Guns N' Roses

Air Canada Centre

in Toronto on Friday

Ten years ago, Kurt Cobain dismissed Axl Rose as a has-been. "His role has been played for years," he said, and the putdown, along with some egging on from Courtney Love, eventually led to verbal fisticuffs at the 1992 MTV Music Awards. The animosity was mutual. Guns N' Roses, with its pyrotechnics and long-haired following, was everything the Nirvana generation kicked out in favour of stripped-down grunge.

The irony, of course, was that Cobain and Rose have similar backgrounds, both high-school dropouts from poor, dysfunctional families, who grew up to become rage-fuelled artists. But where Cobain was the sensitive kid who couldn't wait to get away from the town hoodlums, Rose was the tough guy who turned those same disaffected hoodlums into his fans.

With this sort of reputation preceding you, and the recent Vancouver riot when Rose failed to appear for a concert, security was intense at Friday's Air Canada Centre show. Alcohol sales were cut off at 10 p.m., and police officers were stationed throughout the hall. The media were herded into the acoustically horrendous upper reaches of the press gallery, where every song sounds like a four-year-old banging on a new drum kit.

In the end, all the hand-wringing was secondary to the two-hour musical onslaught unleashed on stage. It has been a decade since Cobain declared the end of Axl -- only Rose is back. He's missing all his original bandmates, has not released an album since 1993, and has been portrayed as an eccentric recluse, but he showed why Guns N' Roses was always millions of miles ahead of teased-hair crews such as Poison.

However, the show was also evidence that the band is unlikely to scale their early heights again. The set was short on new numbers. Madagascar is an epic anthem, and was inexplicably accompanied by images of Martin Luther King projected onto the video screens. The title track of Chinese Democracy, a new album rumoured to be forthcoming this summer, has fewer frills than the classics, but is an intriguing glimpse of the future.

The problem for Guns N' Roses, should the album actually be released as scheduled, is that it would take a superlative CD to top the legacy of 1987's Appetite for Destruction and the band's best output in the five years that followed.

The guitar lines in Sweet Child o' Mine, the opening piano bars of November Rain and the snarled chaos of show-opener Welcome to the Jungle have secured a prime spot in the rock 'n' roll history books.

Paul McCartney's Live and Let Die featured the first of the band's exploding fireballs that made the heart race. Patience and the aforementioned Rain brought out the flickering lighters, while Paradise City gave the crowd one last chance to head-bang while confetti rained down and sparks filled the stage.

Despite their junior-gunner status, the band filled their slots well, particularly Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robert Finck, former Replacement bassist Tommy Stinson, and guitarist Buckethead (Brian Carroll). In a surreal moment, Buckethead, a cult figure who always appears wearing an upturned KFC chicken bucket (this one imprinted with the word "funeral") and a white mask, gave a solo guitar recital, then threw a bunch of toys into the audience.

The energy in the arena was at maximum capacity, and Rose matched it. He jogged continuously from one end of the stage to the other, up the stairs of the podium in the middle of the stage, down the other side, stopping only to shimmy from side to side, or stomp his feet in place, making the most of his braided hair all the while.

For yesterday's man, it wasn't too shabby a showing.