Written by “Apologies if I sound like shit, but too many planes and too much cocaine…”
It’s September 17, 1988, and onstage at the Texas Stadium, home of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, Guns N’ Roses are struggling through what lead guitarist Slash will later recall as the worst gig his band have ever played.
It’s the final US show on the Los Angeles quintet’s Appetite For Destruction tour, a one-day festival headlined by Australian rockers INXS, and the five members of Gn’R are tired, pissed off, and wishing they were anywhere else but here. The group didn’t bother soundchecking, they can’t hear themselves, and as the tail end of Hurricane Gilbert deposits incessant rain on the Texxxas Jam stage, it’s all they can do to stay upright. Axl Rose has been expressing his displeasure by kicking wedge monitors into the photo pit, leading INXS’s production manager to warn Guns’ New Zealand-born manager Alan Niven that if one more monitor goes ‘overboard’, his crew are ready to beat the shit out of the band. That opportunity is denied when the American band walk offstage less than 50 minutes into their scheduled 75-minute set, Duff McKagan smashing his bass into matchwood as he exits.
“Does it get any worse than this?” one of the festival’s promoters was overheard saying.
“It was horrific,” Slash recalled in a 2014 interview with the Metro newspaper. “Everything that could go wrong went wrong, and the band didn’t have enough experience to handle it properly. It was a huge disaster in front of 65,000 people. We fell apart on stage.”
On the day, Guns N’ Roses were being shadowed by a writer and photographer from Musician magazine, who witnessed the frazzled group’s meltdown.
“If [INXS vocalist] Michael Hutchence says anything about me, I’ll go back down there and kick his ass!” Axl Rose threatened as he watched the headliners’ performance on a video monitor.
“I hope we learned a major lesson from this,” he added. “Don’t do something for money, ‘cuz it ain’t gonna work. We agreed to do this show a long time ago; we’ve been dreading it ever since. When we finally got out onstage it just hit us like a ton of bricks: Who the hell are we foolin’?”
“Usually when we get in that situation, we get very punk,” Slash told Musician. “We blaze, even if we don’t play that good, ’cause we get so energetic. But we didn’t do that today. We cracked. We didn’t take over… The thing is, we’re burned out.”
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In the book A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap, the guitarist shared an amusing post-script to the day.
“The tour ended and I was back in my apartment in LA,” he recalled. “One day, I was opening up the mail, and in one envelope was an Appetite for Destruction cassette broken in half. The letter that came with it said, ‘We saw you at Texas Stadium and it was the worst thing we ever saw.’ This fan was so disappointed that he sent us our album back!”
