THE BIG O RIOT 25 YEARS LATER
Revisiting the Metallica/GNR debacle
Happy anniversary, Montreal. Looks like you owe Axl Rose some silver.
Perhaps a nice platter, inscribed “Memories 08.08.92!” with one of those wedding bonfire sunsets.
A plated Colt pistol and sterlingdipped natural rose for the literalists out there.
Or maybe a silver photo frame with a picture of the Guns N’ Roses singer storming off the Big O stage on Aug. 8, 1992, split-screened with the merry sight of T-shirt pyres lighting up that cavernous hellhole. Summertime!
You’ve enjoyed Montreal’s 375th, and Canada’s 150th, and all the cash-burning involved — but you haven’t experienced the true nostalgia detonation that is the 25th anniversary of the Guns N’ Roses/Metallica riot at the Olympic Stadium, when we learned that expensive T-shirts are only as valuable as the lighter-holding buyer’s rage, and a concert event that should have defined a decade was instead driven into global history for all the wrong, if predictable, reasons.
Aug. 8, 1992. A packed Olympic Stadium. The lead from my review/police report that night stands as simple statement of fact: “‘They said it would never happen’ was the tag line for last night’s Metallica/Guns N’ Roses blowout for 53,000 at the Big O. They were right.”
They were. The cop-car-churning, souvenir-burning, international-news-flaming disaster of that night had its roots in a mood, an esthetic, and a band’s DNA — mainly contained in its singer.
So let’s roll the videotape and relive the promise and the ugliness as we celebrate the fluke of timing that has both 1992 principals playing outdoor headline gigs this summer at Parc Jean-Drapeau: Metallica on July 19 (a Wednesday? Really?); Guns N’ Roses on Aug. 19. Hard rock synchronicity! Also, a sylvan outdoor space where breaking stuff is not so easy. (That’s in no ways an invitation, kids.)
It’s not like you couldn’t have seen it coming. But who wanted to?
The biggest tour of its era was coming to the largest indoor venue in Canada, with the hugest egos in hard rock compacted onto one bill. What could go wrong?
Well. One could look back to the Verdun Auditorium, Aug. 17, 1987 (What is it with August? The heat?), when GNR opened for The Cult. The Cult was huge then; the opening band was a nonentity.
“There ain’t no rules, Montreal,” Axl Rose declared that night with a strangely flat assurance, given the lunacy of the rest of his performance. He was announcing the demise of that kind of genteel arena rock with a set so feral that I reviewed it predicting the band would either be the biggest in the world, or kill itself. And yeah — both happened.
Meanwhile, that night, Metallica was elsewhere owning metal/ hard rock from the opposite pole: speed, precision, menace, as opposed to sleazy post-Aerosmith junk-aggression. Metallica sounded like a military operation; still does, with older soldiers. GNR had something that was filthily, chaotically approaching a groove. And given neither band was singing about wizards or Mordor, they had swept out the dazed romantics and the dragon pants for what we will call “reality.”
By the time they rode their pandemonium buses into the Big O in ’92, Metallica was a year into eventually selling 30 million copies of the Black Album; GNR’s Use Your Illusion I and II debuted at No. 2 and No. 1 respectively on the Billboard chart. One is reminded, however, of a tragicomic MTV contest at the time: it was called Evict Axl, with the singer playing along in giving away his Hollywood condo after years of neighbours’ complaints and cop visits.
Some people. You can’t take ’em anywhere.
As an aside, here is a brief list of the generation-defining bands that never found occasion to storm off a stadium stage: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, U2. All of whom faced equal if not greater challenges than bad monitors or hoarse throats or achy sacroiliacs or whatever the end complaint was, and none of whom tantrumed a megashow into an infamous travesty.
DNA. I’ve interviewed Slash any number of times and always found him to be genial, gentle and — just as importantly — honest. He knew who Axl was when he married him, and surely knew the volatility when he promised a great show despite the typhoon of chaos surrounding the band.
I could go on about Axl Rose and the DNA. The fact that he recorded One in a Million and Look at Your Game, Girl (songwriting credit: Charles Manson. Yep.), and the fact that he took so long between albums of original material — from Use Your Illusion I and II (1991) to Chinese Democracy (2008) — that humanity used its free time to invent the iPhone, Viagra and, really, the internet. What is bred in the bone will come out in the flesh. So. Aug. 8, 1992. The Show. The details? Metallica plays for north of an hour, and all is well. They crush Creeping Death and The Shortest Straw. Then, after a Kirk Hammett guitar solo in Fade to Black, frontman James Hetfield loses his place among the pyro flashpots, a stadium-wide series of which had just gone off. Imagine standing over one. Hetfield is seared to the bone. Stunned with second- and perhaps third-degree burns (I’ve been there — I feel his pain even now), he is rushed to a hospital. And yeah, this has really messed with Axl’s yoga sked.
GNR could have taken the stage, even though it was far ahead of their set time. But, you know — why not?
But no. One hundred and 35 minutes — more than two hours — later, the band finally louched their way onstage. Even an Axl toady would concede that a delay that lengthy in a venue already reeling from a semi-comprehended but rumoured serious incident maiming one of its heroes would cast a certain Altamont vibe over the proceedings.
GNR played nine songs, opening with two from Appetite for Destruction — It’s So Easy and Mr. Brownstone — heading into the guaranteed widescreen detonation of Live and Let Die. Although already, there were problems. The band was unfocused, and Axl kept muttering into his mic and stalking the wings rather than centre stage.
We’re not even going to address Axl’s rumoured occult fear of Bad Juju happening in cities beginning with M. Because the Bad Juju was wearing a bandana and kilt and strutting around bitching about monitors and band members. He was the Walking Bad Juju. No, so much of this seemed ginned up. Like a band of rock curs Trying Very Hard to mimic the indulgence and significance of their greater forbears in Badness. Like a motley conflation of the Stones and Zep and Bowie. But DNA will out: instead of wrecked elegance, we would get wrecked everything else.
At some point between the sleazoid Bad Obsession and Double Talkin’ Jive, the onstage mood palpably darkened, and the crowd picked up the sense. Rose sat down on a monitor. He would be gone within minutes, along with what was left of his and his band’s rep.
(Only one band finished a set that night: opener Faith No More. But the crowd was still milling to its seats at that point, too stoked for their heroes and blind to the debacle to come to enjoy the truly, grandly transgressive band on the bill. The sound was awful; they were great.)
The ensuing riot would rage until 1 a.m. I ran through the cavernous highway-wide hallways and ramps of the Big O looking for quotes, but nobody knew anything. There were 300 police officers and 400 security personnel on the scene, pricey Tshirts were blazing in bonfires, the Expos souvenir boutique was being looted, cop cars were being overturned, and a half-million dollars of property was being damaged.
That’s what it looked like from the crowd, and the street. How about backstage?
“I remember Axl’s roadie coming to get more Champagne so he could get back in the pool skinnydipping with a bunch of girls.”
That’s Donald Tarlton, a.k.a. legendary Montreal impresario Donald K. Donald, who doesn’t need to deal with any of this crap anymore, but, on the night, had been expecting a triumph while being wary of the GNR backstory. He was about to experience “a nightmare.” And has no problem ascribing responsibility for what happened.
“Yes, it was his fault for throwing his microphone against the speakers and rendering his equipment useless,” Tarlton said this week. “He had a problem with his monitors. And instead of getting a hold of a roadie to fix them, he decided to throw a temper tantrum. He ended up walking offstage. The rest of the band didn’t know what was going on — they didn’t think he was coming back — and headed for the corridors.
“People like myself were trying to figure out with managers and agents and representatives how to get him back onstage. Finally, it didn’t work.”
Hey — GNR never left. They partied on backstage, dude.
“People had told me to be careful,” Tarlton says. “So I was not looking for aggravation at all, whatsoever.” But “there was a complete lack of rational thought” coming from Axl and his party.
Concert promoters are can-do. They prepare for every eventuality, with a Batman sensibility. I can fix this.
“I had a responsibility, first and foremost, to see if I could get the concert back on track,” Tarlton says. “That didn’t work out. My next concern was to have the people safely exit the building and be fine. And then I heard about the problems happening out in the street, and I was just horrified. I couldn’t do anything about that.” The other band? “Metallica were above board in everything. They certainly took care of the fans later.”
There was a lawsuit that “went on and on and on.” But Rose refused to attend discovery hearings, and eventually the balance of fees for both acts and the percentage of overages of surplus revenue went into a pool. Which became the subject of yet another lawsuit. DKD and others petitioned the judge to award the monies to 10 community charities. So something good came of the debacle after all?
“I wouldn’t say that,” says Tarlton, tartly.
More to the point, in rock ’n’ roll terms, Tarlton poignantly nails it: “The tremendous opportunity that Axl missed was, when Hetfield got hurt, he could have been the hero of the century. Come out to the audience, say ‘Listen, my comrade brother-in-arms has fallen. They can’t finish their show. So I’m gonna give you a show to remember.’ That was the message we tried to communicate, but he wouldn’t buy it.”
But, you know, you make the mess …
Metallica was back six months later, returning for two half-price Forum shows in February 1993. (Re-read that: they came to make it up to their Montreal fans in February.) Kirk Hammett has always been a level-headed, even genteel figure in metal, and when I spoke to the guitarist then, he had no problem reading the incident.
“I thought it was unusual that they would leave the stage like that, after what had just happened. The crowd’s temper was short to begin with, and I’m sure they must have realized that.”
Did he think Guns N’ Roses behaved irresponsibly? “Oh yeah, absolutely.” Would Metallica ever have done something like that?
“Never in a million years. We’re not that type of band. What can you do? Those guys insulate themselves from opinions as well as people. We’re a lot more grounded, I think.
“It’s because of the way we are as people. And we’re fans ourselves, so we can relate to other fans.”
So you had the blue-collar band from the Cali suburbs out-populisting the poster boy for damage, a supposed avenger from the streets who instead became a narcissistic nailbomb. And it was always going to be about him. In the main, Rose had confirmed that, unlike previous rock ’n’ roll generations, this one would not produce anything resembling a statesman.
It would take him 18 years to return to Montreal, in a Bell Centre show with three whackjob guitar players.
So, when is it just your fault? And when do you make amends? As we watch the Trump Trainwreck, these are bracing questions. And so let us be serious. None of this — the debacle, the recriminations, The Event — happens if one singer somehow avoids an onstage tantrum and deals responsibly with his situation and his audience. And yes, that includes apologizing.
Not going to happen. Not In This Lifetime™.
None of which overlooks or exonerates the actions and reactions of the typically hard-core element of the crowd. I mean, angry customers, sure, and duped metalheads, yeah, and viva la revolución and all, but once the expensive souvenir bonfires had been ignited — in a covered building with a nightgown-flammable roof, no less — the modest miracle was that the only fatalities were a good time and what was left of GNR’s tattered reputation. Small comfort to the unnamed girl who was apparently pushed through one of those windows by the goons.
None of this will matter on July 19, when Metallica immolates Parc Jean-Drapeau. Or on Aug. 19, when Axl, Slash, Duff and their drones ride the Nightrain into your furtive dreams. Many of the fans gathering on those evenings will have no memory of the atrocity, because they will have been born since.
None of this will matter, that is, assuming they deliver. Metallica is a government bond — they’re always solid. GNR? The reunited band has spent more than a year rebuilding a brand that has shifted from Volatility to Reliability.
Volatility — that is a central component to creativity. It’s DNA. So let’s see where this goes. Rock ’n’ roll is a forgiving mistress. Metallica has nothing to acknowledge. If Axl were to address that evening, I’d be happy to forgive him, onstage.
I thought it was unusual that they would leave the stage like that, after what had just happened. The crowd’s temper was short to begin with, and I’m sure they must have realized that.