Axl Rose once killed a moth with a shotgun during Guns ‘n’ Roses‘ longest ever tour.
The band headed out on the Use Your Illusion tour and were on the road from January 1991 to July 1993. Guns ‘n’ Roses would mark some intense moments during this tour, once performing a three-and-a-half-hour show and, allegedly, killing a moth with a shotgun. While stories from Guns ‘n’ Roses’ show should be taken with a grain of salt, Rose‘s former assistant, Craig Duswalt, says he once had to bring the frontman a “shotgun” to rid himself of an insect. During a break on the Use Your Illusion tour, Rose once instructed his at-the-time assistant to bring him a weapon of some kind to deal with the bugs in his Malibu home.
According to Duswalt, Rose was handed the “shotgun” and “positioned himself under the chair, lying on his back” before taking aim at the moth. Duswalt had been insisting there was a better way to rid the room of bugs, but Rose appeared to be unconvinced by anything that didn’t involve blasting the moth with a gun.
Duswalt claimed the gunfight with the moth occurred in his book, Welcome to My Jungle, which documented his time with the band between 1991 and 1993. The Use Your Illusion tour took the band across the globe on a two-year stretch of shows. The band’s average, thirty-one-song setlist for the start of the tour, can be found below.
- Perfect Crime
- Mr. Brownstone
- Right Next Door to Hell
- Bad Obsession
- Live and Let Die (Wings cover)
- It’s So Easy
- Yesterdays
- Dust N’ Bones
- Double Talkin’ Jive
- Civil War
- Patience
- You Could Be Mine
- November Rain
- My Michelle
- 14 Years
- Nightrain
- Welcome to the Jungle
- Pretty Tied Up
- Rocket Queen
- Don’t Cry
- Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (Bob Dylan cover)
- You Ain’t the First
- Used to Love Her
- Move to the City
- Sweet Child o Mine
- You’re Crazy
- Locomotive
- Out ta Get Me
- Dead Horse
- Estranged
- Paradise City
The release of Use Your Illusion I came just a short while into the shows. In a one-star review of the album, Cult Following wrote: “Use Your Illusion I is so consistently bad you may find yourself turning back to whatever belief system you abandoned. A lapse in your faith all those years ago is repaired by just how horrendously plodding the likes of November Rain can be. Ask for an embrace from the deity you abandoned.
“There is nothing but rot and sin and wasted time in Use Your Illusion I. We are often told to reserve snobbery, to accept all those from any genre. Not Guns n’ Roses. People will rightly think less of those who actively listen to this vapid, rock and roll slop. If you were hoping the instrumental strength of Guns n’ Roses’ debut would remain, but that their lyrical choices would improve, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Use Your Illusion I is never underwhelming, though; it’s an actively obnoxious, regressive piece of work.”
