobbled to the first aid with injured ankles and other body parts — made a beeline out of the concert area.

One couple was dragged to the security area for a domestic battery case. The woman complained to the police officer who was arresting her assailant that it was just a boyfriend-girlfriend thing. Another woman was treated for hyperventilation.

And if that wasn’t enough, during the two-hour wait the production crews entertained the crowd Indy 500 style. A few cameras and several hundred women eager to bare their breasts on cameras gave a quieting crowd a reason to yell again.

It’s only rock ’n’ roll, and some people were loving it.

Finally, after two hours and a rousing introduction as “L.A.’s Baddest,” the Gunners hit the stage just after midnight with a raunchy version of “Nightrain.” One more song and it was time for a little talk from Mr. Rose.

The mouthy man from Lafayette really does hold a huge grudge against his home state. Even Axl haters should admit he carries a big stick when he speaks harshly.

Some people, however, would rather not hear it.

Refreshing, though, was the rest of the Guns N’ Roses circus. When it came time for soloing and assorted free-flying behavior, lead guitarist Slash and company drove the raging fury into listeners’ heads with sincerity.

Drummer Matt Sorum, who has brought as much strength to this band as it lost with rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin’s departure, is a tremendous fixture under the hard rock mayhem. In contrast to Metallica’s Lars Ulrich — a super drummer in his own right — Sorum pounds out an old-fashioned 4/4 beat.

Slash, however, managed to steal the show, even with Axl’s endless banterings.

The man is a mess on stage. His hair is in his face like an old English sheepdog, and his grubby leather pants shine with his own sweat. It’s a wonder he manages to keep a lit Marlboro in his mouth throughout all his thrashing and jumping.

The band’s live edge glittered on the Use Your Illusion I tracks “November Rain” and “Live and Let Die.” Slash, in his glorious, sloppy style truly burned. His outro solo on “November Rain’s” moving coda affirmed that great rock ’n’ roll instrumentation can sound terrific minus large doses of technical skill.

In the end, Guns ’n’ Roses left even non-fans with a certainty. The band is one of the best live acts in America today. Period. It takes a consummate body of rockers to assemble such a punishing, yet occasionally eloquent sound and deliver it with such believability.

The trick for the band’s future will be to cool Rose’s flames before he alienates fans. That’s a very real proposition the band will have to face.

Even rock ’n’ roll this good can’t get by without a little restraint.

***

Axl in his own words, sort of

Lafayette native Axl Rose made no bones in describing how he felt about current issues Wednesday night.

More often than not, however, he unleashed obscenities and taunts at audience members who jeered him.

Here’s a roundup of some of the things Rose said between songs. Consider that some of these are paraphrases due to his choice of words:

• “I don’t think Iron Mike was right,” Rose said in reference to the Mike Tyson trial in January, “but I don’t think that two-timing #*!& was right, either.”

• Before launching into “Bad Obsession,” he dedicated the song to “all the beer drinking, pot-smoking jocks in the audience who made fun of guys standing outside smoking cigarettes and wearing Ozzy Osbourne T-shirts.”

• He asked audience members if they’d done anything this week other than come home from work, drink a 12-pack and think about having sex with the guy or girl down the street.

• He referred to Indiana as a state that produces corn and drugs and is overrun by Japanese car factories.

• He blasted Indiana for being the conservative, backward state that sent Dan Quayle to the vice presidential office.

— Peter Agostinelli/Journal and Courier

Axl at Arni’s: Fans eat it up

By D. CAROL KRIEBEL and PAULA JARRETT
Journal and Courier

Head-banging fans of Axl Rose, gripped with small-town mania, squealed and screamed when they met him at Arni’s on Thursday night.

With his trademark headband and entourage of bodyguards, the Lafayette native and lead singer of Guns N’ Roses smiled and waved at about 30 fans as he scrambled into one of three limousines parked at the curb about 8:15 p.m.

Rose and friends had just finished pizza at the popular Market Square restaurant, a few hours after blasting oppressive Midwestern life at a concert in Indianapolis.

“He was really hot,” said Shannon Thompson, 16, a Lafayette Guns fan who went to the concert Wednesday night. Thompson was wearing a black T-shirt from the show emblazoned with Guns, Metallica and Faith No More insignia.

She said Axl’s disdain for his hometown was a positive message: “What he’s saying is, we’re the people who have to make the difference.”

Allison West, 15, trying to control her breathing, screamed, “Oh my God! Oh my God! I need a bag! I need a bag!”

Avid Axl fan Lisa Warren of Rensselaer came to pick up a pizza and saw limos and bodyguards. She called her friend Rhonda Hollis of Lafayette and they hustled back.

“All we want to do is get his autograph,” Warren said.

Emily Jones, 14, and her sister Carrie, 11, live down South 24th Street from Axl’s grandmother. The three dark limos that sped down the street proved to be too much of a magnet for the star-struck girls.

“Axl's grandmother lives down the street — we call her Grandma. We saw limos down there and started to chase him for two blocks. My mom and the neighbor drove after him,” Emily said.

Nick Peinecke, 14, walked off with a personal memento from Axl’s visit. He picked up Axl’s still-smoldering cigarette butt from the sidewalk.

“I’m going to put it in my room ... frame it,” he said. “I’m going to take a drag.”

Annoyed

Last Friday I was annoyed to learn that Axl Rose was in town — stinking up the place, as is his style. Based on his own commentary, if Lafayette is such a drag, why does he bother?

As a member of the music community, when I come to town, my hometown, Lafayette, I come to play serious music and share good times with the folks who come to listen, not to parade around throwing rocks at tradition and to flaunt my nonmusical carryings-on.

If Axl is the hope for the future, may heaven help us all! He should do us a favor and stay gone — a long time. In fact, why doesn’t he and his pathetic little tribe of pseudomusicians get off the continent and become someone else’s social disease? He might stick to playing music and get away from the animal act. It couldn’t hurt!

Larry Graefhitz
Earl Park

Look ahead

I completely agree with Larry Graefnitz's recent letter. As a matter of fact, why even write about Axl Rose (AKA Bill Bailey) anymore? We have more than corn here.

We even have beans. Imagine that!

Indiana is my home. I didn’t particularly like growing up here either, but once you are older, life takes a different meaning. Everyone has a past, and that's just what it is — the past.

Let’s look toward the future and a new roller rink. Seeing that he is so great, maybe Axl can donate to the new rink, so that we can have more than corn here.

Mary Camp
Lafayette

Rose's music hath more charm than he

By MIKE REDMOND
The Indianapolis News

At 2:28 a.m., Axl Rose finally shut up.

Rose, the internationally known bon vivant and raconteur from Lafayette — a quirk of geography which seems to bug him no end, poor lad — had spent the 2 1/2 hours previous interspersing some fairly decent rock with some fairly inane commentary on the state from which he escaped. He calls it Indy-exple-tive-ana, a place that “tries to break you down every step of the (expletiving) way."

“Like my shirt?” he asked the crowd at the Hoosier Dome, showing off his "Free Mike," T-shirt, the one with convicted rapist Mike Tyson's photo on the front. "Do you know who put him away? Indy-(expletive)-ana, that's who.

"I ain’t saying Mike Tyson was right," he added, "but I ain’t saying some two-timing, scamming little (bad word) who said previously she was gonna make some money off him was right, either.”

Oh, Tippecanoe County’s gift to the diplomatic and legal communities sang a few songs, too.

In fact, take away his obsessive, whining commentary on how brutal it was to grow up here and you were left with a great show. Metallica was superior. Faith No More was impressive. And Guns N’ Roses was honest-to-goodness brilliant at times.

But Rose likes to rant, and he ends up dragging the show down because of it. . . not to mention looking exceedingly silly — make that juvenile — at times.
ON MUSIC
Take his whiny high-school introduction to "Bad Obsession,” for example. He dedicated it to “jocks who drink beer and smoke marijuana but like to think they’re better than the guy who smokes cigarettes and wears an Ozzy Osbourne shirt."

Hey, Axl. Wake up. Study hall’s over.

Rose’s ridiculous tirades served only to illustrate two sharp contrasts: Axl singing is far, far preferable to Axl mouthing off, and Metallica’s no-nonsense, full-speed-ahead approach to rock and roll is worlds more mature than the aren’t-we-dangerous attitude copped by Guns Ν' Roses.

Metallica charged ahead, relentlessly, for two hours and 15 minutes of some of the best metal seen around here since . . . since . . . since the last time they played here. The music was powerful, propelled by one of the tightest drums (Lars Ulrich) and bass (Jason Newsted) combinations in the genre. Their assault was like being punched in the chest in four-four time, all night long — with guitarist Kirk Hammett waving a chainsaw around your head at the same time.

Singer-guitarist James Hetfield — who greeted the crowd with a cheery, “How the (bad word) are you (worse word)?" — looked startlingly leonine as he snarled and growled and spat the dark-sided lyrics.

Best song? There wasn’t a dog in the bunch, but "One,” from the encore, and “Enter Sandman," the show closer, were just about perfect examples of what makes Metallica great: They had volume, intensity and power to spare.

Those qualities were in evidence, too, during Guns Ν' Roses’ set. And the Guns have qualities Metallica doesn't — chiefly a wider range of lyrical material and a more melodic approach to metal.

The band came out charging hard with "Night Train," “Mr. Brownstone” and "It's So Easy." Then came Rose’s first mouthoff of the night, but it led, eventually, to one of the band’s better moments: An absolutely blazing cover of Wings’ "Live and Let Die.” Rose’s vocals were over the top, punctuated with a scream that began down around his toes and caught fire on the way out.

It was just a warmup, though, for what came several songs later when the band went into "Welcome to the Jungle.” It was stunning — as good as Guns Ν’ Roses gets. And when Rose repeated his chilling intro ("You know where you are? You in the jungle, baby”) while spotlights swirled around the audience it was a great piece of rock and roll theater.

Other good stuff: "November Rain," featuring a stylish piano solo by Rose: just about all of Slash’s guitar solos, which ran the gamut from faux flamenco to tortured blues: “Civil War;" “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door;” "Sweet Child O’ Mine;” and the show-closer, "Paradise City."

The show began at 6:30 p.m. with a 50-minute set by Faith No More. It would be more than eight hours before the Hoosier Dome crowd would begin filing for the exits.

It took about forty minutes for the crew to tear down Faith No More’s rig and get Metallica’s into place. Changing the stage from Metallica to Guns N’ Roses, however, took an hour and a half.

During the lengthy break, cameramen shooting the concert for video screens turned their lenses toward the crowd, going in for closeups of attractive young women who were then encouraged to display parts of their anatomy on big-screen TV. Many of them obliged.

Bloom is off the Rose

Lockup jammed after concert

The Indianapolis News

By the time the Guns Ν’ Roses concert concluded early today, city and state excise police arrested 133 people on charges ranging from public intoxication to drug violations in and around the Hoosier Dome.

“It was a party around the Hoosier Dome,” said state excise police Lt. Tom Newgent. “We would grab them as fast as we could get them.”
Indianapolis police reported 49 arrests. Excise police reported 84. Normally, about 60 people are confined in the City-County Lockup at this time of the week, but today the facility was holding 127 people.

Newgent said the excise police arrest total was limited only by manpower. His crew “could have quadrupled,” the total, if he’d have had more than 18 officers.

Metallica's luster wilts Guns Ν’ Roses

By Dave Larsen
POP MUSIC CRITIC

INDIANAPOLIS - If the massive stadium tour co-headlined by Guns Ν’ Roses and Metallica is to be viewed as a battle for supremacy between two heavy metal titans, the latter was clearly the victor long before the smoke cleared at the Hoosierdome on Wednesday night.

Actually, with the notoriously tardy Gunners last on the bill, make that Thursday morning.

Both bands, along with opening act Faith No More, tested the mettle of 39,000 hard-core headbangers with an eight-hour show in which each group performed with its own lighting and staging (instead of sharing, as is common with multiact packages). That led to interminable delays between their equally lengthy sets.

Wedged between two reputedly powerful live acts, Metallica hit the stage like a blow to the head and rampaged unabated for more than two hours, throwing down a gauntlet that proved to be too heavy for the typically inconsistent Gunners to follow.

Guns Ν’ Roses suffered from an inability to maintain any sense of momentum during its listless 2 2 1/2-hour set, which sounded as if it was played by rote from the same song list the band used during its Dayton appearances in January. GN’R would bring the crowd to its feet with a solid rendition of something such as You Could Be Mine, only to lose its head of steam with a meandering solo or one of W. Axl Rose’s pointless tirades.

Turning his embittered bile on his home state of Indiana, the singer’s whining act quickly wore thin, and his rambling diatribes were mostly met with stony silence or shouts of “Shut up and sing!” which only served to exacerbate his open contempt for the crowd.

Rose’s backstage behavior was just as bad, snapping at one female fan (“What’s her problem?”) and having her forcibly ejected for an offhand comment, while guitarist Slash whiled away the 1 hour and 45-minute break between bands by autographing the body parts of female fans. The more down-to-Earth members of Metallica, in contrast, relaxed with their girlfriends, conducted interviews or chatted with fans.

The most fitting symbol for GN’R’s performance were the two giant inflatable monsters (taken from the original cover art of Appetite For Destruction) that burst from the upper deck of the stadium during Welcome to the Jungle — one of which went limp long before the song was over.

Metallica’s brutally insistent set was like one long adrenaline rush of open-throttle metal, marked by dramatically abrupt changes of tempo, high-speed guitar runs and precise pile-driver rhythms. Microphones placed at numerous points around the stage and a drum riser on rollers allowed the band to play to all sections of the audience, rather than only those fans in front, and the entire stadium literally shook as Metallica bashed its way through devastating renditions of Seek and Destroy, Enter Sandman and One.

Faith No More played its 45-minute set as if someone had hooked a live electrical wire to the stage, although the metal-funk band’s sound was swallowed whole by the stadium, often being reduced to an echoing roar.

Promoters are still pushing tickets for the heavy-metal double bill of Guns ’Ν’ Roses and Metallica at the Hoosier Dome July 22.

As of Wednesday, promoters still had 10,000 tickets available for the eight-hour metal marathon.
Casual fans should think twice before dropping $27.50 for a seat — generally, the sound in the Hoosier Dome is a dud.

But if you can’t stand to stay away from Axl Rose and his expected diatribes maligning Indiana in general and his hometown of Lafayette, or if you just enjoy watching a rock ’n’ roll show with twice the population of Greenwood (show capacity is about 60,000), then check it out.

Doors open at 4:30 p.m.

200 fans arrested at heavy metal concert

By Bob Dillier
DAILY JOURNAL STAFF WRITER

Indianapolis police and Indiana Excise Police say approximately 200 music fans were arrested late Wednesday and early today in connection with a Wednesday night heavy metal concert featuring Guns N’ Roses, Metallica and Faith No More.

“Mostly it was public intoxication and disorderly conduct,” said police spokesman Lt. Tim Horty. IPD made 130 arrests.

Tom Newgent of the Excise Police said his officers made another 84 arrests.

Most of those arrested by the Excise Police received summonses to appear in court at a later date and were sent on their way.

“We poured out all their beer, so we probably ruined their evening,” said Newgent. “But we figured if we grabbed them before they went into the concert, at least they’d leave sober.”

Newgent said his officers started arresting people at about 4 p.m. and ended their rounds at midnight, just 15 minutes after Guns N’ Roses, the concert’s headliner group, took the stage.

The Hoosier Dome concert started at 6:30 p.m. and finished at about 2:25 a.m. today, said Hoosier Dome spokesperson Christine Wattles.

“We didn’t have any incidents inside the concert,” she said. “That’s great for that long of a show.”

But the nearly eight-hour show wasn’t all music.

“There was a lot of time in between acts,” said Wattles. “They had to tear down the stage from one act and

set it up again for another.”

Wattles said Metallica, the middle act, left the stage at about 10:45 p.m., about an hour before Guns N’ Roses started to perform.

“That’s normal for a show of this size,” Wattles said. “They played music over the PA system during the breaks.”

Wattles also said fireworks played a big part in the acts of Metallica and Guns N’ Roses.

“The promoter set some off in each act,” she said. “There were also a couple of plastic jungle animals that inflated when Guns N’ Roses played ‘Welcome to the Jungle.’ ”

Wattles said the animals — nearly 10 rows high — were located in the upper decks flanking the stage.

She also said Axl Rose, the lead singer for Guns N’ Roses, said he was glad to be back in his home state.

Rose, from West Lafayette, had criticized his early life in Indiana.

“He talked about Indiana a lot,” Wattles said. “He said, 'It’s good to be back here.’"

Wattles said the concert was virtually incident-free because the Dome didn’t sell alcohol during the concert, and because patrons were subjected to a metal-detector security search before entering.

Newgent said the arrests were in proportion to the number of concert-goers, which officials estimated at nearly 39,000.

“If the concert had been 15,000 people, we probably would have made about 40 arrests,” Newgent said. “When you get heavy-metal bands, they draw crowds that like to drink a lot and use drugs.”

He said that many people openly drank and used drugs in cars around the Hoosier Dome.

“But there's only so much 18 Excise Police officers can do,” Newgent said. “If we had more officers there, we probably would have made more arrests.”

Soulmonster wrote:Review by Marc D. Allan in The Indianapolis Star:



Transcript:
July 24, 1992

MARC D. ALLAN

Guns N' Roses/Metallica

Opening band: Faith No More.
Where: Hoosier Dome.
When: Wednesday.
Ratings: Guns N' Roses 2 1/2; Metallica 3 1/2; Faith No More 1 1/2

Metallica won the Wednesday night/Thursday morning hard-rock wars at the Hoosier Dome, demonstrating how to vent anger and frustration in music without victimizing the audience.

The titans of hard rock played a taut 140-minute set that burst with brilliant flurries of music and contained no attitude other than gratitude.

By contrast, Guns N' Roses played its usual waiting game, taking the stage at 11:55 p.m. Wednesday — nearly two hours after Metallica had cleared out. Over the next 2 1/2 hours, the audience would be lectured to, briefly walked out on and forced to suffer Guns N' Roses' foolishness.

While Metallica played for its fans, profusely thanking them for their fierce loyalty, Guns N' Roses taunted the audience. At 1:40 a.m., singer Axl Rose announced that the band would take a short break until the fans up front decided to stand.

"I didn't come here with the intention of you liking my (bleep) tonight," Rose sneered at one point.

When Guns N' Roses decided to shut up and play, it successfully defended its standing in the hard-rock pantheon. Compared with the group's previous central Indiana performance, this show found the members playing as a unit rather than a loose collection of talent held together by drummer Matt Sorum.

Double-Talkin' Jive featured guitarist Slash reeling off several intricately textured runs and also spotlighted the muscular trio created when its lead guitarist, drummer and bassist Duff McKagen jammed.

Slash and harmonica player Ted Andreadis teamed for a swampy version of Bad Obsession. Later, during his solo, Slash again played the blues in tandem with keyboardist Dizzy Reed, displaying as fine a combination of speed and tastefulness as any hard-rock fan will see.

Rose's sole shining moment came during Welcome to the Jungle, a bitter assault that found him at his snapping-turtle angriest.

When Rose puts his spleen into the music, he has few peers. But his spoken tirades about Indi-(bleeping)-ana and boxer Mike Tyson's rape conviction display an arrogance and petulance that may be cute on the gossip pages but have no place in a concert setting.

Metallica wouldn't even think of wasting its audience's time with petty ranting. It knows the crowd has come to hear its engines-racing brand of music, and there's no time to waste.

The group's stripped-down set eliminated nearly all solos and occasionally created a whiplash effect by going from one song directly into the next.

During Fade to Black, Shortest Straw and One, the band entered an attack mode where it shut out everything else and played with unparalleled intensity. With guitars blazing and drums bashing, the four members sounded more cohesive than ever.

Perhaps they were trying harder, too. Metallica usually plays before its own crowd, a hopelessly devoted throng that knows every word, every beat, every stop and start.

Here, in trying to win over Guns N' Roses fans, singer/guitarist James Hetfield spent some time trying to rally the crowd, estimated at 40,000. He shouldn't have to. Metallica may not have easily accessible melodies, but that's not what its fans want. They want action.

Metallica provided that in abundance.

Faith No More ended up the big loser in this three-band bill. A miserable sound mix killed any chance the band had of trying to put across some of the considerable humor and subtlety in its music.

Confined to a small portion of the stage and forced to play while sunlight kept the dome bright, the band worked hard. But as much as singer Mike Patton tried — climbing ladders, acting like a human pogo stick, even jumping into the audience — he likely generated more cries of "what?" than "wow!"



Axl's reponse letter:



Transcript:

W. AXL ROSE
2001 BARRINGTON #100
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90025
GUNS N’ ROSES
July 24, 1992
MARK D. ALLAN, (USED TO BE THE NAME OF OUR TRAVEL AGENT, WE FIRED THEM)
You don’t get it… Wait, that’s too easy… Maybe you don’t want to get it – or you’d have to face yourself and oh my God that’s just too scary. Maybe it’s impossible and it’s too late for you – you know, have someone stick a fork in your ass and turn you over you’re done. Indiana needs to wake up and hey if that takes a little taunting and 2 and half hours of music + a fireworks show + cartoon for a total of 2 hours and 50 minutes to wake up maybe 5% of a 48,000 plus crowd then so be it. I can also suffer your redneck, blind, narrow minded refuse about ranting – you nor anyone will ever dictate my actions, attitudes, comments, oratation, and musical performances on stage. Don’t kid yourself and act above, better than, or even comparable to me or G N’ R. If that were true there’d be no reason to censor my language in your basic Indiana attempt at journalism.
I came here to enrage… Thank you, you have helped me know I succeeded. I’ve made my inquiries, I am your Rock N’ Roll nightmare. And you… You’re just gonna sit on your wanna be ass and watch me, born a Hoosier, grow larger than you could ever imagine or ever be able to stop. That’s not to say I didn’t appreciate your anger, hostility and general ignorance. It shows me my so called “RANTS” are a much needed, missing piece in our puzzle of society.
stay away from microwaves-
Love Axl
(Signed, ‘W. Axl Rose’)
P.S. Oh, and it was never a battle O’ the bands, I imagined this thing, and everyone wins, as long as I show up to my own dream, that is!!!