We fly through the West Virginia border at 4:04 A.M. This is a strange part of the country, but perhaps an ideal place for a group trying to re-create 1988: On the same FM station that played Jewel and Rush, two early morning DJs are unironically joking about Julia Roberts’s relationship with Lyle Lovett.
After getting breakfast from the aforementioned redhead in White Sulphur Springs, we get back on the road (doomed to complete the voyage while driving into the rising sun). After hitting the Virginia state line, Trask begins scanning all the radio stations in the hope of hearing “The Commercial.” This is a radio spot promoting Paradise City’s concert at the Mainstreet Bar & Grill. The band gets excited about hearing “The Commercial” in the same way normal bands get excited about hearing their first single on the radio; for a tribute group, exposure equals success. When we finally hear said advertisement, it refers to Paradise City’s “triumphant return” to Virginia. High-fives are exchanged all around.
I want to talk about the real Guns N’ Roses for a while, and Trask is more than willing to oblige. Though he admits that his first musical love was Mötley Crüe (before Paradise City, he fronted a Mötley tribute called Bastard), one cannot deny his sincere adoration for GNR, a band whose legacy is—to be fair—problematic. Guns N’ Roses debuted as L.A.’s most dangerous band in 1987, blowing the doors off pop metal with Appetite for Destruction, arguably the strongest debut album in rock history. They followed with an EP titled GNR Lies, which is best remembered for the ballad “Patience” and the controversial “One in a Million,”[27] a track that managed to be racist, homophobic, and xenophobic in just over six scant minutes. Two years later, the Gunners released two massive albums on the same day, Use Your Illusion I and II, cementing their place as the biggest band in the world. Yet by 1997, all had collapsed; one by one, every member—except the mercurial Axl Rose—either quit or was fired. Rose became a virtual recluse for almost a decade, endlessly working on his alleged masterpiece, Chinese Democracy, and earnestly growing dreadlocks.
I ask my traveling partners if they’re concerned about what will happen when Chinese Democracy eventually hits stores. It’s a paradoxical problem: If the album does well and Rose tours, it could decrease the demand for a GNR tribute; if the album flops, it might make the concept of a GNR “tribute” vaguely ridiculous. But Trask and Dischner aren’t worried. They’re confident there will always be a demand for the original incarnation of Guns N’ Roses, and that can only be experienced through their show. History is not an issue for these people; for them, the past is not different than the present, and the future will be identical. Every year, Axl Rose grows a little older, but Paradise City never ages beyond the summer of ’91.
We arrive at the Hampton Inn parking lot just before 11 A.M. The girl at the front desk is a little overweight, but she has a nice smile. Trask is impressed. “Do you like Guns N’ Roses?” he asks her. “We’re a Guns N’ Roses tribute band. I’m Axl. You should come to the show tonight at the Mainstreet. It’s going to be crazy. They love us here.”
In a few hours, members of the Paradise City entourage will have lunch at a nearby Long John Silver’s. A total stranger will ask Punky if they’re in a band. When Punky replies “Sort of,” the man will ask him, “Are you guys Molly Hatchet?”
There are no “fashion don’ts” inside the Mainstreet Bar & Grill in downtown Harrisonburg. You want to inexplicably wear a headband? Fine. You want to wear a FUBU sweatshirt with a baseball hat that features the Confederate flag? No problem. This is the kind of place where you will see a college girl attempting to buy a $2.25 glass of Natural Light on tap with her credit card—and have her card denied.
Certainly, the Mainstreet is not trendy. But it’s still cool, or at least interesting, and Paradise City has sold it out. Almost five hundred people (mostly kids from nearby James Madison University) have paid $12 to get inside, which is as many as the Mainstreet will draw for next week’s Dokken show. One can only wonder how the real guys in Dokken feel about being as popular as five fake guys in Guns N’ Roses.
The opening act is a local collegiate jam band called Alpine Recess; they look like they’d rather be opening for a Phish tribute, but the crowd is polite. Meanwhile, Paradise City is dressing downstairs in the basement,[28] drinking free Budweiser in the storeroom, and leaning against the water heater. They have decided to open with the song “Night Train,” even though the tune includes an extended five-minute guitar solo that Young fears might anesthetize the audience.
Unlike the real GNR, Paradise City hits the stage exactly on time. However, things are not perfect: There are sound problems on “Night Train” that can only be described as cataclysmic, and Trask glares at the soundman. But things get better. Things get tighter. Trask moves his hips in Axl’s signature snake like sway, and the crowd sings along with everything. Paradise City may not always look like Guns N’ Roses, but they certainly sound like them; when I go to the bathroom and hear the music through a wooden door, it’s impossible not to imagine that this is how it would have sounded to urinate on the Sunset Strip in 1986.
“This next song is dedicated to everybody who ever told you how to live,” Trask tells us as he prowls the twenty-five-foot-stage in his kilt. “This is for everybody who told you not to smoke weed or not to drink beer every day. There are just too many people who make life too hard.”
This soliloquy leads into the bubbling bass intro of “It’s So Easy,” the angriest three minutes off Appetite for Destruction. Girls begin crawling on stage to dance on top of the amplifiers, and the band couldn’t be happier. Ultimately, this is why they do this: They’re literally paying tribute to the music of Guns N’ Roses, but they’re figuratively paying tribute to the Guns N’ Roses Lifestyle. They’re totally willing to become other people, as long as those people party all the time, live like gypsies, and have pretty girls dancing on their amplifiers. This is precisely why guys create rock bands; Paradise City just created somebody else’s.
“I’m not pretending to be a Guns N’ Roses fan,” says Kelly Gony, a stunning twenty-two-year-old history major who danced on stage in her cut-off denim skirt for the last forty-five minutes of the show. “I just think they did an excellent job. Maybe some of the people in the crowd were clapping for Guns N’ Roses, but there also might have been some people clapping about the fact that these guys can act exactly like Guns N’ Roses. I mean, look at me—I’m dressed like it’s 1988. It’s just fun, you know?”
This blue-eyed girl is correct—it is fun, although not so fun that she accepts the band’s offer to go back to their hotel. Gony goes home. However, a few females (most of whom seem very young) agree to go back to the Hampton for a few dozen night caps and more weed. I assume the goal is to have sex with them, although I don’t think this works out for anybody, except possibly Spike. Punky sporadically asks these girls to remove their tank tops, and—although they never actually do—they don’t seem particularly offended by the request.
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3. The last time Paradise City performed in Harrisonburg, they received a death threat from two Middle Eastern patrons after playing “One in a Million.” Over the course of the weekend, this story is breathlessly recounted to me six times.
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4. During the Paradise City set, Punky will lay on the dressing room’s concrete floor after falling down a flight of stairs. Though he will continue to post-party with the band for most of the night, Punky will need to be rushed to the hospital by ambulance the following morning when—upon finally sobering up—he will realize he has broken his wrist. Oddly (or perhaps predictably), the band will simply leave him in Harrisonburg and drive back to Ohio.