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Ecw Press - Art Tavana

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137 pages

English

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Goodbye, Guns N' Roses is a genre-rattling attempt to explain the appeal of America's most divisive rock band. While it includes uncharted history and the self-lacerating connoisseurship of a Guns N' Roses fetishist, it is not a recycled chronicle - this book is a deconstruction of myth, one that blends high and low art sketches to examine how Guns N' Roses impacted popular culture. Unlike those who have penned other treatments of what might be considered a cliched subject, Art Tavana is not writing as a GNR patriot or former employee. His book aims to provide an untethered exploration that machetes through the jungle of propaganda camouflaging GNR's explosive appeal. After circling the band's three-decade plundering of American culture, Goodbye, Guns N' Roses uncovers a postmodern portrait that persuades its viewer to think differently about their symbolic importance. This is not a rock bio but a biography of taste that treats a former 'hair metal' band like a decomposing masterpiece

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	11 mai 2021
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781773057262
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Goodbye, Guns N’ Roses The Crime, Beauty, and Amplified Chaos of America’s Most Polarizing Band
Art Tavana

Contents Epigraph Prologue 1: Failure to Communicate 2: Faces of Death 3: Runnin’ with the Devil 4: Not a Glam Band 5: Sweet Child o’ Die 6: Days of Thunder 7: One in a Million 8: Star-Spangled Danger 9: Pump Up the Volume 10: Better off Dead About the Author Copyright

Epigraph
“We have a theory that crime enhances one’s beauty.”
—Female Trouble (1974)

Prologue
The following is not a traditional rock bio. This book won’t fit neatly among the oft-romanticized canon of exposés and coffee-table books. While I’ve produced a sweeping history on the subject, that was not my initial quest. This book began as a self-interrogation of taste; to wrestle with whether Guns N’ Roses is or is not art. It would evolve into a deconstruction of myth that melds popular culture with my second-generation MTV eyes.
Its title, Goodbye, Guns N’ Roses , has no purpose beyond a fitting substitute for an epilogue. I have chosen it for that reason.

1 Failure to Communicate
“If I say it's safe to surf this beach, Captain, then it's safe to surf this beach!”
— Apocalypse Now (1979)
“All I could think of was getting back into the jungle,” Willard says to himself, with the sun bleeding through the venetian blinds of his Saigon hotel. What we see are the illuminated eyes of a caged animal. We hear Jim Morrison’s poetry echoing through the rotating blades of a ceiling fan. Willard looks at himself in a mirror and caresses himself like Axl Rose under the gaze of Herb Ritts. When he sees himself “getting softer,” he punches his reflection with his naked fist, shattering the glass, as the blood trickles into his palms—making a beast of himself to kill the pain, as Samuel Johnson may have described it. Willard smears the blood over his face. He does martial arts poses in his underwear. He’s forgotten how to live outside the theater of war. He’s transformed into the beast.
Actor Martin Sheen (Willard) wasn’t merely acting; he was showing us what it felt like as the walls began to close in on his stressed heart. Sheen was so deep in the method that he had begun to go mad. He was drinking himself blind, chain-smoking Camel cigarettes, and inching closer to his breaking point. One day on the set, he would feel a sharp pain in his elbow. The feeling slithered into his chest like the venom from a poisonous snake. It was 1976, and Martin Sheen would experience a nearly fatal heart attack on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). He was read his last rites by a Catholic priest. Sheen was 36 years old, which is roughly the same age Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash was when doctors discovered that his heart was swollen, giving him weeks to live before installing a defibrillator to keep his heart from going limp. In 2001, Slash, 36, nearly experienced a heart attack while playing with Michael Jackson in Madison Square Garden.
“Once I get up onstage my heart rate skyrockets,” Slash told a British reporter in 2009. “When I took the stage with Michael and got into it, I was suddenly hit in the chest by a shock and my vision flooded with electric blue light.” It was the first concert since his operation. The stage was Slash’s theater of war. Willard was lost without the theater of war. For Slash, an arena filled with roaring fans was his mission. “If I don’t play, I’ll be a junkie,” he told Kerrang! in 1996.
“I’ll stress over anything that slows me down,” Slash told Rolling Stone in 1991, referring to the end of their tour in 1988, and the bone-freezing anxiety of being a junkie without a distraction. Imagine, for a moment, Slash walking out of the shower with a white towel wrapped around his mane, like one of Helmut Newton’s models, with his wet curls dripping onto his brown skin. Picture him grabbing a rumpled pack of cigarettes and lighting one up like a crackling Marlboro ad, as he would often do, crossing his hairless legs like a painter studying the brushstrokes on his canvas. Slash would pinch the cigarette between his thick lips and use both hands to pull his hair into a ponytail. This is how I imagine Slash being interviewed by Rolling Stone in his hotel room. “All of a sudden we got off the road,” he told the reporter, “and it was like wind and fucking tumbleweed.”
During the doldrums following a series of concerts with the Rolling Stones in 1989, Slash would check into a luxurious bungalow in Arizona (on an exclusive golf resort), and professionally, as if he were a hitman unpacking his silencer, begin to shoot himself up with a speedball. “I could think of no better therapy than shooting coke and smack all night to soothe my soul,” he wrote in his 2008 autobiography. Slash would inject so much of it into his body that the shadows inside his bungalow began to animate across the walls. “I started shadowboxing with monsters . . . I was bobbing and weaving.” In the morning, Slash would take a hot shower and try to forget his hallucinogenic self-persecution. The curtains extinguished sunlight from illuminating his air-conditioned dungeon. As Slash showered, the steam triggered more hallucinations, as tiny shadows formed behind the thick fog of his glass shower door. “I wasn’t going to let them get me, so I punched them as hard as I could, sending the entire pane of glass into pieces all over the floor.” With his guitar-playing hands sliced and bleeding all over the floor, Slash once again began to see small creatures, who were now holding machine guns at the doorway. He was tripping on his own demons, like Willard in Saigon. “I decided to flee,” Slash wrote. “I broke through the sliding-glass door, cutting myself further and spraying debris all over the room.” He would run out of the bungalow and sprint into another bungalow, naked, grabbing an aghast hotel maid and using her as a shield. Sweating profusely, Slash would dash past the monsters and shelter himself inside a shed on a fairway, where he’d hide behind a lawnmower and wait for the creatures to disappear. Sweating, waiting, and wondering what was real, and was not, Slash’s Vietnam would become the purgatory between sober reality and druggified illusion (i.e., the jungle).
Apocalypse Now screenwriter John Milius once described Vietnam as a “psychedelic war.” The film uses tribal drums and saturated colors to create a surrealistic nightmare. For Slash, his “psychedelic war” was filled inside a needle. The film is introduced with colorful smoke that lulls the viewer into the narcotic and slithering guitar on The Doors’ “The End,” which trickles over the mustard-colored smoke rising towards the lush palm trees of Vietnam. This is the first scene, as a thrumming helicopter transforms into a musical instrument that accompanies Morrison as he reminds us that this is, in fact, the end, which was the lyrical progenitor of Axl Rose inviting us into his jungle, baby, and informing us that we were about to die. Axl once said that Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” shared a bloodline with “Welcome to the Jungle”; separated by two decades, “The End” could be viewed as the more Eastern-sounding prequel to “Welcome to the Jungle.” Though DNA evidence doesn’t directly link Coppola’s Apocalypse Now to Guns N’ Roses, it is a film that showed a side of Vietnam that was foreign to most Americans. “Welcome to the Jungle” showed a side of an urban jungle that was foreign to outsiders. It’s a song that doesn’t offer a shamanic voyage through Williams Blake’s doors of perception (later psychedelicized by Aldous Huxley). “Welcome to the Jungle” is a concrete death sentence in a suffocating dystopia. Los Angeles in 1985 was a hedonistic version of the sweaty Midwestern city in John Huston’s heist film The Asphalt Jungle (1950), where a professional safecracker informs us, “If you want fresh air, don’t look for it in this town.”
There was no fresh air in the polluted landscape of Los Angeles circa 1985. By 1987, lung autopsies showed that an estimated 27 percent of Angelenos would die with “severely damaged” lungs. “Welcome to the Jungle” is a song that fills your lungs like pollution in the city, or napalm in the jungle, as Slash’s guitar stabs your senses with a series of intense daggers. The opening riff is melted down by Axl Rose’s scorching yell. It’s a machine gun–like screech that sounds terrifying at close range, like the sound of a subway car whizzing past your nose. But Axl’s youthful falsetto was detached from any form of modern transit; it felt wobbly, with rivets popping off, as the windows exploded off the frames. He was using his voice to assert control over his uncontrollable moods—turning himself into a beast in the process. Axl wailing would boil his years of internalized trauma. If Jim Morrison was rewriting his childhood through French poetry and sloshed interpretations of the blues, 20 years later Axl Rose was hurling death threats at his audience. For Axl Rose, it began with a need to obliterate, not self-identify, or explore a childlike desire for adventure, like Morrison had. Axl Rose was Jim Morrison as an ex-con warning the cops, teachers, and priests that “no one here gets out alive.” He was Rorschach impolitely screaming at other prisoners that he wasn’t locked up with them, but that they were locked up with him . Morrison wanted us to find some kind of meaning in the melancholy. What Axl wanted was never entirely clear. His philosophy was nihilism as a moving target. He was collateral damage for Vietnam and America’s gun-toting military industrial complex. On “Welcome to the Jungle,” the transition from Axl’s flamethrower vocals is met with Steven Adler’s exploding drums, foll