GUNS N’ ROSES at the Rogers Centre, Saturday, July 16. Rating: NNNN
If you’re looking for a critical review of Guns N’ Roses at the Rogers Centre, this is not it. If you’re a person who hates when writers use the first-person point of view, this won’t be for you. There are “I”s all over this thing. Here’s the first:
I went to the concert knowing I was going to have the time of my life. I knew this because I wanted to have the time of my life and I made that happen. That is a thing you can do. The good energy you put out feels awesome and even comes back to you, often in the form of high-fives from strangers and singalongs and free beers. Lesson one.
Instead of taking notes, like the man next to me did, who barely ever glanced at the stage where three reunited members of the classic lineup – singer Axl Rose, lead guitarist Slash and bass player Duff McKagan – were playing together for this historic tour, I thrashed my hair around and punched my fists toward the roof and air-drummed like an idiot and sang loudly enough to be a bit hoarse the next day.
My sister Lynette, next to me, did the same. It was like we were (non-competitively) egging each other on to be more into it, to let loose harder, to not pay too much attention to the concertgoers around us (though you have to be respectful. We kept our limbs within a tight, unobtrusive perimeter).
Despite having reached and/or nearing the age of 40, despite the gaping arena often making the band sound like an undecipherable blob, despite the bloated aspects of the two-and-a-half-hour set, we tapped into that old teenage feeling.
But the bigger thrill came from discovering that it was possible to let go in a way that we weren’t able to when we were younger. You’d think the capacity for this would diminish with age, and probably it does for some. But age can enhance it, too. You get older and more comfortable with who you are, and that acceptance leads you to a new, more fun place. It’s like you’re wearing your real self in public for the first time. Lesson two.
It helped that the band opened with It’s So Easy, an inspired move. It helped that Axl’s voice sounded excellent, and that they played two-thirds of 1987’s Appetite For Destruction and Patience from Lies and the best songs from the Illusion albums, and covers of Attitude by the Misfits and Johnny Thunders’s You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory, sung by Duff.
Summing up what your favourite band means to you isn’t easy. Guns N’ Roses changed my life. They changed many people’s lives. There is a lot I could write about that, but I won’t. For context, I’ll just say that my sister and I were kids isolated in the suburbs of Halifax when Appetite came out, looking for a way to make our worlds bigger and knowing music was, for us, the way to do it.
We were good kids. We folded our hands on our school desks and passed in assignments on time and ate dinner with our family every night and didn’t cause trouble at home because there was already enough of that going on. And when we started going to shows and starting our own bands, we stayed in the background as much as possible due to the very real possibility of humiliation. We did our best not to take up space, and that came easy to us.
That was a huge part of the appeal of Guns N’ Roses. They were the baddest. They took up a lot of space and still do, running across the stage like maniacs and cranking their amps and letting their often-problematic opinions pour out. We put their posters on our walls for character study. Their sneers, their toppled-over booze bottles and visible pubic hair, their mesmerizing tangle of accessories.
The first time I heard Appetite, I stood alone and frozen in my bedroom, door locked, headphones attached to my Walkman, the sounds awakening electric energy in the deepest cells of my body.
I listened to it while staring at the band photo, and at the rape scene illustration of the predatory and avenging robots and the thrown-away woman with her underwear around her ankles. The way that drawing made me feel was and still is impossible for me to articulate, but it added to the unsettling mix of danger and damage building inside me.
By the end of Side One, I was leaping across my room like an animal. I almost punched my fist through my bunny wallpaper. I felt newly alive, but I had to be careful to keep the energy bottled up. I got the sense that if it spilled out, it would cause some sort of madness to take over that I might not come back from.
Katarina Benzova
That energy returned at the concert, but the threat of madness didn’t. That’s another great thing about adulthood. You’ve got tools. You know yourself better. You can swing close to the edge and reel yourself back in. You’re no longer a troubled teenager without access to therapy and a support network and self-care. Lesson three.
Then there are the rock ’n’ roll clichés that Guns N’ Roses and most other bands built/build their careers on, stuff you buy into part-and-parcel when you’re young. But the thing is, no two lives look the same, nor should they. We each find our own ratio of badassery and goodness, wildness and responsibility, darkness and light. Lesson four.
But aspects of the past still rule. This is a nostalgia tour, after all. As the band kicked into Rocket Queen, the song Lynette and I most hoped they’d play, she yelled over to me in ecstasy, “This was the first drum beat I ever learned!”
And I caught the memory of her as a 10-year-old goofball sitting in her bedroom with her dorky practice pad, on a quilt covered in music notes, and the past and present swept into each other all blurry and mixed together.
Even though it seems like the average person values music less and less these days, it’s important to remember that we can all be transported by it. And then we can bring what the past taught us into the present and make the future count even more. Lesson five.
carlag@nowtoronto.com | @carlagillis
