2006.11.05 - Continental Airlines Arena, East Rutherford, USA

Metropolitan Talent and Live Nation presents

GUNS N' ROSES
MADISON SQUARE GARDEN - SOLD OUT!
TICKETS STILL AVAILABLE FOR CONTINENTAL AIRLINES ARENA NOVEMBER 5th

GUNS N' ROSES OWN NY !!!

Hot on the heels of their 4 sold out shows at Hammerstein Ballroom in May, Guns N' Roses have just sold out the world renowned Madison Square Garden (Nov 10). It won't be long until New Jersey's Continental Airlines Arena (Nov 5) reaches capacity as well. The 2 New York area concerts are part of a just-announced 36 date North American tour, set to kick off October 20 in Jacksonville, Florida. Former Skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach has been tapped as opening act. With stellar concert reviews and strong ticket sales across the country, Guns N' Roses are currently ranked Number 1 on Pollstar's Top 50 chart ahead of The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Aerosmith who round out the top 5.

Friday, November 10 - 8:00pm
MADISON SQUARE GARDEN - SOLD OUT!

Sunday, November 5 - 8:30pm
TICKETS STILL AVAILABLE FOR CONTINENTAL AIRLINES ARENA
East Rutherford, NJ

Tickets: $89.50, $59.50 & $39.50

Tickets available at the Continental Airlines Arena box office, Ticketmaster locations, online at Ticketmaster.com or charge-by-phone at 201-507-8900, 212-307-7171, 631-888-9000.

All dates, acts and ticket prices subject to change without notice.

A service charge is added to each ticket price.

Axl Rose still leads a revamped Guns N' Roses

By Marty Franzen

Will it be the concert event of the fall season or will it be a huge letdown?

Only lead singer Axl Rose is left with Guns N' Roses, the 1980s and '90s band that earned five gold singles with the songs "Sweet Child O' Mine," "November Rain," "Welcome to the Jungle," "Don't Cry" and "Patience," scheduled to play the Continental Airlines Arena off Exit 16W of the New Jersey Turnpike in East Rutherford, at 8:30 p.m. Sunday.

And when Rose was joined by bandmates Duff McKagan, Izzy Stradling (replaced by Gilby Clarke), Slash, Steven Adler (replaced by Matt Sorum) and Dizzy Reed, the group sold more than 30 million copies of just five albums.

But the bubble burst for Guns N' Roses in '94 and the band members went their separate ways. Slash, Sorum and Clarke formed Slash's Snakepit for one album, while Rose tried to keep GNR going on his own.

For the last 10 years, Rose has promised fans a new album titled "Chinese Democracy," but so far, only a few songs have turned up on his overseas shows and no CD release is expected anytime soon.

So it is that GNR plays the New York City market, one of the most populous in the country, hoping to draw as many fans as it can in one shot, to scrounge up some quick cash and some new interest in the band.

Along that same line, GNR has a new three-CD boxed set of interviews, biographies, memorabilia and posters, recently released to stores titled simply "Collector's Box."

For this show, expect the hits, a few new numbers and other chart successes like "Paradise City," "Nightrain," "You Could be Mine," "Live and Let Die," "Yesterdays" and "Sympathy for the Devil."
Tickets: $37.50 to $87.50. Information: (215) 336-2000.

Bach back to basics

'Savage Animal!' is history for former Skid Row singer

By WES ORSHOSKI
FOR THE STAR-LEDGER

Guns 'N' Roses
With Sebastian Bach
Where and when: 8:30 p.m. Sunday, Continental Airlines Arena, East Rutherford, and 8 p.m. Nov. 10, Madison Square Garden, New York
How much : $37.50-$87.50 in East Rutherford and $49.50 and $89.50 in New York; call (609) 520-8383 or visit www.ticketmaster.com.

If it's important to laugh at ourselves - if it builds character - then right about now Sebastian Bach is feeling chock full of character.

Since the airing of his most recent VH1 reality series, "Supergroup" - which charted the 12-day life of a so-called rock supergroup fronted by the former Skid Row singer and featuring Ted Nugent and Anthrax's Scott Ian, among others - Bach has had to laugh at his own ridiculousness.

Just two words that he uttered on the show have come back to haunt him.

"Everywhere I go, all I hear is . . . Wait, you wanna take a guess? Two words. Come on!" he says.
"Savage Animal!" he says, shouting the absurd name he came up with for the band during one episode. (It wasn't used.)

"Come on, dude! It rolls off the tongue," Bach cracks, mocking himself.

"Everywhere I go, there's drunken chicks shouting, `Savage Animal!' It rolls off the tongue! Whoooo! Everywhere I go, every e-mail I get: 'Savage Animal' and a thousand exclamation points. That's all I ever hear!"

Despite the ribbing, and even if parts of "Supergroup" make him want to "put my foot through the television," Bach can't knock the series too much: Some 10 years after he was booted from Skid Row, he's found new management and is working on a new album and record deal. All thanks to the show, which aired several times.

"Everything has just snowballed," he said.

But, most importantly to the Lincroft-based singer, he's hitting America's biggest arenas again, as the opening act for Guns 'N' Roses. While he's been in a couple of shows on Broadway and has become a relative fixture on VH1 in recent years - he's starred in several of the cable network's shows, including the video program "Forever Wild" - both those gigs are fun distractions when compared to music, he says.

"You just can't compare saying, 'Hey, man, here's the next Queensryche video' to singing '18 and Life' in a sold-out arena with lighters - although now in 2006 it's cell phones - with everybody's hands up in the air," he says. "Sometimes I don't realize what I am, that I've been doing it since I was a teenager. I've been doing it so long that, really, all I know is rock. There's your headline, dude: 'ALL I KNOW IS ROCK.'"

Like anything that involves Axl Rose, Bach's recent out-of-the-blue reconnection with the Guns 'N' Roses frontman has been an interesting ride. About a month before the band's recent stand at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York, Bach got a message, which he immediately thought was a joke.

"I got this text saying, `Hey Bas, you still around New York? You want to hang out?' And I was like, 'Who's pretending they're Axl Rose on my cell phone?' So I pressed 'call sender,' and I hear this 'Hello.' I was like 'Holy f- - -!'"

Rose and Bach performed the Guns 'N' Roses classic "My Michelle" together onstage at the Hammerstein three times; then Rose added Bach as opening act for the Europe tour. At the end of the last set in London, Rose's voice apparently gave out on him and Bach finished the show, singing "Night Train" and "Paradise City."

In terms of his own set, Bach says fans can expect the expected: New songs interspersed with Skid Row anthems like "Youth Gone Wild" and the power ballad "I Remember You."

A long, late night with Axl Rose

By BRADLEY BAMBARGER
STAR-LEDGER STAFF

There was a surprise guest at Sunday's Guns N' Roses show at Continental Airlines Arena - Axl Rose, the cuddly version.

The singer - whose public tantrums, brawls and brutal dealings with intimates and fans are infamous - seemed to be in a jolly mood, despite facing a surprising number of empty seats. Rose commented on the day's bright weather, continually thanked the crowd and even joked about the already late show's hour-long delay as not being his fault "this time."

Since he made guitarist Slash and his other original Guns N' Roses mates walk the plank out of the piratical Sunset Strip band, the 44-year-old Rose has become something of a dark clown. The obsessive-compulsive indulgence that has delayed the release of the first G N 'R album under his sole leadership is a decade-long joke; many fans would expect to see a unicorn appear before his mooted "Chinese Democracy."

The original Guns N 'Roses created one of the iconic rock albums of the late `80s, "Appetite for Destruction." And although the Meadowlands crowd was about 4,000 people shy of capacity, the G N 'R brand name still draws - Friday's Madison Square Garden show is sold-out, and four May shows at New York's Hammerstein Ballroom sold out in minutes.

Rose and his seven-piece backing band opened Sunday's set in style with three "Appetite" signatures - the sleaze-rock classic "Welcome to the Jungle," "It's So Easy" (blurring sexy/sexist in the "Spinal Tap" tradition) and authentically gritty heroin tale "Mr. Brownstone." Rose's grandiose side took over, though, with his long-standing covers of Paul McCartney's James Bond theme "Live and Let Die" (all the spectacle without the humor) and Bob Dylan's "Knocking on Heaven's Door" (grim karaoke).

As for material from "Chinese Democracy," the rocker "Better" was the standout, brimming with brawny hooks. The title track boasted a jaggedly appealing riff, but Rose indulged his inner Andrew Lloyd Webber on an awful ballad, "The Blues."

Whether or not Rose has had plastic surgery as it appears, the years have not been kind to his voice. His vocals were a mannered mix of squeals and growls, which grew more strangulated as the night went on. The stripper's anthem "Sweet Child O' Mine" even brought to mind Adam Sandler's "Saturday Night Live" parody.

Although the semi-acoustic jangle of "Use to Love Her" ("but I had to kill her") sounded like edgy black humor in the `80s, it just sounds ugly now. And anyone enamored of the romance in a real rock band would be disappointed by Rose's group of anonymous hired hands. Now in hit act Velvet Revolver with his fellow G N 'R exiles, the charismatic Slash was most missed during the over-the-top power ballad "November Rain," as the climactic guitar solo drizzled rather than stormed.

For a supposed megalomaniac, Rose was unusually generous with the spotlight; in this, he has something in common with Barbra Streisand, oddly. Like her recent use of smarmy vocal quartet Il Divo to cover her costume changes, Rose allowed all three of his guitarists and his piano player to take extended between-song solos. This was obviously to give his vocal cords a break, but these noodling features killed any momentum and bloated the set. The show didn't end until after 2 a.m. (with Rose having gone on at 11:40 p.m. after an hour-long technical glitch delayed his start following openers Sebastian Bach and Papa Roach.)

After a bit of show biz good humor that even he found forced, Rose exhibited self-knowledge that perhaps Streisand wouldn't. He said, "It's like that joke about the key to acting being sincerity. Once you learn to fake sincerity, you've got it made."