Guns N' Roses Prove Sometimes You Can't Go Back Home Again

I've wanted to see Guns N' Roses since I was 12 years old.

I came close once. In 2002, I had a ticket to see them in Vancouver, but Axl never showed up. People rioted.

Two years ago, I even saw a Guns N' Roses cover band called Gunts N' Roses, with an Axl stand-in that looked more like Vince Neil from Motley Crue. It was one of the rowdiest shows I've ever seen.

These are the trials and tribulations Guns N' Roses fans are willing to endure — cancelled gigs, 15-year gaps between (bad) albums and yes, a group of hired guns playing our favourite songs — all because 20-some-odd years ago, this band made a record called Appetite For Destruction.

It's how a band that are a shadow of what they once were managed to pack the Air Canada Centre, and it's how a hardened, cynical 28-year old reviewer can time-warp back into his idealistic young self.

Hitting the stage at 11:30 p.m., a mere two hours after their scheduled start time, Rose and company managed to drop seven tracks of that immortal LP. Unfortunately, they also played nine off of the bloated turd that was Chinese Democracy, including three during a four-song encore that pushed the night up to the 2 a.m. mark.

Given this was billed as the "Chinese Democracy Tour," the glut of new material was to be expected. Freed from the claustrophobic production of the record, songs like "Better," "Shackler's Revenge" and opener "Chinese Democracy" sounded pretty great. But ballads like "Street Of Dreams," "Sorry" and "Madagascar" felt increasingly grating as the night progressed with the knowledge that I was going to miss the last subway home.

Appetite's trifecta of hits — "Welcome To The Jungle," "Sweet Child O' Mine" and "Paradise City" — were sprinkled throughout the set, but the band seemed sluggish during these tracks, perhaps due to their "hafta play them" nature. Deeper cuts from the album fared better, especially "Rocket Queen."

But the night's highlight came from a pair of tracks from the too often ignored Use Your Illusion albums. "November Rain" and the still menacing "You Could Be Mine" were where the band seemed to really pull it all together and proved worthy of the ridiculous adulation their fans still bestow upon them.

Rose seemed in incredibly good spirits, joking that the group were, essentially, hungover from partying the night before, and telling stories, a stark contrast to the public perception of the reclusive singer who was too temperamental for the guy that wore the KFC bucket on his head.

Rose's voice hasn't deteriorated at all, and between frequent trips to a little black hut on the side of the stage, he rarely stopped moving around the stage. The band, which now includes long-time bass player and ex-Replacement Tommy Stinson, guitarists Bumble Foot, Richard Fortus and DJ Ashba, drummer Frank Ferrer and sole-early '90s hold-over Dizzy Reed on keyboards, were equally as animated.

Guns N' Roses circa 2010 can definitely cut it in technical proficiency — all are talented musicians. They're not exactly left in the background while Rose takes the spotlight (all three guitarists got their own instrumental solos). But the sense of menace and seething anger is missing from the current incarnation. It's what drew me to them as an impressionable 12-year-old.

While Rose still carries these qualities with him everywhere he goes, the rest of the band seem subservient to his whims. It's not that the original line-up didn't have to deal with his antics; they put up with quite a lot, in fact. But the group always felt like a unit who had lived the nihilistic lyrics of their songs and had come together to take on the world. It's a quality that you can't replicate and no matter how good this band gets, Guns N' Roses will never have that again.