2006.09.20 - Warfield Theatre, San Francisco, USA

Guns N' Roses comeback not bad, but not nearly good enough

By Tony Hicks
Contra Costa Times, Walnut Creek, Calif.

Axl Rose has a lot to make up for. How he's going to do it is still a mystery, even after seeing the singer and his band, Gun N' Roses, at the Warfield in San Francisco Wednesday night.

If you don't want to hear comparisons to the old GNR, stop reading now. That's what's going to happen when a one guy hijacks the name of a legendary band, doesn't tour or make records for a decade, then comes back resting squarely on the deeds of years past.

Rose has hired a stage full of musicians to play under the moniker that so many people still know and love. No Slash to play guitar anymore? No problem. Rose hired three great players who look and sound like superstars though three was probably a bit of overkill, , leading one to the obvious conclusion as to the identifiable sound and skill level of the old guys.

No Duff on bass? No problem. Rose hires Tommy Stinson, the bassist from the Replacements, one of the greatest alt-rock bands to ever grace the planet.

No Matt Sorum on drums? Rose gets Brian "Brain" Mantia, the excellent drummer of the Bay Area's own Primus.

That's a lot of credibility with which Rose has armed himself to take Guns N' Roses into its new phase. Well, at least the touring version of the new phase. We're still waiting (more than a decade) for the release of GNR's infamously oft-delayed "Chinese Democracy" record.

So the question is this: What was Rose trying to accomplish Wednesday night? Is it truly a new Guns N' Roses he's shaping, or is he trying to replicate the feats of the old band while nudging the current lineup into new territory?

It wasn't clear. Rose may not realize that without a new record, and playing with an ever-shifting line-up of non-household names, fans can only judge the new GNR on the old GNR. As far as that goes, they sounded fine. They played all the old stuff during a late-running set that, while a nice trip down memory lane, still fell short of expectations. That's what happens when a legendary band lets four out of five original members leave and waits more than a decade to do anything.

While Rose is still a dynamic frontman with a unique voice, so much of GNR used to depend on the laid-back coolness-that-could-explode-at-anytime vibe of the former members. It's hard to even call the new GNR anything but an Axl Rose solo band, featuring some nice backing players.

Looking better and more lively than what he's shown on scarce TV appearances in the past few years, Rose himself fought through sound problems to attack the stage like the Axl of old.

From opener "Welcome to the Jungle," through "It's So Easy," "Mr. Brownstone," "Live and Let Die," "Sweet Child O' Mine," and "You Could be Mine," everything sounded good and looked good, except for a couple of minor hiccups on "It's So Easy." At least, everything was as right and good as possible with so many unidentifiable faces on stage.

That's the thing guitarists Robin Finck, Ron Thai and Richard Fortis are all very good players (though we could've done without three guitar soloists taking up so much of a 21/2-hour set). All three try damn hard, running about, striking the right rock poses, sneering ... all the standard stuff from Rockstar 101. But that in itself was strange, as GNR never had to try so hard. The new guys are doing their best, but when it comes down to it, they painfully lack by comparison. It takes three guys bashing about to equal the absolute coolness of Slash and Izzy, who never had to resort to punching strings and doing windmills to make a point.

The few new songs scattered about the set were short of memorable, lacking the band's former and very-underrated natural groove. Some songs dragged ("Knocking on Heaven's Door,") and some were appropriately epic, like "November Rain," though Slash was dully missed. The crowd didn't seem to care who was up there playing under the GNR banner, with monstrous sing-alongs all night, especially during "Patience."

Maybe old fans need to get over the fact that it's a new century for GNR. But until Rose and his new crew can forge an identity with a new record one of these years, Guns N' Roses won't be able to escape the shadow of its former greatness.

Axl Rose leads Guns N' Roses back to the jungle

By Peter Hartlaub
Chronicle Pop Culture Critic

When you're waiting outside a Guns N' Roses show at the Warfield in San Francisco, with the band still working the sound check an hour after the show was supposed to start and a line around the block so long that the back nearly touches the front, the imagination naturally wanders to how things might go wrong.

Our doomsday scenario: Axl Rose comes out at 2 a.m., plays two and a half songs, throws the mike stand at the sound man and storms off stage -- sparking a riot that leaves the 900 block of Market Street a crater of smoldering rubble.

In reality, something even stranger happened: The band appeared an almost-reasonable two hours late; played a tight two-hour, 15-minute set that sounded a lot like early Guns N' Roses; and Rose made a convincing case that he's finally in a good place.

"Tommy told me people are getting a little smashed in the front," a concerned Rose said early in the show, without a hint of a snarl for the security guards up front. "Everyone want to take a little half-step back so people can breathe?"

Rose's nearly-a-decade-in-the-making "Chinese Democracy" album may never come out, surpassing Spinal Tap's "Smell the Glove" as the ultimate rock band punch line. (Guns N' Roses hasn't released a studio album since 1993, a couple of years before the last of the original musicians left the band.) But for now, at least, Guns N' Roses II appears to have exorcised the demons that made Rose one of the most notoriously surly touring artists in history.

Wednesday night's sold-out show was the first of two at the Warfield -- part of a four-night smaller-venue warm-up before the band begins its first U.S. trek since 2002, when riots related to the band's inability to take the stage on time led promoters to scuttle the tour.

If the buyer's market outside the Warfield was any indication, confidence isn't high that this tour will turn out any better, and there could be plenty of empty seats inside the bigger arenas this time around. If you were a good enough negotiator, you probably could secure an upper-level balcony seat for a pack of cigarettes and half a cheese sandwich.

But those discounted scalped tickets turned out to be a decent bargain -- and not just for the kitsch value. After a spirited hourlong set by Sebastian Bach that had us at "I Remember You," Rose bounded out at 11:12 p.m. to the first notes of "Welcome to the Jungle." His conservative black jacket, gray T-shirt, jeans and red boots were typical of his four changes in dress. If it weren't for his shirt unbuttoned to the navel for half the show, he could have been going for a job interview at the Gap.

The band looks nothing like the original lineup -- only keyboardist Dizzy Reed has been held over from the 1991 "Use Your Illusion I & II" days, and no musician is left from "Appetite for Destruction" -- but it played accurate renditions of all the hits, with three guitarists, including former Nine Inch Nail Robin Finck and former Psychedelic Fur Richard Fortus, sharing the leads. Ex-Replacement Tommy Stinson is back on bass, and Primus drummer and Cupertino native Brain fill out the rhythm section, somehow avoiding getting seared by the mushroom clouds of pyrotechnics in the back of the stage. (Haven't these guys heard of Great White?)

But the new lineup sounded surprisingly tight as it barreled through 18 songs, plus four extended solos showcasing Reed and the guitarists -- including an apparently irony-free instrumental rendition of Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful" by Finck and Fortus. The set was heavy on songs from "Appetite," the band's first studio album. Four so-so songs from the alleged new album sounded like they could be outtakes from "Use Your Illusion III."

The 44-year-old Rose isn't quite as spry as he used to be, but he's back to his fighting weight, and his signature snake move is starting to look cobra-like again. (For a while, he was looking more like a python that just swallowed an antelope.)

His voice gets mixed reviews. The singer didn't miss many notes, and at times showed the range that he had in his prime, especially when he traded lines with Bach on the "Appetite" gem "My Michelle" -- easily the highlight of the evening.

But whether it was fatigue or poor sound mixing or both, his voice completely faded out at times. Rose also had the bizarre habit of sprinting backstage during almost every extended guitar solo -- as if he had a tuna casserole he needed to check in the tour bus oven.

A few incidents might have even deserved a swift and angry response, including a water bottle thrown on stage and a blast of feedback during the first of the new tunes. Rose seemed to let it pass, singing a few more crowd-pleasers and making nice with the audience, up until the confetti-filled encore.
"Please take care getting home!"

It was 1:27 a.m. Who else was going to be on the road?