Axl Rose arrived at the airport in Rosario, Argentina earlier this week, and a fan caught him on video screaming “Get the fuck away from me, you fucking idiot!” at some guy as he exited the car. The guy’s crime appears to be standing too close to Axl’s door as the vocalist attempts to exit the vehicle, which is, in fact, an offense punishable by death in some countries.

I have no idea who the guy is; Blabbermouth says it’s a “fellow passenger” in Rose’s car, which seems right, ’cause there’s a barricade of cops protecting Rose from the fans, so he can’t just be some random dude. Assuming he is an employee of The Gingered One’s, Rose’s rage seems wholly warranted, because, well, that guy needs to learn his place. Good help is so hard to find these days.

-AR

We got like a gajillion e-mails yesterday about The Mini Band, a sextet that consists of four eight year-olds and two ten year-olds who recently covered Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” And when I say “a gajillion e-mails,” I am exaggerating only slightly. My own personal e-mail was flooded with “tips” from friends and family members who don’t even give a shit about metal.

It’s not surprising, though, ’cause these lil’ tykes are adorable, and actually sound really good, especially when you take their ages into consideration. And given how the actual Metallica and Axl Rose’s pseudo-GN’R sound these days, well…

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Despite not being the kind of grim n’ gritty tune Guns N’ Roses were most famous for, and despite having a ridiculous video in which Axl Rose swims with dolphins for no apparent reason and reminds everyone that he has more money than they do, “Estranged” is my favorite GN’R song. And I always thought it would be cool to see Axl’s Nu-GN’R do the track with Buckethead, ’cause I bet that dude could totally rip it.

So, of course, now that Buckethead has already been out of the band for seven years, Axl did the song at last night’s Rock in Rio performance.

Not a shock that it’s a little anticlimactic, ’cause for every one thing the band got right, there’s something else they got wrong: Axl can still sing the low parts pretty well, but not the high parts, and at one point his voice cracks like he was me at my bar mitzvah; Bumblefoot sounds great, but for some reason looks like Robin Finck now; Dj Ashba sounds so-so, but continues to do a ridiculous Slash impersonation, and there’s a much better guitar player who isn’t just aping someone else, Richard Fortus, standing right there on stage, but for some reason Axl won’t let him play the leads; Matt Sorum wasn’t invited, so the drums actually sound right for a change. So I guess ya take the good ya take the bad ya take them both and you still don’t have Slash in the band.

GN’R apparently really are going to a U.S. tour starting at the end of this month; we’ll see if they break out any other oldies but goodies.

-AR

[via Bumblefoot's Twitter]

So long as Axl Rose, Slash, Izzy Stradlin, and Duff McKagan are all involved, no one would be more excited about a reunion of the original Guns N’ Roses than me. Yeah, I’d prefer if Steven Adler were the drummer instead of Matt Sorum, but that seems unlikely, and I’d be willing to settle. I’d be severely depressed about it, but I’d probably even be willing to settle for Gilby Clarke instead of Izzy if it came down to it. And I know there’s really no chance that the reunion would be great; Axl has turned into Yosemite Sam and Slash has a pacemaker and can’t run around the way he used to, so, at best, it would be a total nostalgia trip. But it would be a lot of fun, and given that Rose has completely failed to maintain a stable line-up of G&R (a.k.a. “Guns N’ Roses 2.0,” a.k.a. “Nu-GN’R”) anyway, might as well, right?

And now Guns N’ Roses are one of the fifteen finalist nominees for induction into the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2012. And it seems like they have a pretty decent chance of being one of the five artists who will actually get in, despite the fact that they only made four albums of original material in four years and only toured for an additional two, because, well, those albums sold a gajillion copies, and inducting them would, frankly, be good for business. And so, of course, people are starting to get really excited, because if they get inducted, maybe that reunion we’ve all been dreaming about for almost twenty freakin’ years will finally happen, right?

Only here’s the thing: There is absolutely no chance in hell that the original band will reunite, even if they are inducted into a meaningless museum.

Click to read more…

Dates for a Guns N’ Roses tour of America have been slowly trickling out for the past couple of weeks, but even as the world’s last remaining Axl Apologist, I haven’t felt compelled to write about them, ’cause, well… the itinerary was clearly not at all complete, and I kept thinking that maybe there’d finally be some kind of proper tour announcement and we could put all the info in one post. Silly me.

Now Metal Insider says that the tour is a go, and I trust Metal Insider… but the tour schedule is still lacking in key information, like, oh, I dunno, venues and dates. And it’s worth noting that neither GN’R's official website nor their official MySpace page has any mention of these gigs. Even  fan site Here Today… Gone to Hell! — which is as close to a regularly updated official site as this version of the band may ever get (administrator Jarmo Luukkonen has toured with the band and was even thanked in the liner notes for Chinese Democracy) — only lists a small handful of them. That strikes me as being highly suspicious, because Rose has cancelled entire tours before and claimed he knew nothing about them until he read about the concerts on the internet (hell, he’s cancelled shows even when he did admit to knowing about them), so until there’s a press release with a statement from the man himself, I don’t think anyone should get their hopes up that this is really happening.

Click to read more…

Tomorrow marks the twentieth anniversary of the release of Guns N’ Roses’ double-disc opus, Use Your Illuision. It seems like public perception has soured on these albums over the years — even Axl Rose and Slash have accused them of being bloated and over-produced — but I still love ‘em to death. For one thing, seeing as they ended up being the last proper studio albums of original material from the actual Guns N’ Roses (not Axl Rose’s solo group or whatever),  I’m glad that the band basically included every song they had written up ’til that point here. And for another thing, I love the diversity of the records — that they didn’t just end up being Appetite for More Destruction. Maybe the Illusion albums ended up being a failed experiment, but I still, to this day, find them to be a pretty exciting experiment*.

So. Since we didn’t do a “Question of the Week” this week, and I wanted to do something to commemorate this anniversary, I thought we’d play a fun game that Vince and I (and a lot of our other friends) used to play in the past: whittling these two mammoth albums down to one collection. Geffen Records actually did that themselves in 1998, releasing a twelve-song single volume version of UYI that, if you ask me, had a pretty strange selection of songs on it… but it’s an entertaining time waster to see if you can do better.

There are no rules to the game, other than a) all the songs on your track list have to come from the Illusions albums (duh), and b) it all has to fit on one CD (roughly 80 minutes), despite the fact that CDs are now obsolete. I’ve included my own personal version after the jump… I’ll be more than a little excited to see all of yours as well.

Click to read more…

Photo by Clay Patrick McBride

Sebastian Bach’s new record is surprising and unsurprising. That is, no one who has witnessed the former Skid Row singer’s recent playdates with members of Asking Alexandria and Black Veil Brides could be shocked by Kicking And Screaming‘s slick, modern vibe. Plus, a clue was provided by each of Bach’s personnel moves, be it a 21-year old guitar prodigy, or a producer of tight radio rockers (Shinedown, Saliva) and lovable old guys (Iommi, David Lee Roth). And duh it’s 2011: For mainstream rock, the choice is big production or small potential. And there is nothing small about Sebastian Bach.

Anyway, those were my thoughts during the opening notes of Kicking And Screaming. But the album’s surprise element mounted with each song: He pulled it off! Yes, Bach is great at bright, pop-punkish hard rock throughout the totally lovable Kicking. Eventually it dawned on me that Bach might’ve been supplementing — not discarding — his OG fans via cavorting with scenebros, dissing of today’s Skid Row, and tabloid-friendly barroom antics. Via producer, boy wonder axeman, and his own snarling edge, his aim was a collection of jamz for both sensibilities and their overlap. Via classic Bach thrust and charm, Kicking is a Skid Row fan’s newest friend.

Last week, I spoke with Baz about Kicking And Screaming‘s creative team, singing high, being high, Steven Adler, John 5, Phil Varone, and tons more in an epic MetalSucks interview that crescendos from chill (excited new album chatter) to silly (an impromptu stoner giggle party) to rampage (invective against the Skid Row he never bargained for). Read and laugh!

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To help promote their upcoming tour, on October 11 Judas Priest will release The Chosen Few, their umpteenth career retrospective, and one which does not feature any new material. The Chosen Few does have a hook, though — I mean, beyond the fact that the band members appear on the cover only as silhouettes, I assume at least in part to downplay the fact that a certain key member is no longer in the group.

No, the hook  (and this is actually a neat idea) is that the band has let a lot of other celebrity musicians — including Ozzy, Lemmy, James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kerry King, Slash, and Vinnie Paul  – choose which songs would appear on the collection. And, yeah, it’s interesting to know that Zakk Wylde is way into “Grinder,” and and that Randy Blythe and David Coverdale might actually have something to talk about at a cocktail party, and that Joe Satriani likes his Priest heavier than I might have suspected.

But like I said, there’s no new material here, so I can’t quite imagine why anyone would want this album anyway. The coolest thing about The Chosen Few is seeing which dude chose which song, and you can do that after the jump. So, look, we just saved you ten bucks.

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Slash’s latest “They paid me so I showed up” gig is apparently going to be an appearance on Comedy Central’s Roast of Charlie Sheen, which filmed last week. I was kinda hoping that the Slashter might try his hand and making a few jokes at Sheen’s expense — I mean, it’s not like he’d have to write his own bits or anything, he’d just have to get up and deliver what was written for him — but the below clip suggests that he’s just gonna play guitar. Not the worst thing in the world but not the most exciting, either.

Metal Insider notes that Comedy Central has been using Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” in promos for the roast, and, indeed, Sheen and Slash do appear on a train… although Slash doesn’t play the song, I guess either ’cause he didn’t want to, or ’cause the execs at Comedy Central didn’t wanna hafta pay any further licensing fees.

ANYWAY, these roasts are often pretty funny, so Slash or not, this thing might be worth watching. It airs this coming Monday, September 19.

-AR

Remember Motley Crue’s The Dirt? Of course you do, it’s like the single greatest thing ever written by anyone anywhere in the history of writing or even conveying stories via grunts and finger painting on cave walls. And Neil Strauss, the guy who put it together, clearly understands storytelling as an art form; for one of the cardinal rules of telling a story is “Grab your reader right from the start,” and Strauss certainly accomplished that. Here’s the entire first paragraph of The Dirt, told from the point of view of Vince Neil:

“Her name was Bullwinkle. We called her that because she had a face like a moose. But Tommy, even though he could get any girl he wanted on the Sunset Strip, would not break up with her. He loved her and wanted to marry her, he kept telling us, because she could spray her cum across the room.”

BRILLIANT. A++++ WDBWA. In just four sentences, Strauss has pretty much assured that you will read the rest of The Dirt. This paragraph has sex, it has humor, it makes immediate reference to other members of Motley Crue, and it offers a “Psst! Wanna hear some gossip?” tone that allows the reader to feel secure that he or she did not waste his or her money. No wonder this thing was such a high seller.

Now, let’s contrast this with the opening paragraph of It’s So Easy and Other Lies, Duff McKagan’s new autobiography, the first eighty pages of which are now available for free download here:

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Guns N’ Roses not-quite-complete video trilogy from the early 90s — “Don’t Cry,” “November Rain,” and “Estranged” — remains infamous twenty years after its release, I imagine because –

• The videos were INSANELY popular at the time. I think at least one of them played every hour on the hour on MTV.
• They are, of course, completely ridiculous.

So this comic strip version of the “November Rain” video, which was posted recently on Funny or Die, is really taking a cheap shot at an easy target. It’s not news, for example, that the dude overreacting to rain and jumping through the cake makes no sense.

Still, as far as easy targets go, this is a pretty funny one.

Go here to check it out, then pray for comic versions of “Don’t Cry” and “Estranged” in our comments section below.

-AR

[via Badass Digest]

Spurred by a lazy crossword clue in The Onion (36 down, four letters: “Faith No More’s only hit”), MetalSucks contributor Anso DF dedicates every single day in August to celebration and exploration of the San Francisco alt-metal greats. Here we prove that history’s greatest band landed more than one commercial hit (crossword answer: “Epic” natch), we revel in FNM’s embarrassing wealth of winning album tracks (themselves often fit for chart topping), and we dip into the staggering best of the b-sides (ditto). Along the way, we survey the context of FNM’s big break (amid similarly seminal acts Jane’s Addiction, Nine Inch Nails, and Ween) to the post-Nevermind, panic-based music commerce in which the brilliantly versatile, fearless powerhouse band operated until their 1998 demise. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it.

Song ”The Cowboy Song”

Written by um likely Patton (L); my guess is Gould, Martin (M). If you know, internet me @AnsoDF okay? Thanks!

Released 1989, 1991

Appears on ”From Out Of Nowhere” 12″ single (UK), Live At Brixton Academy CD (UK)

Produced by Matt Wallace

Guitars by Jim Martin

Key lyric ”The next thing you know/There you are standing on the edge.”

Single? B-side from “Nowhere” single in UK, add-on to live album Live At Brixton Academy.

Click to read more…

I wasn’t alive back in the 1980s to see it firsthand, but from what I understand it was considered cool back then to play guitar solos. And I can see why: if you are home sick from school and you watch VH1 Classic, whenever the guy in the video plays a solo, the crowd goes crazy. All the dudes are like “OMG he is so talented!!!” and all the chicks are like “GET IN MY PUSSY!!” It must have been awesome to be a guitarist back then!!

But that was a long time ago, and things have changed a lot. These days, only fat guys with ponytails and glasses care about guitar solos. Nobody thinks it’s cool to be like “CHECK ME OUT, I’M SHREDDING THE FRETBOARD *WEEDLY WEEDLY WEEDLY*” There’s only one thing that makes dudes lose their shit and chicks get wet in 2011: BREAKDOWNS!

Unlike a lot of you, I’ve been listening to metal since late 2004/early 2005, so I think I know what I am talking about. With that said, I’m not a musician, but I know a lot of you are, so I am asking you, the readers: ARE BREAKDOWNS THE NEW GUITAR SOLO???

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1) Be nicer to Sebastian Bach
2) Compare penis sizes with Tommy Lee
3) Hire Phil LaBonte as a vocal coach
4) Hire Billy Milano as a personal trainer
5) Hire Tripp Eisen as a baby sitter
6) Sleep with present-day Tawny Kitaen
7) Help Danzig clean up his motherfucking bricks, bitch
8) Listen to Ted Nugent talk about politics
9) Listen to Ted Nugent talk about romance
10) Listen to Ted Nugent talk about Ted Nugent

Click to read more…

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Welcome to “Question of the Week,” a (not really at all) weekly debate amongst the MetalSucks staff regarding a recent hot button issue.

We haven’t done one one of these all summer, but we came up with a fun one for this week:

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME AND PLAY ANY METAL BAND/MUSICIAN SOME OF THEIR MUSIC AND/OR SHOW THEM PHOTOS/VIDEOS OF THEMSELVES FROM THEIR FUTURE (OUR PRESENT), WHO WOULD IT BE AND WHY?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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Vince and I are going to see the Mötley Crüe /Poison/New York Dolls tour tonight, and, yes, we are excited. And while it briefly seemed as though this would be a magically drama-free tour after Nikki Sixx allegedly apologized for some not-very-nice things he and at least one of his bandmates (Tommy Lee) said about Poison, it’s become increasingly clear that Nikki either didn’t apologize, or didn’t want that apology made public. In any case, he has continued to smack-talk Poison at every opportunity, which, of course, makes us drama queens at MetalSucks very happy.

But the really wacky thing about Nikki’s insults against Bret Michaels and company — and I’ve been saying this since November, when word of the tour first got out — is that Nikki seems to be operating under the impression that Mötley Crüe never dressed like this…

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Even if I haven’t exactly been thrilled with Slash’s post-Guns N’ Roses output, I never thought his guitar playing got bad; listening to No More Tears over the weekend, I was struck (again) by the fact that Zakk Wylde’s playing has become a parody of itself, but Slash still seems to have an endless arsenal of killer guitar solos left in him. If the dude could just get Izzy Stradlin to write him some decent songs, I have little doubt that the man would be able to turn me back into a fanboy faster than you can say “Saul Hudson.”

Case in point: “Kick it Up a Notch,” a new song Slash has recorded with a couple of cartoon characters. And, no, I don’t mean Axl Rose and Scott Weiland.

Click to read more…

Bill Bailey is a British comedian with whom I’m not familiar… in fact, the first thing I thought when reader Charles Farmer sent us a link to the below video was that the video was going to be Axl Rose-related (Rose’s real name is William Bailey, in case ya didn’t know).

It has nothing to do with The Ginger One, though, and everything to do with Metallica. I don’t think there will be much entertainment value if I give the whole video away, so you should really just watch and enjoy for yourself.

Not bad, eh? Bicycle horns > Hetfield’s actual vocals, if you ask me…

-AR

Am I high or is it weird that in 2011 nobody touts the first two Skid Row records as mega-masterpieces? What has undermined lasting renown? Is it that those jams are too heavy for radio listeners and not aggro enough for metal fans? Did major line-up changes doom them to be written off (except for the three enduring singles)? Is it Sebastian Bach’s fault? Is the rest of the band too stubborn and unambitious? Really, has there been a more compelling, awesome, and fearless heavy rock record since? Help me figure this out?

To me, it’s not a problem per se that one-time Skid Row vocalist Sebastian Bach is a huge jackass. One, his all-time top ten singing chops justify extreme arrogance and render decency unnecessary; two, reality TV and morning radio has immunized us all to dunderheads of Bach’s type. So fans are over it, right? Yet it’s still possible that Bach’s exhausting bimbo-ism has quieted the global and unanimous mega-acclaim that Skid Row deserves. How?

Think about it: Is it not Bach-related acrimony among the members of Skid Row that hamstrings their legacy-building? No reunion tours, no massive retrospectives, no anniversary celebrations. No documentaries, no tribute albums, no peer buzz. It’s probably Bach’s spaztardation that makes these things impossible. Click to read more…

Having some kind of string section cover Guns N’ Roses isn’t exactly a new idea, but I don’t believe it’s ever been done with this much geek love before. The group 2Cellos — which, in case the name somehow didn’t make it obvious, consists of two cellists, Luka Sulic and Stjepan Hauser — have not only did created their own interpretation of GN’R's classic anthem, “Welcome to the Jungle,” but they’ve made a video for that interpretation as well. And that video not only features headbanging, and not only features a section where one of the musicians uses his cello as a percussion instrument, but it also features what I believe is the first-ever mid-song cello swap. Of course, it’s totally fake, but, hey, I appreciate a little theatricality sometimes.

If This or the Apocalypse could figure out a way to have their two guitar players throw one another their instruments mid-song and then immediately continue to playing, I would never make fun of their choreographed stage moves ever again.

-AR

Additional reporting by Corey Mitchell