"Apologies if I sound like shit, but too many planes and too much cocaine..."
It's September 17, 1988, and onstage at the Texas Stadium, home of the NFL's Dallas Cowboys, Guns N' Roses are struggling through what lead guitarist Slash will later recall as the worst gig his band have ever played.
It's the final US show on the Los Angeles quintet's Appetite For Destruction tour, a one-day festival headlined by Australian rockers INXS, and the five members of GN'R are tired, pissed off, and wishing they were anywhere else but here. The group didn't bother soundchecking, they can't hear themselves, and as the tail end of Hurricane Gilbert deposits incessant rain on the Texxxas Jam stage, it's all they can do to stay upright. Axl Rose has been expressing his displeasure by kicking wedge monitors into the photo pit, leading INXS's production manager to warn Guns' New Zealand-born manager Alan Niven that if one more monitor goes 'overboard', his crew are ready to beat the shit out of the band. That opportunity is denied when the American band walk offstage less than 50 minutes into their scheduled 75-minute set, Duff McKagan smashing his bass into matchwood as he exits.
"Does it get any worse than this?" one of the festival's promoters was overheard saying.
"It was horrific," Slash recalled in a 2014 interview with the Metro newspaper. "Everything that could go wrong went wrong, and the band didn’t have enough experience to handle it properly. It was a huge disaster in front of 65,000 people. We fell apart on stage."
On the day, Guns N' Roses were being shadowed by a writer and photographer from Musician magazine, who witnessed the frazzled group's meltdown.
"If [INXS vocalist] Michael Hutchence says anything about me, I'll go back down there and kick his ass!" Axl Rose threatened as he watched the headliners' performance on a video monitor.
