Sign In
Register
Help
Peter Hartlaub, Chronicle Pop Culture Critic
Friday, September 22, 2006
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!"
Back to top
MultiQuote
