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Guns N' Roses steal show

Neva Chonin, Chronicle Pop Music Critic

Friday, August 30, 2002

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.

Even before the 2002 MTV Music Video Awards began, it was all about the Hives. It was all about the Hives because MTV's VJs made sure it was.

"It's all about the Hives, isn't it?" Kurt Loder asked OutKast's Andre before Thursday night's show. The evening's best-dressed star (high-waisted plaid trousers will rule the runways this fall) graciously agreed.

It wasn't, though. It was all about Axl Rose's retooled Guns N' Roses, who closed the ceremony with a surprise, and not too shoddy, performance of "Welcome to the Jungle" to delirious acclaim.

If this year's awards proved anything, it was that the mainstream music industry has yet to embrace garage rock's retro cool. The Hives and the Vines' back-to-back sets might have been the artistic highlights of the night, but they met with lukewarm response from the star-studded audience.

With the exception of Guns N' Roses' sneak appearance, the evening was uneventful, the winners ranging from the deserving to the predictable.

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Axl Rose brought Guns N' Roses back to the MTV Video Music Awards Thursday night for the first time in 10 years, but the frontman indicated that the wait for a new album from the band will continue.

"You'll see [the album], but I don't know if 'soon' is the word," Rose explained to MTV News immediately after unveiling the current GN'R lineup to an American television audience for the first time.

"It will come out, and we'll do some more recording and start the American leg of the tour," he promised.

Thursday night's VMA performance marked GN'R's first since 1992, when the band performed "November Rain" with Elton John (see "Guns N' Roses Cap Night Of Spectacles From Diddy, Eminem, Timberlake"). The band remained largely off the map in the decade that followed, shedding members and bringing in fresh blood. Axl and his current lineup — which includes drummer Brian "Brain" Mantia, former Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson and guitarists Buckethead and Robin Finck — have been working on an album, Chinese Democracy, for years.

"How do you make a whole bunch of guys into something that already was, and with this intensity of these players wanting to play this material?" Rose said of the delay.

So while Guns N' Roses may be back on the airwaves, they may not be back in record stores any time soon.

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MVA breaks records for viewership!!

MTV's 2002 Video Music Awards, fueled in no small part by GUNS N' ROSES' "surprise" appearance in the show's finale, earned record overnight ratings, according to Hits Daily Double. An average of 7.8 million people watched the show, with a 11.1 rating for persons 12-34, up 5% from 2001. That made the VMAs the #1 rated and most-watched basic cable program for 2002 among households and 12-34-year-olds, with a 8.3 HH number. The 2002 VMAs were also the highest-rated ever among 25-34-year-olds, and the second highest-rated telecast among persons 12-34 in the history of the channel. MTV/MTV2 President Van Toffler called the show "a success on so many different levels—an amazing lineup of live performances, a great host, beautiful stars, and tons of surprises that the VMAs are known for. Especially Christina Aguilera's schmata." The pre-show ratings were up 16% among 12-34-year-olds, while the post-show was up 33%, garnering a 7.0 for 12-34-year-olds.