Michael Craig's Journal

1. I Could Sleep in it ‘Til Morning but this Nightmare Never Ends

In the pre-dawn hours of September 14, I had a dream. I consider my sleeping dreams insignificant and I rarely remember them. (In contrast, I think my waking dreams are very meaningful.)

But this one was different.

I dreamed I was talking to Axl Rose, explaining to him why it was in both our interests that my next book be about the 15 years he has spent between Guns ‘n’ Roses studio albums. A psychiatrist would (and, someday, may) chalk it up to deadline anxiety. I’ve been working like a Tijuana whore on crack all year on the Full Tilt book, while Mr. Badass Axl Rose has been closeted for more than a decade in a Malibu mansion trying to create 60 minutes of music.

I took a different message from the dream: I should see Axl about being the subject of my next book. Five minutes after I signed on to AOL that morning, I looked at Robin Leach’s column about Vegas and saw for the first time that Guns ‘n’ Roses was coming to the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in 3 days. It seemed like a sign to me.

Robin knows everybody in Vegas and everything that’s happening, so I e-mailed him about the show. He told me he would not be attending because he was going to L.A., coincidentally, to pitch his agent the TV movie idea we’ve been working on together along with Eric Gladstone.

He offered to let me cover the concert for his AOL column and put me in touch with the P.R. person connected with the show.

Let’s cut to the chase: someone pulled a scam on me. No way in a million years would Robin Leach have covered something like this show. And the P.R. person, a perfectly sweet woman named Andrea who couldn’t have been nicer, must have been in on it.

I had to be the only journalist in attendance. No member of the media in their right mind would have put up with what I endured, for a story about indulgence and misogyny.

But I was a man with a dream.

 

2. I’ll Pay You at Another Time, Take it to the End of the Line

In my next life, if I have any involvement in journalism, I am swearing off covering “events.” The difference between covering “events” and covering “news” is that for events, you either need access from someone who controls it or would like the cooperation of some non-antagonistic entity. There’s always a risk of a conflict if Guns ‘N’ Roses or the Hard Rock cooperate with me: I might feel that I can’t disclose that the Hard Rock is negligent, stupid, and just asking for trouble by not requiring a grade school education of its security guards and routinely booking acts who arrive eons late for their shows, assuring a drunk, angry mob for an audience; or I might feel that Axl Rose’s 3-hours late arrival shouldn’t get mentioned because it implies something negative about the intelligence and sensitivity of a man who, during the last four months, was accused of biting a security guard and allegedly bitch-slapped by Tommy Hilfiger.

[FYI, I've always questioned Rose's bona fides as a bad ass. At the MTV VMAs in 1991, GnR got into a well-publicized shoving match backstage with Nirvana. This story has always been hauled out to show how real Guns 'n' Roses was - uncivilized, impolite, unruly. But come on. A shoving match? Shoving? With Nirvana? If not for Kurt Cobain's suicide, I think the Dixie Chicks could have taken Nirvana in a fight.]

Oops. Guess I let the cats out of the bag. The greater risk, actually, is the opposite: that the organizers will treat the media like shit and if the media writes anything negative, they can claim bias because the media didn’t get treated sufficiently “special.”

Frankly, I’d have been happy to pay the $150 for the ticket. But I didn’t get an actual ticket, or a seat. Everyone who paid $150 was ripped off, given the same consideration as cattle on the way to slaughterhouse. So I take that back. I wouldn’t have paid $150 for that. I’d have paid $150 to be treated decently, but that wasn’t an option.

I was told that the doors to the theater open at 8 PM, so I made sure to be at the box office by 7:45. They didn’t have a ticket for me. Instead, they issued me a pink bracelet. I went to one of the four places at which people were lined up for admission. (No one in the ticket office knew what this meant, nor did they know where I was supposed to go to gain admission.) There were people with tickets, people with badges around their necks, people with line passes.

I had a pink bracelet. No one knew whether this would gain me admission or which line I should stand in. Every employee of the Hard Rock responsible for tickets, admission, lines, or security acted like this was their first day on the job. Don’t they do this all the time?

In line, the people waiting ranged in age from 8 to … almost as old as me. There was a lot of smoking, drinking, and tank tops.

The doors still hadn’t opened as it neared 8:30, but they did offer us some pre-show entertainment. Security had some guy in a choke hold and they paraded him by us. Word in the line was that they guy was a ticket scalper. I think he was part of a pre-arranged plan to scare us into obedience. 90% of the calories burned by security from 8:30 PM until when Axl called it a night at 1:30 AM were during this little drama.

Finally, just before 8:30, they opened the doors and let us in. There was no seating in The Joint - all general admission, unreserved, standing room only. The ticket-takers, however, didn’t know what to make of that, or the variety of items they were being handed as tokens of admission.

TICKET TAKER: Ticket?

MIKE: I don’t have one. I have this pink bracelet.

TICKET TAKER: You have to have a ticket.

MIKE: I don’t have one.

TICKET TAKER: Then go in.

Security then did a “scan” they must have learned from the Helen Keller School of Security. The guard snatched the water bottle out of my shirt pocket but missed the camera and voice recorder I was carrying. Four and a half hours later, badly dehydrated and seeking revenge, I turned on the voice recorder and captured the last twenty minutes of the show. It sounds like the inside of a lion’s mouth.

I repeated the rap with an inside ticket-taker and a hand-stamper. Both made calls on their walkie-talkies (props, no doubt). I had a twenty-dollar bill in my hand, ready to hand over to move things along but they were too inefficient even for bribes. I assume everyone who works in a casino who acts stupid is just holding out for a tip, and I’m usually right. But this was True Stupidity: people too dumb to be tipped. That’s as rare as True Love.

Befuddled, both just waved me on.

A minute later, I was standing five feet from the stage.

And within five minutes, the person standing next to me threatened to kill me.

 

3. I Used to Love Her, But I Had to Kill Her

Somehow, after all that, I ended up being one of the first in the room. I walked up to the stage and stood behind the people in front of me. As a crowd started filling in behind me, I did what I always do when I’m stuck someplace.

I started writing.

This is apparently not normal behavior at a concert. I heard that throughout the night, and what happened immediately after I opened my notebook was the most conspicuous proof of this. A blonde woman with a weathered face on my right asked what I was writing.

I have told this story to several friends and when they ask why the woman threatened to kill me, I say, “because I answered her question.”

“I’m writing about the show for AOL and taking notes about how small the stage is.”

She made some comment about computers and I asked her if she had seen GnR perform before. She gave me a very detailed explanation about having seen them at the L.A. Coliseum, “but that was when it was really Guns ‘n’ Roses, not this shit.”

I almost asked her why, if she felt that way, she paid $150 for a ticket, but I didn’t. It turned out that it didn’t matter what I said, because she sneered and said, “Don’t fuckin’ talk to me, okay? In fact, why don’t you get the fuck away from me?”

I said nothing and returned to my notebook. Now, at least, I had something to write.

A minute later, she said, “I go to concerts because I hope I’ll end up next to a serial killer. Then I can stab him during the show and get off on that. You wouldn’t be a serial killer, would you?”

“No.”

“So, are you going to move?”

“No,” I told her. “I don’t think so.” I went back to writing.

“Damn,” she said, “and I left my knife in my pickup. Let me ask you another question then. Have you ever fucked anything over thirteen?”

Ms. Altamont actually did me a favor. I usually don’t mingle well in crowds of strangers. Granted, I now had a mortal enemy, but this scene broke the ice with the people to my left. They were more friendly than Psycho Lady - hell, Axl was more friendly than Psycho Lady - and we now had something to talk about.

And time to talk there was aplenty. It was 2 hours 45 minutes until Guns ‘n’ Roses came on. Hoobastank performed a set from 9 to 9:30. The rest of the time was spent waiting. Because I don’t drink or smoke, that left me without the occupations being pursued by 99% of the audience.

Julie, who ended up becoming my Tour Guide to the concert scene, came with her boyfriend and another couple, Brian and a girlfriend whose name I didn’t catch. Brian and his lady were standing behind me to my right. At one point, Brian, who I also chatted with, told me the guy to their right was disrespecting his girlfriend, so she was going to stand close behind me, with Brian separating her from Freddy Frottage.

Accommodations were so tight that Brian actually asked, “You don’t mind if my girlfriend mashes her boobs into your back for the next couple hours, do you?”

I was flattered that Julie and Brian took me into their collective, um, bosom. It turned out that membership wasn’t all that exclusive. They had also befriended Ruth, a young woman there with her boyfriend. Ruth had been standing in line since 8 AM to get tickets, then to be the first one in the room. (Ruth seemed sweet, but I didn’t talk with her much. I’m not sure if she would have appreciated that I showed up 15 minutes before the doors were supposed to open, got my admission for free, and seriously considered just walking out several times.)

Some woman with bouncy, buoyant hair moved to Julie’s left and was in conversation with someone about something that required that she punctuate her end of the discussion by whipping her hair back and forth. At one point, Julie put her hand over her mouth and said to me, “Could you ask your psycho after she finishes you off if she’ll take care of the bitch who’s whipping me with her hair? Or at least let me use her knife so I can give her a trim?”

Ten minutes later, Julie was introducing me to Shelli. Shelli was interested in what I was writing and, notwithstanding what happened the last time I shared, I showed her some of my notes. She wasn’t sure if she liked my designation of her as “the big hair girl,” so I changed it to “the attractive big hair girl” in my notes and she was … copasetic. (Shelli really was attractive, and she re-applied her lipstick as Guns ‘n’ Roses started its first song for who-knows-what reason.) I made sure NOT to show Shelli the part about her new friend Julie wanting to stab her.

Beer was in abundant supply, though I don’t know where it came from. Actually, I knew it was coming from the bar at $6 per bottle, but I didn’t understand where it KEPT coming from, because everyone seemed supplied, yet no one was willing to give up their space. Julie, who was knocking back her share of the brews, led the discussion on whether the intoxicants would urinate where they were standing if Guns ‘n’ Roses delayed their arrival long enough.

Hoobastank, as I said, started playing at 9. There was no introduction. The lights went out and when they came back on, four guys were making as much noise as they could. I know of only one Hoobastank song - The Reason (which they saved for the end) - and I have no idea what they look like.

But I knew it was them because one of their amp cases had a small piece of masking tape with “HOOBASTANK” written on it. I watched the crew set up and specifically noticed all the boxes and cases and speakers. I’m pretty sure that tape wasn’t there before the lights went out.

Here is everything I remember about Hoobastank: (1) They were NOT Guns ‘n’ Roses, a fact that I knew instinctively but many people in the audience regarded as a heinous insult. (2) The lead singer looked way too young and clean-cut to be a bad ass, though they had a loud, bad-ass sound. (3) Their one hit, The Reason, sounded nothing like any of the other songs in their set. (4) One of the guys in front of me set his drink on the floor after their set started. Wow, I thought, that’s optimistic.

During the 100 or so minutes between Hoobastank’s exit and Guns ‘n’ Roses’ entrance, I got to reflect on the paradox of rock concerts: The music of a band like GnR doesn’t work unless audience members are angry. But why should they be angry if they are about to be treated to a performance by their heroes? The paradox gets resolved by making people wait until they are properly angry. Axl, I’m sure, was willing to wait backstage as long as it was going to take.

 

4. The Shining

Imagine the worst bully from your junior high school. Then imagine 20 of them, all grown up, all drummed out of whatever malls they tried finding jobs in. That was the security for the show. The main qualifications for this job are, apparently, a shaved head, a goatee, and big forearms. You could cheat on the third one, though. If you had a big gut and were willing to cross your arms over it a lot, that’d make your forearms look nice ‘n’ beefy.

I think the main job of security, other than to look menacing, was to reprimand people for taking pictures. Every single person around me was using their cell phone to take pictures. Every single person. In the olden days, Axl might have once walked out because someone took a picture of him. (He mellowed a little bit, at least, in this regard. During one song, he was singing at the right side of the stage and someone lobbed an empty water bottle at him, which he followed with his eyes as it missed. No harm, no foul.)

But taking of pictures is still technically forbidden. Every so often, a security guy would pull out his flashlight, lean over the mesh screen, flash it at an offender - any random person but me, because everyone was taking pictures - and stick out his jaw like Bill Cowher, the coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and stare.

That was it.

If something Really Bad happened (and Really Bad was a given with 1,200 rowdy strangers shoved together with a truckload of cigarettes, 100 cases of $6 beers, and 3 hours with nothing whatsoever do to), several guards would flash their pen lights and strobe them. When things got heavy - and I’m not talking about the customary 30 extra pounds Hard Rock security requires of its employees - the shaved-head/goatee crew would be pushed aside by The Man with a Crew Cut and No Neck.

When the appearance of brute force wasn’t enough to enforce order, they brought out Mr. Pony Tail. Mr. Pony Tail was the only security guy with the authority to speak. I think they gave him this power because (a) in some cultures, I guess a pony tail confers power and dominance, and commands respect (though other than the fictional world of Ponyland, I know of no such place), and (b) he regularly reads Word of the Day. On one occasion, a half-dozen security guys had their penlights trained on a spot just to my right. Crew-Cut even had his full-sized D-cell battery light operating at full strobe. Five members of the audience pointed to one guy, who had, from the complaints screamed at the stage, been feeling up guys’ girlfriends, shoving his way toward the stage, burning people with a cigarette, and starting fights.

The Pony-Tailed One leaned over the mesh security barrier. “C’mon, you. We want everything to be copasetic.” With that, the flashlights were extinguished and the security dudes disappeared.

Julie, my narrator, managed to work “copasetic” into conversation six times in the next fifteen minutes, which was actually quite impressive because each time she did it - and we weren’t exactly in deep conversation - it was unexpected. Her wit was surgical in this regard, which is quite rare in a concert audience.

But that was the crazy thing about Mr. Copasetic & Co. They were completely powerless. So think of those 20 awful bullies with absolute power, except they are imprisoned behind a 4-foot mesh screen that they aren’t allowed to cross, and they are armed only with tiny flashlights and, for one of them at least, a single 4-syllable word.

Take a picture? You’ll get a shining.

Spill a beer on somebody? That’ll earn you a shining AND a strobing mister.

Start a fight? You’re gonna get the shining of your life for that one, and a strobing you’ll never forget.

 

5. Just an Urchin Livin’ Under the Street

Several people brought their kids to the show. My two older kids, Barry and Ellie, both expressed diappointment that I wouldn’t bring them along. They don’t know how lucky they are. They both like Guns ‘n’ Roses music, but I don’t remember either expressing an interest in standing around for three hours and both are more likely than me to complain when the TV is too loud. They will get into arguments over who gets to sleep on the couch because sometimes, late at night, they are both too lazy to climb the stairs to their bedrooms.

Clearly, this wouldn’t be their scene. Nevertheless, I saw a lot of 8, 10, 12 year old kids dragged along. And I mean dragged. There didn’t seem to be a single kid who looked like they were enjoying themselves. One woman had two kids with her and they looked positively dazed. But why shouldn’t they be? What 10 year-old could handle standing in one place for three hours? The only comfort she provided them was getting them in the very front row, so they could lean on the mesh barrier separating the band from the audience. (Based on the other conditions at the show, it wouldn’t surprise me if the mesh was constructed of razor wire.)

The kids looked very unhappy, though maybe it was because ma put on her 1987 concert-going get-up. For all I know, she looks like this very day, but it certainly appeared to be a Halloween costume: piles of make-up, Appetite for Destruction tank-top, about six bra straps of different colors showing [?], shredded jeans, high-high-high heels. Was she angling to get invited backstage by the band? Maybe the band’s kids would invite her kids backstage too? Or, in that event, would she just sell them to gypsies?

Mostly, the children were ignored, by their parents and the other adults in the vicinity, who were smoking like tobacco was about to be banned in America and getting progressively drunker and angier. At one point before the show, I heard this from two guys right behind me:

FIRST GUY: I got a joint. Wanna light up?

SECOND GUY: Be cool. There’s goddamned kids ten feet in front of us.

FIRST GUY: What do you want me to do, pass it around? They’re not my fuckin’ kids.

I was walking to the parking garage after the show behind another guy and his son, who was about 13. This scene looked a lot more familiar than Mom Does Axl.

DAD: So c’mon. You didn’t like anything about it?

KID: Ah-oh-ough. [That's Exhausted Kid for "I don't know."]

DAD: If you remember just one song, it’ll be worth it to me. 

 

6. Just Like Children Hiding in a Closet Can’t Tell What’s Going on Outside, Sometimes We’re so Far Off the Beaten Track We’ll Get Taken for a Ride. (A/k/a, The Show)

My report on the show will be appearing in Robin Leach’s LUXE LIFE any day. The show itself was like sitting on top of a jet engine turbine. Dangerous, exciting, but mostly loud behind human endurance. Because it was dark (except when there were explosions from the stage illuminating the room briefly or a nearby patron was getting a strobing), too loud to think, and too crowded to reach into my pocket for a pen and notebook (yet it was, ironically, a Pickpocket’s Paradise), I couldn’t take many notes during the show.

* 11:15 - Axl and GnR come out and start POUNDING.

* Robin Finck looks nearly as cool as Slash when he comes out. Long, long hair and long beardl. Fedora. Shades. Dark suit. (This was before I saw that he was also wearing some kind of wrap-skirt and bright red tights or knee socks. Finck was so close to perfecting the Bad Ass Guitar look, but he fumbled the ball on the 3 yard line.)

* Axl Rose is heavier than in his touring years but he still looks like he’s in good shape.

* During “You Could Be Mine,” Axl sings with this expression on his face. Sneering. Malevolent. He knows enough stagecraft to go through the motions, but that look makes it seem like the performance still matters to him.

* Axl introduces one of the guitarists by saying, “Looking smart in a striped suit ….” Look who we’re getting fashion opinions from? A guy with multihued dreadlocks.

* Dizzy Reed looks like Axl’s little brother. He has Axl’s 1987 physique (and rarely wears a shirt), similar-looking tattoos, and even a little-brother version of Axl’s current hairstyle.

* The guitars are so loud that hardly anything else about the music matters. Axl’s lyrics are barely recognizable sometimes. It’s impossible to tell if the new songs are any good. But they’re loud.

* Maybe this makes me an old fogey, but I don’t know if explosions have a place in an indoor show in front of 1,200 people. The drummer looked he was going to get Spinal Tapped a couple times.

* Instead of breaks in the show, several members get solos while Axl towels off. One of the guitarists set to play with the group this year, named Buckethead, quit 2 weeks before their May New York shows. They replaced him with a guy named Bumblefoot - some kind of numerology thing about initials and number of letters? - so I thought the least I could do was applaud his solo, which was actually quite good. In fact, this is a very good group of musicians, not that I’m qualified to know. (The high water mark of my music knowledge is telling people that the same guy who directed Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody video also directed the Kidsongs videos my kids watched as toddlers.)

* GnR played for 2 hours, 15 minutes, finishing at 1:30 AM. My face felt numb when I walked out of The Joint.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 4:10 pm and is filed under My favourites:.