The Barryfest Chronicles

When you’re drunkenly balls deep in a plate of cheese fries at F&M’s on a Thursday night, it is easy to forget that there is a lot more to Louisiana than New Orleans.  This is the “Sportsman’s Paradise” for chrissakes, and I’ve been down here for almost a year and have not actually done anything even remotely “sporting.”

To remedy this, I spent the weekend at Fountainebleau State Park with a crew of brave souls willing to endure some good old fashioned outdoor living in what could easily be the coldest weather any of us will see all year.  Yeah, the winters are pretty mild in southeast Louisiana; but the fact that the mercury doesn’t dip too far below 40 degrees over a 12 month span doesn’t make those 40 degree gusts any toastier when they are whipping across your campsite.

But the trip was a blast, and when I wasn’t gathering firewood, complaining about non-Kosher hot dogs, smoking Natural American Spirits, slugging persey bottles of Charles Shaw, pounding packets of BC, dancing on top of a picnic table to Rilo Kiley, tossing hard-boiled eggs into Lake Pontchartrain, or freezing my dick off after passing out in a tent with no pillow or sleeping bag, I engaged in my new favorite pastime: hypothesizing about whether or not Chinese Democracy is going to be any good.

For me, the answer is simple.  Guns N’ Roses became my first “favorite” band back when I was introduced to their music when I was about 9 or 10.  Before that age – and my development of the meaningful preference that comes with maturity and experience – I just rocked out to whatever adult contemporary or classic rock my parents happened to be grooving on.  They kept a nice rotation of Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac and The Cars surging through the living room Hi-Fi, so I am certainly not complaining, but it is hard to get too excited about anything (even the genius of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker) when you are consuming it in such a passive manner.

When I finally started my career as a music consumer in my own right around 1993, Use Your Illusion I & II were still wreaking havoc on the Billboard charts even though they had dropped almost two full years earlier, which is probably why I heard those two albums in their entirety before getting a true taste of the depth of Appetite for Destruction.  I am not going to act like I was oblivious to “Welcome to the Jungle” or “Sweet Child O’ Mine” back in the early 90s, but I can say with certainty that I heard “Dead Horse” before I even got a whiff of “Mr. Brownstone.”

My brother owed all the albums, having claimed them as his reward for making various middle school honor rolls.  At my age, I still think that I was asking for Starting Lineup figurines when I pulled all “A”s, but through him I eventually got intimately familiar with the entire Guns N’ Roses catalog.  Don’t get me wrong: it all made short work of my face when it came time to melt some shit.  But there was something about their later work that proved inescapable for a kid of my age and disposition.

And while my musical tastes have evolved over the years, this enchantment hasn’t faded.  As a 7th grader, I wrote a history paper explaining the imagery in the masterpiece “Civil War,” but just last fall my friends and I threw $25 in a jukebox at Whiskey River in New York City to hear “Estranged” four times in row, and I still go to YouTube and queue up the video for “Don’t Cry” at least once a month.

Maybe this is why I approached speculation that Chinese Democracy was full of the overproduced, self-indulgent arrangements found in the Use Your Illusion era with excitement.  Nothing against slash and burn rockers like “Out ta Get Me,” but is it that surprising that an album that has taken over 15 years to make would have more in common with an grandiose, overreaching follow up than a major label debut recorded in a few weeks on Skid Row between a lead guitarist’s heroin overdoses?  And how could that categorically be a bad thing?

My confidence in the new album hasn’t wavered since Jimmy Fallon excitedly introduced Axl and his latest group of hired guns at the 2002 MTV Music Video Awards, but one of my friends cast the most credible shred of doubt on the new project while we were cruising across the Causeway on Saturday afternoon.  “Maybe it’s taken 15 years not because it is going to be really good, but because it sucks,” he suggested.

You know what?  Maybe so.  He raises a valid point, as there is a good chance that Chinese Democracy will be a huge disappointment.  But I can assure you this: On Sunday, I’ll be making a trek to my nearest Best Buy and grabbing a shrink wrapped CD from the endcap display.  The prospect of driving to a store and purchasing “the new Guns N’ Roses album” the week that it comes out has haunted my dreams ever since I discovered the hidden, Charles Manson penned track on “The Spaghetti Incident?”

After 15 years, I am ready for it.  And, after 15 years, I trust it is ready for me.