Misfit Metalheads

By JOE QUEENAN

For the original cover of their monstrously successful 1987 debut album Appetite for Destruction, Guns N' Roses selected a painting of a sinister robotic figure towering over a ravished female with her undergarments around her knees. The album, whose leitmotivs were violent sex, drug abuse, alcoholism and insanity, featured lyrics like "Tied up, tied down, up against the wall/ Be my rubbermade baby/ An' we can do it all." The record sold 14 million copies.

Buoyed by this success, the Gunners in 1988 exhumed some archival material and released a stopgap, extended-play album with such lyrics as "I used to love her/ But I had to kill her"; "Police and niggers, that's right, get out of my way"; and "Immigrants and faggots . . . come to our country and think they'll do as they please/ Like start a mini-Iran, or spread some f ---disease." The record sold 6 million copies.

Buoyed by this success, the Gunners have now made rock-'n'-roll history by simultaneously releasing two completely different albums with virtually identical covers: Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II. This time out, the Gunners, while clinging to their trademark bitch-slapping posturing, have also introduced such engaging new subjects as bondage, the lure of homicide and the pleasures of drug-induced comas. They offer a song called Pretty Tied Up, accompanied by a drawing in the lyric sheet of a naked, bound and blindfolded woman. They also graphically invite the editor and publisher of Spin magazine, Bob Guccione Jr., to perform oral sex on the Guns N' Roses' irrepressible lead singer, W. Axl Rose.

The two albums (price: $15.98 apiece on CD) went on sale at midnight last Monday, and many large stores stayed open to accommodate sometimes raucous crowds of buyers who had milled about for hours. Nationwide, the albums sold an estimated 500,000 copies within two hours of going on sale, and 1.5 million copies within three days. With 7.3 million records already shipped to dealers around the world, the record company, Geffen Records, has encouraged wild talk that the album could be as big as Michael Jackson's Thriller, the top-selling record of all time (more than 40 million copies sold worldwide).

It would be unfair to attribute all, or even most, of Guns N' Roses' success to their unrelentingly sexist and uncompromisingly violent lyrics or to their forays into xenophobia, racism and sadomasochism. Rock 'n' roll has always been filled with sexist, violent bands, but very few of them sell 14 million copies the first time out of the chute. What sets the Gunners apart is that they are a genuinely electrifying band that neither looks nor sounds like the interchangeable Whitesnakes, Poisons and Bon Jovis that make up the drab MTV universe. What the Gunners play is very, very good. What the Gunners say is very, very bad. Of 30 songs on the new albums, 10 contain the F word. That's why several chains -- including K Mart and Wal-Mart -- won't stock them.

The Gunners stick to the serious business of rock 'n' roll, synthesizing the Stones and the Sex Pistols to produce Aerosmith for the '90s. They never drift very far from the jackhammer style that began to dominate the idiom two decades ago. This is the main reason their audience is not entirely limited to 16-year-old boys with baseball caps worn backward. Guns N' Roses tenaciously clings to hard rock's tradition of being loud, mean and obvious. No one alive looks more like rock stars than Rose, 29, and guitarist Slash, 26, with their tattoos, their headgear, their emotional problems (Slash has frequently used heroin, and Rose is a manic-depressive) and their we-sold-our-soul-to-rock-' n'-roll attitudes.

The Gunners' success is giving the kiss of life to a moribund record industry, and has kept rock 'n' roll from doing what it keeps threatening to do: expire. Veering between creaking dinosaurs like the Grateful Dead (the hottest concert act of the past summer), pious scolds like Sinead O'Connor, and mopey '60s retreads like R.E.M., rock 'n' roll is in need of the juice that only true believers like Guns N' Roses can supply.

The Gunners certainly know how to stay in the news. With Rose's brief marriage to Erin Everly, daughter of singer Don Everly, Slash's drunken, profanity-spewed acceptance speech at the 1990 American Music Awards (carried on live TV), Rose's annulment of his marriage, guitarist Izzy Stradlin's arrest for urinating in an airplane galley, and Rose's arrest last November after allegedly hitting a female neighbor on the head with a wine bottle (the charges were later dropped), you have the makings of a mythology that Keith Moon would envy.

On July 2 at a concert not far from St. Louis, Rose got into a fight with a camera-toting biker (cameras are banned at Guns concerts) and ended up storming off the stage, to the dismay of 20,000 fans. In the ensuing riot, 16 people were arrested, 60 were injured, and $200,000 in property damage was sustained.

The band's exploits bring to mind Rob Reiner's priceless 1984 film This Is Spinal Tap, a pseudo-rock documentary chronicling the disastrous final American tour of the world's stupidest rock band. Surveying the Gunners' career, one gets the impression that the band may have seen the film, entirely missed the satirical thrust, and elected to pattern themselves after Reiner's brain-dead metalheads.

It's hard, for example, not to question the intelligence of a band that uses the word niggers even though its lead guitarist, Slash, is half black. It's hard not to be puzzled by a band that agrees to appear at a benefit for the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City, only to get bounced off the program because its latest record contains the word faggots. It's hard not to be mystified by a band that goes on a 25-city tour after a two-year absence and puts out two new albums after the tour is over. And it's hard not to chuckle at a band whose lead guitarist spends a sizable chunk of his Rolling Stone interview discussing the death of his pet snake Clyde. ("Had he been sick for a long time?" inquired Rolling Stone, in arguably the most unforgettable rock-'n'-roll interview question of all time. Yes, the snake had.)

The Use Your Illusion albums seem certain to keep selling well. Although the first album is better than the second, and although neither contains a song as memorable as Sweet Child o' Mine or Paradise City from the Appetite for Destruction album, both are exciting, well-produced records, with plenty of catchy rockers and only a handful of outright duds. The guitars are hot, the drumming is hot, the vocals are red-hot. Anyone who can get past the offensive lyrics will be buying one of the best rock albums of the year. Or two of them.

Assisting the layman in getting past the lyrics will be the cottage industry of those rock critics who earn a living by explaining away the Gunners' verbal excesses as "satire," "parody" or a crude but sincere attempt to achieve a sort of audiophonic cinema verite. These are the same people who fashion byzantine intellectual justifications for the vicious anti-Semitism of the rap group Public Enemy or the uninterrupted verbal degradation of women that is the stock-in-trade of 2 Live Crew.

It is a very troubling thought that never in the history of the business has the record industry has been so dependent for its financial well being on the success of such social misfits. Whereas in the past the industry has looked for a shot in the arm from the cuddly Beatles, the enigmatic Michael Jackson or the populist Bruce Springsteen, it now turns its yearning eyes to a bunch of young men who, by even their own admission, are "sociopsychotic."

And whiners. Yes, one increasingly grating thing about the band is their inexhaustible capacity for self-pity. Having been coddled from birth by their record company and by MTV, and having been given a free ride by the rock press, the Gunners nevertheless cannot get off the whinemobile, as they moan about the demanding life of a rock star. According to Forbes, the Gunners will earn $25 million in 1990-91. These guys don't know how to take yes for an answer.

So they retreat into Guns-vs.-the-world self-pity. "Don't damn me when I speak a piece of my mind," sniffles Rose in the band's most annoying new number. "Cause silence isn't golden when I'm holding it inside." Poor Axl. A talented vocalist and a whirling dervish of a stage performer, Rose is nonetheless one very disturbed human being, who sings, "I'm a cold heartbreaker/ Fit ta burn and I'll rip your heart in two." This is probably true. But even truer, and more appropriate, are the words once sung by his obvious intellectual forebear, the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz:

I would not be just a nuffin',

My head all full of stuffin',

My heart all full of pain.

And perhaps I'd deserve you

And be even worthy of you,

If I only had a brain.