History of Guns N' Roses
Guns N' Roses was officially formed in 1985 when members of two bands decided to form a new group. The name comes from these 2 bands: Hollywood Rose was a band Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin' were in. In 1985 Tracii Guns from L.A. Guns joined them and that's when GNR was born. Shortly after that, Tracii Guns was out, Duff joined Guns N' Roses, and soon after that, Slash and Steven Adler also joined. The Appetite for Destruction version of the band started to exist in the middle of 1985.
At the beginning, things were not easy for Guns N' Roses, their first tour to Seattle was not a success and in Los Angeles they were all sharing a very small apartment that they called the "hell house". The money was not there but the creativity was. They quickly composed a lot of their big hits around that time, including Don't Cry and Welcome to the Jungle. They started to gain popularity and played clubs such as the Troubadour and the Roxy in late 1985 and early 1986.
After a while they caught the attention of the record companies but these people were a bit scared to sign the band because of their tendency to party and consume large amounts of drugs and alcohol. But in Spring 1986 Geffen Records takes the chance and offer them a contract. Axl, Slash, Izzy, Duff and Steven started recording material for their first album. At the end of the year they released 10,000 copies of an EP called "Live like a suicide" featuring 4 songs: Reckless life, Nice Boys, Move to the city, and Mama Kin. This album was not live though, they simply added crowd sounds to make it sound like it was live. This release is very popular with collectors and you will need to spend a lot of money if you want to own one of these. You can find them from time to time on eBay.com.
After that, things turned bad. The band never really worked on a new album. Axl seemed to become more and more recluse. Slash decided to start a temporary solo project called "Slash's Snakepit" (Matt Sorum, Gilby Clarke and Dizzy Reed also participated to that). Snakepit released an album and went on tour in 1995. After that Slash returned to GNR to work on the new album but the relationship with Axl was not working anymore, so Slash officially announced he was leaving in 1996. Duff and Matt Sorum quickly followed. Gilby was out too.
Since then Axl Rose is apparently working on the "next album" but no release date has been announced (Well many dates have been announced in the past but they were all wrong). In 2000-2001 Axl performed 2 shows with the band he still insist to call "Guns N' Roses" even though he's the only remaining original member. They played mostly old GNR stuff and several new songs which were very different and not all that great. In 2002 the band did a short tour in the USA with dissapointing crowds, they canceled the tour in the middle of it. The lead guitarist at that time was a strange guy named "Buckethead" who's apparently out of the picture as well by now.
