The biggest challenge for any rock and roll band over time is to make sure that the singer’s still in shape. Although the band themselves are all capable on their instruments, it’s a lot more complicated when the instrument is the human voice, and even if people have to compromise over time, Axl Rose wasn’t safe from a few harsh tunes during Guns N’ Roses’ glory years.
But when the musical street gang first got started, not everyone knew what they had on their hands with someone like Rose. He had the basics of what made a good frontman work, but listening to every one of the band’s songs, he possessed the range that most people would have killed for, usually reaching notes that wouldn’t have seemed possible when they would play tunes like ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ live. Even for Rose, though, there needed to be limits.
In the same way that no one would ask Slash to start playing like Yngwie Malmsteen, Rose was never going to be earning any awards for his operatic voice by any stretch. He worked with what he had, but looking through some of the band’s greatest moments, there were more than a few times where he did overstep his bounds a little bit.
It’s understandable that he might not be able to hit all the high notes like he used to do, but Use Your Illusion may as well have been an endurance test for what someone could put their voice through. Rose wasn’t messing around on the first track of the experience by screaming in ‘Right Next Door to Hell’, but the albums offer a look at every part of his voice, whether that’s the soft-spoken balladeer on ‘You Ain’t the First’, the showstopping numbers like ‘November Rain’, or the rockers like ‘Garden of Eden’.
Then again, nothing could have prepared anyone for what they had in mind for ‘Coma’. A lot of the biggest moments on the first disc seemed reserved for ‘November Rain’s crushing nine-minute runtime, but the closing track is even longer and manages to fit in everything but the kitchen sink, from Rose screaming to clean singing to including dialogue from nurses and paramedics trying to revive the protagonist midway through the song.
The whole thing is one of Guns N’ Roses’ most masterful moments, but Slash knew there was no way of getting the tune out of the studio that often, saying, “We played ‘Coma’ early on in the Use Your Illusions tour. We probably played it about six times in total. It’s a very long, complicated song. More than anything, it was a little vocal-challenging because there was so much vocal going on. There’s no air, vocally, on there. I think it was a little bit hard for Axl to keep up with that song every single night.”
At the same time, even attempting to play this song live probably explains why Rose would take sabbaticals from the band every now and again and leave an entire crowd hanging for hours on end during the tour. He knew that he had to protect his instrument, so trying to shred his voice night after night meant needing to do overtime when on the recovery part after every single show.
Although the rest of the tour sounds like a 24 hour roller coaster that no one could get off of, the fact that Rose maintained his voice enough to make it through six different live renditions of the tune is a miracle on its own. Most people would have probably have passed out by the time the song was over, but putting it in between equally demanding songs like ‘Paradise City’ is the kind of strength that most singers only hope to have.