
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, April 19, 1993                   TAG: 9304190022
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CAROLYN CLICK
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GUNS N' ROSES N' THE NEWSPAPER: AN ODD MIX

Frankly, I'd been wondering for weeks what a nice newspaper like this was doing at Guns N' Roses.

You saw the promotion: "Everything's coming up Roses," touting the newspaper drawing to send "five lucky readers" and their guests to see the bad boys of rock 'n' roll.

The pitch was upbeat and hip, conveying a sense that some folks in the Roanoke Times & World-News building had their finger on the pulse of what's happening in the community.

But given this band's propensity for acting up in a big way - assaults, urinating in public, inciting a riot - I'm wondering just what kind of promotion this turned out to be.

Don't get me wrong. I have no problem with Slash and Axl Rose bringing their show to town - they are just about the biggest attraction in raunchy rock music today, and if people want to pay good money to stay up past midnight to see them, well, let's just say P.T. Barnum would have loved it.

Nor am I immune to the thrill of rock 'n' roll. I remember waiting an hour outside a dressing room to catch a glimpse of Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. (OK, that dates me a little.) And even within the past five or six years I paid $80 to ride on a bus full of '60s postscripts to see the Rolling Stones and their Steel Wheels tour, proving, perhaps, that cognitive skills may not always improve with age.

But this Guns N' Roses thing, I just don't get.

I figure the band is probably to the 20-something generation what the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zepplin and the rest were to mine - in-your-face, nose-thumbing symbols of rebellion. Every generation has them and it will be up to history to determine if Guns N' Roses survives the cut.

But I'm squeamish about co-opting a symbol as controversial as Axl Rose for the simple purpose of selling a newspaper. And that's what I think this is all about.

Like thousands of other newspapers around the country, this one is running scared because the 20-something crowd, raised on CNN and MTV, just doesn't read newspapers anymore.

They are video whiz kids with hardly a drop of printer's ink in their blood. So newspapers struggle daily with ways to attract a younger audience - shorter stories, brighter graphics, redesigned pages.

And slick promotions of generational icons, even if that icon has been criticized, as Mark Morrison wrote in Thursday's editions, "for glorifying racism, sadomasochism, gay-bashing, xenophobia and violence in its song lyrics."

Maybe what it comes down to is this: everything seems to be for sale in America. When the Berlin Wall falls, AT&T is there to record a tearful telephone reunion between (can it be?) ecstatic relatives who finally make a connection after years of silence. Never mind those international charges.

Dean Witter appears on grainy videotape to give us his dignified prescription for success, building his company "one investor at a time." Only Dean's really an actor and the fuzzy tape a clever adman's gimmick.

So when Axl Rose rolls into town, suddenly everything's coming up roses.

(Well, not quite. The promotion reaped only 450 entries for Thursday's concert compared to about 4,000 for country star Vince Gill.)

I'm a little embarrassed for a newspaper that gets on its high horse about guns and violence and the decline of American schools, and then undermines that lesson by cashing in on an entertainment figure who is offensive to probably three-fourths of the community it serves.

Commercial rock 'n' roll radio has traditionally had the corner on concert promotion, giving away free tickets and backstage passes in exchange for listeners' allegiance. It is a symbiotic relationship between the promoters and the radio personalities, and everybody knows how the game is played.

A newspaper, with its First Amendment responsibilities, is different. It is a community institution - with the emphasis on institution - its mission to impartially report and reflect on what's going on in that community.

That means going to the concert, reviewing the music and reporting on the scene. But promoting Guns N' Roses? That's a big price for a newspaper to pay simply to overcome a stodgy image.

Carolyn Click covers health and medical issues for this newspaper.

by CNB