#DON HENLEY

[retropopcult]

Eagles, 1979

[1spy]

1988 | Guns N' Roses - "Patience"

I was riding my bike with a friend back in middle school, and he started singing this song that sounded really cool. The kids now would call it a meme song, where there's just one catchy bit that gets memorized and transmitted instantly to seemingly every kid you know. All I know is we were riding our bikes around and singing this song at the top of our lungs like kids did back then:

Take me down to the paradise city / Where the grass is green and girls are pretty / Oh won't you please take me home

It was so dumb and fun. And I had not, at the time, even seen the video for "Paradise City." In fact, the first video I remember seeing from Guns N' Roses was their mega-popular acoustic ballad "Patience."

It's not the most representative song in their catalog. GNR's debut album, Appetite for Destruction, had come out in 1987 and was full of heavy, uncompromisingly sleazy hard rock bangers that made other LA hair metal bands sound tame and fake in comparison. The album painted a portrait of a Hollywood underworld where sex and drugs are traded for access and opportunity, but where the American dream is most likely to end in an overdose. All of which seemed pretty far away from my life in suburban Spring, Texas.

But Patience was a perfect entry point for me, a kid whose favorite band was—at the time—the Eagles. The gentle acoustic ballad opens with Axl whistling, which may have been a savvy bid for pop relevance only one year after Bobby McFerrin's huge #1 hit "Don't Worry Be Happy" also included prominent whistling. Patience got all the way to number four.

I wasn't the only one connecting GNR to the Eagles. Hotel California and Appetite for Destruction have similar themes involving sex, excess, and corruption in a drug-soaked Hollywood. Axl had performed backing vocals on Don Henley's album, End of the Innocence. And Henley played drums and sang backup when Guns N' Roses played "Patience" on the 1989 American Music Awards.

It took two years for it to happen, but the singles for "Welcome to the Jungle," "Paradise City," "Sweet Child O' Mine" and "Patience" eventually made the band ubiquitous. And Axl was constantly in the news for being a terrible human: starting shows late, nearly starting riots at his own shows, saying racist, misogynistic, and homophobic shit, and otherwise being a huge asshole.

At the time none of that mattered to me. What mattered was the way I felt when I pressed play on the CD. It was exhilarating every every single time. It still is. Appetite for Destruction is the best selling debut album of all time because it has no skips. It's an incredible hard rock album front to back, full of songs that are musical, surprising, funny, sophisticated, angry, and—more than anything else—convincing. It was hard to listen to Appetite and then put on Warrant, Poison or Motley Crue. Nirvana killed all those bands, but GNR put them on notice.

"Patience" wasn't on Appetite. It was on a follow-up collection of two EPs called GN'R Lies. The GNR half was old live performances from 1986 ("Move to the City" was my fave). The "Lies" half was a set of four acoustic originals whose popularity may have inspired MTV Unplugged:

"Patience"- the second song I ever learned to play on guitar all the way through.

"Used to Love Her" - A jokey song about killing your girlfriend and burying her in the back yard.

"You're Crazy" - Better, bluesier, and somehow darker than the version on Appetite.

"One in a Million" - The song whose lyrics included racist, anti-immigrant, and homophobic slurs, but also functioned as an Axl Rose origin story.

Even when I was a kid listening, the lyrics to "One in a Million" bugged me because Axl's lyrics on the song weren't just hateful, they were the worst lyrics he had recorded. It was a missed opportunity, because it's probably the best song on this record. It was his best vocal performance, it had the best solo, and Axl whistles over the opening again with an even better melody. It sucks because he ruined the song with half-assed, bigoted lyrics.

None of this is to provide an apologia for GNR (or for me). They were my favorite band until my senior year of high school. They were the reason my first guitar was a Gibson Les Paul like Slash played. And I dove DEEP into both Use Your Illusion records when they came out (I could write three or four more posts about UYI I & II).

But once Izzy Stradlin' left the band, I knew they were never going to make another record as good as Appetite. The best songs off Use Your Illusion are the Izzy songs. The coolest guy in that band was Izzy. And the best post-Appetite record by anyone in the band is Izzy's solo record with the Ju Ju Hounds.

I went to see Guns N' Roses in 1992 with Soundgarden opening. And I'm glad I did. But Izzy wasn't there, and I felt his absence. Basically, it feels like I left GNR when Izzy did.

But if he ever rejoins the band, I might see them again.

Fave lyrics (for someone who loved walking the tough suburban streets of Cypresswood at night):

I've been walking the streets at night Just trying to get it right It's hard to see with so many around You know I don't like being stuck in the crowd And the streets don't change but maybe the names...

[zimtrim]

The Eagles - Glenn Frey

[jt1674]

[allthedesiredusernamesaretaken]

... morning music ...

[deejayphoto]

Solo Eagle

[makingdonalddrumpfagain]

[petiteclover]

Eagles photographed by Henry Diltz in Joshua Tree, 1972.

[mostlythemarsh]

Friday Records

[adashofginger]

“Give to me your leather, take from me my lace.”

Leather and Lace | Stevie Nicks and Don Henley

Model: Will Hutcheson

[dejablonde]

[zimtrim]

The Eagles - Glenn Frey

[jarofalicesgrunge]

Eagles

[ifelllikeastar]

Don Henley (born Donald Hugh Henley) July 22, 1947