Dee Snider Savages Guns N’ Roses: Slams Current Line-Up As Little More Than Axl Rose’s Hired Help

Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider has launched a vitriolic verbal volley at the current Guns N’ Roses line-up, describing them in not so many words as a fake band cashing in on the glories of the founding members.

Once upon a time when big hair, tight jeans, and leather jackets ruled the roost, many Guns N’ Roses fans suffered under the illusion that without Slash, Duff, Izzy, and let’s be charitable, Steven, there’d be no Guns N’ Roses, but they didn’t take into account the neurotic tenacity and egotistical pride of Axl Rose.

The original Guns N’ Rose line-up may have gone their separate ways, but a determined and relentless Axl has continued to plough his own furrow and continued to perform and record, albeit one very patchy album, under the name of a band who bear about as much resemblance to Axl’s current crop of hirelings as coal does to gold.

Like a spurned mistress who just cannot accept that a once-intoxicating, giddy, and whirlwind romance is now nothing more than dust and bones, Axl has continued to flog the Guns N’ Roses brand like a dead horse in the hope that one day the donkey will turn back into a stallion and gallop both wild and free to the top of the charts once more.

It hasn’t and it won’t. Because the chemistry that created the magic has long since evaporated when the original members were scattered to the four winds. At best, today’s Guns N’ Roses could be described as the Axl Rose experience, at worse, nothing more than a talented tribute band.

If Axl Rose had decided to forge a solo career instead of clinging obsessively to the name of the band who made his name, who knows what heights he could have gone on to scale, instead nostalgia, past glories, and the whispered promise of a band they could have been, conspired to render the future of Guns N’ Roses, by and large, obsolete.

For the subsequent musicians who were hired by Axl Rose to fill in for his former bandmates and take it in turns to do prolonged periods of grunt and groan at the coalface, history will not be kind.

Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider explained the situation in a recent interview on Eddie Trunk Live.

“The practice of billing post-peak players as ‘of’ or ‘from’ a famous group is misleading to the public. There are guys today who are in Guns N’ Roses? Dude, you’re not in Guns N’ Roses. You’re playing with Axl Rose. … I’m sorry, man. I’m sorry. If you’re hired to play in a band after their heyday, I don’t care if you played with them for three decades. You’re a paid sideman. You’re on salary. You’re not a band member. None of these guys are band members.”

Harsh as Snider’s words may sound. Ask any Guns N’ Roses fan what they’d prefer — Axl to continue doing what he’s doing with the hired help, or to reunite with the original line-up for a series of concerts and possibly a new album. You can bet your bottom dollar and old bandanna what the answer will be nearly every time.

[Image Via Ethan Miller/Getty Images]