Globe and Mail article on Axl - Canadian national newspaper

[northernwave]

in Saturday's Review section...I have the hard copy but you need an account to get the online version and I'm at work with no scanner, but it's quite the article....sample quote:

"This sort of comeback is rare among rock stars...Rose is still effecting the impossible.  He is still scary, damaged, ludicrous, appaling and beautiful...HE STILL ROCKS...What is particularly spectacular about Rose's comeback is he is not asking us to remember the days...he is asking us to step forward..."

[Nighteyes]

are you going to scan the article when you get home?

[AXL 20]

well heres something good out of canada besides hockey (which they ruined anyays  )

[northernwave]

i'm here for the next 12 hours...I'm sure someone will have found it by then. ?Will try to if no one has posted it by then

[makane]

in Saturday's Review section...I have the hard copy but you need an account to get the online version and I'm at work with no scanner, but it's quite the article....sample quote:

"This sort of comeback is rare among rock stars...Rose is still effecting the impossible.? He is still scary, damaged, ludicrous, appaling and beautiful...HE STILL ROCKS...What is particularly spectacular about Rose's comeback is he is not asking us to remember the days...he is asking us to step forward..."

Say whaat?

[RichardNixon]

in Saturday's Review section...I have the hard copy but you need an account to get the online version and I'm at work with no scanner, but it's quite the article....sample quote:

"This sort of comeback is rare among rock stars...Rose is still effecting the impossible.? He is still scary, damaged, ludicrous, appaling and beautiful...HE STILL ROCKS...What is particularly spectacular about Rose's comeback is he is not asking us to remember the days...he is asking us to step forward..."

Say whaat?

It means Axl doesn't want to live in the past.

[slashedtires]

The Globe and Mail has always written really positive articles about GNR's comeback...they must have a gnr loving editor in the A and E section.


but what the hell is this?---"finally something good out of Canada besides hockey" (which they ruined anyays   )

A) you are either a pro-Bush American or ignorant

B) Canada ruined hockey??? - this past season was probably the best season of hockey since the hey days in the 80's...what are you talking "aboot"?

Cheers...Happy Canada Day! (its july 1)

[Annie]

Great review and I totally agree with the writer! 

[jbenzz]

Axl, if you're reading this, bite my leg
Start flipping your hair and work on your metal hand and rock lock: Axl Rose is returning, and he appears to be welcoming us back to the jungle where he once presided, as king of the hyenas.

Chinese Democracy, his hard-core Minzhu version of Truman Capote's Answered Prayers, is rumoured to be released this year after a 10-year wait, during which we all started to believe that the album, and the kilted, maniacal Guns N' Roses front man and last remaining member, no longer existed ? one had a sense of Rose, walking the streets of L.A. like the bloated ghost-lead of Eddie and the Cruisers, scribbling lyrics like "Betta call the preside-hent!" in a small, soiled notebook.

Yet these lyrics are genuine, as is the album that a crafty friend procured for me, and the first track ? loaded with real-deal Rose wails, Robert Plant-ish porn sighs and long, prog-rock bridges ? alludes, as far as I can tell, to all the rumours surrounding him, and asks, quaintly, "What shall I do?"

So Axl went and bit a Swedish man in the leg. Or so the charges allege: After a concert in Stockholm this week, Rose retired to the Berns Hotel and is reported to have fought with an unknown woman, semi-trashed the lobby, and sunk his teeth into a security guard.

Aftonbladet newspaper claimed Rose was "intoxicated" and required handcuffs and restraints: Now that's the star I know and love. I was mortified for him when he started a rumble with Teletubby Tommy Hilfiger in May, a rumble that roughly equals a scrap between Lemmy Kilmister and Paul Anka, and am very happy to see him, so aggressively, refusing to either burn out or fade away.

This sort of comeback is rare among rock stars for two reasons: Older men bald and older men lose their youthful timbre. Elvis Presley, whose voice matured into sweet, heavy honey, was known to have hated performing his early hits ? in the voice he compared to a chicken squawk ? during his later life as a Las Vegas performer. Similarly, other (relative) old-timers, such as Bruce Springsteen, cannot hit one note of The River he once dove into, and has switched to more scream-cured, low folk vocals.

Axl, a genius, has simply replaced his fiery red mane with a kerchief and a cascade of looks-like-stitched-on corn rows. Yet his voice, in spite of the way he luridly treated his throat in his "rags to richez" tenure as the eighties tour-guide to Paradise City, remains the same.

Rose is not alone in his desire to keep riding the Nightrain as if never having missed a stop: The Rolling Stones, miracles of sexy decrepitude, continue to grease their steel wheels, irrespective of their profound redundancy and a posh six-page rider that details backstage video games "suitable for families and small children."

When Mick Jagger was in town a few years ago, he gave his number to a friend of a friend, and I called him, sleazily pretending to be her: "I have dinner with my small children," he told me, "but how's later for you?" My male friends were actually weeping with envy as we talked, a clue to the persistence of monster rock stars, whose following is, essentially, a shadow-formation of innumerable men's lives and dreams.

Of my obliviousness, I told the men: "It's not like I was talking to Axl Rose!" While the Stones and their generation rely on kicking fans back to where they started, Rose lives, vividly and terribly, in the present. And with the "gorgeous, carnal grossness" that radical novelist Mary Gaitskill once attributed to the GNR singer, Rose is still effecting the impossible. He is still scary, damaged, ludicrous, appalling and beautiful, where other remodelled slither gods depend on a grave suspension of disbelief on the audience's part, as in, "Okay, he's trollishly deformed, wearing comfortable slacks and sounds like he's karaoke-ing himself, but . . . HE STILL ROCKS!"

The plain truth of the matter is that very few, if any, old rockers still have it: What they do have is our kind and sentimental ability to use our illusions; that is, to blur who they have become with what they have been, by virtue of our blind devotion.

GNR's latest tour riders are not available, but back in their day, the band submitted a tough-guy list of meat, potato chips, cookies, pop and, as if editorializing, some Dom Perignon. The very idea of requesting, like the Stones, an English driver and snooker table was anathema to the Hollywood-based band who started working together in an apartment so filthy, a crack whore would take umbrage at the decor.

When GNR would play, long ago, the announcer would yell: "You asked for it, you got it. The greatest band in the world!" (Or something to that effect: Keep in mind one is usually non compos mentis when blaring metal.) What is particularly spectacular about Rose's comeback (besides the fact that his name remains an anagram for "oral sex") is he is not asking us to remember the days we were banging heads or committing near-suicide with Jack Daniels and November Rain. Rather, he is asking us to step forward, eat a salami and swill some champagne as we accept that we, like he, have grown up.

In another Chinese Democracy track, Rose sings of a "November hell I can't describe." And in doing so he is drawing a new line in the sand and imploring us to step over and describe it; that is, whatever hell we are experiencing, more than 20 years later, well out of the cold November rain that doesn't "last forever"; simply reminds us that we, and Axl, sometimes, "need some time of our own . . . all alone," before returning in a blaze and biting some leg.


By LYNN CROSBIE

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

[Scabbie]

Great article! 

I need the number of this so called 'crafty friend'! Do you think this guy is for real or did he get handed a cd of leaks?

What songs are these lyrics from?

'November hell I can't describe'

'What shall I do'

[axe]

What songs are these lyrics from?

'November hell I can't describe'

'What shall I do'

The first is The Blues (more commonly "now there's a hell  I can't describe"). The second is I.R.S.

[LittleFly]

'November hell I can't describe'

I think that's a misheard lyric from the Blues.

[evergreen_layne]

'November hell I can't describe'

I think that's a misheard lyric from the Blues.

Yeah but I like it

[Elrothiel]

Awesome article!

And this bit is genius... "before returning in a blaze and biting some leg!"

And great story about callin' up Mick Jagger!

[jc524]

Imo, this article sucks

The author gets the lyrics wrong and it seems like something that would be written in a tabloid.

not to mention - "You asked for it, you got it. The greatest band in the world!" - That was KISS who had that said before they went on

the guns annoucer said something like: "You wanted the best, well they didn't fuckin make it" - like in the begining of Live Era. Or - "of all the bands in the world, this is definatly one of 'em"


but, its good that they are getting some publicity!

[gnrlies247]

That's a great article, one of the best i've read in ages.For once, axl isn't being slagged off!

[Sweet]

Excellent article, finally i'm reading people who have a clue, thank you!

[BrokenGlass]

Nice to read something positive for once.

[Filipe_Guns]

is good to read good things about Axl but....c'mon, this article sucks!
looks like the author just got some new songs recordings and heard it for the first time and decided to write an article.

[makane]

Ehm. Now this is a good article when they praise Axl from heaven to earth and has all the facts wrong?

"Aftonbladet newspaper claimed Rose was "intoxicated" and required handcuffs and restraints: Now that's the star I know and love."
Says it all.