She is not a beautiful woman.
She is not necessarily repulsive, I suppose, but no one is going to suspect this woman is an upstart actress or an aspiring model. One assumes there aren’t a lot of actresses or models in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and one assumes even fewer would be working in a roadside café at 5:55 A.M. on Saturday morning. But for the next ten minutes, this aging red-haired woman is being treated like the foxiest rock chick in Appalachia. For a few post-dawn moments on this particular Saturday, she might as well be Tawny Kitaen.
“Do you like Guns N’ Roses?” asks Randy Trask, the be spectacled twenty-eight-year-old who talks more than the other five people at the table combined. “We’re a Guns N’ Roses tribute band. I’m Axl. We’re doing a show tonight in Harrisonburg. You gotta come. It’s only like four hours away. Bring all your girlfriends. It’s going to be insane. They love us in Harrisonburg. But I need to see you there. I’m the singer. I play Axl.”
The waitress blushes like a middle-school crossing guard and calls Trask a sweetheart. She tells us that she can’t come to the show because her grandfather is dying, and you can tell she’s not lying. In a weird way, this might be flirting. When she leaves to fetch our pancakes, Trask glows like the MTV logo, circa 1988. Before we leave the restaurant, he will give this not-so-anorexic waitress a hug and aggressively declare that we will stop back to see her on our way home tomorrow afternoon.
“Exit 175. Remember that. This restaurant is off Exit 175,” he says when we crawl back into the pickup. “What did I tell you? There’s just something about me and redheads.”
In truth, Mr. Trask should be a redhead. His overt blondness—along with the fact that he’s six-foot-four—makes him look more like David Lee Roth than W. Axl Rose, and he knows it. “I am going to dye my hair red. That is definitely in the works,” he says. “It’s just that the last time I tried, it turned sort of pink. And for some reason, people get scared of you when you have red hair. I don’t know why that it is, but it’s true. They just don’t warm up to you the way they do if you’re blond.”
Trask tells me this at ten minutes to midnight while we sit in his 1997 extended-cab Ford Ranger pickup, which we will drive from Cincinnati to northern Virginia for tomorrow night’s rock show. It’s roughly a ten-hour drive, so leaving in the middle of the night should get us to town just in time to check into the Hampton Inn for an afternoon nap. There is some concern about this, because the last time Trask and his band mates in Paradise City were in Harrisonburg they were banned for life from the Econo Lodge. This weekend, they need to make sure things go smoothly at the Hampton; there just aren’t that many hotels in Harrisonburg.
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.
There was a time when Paradise City had a tour bus, but they lost it last summer. This is not a euphemism; they literally can’t find it. It broke down on a trip to Kansas City, and they had to leave it in a Missouri garage to make it to the club on time. Somehow, they lost the business card of the garage and have never been able to recall its location. Dischner tells me this story three times before I realize he’s not joking.
“We drove back through Missouri a bunch of times, we put up a picture on our Web site, and we even called the Highway Patrol,” Dischner says. “But we lost the bus. And I guess there’s some law that states you only have thirty days to find your bus.”
As it is, the band is now traveling in two vehicles. Axl/Randy will pull the Haulmark trailer that contains their gear; he’ll drive the truck, I’ll ride shotgun, and Izzy/Paul will curl up in the extended cab. A friend of the band—some dude named Teddy—will follow in his Ford Mustang, which will also hold Slash/Bobby and Steven/Rob. The pickup box is covered with a topper, so Duff/Spike will lay back in the truck bed with Punky.
Trask and Dischner do not know who Punky is.
They’ve only met Punky a few times, and they don’t know his last name (or his real first name). They are told that Punky is friends with Teddy and Young, all of whom are evidently longtime running buddies. Young is thirty-six, which is a little older than Trask (twenty-eight), Dischner (thirty-one), and Pohlman (twenty-nine). Nobody knows how old Spike is and he refuses to say; a good guess might be forty.
Our last stop before hitting the highway is Spike’s home in Clifton, Ohio, a few scant miles from the site of Cincinnati’s recent race riots. Spike’s house is terrifying. It appears completely dilapidated, but—supposedly—it’s actually being renovated. The home contains a python, several large birds, two alligators in the bathtub, and the most bloodthirsty Rottweiler in North America (Dischner gives me four full minutes of instruction about how to safely walk past this animal). Spike deals exotic animals in his spare time; nobody but me seems to find this unusual.
At departure time, only 40 percent of the band is not under the influence of some kind of chemical. Twenty minutes into the trip, that percentage will fall to zero. Even before we get on the road, this Punky character looks drunk enough to die; amazingly, he’s just getting started. They’re all just getting started. Everyone is smoking pot, and it’s the second-strongest dope I’ve ever inhaled: I keep looking through the windshield, and the vehicle seems to be moving much faster than it should be. It feels like we’re driving down an extremely steep incline, but the earth remains flat. I am not the type who normally gets paranoid, but this is a bit disturbing. I’m trying very hard to act cool, but I start thinking too much; in order to relax, I smoke another half joint, which (of course) never works. I start imaging that we’re going to crash and that my death is going to be reported as some sort of predictable irony—I will forever be remembered as the guy who wrote a book about heavy metal bands who were mostly fake and then died while touring with a heavy metal band that was completely fake. I start having hallucinations of elk running out in front of the vehicle, and I notice that Trask isn’t even watching the road when he talks to me. Finally, I can’t take it anymore. I politely turn to Trask and Dischner and make the following announcement: “Okay—now, don’t take this the wrong way, because I’m probably just nuts, and I’m probably just too fucked up to know what’s going on, and I’m probably overreacting for no valid reason, and I hate to sound unreasonable or immature, and I don’t want to sound pretentious, but elks are prevalent. And perhaps this is out of line and I’m certainly open to debate on this issue, but I need to go on record and say that I am not 100 percent comfortable with the situation regarding this truck at the moment, because I have a feeling that we are all going to die.”
“Dude,” Trask tells me. “I totally wish I could trade bodies with you right now.”
It remains to be seen if these guys can sound like Guns N’ Roses, but they clearly have their self-destructive aspirations deftly mastered.
Our vehicles barrel into the darkness of Kentucky, loaded like a freight train and flyin’ like an aero-plane. Spike and Punky are freezing in the box of the pickup, and they try to stay warm by drinking more Bud Lite. Inside the toasty cab, faux-Axl and faux-Izzy have straightened up (slightly), and we’re discussing the question most people have about tribute bands, which is “Why do you possibly do this?” It seems antithetical to the whole concept of art; the notion of creativity has been completely removed from the equation. Wouldn’t the members of Paradise City be happier if they could write their own songs, dress however they want, and—quite simply—be themselves?
No.
“Obviously, being in an original band is the ultimate dream, but it mostly sucks,” Dischner says. “You don’t get to tour. You don’t get no money. You have to beg your own friends to come to the show. But being a mock star is awesome.”
Paradise City will earn $1,100 for the Harrisonburg show. After their manager takes his 15 percent and they pay for gas and promotions, they will be left with $655, which—split between five people—ends up being $131 each. This is almost nothing. But the operative word is “almost.” If these same five guys in Paradise City performed their own material, they would have to pay to play in most reputable clubs; as a tribute band, they can live as “professional musicians.” Relatively speaking, $1,100 is good money.
“The thing about being in a tribute band is that your fans already exist,” Trask says. “You show up at the bar, and there’s immediately a few hundred people who love Guns N’ Roses and therefore love you.”
This is not always true. A month later, Paradise City will play a show at a club called Dr. Feelgood’s in the desperate lake town of Conneaut, Ohio, and virtually no one will notice; the bar’s billiard tables will have more spectators than the stage, and the owner won’t even give them free beer until they finish the first set. It’s a bit uncomfortable for everyone involved, but not really humbling or tragic: No one in Paradise City seems confused about the social significance of this group.
“I never think of myself as Axl Rose, and we don’t think of ourselves as Guns N’ Roses,” Trask says. “Our fans are Guns N’ Roses fans—they’re not really fans of Paradise City. We’re not deluding ourselves.”
And in a way, somber nights in ghost towns like Conneaut validate their cred; Paradise City almost seems to enjoy adversity. They love talking about how “life on the road” is a hard-yet-satisfying experience. They give “tribute quotes” that sound like outtakes from VH1’s Behind the Music: It’s all about the fans, it’s all about the music, it’s all about the awe-inspiring majesty of rock; it’s all about something, and then it’s all about something else entirely. But they’re never lying—in tribute bands, all those clichés are true. Paradise City cares more about Guns N’ Roses than the original members of Guns N’ Roses care about the song “Paradise City.”
In fact, the guys in Paradise City seem to care about all music with more enthusiasm than any group of musicians I’ve ever encountered. There is no elitism. As we roll toward West Virginia, the truck’s stereo never plays an artist they dislike. They have positive things to say about Aerosmith, Nickelback, Celine Dion (!), Black Sabbath, White Lion, Pink Floyd, and Alabama. When Jewel’s “You Were Meant for Me” comes on the radio, Dischner mentions that the song always makes him wish it were raining; ten minutes later, he tells me that Rush is “just about the greatest three-piece band ever,” and then gives a similar compliment to the Rush tribute band 2112.
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.
I hang with Paradise City until around 3:30 A.M.. Part of me thinks that I should really try to party with them all night, because perhaps that’s when things will truly get insane. Maybe there will be a transcendent moment, complete with speedballs and hookers and an albino musk ox. But the larger part of me is tired and drunk and stoned, so I go to bed (luckily, I have my own room). The next morning, I see Dischner in the lobby and ask him how the rest of the night went; he tells me nothing really happened. I ask the same question when I run into Bobby Young, and he spends ten minutes telling me how the girls who came back to the hotel were nothing but “brain-dead cock teases.” He thought the evening sucked.
But not Randy.
Trask is sitting at the wheel of his truck, ready to drive us home on three hours rest. His version of the night is quite different. “It was a madhouse,” he tells me unspecifically, neither lying nor telling the truth. “You should have stayed up with us, Chuck. It was unbelievable. I’m serious. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
I nod. I agree. One way or the other, we all use our illusions. And I’m sure Axl would completely approve.
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.
2. Premonition’s two singles, “He Is Rising” and “Mr. Heroin,” were both (presumably) about Carlos and allegedly charted in Greece.
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.
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.