Swizec Teller - a geek with a hatswizec.com

Senior Mindset Book

Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

Senior Engineer Mindset cover
Learn more

    Geek at a music festival: Day 5

    Fat Axl

    Don't rely on your brain the day after a festival.

    Don't have any prior engagements either.

    It won't go well. I promise. Something as simple as picking up your car can go terribly wrong when you walk for 30 minutes across the town, get the Awesome Dude Who Loaned You His Garage to open it and your first thought is "Oh right, I need my car keys for this"

    By that point it's already so late it makes more sense to go for lunch then re-do the trip. And before you know it, it's 5PM and you're several hours late already.

    Then you almost doze off a few times on the highway, get lost in another strange city and voila, the day is gone.

    But hey, at least you had an epic time at the festival the previous night so all is well!

    Maybe you did, but I was at the Guns And Roses concert the whole night. It was probably a good concert, we just got there 20 years too late ... it was just a mess. Too many old songs, too many ballads, too many old people.

    We know you made a new album or two since Your Time, but we don't really care. Play the ten songs we came for and let us home. No point in dragging the whole thing out for three hours. Especially when you start off with an hour of ballads.

    I didn't even know they made so many!

    And the breaks! My god, why were there so many breaks? Is Fat Axl really that out of shape that we even had to hear a song made by the bassist, a song by a guitarist, a ten minute guitar solo (and not by Faux Slash) and a fifteen minute piano solo? The last two hours there was a five minute break between each song ...

    And Faux Slash was really offensive. Even to me who's never heard the real thing live. The guy is obviously a decent guitarist, so why does he impersonate Slash in every little thing?

    Every. Little. Thing.

    Everything from the hat to the positioning and poses on stage. Maybe they just hired an actor and he doesn't even play the songs? Wouldn't be surprised if even the tattoos are copied over mark for mark ...

    But, y'know, the bastards have figured out their setlist so well that those of us who managed to stay until the end actually liked-ish the concert because the last song was bloody good. If a little off tune and Axl was already croaking a bit.

    Oh yeah, Axl, famous for his voice, actually croaked a few times when trying to talk. That was both fun and sad at the same time.

    PS: his famous dance step looks ... odd ... now that he's fat.

    @vranac's face sums up the concert Fat Axl played November Rain himself Faux Slash Khal Drogo guitarist This guitarist was actually pretty decent, whomever he is Crowd had fun though But we were all glad when it was over
    Published on July 16th, 2012 in Axl Rose, Concert, exit, festival, Guitarist, guns-n-roses, Slash, Travel + Events, Uncategorized

    Did you enjoy this article?

    Continue reading about Geek at a music festival: Day 5

    Semantically similar articles hand-picked by GPT-4

    Senior Mindset Book

    Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

    Learn more

    Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.

    Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.

    Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help 👉 swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.

    Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers 👉 ServerlessHandbook.dev

    Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization

    Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections

    Did someone amazing share this letter with you? Wonderful! You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.com/blog

    Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com

    By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are ❤️

    Created by Swizec with ❤️