In a recent interview with Appetite For Distortion, Kane Roberts recalled the time Guns N’ Roses supported Alice Cooper at the UIC Pavillion in Chicago in 1987. Revealing the origin of a photo shoot done at the time, involving him, Cooper, and the band members, he said:
“I think that photoshoot just started to gestate somehow on the road, and it was very quick. And Alice just said, ‘Hey, Kane! Come on, we’re going to do a photoshoot.’ That’s all it was.”
The guitarist referred to the absence of other Alice Cooper Band members in the picture and explained:
“It wasn’t like a ‘I don’t want the rest of the band in it.’ It’s basically what the function of this thing was in his mind. We both wanted to take pictures with him. You know, Steven Adler, all those guys. They’re just f**king great people. So, that’s how it happened.”
Looking back on the night, he went on:
“I don’t want anybody to think there was some – A lot of times on the road, there aren’t these meticulously worked out decisions that are made to make sure that we hit the right demographic. It’s chaos, you know. So, that’s how that night ended up.”
At some point, the interviewer mentioned some photo shoots where photographers had to use props in place of the musicians and asked Roberts whether they experienced something like that:
“We never experienced that. There were no moments where I’d walk by, and they – We even would go to nightclubs after the show or the night before or whatever. I didn’t see anybody hammered. I just never saw it. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. [Laughs] I know Steve partied a little bit, but nobody was ever during the show having problems or whatever. At that time and still now, the center of everything that they do, the most important thing, was music. That’s what it was.”
Guns N’ Roses joined Cooper in the second half of 1987 as a part of its Appetite For Destruction Tour. In the following years, the two parties collaborated on a song from the band’s third studio album, ‘Use Your Illusion I.’
Classic Rock featured the ‘The Garden’ track in its ’50 greatest Guns N’ Roses songs ever’ list in June 2023 and talked to Cooper for its story. During the chat, the singer also recalled how the tour with the band went, saying:
“We took Guns N’ Roses on their first tour, and the very first night, after they played, I told my band: ‘We’d better be very good tonight.’ They had the attitude, the sound, the swagger. I had to send somebody out for bail money on that tour because one or two of them were in jail. So we were kinda like their big brothers, and they knew they could call me any time.”
You can check out Kane Roberts’ interview and one of the 1987 photos in the video below.
