The question was inevitable.
For the purposes of Guns N’ Roses on Friday evening, “the jungle” was a football stadium filled to capacity with middle-aged suburbanites in conspicuously crisp Appetite for Destruction T-shirts whose appetite for GNR hits was eclipsed only by their thirst for domestic beer. This was just the fourth date of the much-anticipated Not in This Lifetime . . . tour, which represents a hard rock hell-freezes-over moment: the classic GNR lineup reunited. Well, sort of. Axl, Slash, and Duff at least. The mercurial front man and the guitar idol putting bad blood behind them to perform together reportedly for the first stint in nearly two dozen years.
Like the first Slash sighting, it takes a moment for Rose’s image to really settle in your brain. He cuts a figure of a guy wearing a store-bought Axl Rose costume, like something that would come from a bag off the rack at Spencer’s: tidy jeans, meticulously shredded, with a flannel shirt tied around his waist, a pair of shiny necklaces with diamond crucifix pendants. Several wardrobe changes consisted of a parade of graphic T-shirts and leather jackets with varying levels of fringe, and the occasional Stetson.
Over the course of two and a half hours, there was just enough ignorable Chinese Democracy material (the title track, “This I Love,” “Better”) and nonessential classic-rock covers (the last section of “Layla,” an instrumental “Wish You Were Here,” “The Seeker” by the Who) to allow for convenient bathroom breaks and beer runs. At times the lengthy set and breakneck pace seemed to be testing the endurance of the middle-aged men trying to burn through songs they wrote and recorded when they were half as old. Three-quarters of the way through the night, Axl sat doubled over on the steps in front of the drums while singing “Coma” out of the side of his mouth. Dead-eyed behind the piano on “November Rain,” he awkwardly caressed the keys with a right hand weighed down by a large, glistening ring that brought his look into Beyond the Candelabra territory.
Encore: “Don’t Cry” “The Seeker” (The Who cover) “Paradise City”
