Review: Why did watching this Guns N’ Roses show make me think of the ‘Die Hard’ movies?

The evening started not with a cold November rain, but with a warm late-August one.

About 15 minutes before opener Dirty Honey started its set at Spectrum Center in Charlotte on Tuesday night, fans wearing a variety of black Guns N’ Roses T-shirts started running for cover as the skies opened up outside on Trade Street; the cloudburst came on suddenly enough and came down hard enough that anyone caught in it was pretty well soaked by the time they got inside.

Nearly four hours later — long after fans’ clothes had dried off — G N’ R put the finishing touches on “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” and as lead singer Axl Rose took two deep bows, six stagehands rushed to roll a massive Yamaha grand piano out onto the stage.

Axl sat down on the bench wearing dark sunglasses and a long, silver, silk suit jacket.

The crowd roared.

It was finally time for the actual “November Rain,” the operatic G N’ R hit from its seminal 1991 rock album “Use Your Illusion I.” And for the next several minutes, for what seemed like the first time all night, Axl consistently produced notes that sounded on-key. Well... he did so with the piano, at least.

His voice, meanwhile, continued to sound like it was coming out of the mouth of an Axl Rose impersonator having a bit of an off-night.

Or an Axl Rose impersonator who was simply afraid to just go for it.

Take “Rocket Queen,” for instance, done at the show’s midway point. It’s a song that originally required Axl to really belt to get that raw, raspy goodness out of his voice — particularly in that killer bridge — but on stage in Charlotte he opted to do pretty much the whole thing using a falsetto approach that was just barely above a whisper. He used strained and pained facial expressions to make it seem like he was pushing his voice, but his mic’s audio was jacked up enough on this one that it was obvious he was pulling vocal punches.

Three songs later, Axl did the same almost-soft-rock-y falsetto thing with “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” banger “You Could Be Mine,” and for some reason the soft-pedaling felt even stranger on this one, next to Frank Ferrer’s thunderous, rapid-fire drumbeat.

When he did push, though, Axl often would sound more audibly out of tune and even winded, the latter most noticeably on songs that require more breath control, like the rat-a-tat I used to do a little but a little wouldn’t do / So the little got more and more bridge of “Mr. Brownstone.”

(For what it’s worth, there also seemed to be a correlation between him getting winded on songs and him running into the little tent set up at stage left. Axl has, in the past, reportedly used such tents to get some relief from an oxygen mask.)

Even when the vocals that sounded “better” — when Axl’s voice was a bit more evened out, on lower-key, lower-register stuff like “Civil War” and “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” — they might not have made the cut for a live album being assembled by a producer who cares about real quality.

Maybe saying he sounded like an Axl Rose impersonator, however, is too harsh.

Hmm.

OK, this might be a better way to put it: Axl Rose reminded me of John McClane.

I mean, when many Gen Xers were in their prime, circa 1988, Axl Rose was one of the coolest frontmen in rock music and John McClane was one of the coolest movie characters in cinema. Rose ruled the charts for a big chunk of the first half of the ’90s thanks in large part to “Use Your Illusion I,” McClane ruled the box office in the summers of 1990 and 1995 thanks to “Die Hard 2” and “Die Hard With a Vengeance.”

But by the time the fifth “Die Hard” movie was released in 2013, McClane was 58 years old and making a fool of himself, crippled by a bad script and an overwhelming sense that it was time to persuade him to retire.

And in 2023, I do think the struggle is similarly real for Rose, who is now 61 himself.

Of course, on Tuesday night, he didn’t get much help from the tour’s sound engineer. You never knew what you were going to get next from the mix. During “It’s So Easy,” for instance, Axl’s vocals seemed like they were turned up to about a 10 and the band’s instruments seemed like they were turned down to about a 4. During “November Rain,” it was the exact opposite; Axl’s voice was so drowned out by Slash’s and Richard Fortus’s dueling guitars that I wouldn’t have been able to identify more than a few words if I didn’t know the song by heart.

There are a dozen other examples of wonkiness. It was as if someone sat a toddler at the board and told them it was OK for the kid to play around with whatever knobs or switches they wanted to all night long.

Yet despite all of these shortcomings, there’s absolutely still a thrill — a pretty big one, frankly — associated with getting to be in the room when Guns N’ Roses’ full band re-creates an iconic anthem like “Welcome to the Jungle” or “Sweet Child o’ Mine.”

“Welcome to the Jungle,” appropriately, started in the coolest way possible: with Slash up on a speaker box at center stage, leaning forward in a hunch, his signature top hat on his head and dark shades over his eyes, the guitar down by his knees as he played through the bluesy opening guitar riff of Link Wray’s “Rumble” for close to a minute. Then he broke into those first guitar rumbles in “the Jungle” and repeated them several times, before unfurling the full intro to mass hysteria as Axl screeched, “Do you know where the f--- you arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre???”

And even though G N’ R tainted “Sweet Child o’ Mine” ever so slightly by selling it and Slash’s participation to Capital One for that obnoxiously overplayed commercial, the sound of the opening riff emanating from Slash’s guitar fairly compensates fans who might have come in expecting more bang for their buck in other facets of the show.

I found myself using Slash as a lifeline a lot, actually, on Tuesday night.

“Man, I’d love if we’d gotten Carrie Underwood as the opener here like they did in Nashville last week (or The Pretenders like they did in Chicago, or Alice in Chains like they will in Kansas City). But hey, I still got to see Slash slay the double-neck guitar on the solos for ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ and ‘Civil War.’”

“Gee, I’d love for them to stop messing around with the sound mix. But hey, at least it was dialed in correctly when Slash was vocalizing on that crazy talk box thing during ‘Rocket Queen’ and ‘Anything Goes.’”

“Ugh, here goes Axl with that lightweight falsetto thing again in ‘Welcome to the Jungle.’ But that’s so crazy how Slash can make sounds like baby birds chirping and grind out those low reverb-y notes with the SAME guitar!”

Look, I do like Axl. He’s fun to watch up there — the shimmying, the side-stepping, and the backwards skipping; the kicks, the hops, the leaps, the bounds; the spinning around and the spitting on the ground; when he tosses the mic from one hand to another like a hot potato; when he throws his mic stands across the stage; when he dances in place or when he just paces. (The man gets his steps in, no doubt about it.)

He’s also focused. He wants to do music, not storytelling, limiting his banter to short one-liners about wardrobe malfunctions (“my balls were loose,” Axl said during “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”) or, say, his ability to write songs about trying to win back an ex-lover (“I’m kinda like Dr. Phil,” he joked while introducing “You Could Be Mine,” “only not”).

He insists on three-hour shows, because he does want fans to get as much value out of the high price they pay for their tickets as they can.

But it’s not quite the same when it sounds like this. It’s just not.

And I really think the only fans who feel like they’re truly, totally getting their money’s worth these days, given the current state of Axl’s singing voice, are — pardon the pun — the diehards.

Guns N Roses’ setlist

1. “It’s So Easy”

2. “Bad Obsession”

3. “Chinese Democracy”

4. “Slither”

5. “Mr. Brownstone”

6. “Live and Let Die”

7. “Pretty Tied Up”

8. “Welcome to the Jungle”

9. “Double Talkin’ Jive”

10. “Hard Skool”

11. “Estranged”

12. “Reckless Life”

13. “Absurd”

14. “Rocket Queen”

15. “Down On the Farm”

16. “Perhaps”

17. “You Could Be Mine”

18. “T.V. Eye”

19. “Anything Goes”

20. “Civil War”

21. “Slash Guitar Solo”

22. “Sweet Child o’ Mine”

23. “November Rain”

24. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”

25. “Nightrain”

Encore:

26. “Coma”

27. “Patience”

28. “Paradise City”