Guns N Roses reunion confirmed
 

Part of the original GNR line up will be playing a festival next year in California, with a possible 25 city tour dates across North America.

Members will include Axl, Slash, Duff & Matt Sorum.

It looks like Steven Alder gets the shaft, at least at this point, and Izzy has decided to be a perpetual hermit again. Shame that.


Confirmed: Reunited Guns N' Roses To Play Next Year's Coachella Music And Arts Festival - Blabbermouth.net

Oh, goody.

Lol, go roll some 20 sided dice and beat off to your Iron Maiden records :)

I for one am excited!

Between now & then, I'm sure they will convince (come to terms on a contract) Izzy to jump on board....and Adler has stated multiple times he would be okay with a dual-drummer set-up, or him doing the stuff he played on and Sorum the rest...

I really hope Izzy does jump on board, he's a talented guitarist and the reunion wouldn't feel complete without him.

I guess will have to wait on more information regarding Alder though. He more than anyone wants to be part GNR reunion.

$250 - $275 per ticket?

Reunion or not, how do people still fall for this?

If we all chip in the price for a ticket, do you think they'll break up again?

Love these lads, their music is beyond amazing. But this reunion should've taken place long ago... something smells money-orientated here... unless they make a new -and indeed good- album. Anyway, I'm all for the idea of a dual-drummer set-up. It would be well-served to Adler. And I'd like Bumblefoot to stay. He's a sublime musician. But then, of course, nothing of this will ever happen, and I'll end up frittering away all my little money on a Guns N' Roses ticket.

I'm not hyped. They really haven't done anything good since 1991.

Money is the only reason they're doing it. There's no way Slash and Axl are magically on good terms again, not with the history they have together. The money this time around just happens to be good enough for them to put aside their differences for 25 shows. Their bank accounts will get padded nicely when it's all over, and they'll go back to hating each other again.

I don't think you really need magic to get back on good terms with people.

For the entire tour it'll be separate flights, separate limos, separate hotels, separate dressing rooms, and they'll probably walk on and off stage from opposite ends.

So, like a Motley Crue show? Sweet. And what world-class band shares a dressing room?

Bumblefoot began to have substance control issues while on the never-ending CD tour, and he has walked away from GNR to save his life. Don't think he'll be back, he sounded pretty resigned to that in an interview with Eddie Trunk earlier this year.
And of course it's about the money- every tour is about the money- this is the only way these guys make coin in the age of digital ripoffs. The band doesn't set the price of tickets, only the gig- the promoters are the ones who set ticket levels, so blame them, not Axl & Co. Rumor is they are asking for a million per show at the stadium level. So say they play the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, seating capacity 92,000 as is, add in another three thousand infield seats at minimum. So if you sold 95000 tickets at $10 a pop, that pays the band. Throw in all the costs to produce and promote the show, charge $30 a ticket, you still come out ahead. And I'm willing to bet they sell a corporate sponsorship to eat the costs of the production, like the Stones do..so keep that in mind when marveling at the ticket prices- it's not always the band behind the massive mark-up....I don't know if I would pay those prices. Perhaps if there was a pretty special double bill or opening act. But I saw GNR during their heyday, and they were nothing special live, IMO, pretty sloppy sounding back then....and Axl's voice has had 25 years to age, I saw the new GNR version 2 years ago and it was rough in spots to my ears...

The problem is that they're charging way above a simple $50-$60 ticket, which would easily turn a profit a couple times over with that many seats. I know veteran acts charge out the ass all the time, but $250 and up is just inexcusable, especially for a band that only has one great album, a semi-decent double album, a covers album that nobody asked for, and a "comeback" record that took fifteen years to record.

Any other band would have faded in popularity with such little material and band infighting that these guys have, and yet people are still willing to throw hundreds of their hard-earned money at these guys who haven't recorded anything together in over twenty years. How they're still relevant in any sense is mind boggling.

Appetite was a damn fine record and seeing most of that lineup again would be pretty cool, but too much time has passed for me for it to be worth it, not to mention the ridiculous ticket prices.

Queen, Manowar, etc...

Basil, Two Spirit, I think you're totally right. I had no idea about Boomblefoot walking away from GNR or anything... I kind of decided to lay off music magazines, bands news, etc, long ago. That piece of news did surprise me, I must admit. I was kind of raving, anyway, because I think Ron Thal is an outstanding musician: but if there's going to be a reunion, he has no place indeed, although he was Axl's mate for nearly 10 years.
I saw GNR in 1992; those days were indeed their heyday, and I think they were special live: a luxurious band backing them up, interesting solos by Sorum and Slash, jams that blew me away... I mean, it looked more like a professional performance than to a handsome guy singing ballads. I think they did their very best. And I was there for their very last concert in 1993 as well, which wasn't as good as the one in 1992.
Cheers and have a great 2016!
:beer:

I have a documentary from a show they did in 1986. They shared a dressing room, or at least an area where they'd hang out and warm up together prior to going on stage. Those guys were really close.

If the money's right...
You do if one of them is dead. ;)

I understand what you're saying, but the days of a $50-60 ticket for a mega-band concert are long gone. It's 2016 now, for a stadium-show, I fully expect prices to be over $100 for crappy seats- for ANY artist. I mean, Janet Jackson was scheduled to play here (now cancelled) and she was charging $150 for nosebleeds at the rear of the arena.

You have to consider that a GNR reunion tour is a mega-event. They were the biggest band in the WORLD for a 5 year period- nobody came close to touching them, and a couple of generations call them "their" Led Zeppelin. That's big. It will be a massive money-maker, in merchandise alone much more than ticket sales, IMO. The hard core GNR fans will eat this up and hit multiple shows. The casual fans will go because it's the thing to do in town that night- and they don't know the catalog, they're going to hear 3-4 songs at best anyways. Rock fans will go because it won't ever happen again and some of them missed it the first go round.

I personally don't think they put out a bad album. I was hugely disappointed in Chinese Democracy because it was too much production- if they ever go back and strip it down, go more with a live sound, it'd be much easier to swallow. Everything else is very, very good, IMO. Go back and revisit the early stuff, you might find you hear things you missed before. I know I dismissed the live album the first time around but now it's one of my favs.

Thal is indeed a great, great guitar player but I think he is truly satisfied with doing his own thing and being a hired gun from time to time. His wife is a physician, so he doesn't need the money, lol.
As for GNR in '92, sure, they were firing on all cylinders back then, the apex of their stardom. But also consider that you can see that in almost every single band that has ever existed- that climb, the apex, that decline- they never last forever, they don't always keep getting better and things fall apart much of the time. If you could have seen the Crosby, Stills & Nash I did in the early 70s compared to the one today, you'd think they were different bands. Neil Young/ Crazy Horse was phenomenal in the 80s, not so much this last tour. And if you saw Springsteen in '76 like I did, well, you might shake your head at today's Bruce. it's nature at work, and nature isn't always kind.
Black Sabbath in 2015 wasn't anything close to it in 1975. But I went because it was Black Sabbath!

I love G'n'R but there's no way on earth I'd pay that much to see them, especially since it would be in some crappy stadium where you can barely even see the stage. I truly don't understand why people are willing to pay extra-large sums of money to see any band in that kind of environment.

There is no way on this green Earth that GNR were EVER the biggest band in the world. Ever. :nono:

A couple of generations? Turn the hyperbole down son. I could take your post apart in a bunch of other ways, but I'll give you a pass.

And do you really understand just how insanely huge Led Zeppelin was long before there was an MTV hype machine?

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com...791926235f.jpg

Flawless appreciation, Basil C. Thurston III ! 100% in agreement. It would be pleasantly surprising if GNR made a new and first-class album. Literally first-class. I might have lost the plot entirely, but I think "Chinese Democracy" is a very good album! So, they could make some effort and write good songs again. However, we know that's probably not ever going to happen.
Black Sabbath: my favourite band - ever. I can listen to "The Writ" or "Laguna Sunrise" or "Snowblind" after so many years and still feel as good as a baby in its cradle.
Black Sabbath: :bowdown:

GNR was popular with both the (later) 80s and (early)90s generations, hence my comment. I was not speaking of "twenty years". As Appetite came out in '87, and their success translated through the mid-90s, it's a fair statement., with not a trace of 'hyperbole"...

Yes, I know how huge Zep was- I lived through it. Feel free to "take apart" my post, if that's your thing. But read my post again before you do- I was not comparing Zeppelin to GNR in any fashion, I was using them as a standard of popularity level, i.e. the biggest band in the world during their apex of popularity. And for those that question that, tell me who WAS the biggest band from 1987 to, say, 1993. And someone will say Nirvana, and I'll say you'd better research it first, lol...

My apologies. You're 100% right. In hindsight, I shouldn't have lumped you in with those who don't understand the subtleties of these types of "best of" discussions.

G&R were ****ing HUGE after Appetite sunk in with the masses. Not to mention, as a guitarist, it was kinda cool to hear an LP straight into a Marshall after all of the super processed **** that pre-dated it.

Again, I'm sorry for being a judgmental dick.

Welcome to MB!

But was anything GNR did after Appetite in '87 as big as Nevermind in '91? I've certainly never heard the Use Your Illusion albums spoken of in the same not-so-hushed tones.

So after the eighties, wouldn't they have been been replaced by Nirvana and Pearl Jam, even if they were still relatively equally popular?

The Use Your Illusion albums were huge when they came out. They were like the THE rock releases of the fall of 1991. That said, very shortly afterward Nevermind became super-popular and ushered in an era when anything even remotely associated with glam metal was seen as dumb and irrelevant, which definitely affected the reputation of the UYI albums.

It also didn't help that there was so much band infighting during the '92 tour they did with Metallica. After that, they didn't even bother recording new studio material, and instead released The Spaghetti Incident, a covers album that's barely even remembered. Then most of the original lineup left in the coming years, turning it into the Axl Rose show that it's been for the past twenty years.

It's amazing the artistic and financial goldmine that this band has passed up over the course of the past three decades because they couldn't get along with each other. Just imagine if they managed to work all their problems out and were on their tenth album by now. They could've become like U2, still releasing massively successful albums and embarking on high grossing tours.

Neither getting along nor releasing a real album instead of The Spaghetti Incident? would have mattered. Anything remotely associated with glam metal was as uncool as uncool could be by 1993 and there was no chance that G'n'R would have been able able to repeat past successes or attract new fans.

In that case we should be thankful that Chinese Democracy took so long and that the world was spared up to that point.

Now if only U2 had spent 23 years making Zooropa...

here is how i feel about this reunion..

Axl can't even sing anymore.

Yup. One shot and done.

When's the last time you heard him sing? I heard him 2 years ago in Orlando, at a smaller venue when they did a warm-up gig for the European Tour, and he sounded no better, no worse than when I saw them back in ~1990 in a stadium. I bootlegged the show and it sounds fantastic, Axl's vocals included. Let's face it, Axl was never a premier vocalist to begin with, he had a particular howl that worked with the energy of the songs. There are very, very few rock singers who can still maintain and perform all the same notes they hit in their younger days when they are approaching middle age, and even fewer who can do it when 60 and up. So many people base their comments on Axls voice from one particular bad performance, on the MTV video awards almost a decade ago, where he got a lot of attention because he was out of shape, in dreads and sounded gassed a minute into the song. He didn't sound that way in Orlando, matter of fact, he was spittin' fire the whole night- 3 hours worth. Only time I heard his voice waiver was at the very beginning of November Rain, when he sat down at the piano after two particular heavy songs.

He couldn't sing to begin with, so I imagine that that fact remains.

A lot of people were seduced by the uber screech thing he was doing back then. I always thought him the weakest link in the band but he ended up making it work - for a while.

Now that his voice is shot it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.