1991.06.11 - HersheyPark Stadium, Hershey, USA

Guns N' Roses Back From A Thorny Hiatus

From Call news services
Morning Call Arts Editor Len Righi contributed to this story.

In 1989, "Appetite For Destruction" wasn't just the title of Guns N' Roses' No. 1 album. It was turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

While the band opened a series of outdoor shows that year in Los Angeles for the Rolling Stones, singer W. Axl Rose (real name William Rose) chastised his fellow band members --guitarists Slash (Saul Hudson) and Izzy Stradlin, bassist Michael (Duff) McKagan and since-departed drummer Steven Adler -- for abusing drugs and announced on stage that if they didn't clean up their act, the band would break up.

To that point, the band's bad-boy image and the musicians' seedy appearances -- plus Rose's lyrics about dreams clashing with the gritty realities of street life -- fed a perception of danger and decadence that has always intrigued rock 'n' roll fans, particularly teens.

But the image was catching up to the group. Founding member Adler was kicked out when he couldn't clean up his drug habit. The group was labeled racist and homophobic for the song "One in a Million."
McKagan and Slash suffered an embarrassing drunken national TV appearance during the 1989 American Music Awards that prompted some radio stations to boycott the group's music.

This week, when the Los Angeles bad boys take the stage for a show at HersheyPark on Tuesday (Thursday's Pocono Downs show has been canceled) , they'll be wearing a few scars from that year of private and public battles with drugs, drink, fame and the media.

And they'll also be introducing a new band member who helped them pull out of it, drummer Matt Sorum, formerly of British hard-rockers The Cult.

"From what people tell me, I've helped the band get back on its feet, and that makes me feel good," he says. "I'm just glad the band is back out there."

That the members of Guns N' Roses have been largely inaccessible during the last two years only heightened their mystique. They've kept a tight control over the media; earlier this year they required reporters and photographers from the United Kingdom to sign contracts giving the group full copy control and copyright over stories and pictures, with $100,000 fines as punishments for violators.

"The contracts were designed for a few members of the press who were giving the band trouble," said Bryn Bridenthal, the band's publicist. "The band was having trouble with fabricated interviews ... People in the U.S. got a hold of (the contracts) and some people signed them. But none of those people got an interview because the band is not doing interviews until the new record comes out."

Guns N' Roses' show will include songs from its upcoming record, but since the band changes its set list for every show, it is impossible to know how many. The new record will be released by Geffen Records on two compact discs as "Use Your Illusion I" and "Use Your Illusion II." The discs will have 36 songs, or about 2-1/2 hours of music. A July 30 release has been tentatively set for the project, which was originally supposed to have been recorded in Chicago in 1989.

After selling 12 million copies of their first two major-label records, "Appetite For Destruction" and "GN'R Lies," and with hit singles such as the No. 1 "Sweet Child O' Mine," "Paradise City" and "Patience" establishing the group in rock's upper echelon, Guns N' Roses thought that escaping the "distractions" of Los Angeles would jump-start a new album.

The Chicago sessions went nowhere, however, and the band returned to Los Angeles in disarray. But before leaving the Midwest, Slash and McKagan took in a Cult show at Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wis., and were impressed by Sorum, a former Los Angeles session musician.
"That's when I first met the guys and they were in kind of a state," Sorum recalls. "It (fame) got thrown on them in a major way. They came from out of the clubs to selling millions of records and they didn't have any time to adjust. ...

"They didn't approach me again until the very last show I did with The Cult in April last year, so I had a sneaking suspicion something was going on.

"The next day I got a call from Slash at my house. Originally I was just going to go down and do the album. Then about two weeks into rehearsal, I went up to Slash's house for a little barbecue and he asked me to join the band."

Sorum replaced Adler, who had been with the band since its inception in Los Angeles in 1985, when all five band members lived together in a shabby apartment, writing songs and scraping up Tuesday night gigs.

But while the other band members battled to control their drinking and drug habits, Adler's condition deteriorated to the point where he was having difficulty playing. Reportedly he still lives in Los Angeles.
Sorum's professionalism helped the band refocus on its music. "As soon as I got into the band, it was like clockwork," he says. "We rehearsed for a month every day for four or five hours. There was none of this calling in sick because you were up too late the night before partying. If you were, you had to show up anyway.

"Duff told me one day, `At first, I didn't really want to like playing with you, but now I really dig it.'"
The projected first single from "Use Your Illusion" is "Don't Cry," a ballad that hints at the wider emotional and musical territory covered on the new album. Says Sorum: "It's a love song, a pretty emotional tune for Axl to sing."

According to Sorum, the tunes run from the low-key introspection of "November Rain" to what he describes as a Metallica-like metal cut, "Coma." Rose plays piano on several songs, and several longer tracks reflect the influence of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." The album also includes "some really heavy-duty punk stuff, middle-ground rock and some weird acoustic things in which I use brushes or just a tambourine.

"`Appetite' was a party album," he says. "This new stuff goes deeper than that."

Sorum says the album doesn't have any overt political messages. "It's more about relationships, stuff that's happened to the band over the last few years."

But the drummer was evasive about whether the band directly addresses critics of the song "One in a Million," a "GN'R Lies" track that got negative press because of its racist and homophobic lyrics.

"There might be something on the album that ticks someone off, but who knows? I hope not," Sorum says. "Basically Axl speaks his mind, he tells it how it is and how he feels. He's not gonna be singing any `Baby, baby, I love you' stuff."

Guns N' Roses and Skid Row play Tuesday night at HersheyPark Arena & Stadium, Hersheypark Drive. Show time is 8 p.m. For information, call 1-800-HERSHEY.