1993.04.10 - Omaha Civic Auditorium, Omaha, USA

Hard rock band to play 1st Nebraska concert

BY JOURNAL WRITERS
and News Services

Guns N’ Roses, the most popular and controversial hard rock band of the last five years, will present its first Nebraska performance Saturday night at Omaha’s Civic Auditorium.

The 8:30 p.m. show is sold out. Initially a second show was planned for the 11,000-seat hall. But that concert was dropped. Former Queen guitarist Brian May has been opening shows on the Guns N’ Roses current tour.

The new show is not as complex as earlier tours that followed the two “Use Your Illusion” albums.

The “Guns N’ Bones” tour, as it is being called, is without the two backup singers, three horns and additional keyboardist that had made the band nearly as big as Chicago.

“After doing that for a year and half, the band was going, ‘Let’s be a rock band again.’ We stripped everything down. We got rid of the whole background section. The set is like a club stage; there’s just one level and a back line,” said guitarist Gilby Clarke, who joined the band in December 1991. “And it’s cool. It’s just down to us. And we’re playing songs that we’ve never, ever played before — a lot of songs off the ‘Lies’ record and stuff off the ‘Illusion’ albums that we’ve never played. It’s kind of like a harder, faster tour.”

Guns N’ Roses delivers no-frills rock

Band avoids past outrageous behavior, gives superb performance

BY L. KENT WOLGAMOTT
Journal Reviewer

OMAHA - Forget all the previous extraneous, outrageous behavior on stage and off. It now seems that Guns N’ Roses is content with demonstrating to the world that it is the best at what it does.

While the band didn’t appear to be thrilled when it hit the Civic Auditorium stage Saturday night, it soon warmed to the task at hand and delivered a dynamic 2-1/4 hours of rock in a stripped-down, no-flourishes setting that put the emphasis on the music.

Like the Rolling Stones, one of its obvious influences, Guns N’ Roses is a distinctly two-man show in live performance as singer Axel Rose commands the audience's attention, then sprints to the back of the stage while Slash takes a solo on his Les Paul.

When singing, Rose covers the stage with catlike grace, slinking and dashing about. And when he throws his head back, his high, scratchy wail establishes him as the most distinctive rock screamer since Robert Plant.

Slash is not a flashy guitarist in the modern rock-hero mode. Rather, his smooth, fluid style harks back to the early '70s, an element that allows Guns N’ Roses to connect with a wider age range of fans.

That was the formula for nearly all 20 of the songs the band roared through in its first Nebraska appearance before a packed house. The song selection revealed plenty about the group, which exploded onto the pop scene in 1988 and has been among the most popular rock groups since.

The concert and band were clearly heavily dependent on songs from the group’s 1987 debut album, “Appetite for Destruction.”

Those hits — “Welcome to the Jungle," the set-closing “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and the stroboscopic encore, “Paradise City” — received much greater response than anything from the double “Use Your Illusion” set, with the exception of Rose’s piano ballad “November Rain.”

That is by and large because they are far stronger songs than the band’s later material — although many of the better “Use Your Illusion” songs were written by ex-Gunner Izzy Stradlin and not surprisingly were absent from the concert’s set list.

The superbly paced and performed concert was highlighted by a five-song acoustic set midway through the show. Lest one think that Guns N’ Roses is hopping on the “unplugged” bandwagon, its EP “G N’R Lies,” which featured three of the five acoustic tunes, was released at least two years before acoustic became the thing to do.

There was little to report on the scandalous front from Saturday’s show. In most ways, it was just another rock concert.

True, girls in the crowd lifted their shirts to flash the in-house video camera during the stage change, providing more excitement in the crowd than did the lame opening Blind Melon in its 50-minute set. But that is standard procedure at Guns N’ Roses shows and likely came as a shock to no one in the hall.

The concert did, however, provide further evidence that general admission concerts have outlived their usefulness.

Although promoters limited the number of people on the auditorium floor, anxious kids nonetheless rushed to the barrier in front of the stage 30 minutes before Blind Melon took the stage.

Fans Think Guns N’ Roses Worth the Wait
 
BY JEFF BAHR
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
 
To answer the most important ques­tion about Saturday night's Guns N’ Roses concert: Yes, Axl Rose and the boys showed up. taking the stage at just after 10:30p.m.
 
As for the other key issues, the late start made it impossible to view the entire concert, but at least partway through the show, Rose had not gone into the audience after a video camera. And there had been no riots.
 
There was considerable enthusiasm inside the City Auditorium, though, for the Guns N’ Roses show, which had been sold out since tickets went on sale Feb. 20. A crowd of 10,725 was on hand.
 
There was a sense of anticipation before the show that made the evening seem special. At 8 p.m., a half-hour before the concert was scheduled to begin, seating was packed. Axl Rose, the group’s lead singer, may have a problem with punctuality, but it doesn’t seem to be a problem for Guns N’ Roses fans.
 
Evidence outside the building also indicated that many had waited a consid­erable time to get in. Auditorium person­nel were cleaning up the garbage they left behind.
 
Major disturbances — both on and off the stage — were nonexistent. One fistfight, though, broke out between two men on the floor of the auditorium shortly after the opening act left the stage. Security personnel quickly broke up the fight.
 
A police presence also was noticeable at the concert. Shortly after Guns N' Roses took the stage, close to a dozen police vehicles could be seen outside the auditorium, as well as three officers on horseback.
 
Although violence was at a minimum, decadence was on display. While the crowd waited for the main attraction to take the stage, Guns N’ Roses crew members pointed video cameras at young females in the audience, inviting them to lift up their tops. Several women complied, earning loud reactions from audience members watching the images on two large video screens.
 
Rose has said that he finds it “compli­cated” to get onstage. He would rather not go out until he feels good about performing or until he’s resolved any­thing that's bothering him. He must have felt all right about himself Saturday night.
 
Guns N' Roses came out only 40 minutes after the opening act finished up at 9:50 p.m. Compared with some of the group's long-delayed starts, that wait was a breeze. And because of the video show, many members of the audience probably thought it was even shorter.
 
Blind Melon, the opening act, took the stage at 9 p.m. — a half-hour late. (Apparently the group has learned some­thing from the headliner.)
 
The audience clearly came to hear Guns N’ Roses, however. The reaction Blind Melon earned from the audience was noticeably cool. Some members of the audience could be heard yelling insults at the band, inviting the group to leave the stage.
The reaction eventually irritated vo­calist Shannon Hoon. At one point, he told a section of the audience that if they didn’t quiet down, he would stay onstage for 45 more minutes.
 
He also seemed to be making a point when he said he was from a small town in Indiana, and that “It’s nice that this tour is stopping off in a lot of small, small towns, because we are people, too.”
 
The presence of two display tables — one opposed to rock censorship, the other representing NORML — made the auditorium lobby slightly different from other rock shows.