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Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil  Date: January 20, 1991
Setlist: Pretty Tied Up, Mr. Brownstone, I Was Only Joking [Intro], Patience, Godfather Theme, Double Talkin' Jive, Welcome To The Jungle, Only Women Bleed [Intro], Knockin' On Heaven's Door, Drum Solo, You Could Be Mine, It's So Easy, Guitar Solo, Civil War, Dead Horse, Sweet Child O' Mine, Estranged, Paradise City

Information: The first of two appearances at the Rock In Rio II festival. Both shows were broadcasted on Brazilian TV. This show featured the first performances of "Pretty Tied Up", "Godfather Theme," "Double Talkin' Jive," "You Could Be Mine," "Dead Horse" and "Estranged." It's also Matt and Dizzy's first show with the band. Axl doesn't sing the last verse on "You Could Be Mine".

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Recording Info

Sound clip: N/A

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Articles N' Reviews

Heard From The Stage

Axl: [during the "Double Talkin' Jive"-solo] When the poor come down from the hills at night. And the governments and the merchants sends the death squads out to remove the beggers, to keep them out of the way of the rich, to keep the slums from coming down into the city: You gotta watch your ass, homeboy, cause I ain't been that many places, but you know where you mutherfuckers live? I said do you know where you live?

In Their Own Words

Matt: The first time I performed with the band was in front of 260,000 fans on Rock in Rio this January. It was actually the first time I played together with Axl, or even the first time I heard him sing in the reality!¹

Duff: Matt and Dizzy had never played with us as a complete band, because Axl doesn't come to rehearsals. They'd never seen Axl sing with us. And we didn't even have a set list for Rio. We have this 'pick list' we like to use. So, anyway, we tell Matt, three minutes before he goes onstage in front of 140,000 people, that he's gotta do a drum solo. And he pulled it off! He rocked! Dizzy, shit, the biggest crowd he ever played for was about 400, opening up for L.A. Guns at the Country Club. Let's just say Dizzy had a few cocktails before we went on, but he pulled it off too. Right before we went onstage, the whole band - and this hadn't happened for a long time - got together in one room. You could just feel the electricity. No matter how many people were out there, or our families, or the press and photographers, bla bla bla, what it came down to was, we were just the same guys that we were five years ago, and you could feel that in the nervous laughter. It was fucking amazing!²

Matt: That was my initial welcoming to the band gig, which was two nights, sold-out. And I remember when we got there, and we got off the plane, it was a mind-blowing experience.³

Duff: It probably was more for him.⁴

Matt: For me, I was just like, 'whoa.' I got off the plane and it was like being in the Beatles or something. It was the closest thing I could relate to being in the Beatles, because we were being chased by kids and, there was hundreds of kids outside the hotel. It definitely changed my life, everything just changed drastically.⁵

Axl: When we played at Rock In Rio II, Dave Mustaine of Megadeth had been trying to get me to hang out with him the whole show. He had all kinds of people coming up to me and asking me to talk to him and so on. But due to my past experiences with Dave Mustaine, every time I've talked to him, no matter how good the conversation or how good I thought things were, a couple of days later he would try and pull a fast move, backstabbing, just to get himself some coverage. We came back to L.A. and Dave's on the radio saying that they won't be playing any dates with Guns N' Roses. That there were deaths at the show. Guns N' Roses shouldn't have played on the night that they played and all this other stuff. What Dave didn't realize is that Guns N' Roses was one of the reasons there was a Rock In Rio II. The people who ran the television station down there and were major financers wanted to see Guns N' Roses. The owner of the television station wanted to see Guns N' Roses. We had the say-so of who was allowed to play. One of the deaths was caused by the police shooting the fire marshal for not allowing 20,000 people with tickets in the show when they allowed 20,000 people without tickets in the show and were taking the money for themselves. There were 80 bootleg Guns N' Roses T-shirt booths run by the chief of police. The other deaths happened during Megadeth's show. We went onstage early because Judas Priest had pulled off on their own accord, and then said that we asked them to leave the stage early, trying to make us look bad. We had told Judas that they could play as long as they wanted, they could have whatever they wanted. The only thing they couldn't have, which the fire marshal wouldn't allow, was their pyro. Then Rob Halford is in magazines saying that I wouldn't allow him to have his Harley. I heard about that during the day. One of the guys who worked with us was in my room with a walkie-talkie, so I grabbed it and said, "Tell Robbie he can have anything he wants." There was no way I wasn't going to allow Judas Priest to do whatever they wanted, because I didn't want bad vibes. Judas Priest was one of the major influences on my singing because Rob Halford is one of the technically best in the world at what he does. And for me to tell them that they couldn't have their Harley is stupid! This guy was saying that I wouldn't allow it, which was a lie!⁶

Axl: The crowd was really rowdy up until the time we went onstage because a lot of people came to see Guns N' Roses. We had four songs in the Top 10 and a number one song down there on MTV, and four songs on MTV's Top 10. We were huge at the time. We didn't know how huge we were until we got there. There was my picture right beside a picture of the hostages in the war; on the front page. It was like, "Axl takes his shirt off." It was really wild. The promoters and some people in the press were thanking us for going onstage when we did because it calmed the crowd down. When I called a friend of mine in L.A., Del James, I described the show as really "nice." He said, "That's not a word that you usually associate with Guns N' Roses." Something happened when we went onstage. It calmed the people down. They were happy that we were there.⁷

Matt: The solo I did on "Use Your Illusion" live from Japan was a solo I started doing the very first show I did with GnR. Not always the same but I would just play the way I felt at the time. Axl asked me to do a solo at Rock In Rio in front of 145.000 right before the gig. When he introduced me, I came up with something on the spot. I hadn't done a solo for along time. I never soloed with The Cult. so it was crazy... The band loved it so i did it everynight after that.

Matt: The drum solo is great! I never got to do one when I was with the Cult. Actually, I never did one before Rio. Hopefully they'll keep getting better. It's really cool of the guys for letting me do it.⁸

Slash: Doug [Goldstein] took us out of the studio to play Rock In Rio in Brazil in 1991, which would be Matt and Dizzy's first show with Guns. It was incredible; we played two nights in a row to 180,000 fans in Maracana Stadium. It was a festival that had gone on for weeks, where everyone from Megadeth to Faith No More, to INXS, Run-DMC and Prince, had played. It was something else; I'm not sure that I've ever seen a more insane Guns n' Roses crowd - and that is saying something. When we kicked into the bridge of "Paradise City" people swan-dived from the upper tier of the stadium. [...] They didn't want to hurt us, but they definately wanted to break a piece of uss off to keep for themselves. It was bizarre.⁹

Slash: After we got our stage show together, backup singers, horn section, and all, and did a week's worth of rehearsals with every element intact, suddenly we found ourselves in South America, before a crowd of 180,000 at Rock In Rio II, on January 20, 1991. We didn't even have a new record out yet; we were there solely on the strength of Appetite and Lies, which by this point were four and two years old, respectively.¹⁰