Our pickup is sitting outside the home of Paul Dischner, and the engine is idling. Like Trask, Dischner is striving to be someone else; he’s supposed to be Izzy Stradlin, Guns N’ Roses original rhythm guitar player. In the band Paradise City, everybody is supposed to be someone else. That’s the idea.
“I initially had a problem with the idea of doing a Guns N’ Roses tribute, because I didn’t want anyone to think I was discrediting Axl. That was always my main concern. If Axl was somehow against this, I’d straight up quit. I would never do this if he disapproved,” Trask says. “But I really think we can do his songs justice. People constantly tell me, ‘You sound better than Axl,’ but I always say, ‘Whoa now, slow down.’ Because I like the way I sing Axl’s songs, but I love the way Axl sings them. That’s the main thing I’m concerned about with this article: I do not want this to say anything negative about Guns N’ Roses. That’s all I ask.”
I am the first reporter who has ever done a story on Paradise City. This is less a commentary on Paradise City and more a commentary on the tribute band phenomenon, arguably the most universally maligned sector of rock ’n’ roll. These are bands mired in obscurity and engaged in a bizarrely postmodern zero-sum game: If a tribute band were to completely succeed, its members would no longer have personalities. They would have no character whatsoever, beyond the qualities of whomever they tried to emulate. The goal is not to be somebody; the goal is be somebody else.
Though the Beatles and Elvis Presley were the first artists to spawn impersonators, the modern tribute template was mostly set by groups like Strutter, Hotter than Hell, and Cold Gin, all of whom toured in the early nineties by looking, acting, and singing like the 1978 version of KISS. It worked a little better than anyone could have expected: People would sooner pay $10 to see four guys pretending to be KISS than $5 to see four guys playing original songs nobody had ever heard before. And club owners understand money. There are now hundreds—probably thousands—of rock bands who make a living by method acting. There’s the Atomic Punks, a Van Halen tribute that celebrates the band’s Roth era. Battery is a tribute to Metallica. Planet Earth are L.A. based Duran Duran clones. Bjorn Again claims to be Australia’s finest ABBA tribute. AC/DShe is an all-female AC/DC cover group from San Francisco. There are tributes to groups who never seemed that popular to begin with (Badfinger, Thin Lizzy, Dream Theater), and there are tributes to bands who are not altogether difficult to see for real (The Dave Matthews Band, Creed). And though rock critics deride Stone Temple Pilots and Oasis for ripping off other artists, drunk people in rural bars pay good money to see tribute bands rip off Stone Temple Pilots and Oasis as accurately as possible.
And being consciously derivative is not easy.
Trask and Dischner can talk for hours about the complexity of feeding their appetite for replication. Unlike starting a garage band, there are countless caveats that must be fulfilled when auditioning potential members for a tribute. This was especially obvious when Paradise City had to find a new person to play Slash, GNR’s signature lead guitarist. It is not enough to find a guy who plays the guitar well; your Slash needs to sound like Slash. He needs to play a Les Paul, and he needs to tune it like Slash. He needs to have long black hair that hangs in his face and a $75 top hat. Preferably, he should have a dark complexion, an emaciated physique, and a willingness to play shirtless. And if possible, he should drink Jack Daniel’s on stage.
The Slash in Paradise City fulfills about half of those requirements.
“Bobby is on thin ice right now, and he knows he’s on thin ice,” says Trask, referring to lead guitarist Bobby Young. “I mean, he’s an okay guy, and he’s a good guitar player. But we have ads out right now for a new Slash, and he knows that. I want someone who is transfixed with being Slash. We want someone who is as sick about Slash as I am about Axl.”
What’s ironic about Young’s shortcomings as Slash is that—in a traditional band—his job would likely be the most secure: He is clearly the most skilled musician in Paradise City, having received a degree from Cincinnati’s Conservatory of Music in 1987 (that was the same year GNR debuted with the album Appetite for Destruction). “I was classically trained, so I’m used to everything being built around minor chords,” he tells me. “But Slash plays almost everything in a major chord, and his soloing is very different than mine. It’s not in chromatic keys. I really thought I could learn all of these Guns N’ Roses songs in two days, but it took me almost two weeks.”
Unfortunately, Young can’t learn how to look like a mulatto ex-heroin addict, and this is the only occupation in America for which that is a job requirement. He only vaguely resembles Slash, and his band mates tease him about being akin to an Oompa Loompa from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. There’s a similar problem with Paradise City’s bassist; he’s portrayed by an affable, laidback blond named Spike, but Spike is built a little too much like a farmer. His shoulders are broad, and he actually looks more like Larry Bird than Duff McKagan. Amazingly, Spike is also partially deaf from playing heavy metal for so many years (he can’t hear certain frequencies, including feedback), but—somehow—that doesn’t pose a problem.
Visually, the rest of Paradise City succeeds at varying degrees. Drummer Rob “The Monster” Pohlman could pass for Steven Adler if Pohlman hadn’t just shaved his head and dyed his remaining locks orange, a move that completely baffles Dischner.[25] The fact that he hides behind a drum kit, however, substantially mitigates this problem. Trask is eight inches too tall, but he has the voice and—more importantly—the desire. He wills himself into Axlocity.
Dischner is the only Paradise City member who naturally looks like a GNR doppelgänger. He’s also the guy who makes the trains run on time; he handles the money, coordinates the schedules, and generally keeps his bandmates from killing each other. All of these guys are friendly, but Dischner is the most relentlessly nice. He’s also mind-blowingly idiosyncratic. Prior to Paradise City, Dischner played in an Yngwie Malmsteen–influenced band called Premonition, a group whose entire existence was based on the premise that the Antichrist is Juan Carlos, the King of Spain.[26] To this day, Dischner adheres to this theory and claims it can be proven through biblical prophecy. He lives with his wife (an aspiring vampire novelist) in a small suburb of Cincinnati, and he peppers his conversation with a high-pitched, two-note laugh that sounds like “Wee Hee!” Over the next thirty-six hours, he will make that sound approximately four hundred times.
When we leave from Dischner’s house at 12:30 A.M., it has already been an incredibly long day for Trask. He awoke Friday morning at 2:00 A.M. at his home in Ravenna, Ohio, and immediately drove four hours to the outskirts of Cincinnati, where he spent the day cutting down a troublesome tree in Dischner’s front yard; Trask’s father runs a tree service in Northeast Ohio, so his son knows how to handle a chainsaw. After a brief afternoon nap, the band hooked up for a few hours of rehearsal before supper. Now it’s midnight, and Trask is preparing to drive the entire way to Virginia, nonstop. I have never met anyone who needs sleep less. Trask once drove twenty-two hours straight to Hayes, Kansas, and played a show immediately upon arrival. If the real Axl Rose had this kind of focus, Guns N’ Roses would have released fifteen albums by now.
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1. Three days before Pohlman’s haircut, Dischner had told me that “What sets us apart from the other twenty-two Guns N’ Roses tribute bands in America is that we don’t wear wigs.” This new development with Pohlman’s scalp was not to his liking.
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2. Premonition’s two singles, “He Is Rising” and “Mr. Heroin,” were both (presumably) about Carlos and allegedly charted in Greece.