Guns & Roses at Taoyuan Stadium

                I would have planned things differently but my wise wife knew better. Why complicate the Guns & Roses trip with a side track to Taipei? Did it matter that Taipei was fifteen minutes from Taoyuan?  Why complicate the GnR trip? 

     First of all, it was raining when the HSR passed Miaoli heading north and it did not stop raining until late in the afternoon. We would have had to deal with the rain and the crowds in Taipei; instead we rested in a comfortable Fullon Hotel room in beautiful downtown Zhongli. Well, it isn't exactly beautiful. The streets are narrow and crowded. Our hotel street had the center closed for construction of a subway extension. Zhongli is famous for the ugliest Taiwan Railroad station in Taiwan; seriously, it was voted so. It is the ugliest station I have seen here; outside it looks like a noodle factory. Inside it looks like an industrial bathroom without toilets. Besides the sign, there is no indication that it is a train station in Taoyuan County's second largest city.  The day-laborers that flood the waiting room  on their way out of town  are not to blame. 

     And it was those Filipino laborers that made possible the grocery store with imported provisions that I had wanted but couldn't find anywhere else in Taiwan; mug root beer imported from P.I. and cans of the Red Horse beer, 8% alcohol.  The hotel was comfortable, ten minutes from the airport MRT station, and two stations in the less-crowded direction away from Taoyuan Stadium; the trip was still concentrated on a GnR concert that evening. 
     The last tour in 2014, featured D.J. Ashba and "Bumblefoot" both that left the band along with Tommy Stinson and Chris Pitman and so the table was set for original members Slash and Duff McKagan to rejoin  with Melissa Reese on Keyboards. 159 shows were performed until "leg Ten" was added including Taiwan's show.

 

The price we paid was triple the listed price.

     Truth be told, I wouldn't have paid so much money buying scalped tickets for Guns & Roses if Slash and Duff were not playing guitar for them this time. Axle Rose had lost his voice and his figure decades ago and was only left with an ego. Nine years ago he brought the franchise name he owns to Taiwan without Slash and kept concert-goers in Taipei waiting long enough to wonder if he would ever show up. Not that many Taiwanese were disappointed in this rock-starved island but this was the first tour of GNR with Slash since the pivotal hard rock-punk band broke up in the '80's. With Duff, three almost-original musicians (minus Izzy Stradlin) were left to make Axle tolerable again. The word on the street this time was 
    Slash and Duff took in the sights of Taipei before the show while Axl holed up in his hotel room until the limo came. 
     The three and a half hour concert, with no opening act,was amazing thanks to the tuned down vocal microphones and turned up Marshalls on the musicians. Slash was in top form; the only thing missing from his glory days was the bottle of whiskey near his amp and cigarette tattooed to his lip. If it weren't for the obnoxious mandatory 'touch your heart' moment of "Wichita Lineman" into the coda of "Layla" into "Knockin' on Heaven's Door", not that Dylan was dead yet but Axle was closely knockin' and needed an excuse to roll out a Baldwin piano he had packed in his trans-pacific flight, but at least it led up to "November Rain" ironically bringing back the clouds that covered the stars before they threatened to drench us in the canopied grandstand. The "Black Hole Sun" tribute to Chris Connell was sweet and actually not poorly sung. The song selection was hard and loud with a few Duff punkers to bring it on home. 
     The show ended with "Night Train" and they left the stage to the sound of a pin dropping, the same pin that dropped after every song in their set; Taiwanese do not know how to whoop it up or, Confucius forbid, give a standing ovation, and the extensive usher staff was having no dancing in the aisles, anyway.

 I paid 500 NT-$17 for the bootleg, but it was missing
 the last three stops and had "Hong Kong China" written
      instead of the official t-shirts "Hong Kong Hong Kong".  

The entrance and exit was orderly, unlike the mess at the Little Dome in Taipei for Celine Dion, and there were merchandise tables with apparel, souvenirs, and CD's, though lines were too long and prices over-priced to warrant wasting any time or money than had already been fleeced. On out prompt exit after the un-plugged encore of "Patience" etcetra (they neglected to play "I Used to Love Her but had to kill her" ) we beat the crowd of 12,000 to the Airport MRT station after the mandatory “Paradise City” with Slash doing leads with the guitar behind his neck!
We left in time to see vendors selling under-priced bootleg t-shirts and tote bags, probably made in the same sweatshops as the official shit, and I got a slightly off-centered concert tour knock-off. It still read "Taipei Taiwan" though, truth be told, the concert wasn't in Taipei any more than Taoyuan International Airport is.

 My wise wife had us going in the right direction; two stops to Zhongli instead of on the overcrowded side towards the airport, where many concert goers would disembark for flights overseas to Japan and China that lacked appearances, or a last stop in Taipei City forty-five minute away on a slow local or thirty on a pricy HSR north or south on Taiwan's West Coast. We had seats and no jostling as we hailed a taxi to the hotel room for the night, but not before a late mapo tofu and three cans of Red Horse!