(Gibson) Imagine coming home from a work trip to suddenly find that everybody you saw was a clone of you. That's exactly what confronted Duff McKagan after his first Guns N' Roses tour.In an interview with the New York Times, McKagan said that when the band left on tour, the glitzy glam look that GNR railed against was still in vogue. "We left on tour in June of '87 and were gone for a year and a half," he said. "There were no computers, no social media, hardly even fax machines, so we had no idea that people in L.A. made this shift in culture to look and sound like us. Imagine landing back on Planet Earth: People were all glammed out when you left, and now you could tell the photo of us they were trying to look like. There was the Izzy [Stradlin] guy, the Slash guy, the Axl [Rose] guy, the me guy, the Steven [Adler] guy, and they were walking all over Hollywood. It was weird."
In the same piece, Poison's Bret Michaels describes the appeal of the era. "They solely want to wrap it up as a fashion statement and throw it out," he says. "But when you listen to the musicians who played then — Slash, Zakk Wylde, the songs that we wrote — we really spent time learning our craft. Something stood the test of time? more on this story