Fifteen Years of Silence; Fifteen Years of Pain

I had just an excellent, excellent experience in my car at 10:07 AM on Sunday. Slid a fingernail under plastic wrap, peeled it back, and cracked the case open with a little trick that Will Robertson showed me back in the day to break the sticker label cleanly. Opened that pristine case, popped the CD off that stupid plastic ring, and slid it in the car player. One minute and twenty four seconds later, for the first time in a decade and a half, a brand new Axl Rose wail filled my car.

Chinese Democracy is finally out.

Yeah, of course I bought it the first day out. I've pledged my allegiance to Guns N' Roses on these interwebs before, and I don't care how many bad reviews it gets - actually, the majority have been positive - you have to stay true to something lest you go careening off into a nihilistic tailspin, and dammit, late 80s early nineties overblown dinosaur rock is my tenet. So I'm gonna embrace my inner headbanger, my follow the masses twelve year old who still loves to play "You're Crazy" on the acoustic. These are the highly offensive RAWK tunes that made us.

I don't want to try to review the album here, not that anyone cares about that sort of thing anyways (I happen to think Chucky CK nailed it, anyways). I just want to reflect a bit on the CD opening experience here. I picked up Appetite in the Houston galleria from a tape store clerk who should have known better. I listened to it at low volumes in my bedroom to keep the explicit lyrics from attracting attention. I got Lies on cassette, too, played it over headphones on a Walkman. I got Use Your Illusions the day that came out in tape form, locked myself in room with a pair of notebooks, thoroughly evaluating them track by track. I got The Spaghetti Incident? in CD form, blared it on the downstairs CD player when my parents were away and couldn't figure out for the life of me what had happened to G'N'R¹. And then nothing for years and years.

So popping open that CD had a ritual effect for me. AND I was still in the glowing buzzing glow of the Ultimate win from the previous night. So sonic childhood reminiscing rock euphoria on top of residual frisbee euphoria produced quite the effect. I just sat for a second and smiled like an idiot while people passed the car en route to spending money they don't have on flatscreens and such. (The album was exclusively sold at Best Buy. I somehow managed to not let this tarnish the AUTHENTIC ROCK I was hearing). After letting it thunder for a bit and debating whether to roll down the windows or not (I went with not for maximum reverberate in the car experience), I finally pulled out of the lot and headed home. Continuing to rock, of course.

These particular CDs have a sort of JFK-where-were-you flash-bulb memory for me; I know exactly where I was the first time the metaphorical needle dropped on all of these bad boys. They're not the only albums that I've had that experience with - 311's Transistor, Steely Dan's Aja, A Tribe Called Quest's Low-End Theory are but a smattering of the multitude of big impact first listens I've had. But regardless of the years and the lack of Slash, a Guns N Roses album is always going to have a stupid pride of place. And now I add "in a Phoenix Best Buy parking lot in a Honda Civic" to the pantheon of sacred places.

So I'm not gonna review it, but I'll qualify that it rocks appropriately, it needs to be listened to on headphones, and wow, there just really isn't anything quite as grandiose, ridiculous and transcendent as an Axl Rose penned anthem. I've thoroughly enjoyed blaring this bad boy in the car and have been writing to it almost exclusively the past two days.

So for all the bloated, for all the unmet expectations, for all the "there'll never be another Appetite" sentiments, I'm just glad there's another G'N'R album in the world. It reminds me of being young and stupid and caring. New but old. A number of people have pointed out that this album as a CD is one of the last of its kinds, that Axl as an epic out of control megalomaniac rock personality is one of a dying breed. I don't know about that - it certainly seems that CDs and albums-as-release-events have been and will continue to be further be blown to smithereens by digital music, but no more Axls in this fine world? Say it ain't so! I'm just gonna hang on to this one and keep the dream alive for a few more spins.

Said the guy listening to the album on his computer in mp3 form...

¹ The Spaghetti Incident? is an album of primarily punk covers. At the time, everybody dug "Hair of the Dog," a Nazareth classic rock tune, and "Since I Don't Have You," a doo-wop cover the Axl made entirely his own. Those were tracks one and eight, and the rest of the album pretty much baffled me. NOW, in with a healthy self-schooling in the annals of punk, I know where the hell those songs are coming from. And they actually carry those covers quite nicely. But man, without that historical background, your average fifteen year old heard that album with a decided look of "huh?" on his face. You can understand why it was so disappointing for that to have been the band's swan song.
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Now playing: Guns N' Roses - Riad N' The Bedouins