1992.09.02 - Citrus Bowl, Orlando, USA

For Axl, it's been no bed of roses

As Guns N' Roses' temperamental lead singer will tell you, it really is a jungle out there.

By Philip Booth

IF IT'S MONTREAL, then Axl Rose must be having a tantrum.

Rose, 30-year-old brat without a cause and lead singer of millionaire hard-rockers Guns N’ Roses, has continued along the path of easy, prepackaged rebellion since he and his band last played Florida.

As headliner on a triple bill with Metallica and Faith No More, he’s repeated some of the same shenanigans that first created controversy for the chart-busting Los Angeles band.

The group, whose “Use Your Illusion I” and “II” albums have racked up combined sales of more than 6 million, still makes its fans wait, with show delays of up to several hours.

And the band's lead singer reportedly rants and raves on occasion, on the pet peeve of the moment.

Earlier this month, Rose stomped off the stage at a concert in Montreal after about eight songs, reportedly because he was angered over sound problems.

“We got it together in Europe, only to have it come apart here,” he said. “In case anyone is interested, this is going to be our last show for a long time.”

More than 53,000 frustrated fans rioted, setting fires, overturning cars and damaging nearby establishments. The band, of course, declined to comment on the melee they sparked.

Rose, too, made news recently for his arrest on misdemeanor charges stemming from a riot at a concert in St. Louis last year.

Accused of diving into the crowd during a concert and setting off a disturbance, he was wanted on four
misdemeanor assault counts and one count of damage to property. About 40 concertgoers and 25 police officers were injured during that incident.

The band’s shenanigans, while distracting and maybe indicative of a certain insecurity about the group’s status in the rock world, don’t negate its power as a live act.

Last December at the Florida Suncoast Dome in St. Petersburg, in front of a crowd of 34,000, Guns N’
Roses gave a performance that might have turned naysayers into believers.

From guitarist Slash’s first chugging notes on the show-opening “Welcome to the Jungle” through a churning finale of “Paradise City,” the group lived up to its reputation as one of rock’s most riveting, provocative performing acts.

If they hold together that long, Wednesday night’s Orlando show promises more of the same.

***

Metallica rides thrash to glory

An underground fan base took them to the top. Now the speed-metal kings are taking it to the mainstream.

By Philip Booth

Metallica, godfathers of speed metal and the first heavy-metal thrashers to land an album on the top of Billboard’s pop music chart, once made its living off a hard-core fan base.

Last year’s No. 1 "Metallica” album, thanks in part to the success of the omnipresent “Enter Sandman” single and its accompanying video clip, forever changed the band’s underdog status.

The Southern California band, once recognized for easily identifiable six-string rips, guitar-army chord crunches, dark lyrics and songs as bracing as hard rock, as heavy as metal and as malevolent as punk, made a sharp turn in another direction.

Tighter songs, denser-sounding arrangements and harmonies took some fans by surprise.

"There are the idiots who think now that a lot of people like us, they shouldn’t like us,” James Hetfield, the band’s singer and guitarist, said by telephone earlier this year. “It’s like peer pressure, which is stupid in the first place.

“No doubt the fan base has gotten very strange,” he says. “There’s young, old, nicely dressed, scum, whatever.

There’s all kinds. But we’ve heard sellout since we did [the ballad] ‘Fade to Black’ on the second album. Those people are limiting us.”

The band, formed in 1981 by Danish drummer Lars Ulrich and skate-punker Hetfield, brought the wrath of some parents with titles such as 1983’s “Kill Em All” (the debut album).

Metallica began its commercial ascent in 1986 with "Master of Puppets,” a top 30 album that boasted better production values and listener-friendly tunes about such subjects as insanity (“Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”) and cocaine addiction (the title track).

" ...And Justice For All,” a double album released in 1988, sold more than two million copies — in part due to the success of death-wish single “One” — and alerted the industry at large to the commercial potential of the genre.

The group — Hetfield, Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Jason Newsted — has survived two seismic personnel changes.

Original bassist Cliff Burton was killed in a September 1986 bus crash in Sweden, and Newsted was recruited from Flotsam and Jetsam. Guitarist Dave Mustaine left to form Megadeth days before the debut Metallica album was recorded.

The band faced a minor setback during a show earlier this month at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium.

Its set, on a bill with Faith No More and Guns N’ Roses, was cut short after Hetfield suffered second-and third-degree burns on the back of his left hand, as well as first-degree burns on his right arm. Hetfield reportedly ventured too close to a pyrotechnic device.

Although expected to fully recover, Hetfield might not be playing guitar at the Orlando show. His parts may be played by a temporary additional band member.

***

Misery in 'Epic' proportions

In a world gone mad, Faith No More just gets madder. The band's looniness is both comedic and caustic.

By Jon Pareles

Decay, lies, apathy. Defeat.

Disillusionment. Surgery. Senility. Death.

Laughing yet?

Those are some of the things that set Faith No More cackling on its new album, “Angel Dust.” In the first song, “Land of Sunshine," the words promise: Fortune is smiling upon you. But they’re delivered with a guttural growl amid sinister organ triplets and interrupted by an orotund voice intoning, Here's how to order!

Faith No More has been weaned on the smiling, hard-sell fraudulence of television, modern politics and modem rock. Its response is to suspect everything, to grab at fragments and to stay so vulgar and unpredictable that it sticks in the craw.

With a self-mockery that undercuts even the band’s own cynicism, Faith No More takes nothing seriously — and means it. It’s an attitude with a future, a full-scale extrapolation of the "Wayne's World" byword: "Not!”

Faith No More previewed the 1990s with the chorus of “Epic," from its 1989 album "The Real Thing”: You want it all. but you can't have it. As early as the title song of the band's first album, “We Care a Lot,” released in 1985, Faith No More had put together the ingredients that made “Epic” a hit.

San Francisco bands tend to flaunt their eclecticism, and Faith No More applied its hometown strategy to some generally reviled sources. “We Care a Lot” patched together portentous keyboards from progressive rock, a stately chorus and uplifting guitars from 1970s pomp-rock, chanted verses and a sardonic attitude: We’re out to save the world / Well, it’s a dirty job but someone's gotta do it.

Elsewhere on the album, the harsher guitars of early-1980s heavy metal blared.

Since then, the band has reshuffled its influences, using the jumpy meters of hard-core rock, making the metal more menacing, shifting the chants toward rap. It also changed vocalists, replacing Chuck Mosely with the more flexible Mike Patton, who can rasp like a heavy-metal ghoul, emote like a pop-metal singer or sneer cartoonishly through his nose.

The band professionalized with two major-label albums, "Introduce Yourself” in 1987 and “The Real
Thing,” as the mass rock audience began to accept more caustic music; “The Real Thing” also came up with more melodic choruses.

“The Real Thing” sold 1.5 million copies; but Faith No More is determined not to become any more accessible. “Angel Dust” is rougher, less pop-tinged, lest the band be accused of selling out.

“The Real Thing" mixed thriller scenarios (a vampire in "Surprise! You’re Dead!”) and existential hopes and miseries. But love, although generally twisted, was still a possibility on “The Real Thing”; “Angel Dust” promises only that everything falls apart.

There’s misery for every age group. In “Midlife Crisis,” chugging along with whisper-growled and distorted vocals, a husband walks out on his wife and his responsibilities. Above the dissonant march of “Kindergarten,” the singer visits his old school and relives his old fears.

In “R.V.,” a woozy waltz carries the musings of a character who might be a prisoner or a nursing-home patient. He wonders, Would anybody tell me if I was gettin' stupider? and decides to hand on his father’s admonition: You’re never gonna amount to nothin'.

“Everything’s Ruined,” which compares propagation to an investment that goes wrong, veers from earnest piano to speed-metal crunch to ironically triumphal anthem, while Patton crows the title.
“Crack Hitler” describes a dealer’s tenuous and violent empire in distorted walkie-talkie voices over chomping wah-wah guitars (another 1970s legacy). And "Smaller and Smaller,” pounding along with grim, bruising guitars, follows a desperate man through poverty, suicide and decomposition, until small becomes all.

About the only good news arrives in “Malpractice,” which whipsaws through shifting meters, ominous howls and an Arabian-tinged dream sequence, but concludes, The hands removed the bad thing.

For some stretches, “Angel Dust” could pass for a thrash-metal album, all brutal guitars and bad
news. But Faith No More can’t keep a straight face or stick to a genre. Patton’s voice keeps twisting its tone, smirking at the possibility that he might sound convincing; the music lurches from one sphere to another, simultaneously showing off the band’s skill and suggesting that style choices are arbitrary.

"Caffeine” shouts, The world expects the pose, and rails, It’s not funny anymore / It’s the thing you hate the most. Behind the pose, however, Faith No More finds only more poses or, worse, a banal horror. The band’s gallows humor masks a bitterness that irony can’t cure.

Jon Pareles writes for The New York Times.

***

Guns Ν’ Roses, Metallica, Faith No More

■ WHEN: Wednesday at 6:30 p.m.

■ WHERE: Citrus Bowl, Orlando

■ TICKETS: $28.50 (plus service charge), available at TicketMaster outlets: (813) 287-8844

Heavy metal madness

48,000 storm Citrus Bowl to dance, thrash, listen

By Mike Oliver
OF THE SENTINEL STAFF

From high in Orlando’s Citrus Bowl, the 48,000 metal music fans in basic black looked like a stormy sea Wednesday night, swirling and crashing up against temporary barricades like high water at a sea wall.

As slashing guitar chords shredded the still night, the sea parted now and then as “mosh pits” — a speed metal version of a square dance circle — formed like whirlpools. Young people slammed into each other while the band played on.

“It’s excellent and thoroughly thrashing,” said a sweating, shirtless Chuck Jennings, 20, bearing two long scratches across his abdomen from the contact dancing, “It’s evil and emotional. You’ve got to go in there.”

Guns Ν’ Roses took the stage around 11:15 p.m., and the frenzied dancing stirred by Metallica all but disappeared as the music changed from speed metal to a more traditional hard rock sound. Fans seemed more intent on listening to the show, which was paced with frequent talks by lead singer Axl Rose.

Police reported 200 people were treated for minor injuries and four arrested on minor offenses. Those figures are low for this kind of concert, said Orlando Police Capt. Charles Edwards.

City officials watched eagerly and anxiously as Guns Ν’ Roses, Metallica, and Faith No More unleashed their stadium show in Orlando. With tickets selling for $28.50 for the
6:30 p.m.- 2 a.m. show, the city was hoping to clear more than $200,000 from a $1,4 million gross.

But officials also watched with some anxiety because during Metallica's last date in Orlando in March, fans ripped up $38,000 worth of seats at the Orlando Arena, a tab the band has paid. Also this current tour was marred by violence at a stop in Montreal last month. Angry fans rioted when Rose stopped the show because he had a sore throat.

“When’s Axl going to be here?” Orlando Centroplex director Joanne Grant asked over her radio earlier in the evening.

Grant watched from a command post in a glass-enclosed sky box high up in the stadium. She was informed that Rose, who usually travels separately from the rest of the band, had already arrived at the stadium, having flown into Orlando Executive Airport earlier.

Grant breathed a sigh of relief. At a date in Washington, D.C., Rose barely made it on stage in time as he was rushed from the airport to the venue with a full police escort.

From her perch, Grant and other city personnel watched the crowd with binoculars and barked orders and warnings such as “The barricades are coming down in the southeast corner.”

“If they [guards] can’t keep people off the field, tell them to get out of the stadium," Grant yelled during one angry moment.

There were 10,000 tickets sold for the field, and the remaining 38,000 were reserved stadium seating. The 250 temporary security guards were busy all night stopping “leapers” and "gate crashers.” The leapers would jump from the stadium seating onto the field and flee into the crowd while gate crashers just pushed or sneaked their way onto the field.
There also were 100 Orlando police officers, 35 emergency medical technicians, 55 ushers and 40 ticket-takers. The night’s payroll for city employees, paid by the bands, totaled $103,000, Grant said.

Fans came from as far away as Miami, Tampa, Sarasota, and Tallahassee, she said.

The show featured a mammoth stage and two 10-foot video monitors. Fans seemed to have collaborated before the show to decide what to wear: black T-shirts, jeans, bandana (optional).

The crowd ranged in age from early teens to middle age. Most appeared to be between 16 and 22.

“This is the best concert yet,” said Nicholas Cotton, a 15-year-old from Orlando.

Artie Ascolese, 22, drove from Daytona Beach to see his two favorite bands, Metallica and Guns N' Roses. He wore a lei of fake marijuana leaves that he purchased from the table set up by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Martha Conley, 36, didn't think much of the crowd. She said it was a much younger crowd than she remembered the last time she saw Guns N’ Roses.

“I'm not into this crap,” she said. “Everybody is already wasted.”

Some sound off over nudity at concert

Toplessness a surprise, not a showstopper

Topless women who joined Guns N’ Roses onstage took many, including the Centroplex director, by surprise.

By Mike Oliver
OF THE SENTINEL STAFF

Bare breasts at the Guns Ν' Roses concert in Orlando have angered some concertgoers and parents who thought the show was inappropriate for the thousands of teenagers in the audience.

"I've never seen something so tasteless," said Sean Mason, 25, whose concert companions included a 15-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl.

Just before 1 a.m. Thursday at the Citrus Bowl concert, about a dozen women joined the heavy-metal band onstage, and most took off their tops during the song "You Could Be Mine."

A few of the women stripped to G-strings as 12-foot video monitors brought the show closer to those
in the outer reaches of the stadium. While some people left, many of the 48,000 stood and cheered,

“It was a total surprise," said Joanne Grant, director of Orlando Centroplex. “We’ve had many phone calls and we are directing them to [the band’s] management."

Grant, who worked at the concert, said she called the agent and the promoter who were in a trailer behind the stage during the show to complain. She said promoters were unaware that Guns N' Roses had planned the exhibition.

Grant said the women were apparently from the Orlando area and had received backstage passes from the band.

“Certainly the band never set out to offend anybody, especially not the parents of children," said tour publicist Wendy Laister.

Laister said the band thought the Orlando audience was great and said that as a European she finds it amazing that people are offended by breasts.

“Any kids who come to a Guns N' Roses show are certainly going to have seen a breast before," Laister said. "I think those offended were in the minority." Grant said she has responded to parents who have asked why the show wasn't stopped.

“For me to send officers up on the stage would have caused a riot," Grant said. "It was a decision tο just let it happen and it will be over in a few minutes. I'm certainly not happy about it." Although officials couldn't clean up Guns N' Roses act, the city did clean up at the box office, Grant said.

The city is expected to turn a $265,000 profit from the $1.05 million it received in revenue from stadium rent, concessions, parking and T-shirt sales. The $28.50-per-ticket show, which also featured the bands Metallica and Faith No More, was one of the biggest money makers in recent memory, Grant said.

Grant said the seven arrests made at the concert were low for an event of this scale. No major injuries were reported.

There have been violent outbreaks at other Guns N' Roses concerts, including one recently in Montreal when lead singer Axl Rose stopped the show because of a sore throat. It is also common at Guns N' Roses concerts for women to take off their tops.

Mason said he was disgusted because the camera operators who provided a live feed to the giant video monitors encouraged the audience to strip by zooming in.

"There were guys ripping off girls' shirts and rubbing their hands all over their breasts for the camera," Mason said.

Roses’ concert has its thorns

Guns Ν’ Roses, Metallica and Faith No More combined for a disappointing concert.

Overcoming the past

By PHILIP BOOTH
Tribune Staff Writer

ORLANDO — Axl Rose, the bratty millionaire and self-styled rebel leader of Guns Ν’ Roses, waited just four tunes — from the band’s galvanizing hard-rock anthem "Welcome to the Jungle” through a rather routine cover of Paul McCartney’s "Live and Let Die” — to switch into preaching mode on Wednesday night.

Members of the media, he told a rowdy Citrus Bowl crowd of about 60,000, are among the forces of evil conspiring to destroy the momentum of the band's summer tour with Metallica and Faith No More.

"The whole purpose here is to have three different kinds of rock ’n’ roll for the money," Rose said. "We wanted to throw a concert that we would like to see."

The triple-bill show, as it turns out, indeed offered plenty of appeal.

Faith No More, the San Francisco quintet led by cartoon-character singer Mike Patton (see how he grimaced and hopped across the stage), opened with its fierce, patented mix of punk, funk and rock.

The alternative band, on material from 1989 album "The Real Thing," and this year’s disc, ‘‘Angel Dust," mostly failed to connect with the audience of headbangers.

The exception: The cathedral-organ swells and rap-to-pop sounds of breakout single "Epic." Mosh pits, swarming masses of kids running around and bouncing off each other in circular paths, sprung up all over the field during the 45-minute set.

Metallica, whose speed-metal riffs and dark minor chords became monster commercial commodities with last year’s platinum-selling "Metallica," may be the band of the ’90s, if the number of teen-agers mouthing every word to every song was any indication.

Not to mention the contingent of would-be drummers and air-guitarists imitating the moves of powerhouse drummer Lars Ulrich and chief six-string shredder Kirk Hammett.

Metallica, unlike the headliners, just shut up and played their guitars, unleashing trademark pummel-and-stop rhythms on big hit "Enter Sandman,” "One,” inspired by Dalton Trumbo's gloomy World War I novel "Johnny Got His Gun," the paranoia-laced "Master of Puppets" from the 1986 album of the same name, haunting ballad "Nothing Else Matters" and "Harvester of Sorrow."

James Hetfield's vocal attack was riveting (John Marshall from Metal Church played the injured Hetfield’s guitar parts), and the unison heavy accents proved entrancing. But Metallica ultimately offered little in the way of tonal or stylistic variety.

Both Guns Ν' Roses and Metallica did benefit from flashpot explosions, stage front flaming torches and two giant video screens that helped transform  onstage action from a mere concert into a circuslike spectacle.

The former band, though, boasts an appealing eclecticism that allowed for everything from the catchy hooks of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and “Patience” to overblown ballads “Civil War” and “November Rain” to ferocious hard-rockers “You Could Be Mine” and “Paradise City.”

Guns N’ Roses, during a set that began at 11:20 p.m. and raged on for more than two hours, pumped up the sound with horns and backup singers and gave well-used solo space to lead guitarist Slash, the show’s Most Valuable Player.

Too bad Axl can’t simply let the music speak for itself. Instead, he feels compelled to rant and rave in front of fans who have paid big bucks to see the shows and buy the albums.

This time, the admitted substance abuser rather ungracefully chose to pick on Seattle upstarts Nirvana, who turned down the opening slot on the tour.

He labeled lead singer Kurt Cobain “a junkie” and assailed Cobain and wife Courtney Love.

“We’ve had our share of problems with so-called ‘alternative’ bands,” Rose said. “What is this word?”
Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, he said, had as much trouble initially gaining radio access as did Nirvana and the other underground rock bands, he said. “So I think we have the world’s biggest alternative crowd here tonight.”

Will Rose’s band, long beset by internal struggles — two key band members have been replaced in the last two years — and tortured by its own addiction demons, hold together that long?

“One of the good things about Guns N’ Roses is that having survived personnel changes has made us a tighter, stronger group,” Slash said last week in a telephone interview. "The biggest obstacles have been just getting on with getting on — getting the tour started, the logistics of every single show.

“We’re not angels by any means,” he said. “We’re still the eternal teen-ager band. We still like to go to parties and get loaded but as far as any of the really serious drugs, we found that it really wasn’t conducive to being productive.

“Obviously you want to expand your talents so you search for new styles of music as it goes on. The main thing is to keep it fresh and exciting. Otherwise it would get really dull and predictable and it wouldn’t really last long. We’ve managed to survive.”  

‘Arena rock’ scene has become hah’buhl

By Mark Lane
Cox News Service

“It was just hah’buhl."

My informant was referring to the Guns N’ Ro-ses/Metallica concert. The groups are on tour and had swung by Orlando, Fla.

To me probably to anyone who has grown up in the South — “hah’buhl” has a way of conveying a certain kind of disapproval. It has overtones of that old-fashioned shocked-but-not-at-all-surprised reaction that a mere “horrible” never quite gets across.

She had gone to the event expecting all the usual, vaguely stupid customs that have become arena rock’s rituals: T-shirt hawkers, people throwing things, lost teen-agers gamely aping the main act’s costuming, lighting matches while the band decides — surprise! — to come back for a big encore number.

All of which are accepted crowd pathology. Most of those paying to be there would feel cheated if any part were absent.

The extra touch at Guns N’ Roses concerts has to do with strolling minicam operators who show the crowd its picture on video monitors.

The cameramen focus on members of the audience who see themselves as video giants on immense screens. Often when a woman is in the viewfinder, the crowd chants for her to flash her breasts. So up goes the shirt and everyone cheers. Or sometimes boos if the majority is unimpressed or if the subject doesn’t cooperate.

Hah’buhl.

Even by normal mutant-metal, grunt-rock standards.

It used to rate a hah’buhl when a girl would sneak out to a rock concert all dudied up like I-don’t-know-what. Now she’s displaying her stuff before a roving minicam for the edification of thousands of concert-goers on a giant-screen arena television. Well, it’s beyond hah’buhl.

I should mention in the spirit of full disclosure (“Show us your biases,” I hear the crowd chanting) that I was not personally present at the mega-metal event. I wasn’t much into arena rock even when it made some kind of demographic sense for me to be on site. My tolerance for crowds is usually exhausted with a visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

But I stand by my sources on this one and the harried folks at the Orlando Centroplex, who are directing complaints about nudity on- and offstage to the band’s management, which undoubtedly is very concerned that their boys caused offense.

Besides, the stadium’s $265,000 profit from the concert has greatly assuaged its concern about complaints.

Need for complaints?

And should there be complaints? Guns N’ Roses are known for barely disguised racism, wild sexism, public petulance and contrived overtones of violence. Should we really be too surprised that the crowd acts like leering video-assisted goons at their concerts?

Probably not.

Yet I find a lot of people who enjoy all the noise, who are undeterred by the conduct, smell and goofiness of the crowd, who haven’t outgrown rock ’n’ roll, who nonetheless find themselves uncomfortable with an arena scene that is getting undeniably uglier and more cynical.

They don’t often say so in so many words. After growing up defending concert rock against people who just didn’t understand, fans who are out of high school but not ready for oldies are uncomfortable criticizing the medium, no matter how exploitative and self-important it gets.

Anyway, it’s only rock ’n’ roll, to quote one of the oldies bands.

Yet, it is a measure of how spent the music is that the audience needs to flash itself in order to generate a little excitement. Why when I was a kid, rock ...

Oh well, it was hah’buhl then, too, but not like that.


Mark Lane writes editorials for The Daytona Beach (Fla.) News-Journal, a Cox newspaper. His column is distributed by the New York Times News Service.

Street talk

Volusia Extra asked people recently:
What was the weirdest or most unusual experience you’ve ever had?

[...]

‘‘Wednesday night. Being in the middle of the Guns ’N’ Roses concert, at the 50-yard-line, selling T-shirts and having 8,000 people surround you, thoroughly enjoying themselves. That’s not counting the people in the stands. These people, they were really having a good time. I work for a company that sells T-shirts. Whenever they need help, they call. It was like standing in the middle of a pasture surrounded by cows and somebody yelling, ‘Stampede!’ They were just enjoying the music, dancing around. They were taking pictures in the audience and girls were flashing [raising their shirts]. These people, they were strictly wild. They were into the music. They had that riot up in Montreal with Guns ’N’ Roses. They tore up 13 police cars. I’m not really into heavy metal. I’m into country. There were people out there waiting to get in [to the concert) at 9 o’clock in the morning and the concert didn’t start until 4:30 p.m. Sales were fantastic. Everyone had to have a memento because I guarantee you three-quarters of them won’t remember the concert. They were lying passed out on the field. There were people who probably woke up with sore hands and legs because people walked on them."

Maud Levesque, 39
Orange City

[...]