Given the incendiary, fragile alchemy that made them such an explosively brilliant band, it’s no surprise that it took a few attempts to get the classic Guns N’Roses line-up right. It was a formula they had been trying to get right over the course of a few years, first with Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin’s band Hollywood Rose and then as they merged with fellow Los Angeles band L.A. Guns in early 1985. But still, something was amiss.
The line-up took its first steps towards their definitive crew with the addition of bassist Duff McKagan shortly before their first gig as Guns N’Roses at the Troubadour in March 1985. This version of the quintet did not last long, though. Instead, with a short tour of the Pacific Northwest planned for early summer fast approaching, it all looked like it might fall to pieces when lead guitarist Tracii and drummer Rob Gardner departed on the eve of the booked dates.
Whilst Tracii would later claim he left because the band “wasn’t fun anymore”, the members he left behind said it was down to the six-stringer being uncomfortable with arrangements regarding the forthcoming tour. “Izzy and Axl were like, ‘Let’s do it, let’s go on the road’!” McKagan explained in Marc Canter’s book Reckless Road, documenting the band’s first 50 shows. “Tracii and Rob were more concerned with where they were going to stay or how we were going to get there. They got cold feet at the eleventh hour for doing a tour of the Northwest. Izzy, Axl and I just didn’t care.”
Suddenly the fledgling rockers had two spaces to fill, but McKagan knew just the guys. The bassist took Axl Rose to watch Slash’s then-band Black Sheep play at L.A. venue Country Club on the last day of May, 1985, the pair convincing the guitarist to bin off Black Sheep and join them instead. McKagan chucked a bonus ball in too, telling Slash they also needed a drummer and to bring along his pal Steven Adler.
It was just two days before a previously-scheduled show at LA’s The Troubadour when Rose, Stradlin, Slash, McKagan and Adler got together in a rehearsal space in the city’s Silverlake neighbourhood to play together. This needed to work, or GN’R was over before it had even started. They dived into a rendition of Shadow Of Your Love, a rollicking, rattling rock tune that had been knocking around since Hollywood Rose, and all five of them immediately clocked that something electrifying was going on. “We could all hear and feel that the fit was right,” Duff wrote in his autobiography It's So Easy (And Other Lies). “The chemistry was immediate, thunderous and soulful. It was amazing and all of us recognised it instantly.”
“We were playing Shadow Of Your Love and Axl showed up late,” Steven Adler recalled. “We were playing the song and right in the middle of it Axl showed up and grabbed the mic and was running up and down the walls screaming. I thought, ‘This is the greatest thing ever’. We knew right then what we had.”
Reminiscing about the rehearsal in Reckless Road, Duff said it was a live-changing moment. “That day was probably the most important day of our lives, as players and musicians,” he marvelled. “It definitely ranks up there because that’s when we all knew it was solidified. This was the best band that any of us had come close to being in.”
Their live debut had to be at the Troubadour, the West Hollywood venue from which a string of giant 80s rockers including Mötley Crüe and Poison had launched their careers. It was, as McKagan recounted, the epicentre of L.A. rock’n’roll. “Most bands started there in an opening slot on a Monday or Tuesday night,” he said. “If and when you began to draw in an audience, you could earn a chance to move up the bill, maybe even to a headlining slot, and you could shift to more desirable days of the week, and finally to weekend gigs.”
If you managed to headline on a Friday or Saturday, Duff said, you were on the cusp of something big, those slots an indicator that you had real momentum behind you. But GN’R weren’t there yet. “For now we were a little too dirty to get even an opening slot on those coveted Friday and Saturday night bills. We would have to start at the bottom and get there on our own.”
“The bottom” meant propping up the bill on Thursday 6 June, 1985, in support of Fineline and Mistreater, the band who would shortly be one of the world’s biggest and best groups taking to the stage in front of a sparse crowd.
One of those present in the audience was Slash’s old high school buddy Marc Canter, whose family ran a local deli often frequented by the band, and who took photos of the show so the band would have some promo snaps for their dates in the northwest. One of his pictures would go on to be used on the back cover of their Live! Like A Suicide EP.
With a polite “Thank you everyone for coming out tonight, we’re Guns N’ Roses” from Axl and a less polite “Come up here closer to the fucking stage, move your fucking asses!” from Slash, the classic line-up of GN’R was born, the group launching into a punchy 10-song set that included future classics Don’t Cry and Anything Goes alongside covers of Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Heartbreak Hotel.
“I definitely had a sense that something special was brewing,” Adler said. “Something permeated the show at the Troubadour, it went pretty well. We played for only about 10 people and it didn’t matter. We were playing for the music, for the sheer excitement of performing live.”
By the time they returned from the troubled run of dates in the northwest – a story for another day – they were all fully invested. It was a line-up that couldn’t, wouldn’t and didn’t last long, far too volatile for that, but one that would lay down a marker against which all subsequent rock bands would be measured. “We started rehearsing with a burning sense of purpose fuelled by the knowledge that each of us was all in,” said McKagan. World domination beckoned.
