Axl Rose Year by Year: 1984-2020 Photos
It's been more than three decades since Guns N' Roses frontman Axl Rose arrived on the scene and quickly became one of the most popular and controversial figures in rock music. We're looking back on his career with the below photos of him nearly every year beginning with 1984 up to the present day.
So we tracked down as many pictures as we could from the time Rose began to make a name for himself in Los Angeles' club scene in the early '80s. All of his famous hairstyle and headwear choices over the years are well-represented: hairspray, bandannas, cornrows, hats.
As with anything connected to Guns N' Roses, it wasn't a straight-ahead task. There were several years where we couldn't find even an unauthorized photo of Rose. The majority of these seven missing entries are from the so-called "wilderness years," when Rose was working on 2008's long-gestating Chinese Democracy album. (It's pretty incredible that, in this social media-mad, camera-phone-in-every-hand era, we also came up snake-eyes for 2015.
But he resurfaced a year later, bringing back original Guns N' Roses members Slash and Duff McKagan for the Not in This Lifetime tour that lasted from April 2016 until December 2018 while also finding time to front AC/DC for a stretch when hearing issues forced Brian Johnson off the road in 2016.
Still, the photos below tell a pretty good story of more than 30 years of Rose in the spotlight. Check them all out below.
Axl Rose Year by Year: 1984-2020 Photos
Gallery Credit: Matthew WIlkening