Guns N’ Roses headlined the first night of this weekend’s Power Trip hard rock festival with a show that lacked spectacle and mayhem.
Axl Rose has history at the Empire Polo Club.
In 2016, the Guns N’ Roses frontman reunited with the core members of his menacing and flamboyant hard rock band to headline Coachella, the annual desert mega-festival that goes down on this grassy expanse two hours east of Los Angeles.
He returned last year for a surprise drop-in with Carrie Underwood, of all people, at Coachella’s country-music counterpart, Stagecoach.
Late Friday, Guns N’ Roses was back in Indio for the first night of Power Trip, a three-day heavy-metal(-ish) blowout that also features Metallica, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Tool, and to mark the occasion, Rose, 61, relayed the heartwarming fact that the incident described in GNR’s song “Double Talkin’ Jive” really happened.
“True story,” he told the crowd after guitarist Slash took a long, snarling solo. “Found a head and an arm in a trash can behind the studio.”
Guns N’ Roses’ Coachella comeback was notoriously hamstrung by Rose’s injury; he broke his foot just days before the fest during a warm-up gig at the Troubadour, forcing the most kinetic of rock singers to perform while seated in a throne he borrowed from Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl (who’d used it himself after breaking his leg).
Seven years and dozens of stadium concerts later, the band — with OG bassist Duff McKagan along with keyboardists Dizzy Reed and Melissa Reese, guitarist Richard Fortus and drummer Frank Ferrer — has become a well-oiled machine. Its three-hour Power Trip set moved efficiently through nearly 30 songs, including such genre-defining hits as “Welcome to the Jungle,” “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” “You Could Be Mine,” “Patience,” “Paradise City” and the crowning achievement of hard rock’s greatest ballad singer, “November Rain.
