Guns N’ Roses, Use Your Illusion I
Featured Album
Surprisingly good despite its overreaching — or because of it
A Wings cover, a 10-minute mini-opera that recalls Bloodrock's "D.O.A.," multiple songs that cross the five-minute mark, an Alice Cooper cameo, a waltz…the list of odd things about the first half of Guns N' Roses' 1991 diptych can stretch on and on. Is this the same band who offered up the lean, mean Appetite For Destruction only four years prior? Well, yes, at least sort of — by this time, drummer Steven Adler had left the building, the Cult's Matt Sorum had replaced him, keyboardist Dizzy Reed was grafted onto the band's lineup, and Izzy Stradlin was on the way out. Those changes in personnel were but the beginning of switch-ups for GNR, who were still the biggest rock band in the world at this point; indeed, much of the lyrical content on the album deals head-on with that fact.
Given the list of indulgences laid out above (including the meta-rock-star content), one might assume that Use Your Illusion I is a bit too much, a lot of pounds of rock in a bag that can hold about half that amount. But it's a surprisingly good listen despite its overreaching — or, indeed, because of it at times. Take the Wings cover, which only slightly reimagines its source material ("Live and Let Die") yet manages to serve as an effective showcase for Rose's strangled screams; or the waltz, which is a campfire-sing-along kiss-off on which Rose and Stradlin harmonize with Blind Melon's Shannon Hoon.
There are other highlights as well, many of which occur when the band most aggressively flaunts its Rolling Stones influence: Two songs have the cooler-than-cool Stradlin on vocals, including the shambling "Dust N' Bones"; "Bad Obsession," another entry into the catalog of songs that could be about indulging in either drugs or women, is one of the album's most swaggering moments; and the one-two punch of "Bad Apples" and "Dead Horse" bring a bit of mood-lightening barroom blooze to the record's back end. "Garden of Eden" is a speedy rundown of Rose's grievances with the society of the time during which he ranted so quickly, the accompanying video had a "follow the bouncing ball" conceit superimposed over its lyrics. And then there's "November Rain," the long-marinating Rose ballad that one suspects he committed to record because his stature allowed him to finally afford it the full mini-opera treatment; it also has Slash's most pealingly romantic solo since "Sweet Child O' Mine."
