Something they don’t tell you about being a major league rock star is that your relationship with music will almost certainly suffer. Which, in a horrible way, makes sense.
No matter how cool your job is, it eventually becomes your job. Which is to say it ultimately becomes a tiresome drain on your soul that you’d rather headbutt a hornet’s nest than deal with without getting paid for it. Yes, even one of the great joys in life, like music. This is the case at every level of rock stardom, whether you’re an up-and-coming indie band or a titan like Axl Rose.
If anything, it makes more sense for the titans to have a complicated relationship with the thing that, previously, gave them the most joy in life. Guns N’ Roses are actually a perfect example of this, now that I think about it. You get a bunch of ambitious, talented guys together on the Sunset Strip in the mid-1980s. The time when not only is the strip one of the most exciting places for music in the entire world, but when the kind of music being played there is colonising the pop charts. Then, they play that music, but just inherently better than everyone else.
After spending a few years on that scene tooling around in bands, Guns N’ Roses were together for all of about two years before becoming an overnight success. Becoming one of the world’s biggest bands, essentially off the strength of the music video for ‘Welcome To The Jungle‘. It really was that quick too, going from the same clubs they’d cut their teeth in to the biggest venues in the land within months. Now, this is obviously the dream, at least on the surface, but think about it for a moment. You go from music being your passion to music making you have to do, that a small fleet of suits are depending on you to do.
There’s only so much sympathy to be earned here, mind you. Fundamentally, they were in a position to play music to millions of people all over the world and get paid handsomely for it. Axl Rose in particular took to this new normal with aplomb, developing an ego to match. One wonders whether his taste developed to match, too.
In 1992, at the height of Guns N’ Roses mania, he gave an interview where he admitted to catching as many live shows of a band as he could of a band he probably wouldn’t have been caught dead listening to not so long ago.
Which band was Axl Rose obsessed with?
This is especially big of him because at the time, Axl Rose regarded music journalists with a hatred and suspicion so intense that one would assume they burnt down his granny’s house rather than published some quotes of his out of context. Yet, he sat down with Andy Secher, not one of the writers he called out by name in the infamously pissy temper tantrum ‘Get In The Ring’, and was surprisingly open about what he was listening to when asked about it.
“Well, Jane’s Addiction was my band, and they broke up,” he begins, something that Axl Rose shares with the late, great Taylor Hawkins. Then he starts really opening up. “I really don’t get the chance to see that many bands live because it’s just too hectic. But I’m really into U2, and I was really into their stadium shows. I went to every one of their shows that I could.”
Now, considering that at the time, these were U2’s Zoo TV stadium shows, that’s totally understandable.
These are famously some of the most eye-poppingly huge stadium concerts ever played, with a set that, over 30 years after the tour concluded, is still mind-boggling to behold now. U2 themselves were about as cool as they’d ever get off the back of their masterpiece Achtung Baby, but that’s still a low bar to clear when it comes to cool. However, that kind of success makes you view other bands differently.
After all, Guns N’ Roses were one of the few bands at U2’s level. To Axl Rose, Bono wouldn’t have been some stuck-up ponce trying to save the world, but, whisper it, a peer of his. Someone who would actually understand him on a level that no one else in the world could. That’s what happens when you join that upper echelon of rock stardom: you view music in a much different way than the rest of the world, and you start appreciating it in a way you never thought you could before.
