MrSaigon wrote:Swirls wrote:Wife and I saw Guns N Roses Friday night in Vegas. I feel I need to update my prior guitarist rankings. Slash is now the best guitarist I have ever seen live. Followed then by Angus Young and Eddie Van Halen.
Jesus he was awesome. He even broke out the vintage double guitar for a few songs.
How was it? Axl didn't storm off the stage? He wasn't too fat to sing? There's a ticket available to me for the Seattle show, but they took on a ridiculous package and I don't want to shell out that much money. Especially for a tour that may be over or feature a guest singer by then.
The GNR portion of the show was fantastic. 2.5 hour show - I think I read it was a 17 song set. I wasn't counting during the show, but that seems about right. Alice in Chains was the opening act, and they were fine (wife and I saw them a couple years ago, so we were glad GNR had a legit opening act). Axl wasn't a drama queen, and had surprisingly good pipes considering he was sitting down for the entire show.
The rest of the evening was a complete and utter gigantic [expletive] show. It was held at the brand new T-Mobile Arena, which if you've followed at all has been a cluster [expletive] for damn near 10 years. The arena had it's grand opening two days prior to our show featuring The Killers. So we knew going in that they likely hadn't quite worked out all of the kinks yet, but were hopeful considering it's Las Vegas and they do shows all up and down the strip every single night for thousands and thousands of people, and then obviously have huge fights and stuff on PPV.
Our tickets said doors open at 8pm, show starts at 9:30pm. Well, we didn't show up until 8:45pm because it had been raining nonstop all evening and we didn't feel like walking in the rain if we could avoid it (we didn't pack anything heavy since it's the [expletive] desert, not Seattle). Well, the doors didn't open until around 9pm, so there was this huge crowd at the main gate that had been sitting there for over an hour in the rain. They only had one entrance that they were letting people into (no idea if they have gates at all four cardinal directions or just the one main gate) and people were basically being searched right at the door... So it was a crawl. Took us over 45 minutes to get inside after they opened the doors. In the rain.
AIC played for about 45 minutes, and they came on right before 10pm. Then nothing for over an hour, as it only took the set crew about 15 minutes to set up for GNR. At midnight, Axl finally rolled onto the stage in his "wheelchair light show" that Dave Grohl let him borrow the day before. So the 2.5 hour show ended at 2:30am, and we had another 1+ hour walk back to the Palazzo (which took us about 1.5 hours because we stopped at a couple different Walgreen's to buy beer during our trek). Again in the rain.
Our tickets were stupid expensive ($300+ each for nosebleeds), but we figured they were worth it since it was the inaugural reunion concert (not counting the mostly private show they did at the Troubador a couple weeks ago). Hotel and airfare was essentially free since we booked it using points and miles. My sister-in-law works in Vegas for a PR agency, so we got most of our meals comped since they were at her clients' locations. That also helped offset the ticket prices.
