Bo Knows

Bo Knows

1. Bo Diddley, "Bo Diddley"
2. U2, "Desire"
3. Buddy Holly, "Not Fade Away"
4. Led Zeppelin, "Custard Pie"
5. Dr. John, "Iko Iko"
6. The Rolling Stones, "Please Go Home"
7. George Michael, "Faith"
8. Elvis Presley, "(Marie's the Name of) His Latest Flame"
9. The Magnetic Fields, "I'm Sorry I Love You"
10. Bruce Springsteen, "She's the One"
11. Johnny Otis, "Willie and the Hand Jive"
12. The Clash, "Rudie Can't Fail"
13. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "American Girl"
14. The Who, "Magic Bus"
15. The Supremes, "When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes"
16. Jefferson Airplane, "She Has Funny Cars"
17. The Stooges, "1969"
18. Guns N' Roses, "Mr. Brownstone"
19. The Go-Go's, "How Much More"
20. Them, "Mystic Eyes"
21. Ace Frehley, "New York Groove"
22. Primal Scream, "Movin' on Up"

Happy Mother's Day, 2016. Guess the theme.

Mötley Crüe, "Home Sweet Home"

19 Days to Find a Home



Mötley Crüe is a great pop band. Yes, they're silly, and soft when compared to their biggest rivals (Metallica and Guns N' Roses among them), but they've got an undeniable knack for hooks and melodies. If you ever thought George Michael or Billy Idol needed louder guitars, girl do I have a band for you.

"Home Sweet Home" was greeted by longtime fans as a sellout in 1985. A sappy piano ballad must've felt like a slap in a face to kids who bought Shout at the Devil for the pentagram on the cover. But 30 years later, it sounds like a coup to catapult these roughnecks into the mainstream, changing the joke and slipping the yoke. Nikki Sixx is smarter than he gets any credit for being (Theatre of Pain, the album which hosts "Home Sweet Home", takes its name from Antonin Artaud), and I'm still dazzled by the massive trick he pulled by getting a song by the guys in The Dirt to be covered by Carrie Underwood for an American Idol theme. Of course her version had to cut Mick Mars' solo--maybe Mötley Crüe are too rough to write pop songs, after all.

Living Colour, "Solace of You"

I saw Living Colour earlier this week, and have been on a kick ever since. I thought it would be a good nostalgia show, and it was--their energy and musicianship is always first rate. But the songs also held up much better than I remembered. "Cult of Personality" is deservedly a classic, but the range of tracks they performed from Vivid and Time's Up made me wonder why both of those records are underrated in 2014.

My co-attendee commented on how surprisingly diverse their influences are, and that may have something to do with it. A band that covers Robert Johnson, Talking Heads, "Amazing Grace," MC5 and James Brown all in the same night is bound to alienate someone. The hipsters who know "Cult of Personality" probably lump it in with Megadeth and the other thrash metal bands they ignore, and headbangers who bought Vivid likely wanted more meat and potatoes rocking. But for those of us who enjoy more than one type of music, Living Colour offers a plethora of riches.

"Solace of You," from Time's Up, sounds like it could have been written and recorded for Paul Simon's Graceland. Living Colour are often wrongly described as "funk metal" (or worse, rap-metal) by people who don't know how to handle the individuality of an all-black rock band. But more so, Living Colour gave metal a stronger sense of African-American tropes and history than any other band, exhibited by the American Afrobeat of "Solace of You." Not only did they bring something to the game that distinguished them from Metallica and Guns N' Roses, but they beat (and bested) Vampire Weekend and tUnE-yArDs to these polyrythms by about 18 years.

Aerosmith, Pump

When did Aerosmith go bad? Even their most forgiving fans, the ones who lapped up "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing", seem to have jumped ship. It's been 13 years since the band had a hit ("Jaded"), making this an even longer dry spell than the one that Run-D.M.C. infamously dragged them back from. Some will claim that Aerosmith jumped the shark when Steven Tyler joined American Idol, or when they brought in song doctors for Permanent Vacation, or at the peak of the drug years in the late 70s, or when a group of New England kids decided to form a band that sounded like a louder, dumber Rolling Stones. Whatever the case, at some point in history, Aerosmith decidedly started to suck.



I'm in the boat that claims Pump, which turns 25 this year, was Aerosmith's last great album. Get a Grip was more popular, and amazingly is still their highest-selling album, but by then they were already drowning in the pop-rock sound they had embraced on their comeback, shooting off McBallads like "Cryin'," "Crazy" and "Amazing" that could almost make you forget they were performed by the same five guys who wrote Rocks. It was also memorably the tour where they kicked openers Megadeth off the bill and replaced them with Jackyl. We should have known it would get worse from there.

But Pump is a different story. Yes, it's from their pop era, but it showcases Aerosmith changing pop rather than pop changing Aerosmith. It sounds more like classic rock than glam metal, with "Young Lust" and "F.I.N.E." roaring out like a pair of hidden toys in Aerosmith's attic. The Tylerisms were in their prime ("Love in an Elevator"), but he wasn't too self-conscious yet to let his heart get broken ("What it Takes") or give the world a chill over murder and sexual abuse ("Janie's Got a Gun"). Perhaps it was the need to distance themselves form an abundance of third-rate imitators, or maybe a need to compete with newcomers like Guns N' Roses who trumping Aerosmith at their own game. Whatever the case, Pump stands as one of Aerosmith's best albums, and a triumph for hard rock.

Three great versions of "Sweet Child o' Mine" (and one terrible one)

1. Zoe Thomson

This went viral last year, shortly after Thomson's group, the Mini Band, earned Metallica's attention for their version of "Enter Sandman." Striking out on her own, Thomson doesn't let anything like being barely big enough to hold a guitar stop her from kicking out the jams. Holding this to the same standards that I hold Slash to, I think Thomson nails it.



2. Michelle Kwan

No, not that Michelle Kwan. I couldn't have told you what a guzheng was until I saw this, but the way she adapts the song here is beautiful, tackling the guitar, bass and vocal melodies in one mind-blowing arrangement.



3. Scott Bradlee & Postmodern Jukebox with Miche Braden

Proof that "Sweet Child o' Mine" might be the most universal hard rock song ever, a band that does old school jazz versions of contemporary hits topped themselves covering a song that was neither jazz nor contemporary. Guest singer Miche Braden owns it here, giving it a New Orleans-style makeover that both honors and reinvents the original. 


 
And one terrible one, courtesy of the Step Brothers cast:



Yes, it's supposed to be bad, but that doesn't make it any less painful. Still, better than the version Fergie sang at the Super Bowl.

Guns N' Roses, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"

At some point in nearly every high school and middle school class that I ever taught, I would tell a story that I had originally heard from fiery New Jersey writer Amiri Baraka. No matter what else happened in my classes, that always seemed to be one the lesson that resonated with all of the students.

As Baraka told it:

There was a story I always like to tell that I heard from somebody who I can’t give credit to:
He told me he said,
Billy the Kid and his nephew were walking down the street one day. They go past this field of reeds.
And the nephew says, “Uncle Billy make me a whistle.”
And he said “bkrrrrrr,” and he quickly shoots a hole in it.
“How did you do that without aiming?”
He said, “I’m always aiming.”
That’s the story about the writer.
You’re always aiming. Whatever you see or feel or look at is gonna come out. You might write it down; you might not write it down.
Writing it down is a good idea. The best poets I know, you know when they go into their pocket man they’re bringing out their notebook.
It’s a question of study. You can’t write without studying. These people who think that you just write off the top of your head are boring usually. You have to do a lot of studying. Try to find out what’s happening in the world.
You know Richard Wright used to say that you have to be at the top of your time.

Like everyone who met Baraka, or anyone who followed his life and career with any perspective, I have some qualms with him. But there's no denying that he was a fascinating writer, and that works like Blues People: Negro Music in White America should be read by anyone with an interest in music criticism. With Baraka's passing last night, I'm sure many will be playing Blues People mainstays like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong in the late author's honor.

But for a headbanger, I'm picking "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," a cover of a song by one of Baraka's early 1960s Greenwich Village coinhabitants, written for a film about Billy the Kid, sung by another artist who's known for being almost synonymous with controversy.



Maybe Amiri Baraka would be appalled to hear heavy metal as a requiem, and he'd probably insist that Slash doesn't get enough credit because he's black. But as someone who didn't care much for what other people thought, maybe he'd appreciate me doing that here. Rest in peace, Mr. Baraka. Always aiming.

Guns N' Roses, "14 Years"

Margaret recently asked me for New Year's songs, and there are always two I can think of--young U2's still-thrilling "New Year's Day" and the Breeders' sleek "New Year." But for 2014 especially, I'll be blasting "14 Years."



Use Your Illusion I & II is the closest that metal comes to the White Album, a sprawling, double disc mess of ragers, ballads, studio experiments and enough curveballs to get more dizzying with every listen. But on "14 Years," GNR sounded more like rock music's other great classic double album, Exile on Main St. Perhaps that was a conscious move on Izzy Stradlin's part, letting the world know that he (and not Slash) was the band's Keith Richards, the indispensable songwriter who could drop a hook as well as the frontman. Axl steals the chorus, but it's Izzy's song, a perfect barrelhouse rocker that conjures up the Mick and Keith's chemistry, if not their ability to put aside their differences.

Kanye West and Axl Rose

"(West) seems to have insinuated in a recent New York Times interview that My Beautiful Dark, Twisted Fantasy was to make up for stupid shit he'd done. And now, with this album, it's 'Now that you like me, I'm going to make you unlike me.' It's a dare. It's braggadoccio. Axl Rose has done that too, lots of people have. 'I Am a God' — I mean, with a song title like that, he's just begging people to attack him."
                                --Lou Reed

"The softest song at the end of the hardest album – like GN'R putting 'Rocket Queen' at the end of Appetite for Destruction. Without it, Yeezus would be a totally different album, maybe one-third as powerful as it is. After all that techno-testosterone rage, Kanye finally releases all the girlie emotions he keeps hidden in his soul, and it all comes down to that "uh huh, honey."
                                --Rob Sheffield

"Nobody can tell me where I can and can’t go. Man, I’m the number one living and breathing rock star. I am Axl Rose; I am Jim Morrison; I am Jimi Hendrix. You can’t say that you love music and then say that Kanye West can’t come to your show! To even think they could tell me where I could and couldn’t go is just ludicrous. It’s blasphemous—to rock ’n’ roll, and to music.”
                                --Kanye West

"Patience" in Warm Bodies

Body Count, "Cop Killer"

Mike Huckabee is generally one of the most loathsome social conservatives in America, but he surprised me a few years ago on Morning Joe with his comments about Rev. Jeremiah Wright, then-candidate Obama's hotheaded former preacher who was actively claiming that the US Government invented AIDS and that America deserved the 9/11 attacks. Without defending Wright's statements or linking his agendas to Obama's, Huckabee delivered the wisest message that I heard about the whole ordeal.

"One other thing I think we've got to remember," Huckabee told Joe and Mika. "As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say 'That's a terrible statement!'--I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack--and I'm gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who's gonna say something like this, but I'm just telling you--we've got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told 'You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus.' And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me."



I wonder if Huckabee would have defended "Cop Killer." Today it's remembered as a historical relic, the finale of Ice-T's punk metal album that launched a thousand free speech debates and sparked public condemnation from President George H. W. Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle. No one seems to care that it was quickly taken off pressings of Body Count (the internet has kind of made that fact irrelevant), and no one remembers that their invitation to the Metallica/Guns N' Roses stadium tour started a press war between those bands' leaders, culminating in Axl Rose calling James Hetfield a racist from the stage. "Cop Killer" rarely gets mentioned or written about today, not even in the summer of the George Zimmerman trial and Fruitvale Station.

That's a shame, because musically, "Cop Killer" is one of the best hardcore songs that I've heard. It's got a perfect bar fight riff, and the machine gun drums are as thrilling as they are unnerving. Ice-T sounds like the most charismatic MC on the planet, the kind of guy who would beat Jay-Z to "99 Problems" by eleven years. In high school, I even liked the lyrics. I would compare them to something like Scarface, an amazingly campy violent movie. Yet today, I don't like Scarface anymore, and I've never liked Reverend Wright, but I still like "Cop Killer."

Like a lot of Body Count fans, I was too far removed from Ice-T's situation to think of "Cop Killer" as anything other than a gleeful prod to the stodgy system, too over the top to be taken as serious social commentary. But now I hear it the way that I hear my favorite metal, punk and hip-hop, as someone blowing off steam. Someone managing the harshest realities of their existence by going there. It's not the call to arms that President Bush feared that it was--if Ice-T really believed in killing cops, he would have done it himself. I'm glad that he was able to talk about it instead.

Pantera, "Hellbound"

"Hell ain't a bad place to be," the polemicist Bon Scott tells us in his Let There Be Rock dissertation. As usual, he was being understated. Hell is the most metal place in the universe, as emphasized by Slayer's waiting, Venom's welcome and Stryper inviting the Devil there. Ozzy and Lemmy both went a-raising, right on the same song. Some of metal's finest documents start in the underworld, or at least right next door, including AC/DC's two best albums, Megadeth's most violent junkie dream and Guns N' Roses two-CD loose cannon. But no one ever made it sound louder or angrier than Pantera.

Pantera dominated the '90s as the world's best and biggest metal band, just as Black Sabbath ran the '70s and Metallica owned the '80s. They kicked off the decade by introducing themselves as the Cowboys From Hell, but bookended it by dragging us back home with them on their final album.



Even when Dimebag was still alive, there was much uncertainty as to whether we'd ever see another Pantera album. Every Pantera fan who read about them in metal mags (and if you were a Pantera fan, you absolutely read metal mags) knew that there was infighting between Phil Anselmo and the Brothers Abbott. It had been four years since The Great Southern Trendkill, years in which mainstream metal had been reoccupied by Korn and Limp Bizkit. But on the wonderfully preposterously-titled Reinventing the Steel, Pantera outsavaged not only the nu-metal legions, but more importantly their own storied career.

"Hellbound" is a band at their most ruthless, throwing all of their brutality into their last testament while still hanging on the the grooves. Phil Anselmo's banshee scream in the chorus is the stuff of immortals. He couldn't keep it much longer, as his voice settled into its present-day baritone, and the band couldn't even stay together after the Reinventing the Steel tour, with Phil Anselmo famously telling Metal Hammer "Dimebag Darrell deserves to be beaten severely." That quote was run on the magazine's cover one week before Darrell was killed by a gunman.

Pantera may have no longer been friends on Reinventing the Steel, but by Satan's graces they were still a band. If Hell really is other people, than I'm glad Pantera chose to leave the tape rolling.

Who wants to see a concert movie? Anyone?

As recently as college, I would pick up concert movies from my favorite bands. The process was always the same--I'd read about it online, eagerly await its release date, pick it up, watch it on my laptop and then let it collect dust for the next several years. Unless I was playing it in the video store where I worked, which was the perfect way to watch a concert movie (in the background, where you could tune in for the best parts), I rarely took them out of their cases. I eventually stopped buying them, and even stopped buying deluxe CD editions that came with them. I'll just save five bucks and only get the disc I'll play more than once, thank you.





This summer two of my all-time favorite acts are releasing concert movies. I can't pretend that I don't get excited by the trailers--even with the lame voice-over narration and rock radio ubiquity, "Enter Sandman" and "Paradise City" are absolutely thrilling from the stage. Maybe they'll be fun to see in the theater with a few drinks and friends, and they'll probably be cool for Metallica and Guns N' Roses fans whom have somehow never seen them in concert. But who are these movies for, really? Film buffs will prefer more plot-driven art, like Some Kind of Monster or Anvil! The Story of Anvil. Music fans will spend more time with the albums and spend more money on the actual shows. I can't imagine a lot of people watching either of these films more than one.

And why would they? What, besides air conditioning, is someone who loves both of these bands enough to catch them on the tours that they filmed for these movies going to get out of seeing them in a theater? Who, short of Martin Scorsese in The Last Waltz and Shine a Light, can pull one of these off? The subplot in Metallica: Through the Never makes me wish that they'd just stuck to the concert. The straightforward recording of a Las Vegas GNR show makes me wish that they'd added something more--maybe a band documentary, like the one in Iron Maiden: Flight 666. These both look like electrifying shows, but anyone who's seen Metallica or Guns N' Roses in the flesh will tell you that a taped performance is no substitute for the real thing.

As a huge fan of these songs and their performers, I will surely end up seeing both of these movies. I will almost certainly enjoy them both. But I can't imagine that either of them will add much to their band's legacy.

Opinions vs. Observations

I could give you dozens of reasons as to why metal is better than reggae or techno. I'm happy to tell you why Death is better than Dååth, or why Suicidal Tendencies are better than Suicide Silence. At Governor's Ball last month, I watched Guns N' Roses utterly blow away Animal Collective and Kings of Leon. But in my heart of heart and brain of brains, I know that it's all just my opinion.

Then again, I don't. Consider, for example, that Trent Reznor is a better composer than Winds of Plague. This doesn't seem arguable. Understanding why something like The Downward Spiral is better than Decimate the Weak signifies an intelligent grasp of music, not an opinion. Who could argue that W.A.S.P. is better than Metallica? It would be like claiming that Dan Brown is a better writer than Kafka. I'm sure that some people actually believe it, but I'd hope that someday they'd mature enough to change their minds.

My concern about opinions and observations is where they start and where they end. There's a wide, blurry line between thinking that Nine Inch Nails is better than Animal Collective and knowing that they're better than Winds of Plague. Where does that line start and end? Is it when one artist stands the test of time? If so, how long is that? What constitutes as enough sense to decide what is an observation and what's an opinion? What gives me the authority to decide? Can observations change over time, as standards do?

The answer, my friend, is just your opinion.

How Crazy is Too Crazy?

I saw Axl Rose perform twice this week--once in a club that Mungo Jerry is headlining next month, and again atop a sprawling, three-day music festival, which, as Chris Weingarten aptly put it, Axl could headline "if he was backed by a Discman and a sparkler."  The main tying factor between these shows was the pre-show discussions--how late would Axl be? Would he show up at all? Would he play for only 15 minutes? Maybe at midnight, if we were lucky?

Yet no one, even those who paid $150 to be in a 600-capacity room with a singular rock star, seemed frustrated. It was all part of the show, part of the crazy, wild experience that comes with following one of the most mythical artists of the past 30 years. If he was late (20 minutes the first night) or surprised us (early?! the second night?!), we got the Axl Experience. The course of true Axl never did run smooth.

Also this week, Dave Mustaine released Megadeth's 14th album, Super Collider, and ejected a fan in England with a series of homophobic taunts. His words weren't anything you wouldn't hear on any middle school playground in America. But coupled with Mustaine's past year of praising Rick Santorum, outing himself as a birther, denying both gay rights and evolution, and spouting that the Aurora shooting were staged by our President to pass gun laws, his banter emphasized his status as an utterly deplorable human being. And this week, Super Collider is on track to sell 30,000 copies, Megadeth's lowest first-week numbers in decades.

Super Collider also received poor reviews, but that didn't stop Countdown to Extinction, which was a rightful smash and is now a metal classic, 20 years later. Metalheads, except for the ones who also write, famously don't pay attention to reviews anyway. But nobody wants to buy Megadeth albums anymore because Dave Mustaine is crazy. He has a supremely loyal fanbase, some of us whom have picked up the previous thirteen albums through artistic missteps, the advancement of file-sharing and even Mustaine's own horrific behavior. All of his most misguided and malicious nonsense is separable from the perfect thrash metal masterpiece he gave us in the '90s. But with his God-fearing preaching and conspiracies showing up in his lyrics and stage banter, fewer and fewer people want to support him. Every time I see him talk about politics, I half-expect him to keel over like the William Jennings Bryan character in Inherit the Wind.

But why is it this way? Why is it still OK to like one inflammatory, redheaded metal icon and not the other?* Why is Axl's use of the word "faggot" attributed to white trash ignorance and mental illness, but Mustaine's is attributed to homophobia? Because Axl performed with Elton John at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert? Because he's a sexually abused child who doesn't know any better? Because, unlike Mustaine, he doesn't have the pretenses of being a Christian? Because his music is more popular than Dave Mustaine's? Even watching the videos above, two shots of great metal frontmen going off on fans, one of them seems insecure to me and the other looks like a bully.

People tend to forgive their idols. Folks who complain about Vince Neil's behavior might forgive Gene Simmons, who is mercilessly mocked by Lars Ulrich fans, who might get called out by someone willing to forget that Kerry King just kicked out Dave Lombardo. I'd like to think that I forgive Axl and not Dave Mustaine based on how far their actions go. If Axl goes on two hours late or leaves a show early, that's something I considered when I bought the ticket. Dave Mustaine's bigotry isn't something I bargained for. But plenty of people have more patience for homophobia than tardiness. I'm sure a lot of people find Rose's mental eccentricities more appalling than Mustaine's, or maybe they just like Rust in Peace more than Appetite for Destruction**.

But no matter whose music you prefer, or how well you distance the art from the artist, there's no denying that an artist's behavior affects the response to the art. Maybe Axl's newest version of Guns N' Roses would sell more seats if he didn't have a reputation for starting two hours late. Maybe more people would buy Super Collider if Mustaine actually turned the other cheek, as his religion urges. It's a shame when either of them get a chilly response for creating something spectacular, like Chinese Democracy or Endgame, respectively. I'd hate to think of how much those responses had to do with the bandleader's attitudes.

The fact is, though, that those attitudes count. Alice Cooper and Ted Nugent, who were roughly equally popular in the '70s are both politically conservative. But only one of them ever gleefully threatened to assault Hillary Clinton, or boasted about his own draft-dodging. This summer, Alice Cooper is co-headlining arenas with Marilyn Manson. The next time Ted Nugent performs in your town, remind yourself why they're selling tickets half-off during the week of the show.

*Brent Hinds is potentially the third.
**Someone should ask Mike Clink, who produced both of them.

Heavy Meddle

Like a lot of males, I was fascinated with Pink Floyd throughout middle school and high school. The Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall and Wish You Were Here were all beautiful and profound to me. But listening now, they sound thoroughly adolescent, and not in a cool, AC/DC-like way. It's more like a high budget version of the kind of well-meaning but self-serious art that you'd see in a high school talent show.

   

When people compare Pink Floyd to bands like Radiohead or Tool, I can only think that it's because they're both weird and arena-famous at the same time. When people compare Floyd to Porcupine Tree or Dream Theater, I can only think that it's because they're both boring. For lack of a better term, most of their songs leave me comfortably numb.

But listening to Dub Side of the Moon, the audacious Pink Floyd reggae tribute album that's somehow more enjoyable than most Pink Floyd or reggae, I was reminded that Floyd have some lovely songs. It's not really their music that I have a problem with--it's their heavy-handed delivery. Roger Waters compared himself to Picasso in Rolling Stone a few years ago, but anyone who'd ever made it to side four of The Wall could already tell he had an astronomical ego that his talents didn't quite live up to. Yet when removed of his band's self-importance and wankery, Pink Floyd's songs lend themselves well to interpretation. 

1. Voivod, "Astronomy Domine"

Pink Floyd got bigger without Syd Barrett, but they never released anything better than Piper at the Gates of Dawn, their 1967 garage-psych debut. The world was still catching up to it in 1989, when Voivod dropped Nothingface and crashed Headbanger's Ball with their version of "Astronomy Domine." I think Voivod's is more haunting than the original--playing the chorus melody on guitar instead of keyboards was a good idea, as was getting rid of the space rock sound effects. Had it not been for this song, Elektra Records might have never taken a chance on Kyuss.

2. Alice Cooper, "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" 

I'll take Alice Cooper's anti-school anthem over Pink Floyd's any day of the week--it's easier make the case that you don't like school when you don't sound like a child pretending to be an adult. But on his recent tours, Cooper's been slyly acknowledging his own influence on Floyd by quoting "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" at the end of "School's Out." It's amazing how much a little verve and humor transforms that song. There's not an HD version online, but the thrill of Alice's show could even come through on a shaky cell phone video.

 

3. Guns N' Roses, "Mother"

Like "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)," "Mother" is best heard in a small dose, out of context. I usually can't sit through it's overwrought lyrics, or David Gilmour's schmaltzy solo, but the melody is actually quite sweet, proven by the sparse, minute-long reading that Axl and Slash gave it near the end of their Use Your Illusion II video from the Tokyo Dome. Subtlety is not something that one usually equates with Guns N' Roses, but "Mother" proves that when called to the task, they delivered.

 

Ten Metal Bands to See Before You Die: AC/DC

If AC/DC just sat there onstage while a tape played "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap," "T.N.T.," "You Shook Me All Night Long," "Back in Black" and "Highway to Hell," they'd still earn consideration for this list. But as anyone who has seen The Who this century can tell you, playing great songs does not make you a great live band.



40 years into one of the most incredible careers in audio history, AC/DC are still claiming metal's greatest dancer, swinging from the clappers of Hell's Bells, giving us a Whole Lotta Rosie and leaving everything in their wake Thunderstruck. Getting had, getting took and telling folks it's harder than it looks.

By working their way into the 200 Million Sold club without ever deviating from the harder-than-hard rock formula that made them famous, AC/DC makes success look as easy as "The Jack." Then again, nobody has ever played those three chords with the kind of gleeful punch that Angus gives them, not to mention the wildman blues-metal freakout solo that often takes over "Let There Be Rock." The most famous Keith Richards quote about his guitars ("Give me five minutes and I'll make 'em all sound the same") can be applied to Angus Young. But give his admirers four decades, and none of them will sound like him.

No great guitarist this side of Prince has made his instrument such an enthralling part of his performance, without taking away from the playing. Watching Angus Young with a Gibson is akin to watching James Brown with a microphone stand. "I'm a rotten guitar player if I'm standing still," Angus has said, and while I don't believe it, you can tell that he does.

AC/DC does not have many of peers, but even the ones who come closest are put to shame by AC/DC's show. They're not pretending to like each other (Aerosmith, Van Halen,) physically ravaged by their decades of drug abuse (Black Sabbath, Mötley Crüe) or dressing up their guitarist to look like the guy they kicked out (KISS, Guns N' Roses). AC/DC prefer to keep their drama beneath them, where it belongs. They continue to set examples for all younger artists, meaning nearly everyone, and meaning nobody who puts on a show like these guys do.

G N' R Lies: "Mama Kin"

If we're counting Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide as GNR's debut, "Mama Kin" appears on two of the world's most beloved hard rock bands' first albums.

From Aerosmith, 1973:


From Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide, 1986:


After Rose Tattoo, Aerosmith was the second band that Guns N' Roses honored and obliterated by covering them on Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide. This time, it wasn't chops or charisma that gave GNR the distinct advantage, two things that Aerosmith has in droves. It was mainly something that that Aerosmith had that GNR didn't--a saxophone.

The saxophone may be the most polarizing instrument in all of rock n' roll, abhorrent in nearly every instance yet transcendent on Kid A, Cure for Pain and Bill Clinton's Arsenio Hall Show appearance. The A.V. Club and WNYC's Soundcheck have explored the sax's influence with simultaneous awe and scorn. For every Rolling Stones song with Sonny Rollins, there seem to be a thousand Kenny Gs. Aerosmith is one of the only rock bands that can make a saxophone work, and their "Mama Kin" is competent. But nobody listens to rock music for competence. "Competent" would be The Silver Bullet band, whom Aerosmith sound most like on "Mama Kin."

On Lies, "Mama Kin" comes right after "Move to the City," a GNR staple with gritty lyrics, a menacing progression, and yes--a saxophone. In that context, I like "Mama Kin" even more, knowing that Guns N' Roses had access to a saxophone and chose not to use it.

Joe Perry, whose band was taking Guns N' Roses out on tour the year that Lies was released, may have noticed. "I heard a lot of Aerosmith in them, which meant I also heard a lot of bands that came before us," Perry noted in Rolling Stone. "And I remember being a little jealous, because they were really hitting the nail on the head."

G N' R Lies: "Move to the City"

The downfall of the original Guns N' Roses can be traced in "Move to the City."



On Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide, it's the Guns' best song, a hard-boiled but sympathetic depiction of life on the run. Future metal legends recasting Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City" with a girl in L.A. You barely even notice the saxophone.

A few years later, Guns N' Roses were playing it with extended horns and keyboard solos, plausibly so Axl could smoke a cigarette and change his outfit. One saxophonist (yes, there's more than one) even plays a quote from "If I Only Had a Brain."



The biggest difference from these two GNRs is not the size of their audience, but the size of their egos. I avidly worship the Use Your Illusion albums and the videos from the Tokyo Dome, but this is clearly a band successful and powerful enough to do anything they want creatively. Even a band as singularly talented as Guns N' Roses can't thrive on 100% artistic control.

Yet at their best, Guns N' Roses were a perfectly imperfect band. And that's what you hear on "Move to the City," a sloppy, vulgar and antagonistic song that performed by a team of junkies and felons with enough magnetism to earn themselves the choice to let someone in their band play "If I Only Had a Brain" for millions of viewers. Some of us may wish that GNR had known better, but knowing what we now know about them, we were lucky that they ever played anything at all.

G N' R Lies: "Nice Boys"

Great songs can happen to mediocre bands. We hear it all the time in music, less so often in metal, where "hits" are scarce and most metal bands with one actual high-charting single (Faith No More, Living Colour, Queensrÿche) support their place in history with a few great albums. But near the top of the mediocre band/great song heaps sits Rose Tattoo, barely remembered today as the Australian metal band that isn't AC/DC.

Most of Rose Tattoo's songs are routine hard rock fare without the leery charm of Bon Scott and the Young brothers. However, on "Nice Boys," they hit it out of the park, with the band's usual slide guitar riffs and badder-than-thou lyrics coming together for one solid jukebox anthem.



Rose Tattoo's version isn't all too different from Guns N' Roses' more famous cover on G N' R Lies. But why is it inferior?



To these ears, Rose Tattoo are trying too hard. The guitar playing feels labored next to Slash's, the vocals sound strained vs. Axl's feral interpretation. Both versions are great, and both bands have chemistry, but only one of them is iconic.

Chuck Klosterman, the literary world's most vocal GNR fan, might agree. "Because rock is so tied to the abstract concept of 'cool,' it seems distasteful when anyone tries too much," he once wrote in Spin. "Bands that are unpolished and lazy (the Replacements, Pavement, Motörhead) are always more likeable than groups that do 'whatever it takes' to achieve a modicum of success (Bon Jovi, Jimmy Eat World, Flickerstick)."

Now that we know that Axl can spend decades working on a song, it's clear that Guns N' Roses are neither unpolished nor lazy. But on "Nice Boys," they played the part with the finesse of a Scorsese cast.

G N' R Lies: "Reckless Life"

When Appetite for Destruction broke, fans sought out Guns N' Roses' only other release, the limited vinyl-and-cassette Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide EP. There was no internet to help music fans track it down, no torrents to download it on, just word of mouth of the biggest and best band in the world caught on tape playing to a few lucky attendees.



Had there been an internet in 1987, one could probably learn that Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide was a cheat. UZI Suicide, presumably GNR's own label to self-release EPs like this one, is better known as Geffen Records, the billion-dollar home to Elton John and Donna Summer. Investing in a band that was described by its own guitarist as a hand grenade ("and its like everybody's struggling to hold the pin in,") Geffen tried to get as much mileage out of GNR as possible, and released the EP a few months before Appetite to help market a raw rock band putting out their own records before a major entertainment business picked them up. Recorded in a Hollywood studio with a pre-recorded audience track, the sound of the Gunners blaring over hundreds of screaming fans was probably as foreign to the band themselves as it was to most listeners.

As "Reckless Life" proves, GNR were just as crucial to implementing their reputation as Geffen Records. Most of the world was sleeping on their punk-infected hard rock, blues-based solos and wild personalities, so the band threw it all into their first song. Within a few years, people who couldn't tell Slash from Duff McKagan could tell you that GNR were party animals (so much, that their reputation made it to a joke in The First Wives Club,) but with few folks outside of L.A. clubs or Geffen's doors in on the gang's Songs of Innocence and Experience, the boys had to tell everyone that they were, in fact, miscreants.

Today, "Reckless Life" sounds a little forced, like a band singing about a lifestyle before they lived it out in public. Listening to "Reckless Life" feels like looking at early pictures of the Rolling Stones in moptops and matching outfits, a portrait of the artists as a young band, in search of an identities. But by the time "Reckless Life" was reissued on G N' R Lies, the band had found identities, and the applause track didn't seem so strange.