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" Published in the May 2012 Issue Thursday Night, Hiro, Ballroom, New York City The wall of sound comes roaring at us, thundering drums and thudding bass and three guitars that crunch low and scream high. A wolf pack of macho guys in black hats line the front of the stage, a deviant chorus line with rocker tats and walrus mustaches snatched from the faces of seventies coke dealers. The stage smoke catches the swirling lights, and the hall is jam-packed with gorgeous women because it&amp;#039;s Fashion Week in New York City, but just when I&amp;#039;m thinking, Man, I forgot how much fun cock rock can be, I was a real pretentious asshole for never going to a Guns N&amp;#039; Roses show all the many years I lived in L. A., along comes a certain colleague who shall remain nameless. He tells me he saw them a few years ago, and they were almost as awesome as the time he saw them with Slash around the period that Izzy Stradlin ... I said, &amp;quot;Dude, you&amp;#039;re bumming me out, shut the fk up.&amp;quot; He moved slowly away, watching his back. He was a philistine, but he wasn&amp;#039;t stupid. They played the hits. Axl sang well. They had an adorable middle-school kid on lead guitar who was wearing a Slash hat, which was embarrassing, though the kid had his own little group of adoring fans. The most lively part of the show was when someone threw a bottle on stage and the entire wolf pack rushed off the stage to assault him except Axl, who cackled, &amp;quot;See ya, wouldn&amp;#039;t want to be ya.&amp;quot; The best part came late in the night, when Axl finally started relaxing (not to gossip, and God knows my own memory of these events is fuzzy, but I seem to remember that he disappeared backstage a few times). He said, &amp;quot;What do you guys want to play?&amp;quot; and after a light dusting of the theme from The Pink Panther they launched into an epic version of &amp;quot;Knockin&amp;#039; on Heaven&amp;#039;s Door,&amp;quot; with many long and glorious guitar solos. And Axl started camping it up, leaning back-to-back with his hired guns and flashing his best Clockwork Orange eyes \u2014 he really is a diva, isn&amp;#039;t he? (Inside that skinny white man, Little Richard is screaming to get out. But isn&amp;#039;t there something beautiful about that? Something redolent of greasepaint and laudanum and old soft shoes in a touring trunk? Of the strange and delicate phenomenon of stardom?) So was it the best Guns N&amp;#039; Roses show ever? Is the new lineup a pathetic imitation of the old lineup? Can we start making cracks about aging rockers yet? Those questions will not be answered here. Any night rescued from silence is a victory, and a night rescued by high-octane rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll is better than most. It doesn&amp;#039;t have to get any more complicated than that. Plus: concerts from Radiohead, John K. Samson, and The Twilight Sad More from the Esquire 2012 Music Issue: Live Music Edition &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a13689/guns-n-roses-concert-0512/>