Kow wrote:

Appetite for Destruction in 1987 spoke to a lot of teenagers like nothing else did in that moment. I don't think there's any in depth analysis of that really. It was a feeling of the new and exciting.

Yeah, and it only felt new to the ‘kids’ at the time. Older folks remembered the Stooges, MC5, the Ramones, etc etc. Hell, there was even a good dash of Motley Crue and a bit of the Rolling Stones in there. But what G’n’R did was kick against the shiny glossy thing rock had turned into at the time and bring back a bit of grit and attitude. As much as my parents might have heard it all before, to a teenager in rural Yorkshire it felt exciting and vital and I pretty much wore out my vinyl playing it over and over and over again.

Kow wrote:

There was a brief period between the album being released and Sweet Child being a single, when it felt like you were part of small group of fand who had discovered something new and secret.

Very much this.
I was in my early twenties and fully entrenched in the rock scene when they broke around 87/88, but for me and my mates it was by and large the first time that we realised that we were getting older and a new generation of much younger fans were moving in.
Sure, we initially liked GnR when they were still largely unknown. As a club band, they were an incredible proposition...


...but they were very quickly adopted by "kids" in their mid teens, which was obviously a massive tun-off for us older (lol) rock fans.
Appetite was a genuinely incredible album, but to this day I can't listen to songs like Sweet Child, or Paradise City due to the over-saturation these tracks received at the time. It became like aversion therapy, which is a shame really.
So, never a massive fan then, but always watching from the bunker at ground zero with a raised eyebrow in the direction of all those pesky kids.
Like I say, I saw them at Donnington in 88, but I certainly wasn't down the front getting crushed to death. Nah, we were up the back having a high old time smashed on vodka and speed. I barely remember them playing tbh, but I do remember them stopping their set several times to try and disperse the crush. That'll be all them pesky kids down the front again.

Time passed.

I bought Use Your Illusion on day one, and was by and large massively disappointed. The wheels had come off the wagon, and GnR had becomes victims of their own stupidity. This was the sound of a band drowning in self-importance and an unwavering belief in their own idiotic PR. For me, the ship had sailed.

As a coda though, by chance I saw them again at Wembley Stadium in 1991.
My friend Kenny used to work as a courier on the buses that took fans round the country to gigs. GnR being super popular back then, he had a lot of buses going down to London for their big show, so he offered a few of us work doing the courier thing.
I jumped at the chance, because despite having zero interest in GnR by that point, one of the support bands at the show was this new band who were at that point not well known, but would go on to be moderately successful in their own right. Anyway, I was a fan. I'd seen them recently at King Tuts Wah Wah Hut and they were incredible live. They were called The Nine Inch Nails. Some of you may have heard of them.

So anyway, we got free travel to London, some moolah for a day on the piss in the city, and free tickets to the gig. All we had to do was make sure that when the bus left everyone was on it. Easy money. Good times.

The Nails were incredible. In the face of massive crowd indifference, they absolutely tore the place up, and it's a lasting memory to this day. GnR on the other hand were a bloated mess. They went down a storm with the pesky kids, but they were a shadow of what had made them great just a few short years earlier.
Looking back at the setlist for that day...


...I would genuinely struggle to recognise half the songs they played that night. It was interesting to watch as a (by that point) dispassionate observer though. They had embraced everything they railed against in their early days. This was a band slowly imploding on their own self importance right before my eyes, and that tour would ultimately destroy them as it rumbled around the world.
Me? I went home and was never interested in anything they did again. It was over.

Cracking view from the front lines there, G. Thanks.

NIN are a really interesting comparison … a rare example of a band ageing gracefully.

Crue were pure comedy from day one. If by dangerous we mean thick, then yeah. Their first album was hilarious, even to 15 year old me.

Most Cock Rock is dangerous in the way that Darkwing Duck says it.

Alkaline Trio only had one good song so I genuinely can't imagine them doing a set. Never mind a blistering one.

Bob is a filthy casual, it's got to be Stupid Kid.

Emo credentials confirmed.

poprock wrote:

Emo credentials confirmed.

I'd have been any dumb subculture for her. We even shared a hotel room! All I remember is that we ended up watching a thing on Channel 4 about best artists and it had Beck and Slash and Marilyn Manson on Talking about Radiohead.

Which is a nice loop back to GnR. My Axl and Slash loving pals haaaaaated Radiohead, so it was nice to know that someone like Slash wasn't as closed minded.

Tempy wrote:

Slash wasn't as closed minded.

Slash had a mental upbringing. He couldn’t have grown up as anything but a rock star. His Dad was a designer, working with people like Janis Joplin, the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. His Mum dated David Bowie, for fuck’s sake.

The Alkaline Trio chat makes me want to listen to Slapstick.

“Who are Slapstick?” I hear none of you cry.

One of the greatest bands of all time, if you ask me. (You didn’t.)

They were a ska/punk band from Chicago in the early ’90s. Dan Andriano was in Slapstick. Remember Operation Ivy? Yeah, a lot like them. And, like Op Ivy, Slapstick only left behind a few recordings but started a family tree that birthed a lot of much more famous bands. Like Alkaline Trio, for one.

Slapstick’s scrappy take on ska/punk was super lo-fi. Kids with cheap guitars and scuffed chequered Vans. But the energy was incredible. You had to deal with terrible production on their records, but the songwriting was great – all attitude and adrenalin, like they were the last gang in town.

They put out a few singles, EPs, and compilation tracks, and one short album called Lookit. Eventually Mike Park at Asian Man Records pulled it all together into an anthology and gave it a worldwide CD release. Again, just like Operation Ivy before them, but in a different city and on a different record label.

That compilation was a fucking huge hit on the scene, globally. Not that it sold much – but everybody knew who Slapstick were. They were the coolest of the cool kids. Underground and overplayed. Every punk club DJ relied on that album, every skatepark played it on repeat.

And then, suddenly, Slapstick disappeared. They split up, it turned out, because they were all bored of playing ska. Which is fair enough – it’s only ever a phase for most musicians.

But ex-members of Slapstick started (or joined) a lot other punk and punk-adjacent bands.

Less Than Jake
Tuesday
The Broadways
Alkaline Trio
The Honor System
The Lawrence Arms
Smoking Popes
Duvall
Whale/Horse
The Falcon
Colossal
Jerkwater
88 Fingers Louie
Flowers
The Vandals
Suicide Machines
Sweep the Leg Johnny
…
I’m sure there are more. That lot are just off the top of my head.

Slapstick reformed, once, to play a charity gig at Riotfest in Chicago. I think that was around 2011 or 2012? There are some videos from that kicking about on YouTube.

Actually don’t know what Buddyhead is.

This is especially for @Armitage_Shankburn – around 900 hours of Andy Weatherall mixes on a shared Google Drive.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B23ZLBzfzfvec3ZhVE1uV0JtSGs

Bob wrote:

Shit someone mention the weeknd quick

Pay that.

To be fair I love Chinese Democracy.

A different day could produce a different 12 tracks