1992.08.14 - The Province - Big Time Rock Is No Bed Of Roses (Gilby)

Big time rock is no bed of Roses
 
Guns N’ Roses a mixture of agony, ecstasy
 
By TOM HARRISON
 
Four days before the Guns N’ Roses concert that turned into a riot in Montreal, guitarist Gilby Clark is musing on life as the newest member of rock ’n’ roll’s most controversial band.
 
“I’m learning the difference between cancelled and postponed,” he says. At this moment, for instance, he’s at home in L.A. enjoying an unscheduled vacation due to singer Axl Rose’s loss of voice.
 
This has caused the postponement of several shows in the band’s seven week tour with Metallica and Faith No More and contributed to the cancellation of Monday’s B.C. Place concert.
 
Little does Gilby know that Axl’s throat condition will cause the band to curtail its Montreal set after 55 minutes and incite angry fans to go on a rampage.
 
Little could he know that this and a burn accident suffered by Metallica’s James Hetfield at the same show — the real cause of the Vancouver cancellation — will create another another unscheduled vacation.
 
Yet, if there is one thing the guitarist is getting used to, it’s never knowing what Guns N’ Roses are going to stir up next.
 
“It’s funny,” he says. “I watch the TV to find out things about the band and this tour I never knew.”
 
Nine months ago, only weeks after the band had embarked on a world tour to promote the two volume Use Your Illusion LP and long before G N’ R teamed with Metallica, Gilby got the call to replace an unhappy Izzy Stradlin, one of the band’s guitarists and writers.
 
“I had two weeks to learn the whole catalogue. It was a tough day for me because 1 had a bad hangover from the night before - the band wanted to celebrate the occasion. It was strange. After 10 years of struggling, of trying to play music and have a career, suddenly here I am, playing onstage with the biggest rock and roll band in the world.
 
“Nothing I did before could prepare me for this,” Gilby continues, reflecting on his tenure in little known bands that ran the same circuit of bars travelled by Guns N’ Roses. “And 1 think even the guys, after all these years, weren’t prepared for this.
“That’s one of the great things about being in the band -- because we never know what’s going to happen from night to night.”
 
A night to night history of Guns N’ Roses would fill several diaries with lurid tales of drunken behavior, drug abuse, public temper tantrums, private squabbles and open debates on the racist/sexist/homophobic interpretations of Rose-penned lyrics.
Reading them would lead to the overwhelming conclusion that this band has a collective death wish.
 
Which might be true were it not for the also overwhelming evidence of the band’s success, which is based on an overpowering instinct for survival.
 
Guns N’ Roses formed in Los Angeles in 1985 with founding members Rose, guitarists Slash and Stradlin, drummer Steven Adler and bassist Duff McKagan, who, as a former member of Seattle’s Fastbacks, still has a lot of Vancouver friends from the days when the Fastbacks regularly played punk gigs at the Smilin’ Buddha.
 
This was an unholy clash of disparate personalities from the beginning that only got looser and crazier under the influence of hard drugs and drinking — even as the band’s sound got tighter.
 
In the four years since the phe­nomenal Appetite For Destruction, the album that established G N’ R as a supergroup, Rose has given up hard drugs and admitted that he still is plagued by severe psychological disorders he suffered as an abused child, for which he is undergoing therapy.
 
Rose, then, is not the egomaniacal troublemaker less sympathetic observers make him out to be. Ever since he took the stage, Axl and his equally volatile partners, notably Slash, have been dealing with their lives in public. They don’t care who knows it.
 
“Unh, unh,” agrees Gilby. “There’s no check, no balance, no control. They’re still volatile.
 
For Vancouver, meanwhile, the cancellation is the fans’ loss. Perryscope, producers of the concert, will be giving ticket refunds from Saturday at B.C. Place.