Hollywood Rose
The Roots of Guns n' Roses

Calm and cold-blooded because there's more than a little to say here. This album has made headlines even in courtrooms, sparking various uproars. But it also had the merit of digitizing demos that were circulated among a few people and introduced to the world what are referred to in the title as the roots of Guns N' Roses. This very thing caused a huge mess to the point that in 2004, after the release of the compilation (?) in question, Axl Rose, Slash, and Duff McKagan lashed out against the label Cleopatra Records for using the name of the band. The funny thing is that the label won the case and even pocketed some cash. Definitely a publicity stunt, for an operation that is basically and, perhaps, somewhat sordidly commercial. So much so that my suspicions of a rigged lawsuit might hold water. That said, however, the CD is not empty but features fifteen tracks. Even about that, there's much to discuss. In fact, the songs offered in this album are only five but are all multiplied by three since, along with the original versions (in extra low-fi), there are also remixes by Gilby Clarke, former guitarist of the rough and tough guys, and Cinderella's drummer Fred Coury, who once participated in a GN'R tour. Production credits go to Chris Weber (finally, a member of the original lineup, the guitarist) who financed the recordings with money borrowed from his dad.

William Bailey (Axl) was a youngster at the time, hailing from Indiana. We know everything about his life. Let's just consider the fact that at the time the band was formed (1983), he was 21 years old, and that the lyrics he worked on were probably the result of previous adolescent periods. Not bad if you can already consider the level of songwriting high (in combination with the others, anyway) compared to the productions of that genre at the time. Well, Axl was fresh from the early L.A. Guns, and Hollywood Rose was not a single-cell organism. With him from the start were Izzy Stradlin on guitar with Chris Weber. Completing the group were Johnny Kreis on drums and Rick Mars initially, followed by Andre Roxx on bass. Some time later, following the breakup and reformation of the band, the legendary Tracii Guns (on guitar also in two tracks worked on by Gilby Clarke) joined the scene. The adventure started in January 1984 with the studio recording of some demos, sounding like a varied business card. I won't focus on the remixes but on the individual tracks and their value, which already presented several surprises at the time.

Hollywood Rose were the true homeless of the Sunset Strip. Apart from Weber, the others came from differing backgrounds, and their lives had already been marked by discomforts of all kinds. In my view, their contribution to the construction of the sleaze scene (along with the latter half of L.A. Guns) was crucial in proving that even starting from nothing (i.e., a van as a home) you could go to the City of Angels and create a band. Their drive was felt throughout the States, drawing hordes of young hopefuls to California. Many of these hopes became reality, if you think of Poison, for example, who were still fledgling country boys at the time. There was the hammering shock rock probably inaugurated by the Sister leading the way. A satanic-like band formed in 1976, featuring none other than Blackie Lawless and Nikki Sixx. From then on, a California scene had been gradually forming, still proto-glam and certainly ambiguous. Nevertheless, it was an alternative to classic, lovable, and mature hard rock. In short, it was hard to imagine that the genre could take a decisive turn, especially towards more serious themes. And yet, it is with Hollywood Rose that a certain realism starts to take hold. A deviation emerges, bringing with it the values that those societal outcasts could express. The values of those who had rejected values (Axl was the adopted son of a preacher). The lyrics begin to reveal to the world that part of society that had been unspoken until then. The sidewalk, the street, the heroin explosion, the gangs: in a word, sleaze. The pentacles are removed (thankfully), and a baroque but certainly different iconography emerges, with words that portray what the bourgeoisie might despise as a more seductive and tempting side of life. The exaltation of those souls in search of fame out of hunger. Literal hunger for food first, and then success. And as we well know, they have been insatiable. Personally, I believe it to be an extraordinary episode for rock, so much so that for a certain time, this became rock. A bunch of music enthusiast thugs had managed to mark a dangerous turning point. A turn that the major labels had to bow to, at least initially. Then it became show-biz, but in 1983 it took courage to produce this stuff. So much so that Axl and his associates did it on their own.

The music. Even the sounds, compared to the shifting trends of the scores of those years, take a very precise path. Hollywood Rose create rock n' roll full of spit, needles, metal, and punk. Something decidedly distant even from Too Fast For Love and Shout At The Devil by Motley Crue, who were already on their second album and still proponents of shock rock, also leaning towards sleaze, but still connected to the shock rock of Sister, then exploded by Lawless with WASP. Axl has always focused on antagonism towards Sixx and Neil and, in my opinion, rightly so. Although he appeared later, it was he, with the Hollywood Rose/L.A. Guns horde, who gave rise to the sleaze scene in the strict sense. His voice is young and sounds like a chainsaw from a splatter movie. Rose tearing through the air with his vocal cords at a young age is something to hear, even just out of curiosity. In 1984 he had to be a singer with a physique not yet totally compromised by ailments, and for this reason, his flourishes stand out. All the elements that make a voice are compact and atomically held together in his body. A concrete pellet covered in asphalt. The band is absolutely justified, reflecting the singer's ferocity and creating five tracks without respite and with no regular breathing. They are five bonbons that leave the listener unsettled and faced with a choice: join the armed insurrection of strings and sticks, or decide for something else. The compactness of metal and the fury of the most primordial punk work on rock n' roll melodies of noble lineage, for a product that is essentially the worthy forerunner of the greatest album in street rock history: "Appetite For Destruction". The tracks are Killing Time, which unequivocally clarifies its intentions at the first blow, Anything Goes, also redone on Appetite but here in a more rebellious and destructive version, Rocker, a tribute to all leather and chains heavy metal, Shadow Of Your Love, hot and fast rock n' roll, Reckless Life, in a somewhat average but definitely already advanced version and a sleaze manifesto.

4 for importance, attitude, and style. 0 for Cleopatra's idea. A must-have, maybe not original. But a must-have. The seed of sleaze history is this.