Lest anyone worry that Guns ‘N’ Roses might be losing its edge after the band stunned Chicago fans by starting their Soldier Field show 15 minutes ahead of schedule—or two hours and 15 minutes earlier than they would have at one time—they did something to make everything right. They got caught traveling with a gun. On Friday night, their tour bus was stopped and searched while they were crossing the Canadian border, and that’s when authorities discovered the contraband, according to E! News. A representative of the band’s revived almost-original lineup confirmed to Billboard that the very rock ‘n’ roll incident did in fact occur to the group of middle-aged millionaire musicians, but insisted that the gun did not belong to an actual member of the band.
“You did what? What? ‘Oh, yeah, we found a gun,’” lead singer Axl Rose told the sold-out crowd at Toronto’s Rogers Centre on Saturday night. “So, we weren’t exactly arrested. We were detained.” The 54-year-old singer-songwriter seems to have mellowed in his sentiments about law enforcement since he penned the controversial ode to childish intolerance, “One In A Million,” for his band’s 1988 album G ‘N’ R Lies. At the time, Rose lumped cops in with all the minorities, foreigners, and homosexuals who needed to “cut [him] some slack,” informing officers that he “don’t need no bracelets/clamped in front of [his] back.” These days, his interactions with the police seem a lot more cordial. “They were very nice,” Rose explained to the Canadian audience of 50,000. “They were very nice. They were very understanding. You know, it happens. You can forget you had a fucking gun. Wasn’t my gun.”
This kind of thing apparently does happen with some degree of frequency. In a 1988 interview with Spin, Rose revealed that “This year, I was only arrested once at the Canadian border, for my stun gun. I didn’t know they’re illegal there.”