Yesterday, in a generally polite and well-mannered letter, Axl Rose refused induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, informing the Hall and fans that he would not be attending the ceremony in Cleveland this Saturday, where Guns N’ Roses will be inducted along with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Donovan, the Beastie Boys, and others. It’s well known that Rose, who has retained the rights to the Guns N’ Roses name, doesn’t get along with the other members of the group; what wasn’t known until yesterday is whether the idiosyncratic front man would bury the hatchet for the induction. He won’t. “I strongly request,” he wrote, “that I not be inducted in absentia and please know that no one is authorized nor may anyone be permitted to accept any induction for me or speak on my behalf.”
The letter sets out its argument in sixteen paragraphs of thick prose that is largely free of the wordplay, rage, or animating spirit of Rose’s songs. Instead, it reads like a junior vice-president’s explanation of the phenomenon of Internecine Squabbling In Rock And Roll. Rose feels, and says at great length that he feels, that the group being honored at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, the original lineup, no longer accurately represents the band, which remains a going concern with new personnel. The reintroduction of these new personnel, in fact, yields the best sentence in the otherwise measured letter, a sixty-seven-word thicket of generic lawyerese that eventually rolls into a catalog of names that read like outtakes from “The Basement Tapes”:
Rose’s letter isn’t the only comment from the band. Earlier in the week, Duff McKagan, who was the band’s bassist at the height of its fame, wrote a piece for ESPN.com in which he said he hoped that the induction would act as a kind of low-key reunion that would serve, above all, the needs of fans. The piece was emotional where Rose’s was guarded, direct where Rose’s was Byzantine. It also hit at the heart of the matter: the flaw in the foundation of the Rock Hall. “Music is not like sports,” McKagan wrote, “and hence, a Hall of Fame in music is almost a false pedestal to sit upon. There are no statistics in music and art.” Add to that the fact that sports hall of fames honor individual achievement, which is a distortion of the way that games are played but an acceptable, agreed-upon distortion. Inducting an entire band for its body of work seems doomed from the start: bands are ever-changing things, in life and even in death—especially bands with as vexed a history as Guns N’ Roses.
Rose’s absence won’t stop the show from going on. Guns N’ Roses will be celebrated in a speech and someone will play something. The shame of it, really, is that Rose didn’t turn down the Hall in an appropriately rebellious fashion. When the Sex Pistols were inducted in 2006, Johnny Rotten sent the Hall a hilarious and nasty handwritten screed that dismissed the entire enterprise as “a load of old famous.” “Next to the SEX PISTOLS,” he scrawled, “rock and roll and that hall of fame is a piss stain.”
Photograph by Jason Merritt/Getty Images.
